The controversy over global warming is one of the trickiest to describe accurately. One has to deal with some rather esoteric science, and the extreme difficulty in making predictions about future weather.

But it's one thing to honestly dispute the evidence, another matter entirely to mislead people. Prominent global warming skeptic Richard Lindzen did the latter in an article in the Wall Street Journal's opinion section. Read it here: www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008220.

Lindzen certainly qualifies as an expert. As Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he has solid scientific credentials. But Lindzen misrepresents the evidence, and doesn't even deal with the strongest arguments of those he terms global warming "alarmists."

Here is one example:

"If the models are correct, global warming reduces the temperature differences between the poles and the equator. When you have less difference in temperature, you have less excitation of extratropical storms, not more. And, in fact, model runs support this conclusion."

Extratropical is the key word here. That refers to storms fueled by clashes between warm and cooler air. Tropical storms such as hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons are what the global warming "alarmists" worry about. They are fueled by warm water. Here's some discussion about the issue: www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=181. Even if his claim is true, it is irrelevant.

But if you relied on Lindzen, who claims that global warming skeptics are being intimidated into silence, you wouldn't know this. Here he goes again:

"Alarmists have drawn some support for increased claims of tropical storminess from a casual claim by Sir John Houghton of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that a warmer world would have more evaporation, with latent heat providing more energy for disturbances. The problem with this is that the ability of evaporation to drive tropical storms relies not only on temperature, but humidity as well, and calls for drier, less humid air. Claims for starkly higher temperatures are based upon there being more humidity, not less -- hardly a case for more storminess with global warming."

Kerry Emanuel, Lindzen's colleague at M.I.T. in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, has studied this issue, and published his findings in August in the scientific journal Nature.

Properly cautious, Emanuel says it's not certain that there's a link between global warming and the recent upswing in storm activity. For example, there's an upward swing in hurricane activity in the North Atlantic that is part of a cycle unrelated to global warming. However, there is also a worldwide increase in the energy that these storms have released over the last few decades. And this increase is closely correlated with rising surface sea temperatures. He has more on his Web site at wind.mit.edu/~emanuel/anthro2.htm.

"What we can say is that everywhere we have looked, the change in hurricane energy consumption follows very closely the change in tropical sea surface temperature. When the sea surface temperature falls, the energy consumption falls, and conversely, when it rises, so, too, does the energy consumption. Both theory and models of hurricane intensity predict that this should be so as well," he stated.

A PBS interview with Emanuel (www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3302/07-hott-nf.html) gives more information.

This evidence is far more than someone's "casual claim." It deserves serious discussion. Too bad Lindzen and the Wall Street Journal's opinion page were more interested in spreading disinformation.

Contact staff writer Bradley J. Fikes at (760) 739-6641 or bfikes@nctimes.com.