Energy Probe

Judith E. McKay

June 18, 2007

Judith E McKay, Chief Administrative Office of DuPont Canada, delivers a presentation to the Shared Air Summit in Toronto.

read the full presentation in .pdf format 

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
June 8, 2007

The head of NASA – the National Aeronautical and Space Association is – “an idiot” and “in denial.” He is also “surprisingly naive” and “a fool.” With his judgment and competence so lacking, demands abound for his resignation as head of the largest and most accomplished science agency in the world.

Those comments and others in the past week have come from scientists shocked to learn that NASA chief Michael Griffin thinks differently than they about global warming. Among the most shocked is one of Dr. Griffin’s own employees, James Hansen, a top climate scientist who “almost fell off my chair” when he learned that his research hadn’t convinced his boss. “It’s an incredibly arrogant and ignorant statement,” he told ABC News, referring to an interview of Dr. Griffin on National Public Radio. “It indicates a complete ignorance of understanding the implications of climate change.”

Some might think Dr. Griffin is entitled to think for himself. Apart from his PhD in aerospace engineering, he holds five masters degrees, he is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and the International Academy of Astronautics, he manages a US$1.1-billion climate-research budget and was unanimously confirmed to head NASA by the United States Senate.

But no. He is either “totally clueless” or “a deep anti-global warming ideologue,” concludes Jerry Mahlman, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in a statement similar to many.

Dr. Griffin’s radio interview drew this storm of controversy after he was asked about the seriousness of global warming. He replied by saying, “I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with. To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth’s climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had, and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn’t change.”

Dr. Griffin doesn’t dispute that the Earth has been warming. He does dispute that we can – or even should – do anything about it. “First of all, I don’t think it’s within the power of human beings to assure that the climate does not change, as millions of years of history have shown. And second of all, I guess I would ask which human beings, where and when, are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now, is the best climate for all other human beings. I’m, I think that’s a rather arrogant position for people to take.”

Dr. Griffin’s interview was prompted by criticisms from environmental journalist Greg Easterbrook, who charged that Dr. Griffin is wasting NASA’s time and money on misguided space exploration projects, such as a manned mission to Mars and the establishment of a permanent base on

the moon. Instead, Easterbrook argued, Dr. Griffin should be exercising his right to free speech, coming out against misguided NASA policies and spending more on legitimate priorities, such as greater global-warming research.

The Easterbrook charge led National Public Radio to ask Dr. Griffin why he wasn’t “battling [global warming] as an army might battle an enemy.” Dr. Griffin’s response: “Nowhere in NASA’s authorization, which of course governs what we do, is there anything at all telling us that we should take actions to effect climate change in either – in one way or another . . . . NASA is not an agency chartered to, quote, ‘battle climate change.'”

More howls from critics, who believe Dr. Griffin should be using his discretion to skew NASA’s mission away from its core purpose – and away from his fiduciary responsibilities to his organization – and toward the service of fighting climate change.

To which Dr. Griffin responds, not unreasonably, “The question is, in a democratic society, who gets to choose. Unfortunately for Greg, it’s not him.”

Unfortunately for society, Greg Easterbrook happened to be wrong in another claim: that Dr. Griffin hadn’t lost his right to speak out. For all intents and purposes, he has. Within days of the uproar, Dr. Griffin decided that he should not have discussed “an issue which has become far more political than technical.” In an apology to his staff, he said, “I feel badly that I caused this amount of controversy over something like this,” adding that, “it would have been well for me to have stayed out of it.”

Dr. Griffin is now one more scientist who will not dispute the existence of a “scientific consensus on global warming.”

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Energy Probe Research Foundation.

CV OF A DENIER

Prior to heading NASA, Michael Griffin served as space department head at Johns Hopkins University’s applied physics laboratory in Laurel, Md. He was previously president and chief operating officer of In-Q-Tel, Inc. and chief executive of Orbital Sciences Corporation’s Magellan Systems division. Earlier, Dr. Griffin served as chief engineer and as associate administrator for exploration at NASA, and as deputy for technology at the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization. He is the lead author of more than two dozen technical papers, as well as the textbook Space Vehicle Design. He earned his doctorate at the Michael Griffin University of Maryland.

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
June 2, 2007

Only an insignificant fraction of scientists deny the global warming crisis. The time for debate is over. The science is settled.

