No existe el clima ideal (o lo que Newsweek en español omitió hoy)

La revista Newsweek hizo una cobertura amplia sobre el asunto del cambio climático. En la edición en español - con fecha del 16 de abril- que empezó a circular hoy decidieron omitir un demoledor artículo de quien es una de las mayores autoridades científicas en el mundo en materia de meteorología y clima: Richard S. Lindzen. Es una lástima que los editores de Newsweek en español no hayan querido dar a sus lectores en español lo que los lectores de la edición internacional de Newsweek sí pueden leer. Ni modo.

Copio a continuación tres párrafos del artículo de Lindzen, profesor del MIT, y aquí esta el vínculo para leer, en inglés, el artículo completo.

A warmer climate could prove to be more beneficial than the one we have now. Much of the alarm over climate change is based on ignorance of what is normal for weather and climate. There is no evidence, for instance, that extreme weather events are increasing in any systematic way, according to scientists at the U.S. National Hurricane Center, the World Meteorological Organization and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which released the second part of this year's report earlier this month). Indeed, meteorological theory holds that, outside the tropics, weather in a warming world should be less variable, which might be a good thing.

In many other respects, the ill effects of warming are overblown. Sea levels, for example, have been increasing since the end of the last ice age. When you look at recent centuries in perspective, ignoring short-term fluctuations, the rate of sea-level rise has been relatively uniform (less than a couple of millimeters a year). There's even some evidence that the rate was higher in the first half of the twentieth century than in the second half. Overall, the risk of sea-level rise from global warming is less at almost any given location than that from other causes, such as tectonic motions of the earth's surface.

Many of the most alarming studies rely on long-range predictions using inherently untrustworthy climate models, similar to those that cannot accurately forecast the weather a week from now. Interpretations of these studies rarely consider that the impact of carbon on temperature goes down —not up— the more carbon accumulates in the atmosphere. Even if emissions were the sole cause of the recent temperature rise —a dubious proposition— future increases wouldn't be as steep as the climb in emissions.