To: National Desk, Environment Reporter

U.S.Newswire, 8/19/2004 16:15

Contact: Sean Tuffnell of the National Center For Policy Analysis, 800-859-1154 or stuffnell(At)ncpa.org

WASHINGTON, Aug. 19 /U.S. Newswire/ -- California will become hotter and drier by the end of the century, menacing the valuable wine and dairy industries, even if dramatic steps are taken to curb global warming. That was the doomsday prediction of a new study released by researchers from the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology in Stanford, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Yet experts from the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) responded that this is just the latest example of climate alarmists using junk science to make a political point.

''The climate models these researchers rely on have been proven over and over to be entirely unreliable,'' said NCPA Adjunct Scholar S. Fred Singer. ''They can't even reliably predict the present climate, but they know specifically what's going to happen to California in the future?'' Singer is also the president of the Science and Environment Policy Project and a former director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service.

The NCPA noted that several studies have found the majority of the computer climate models to be entirely ineffective. For example, a recent report by scientists from the Universities of Rochester and Virginia (including Prof. Singer) found that the most often cited computer climate models used to assert that the introduction of greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide (CO2), into the atmosphere is causing the Earth to warm, differ starkly from the actual data of the past quarter-century.

Furthermore, the National Academy of Sciences, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Pew Center on Global Climate Change have all stated that climate models cannot produce meaningful regional predictions. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency concurred, stating, ''...complicated computer models...are still not accurate enough to provide reliable forecasts of...the direction, let alone the magnitude or timing, of the seasonal or even annual changes... ''

The NCPA also noted that in making its doomsday prediction for the California wine industry, the study never actually looked at climate impacts on wine, rather just made statements about the potential impacts. Greg Jones of Southern Oregon University recently conducted a 54-year analysis of observed climates in the wine regions in the Western U.S., and the connections to fruit composition (sugar) and vintage ratings. His conclusion is that while there appears to be an optimum growing climate by which existing varieties do best, further warming would not doom the industry. Rather, it would just cause them to rethink varietal make up and wine styles.

NCPA Senior Fellow H. Sterling Burnett concluded that: ''This is more politics than science. In fact, one of the lead researchers and spokesmen for the study is Stephen Schneider, one of the most vocal alarmists, who was once Al Gore's lead science advisor. In the past he has explicitly called for exaggerating the science and down playing doubts as a way of getting things done politically in the face of ongoing debate.''

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