So said Al Gore . . . in 1992. Amazingly, he made his claims despite much evidence of their falsity. A Gallup poll at the time reported that 53% of scientists actively involved in global climate research did not believe global warming had occurred; 30% weren’t sure; and only 17% believed global warming had begun. Even a Greenpeace poll showed 47% of climatologists didn’t think a runaway greenhouse effect was imminent; only 36% thought it possible and a mere 13% thought it probable.

Today, Al Gore is making the same claims of a scientific consensus, as do the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and hundreds of government agencies and environmental groups around the world. But the claims of a scientific consensus remain unsubstantiated. They have only become louder and more frequent.

More than six months ago, I began writing this series, The Deniers. When I began, I accepted the prevailing view that scientists overwhelmingly believe that climate change threatens the planet. I doubted only claims that the dissenters were either kooks on the margins of science or sell-outs in the pockets of the oil companies.

My series set out to profile the dissenters – those who deny that the science is settled on climate change – and to have their views heard. To demonstrate that dissent is credible, I chose high-ranking scientists at the world’s premier scientific establishments. I considered stopping after writing six profiles, thinking I had made my point, but continued the series due to feedback from readers. I next planned to stop writing after 10 profiles, then 12, but the feedback increased. Now, after profiling more than 20 deniers, I do not know when I will stop – the list of distinguished scientists who question the IPCC grows daily, as does the number of e-mails I receive, many from scientists who express gratitude for my series.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped believing that a scientific consensus exists on climate change. Certainly there is no consensus at the very top echelons of scientists – the ranks from which I have been drawing my subjects – and certainly there is no consensus among astrophysicists and other solar scientists, several of whom I have profiled. If anything, the majority view among these subsets of the scientific community may run in the opposite direction. Not only do most of my interviewees either discount or disparage the conventional wisdom as represented by the IPCC, many say their peers generally consider it to have little or no credibility. In one case, a top scientist told me that, to his knowledge, no respected scientist in his field accepts the IPCC position.

What of the one claim that we hear over and over again, that 2,000 or 2,500 of the world’s top scientists endorse the IPCC position? I asked the IPCC for their names, to gauge their views. “The 2,500 or so scientists you are referring to are reviewers from countries all over the world,” the IPCC Secretariat responded. “The list with their names and contacts will be attached to future IPCC publications, which will hopefully be online in the second half of 2007.”

An IPCC reviewer does not assess the IPCC’s comprehensive findings. He might only review one small part of one study that later becomes one small input to the published IPCC report. Far from endorsing the IPCC reports, some reviewers, offended at what they considered a sham review process, have demanded that the IPCC remove their names from the list of reviewers. One even threatened legal action when the IPCC refused.

A great many scientists, without doubt, are four-square in their support of the IPCC. A great many others are not. A petition organized by the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine between 1999 and 2001 claimed some 17,800 scientists in opposition to the Kyoto Protocol. A more recent indicator comes from the U.S.-based National Registry of Environmental Professionals, an accrediting organization whose 12,000 environmental practitioners have standing with U.S. government agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy. In a November, 2006, survey of its members, it found that only 59% think human activities are largely responsible for the warming that has occurred, and only 39% make their priority the curbing of carbon emissions. And 71% believe the increase in hurricanes is likely natural, not easily attributed to human activities.

Such diversity of views is also present in the wider scientific community, as seen in the World Federation of Scientists, an organization formed during the Cold War to encourage dialogue among scientists to prevent nuclear catastrophe. The federation, which encompasses many of the world’s most eminent scientists and today represents more than 10,000 scientists, now focuses on 15 “planetary emergencies,” among them water, soil, food, medicine and biotechnology, and climatic changes. Within climatic changes, there are eight priorities, one being “Possible human influences on climate and on atmospheric composition and chemistry (e.g. increased greenhouse gases and tropospheric ozone).”

Man-made global warming deserves study, the World Federation of Scientists believes, but so do other serious climatic concerns. So do 14 other planetary emergencies. That seems about right.

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
May 26, 2007

Germany’s Hans von Storch, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, believes that climate change is for real and that humans are responsible. He also believes that we shouldn’t fear climate change, that predictions of doom are “hysterical” when they aren’t “completely idiotic and dubious,” and that many of the science establishment’s pronouncements on climate change are bereft of scientific merit.

“Theories of global warming have left laboratories far behind. Now, they are the stuff of Hollywood,” he wrote in Der Spiegel, in an article that castigated global warming alarmists for debasing scientific inquiry and intimidating those who would challenge the conventional wisdom. Michael Crichton’s novel State of Fear has it right in its portrayal of environmental extremism, Dr. Storch believes.

