UD geography prof testifies before U.S. Senate committee

11:20 a.m., July 31, 2003--A University of Delaware professor testified before the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee this week on research indicating that fluctuations in climate over the last millennium are historical, well-documented in the scientific literature and that air temperature increases during the past century are not unprecedented in the last 1,000 years.

David R. Legates

David R. Legates, director of the UD Center for Climatic Research, has been working with colleagues at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics where a review of more than 200 climate studies found that claims that the 1990s was the warmest decade of the past millennium are unfounded.

The paper argues that the preponderance of scientific articles and research is in opposition to a recently espoused view formulated by Michael Mann of the University of Virginia and his colleagues that global air temperatures remained fairy constant from 100-1900 A.D., then increased dramatically in the 20th century.

The study was endorsed by U.S. Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., who chairs the Senate committee. Inhofe called the study “a credible, well-documented and scientifically defensible study examining the history of climate change."

Both studies by Legates and Mann are cited as Congress debates whether or not to force industry to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, in particular carbon dioxide. There are several bills before the Senate that would put caps on carbon dioxide emissions.

Inhofe cited the Legates study to support his contention that such caps would “devastate” the economy by increasing energy prices and causing coal-fired plants to switch to natural gas.

“We simply wanted to point out the overwhelming body of scientific evidence that there was a Medieval Warm Period and a Little Ice Age in the last millennium and that the Mann, et al, study is not in the mainstream, but is a scientific outlier,” Legates said.

For additional information on Legates’ work visit [www.udel.edu/PR/UDaily/2003/legates041003.html].

Article by Beth Thomas
Photo by Kathy Atkinson

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