were made late in the reviewing process and that the changes affected the essence of the report’s conclusions—sounds serious to the public. But all other committee members know it is nonsense. The report was done quickly at the request of the White House, but editing was done openly, with continual e-mail exchanges with committee members. The public has access to both the executive summary and the full report and can verify that the summary reflects the report’s contents—but how many will do so? Instead, the public hears a “balanced” perspective: Many scientists agree that humans are altering climate, but there seems to be disagreement about that conclusion within the scientific community.
Lindzen’s perspective is summed up in the final statements on his concluding chart shown at the White House meeting, which read:
(1) Scientists who are willing to speak out in support of hysteria are supported with funding, awards, and even legal assistance. (2) The environmental movement coordinates public pronouncements so as to guarantee that all spokesmen are “on the same page.” (3) Institutions, dependent on support, are supportive of alarmism. (4) Scientists who protest alarmism are out in the cold. There is no assistance from any direction.
(These statements are similar to his conclusions at the second meeting of Vice President Cheney’s Task Force.)
Between his opening chart attacking the integrity of Cicerone and Rowland and his final chart’s conclusions, Lindzen’s presentation consisted of a criticism of IPCC and “alarmism.” As an antidote to such “nonsense,” he recommended a book, Taken by Storm , by Christopher Essex and Ross McKitrick. Lindzen’s presentation included only two scientific graphs. The first graph, from the 2001 IPCC report, showed that climate models using a combination of natural and anthropogenic forcings did a reasonably good job of reproducing global warming of the past century. He criticized this result, because, he said, we don’t really know the human-made aerosols and we also don’t know the El Niño and volcano forcings. He is right that the human-made aerosols are not measured. But El Niño is not a forcing—as explained in chapter 1, it is an unforced climate variability, a “sloshing” that is unpredictable except on short time scales, and it has little effect on century time-scale climate change.
Lindzen’s second graph showed that there was a high correlation between sunspots and the number of Republicans in the Senate. He concluded that the IPCC analysis was hardly better than the sunspot-Republican analysis, indeed, “in some respects the climate analysis is more questionable, since the effect is so much smaller.”
Any levity from Lindzen’s presentation dissipates upon the realization that his presentations were taken seriously by the administration. There are reasons to believe that Bush, Cheney, and Rove all shared Lindzen’s perspective (consistent with evidence presented in chapter 7) and distrusted the scientific community. The answer that the National Academy of Sciences had delivered in response to the president’s request, the report that Lindzen “critiqued,” was not the answer the White House wanted to hear. The president did not ask the academy for advice about global warming again during the remainder of his eight years in power.
CHAPTER 4
Time Warp
I SAID THAT MY STORY WOULD cover only the past eight years. Sorry. In this chapter I’m going to have to take you with me for a moment into a backward time warp. If you are irascible by nature, easily angered by broken promises, you may wish to skip directly to the next chapter. But in so doing, you will miss a discussion of some potentially crucial information, key to understanding the task of restoring Earth’s energy balance—and restoring Earth’s energy balance is the fundamental requirement for stabilizing our climate.
It is Kathie Olsen, associate director of the
Lindzen’s perspective is summed up in the final statements on his concluding chart shown at the White House meeting, which read:
(1) Scientists who are willing to speak out in support of hysteria are supported with funding, awards, and even legal assistance. (2) The environmental movement coordinates public pronouncements so as to guarantee that all spokesmen are “on the same page.” (3) Institutions, dependent on support, are supportive of alarmism. (4) Scientists who protest alarmism are out in the cold. There is no assistance from any direction.
(These statements are similar to his conclusions at the second meeting of Vice President Cheney’s Task Force.)
Between his opening chart attacking the integrity of Cicerone and Rowland and his final chart’s conclusions, Lindzen’s presentation consisted of a criticism of IPCC and “alarmism.” As an antidote to such “nonsense,” he recommended a book, Taken by Storm , by Christopher Essex and Ross McKitrick. Lindzen’s presentation included only two scientific graphs. The first graph, from the 2001 IPCC report, showed that climate models using a combination of natural and anthropogenic forcings did a reasonably good job of reproducing global warming of the past century. He criticized this result, because, he said, we don’t really know the human-made aerosols and we also don’t know the El Niño and volcano forcings. He is right that the human-made aerosols are not measured. But El Niño is not a forcing—as explained in chapter 1, it is an unforced climate variability, a “sloshing” that is unpredictable except on short time scales, and it has little effect on century time-scale climate change.
Lindzen’s second graph showed that there was a high correlation between sunspots and the number of Republicans in the Senate. He concluded that the IPCC analysis was hardly better than the sunspot-Republican analysis, indeed, “in some respects the climate analysis is more questionable, since the effect is so much smaller.”
Any levity from Lindzen’s presentation dissipates upon the realization that his presentations were taken seriously by the administration. There are reasons to believe that Bush, Cheney, and Rove all shared Lindzen’s perspective (consistent with evidence presented in chapter 7) and distrusted the scientific community. The answer that the National Academy of Sciences had delivered in response to the president’s request, the report that Lindzen “critiqued,” was not the answer the White House wanted to hear. The president did not ask the academy for advice about global warming again during the remainder of his eight years in power.
CHAPTER 4
Time Warp
I SAID THAT MY STORY WOULD cover only the past eight years. Sorry. In this chapter I’m going to have to take you with me for a moment into a backward time warp. If you are irascible by nature, easily angered by broken promises, you may wish to skip directly to the next chapter. But in so doing, you will miss a discussion of some potentially crucial information, key to understanding the task of restoring Earth’s energy balance—and restoring Earth’s energy balance is the fundamental requirement for stabilizing our climate.
It is Kathie Olsen, associate director of the
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