“Despite some artful fictionalization of the facts, Crichton has certainly delivered an accurate portrayal of the dynamics of communication among the scientific community, environmental organizations, government and civil society.

“Like the protagonists in Crichton’s thriller, the general belief is that in order to keep public attention focused on the issue of ‘climate catastrophe’ [it must] be presented ‘somewhat more attractively.'”

The “climate catastrophe” is hype, he stated. “In the early 1990s, just as Germany was being hit by severe windstorms, the German media were reporting that the storms were becoming more and more severe. Since then, storms of this magnitude have once again become less common in Northern Europe, a fact now ignored by the media. They have also ignored the fact that changes in barometric pressure measured in Stockholm since the days of Napoleon reveal no systematic change in the frequency and severity of storms.”

The fear of climate change, and the blaming of humans for them, did not start with global warming and the Kyoto Protocol of the 1990s. This fear is a feature of human history, and likely part of human nature, he explained in a 2005 paper entitled: “A History of Human Perceptions of Anthropogenic Climate Change in the Past 1,000 Years.”

In the last half century, global cooling theories arose, with man the culprit due to industrial pollution. Nuclear weapons testing also prompted an explosion of theories about the implication on the weather.

In the first half of the 20th century, First World War gunfire was blamed for wet summers, as was shortwave transatlantic radio communication. Because of a major warming that took place in large parts of the world, Monthly Weather Review in 1933 published an unsettling article entitled: “Is the Climate Changing?”

In the 19th century, European and North American scientists claimed that the water levels of rivers would fall continuously, leading to fears that the weather would change and to the laying of blame on both deforestation and reforestation. Europe’s abnormally wet summer of 1816, meanwhile, was blamed on the lightning rods that had just come into vogue.

In earlier centuries, such as the 14th, which saw a prolonged wet period in England, the cause was man’s wicked lifestyle, which precipitated divine retribution. “And nowadays it’s those hedonistic wastrels who pollute the air so that they can look at some pretty fish in the South Seas,” Dr. Storch states, adding that “many scientists see themselves too much as priests whose job it is to preach moralistic sermons to people? It would be better if we just presented the facts and scenarios dispassionately – and then society can decide for itself what it wants to do to influence climate change.”

But scientists don’t, and neither do the governments and quasi-governmental scientific establishments that now lend their own authority to climate-change myth-making.

Dr. Storch thinks it would be helpful to learn why humans keep forgetting how wrong we have been in our past dire forecasts. Until we do, we are doomed to repeat history.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Energy Probe Research Foundation.

BACKGROUND SOURCES

CV OF A DENIER

Hans von Storch is director of the Institute of Coastal Research of the GKSS Research Centre and professor at the Meteorological Institute of the University of Hamburg. From 1987 to 1995, he was senior scientist and leader of the Statistical Analysis and Modelling Group at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology. He is the author of 11 books and 120 peer-reviewed articles. He is a member of the advisory boards of the Journal of Climate and Meteorologische Zeitschrift and the Annals of Geophysics. Dr. von Storch was a lead author of the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC. He received his PhD from the Meteorological Department of the University of Hamburg in 1979

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
May 18, 2007

If you’re the type of person who sets aside money today for the university education of your great-great-great grandchildren, even if it means that you may not be able to afford university tuition for your own children, you may think it sensible for society to invest now in major measures to stop global warming.

If you’re not this type – and who in his right mind is – you should forget about Kyoto-like greenhouse-gas reduction targets and the crash programs that would be required to meet them. Doing so would not only be economically prudent, it would be – by almost any measure – the ethical thing to do.

So argues celebrated economist William Nordhaus, author of pathbreaking books and studies on global warming, and generally considered the most authoritative economist in the climate change field. His verdict on global warming alarmism, as exemplified by the UK’s Stern review, which demanded drastic measures now to avert climate change calamity later: “Completely absurd.”

The Stern review, released last year to banner headlines, argues that the cost of inaction greatly exceeds the cost of action. It has been much criticized for its selective use of data – Sir Nicholas Stern piles one worst-case scenario upon another to arrive at his fantastical costs, and Dr. Nordhaus is among those who note this failing. In fact, Sir Nicholas uses Nordhaus as a source for global-warming costs that could present themselves well after the year 2100, although Nordhaus characterized that data as particularly unreliable.

