Phil Carter’s blast at J. Paul Brown (Herald, May 13), citing 13 Republican House members co-sponsoring a resolution acknowledging humans as a cause of climate change, reminds me of a joke among physicists about Congress repealing Ohm’s law. Congress does not determine scientific truth, and a few politicians jumping on a bandwagon to get votes does not constitute a trend.
Scientific truth is determined by data. The data showed no global warming for 15 years, during which one-third of all the carbon dioxide emissions by mankind, ever, were made. The models upon which the warming predictions are made predict increasing warming with increasing carbon dioxide. It didn’t happen for 15 years, 18 if one considers satellite temperature measurements. The warmists tried to cover their embarrassment by dropping the term global warming in favor of climate change.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has tried to get rid of the warming hiatus by adjusting some of the measurements in the first part down so that current temperatures look like they are increasing. But they couldn’t adjust the satellite measurements, which show no change.
Every year more scientists are becoming skeptical about man-made global warming. They tend to be scientists like me who are not climatologists but who looked into global warming to see what all the fuss was about. I don’t have to be a climatologist to see when the model does not fit the data. In my field we adjust the models to fit the data, not the other way around.
The consensus in science has gone wrong before. When I was at NASA working on Apollo, I had to deal with scientists claiming radiation bursts from the sun would kill the astronauts. The consensus included a lot of people who had axes to grind. They wanted the money spent on something else, say, to cure cancer. We went to the moon; there was no radiation problem.
Science makes errors, but it corrects itself. If scientists can’t get it right, the data eventually overwhelms them. It’s in the process of correcting itself on anthropogenic global warming.
Jerry Modisette
Pagosa Springs
