Sen. Jim Inhofe gets a lot of heat for his position on global warming. Perhaps the most often quoted passage in the blogosphere over the past few years is his 2003 statement that

the threat of catastrophic global warming [is] the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people

This grandiose claim shocks environmentalists, yet, he may be right.

In a recent tour of 30 Oklahoma counties, Inhofe made an effort to educate Okies on the issue. Enid was one of his stops.

… one of Inhofe’s handouts was a June 26 article: “There is No ‘Consensus’ On Global Warming,” by Richard S. Lindzen. The piece criticizes Al Gore’s new documentary film “An Inconvenient Truth” that attempts to raise awareness about global warming and its presumed catastrophic effects.

Mr. Lindzen is a professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT and was one of 11 scientists who prepared a 2001 National Academy of Sciences report on global warming at the request of the White House. According to Lindzen, the report concluded:

We are quite confident (1) that global mean temperature is about 0.5 degrees Celsius higher than it was a century ago; (2) that atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have risen over the past two centuries; and (3) that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas whose increase is likely to warm the earth (one of many, the most important being water vapor and clouds).

But–and I cannot stress this enough–we are not in a position to confidently attribute past climate change to carbon dioxide or to forecast what the climate will be in the future.

And just last month Lindzen reiterates his stance after Al Gore appeared with George Stephanopoulos on ABC:

When Mr. Stephanopoulos confronted Mr. Gore with the fact that the best estimates of rising sea levels are far less dire than he suggests in his movie, Mr. Gore defended his claims by noting that scientists “don’t have any models that give them a high level of confidence” one way or the other and went on to claim–in his defense–that scientists “don’t know. . . . They just don’t know.”

Using Lindzen’s and Inhofe’s criteria of definitively predicting the effects of greenhouse gases toward global warming is an obvious impossibility. It’s like trying to accurately predict the certainty of illness from smoking. Not all smokers get lung cancer and not all people with lung cancer smoke. The parallels of pumping burning gases into our lungs and into the air are alike in many ways. From an interview with John Carlisle, Executive Director of Industry Affairs at the Tobacco Manufacturers Association:

Does smoking kill?
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All I can say is that people who smoke are fully aware that that opinion exists and has existed for many years.

Does it cause lung cancer?
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There’s no shortage of statistics: it’s extraordinary the amount of research that has gone into our product and the many and varied opinions that people hold about it.

What about passive smoking?
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We look at the scientific results and see them in context, rather than just cherry pick, like some organisations. Of the 60 or so tests done over the last 20 years something like 80 per cent don’t show any meaningful risk of contracting lung cancer from passive smoking.

The logic sounds familiar.

Sen. Inhofe is technically right about science not knowing all the answers to all the questions of man’s impact on climate change. I’ll give him that much. But just as science doesn’t have all the answers to the impact of smoking on human health, we shouldn’t doubt that it’s probably a good idea to smoke less, with our lungs and likewise with our machines.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 31st, 2006 at 9:21 am and is filed under Politics, Weather. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.