14 DAY TRIAL // In recent days, so-called climate change skeptics have been quoting a study that they say shows man-made global warming is a farce. Scientists in the international community took a look at the study, and they widely agree that the work is filled with errors and misinterpretation of data.
The idea on which the work is based are neither new or correct, as science has demonstrated when it was first proposed. The work was authored by renowned climate skeptic Roy Spencer, a researcher at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
He is known in the international community as a controversial figure, and a stark opponent to the idea that humans may be responsible for global warming. The main idea behind his new study is that cloud cover causes the phenomenon, rather than carbon dioxide.
Climate scientists qualified the so-called study as unrealistic and politically-motivated. Spencer published the data in the July 26 issue of the open-access online journal Remote Sensing.
The information contained within started making the rounds through climate skeptic circles after they were made public in Forbes magazine. The piece was authored by an employee of the Heartland Institute, a think-tank known for promoting global warming skepticism.
The Institute is also infamous for its stance on the link between tobacco smoking and cancer, especially when it comes to second-hand smoking. It worked closely with Philip Morris against the public interest throughout the 1990s.
Returning to the study at hand, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) cloud researcher Daniel Murphy says that the paper is not newsworthy. He states this opinion as an expert in cloud formation and behavior himself.
“He's taken an incorrect model, he's tweaked it to match observations, but the conclusions you get from that are not correct,” Texas A&M University atmospheric sciences professor Andrew Dessler adds.
Spencer's childish explanation for why global warming occurs is that cloud cycles are at the base of the problem, trapping more heat than usual, and that the change in cloud patterns is caused by “chaos in the climate system.”
However, month-to-month variations in temperature and cloud cover in the IPCC models used do not match those observed in the real world, and researchers say that there are many reasons why that may be happening.
“What this mismatch is due to – data processing, errors in the data or real problems in the models – is completely unclear,” NASA Goddard Space Flight Center climatologist Gavin Schmidt says.
Kevin Trenberth, who holds an appointment as a senior scientist at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), in Boulder, Colorado, says that he cannot believe this study got published by any journal.
“If you want to do a story then write one pointing to the ridiculousness of people jumping onto every random press release as if well-established science gets dismissed on a dime,” Schmidt says, referring partially to the behavior of the media in recent days.
“Climate sensitivity is not constrained by the last two decades of imperfect satellite data, but rather the paleoclimate record,” he goes on to say. Only the fact that the Forbes blogger declared the work important made it go into mainstream awareness.
“It makes the skeptics feel good, it irritates the mainstream climate science community, but by this point, the debate over climate policy has nothing to do with science. It's essentially a debate over the role of government,” in the matter, Dessler concludes, quoted by Space.