Articles

I must contest the inclusion of this book review by M. Granger Morgan in the December 2007 issue of the IEEE Spectrum. I have two protests - one fundamental to the IEEE, and the other technical. I point these out not to add fire to the debate about global warming, but merely to point out the severe lapse of editing of such an article (even if it is merely a book review).

First, the fundamental protest. This magazine is supposed to represent the general nature of the IEEE, which the last I checked, is of an electrical focus (see http://ieee.org/web/aboutus/home/index.html for more details). There is no logical conclusion to which I can come which would place a book review about global warming in the Spectrum, for it has no relationship to electronics - at least none mentioned in the review.

Secondly, although Mr. Morgan pans critics of global warming as "professional deniers", there are many key flaws in the global warming "research", not the least of which is mathematical. For one example, I would submit this paper ( http://www.fys.ku.dk/~andresen/BAhome/ownpapers/globalT/globalT_JNET2007.pdf ), from the Niels Bohr Institute - definitely not a purveyor of what the author calls "scientifically naive journalism." Yes, real scientists debate this controversial topic, even if the author believes otherwise. Indeed, science is about debate and testing of hypotheses, not shunting critics and those with a different view to the side, as Mr. Morgan has done.

In doing my own analysis of some of the core data (http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/US_USHCN.2005vs1999.txt) we can see that of the 127 anomaly "averages" in the 1999 data set, 106 of them were recomputed to a different value in 2005. In fact, the average adjustment to this data set (over the entire set of 127 values) is 17%. To me, this further substantiates the validity of the mathematical critique referenced above.

I expect better from the Spectrum than for one of its authors (and a department head of engineering at CMU, no less) to spout political views upon us. Further, I would expect that the IEEE editors would scrub such baseless (and possibly slanderous) accusations that distort what is otherwise valid scientific debate on a topic that is nonetheless unrelated to the the charter of the IEEE.

Regards,
Mark Radulovich