To the editors:
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A recent issue of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s presitigious Technology Review reports on the culmination of an exhaustive study of worldwide ocean temperatures since 1850 by MIT climatologists Reginald Newell, Jane Hsiung, and Wu Zhongxiang. Its most striking conclusion: “There appears to have been little or no global warming over the past century.”
In fact, the average ocean temperature in the torrid 1980s was less than 0.2 degrees Celsius higher than the 1860s average and virtually the same as it was in the 1940s. Since the oceans cover 70 percent of the earth’s surface and since two-thirds of the buildup of CO2 has taken place since 1940, the MIT data invalidates all current global warming forecasts.
As Patrick Michaels, professor of environmental science at the University of Virginia, explains: “Perturb the climate with carbon dioxide alone, you get global warming. Perturb it with sulfur dioxide alone, and you get an ice age.” Put them together and you have self-canceling effects.
