Posted: 09/15/2004
Climate Alarmists Try To Scare Californians Again
Study Authors First Warn Wine Industry, Now Warn of Heat Deaths
September 15, 2005 – After first warning Californians last month that global warming was going to spell the end to the state’s prized wine industry, climate alarmists are back with a death threat for the state’s residents. According to a new report released this week by ATMOS Research and Consulting, global warming will cause the state to experience l onger and more intense heat waves in the decades ahead, leading to more heat-related deaths in several major cities. Yet experts from the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) say this is another attempt to scare people using shaky science.
“The climate models these researchers rely on have been proven over and over to be entirely unreliable,” said NCPA Adjunct Scholar S. Fred Singer. “They can’t even reliably predict the present climate, but they know specifically what’s going to happen to California in the future?” Singer is also the president of the Science and Environment Policy Project and a former director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service.
The NCPA noted that several studies have found the majority of the computer climate models to be entirely ineffective. For example, a recent report by scientists from the Universities of Rochester and Virginia (including Prof. Singer) found that the most often cited computer climate models used to assert that the introduction of greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide (CO2), into the atmosphere is causing the Earth to warm, differ starkly from the actual data of the past quarter-century.
Furthermore, the National Academy of Sciences, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Pew Center on Global Climate Change have all stated that climate models cannot produce meaningful regional predictions. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency concurred, stating, ”... complicated computer models … are still not accurate enough to provide reliable forecasts of … the direction, let alone the magnitude or timing, of the seasonal or even annual changes… ”
The new report concluded that heat-related deaths can be expected to increase up to 180 percent annually by 2050 and as much as 500 percent annually by the end of the century if the atmosphere continues to warm. The report is a more detailed analysis of a larger study the Indiana-based group released in August that examined the possible wide-ranging effects of global warming on California’s agriculture, water supply, coastline and ecology.
NCPA Senior Fellow H. Sterling Burnett concluded that; “This is more politics than science. In fact, one of the lead researchers and spokesmen for the original study is Stephen Schneider, one of the most vocal alarmists, who was once Al Gore’s lead science advisor. In the past he has explicitly called for exaggerating the science and down playing doubts as a way of getting things done politically in the face of ongoing debate.”