Thank you WSJ! 7.16.09

Global Warmists Just Can't Lose
For years we've been hearing that computer models prove beyond doubt that the Earth is imperiled by "global warming." But as USA Today reports, a new study calls this into doubt:

The report found that only about half of the warming that occurred during a natural climate change 55 million years ago can be explained by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. What caused the remainder of the warming is a mystery.

"In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in the geological record," says oceanographer Gerald Dickens, study co-author and professor of Earth Science at Rice University in Houston. "There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models."

Some 55 million years ago, during a period called the Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum, the average temperature increased by 13 degrees over 10,000 years. At the same time, "the amount of carbon in Earth's atmosphere rose rapidly," presumably because there were no hybrid cars or fluorescent light bulbs--but not rapidly enough, given the models, to account for more than a small proportion of the warming. Conclusion: "Some feedback loop or other processes that aren't accounted for in these models"--not carbon--were responsible for much of the warming.

The Union of Concerned Scientists, a left-wing advocacy group, put out a press release claiming that the study shows "the potential consequences of global warming are likely worse than what scientists are predicting"--as if carbon is the only thing that can cause warming.

So first the global warmists insist that the question is settled beyond debate, then, when it turns out not to be, they insist that uncertainly can only mean their theory is even more true than they had thought. This just is not how real science operates.