The Oregonian    February 25, 2008

GLOBAL WARMING
Climate orthodoxy
Perpetuates a hoax

Gov. Ted Kulongoski’s successful purge of George Taylor — Oregon’s former state climatologist and soon-to-be former director of the Oregon Climate Service at Oregon State University — has a clear message for scientists: agree with the governor or you too will disappear. Don’t hint that man-made global warming is the greatest scientific hoax of our time. It offends the governor.
Many, like Taylor, are unwilling to support political agendas at odds with good science but also too polite to play the role of the little boy in “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” They will quietly say, “Let’s look at the evidence concerning man-made global warming (more properly known as Anthropogenic Global Warming or AGW), because science is based entirely on evidence.”
As a meteorologist, Taylor would show that the warm-up we saw peak in the 1990s was very similar to the warm-up in the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s, before there was significant use of fossil fuels. He would also mention the sharp decline in global temperature this January, returning us close to where we were decades ago. Climate change is perfectly normal.
As a physicist, let me point out that our understanding of climate was not “settled more than a decade ago,” as global warming alarmists argue. Science is never settled, as Albert Einstein spectacularly demonstrated.
Our knowledge of the interplay between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature has gone through three stages over the past 20 years. Al Gore correctly points out that early ice-core data gathered from glaciers around the world showed a very strong correlation between carbon dioxide and temperature over 650,000 years. Because carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, most of us assumed that it regulated global temperature.
By 1999, improving ice-core techniques produced a stunning reversal, showing that the global temperature changed many centuries before carbon dioxide changed. This proved that natural climate cycles were causing changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide, probably by affecting how much remained dissolved in the oceans.
Using new ice-core evidence, Caillon, et al. (Science, March 2003), concluded that “CO2 is not the forcing that initially drives the climatic system.”
This should have convinced alarmists that their scare was unwarranted. But too many would have been thrown out of work, and too many politicians would have lost a hot-button issue. So they ramped up the alarm, relying on ever-more-contrived theories to explain the ice-core data.
In 2007, their last theoretical bastion crumbled. Climatologists announced that a fundamental signature of greenhouse gases, predicted by all U.N. climate models, is missing. There is no “hot spot” from CO2-induced warming at tropical latitudes.
Satellites and weather balloons show normal temperature profiles. The climate models are fundamentally flawed. (Douglass, et al., International Journal of Climatology, Royal Meteorological Society, October 2007.)
Of course, with the abysmal state of science education and the near-total support of the media, global warming propagandists saw no reason to alter their strategy. We continue to hear that catastrophe is just around the corner, and we must sign up for ever more expensive and environmentally damaging “solutions.”
A very important break in this discussion came from The New York Times on Jan.1: “In 2008, a 100 Percent Chance of Alarm” science writer, John Tierney, describes how we are being victimized by a vast array of opportunists. They point out anecdotal evidence of warming and ignore counter evidence — such as the fact that the global temperature last year “was actually lower than any year since 2001.” Governor Kulongoski should understand that responsible science is nonpartisan. We follow scientific evidence, not those lacking scientific training.
Forcing out a scientist because he won’t go along with your favorite hoax hurts Oregon science and ultimately every citizen in this state.
Readers interested in more information from outstanding scientists (including George Taylor) should visit these Web sites:
http://www.icecap.us 
http://www.worldclimatereport.com 
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org 
http://www.co2science.org 

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Gordon J. Fulks, Ph.D. lives in Corbett, OR and can be reached at gordonfulks at hotmail dot com.  He holds a doctorate in physics from the University of Chicago Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Research.

(The original, printed version of this article is here. The online version is here.)