WASHINGTON--When would they yell "fire!" about global warming, Democratic Sen. Frank Lautenberg asked Bush administration officials at a hearing Wednesday, after the officials repeatedly declined to recommend action.
The officials weren't moved by the New Jersey senator's plea, but his metaphor drew a response a few minutes later from Syun-Ichi Akasofu, director of the International Arctic Research Center in Fairbanks.
"We're not sure if the house is really on fire, and to put the water there, making water damage, may be more damaging," Akasofu said........................................
..............The problem, Akasofu said, is that the most advanced computer models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, when fed real historical data, cannot reproduce what actually happened.
"This is what we call hind-casting. We're using the last 50 years of data ... so we think it's the best scientific test of the greenhouse hypothesis," Akasofu said.
Using the scientific method, researchers observe global warming, hypothesize the causes and then seek to verify those hypotheses using supercomputers, Akasofu said.
"If the computer simulation and observation agree, then our understanding becomes scientific fact," he said. "But if the computer cannot reproduce what we observed, then hypothesis has to be disproved."
In fact, he said, the models fail to reproduce the strong warming that actually occurred in the continental Arctic in recent decades. Yet many scientists cling to their hypotheses, he said.
"That gets into the area of what we call science fiction," he said.
Read the whole thing. Also read my April 7 post, if you're so inclined. Actually, the whole "global warming as a result of anthropogenic carbon emissions" hypothesis has already gone to the paradigm stage in most quarters. I hope Dr. Akasofu still has his job next week.
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