In the nick of time, just as the world's diplomats are about to sit down and try to do something about our changing climate, the Wall Street Journal has discovered global cooling. And so, of course, it says here, "The Earth Cools, and Fight Over Warming Heats Up."
The key fact, the basis for the column by the newspaper's environment editor, is a set of statistics that shows that global temperatures have declined since 2006. Now, to people in the business of climate science, citing statistics of two years' duration must sound like the setup for a joke -- you know, like, "Boy, it's cold outside, and they talk about global warming!"
But no, Jeffrey Ball isn't trying to tell a joke. He is serious about this, evidently, and expects to be taken seriously. This cooling, he wrote, "has reignited debate over what has become scientific consensus: that climate change is due not to nature, but to humans burning fossil fuels." But has it, really?
The way Ball frames the "debate," it is not a matter of scientific data or even knowledge, but one of dueling beliefs. On one side are scientists "who don't believe in man-made global warming" who cite the "cooling" statistics as "evidence for their case" and on the other are scientists "who do believe in man-made warming" who "dismiss the cooling as a blip." This sounds like a game anybody can play.
At the center of this conflict is the computer model, as Ball sees it: "A few years of cooling doesn't mean that people aren't heating up the planet over the long term. But the cooling wasn't predicted by all the computer models that underlie climate science. That has led to one point of agreement: The models are imperfect."
(Personally, I think there is something terribly ironic about the Wall Street Journal's slant on the "imperfection" of climate models. I mean, here is a stellar group of economic journalists who failed to foresee the worst market collapse in their lifetimes now feeding off the fact that climate models imprecisely foretell the future.)
Anyway, this may come as a surprise to Jeffrey Ball, but climate scientists have been in agreement about the imperfection of climate models before he was environment editor of the Journal, before he was covering the oil industry for the paper in Dallas, and even before he was covering the auto industry for them in Detroit. Of course they are imperfect! They are computer simulations of an extremely complex and not totally-understood planet.
The truth is, even if climate models were perfect -- and in fact, they are pretty darn good -- they would not necessarily predict year-to-year changes in global temperature, because that is not what they are designed to do and not what climate scientists want from them.
In the end, the problem with this column is not that the subject was handled so badly, but that it was written at all, because there is not such thing as a two-year climate trend.
Here is an experiment you can try at home: Look at the graph from NOAA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies depicting the profile of global temperatures since 1880 and try to discern a significant departure from the long-term upward trend any time in the last 50 years or so. Squint your eyes if you want to, but still, I think you will find that it doesn't help. What does help is closing your eyes entirely.
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