Saturday, May 10, 2008

Don't call it global warming; it's "ambient temperature rise"


An upcoming paper to be published by ASU electrical engineer professor Gerald Heydt [right: ASU Electrical Engineering Dept] is caught up in global warming politics. The journal Science reports that Heydt's paper in IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery describes the impact of global warming on reducing the working lives of electric power transformers. But in the review process, one reviewer referred to 400 scientists who supposedly are skeptics of global warming claims, so in the interests of getting the paper published, Heydt and colleagues replace the term with "ambient temperature rise."

The reference to 400 skeptics sounds suspiciously similar to claims of the Heartland Institute, a self-described think tank that recently held an international conference denying climate change and released a list of supposed climate skeptics that was widely criticized as falsely labeling many of the people on the list.