Two recent stories concerning the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) caught my eye and are worth noting.
The first is the news from Forbes that a recent study of NASA satellite data from the last decade (2000–2010) shows that far more heat is escaping the earth’s atmosphere than has been predicted by AGW computer models. This in turn means that there will be far less global warming than predicted by those models, which were used by the UN climate science panel which took a dire view of the planet’s “warming.”
As the study’s co-author, Dr. Roy Spencer — a climate scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville and Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer on board NASA’s Aqua satellite — put it, there is a “huge discrepancy” between the empirical, observational data coming from NASA’s Terra satellite and what has been predicted by the climate warming crowd.
If you still have the quaint and antiquated notion that scientific theories ought to comport with observed data, this gap is, to say the least, disconcerting.
But the Terra satellite data are consistent with earlier data from another NASA satellite (the ERBS satellite) from an earlier period (1985 to 1999), which showed that vastly more long-wave radiation (therefore heat) escaped the atmosphere than was predicted by the global warming models. We now have a quarter of a century of data from two different satellites, pretty much saying the same thing.
The problem for the computer models seems to be that they predict that the increase in CO2 will cause an increase in atmospheric humidity and cirrus cloud cover, which in turn will trap heat, but the data seem at variance with the prediction. Curious, no?
The second story is about the scientist — one Charles Monnett, to be precise — who published an influential article in the journal Polar Biology in 2006 urging the claim that polar bears were drowning in the Arctic Ocean, presumably because the ice had melted from global warming. The article was based on Monnett’s observations, and this “peer-reviewed” article became an instant hit in the world of environmental activists. The article helped bring the polar bear to the forefront of the worldwide enviro movement. For example, the allegedly beleaguered animal figured into Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, which showed sad polar bears — oh, so cute and cuddly! — swimming desperately in search of ice.
That research was then cited in 2008 when the Department of the Interior decided to put the polar bear on the endangered species list. And it is frequentlyused as part of the evidence that global warming is an imminent threat to animal life, so we need massive policy changes, with potential costs in the trillions.
Now, this particular bit of “science” should have aroused some scrutiny before, because it reeks of tendentious incompetence at work. The observational base of the study allegedlyconsisted of four (count ’em, four) polar bear carcasses floating in the ocean, observed from a plane flying at an altitude of 1,500 feet, on a research expedition studying — whales! No autopsy was done on the bears to see if they had drowned; their drowning was just “inferred.”
Note: the internal “peer review” panel included Monnett’s wife! “Yeah, Honey, your paper looks super! Please pass the pasta . . .”
Monnett is now under investigation for scientific misconduct by the Department of the Interior’s Inspector General’s Office, and has been placed on administrative leave from “the federal agency where he works.”Researchers are talking to him and his research partner about their work. Monnett’s career may wind up looking like . . . well . . . a dead polar bear from 1,500 feet up.
