Posted by: Heather Taylor   - 02/19/10
Last week, two conservative Republican Senators, James Inhofe of Oklahoma and John Barrasso of Wyoming, called for an independent probe of the IPCC – the international scientific body that summarizes the latest climate science – and asked the Senate to halt all climate action until that happens.

The senators claim that because there were some errors included in the IPCC's 2007 report--for instance, how quickly the Himalayan glaciers might melt--the entire phenomenon of climate change must now be questioned.

I am not a scientist by training, but even I know their reasoning doesn't hold up. The few errors that have been uncovered in the thousand pages or so of the IPCC report have nothing to do with the science of whether and why climate change is occurring.  Instead, those errors are about a few specific projections about what might happen in the future.

Saying we should discard the entire thrust of climate scientist because of a couple of sloppy projections is like saying the concept of evaporation is in doubt because a handful of scientists mistakenly said Lake Mead evaporates faster than we thought. 

Read more...