Other voices on climate change

“Let me tell you why most people think that global warming is a serious problem. It comes down to one number: 2,500. That’s the number of scientists associated with the UN’s Panel on Climate Change that the press reports has endorsed the UN Panel’s conclusions. These are the conclusions that get released in the UN’s mammoth reports every six years or so, and that then dominate the media airwaves for weeks.

” ‘2,500 scientists can’t be wrong,’ the press always says, explicitly or implicitly. Without that number, it would have no basis for the claim that they repeat over and over again — that there’s a consensus on climate change. 2,500 is an impressive number of scientists. To find out who, exactly, they were, I contacted the Secretariat of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and asked for their names. The Secretariat replied that the names were not public, so I couldn’t have them. And I learned that the 2,500 scientists were reviewers, not endorsers.

“Those scientists hadn’t endorsed anything. They had merely reviewed one or more of the literally hundreds of background studies, some important and some not, that were part of this immense United Nations bureaucratic process. They did not review the final report or endorse it. Their reviews weren’t even all favorable. I know that from many sources, including from among some of the scientists that I profiled — several of the deniers in my book are among those 2,500. And those deniers, and others, generally consider the UN’s work a travesty. There is no endorsement by 2,500 top UN scientists. The press has been taken. And so the public has been taken.”

To read the rest of this speech to the Petroleum Club by the author of The Deniers, click here.

Dr. Kiminori Itoh is a Japanese environmental chemist and a contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In this weblog on Roger Pielke Sr.’s website and in his book (so far available only in Japanese), Itoh calls fears of global warming “the greatest scientific scandal in history.” He writes (I’ve slightly corrected the English):

• The global temperature will not increase rapidly if at all. There is sufficient time to think about future energy and social systems.
• The climate system is more robust than conventionally claimed. For instance, the Gulf Stream will not stop due to fresh water inflow.
• There are many factors causing climate changes, particularly in regional and local scales. Considering only greenhouse gases is nonsense and harmful.”

To read this article, click here.

“[James E.] Hansen’s 1988 predictions were flatly wrong about the extent of global warming. Yet on the 20th anniversary of his original testimony, Hansen said that people “should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature” for spreading doubts about the promised global warming holocaust. He named names, too: the CEOs of ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy. Excuse me, Inquisitor Hansen, but what exactly are their crimes against humanity? Being demonstrably wrong about climate science?”

To read this article, click here.

Think the world can easily abandon fossil fuels and switch to sustainable sources of power like wind and solar? This book (available as an online download) by a Cambridge University physicist might change your mind. For example, to supply enough wind power to meet half of Britain’s energy needs would mean filling an area twice the size of Wales with windmills. A large reliance on solar power would require panels taking up 10 per cent of Britain’s surface area. The physicist, David J.C. MacKay, also examines the possibilities for other sources of energy such as nuclear and clean fossil fuel technologies.

To read more, click here.

For a summary of Dr. MacKay’s ideas, click here.

“To Dr. [James] Hansen’s agitated mind, those who raise … questions, who inject skepticism into the global warming debate, are “deniers.” The word here is becoming commonplace, but it remains a singular slur. A clutch of the global warming believers like to cast all who would argue with them into the polemical pit, the pit being that dissent from orthodox opinion on global warming as the equivalent of Holocaust denial. It is a shameless and vicious tactic, and hardly accords with the nobility that is suppose to drive the conscience of those out to save the planet.”

To read this article from the Globe and Mail columnist, click here.

“Alarmists like Al Gore will use pseudo-scientific justifications and comparisons in their attempt to make a connection between carbon dioxide and global warming. Even though CO2 is necessary for life on Earth, the alarmists insist on calling it a pollutant, referring to our atmosphere as an “open sewer.” For instance, Gore likes to point out that Venus has far more CO2 in its atmosphere than the Earth does, and its surface is hot enough to melt lead. Therefore, more CO2 causes warming. But we also know that the Martian atmosphere has 15 times as much CO2 as our own atmosphere, and its surface temperature averages about 70 deg. F below zero. So you see, in science a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

To read this article, click here.

The simple truth is that the anthropogenic global warming train has slowed to a crawl, and the riders are jumping off as the facts are discovered. What is the truth? Let’s begin with something we all can agree on. The climate IS changing. It has always changed, it is changing now, and it will always change. Beyond that, here are some simple facts that make those left on the global warming train very uncomfortable:

• The earth is no warmer now than it was in 1998.
• Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, but a gas indispensable to plant life. Plants, in turn, release oxygen, which sustains animal and human life.
• The primary greenhouse gas is water vapor, not carbon dioxide.
• The lack of solar activity in recent months suggests global cooling might be our biggest potential climate change problem in coming years.
• The planet has had weather disasters, extremes, and anomalies since it has been here. We just didn’t have 24 hour news channels and the Internet in prior decades to spread the news.

To read more of this article by a veteran U.S. weather broadcaster, click here.

Worried that we’re going to lose the polar ice caps? “The Antarctic set a new record (since records began in 1979) for sea ice extent at the end of last winter. It has stayed well above the normal through the summer with icemelt 40% below the normal. … In contrast, the Arctic set a record for the least extent since 1979 last September. It recovered at a record pace in the fall and reached levels more like several years ago this
past winter.”

Read the article (in PDF format) by clicking here.

It’s curious that the global temperature data from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre, run by arch-global warming pessimist James E. Hansen, is consistently higher than the data from other U.S. climate centres.

For example, this article says, “Looking closer at March 2008, NASA’s data (http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt) shows the month as the third warm

est on record. In sharp contrast, UAH (University of Alabama at Huntsville)  and RSS (Remote Sensing Systems) satellite data showed March as the second coldest on record in the southern hemisphere, and just barely above average for the whole planet. How could such a large discrepancy occur?”

The article examines why this divergence might be occurring. Is it possible that Goddard is cooking the numbers to get the scary result Hansen wants?

To read the article, click here.

“The non-equilibrium thermodynamic models we used suggest that the Sun is influencing climate significantly more than the IPCC report claims. If climate is as sensitive to solar changes as the above phenomenological findings suggest, the current anthropogenic contribution to global warming is significantly over-estimated. We estimate that the Sun could account for as much as 69% of the increase in Earth’s average temperature, depending on the Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) reconstruction used. Furthermore, if the Sun does cool off, as some solar forecasts predict will happen over the next few decades, that cooling could stabilize Earth’s climate and avoid the catastrophic consequences predicted in the IPCC report.”

To read this report (PDF version) from the journal Physics Today, click here.