Lorrie Goldstein is an associate editor at the Toronto Sun. Normally, the Toronto Sun affects my view of the world only when I use loose copies of the paper and a solution of 1 part vinegar to 3 parts water to wash my windows. Just the same, a recent article caught my eye. In an editorial titled "Debunking hot hysteria" Goldstein outlines five points which suggest that Global Warming is not nearly the crisis it's being made out to be. The byline reads "Political agendas, massive misinformation fueling climate debate." I couldn't agree more, however, in the case of his article, the author himself is the source of this misinformation.
Goldstein's original article text is available here: http://www.torontosun.com/News/Columnists/Goldstein_Lorrie/2007/01/14/3362249-sun.html
Herein, I review Goldstein's five points:
Point 1:
Goldstein states that the earth is 4.5 billion years old and has gone through countless cycles of warming and cooling all of which had nothing to do with human influence, because we weren't even around. Yes, this is true, however, here Goldstein makes a point in favour of Global Warming rather than one against it.
Scientists have been able to extract about 400,000 years of climate data thanks to precious research done in Vostok, Antarctica. Scientists there took ice core samples and looked at the entrapped air bubbles which were samples of the climate at the time they were formed. Using this data scientists were able to look at CO2 concentration and various isotopes (special forms of well known atoms) to determine the atmospheric temperature.
This data is freely available for all to examine at: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/icecore/antarctica/vostok/vostok.html and a telling graph of the past 400,000 years of history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Vostok-ice-core-petit.png shows clearly that throughout this period, the concentration of CO2 has influenced global temperature.
So it is true that Global Warming has occurred countless eons before humans existed, however, it was always tied to the concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gasses. Since no scientist or even Goldstein doubts that humans are dumping unprecedented amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, Goldstein must then be forced to admit that humans are causing this latest Global Warming event.
Point 2:
Goldstein points out the difference between predicting the weather and predicting the climate. He says that alarmists are pointing to Katrina and the recent warm winter as clear evidence of Global Warming and such claims are irresponsible. He's quite right that such claims are irresponsible, however, no reputable scientists are making this claim. Scientists in the field are quite particular about mentioning that while no one weather event can conclusively be connected to Global Warming, humans have put an unprecedented amount of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and this will inevitably lead to Global Warming. The data in this regard (the unprecedented CO2 levels) is irrefutable. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr.png
Goldstein makes a tongue in cheek remark about scientists' inability to predict the weather suggesting that the general public might take climate predictions with a grain of salt. Goldstein is unaware of the law of large numbers. Weather is hard to predict, however, climate (long term weather), given enough data (supplied graciously by the Vostok Ice Core data) isn't. The model here is that Goldstein, an editor of the Toronto Sun, knows approximately how many people a day will read his newspaper reliably. He however does not know a name by name list of those people; so too is it with weather compared to climate. We may not know exactly on which days the rain will fall, however, if we live in a desert, we can reliably put an upper bound on the amount of rainfall.
Point 3:
In this section Goldstein points out that in the 1970's "Time, Newsweek and others ran stories predicting a possible new ice age. Oops." This is also a true statement; these periodicals did run such stories. However all those periodicals made a classic journalistic error of misquote by truncation. Below I will present two quotes from the 1974 proceedings of the National Science Board. The CAPITALIZED TEXT represents text that was omitted.
As quoted: "Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end . . . leading into the next glacial age."
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