[Vision2020] Bad Science

[Phil Nisbet]

I read this particular New Your Times Op/Ed with more than the average bit 
of laughter;

“A BLAST FROM THE PAST To find out whether human activities are changing the 
atmosphere, scientists took ice cores from ancient glaciers in Greenland and 
Antarctica. Bubbles of air trapped in the ice provided a pristine sampling 
of the atmosphere going back 650,000 years. The study, published last month 
in the journal Science, found that the level of carbon dioxide, one of the 
greenhouse gases that can warm the planet, is now 27 percent higher than at 
any previous time. The level is even far higher now than it was in periods 
when the climate was much warmer and North America was largely tropical. 
Climatologists said the ice cores left no doubt that the burning of fossil 
fuels is altering the atmosphere in a substantial and unprecedented way.”

Let’s start with the fact that the planet is a few billion years older than 
a mere 650,000 years and realize that there have been periods on the globe 
when conditions in the atmosphere were higher in CO2 than they are 
currently.  As a matter of fact, the atmospheric content of CO2 was three or 
four orders of magnitude higher than it is presently during the Archaean.

Further, the base condition over the last 650,000 years has been one 
dominated by glaciations or rather thin interglacials, so relating it to 
other periods of planetary history and paleo-atmospheric conditions need to 
be considered.

The next statement that North America was a tropical environment at some 
point over the last 650,000 years comes out of the blue in the next 
sentence.  Never happened.  There is no basis for making a claim that ice 
core data can make any such determination.  Yes, North America many years 
prior to any data that is layed out in ice core had a tropical environment, 
but we have no means related to ice cores of determining what the 
paleo-atmospheric CO2 content of those periods were.  Further, the tropical 
environments of the Paleocene, 50,000,000 years ago, occurred when the North 
American continent was at completely different latitudes than it currently 
occupies.  Continental drift has impacts on paleoclimate, which is why you 
can also find tropical regimes in the stratigraphy of Antarctica.

Yes, human induced warming is occurring and it needs to be dealt with.  But 
No, putting out bad science does not serve the cause of finding solutions to 
what is not currently a crisis.  These sorts of writings remind me most of 
the old saws they used to put out in schools about smoking dope and having 
your nose fall off in consequence.  Those bad science anti-drug messages did 
little to stem the flow and usage of drugs and breed contempt for the 
messengers.

Phil Nisbet

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