Real research a must before changing things

Tom Keller, Henderson

Saturday, Feb. 20, 2010 | 2:01 a.m.

As a chemical engineer, I am one of those global warming skeptics whom The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman pooh-poohs in his Thursday column in the Sun, “Time for a ‘global weirding’ offensive”:

The statistics being used to prove that small changes in carbon dioxide are warming the Earth are good as far as they go, but they ignore so many variables that the conclusions are meaningless.

Water is by far the largest single greenhouse gas component, overwhelming the effects of carbon dioxide, methane and all the others. But, because it is difficult to measure, it is has been totally ignored in the studies. It’s like showing that people have a higher incidence of lung cancer because they don’t take vitamins, but ignoring the fact that they smoke cigarettes.

Friedman wants climate science experts at NASA, MIT, Stanford, etc., to summarize the current data, hoping that reporting them concisely will legitimize their position. I agree that these scientific institutions need to get involved.

But instead of trying to validate flawed statistics, let them instead apply their physics, chemistry and engineering expertise to see if burning fossil fuels can support the conclusions. It’s time to do real science. Changing our whole economic structure based on questionable statistics is nuts.