But a series of unreliable, worst-case scenarios centuries off, by themselves, still would not warrant the extreme greenhousegas prevention investments that the Stern review recommends. To make an economic case for immediate action, Sir Nicholas adjusted his model to have us paying now for potential damage that could be happening hundreds of years from now.

Sir Nicholas estimates the potential costs of climate change to be so great as to force on us a “20% cut in per-capita consumption, now and forever.” Yet his data showed low damages from climate change in the next two centuries. To overcome his data, he applied to his model what economists call a “near-zero social discount rate.” Doing so brings forward future expenses – in the Stern review’s case, expenses that might occur in the 23rd and 24th centuries. The Stern review then presents us with a tab that includes these far-out costs, and the invoice is eye-popping indeed.

But the Stern review approach defies logic, as Dr. Nordhaus illustrates by demonstrating just where zero social-discount-rate thinking leads. “Suppose that scientists discover that a wrinkle in the climatic system will cause damages equal to 0.01% of output starting in 2200 and continuing at that rate thereafter,” he explains. “How large a onetime investment would be justified today to remove the wrinkle starting after two centuries? The answer is that a payment of 15% of world consumption today (approximately US$7-trillion) would pass the review’s costbenefit test. This seems completely absurd. The bizarre result arises because the value of the future consumption stream is so high with near-zero discounting that we would trade off a large fraction of today’s income to increase a far-future income stream by a very tiny fraction.”

Moreover, who should be asked to forgo that consumption? It hardly seems fair to keep back poor countries, yet, if paid by the rich countries alone, the decline would far exceed that of the Great Depression.

Some climate-change alarmists argue that we should invest in combating climate change now as an insurance policy against the risk of future damage. Sounds prudent, until you consider the premium to be paid.

“Suppose that we suddenly learn that there is a 10% probability of the wrinkle in the climatic system that reduces the post- 2200 income stream by 0.01%,” Dr. Nordhaus explains, again to illustrate the Stern review’s logic. “What insurance premium would be justified today to reduce that probability to zero? With conventional discount rates, we would probably ignore any tiny wrinkle two or three centuries ahead. If we did a careful calculation using conventional discount rates, we would calculate a break-even 0.0002% insurance premium to remove the year 2200 contingency, and a 0.0000003% premium for the year-2400 contingency. Moreover, these dollar premiums are small whether the probability is large or small.
“With the review’s near-zero discount rate, offsetting the low-probability wrinkle would be worth an insurance premium today of almost 2% of current income, or $1-trillion. We would pay almost the same amount if that threshold were to be crossed in 2400 rather than in 2200.”

Dr. Nordhaus’s conclusion about such scares: “We are in effect forced to make current decisions about highly uncertain events in the distant future, even though these estimates are highly speculative and are almost sure to be refined over the coming decades.”

Dr. Nordhaus discounts climate-change alarmism, but not climate change itself. He advocates research to better understand its consequences and to develop more efficient technologies. He advocates the elimination of subsidies that artificially increase greenhouse-gas emissions, and other “no-regrets” measures that would benefit the environment without harming the economy. The costs of climate change are real, he believes, and society should act. But not overreact.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Energy Probe Research Foundation.

CV OF A DENIER
William Nordhaus is the Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University. He is the co-author with Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson of Economics, the classic textbook, now in its 18th edition. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. From 1977 to 1979, he served Jimmy Carter as a member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. He serves on the Congressional Budget Office Panel of Economic Experts and is chairman of the advisory committee for the Bureau of Economic Analysis. He received his PhD in economics in 1967 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
May 11, 2007

President George Bush meets Pope Benedict in June. Some Vatican authorities are lobbying the Pope to press the U.S. administration to act on global warming.
“It’s not for me to say what the Pope and President Bush should discuss, but certainly they will discuss current issues and therefore I imagine and I hope they will [discuss climate change],” said Cardinal Renato Martino, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, the Vatican organization charged with developing policy for the environment and social issues.

Cardinal Martino spoke at the start of “Climate Change and Development,” a Vatican study seminar two weeks ago designed to “search for solutions to the phenomenon of global warming.” The 80 scientists, politicians, theologians and bishops in attendance were asked to consider that: “Global warming may bring about not only the imposition of drastic corrective means to protect the natural environment, but also a grave threat that destabilizes the world.”

By the seminar’s end, the 80 participants had heard dire warnings from some experts, but they heard much more, too – that global warming is natural, the cause of warming being primarily solar and that it can be beneficial.

