Michael Crichton's State of Confusion

If you've ever read Michael Crichton's novel "State of Fear", you'll know that the novel is about a self-important NGO hyping the science of the global warming to further the ends of evil eco-terrorists.

Gavin Schmidt (bio), Earth Institute climate scientist and RealClimate.org contributor refutes several major points made in Michael Crichton's book ....(oddly enough ... apparently Crichton did consult with Gavin Schmidt's lab when researching for his book but didn't "get it")

Some of the main points from the Gavin Schmidt's article as far as I can understand are as follows:

• The global cooling b/w 1940-1970 can be attributed to factors other than CO2 (these other factors are called "forcings" .. such as land use changes, volcanic aerosols etc.). The more recent global warming cannot by accounted for by forcings (other than CO2)
• Global cooling in one area doesn't exclude overall global warming since we're talking about the planet wide mean. The whole globe isn't warming uniformly. Crichton uses cooling trends from selective weather stations.
• Crichton says that the global mean temp. is skewed because of of the Urban heating effect. A correction has already been applied for The 'Urban Heat Island Effect' when calculating global mean temperatures.
• Jim Hansen's testimony to congress in 1988 is often quoted misleadingly and out of context. The reliability of his climate model is often confused with the unpredictability of the forcings.
• Sea level is a surprisingly difficult thing to measure. Crichton uses sea-level data in a confusing manner.
• Crichton claims that climate models differ by 400% in their estimates. That's a misleading statement. The current batch of models have a mean climate sensitivity of about 3 C to doubled CO2 (and range between 2.5 and 4.0 degrees) (Paris meeting of IPCC, July 2004) , i.e an uncertainty of about 30% -- again the confusion is probably related to misleading interpretation of Jim Hansen's testimony. Crichton is confusing variability in the forcings with accuracy of the model predictions (basically Crichton appears to be saying that the model gives results that vary by 400% when the forcings vary -- which is a really obvious statement --- you give different inputs to the model -- it will give you different outputs). What Crichton is missing is that the model is fairly accurate given a specific set of forcings and that the set of forcings is what is variable. If the set of forcings is variable, then how can Crichton conclude that global warming is a non-issue ? The correct conclusion based on the climate models should probably be ...if the forcings go a certain way then global warming may not happen, but if the forcings go another way, then global warming can happen. No one can predict the forcings themselves, so you can't say "global waming is a non-issue"

But don't believe my summary .., here is the link to the original aticle. Draw your own conclusions ...