The Hammond Report

Despite what the MSM, Liberals, and the Nobel Peace Prize selection committee who believe humans are the cause of global warming say, there are real scientists out there who believe otherwise. In fact, there is one on the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and shares a piece of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. That's right, believe it or not, John R. Christy, the director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and a member of the IPCC and Nobel Peace Prize recipient does not believe that humans are the cause of global warming. He wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal yesterday called My Nobel Moment.

I'm sure the majority (but not all) of my IPCC colleagues cringe when I say this, but I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see. Rather, I see a reliance on climate models (useful but never «proof») and the coincidence that changes in carbon dioxide and global temperatures have loose similarity over time.

He goes on to explain how complex our climate system is and how difficult it is to build a reliable model of how our climate currently operates, much less how it will be in the future.

Mother Nature simply operates at a level of complexity that is, at this point, beyond the mastery of mere mortals (such as scientists) and the tools available to us. As my high-school physics teacher admonished us in those we-shall-conquer-the-world-with-a-slide-rule days, «Begin all of your scientific pronouncements with 'At our present level of ignorance, we think we know . . .'»

I pulled the title of this post from the above quote because it presents a humble and wise message we should all follow when making such pronouncements on issues as complex as climate change. Rather then blame human activity as the cause of the climate change we are seeing today, he reminds us that «everything we've seen the climate do has happened before.»

Others of us scratch our heads and try to understand the real causes behind what we see. We discount the possibility that everything is caused by human actions, because everything we've seen the climate do has happened before. Sea levels rise and fall continually. The Arctic ice cap has shrunk before. One millennium there are hippos swimming in the Thames, and a geological blink later there is an ice bridge linking Asia and North America.

He also challenges those who report and study climate change to have a global perspective. It's important to understand that one area of the planet might be experiencing warming while another cooling. For example, the Arctic ice sheets are shrinking but the Antarctic ice is actually setting records in growth.

One of the challenges in studying global climate is keeping a global perspective, especially when much of the research focuses on data gathered from spots around the globe. Often observations from one region get more attention than equally valid data from another.

The recent CNN report «Planet in Peril,» for instance, spent considerable time discussing shrinking Arctic sea ice cover. CNN did not note that winter sea ice around Antarctica last month set a record maximum (yes, maximum) for coverage since aerial measurements started.

Christy closes his piece by exploring the futility of our actions to reduce CO2 emissions and the human price of trying to do so. To make even a dent we would have to build 1000 new nuclear power plants, which would possibly slow warming by .2 degrees per century.

But what is the economic and human price, and what is it worth given the scientific uncertainty?

My experience as a missionary teacher in Africa opened my eyes to this simple fact: Without access to energy, life is brutal and short. The uncertain impacts of global warming far in the future must be weighed against disasters at our doorsteps today. Bjorn Lomborg's Copenhagen Consensus 2004, a cost-benefit analysis of health issues by leading economists (including three Nobelists), calculated that spending on health issues such as micronutrients for children, HIV/AIDS and water purification has benefits 50 to 200 times those of attempting to marginally limit «global warming.»

Given the scientific uncertainty and our relative impotence regarding climate change, the moral imperative here seems clear to me.