Letter to the Editor, Chemical & Engineering News:
The article "Global warming is target of disinformation campaign" (C&EN August 19) stands the truth on its head. It deals with facts in an irresponsible way, conveniently labeling them as disinformation whenever they disagree with the preconceived notions of the writer.
There are indeed three main areas of concern, all connected to the recently published report "Climate Change 1996" by the UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC):
First, the scientific integrity of the IPCC is under attack for good reasons; its officials made, or caused to be made, surreptitious changes to an approved scientific report before sending it to the printer. The existence of these changes--never announced but now grudgingly admitted-- was uncovered by the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), an industry-supported group. (But since when does sponsorship affect incontrovertible facts?) The article "A Major Deception on 'Global Warming'" by Dr. Frederick Seitz (Wall Street Journal, June 12) brought the changes and deletions to wide attention.
While the legality of the alterations is still in dispute, there is little question that they were substantive, and that "phrases that might have been (mis)interpreted as undermining these [IPCC] conclusions ... 'disappeared' in the revision process" (Nature, June 13). Here are three of the clauses deleted from key Chapter 8:
A second issue is C&EN's cavalier disparagement of scientific critiques of two papers by Dr. Benjamin D. Santer, who was convening lead author of Ch. 8. (These papers appeared in print--December 1995 and July 1996--well after the IPCC report was completed and sent out for review--May 1995.) In the July 4, 1996 Nature paper, Santer et al. used data limited to the years 1963-87 that showed a temperature increase. Had they used the complete data set available, 1957-1994, the temperature change would have been zero. A note to that effect has been submitted to Nature by my colleague Prof. Patrick Michaels. I know of at least two other critiques challenging the conclusions of Santer et al., which may find their way into print.
Regardless of the merits of these scientific critiques, the integrity and credibility of the IPCC review process is at risk when it allows the lead author to use his own unpublished work for much of the conclusions of the report. For example, there are 19 references to these two unpublished papers in Chapter 8 alone. Eight of Santer's co-authors are also listed as contributors to the chapter. Unfortunately, the scientific critiques of their work--which are only now being submitted for publication--do not appear in the IPCC report.
As to the third issue--global temperature measurements from Earth satellites--the article refers to the wrong channel of the microwave instrument: it mistakenly cites the middle-troposphere channel instead of Channel 2R (lower troposphere). It also distorts the views of Prof. John Christy, the author of the satellite data analysis; there are indeed discrepancies between satellite and surface data.
Isn't it remarkable that the Policymakers Summary of the IPCC report (pp. 3-7) avoids mentioning the satellite data altogether, or even the existence of satellites--probably because the data show a (slight) cooling over the last 18 years, in direct contradiction to the calculations from climate models?
The question the C&EN article fails to address: If the results of current climate models cannot be validated by observations, why should we place reliance on such models when they predict a major warming in the next century?
S. Fred Singer
Science & Environmental Policy Project
The writer, an atmospheric physicist, is professor (emeritus) of environmental sciences
at the
University of Virginia and former director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service.