During the two-day event, tensions were often high – the Catholic News Service, which interviewed participants at the private event, described how one pastor needed to calm down a distraught participant in the corridor, and used words like “bitter” and “heated” to set the early mood at the seminar. No one left the seminar thinking that the science of global warming is settled. To the dismay of those hoping that the high-level group would inspire a Church-led climatechange crusade, the Cardinal, in closing the seminar, urged caution in taking any position on global warming.

The man most responsible for quelling any potential call to action is one of the Vatican’s own, Antonino Zichichi, a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. Dr. Zichichi, who made the seminar’s most powerful presentation, set its tone. It amounted to a damning indictment of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the body responsible for most of the dire warnings that the press reports daily.

Dr. Zichichi demonstrated “that models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are incoherent and invalid from a scientific point of view,” reported Zenit, a news service that acts as an extension of the Vatican administration. “On the basis of actual scientific fact ‘it is not possible to exclude the idea that climate changes can be due to natural causes,’ and that it is plausible that ‘man is not to blame.'”

Dr. Zichichi has concluded that solar activities are responsible for most of the global warming that earth has experienced – he estimates that man-made causes of global warming account for less than 10% – and his conclusions have gravitas: This man is the president of the World Federation of Scientists, past president of the European Physical Society, past president of the Italian National Institute for Nuclear and Subnuclear Physics, and past president of the NATO Science Committee for Disarmament Technology.

He is also Italy’s most renowned scientist, credited with the discovery of nuclear antimatter, the discovery of the “time-like” electromagnetic structure of the proton, the discovery of the effective energy in the forces which act between quarks and gluons, and the proof that, despite its complex structure, it is impossible to break the proton.”There is a need to do more work, with a lot more rigour, to better the models being used,” he argued in a 60-page written paper that accompanied his speech to the seminar.

The Vatican seminar was extraordinary, participants agree: Faith and reason met in inspired discussion and debate about global warming, and despite the occasional heat, came away the wiser for it. How different from the debate on climate change conducted by environmental groups, or, for that matter, the Parliament of Canada, the U.S. Congress or the German Reichstag, where global warming discussions rely on faith alone, and result in one-sided dogma.
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Energy Probe Research Foundation.

CV OF A DENIER
Antonino Zichichi, Professor Emeritus of Advanced Physics at the University of Bologna, has published over 800 scientific papers and 10 books, some of which have opened new avenues in subnuclear physics. He has received numerous awards and honorary degrees from academic institutions around the world, and is the subject of seven books published by others about his accomplishments. He founded and directs the Ettore Majorana Foundation and Centre for Scientific Culture, an organization dedicated to voluntary scientific service, the elimination of secret laboratories, and scientific freedom.

Lawrence Solomon
National Post
May 4, 2007

Once upon a time, and for millennia before then, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were low and stable. Then came the industrial revolution and CO2 levels began to rise. The more man industrialized, the more that CO2 – and the temperature – rose. In the last half century, with industrialization at unprecedented levels, CO2 reached levels unprecedented in the human history. This is the story of global warming.

This story is a fable, says Zbigniew Jaworowski, past chairman of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation, a participant or chairman of some 20 Advisory Groups of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the United Nations`Environmental Program, and current chair of the Scientific Committee of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw.

Dr. Jaworowski agrees that CO2 levels rose in the last half century. Starting in 1958, direct, real-time measurements of CO2 have been systematically taken at a state-of-the-art measuring station in Hawaii. These measurements, considered the world’s most reliable, are a good basis for science by bodies like the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the agency that is co-ordinating the worldwide effort to stop global warming.

But the UN does not rely on direct real-time measurements for the period prior to 1958. “The IPCC relies on icecore data – on air that has been trapped for hundreds or thousands of years deep below the surface,” Dr. Jaworowski explains. “These ice cores are a foundation of the global warming hypothesis, but the foundation is groundless – the IPCC has based its global-warming hypothesis on arbitrary assumptions and these assumptions, it is now clear, are false.”

Ice, the IPCC believes, precisely preserves the ancient air, allowing for a precise reconstruction of the ancient atmosphere. For this to be true, no component of the trapped air can escape from the ice. Neither can the ice ever become liquid. Neither can the various gases within air ever combine or separate.

