WSJ Continues to Publish Rubbish on Climate Change

An opinion piece appeared on WSJ online last week (available here in full via a right-wing site), offering up a tired account of the climate change debate. The author, Syun-Ichi Akasofu (an individual with plenty of scientific credentials, but sadly one wouldn't know it from his article) raises three arguments that he asserts undermines the scientific evidence for climate change - three arguments that were dispensed with as rubbish years ago. Why they continue to resurface in any venue, particularly one associated with a presumably leading media outlet, is beyond me (but then WSJ has a history - see here or here). The three points:

1) "ice-core data showing that temperature rises tend to precede CO2 increases by about 1,000 years." Yes, in a naturally warming world CO2 increases in the atmosphere. This does not mean that any CO2 increase in the atmosphere is natural in nature(to draw this conclusion would be a far more absurd scientific deduction than anything climate change scientists have ever come up with). Rather, what this means is that as fossil fuel combustion increases atmospheric CO2 concentrations, the resulting human-induced warming will cause a positive feedback leading to even more CO2 in the atmosphere, and even more warming.

2) Then there's the old hockey stick graph, which the author argues has been debunked. "Two Canadian statisticians found that the authors of the graph made a statistical error in dealing with the tree-ring data. After correcting the error, the two researchers could not reproduce the sharp upturn of the curve -- even though they were using the very same data." OK, what was the point of the hockey stick graph? Temperatures in the northern hemisphere at the end of the 20th century were warmer than at any point in the prior 1000 years. Since that study was published, there have been about a dozen other independent studies arriving at the same conclusion (see Figure below from the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report). All of this is well documented in the literature for anyone interested in taking an honest look.

3) Then there are the particularly unscientific platitudes that are simply presented without any supporting information whatsoever. Things like global warming "can be attributed to the rebounding effect from the Little Ice Age" or "a supercomputer cannot provide an approximate estimate of the temperature in 2050 or 2100 because scientists are not able to instruct it with all the the unknown processes that may be at play." What the hell is this "rebounding effect" - the planet's energy balance is externally forced, so for it to "rebound" that external forcing must have changed. Although other forcings such as solar radiation and volcanic activity contribute in part to observed climate trends, you can't adequately explain those trends without accounting for the external forcing induced by greenhouse gases. Meanwhile, climate models are capable of reproducing the 20th century climate (although some models are much better than others), so presumably they can give an indication of the direction the climate will be forced in the future (but, hey, there are people that devote their lives to model evaluation - why not cite some of their work rather than making blanket statements). Obviously, if some other large forcing were to rear its head, then greenhouse gases would rightfully move to the back burner. Over geologic time scales, such forcings will invariably arise. But over the time scales of society and policy, there's nothing on the horizon that appears set to dominate over greenhouse gases.

In the universe of climate skepticism, this piece is pretty sub-standard, which makes one wonder why WSJ online would post it. It does a poor job of representing the science, which is exacerbated by the fact that the folks at WSJ online don't know any better or don't care. I'd be thrilled to see an international body of quality scientific research that provides compelling evidence that humans aren't significantly forcing the global climate. That evidence doesn't exist.