A Los Angeles Times editorial ("Years of ignoring climate change shapes present, future," June 25) claims climate scientists' dire predictions are "coming true even more quickly than expected." Their core prediction was that global temperatures would increase as atmospheric carbon dioxide levels went up.
But, since 1998, which was the warmest year of the 20th century, there has been no net change in the Earth's average temperature. Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have increased from 36 per hundred thousand air molecules to 39 per hundred thousand. The climate models on which alarming forecasts are based all predicted the Earth would get steadily warmer during the last 15 years. Climate scientists still believe we need to reduce our carbon footprint, but some at least are asking themselves "What if we were wrong?"
The New Republic, which supports efforts to curtail greenhouse gas emissions, asked in a recent issue: "If scientific models can't project the last 15 years, what does that mean for their projections of the next 100?" Similar concerns have been voiced in the (British) Economist and The New York Times.
German meteorologist Hans von Storch, interviewed recently in Der Spiegel, stated: "If things continue as they have been, in five years at the latest, we will need to acknowledge that something is fundamentally wrong with our climate models. ... A 20-year pause in global warming does not occur in a single modeled scenario. ..."
The failure of climate models to predict the last 15 years supports those who have been saying we don't face a climate emergency and don't know enough to justify the economic dislocations that would result from drastic reductions in the use of fossil fuels.
Malcolm J. Sherman
Albany