Alum Questions Global Warming

To the Editor:

Until its recent Third Assessment Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had managed to be misleading without actually lying. With the TAR Summary for Policymakers, it has now crossed that line by denying that the Medieval Optimum and the Little Ice Age ever existed.
The lPCC history of “global” temperature covers the years 1000 to 2000. It is set forth in a temperature chart that grafts temperatures at the earth’s surface (for the period 1900 to 2000) to temperatures imputed from “proxies” (for the years 1000 to 1900). This chart has the shape of a hockey stick with the 20th century temperatures appearing as the blade. This gives the (totally false) appearance of a rapid rise to present levels that are unique in the last 1000 years.
One doesn’t have to be a climate scientist to wonder what happened to the Medieval Optimum. Knowledge of world history would suffice. The term “Medieval Optimum” has been given to the period of about 300 years when temperatures were above present temperatures, Greenland was given its descriptive (at the time) name, the Vikings farmed Greenland and wine grapes grew in England. All this happened before the industrial revolution began large-scale production of greenhouse gases.
By rewriting history to deny the reality of the Medieval Optimum, the IPCC manages to dupe the uninformed. The Time magazine Ten (none of which are known for their study of climate) come to mind. Dr. George Woodwell, a recent speaker at Oberlin College’s climate change series, abetted the IPCC by presenting its hockey stick history as a basis for his apocalyptic view of the earth’s future, in which he used the term “cinder.” A good liberal arts education would have caused Dr. Woodwell to notice the history missing from the IPCC graph.
There is a sound scientific principle that can be expressed as: What has happened can happen. What has happened is that there are many periods in the earth’s history when temperatures have been warmer than at present and many periods when temperatures have been much colder than present. A long-term perspective shows many ice ages with interglacial recoveries. Earth is still recovering from the most recent ice age which peaked about 12,000 years ago.
The book The Role of the Sun in Climate Change by Hoyt and Schatten is in both the Oberlin Public Library and the College’s science library. Readers will learn how the sun might influence the earth’s climate. They will also obtain immunity from P. J. O’Rourke’s sarcastic barb: “Many people will do almost anything to save the earth, except take a science course.”
The cost of implementing the Kyoto agreement has been estimated at between one and a half to three percent of gross national product. The effect? Go to your thermometer and see what one-seventh of a degree looks like. That is the ESTIMATE of how much we COULD reduce warming in a CENTURY.
Think about this quote from Charles Darwin: “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” And this Dutch adage: “One should not confuse the truth with the opinion of the majority.”

–David C. Greene
OC ’49 (Physics) 
Oberlin, OH