Monday, June 26, 2006
Editorial: A tough climate for sound science
The latest evidence about the evidence supports scientists alarmed by global warming. But politics will keep the controversy boiling.
From the RoundTable blog
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The weight of the science says global warming is real and that human activities -- such as burning oil and coal -- are major contributing factors.
But then, the weight of the science has pointed for years to those conclusions. The controversy is back in the news only because some members of Congress don't like them.
Rep. Joe Barton, a Texas Republican who heads the House Energy and Commerce Committee, so disliked the conclusions that, last year, he subpoenaed the records of a climatologist whose work supports the scientific case for global warming.
After all, the idea that gases from burning fossil fuels are having a dramatic, deleterious effect on the world's climate is bad news for the U.S. economy. These days in Washington, bad news must be wrong.
Barton's harassment of climatologist Michael Mann disturbed Rep. Sherwood Boeh- lert, a New York Republican who heads the House Science Committee. So Boehlert asked the National Academy of Sciences to name an independent panel to review the scientific paper that drew Barton's ire.
The paper, co-authored by Mann, shows a notable rise in temperature in the Northern Hemisphere in just the past few decades, an increase unmatched for a millennium.
Thursday, that NAS panel endorsed the study's basic conclusions. It questioned the millennium claim, but not the evidence that warming in the last 25 years has topped any rise over a similar time since 1600.
The panel emphasized that the study's uncertainties are the norm for any scientific inquiry. They do not weaken the scientific case for global warming: that it is occurring now, mainly because of a buildup of heat-trapping greenhouse gases that people are putting into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels.
Look for the energy industry and its friends in Washington to focus, though, on that millennium claim and to ignore the preponderance of scientific evidence.
They cultivate doubt, and use doubt to justify delay, thus diffusing any public sense of urgency for fundamental, and painful, change. Every study, no matter how alarming its conclusions, leads this administration only to call for more studies.
Now new research indicates natural cycles played little role in last year's heavy hurricane season, but global warming was a major factor in the warmth-fueled hurricane seasons in the North Atlantic. That's bad news. Look for a serious, but tempered, call for further study.
And you, on the coast: Batten down the hatches.
