Climate Change Exhibit is Bad Science

Chicago's lakefront, with its beautiful parks and spectacular museums, is one of the wonders of the urban world. So how could the esteemed Field Museum, its crown jewel, come up with such a wonderfully bad exhibit on climate change? It opened June 25.

The Field enjoys a fantastic reputation for intellectual stimulation, which is what great museums do. They don't preach.

Except, it appears, about climate change. Field's new exhibit is a one-sided ad for the disaster lobby. People will walk away and think, "Gosh, if we all just use compact fluorescent bulbs and drive hybrid cars, we can really make a difference in global warming. And if we don't, the end of the world as we know it is nigh."

I couldn't believe what I saw during a preview earlier this month.

For example, everyone will come away with the notion that global warming is "accelerating," meaning the rate of temperature increase is going up and up. That's bad.

It's also bad science. The reports from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show global warming is projected to take place at a constant rate, not an accelerating one. And indeed, since 1975, when surface temperatures began their second rise in the last century (the first one was from 1910 through 1940, before we had changed the atmosphere enough to have caused it), the rate of warming has been constant. And low.

In its blatant attempt to alarm, the Field neglected to compare the observed rate to the projected warming rates, based upon the panel's "scenario" that best mimics how the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide has actually changed. If it had, viewers would have seen that the actual warming has been pretty pokey compared to the rates projected by the panel's 22 climate models. Observed warming has been hanging around the low end of the panel's range and, unless the mathematical projection of a constant warming rate is wrong, it must continue to be low.

In fact, it's so low that there has been very little warming at all in the past 12 years. 1998 was the global record. While there's a chance that we might finally beat the record this year, if it takes a dozen years to top an old record, that's not much of a warming trend! Rumors about the imminent end of the world are somewhat premature.

But what's really galling about the exhibit is the notion that we can make much of a difference now.

Last summer, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill to strictly limit emissions of carbon dioxide, a byproduct of our industrial society. The bill mandates an 83 percent cut in 39 years. No one has a clue how to do this. The bill would limit the average American to producing no more than the net emissions of the average citizen in 1867.

The U.N. projects a mean warming of about 3 degrees in the 21st century. Using its own projection model, it's easy to see that if the U.S. alone hit the House target, only 0.12 degrees would be prevented, an amount too small to measure.

Say, instead, that we don’t go it alone, but that all of the other nations of the world that agreed to change their carbon dioxide emissions under the UN’s failed Kyoto Protocol on global warming do the same as us.  The result is that a mere 7% of the warming that would have occurred otherwise is prevented. Seven percent of 3 degrees is a 0.21 degree savings over 100 years. Again, too small to measure.

That's because we are rapidly becoming bit players in the world's carbon dioxide budget. China is the world's biggest emitter, and officials there have made it quite clear that the country will not reduce its emissions in the foreseeable future. Ditto for India's plans.

Telling the whole truth is what a great museum is about. But doing so probably would have prompted many visitors to reach a different conclusion than what the Field Museum wanted. The Field exhibitors want to scare visitors, when probably the best thing to do about global warming now is nothing that is expensive. We're going to need a lot of money to invest in future technologies that will provide clean, reliable and inexpensive energy. Diverting money in a futile and expensive enterprise to reduce carbon emissions now is precisely the wrong thing to do about climate change.

The sad truth is that this preachy exhibit will have the opposite effect to what it intended. Instead of leading people to ask serious questions about what we can really do, it exhorts us to futile actions now that will delay the arrival of new technologies that might actually make a difference.

Patrick J. Michaels, Ph.D, is senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute and distinguished senior fellow in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University.