OPINION:
The letter by Tom Harris (“Don’t call greenhouse gas skeptics ’deniers,’ ” Tuesday) rightly suggests that climate scientists be required to “make all the data and calculations completely public.” That’s certainly a good idea, but I think it should be carried a step further.
The results of any taxpayer-funded unclassified research should be available for downloading by the public over the Internet without charge.
The report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is available online for downloading, presents overwhelming evidence that the earth’s climate is changing. However, the conclusion that the present changes are caused mainly by the burning of fossil fuels is far less convincing because the logic behind such conclusions appears to ignore certain laws of physics.
A warming climate, for example, will increase the carbon-dioxide content of the atmosphere without any human activity because of changes in equilibrium between the oceans and the atmosphere and the increased rate of all carbon-dioxide-producing biochemical processes. Additionally, the analysis procedure for gas bubbles trapped in ancient ice may be flawed, falsely indicating lower historical carbon-dioxide levels than actually existed.
Carbon dioxide is subject to solubility differences in water, resulting in bubbles of varying sizes. When ice is crushed to release trapped gases for analysis, larger bubbles can reveal a partial depletion of carbon dioxide while very tiny bubbles can contain gases that remain trapped and go unmeasured, skewing the results.
These points are not directly addressed in the IPCC report itself, but they may be addressed in the cited references. The references, almost entirely from taxpayer-funded research results published in scientific journals, require a fee for reprints, typically $35. The cost of examining hundreds of cited references is prohibitive to the interested individual trying to understand the basis for a suspect scientific conclusion.
This cost is a barrier to the correction of scientific errors, and it should be eliminated.
LESTER VIA
Springfield
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