White House Official In Denial Over Global Warming

White House Official In Denial..." Sounds like something else from that grab-bag collection of stock headlines such as "Miss America Is Wholesome" and "Strikes in France."

This one has to do with Dirk Forrister, head of the White House Global Climate Change Task Force, blowing his cool in a truly Executive fashion in a discussion of global warming science and policy held by the Washington-based Energy Institute Sept. 18.

Forrister, who started off by running down any scientist who dared to disagree with the White House, claimed responsibility for President Clinton’s presentation at last fall’s Global Warming Summit. There, the Chief said, "The science is compelling" on global warming (see below).

At the Energy Institute meeting, Forrister was first apprised that the climate model most frequently presented to Congress a decade ago predicted that the last 10 years would warm 0.45°C, though in fact they didn’t: The observed values in ground-based thermometers was 0.11, while satellites and two independent weather-balloon measurements showed a cooling.

Then Forrister was shown recent results by NOAA researcher Ed Dlugokencky indicating that methane, the second most important human greenhouse emission, will not increase much in the next 100 years. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in forecasting a "most likely" warming of 2.0°C in the next century, had assumed it would increase by more than 150 percent.

Forrister was then confronted with Gunnar Myhre’s recent finding that the direct warming effect of carbon dioxide has been overestimated by 15 percent; and then with NASA scientist James Hansen’s assertion that atmospheric CO₂ isn’t growing as fast as predicted because it’s being taken up by the vegetation at an increasing rate, making the planet greener, not browner.

All of this means that the median forecast of 2.0°C of warming next century is going to have to come down unless there is some yet-to-be-dreamt-up excuse to counter this onslaught of reality.

Based on interviews with several fellow attendees, we recount the following compelling dialogue.

So, to Forrister, the Big Question: If the climate modelers, 10 years ago, had predicted that the likely warming of the next century would be between 1.0°C and 1.5°C, would there be the onerous Kyoto Protocol to the Framework Convention on Climate Change?

Hem. Haw. Shuffle. "I don’t know."

Given that Forrister had just opened up Pandora’s briefcase by allowing the possibility that Kyoto wouldn’t have existed, he was asked if, then, it might not be appropriate, given current knowledge, for Congress to direct the President to withdraw from the climate treaty. According to that treaty, he can do so simply by writing a letter to the United Nations Secretariat.

"Frivolous!" Forrister exploded. "You can’t go around making frivolous arguments like that."

Next question: "What do you think of the findings that methane will not increase next century, that carbon dioxide isn’t increasing as forecast, and that the direct warming effect was overestimated?"

"Frivolous!"

"You really mean to say that all these things are ‘frivolous’?"

"Yes, they’re frivolous."

Forrister’s show, from its derisive beginning to its remarkable end—throwing out the refereed scientific literature with a flip of the Executive Branch’s hand—shows that those who question the White House on its global warming wisdom are subject to the same "scorched earth" treatment being afforded those who question certain White House activities.

References:

Dlugokencky, E.J., et al., 1998, Continuing decline in the growth rate of the atmospheric methane burden. Nature, 393, 447–450.

Hansen, J.E., et. al., 1998. A common-sense climate index: Is climate changing noticeably? Procedures of the National Academy of Sciences, 95, 4113–4120.

Myhre, G., et al., 1998. New estimates of radiative forcing due to well-mixed greenhouse gases. Geophysical Research Letters, 25, 2715–2718.

“Compelling Science?”  Think again.

As Dirk Forrister pointed out, President Clinton based his global warming speech last year on information channeled through the White House Global Climate Change Task Force. Citing their conclusions as bedrock, Clinton said: "The science is compelling."

But it isn’t. We can see the testimony now: "Hey, uh, I didn’t say how compelling. Just because something is compelling doesn’t mean anything more than what I said it meant."

Well, here’s a bit of quantitative guidance on scientific compulsion. The long-awaited new National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) model has finally been published in a massive special issue of the Journal of Climate.

NCAR scientists have leaked some information not published in the journal: The predicted global warming for doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide is a mere 2.0°C, with an increase of only 1.25° over the 19th-century background at time of doubling in the middle of the next century.

We first published something very close to that last year (Vol. 2, No. 19), when we interpreted an illustration from a May 1997 news report in Science.

But we did not know about the huge errors that this most sophisticated model has been making. Figure 1, page 1, is taken from the Journal of Climate. As it shows, the model’s calculations of current June–August temperatures over three-quarters of the earth’s landmass are more than two standard deviations away from reality.

Figure 1. The shaded regions below represent the locations where the current, observed temperatures are more than two standard deviations above or below the temperatures as forecast by the new NCAR climate model. Note that the analysis includes only land areas.

In other words, the errors the climate model is currently making are enormous. Statistically speaking, the model temperatures over 75 percent of the land areas are wrong by accepted mathematical criteria. This information is not reported for the areas covered by oceans, but we can’t imagine that the accuracy there is much better.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is a compelling error, which, if anything, makes the arguments for the Kyoto Protocol frivolous.

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