I note the letter from David Archibald (Aug. 11, 2008, p. 12). As a chemical engineer I found this objectionable for its misuse of specific research data and its general attempt to cloud the issue of global warming with misleading and spurious arguments. Let us examine the following:
a) A search on the web leads us to find that Archibald is on the board of a business interest group, The Lavoisier Group, established by the coal industry in Australia, with the goal of protecting that industry.1
b) Archibald starts with a statement designed to confuse, about the logarithmic relationship of carbon dioxide to global warming. Why do I say confuse? Environmental scientists and modelers know about this relationship, and this effect is indeed included in the climate models, so pointing it out does not change the forecast in the slightest and serves only as a distraction.
c) Archibald uses the University of Chicago Modtran facility2 (Modtran is a self-contained program which models the physical atmosphere and computes the effect that the atmosphere has on propagated electromagnetic radiation, e.g. visible light and thermal infrared) to estimate the consequences of changes in carbon dioxide. The University of Chicago responded that Archibald makes an error in using their program, as he “multiplies the radiative forcing by an absurdly low value of the climate sensitivity parameter,” which renders his results meaningless.3
d) In Archibald’s previous presentations, which are not peer-checked or published in learned journals and on which his letter appeared to be based, he has been extremely selective with the data used to come to his conclusions. “To undertake his computations, which are supposed to indicate a strong correlation of surface temperature to the solar cycle, rather then use worldwide temperature estimates (GISS, HadCRU, etc.), he uses five stations, all from the southeast continental US, all within several hundred kilometers of each other.” This same source continues, “In order to make his ‘predictions’ of global temperature response Archibald uses not five stations but one station’s data (De Bilt in Holland). One data point. Of the thousands available. Strangely enough, each station shows a cooling trend.”3
e) Archibald comes out with a strong statement—“Atmospheric temperature rose 0.7° in the 20th century; it has also fallen by the same amount in the last 18 months”—but offers no basis to support this claim. Another distraction. In fact, real world data indicates that the warming up to 2007 is occurring at the upper end of the projection.4
f) As for the sun’s activities, we have many learned sources which contradict Archibald flatly and say that the sun cannot be responsible for present global warming, such as from the British Royal Society: “Direct satellite measurements of solar activity show it has been declining since the mid-1980s and cannot account for recent rises in global temperatures, according to new research.”5
I am not a climate scientist and do not pretend to be one. However, a review of published literature where articles and papers are normally subject to peer review and criticism, before as well as after publication, far, far outweigh anything Mr. Archibald and his fellow skeptics may have to say on the subject. It is my belief that letters of the nature submitted by Mr. Archibald are intended to create a sense of doubt and hesitation for the lay public. Frankly, the message from Mr. Archibald sheds no new light on the topic, and goes against the consensus. The case for global warming has been accepted by the vast majority of global scientists and by governments, and we need to act and to act now.
Jeff Temple
Petrokazakhstan Oil Products
Shymkent Refinery, Kazakhstan
References
- http://www.lavoisier.com.au/.
- http://climatepolice.com/Climate_Outlook_2030.pdf, p. 3.
- “My model used for deception,” http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/10/my-model-used-for-deception/langswitch_lang/in, plus personal communication from David Archer, professor in the Department of Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago.
- Rahmstorf, Stefan, et al., “Recent Climate Observations Compared to Projections,” Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Science, Vol. 316.
- Proceedings of the Royal Society A (DOI:10.10.98.rspa.2007.1880).
