Gov. Ted Kulongoski's successful purge of George Taylor -- Oregon's former state climatologist and soon-to-be former director of the Oregon Climate Service at Oregon State University -- has a clear message for scientists: agree with the governor or you too will disappear. Don't hint that man-made global warming is the greatest scientific hoax of our time. It offends the governor.
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As a physicist, let me point out that our understanding of climate was not "settled more than a decade ago," as global warming alarmists argue. Science is never settled, as Albert Einstein spectacularly demonstrated.
Our knowledge of the interplay between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature has gone through three stages over the past 20 years. Al Gore correctly points out that early ice-core data gathered from glaciers around the world showed a very strong correlation between carbon dioxide and temperature over 650,000 years. Because carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, most of us assumed that it regulated global temperature.
By 1999, improving ice-core techniques produced a stunning reversal, showing that the
global temperature changed many centuries before carbon dioxide changed. This proved that natural climate cycles were causing changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide, probably by affecting how much remained dissolved in the oceans.
Using new ice-core evidence, Caillon, et al. (Science, March 2003), concluded that "
CO2 is not the forcing that initially drives the climatic system."
This should have convinced alarmists that their scare was unwarranted. But too many would have been thrown out of work, and too many politicians would have lost a hot-button issue. So they ramped up the alarm, relying on ever-more-contrived theories to explain the ice-core data.
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A very important break in this discussion came from The New York Times on Jan.1: "In 2008, a 100 Percent Chance of Alarm" science writer, John Tierney, describes how
we are being victimized by a vast array of opportunists. They point out anecdotal evidence of warming and ignore counter evidence -- such as the fact that the global temperature last year "was actually lower than any year since 2001. "Governor Kulongoski should understand that
responsible science is nonpartisan. We follow scientific evidence, not those lacking scientific training.
Forcing out a scientist because he won't go along with your favorite hoax hurts Oregon science and ultimately every citizen in this state.