Atmosphere of Uncertainty?
To support the conclusion of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that current warming is anthropogenic, William Collins, Robert Colman, James Haywood, Martin R. Manning and Philip Mote assert in “The Physical Science behind Climate Change” that the mismatch between surface and tropospheric warming rates has now been resolved. This claim is not supported by actual observations. According to the April 2006 Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) report, considerable disparity exists between the observed warming-rate patterns and those calculated by greenhouse models. Although the models predict that temperature trends will increase with altitude by 200 to 300 percent, the data from both weather balloons and satellites show the opposite. This result does not deny the existence of a greenhouse effect from the considerable increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gases. But it does suggest that present models greatly overestimate the effect’s magnitude and significance.
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3 Comments
Add CommentSingers numbers are out by a factor of 10: see for example Santer et al http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/309/5740/1551
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Bad plan: feature the letter in full text on the free website, so Google and other search engines will index it uncritically and present it associated with the magazine to searchers, but keep any followup fact or reality checks behind the pay-wall and in the printed magazine to limit awareness of those to a far smaller audience less able to question what they're reading.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWant to rethink this presentation?
Your article about many worlds distinguishes between using the theory as a mathematical tool, and believing in the real existence of infinite universes. No mention is made of how one could disprove such a theory, and without such a test the theory is not science. Given that the people making this assertion were scientists, I am very interested in how they proposed one might prove the theory.
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