Patrick Michaels of the Cato Institute, former Virginia state climatologist, shares with National Review Online readers his critique of President Obama’s approach to climate science.
Obama gets a lot of his climate information from NASA’s Jim Hansen, an astrophysicist who heads the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. A federal employee, Hansen endorsed John Kerry for president in hotly contested Iowa ten days before the 2004 election. This year, he has been all over the media blaming the summer’s major drought on “global warming.”
Global-warming ideologues often make statements of “fact” that are actually testable hypotheses. Good! Let’s subject Hansen’s statement to some normal scientific scrutiny. Warning: Graphs to follow.
Hansen is saying, simply, that global warming is affecting U.S. temperatures in a way that makes us more prone to drought. Given that the equations that calculate likelihood of drought indeed include a temperature variable (warmer temperature = more evaporation), it would seem he’s home free, no? …
… Some possible trouble for Obama’s hypothesis: It appears the PDSI is going up, meaning the country is getting wetter.
So if, as Obama and Hansen would like us to believe, global warming is causing our droughts, a substantial portion of our national temperature increase should be related to planetary heating. That’s easy to calculate with simple regression. …
… Here are the sad facts for Hansen and the president: There is no relationship whatsoever between global-warming-related U.S. temperature and drought. …
… To make matters worse, Hansen and Obama have it exactly wrong. Suppose we look at the U.S. temperature variation that is not related to global warming and plot it against the PDSI. Voilà! The relationship is highly significant, at the .0001 level. In other words, anything but global warming is what drives U.S. drought.
If you are curious about all the ellipses, follow the link above for the word “shares.” You’ll find several graphs and equations that support Michaels’ case.