This perfectly closed system, frozen in time, is a fantasy. “Liquid water is common in polar snow and ice, even at temperatures as low as -72C,” Dr. Jaworowski explains, “and we also know that in cold water, CO2 is 70 times more soluble than nitrogen and 30 times more soluble than oxygen, guaranteeing that the proportions of the various gases that remain in the trapped, ancient air will change. Moreover, under the extreme pressure that deep ice is subjected to – 320 bars, or more than 300 times normal atmospheric pressure – high levels of CO2 get squeezed out of ancient air.”

Because of these various properties in ancient air, one would expect that, over time, ice cores that started off with high levels of CO2 would become depleted of excess CO2, leaving a fairly uniform base level of CO2 behind. In fact, this is exactly what the ice cores show.
“According to the ice-core samples, CO2 levels vary little over time,” Dr. Jaworowski states. “The ice core data from the Taylor Dome in Antarctica shows almost no change in the level of atmospheric CO2 over the last 7,000 to 8,000 years – it varied between 260 parts per million and 264 parts per million.

“Yet other indicators of past CO2 levels, such as fossil leaf stomata, show that CO2 levels over the past 7,000 to 8,000 years varied by more than 50 parts per million, between 270 and 326 parts per million. We also know that there have been great fluctuations in temperature over that time period – the Little Ice Age just 500 years ago, for example. If the icecore record was reliable, and CO2 levels reflected temperatures, why wouldn’t the ice-core data have shown CO2 levels to fall during the Little Ice Age?”

Dr. Jaworowski has devoted much of his professional life to the study of the composition of the atmosphere, as part of his work to understanding the consequences of radioactive fallout from nuclear-weapons testing and nuclear reactor accidents. After taking numerous ice samples over the course of a dozen field trips to glaciers in six continents, and studying how contaminants travel through ice over time, he came to realize how fraught with error ice-core samples were in reconstructing the atmosphere. The Chernobyl accident, whose contaminants he studied in the 1990s in a Scandinavian glacier, provided the most illumination.

“This ice contained extremely high radioactivity of cesium-137 from the Chernobyl fallout, more than a thousand times higher than that found in any glacier from nuclear-weapons fallout, and more than 100 times higher than found elsewhere from the Chernobyl fallout,” he explained. “This unique contamination of glacier ice revealed how particulate contaminants migrated, and also made sense of other discoveries I made during my other glacier expeditions. It convinced me that ice is not a closed system, suitable for an exact reconstruction of the composition of the past atmosphere.”

Because of the high importance of this realization, in 1994 Dr. Jaworowski, together with a team from the Norwegian Institute for Energy Technics, proposed a research project on the reliability of trace-gas determinations in the polar ice. The prospective sponsors of the research refused to fund it, claiming the research would be “immoral” if it served to undermine the foundations of climate research.

The refusal did not come as a surprise. Several years earlier, in a peer-reviewed article published by the Norwegian Polar Institute, Dr. Jaworowski criticized the methods by which CO2 levels were ascertained from ice cores, and cast doubt on the global-warming hypothesis. The institute’s director, while agreeing to publish his article, also warned Dr. Jaworowski that “this is not the way one gets research projects.” Once published, the institute came under fire, especially since the report soon sold out and was reprinted. Said one prominent critic, “this paper puts the Norsk Polarinstitutt in disrepute.” Although none of the critics faulted Dr. Jaworowski’s science, the institute nevertheless fired him to maintain its access to funding.

Is there an alternative to ice-core samples, which are but proxies from which assumptions about the historical composition of the atmosphere can be made? “Yes, there are several other proxies, and they lead to different findings about CO2,” Dr. Jaworowski states. “But we don’t need to rely on proxies at all.

“Scientists from numerous disciplines have been examining CO2 since the beginning of the 19th century, and they have left behind a record of tens of thousands of direct, real-time measurements. These measurements tell a far different story about CO2 – they demonstrate, for example, that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have fluctuated greatly, and that several times in the past 200 years CO2 concentrations have exceeded today’s levels.
“The IPCC rejects these direct measurements, some taken by Nobel Prize winners. They prefer the view of CO2 as seen through ice.”

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Energy Probe Research Foundation.
CV OF A DENIER
Zbigniew Jaworowski is chairman of the Scientific Council of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw, where he has held various posts since 1973. He was a principal investigator of three research projects of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and of four research projects of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The author of four books and 300 scientific papers, he has held posts with the Centre d’Etude Nucleaires near Paris; the Biophysical Group of the Institute of Physics, University of Oslo; the Norwegian Polar Research Institute and the National Institute for Polar Research in Tokyo.