tackling climate change
The Latest in Climate Skepticism
Weathering the onslaught of misinformation.
By ChuCk kutsCher
Chuck Kutscher is a
principal engineer and
manager of the Thermal
Systems Group at the
National Renewable
Energy Laboratory.
He is a past ASES chair
and was chair of the
SOLAR 2006 conference, which resulted in
the ASES report, “
Tackling Climate Change in
the U.S.” (Free download at ases.org/
climatechange.) He
taught a course at the
University of Colorado entitled “Climate
Change Solutions.”
As I write this in late October, the climate change debate is heating up in Congress, although it has taken a back seat to health care. If you think the
health care discussion has been dominated by misinformation spread by those who care only about protecting their profits, you can expect nothing less from the
climate change issue. Thousands of highly paid lobbyists
from the coal and oil industries are hard at work, backed
up by industry-funded think-tank reports and misleading
television ads selling false promises like “capture-ready”
coal plants.
Recently I was invited to join a diverse group of Den-ver-area scientists that discusses climate change issues.
This group is especially interesting because it’s composed
of climate scientists, geologists, meteorologists and others who have some scientific training. The geologists tend
to look at very long time scales (i.e., millions of years),
whereas meteorologists look at very short time scales (i.e.,
days). Significant changes in temperature are quite common on either of those time scales, and so many geologists
and meteorologists have a natural tendency to ask what
The opinions expressed
here are solely those of
the author.
Copyright © 2010 by the American Solar Energy Society Inc. All rights reserved.
all the fuss is about. I wish the National Center for Atmospheric Research climate scientists in this group would
turn the tables and question the geologists on the theory
of plate tectonics!
Most geologists have worked in the fossil fuel industry
and so are not exactly predisposed to believe that burning
fossil fuels is bad for the planet. But they have an excellent
understanding of the Earth’s geologic history and often ask
good questions. Many of them have recently latched onto
the 2009 book, Heaven and Earth: Global Warming — the
Missing Science, by Australian geologist Ian Plimer. One of
Plimer’s previous books took a strong stand in favor of evolution and against intelligent design, so I expected that his
new book would take a scientific approach. What I found,
however, is that Plimer immediately starts his introduction
by blasting the motives of the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change. He paints an erroneous picture of climate
modelers as complete incompetents who only include the
effects of carbon dioxide in their models. After reading such
a biased and ill-informed introduction, I wasn’t inclined to
labor through the remaining 500 pages.
Plimer’s book reminded
me of an earlier reading experience. Last spring, the professional climate skeptic and
lawyer Christopher Horner,
who works for the Competitive Enterprise Institute (one
of those think tanks) was
scheduled to speak in Denver.
Horner has written two books
about climate change: The
Politically Incorrect Guide to
Global Warming and Red Hot
Lies. The former seemed to
have an impressive list of references, so I decided to read it.
I carefully looked up his
references and took 12 pages
of notes detailing more than
30 errors and false statements.
As just one example, Horner
states, “For every shrinking glacier there is a growing
one — but the growing ones
get much less attention.” The
reality is that the World Glacier Monitoring Service has
Global mean temperature index (temperature difference relative to 1951-1980 average)
from the NAsA Goddard Institute for space studies, like that of NOAA, shows 2005 as the
warmest year on record. 2008 was the coolest year since 2000 due mainly to an extended La
Niña. (the preliminary value shown for 2009 is based on an average of the first ten months
of the year.) the slight cooling trend in mid-century has been attributed to solar dimming
resulting from air pollution that occurred prior to clean air regulations.
