When we encounter the latest alarmist litany in newspapers across the nation, we can't help inserting a few choice words in editor's brackets: [A serious misconception about] global warming is accelerating at a dramatic pace.

For some reason, and it's not science, reporters at such esteemed rags as the Los Angeles Times are becoming [un]knowing environmentalist shills, as when Usha Lee McFarling writes that "groups that are concerned about climate change point out that the rate of warming is steeply increasing." The proof? McFarling quotes Lester Brown, author of 25 annual "State of the World" reports on how ecological doom is at hand: "Studying these annual temperature data, one gets the unmistakable feeling that the temperature is rising and that the rise is gaining momentum."

Oh, yeah? Well, Brown and the L.A.Times may choose to behave like stereotypical California New Agers for basing their conclusions on "feelings," but some of us climatologists prefer to actually examine the temperature history in the warming era. Is there an accelerating trend? Absolutely not.

Most scientists believe that the earth's temperature turned a corner sometime in the mid- or late 1970s, when a three-decade cooling period ended abruptly and a warming began. There's a real peculiarity in the global history known as "the great Pacific climate shift" of 1976–1977, and that is what seems to initiate the current warming. So let's start our analysis in 1977.

Figure 1 shows the average warming rate for successive periods beginning with the first five years (1977–1982), and incrementing year by year. If the L.A. Times and Lester Brown were right—and if the latter had really "studied" the data instead of relying on his biased "feelings," he would have found no significant trend whatsoever in the rate of warming.

Figure 1. Average warming rate for successive periods beginning with the first five years (1977–1982) and incrementing year by year. There is no significant trend whatsoever in the rate of warming.

Not even the huge El Niño of 1998 puts a false increase in the record in the last few years. Instead, the rise just hugs a constant 0.15ºC per decade.

Our analysis isn't hard to do. It took us a grand total of 10 minutes. It might have taken Lester Brown (with his renown) an hour; the L.A. Times could've deduced it by tomorrow after lunch.

Though characterized as a "respected authority," Brown seems remarkably out of step with global warming science, since the central tendency of most climate models is to produce constant (not exponential) rates of warming, something the observations bear out. In fact, a good deal of the $20 billion of taxpayer money spent on global warming has been directed toward that modeling effort.

Have Brown and the L.A. Times discovered something new? Could it be that all that money got the mathematical form of future warming wrong? Maybe. But we haven't seen Brown's paper on it, or heard his presentation. And judging from Figure 1, we won't be doing so in the near future, either.

But Brown and McFarling are not alone in confusing global warming facts with feelings. Witness the recent trilateral fiasco involving the L.A. Times, the New York Times, and the American Geophysical Union.

With a headline screaming "Arctic Ice is Melting at Record Level, Scientists Say," the venerable New York paper led off with an alarming prospect: "The melting of Greenland glaciers and Arctic Ocean sea ice this past summer reached levels not seen in decades..."

Under increasing attack for melding editorial commentary and news, the Grand Old Lady seemed to be revealing her true sentiments once again in that December 8 Sunday edition. That same day, both that paper and the Los Angeles Times carried major articles about the latest measurements of a shrinking area of Arctic sea ice and how global warming is to blame.

This "news" appeared in conjunction with the winter meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, from which the New York Times reported that "The shrinking fits in with the trend since the late 1970s and general predictions of global warming."

In fact, though, this year's ice extent probably is not much different from that of summers earlier in the 20th century, at a time before there could possibly have been much of a human contribution to the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Both papers' coverage completely ignored a new and extremely important analysis of Arctic ice and temperatures that appeared just two weeks earlier, by Igor Polyakov and others, in the November 18 edition of EOS, the official scientific journal of the American Geophysical Union—the same people running the San Francisco meeting.

Instead, satellite data cited in both newspaper articles show that in summer 2002 the areal coverage of ice in the Arctic Ocean reached its smallest value since measurements began in 1978.

A record? Yes, in a manner of speaking. But to obtain the whole truth, there are records of much longer duration for ice cover and Arctic temperature, among them Polyakov's history, which goes back 100 years further, to the 1870s, and shows that the current situation is not at all unusual.

Every climatologist worth his sea salt knows that—since we know the Arctic was as warm (or warmer) than it is now some seven decades ago. Figure 2, from the EOS article, clearly demonstrates the warmth of the early 20th century.

Figure 2. Solid line: Six-year running means of Arctic temperature from Polyakov and colleagues. Dashed line: Annual temperatures. Clearly the 1930s, an era before changes in the greenhouse effect could have caused much warming, were as warm or warmer than today.

According to Polyakov and his fellow researchers:

Two distinct warming periods from 1920 to 1945, and from 1975 to the present, are clearly evident...compared with the global and hemispheric temperature rise, the high-latitude temperature increase was stronger in the late 1930s to early 1940s than in recent decades. [emphasis added]

With regard to sea ice:

We examined the long-term observational records of fast-ice thickness and ice extent from four Arctic marginal seas...the analysis indicates that long-term trends are small and generally statistically insignificant. [emphasis added]

Certainly, members of the American Geological Union in San Francisco were familiar with Polyakov's very recent article in their own journal. And it seems unlikely that the science editors of the two Timeses would have missed it. Somehow, it should have come up in conversation as these reporters pulled their articles together.

Reference:

Polyakov, I., et al., 2002. Trends and Variations in Arctic Climate Systems. EOS, Transactions, American Geophysical Union, 83, 547–548.

2002 Lump-O-Coal Award

Imagine. Somehow we forgot to congratulate former federal climatologist Mike MacCracken on his retirement.

OK, we're ingrates. Mike was the major force behind the U.S. National Assessment, which became, embarrassingly, a part of a Bush Administration document called the Climate Action Plan 2002. It was based upon two computer models that couldn't beat a table of random numbers. As recently as December 5, though "retired," Mike stormed the microphone at a national meeting on climate change in Washington, like a 1960s student at an Administration Building, to decry that test as "inappropriate." (So "inappropriate" that Mike's team at the Assessment replicated the calculation.)

You can read all about this fiasco in the soon-to-be-released book, The Alchemy of Policymaking, scheduled for February publication by the Hoover Institution. Over the years, Mike has indeed been an inspiration to Policy Alchemists worldwide. And now, he can burnish his resume with World Climate Report's 2002 Lump-o-Coal Award!

Too bad we don't have the money to carve this year's lump into a nice black watch. But the truth is, Mike has only retired from the federal service. He's now a high-priced consultant, freer than ever to speak his mind. You go, guy!