University of Washington atmospheric scientist David Battisti and Stanford co-author Rosamond Naylor have an article in this week’s Science magazine that is making headlines across the world.
Why? Because they contend that we are fast heading towards a global food crisis as a result of a future temperature rise projected to accompany increasing atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases.
However, the paper itself is long on rhetoric and short on supporting science, with the conclusions based largely on improper reasoning.
They assume that people will sit idly by and slowly perish as the climate changes around them, doggedly clinging to outdated and failing agricultural practices instead of adopting new crop varieties and farming techniques as the climate warrants. This is known as the “dumb farmer scenario.”
But, farmers aren’t dumb. The development and adoption of new technologies and crop varieties is the primary reason why crop yields have increased many fold over the past century.…
Continue ReadingThe Pew Center on Global Climate Change is premised on the notion that climate science is settled and we must move toward major, open-ended government intervention with energy and the economy. “Climate change poses an extraordinary challenge that demands immediate action,” begins the Science Impacts page on the Pew Center’s website.
Thus I was surprised to read this from a Pew representative in a debate over climate-change science hosted recently by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. As debate participant Lawrence Solomon reported the Financial Post:
… Continue Reading“I really detest phrases like the science is settled,” asserted Dr. Jay Gulledge, a climate specialist at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change in his opening statement. “To characterize myself and the Pew Center as viewing the science as settled is a bit of a red herring.”
In last Friday’s Wall Street Journal (Jan. 2, 2008), Science Journal editor Robert Lee Hotz reviewed the climate of 2008 and concluded that despite a relatively cool year, all signs were go for anthropogenic global warming proceeding at a rapid and destructive clip—perhaps even faster than climate models envisioned.
Hotz’s review was extremely selective, with the effect of keeping the specter of catastrophic global warming alive and well, in the face of mounting evidence that it has, in fact, become gravely ill.
A closer look at the recent behavior of global temperatures indicates that all is not well with climate-model projections of alarming climate change.
2008 added another year to a lengthening string in which the rate of global temperature rise has been far beneath model predictions showing that natural variability still plays a large role in everyday weather and climate.…
Continue Reading