In a column today in the Washington Post, Michael Gerson, who once wrote speeches for George Bush, Jr., complains to the Tea Party, re: Obamacare, "You can't handle the truth!"
Gerson puts it a little more politely, saying that the Tea Party in Congress "is against anyone who accepts the constraints of political reality."
The exact same charge could be levelled against the conservative media in regard to the science of climate change, specifically the IPCC's Fifth Assessment of the climate, which was released last week, and which has drawn all sorts of slings and arrows from the right. Media Matters thoroughly and patiently refutes the charges, with footnotes, links, and quotes every step of the way.
For instance, Media Matters compiles four different attacks that charge that the slowdown in global warming over the last fifteen years means that the general circulation models used to project future warming now are "useless." To wit:
- Numerous conservative outlets seized on a Mail on Sunday article, titled "Global warming is just HALF what we said," that claimed a leaked IPCC draft said the temperature was rising at just half the rate predicted in the 2007 IPCC report. [The Mail on Sunday, 9/14/13] [Hot Air, 9/16/13] [Investor's Business Daily, 9/17/13]
In fact, as the graph below shows, the temperatures recorded are still well within the IPCC's first estimates. (One must remember that climatology is almost as far-sighted as geology, and that a single unit in the science — a single "climatology" — is thirty years worth of weather. So a slowdown in warming over fifteen years means a reduction in one half of one unit. Not a big deal, when computed over centuries and eons, past and future.)
They quote the IPCC's answer in the report to this charge:
As in the prior assessments, global climate models generally simulate global temperatures that compare well with observations over climate timescales (Section 9.4). Even though the projections from the models were never intended to be predictions over such a short time scale, the observations through 2012 generally fall within the projections made in all past assessments.
And you can see it below in the graph, which depicts the first (FAR) second (SAR) third (TAR) and fourth (AR4) assessmentz for three different emissions scenarios, against observations.
Results stil fall well within the estimates' error bars. If the slowdown continues for another forty or fifty years, well, in that blessed event, we can talk.
Kit Stolz 