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Over 400 Prominent Scientists Disputed Man-Made Global Warming |
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Friday, 21 December 2007 |
U.S. Senate Report: Over 400 Prominent Scientists Disputed Man-Made Global Warming Claims in 2007
Senate Report Debunks "Consensus"
Report Released on December 20, 2007
INTRODUCTION:
Over 400 prominent scientists from more than two dozen countries recently voiced significant objections to major aspects of the so-called "consensus" on man-made global warming. These scientists, many of whom are current and former participants in the UN IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), criticized the climate claims made by the UN IPCC and former Vice President Al Gore.
The new report issued by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee's office of the GOP Ranking Member details the views of the scientists, the overwhelming majority of whom spoke out in 2007.
Even some in the establishment media now appear to be taking notice of the growing number of skeptical scientists. In October, the Washington Post Staff Writer Juliet Eilperin conceded the obvious, writing that climate skeptics "appear to be expanding rather than shrinking." Many scientists from around the world have dubbed 2007 as the year man-made global warming fears "bite the dust." (LINK) In addition, many scientists who are also progressive environmentalists believe climate fear promotion has "co-opted" the green movement. (LINK)
This blockbuster Senate report lists the scientists by name, country of residence, and academic/institutional affiliation. It also features their own words, biographies, and weblinks to their peer reviewed studies and original source materials as gathered from public statements, various news outlets, and websites in 2007. This new "consensus busters" report is poised to redefine the debate.
Many of the scientists featured in this report consistently stated that numerous colleagues shared their views, but they will not speak out publicly for fear of retribution. Atmospheric scientist Dr. Nathan Paldor, Professor of Dynamical Meteorology and Physical Oceanography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, author of almost 70 peer-reviewed studies, explains how many of his fellow scientists have been intimidated.
"Many of my colleagues with whom I spoke share these views and report on their inability to publish their skepticism in the scientific or public media," Paldor wrote. [Note: See also July 2007 Senate report detailing how skeptical scientists have faced threats and intimidation - LINK ]
Scientists from Around the World Dissent
This new report details how teams of international scientists are dissenting from the UN IPCC's view of climate science. In such nations as Germany, Brazil, the Netherlands, Russia, New Zealand and France, nations, scientists banded together in 2007 to oppose climate alarmism. In addition, over 100 prominent international scientists sent an open letter in December 2007 to the UN stating attempts to control climate were "futile." (LINK)
Paleoclimatologist Dr. Tim Patterson, professor in the department of Earth Sciences at Carleton University in Ottawa, recently converted from a believer in man-made climate change to a skeptic. Patterson noted that the notion of a "consensus" of scientists aligned with the UN IPCC or former Vice President Al Gore is false. "I was at the Geological Society of America meeting in Philadelphia in the fall and I would say that people with my opinion were probably in the majority."
This new committee report, a first of its kind, comes after the UN IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri implied that there were only “about a dozen" skeptical scientists left in the world. (LINK) Former Vice President Gore has claimed that scientists skeptical of climate change are akin to "flat Earth society members" and similar in number to those who "believe the moon landing was actually staged in a movie lot in Arizona." (LINK) & (LINK)
The distinguished scientists featured in this new report are experts in diverse fields, including: climatology; oceanography; geology; biology; glaciology; biogeography; meteorology; oceanography; economics; chemistry; mathematics; environmental sciences; engineering; physics and paleoclimatology. Some of those profiled have won Nobel Prizes for their outstanding contribution to their field of expertise and many shared a portion of the UN IPCC Nobel Peace Prize with Vice President Gore.
Additionally, these scientists hail from prestigious institutions worldwide, including: Harvard University; NASA; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR); Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the UN IPCC; the Danish National Space Center; U.S. Department of Energy; Princeton University; the Environmental Protection Agency; University of Pennsylvania; Hebrew University of Jerusalem; the International Arctic Research Centre; the Pasteur Institute in Paris; the Belgian Weather Institute; Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute; the University of Helsinki; the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S., France, and Russia; the University of Pretoria; University of Notre Dame; Stockholm University; University of Melbourne; University of Columbia; the World Federation of Scientists; and the University of London.
The voices of many of these hundreds of scientists serve as a direct challenge to the often media-hyped "consensus" that the debate is "settled."
A May 2007 Senate report detailed scientists who had recently converted from believers in man-made global warming to skepticism. [See May 15, 2007 report: Climate Momentum Shifting: Prominent Scientists Reverse Belief in Man-made Global Warming - Now Skeptics: Growing Number of Scientists Convert to Skeptics After Reviewing New Research - (LINK) ]
The report counters the claims made by the promoters of man-made global warming fears that the number of skeptical scientists is dwindling.
Examples of "consensus" claims made by promoters of man-made climate fears:
Former Vice President Al Gore (November 5, 2007): "There are still people who believe that the Earth is flat." (LINK) Gore also compared global warming skeptics to people who 'believe the moon landing was actually staged in a movie lot in Arizona' (June 20, 2006 - LINK)
CNN's Miles O'Brien (July 23, 2007): The scientific debate is over." "We're done." O'Brien also declared on CNN on February 9, 2006 that scientific skeptics of man-made catastrophic global warming "are bought and paid for by the fossil fuel industry, usually." (LINK)
On July 27, 2006, Associated Press reporter Seth Borenstein described a scientist as "one of the few remaining scientists skeptical of the global warming harm caused by industries that burn fossil fuels." (LINK)
Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the IPCC view on the number of skeptical scientists as quoted on Feb. 20, 2003: "About 300 years ago, a Flat Earth Society was founded by those who did not believe the world was round. That society still exists; it probably has about a dozen members." (LINK)
Agence France-Press (AFP Press) article (December 4, 2007): The article noted that a prominent skeptic "finds himself increasingly alone in his claim that climate change poses no imminent threat to the planet."
Andrew Dessler in the eco-publication Grist Magazine (November 21, 2007): "While some people claim there are lots of skeptical climate scientists out there, if you actually try to find one, you keep turning up the same two dozen or so (e.g., Singer, Lindzen, Michaels, Christy, etc., etc.). These skeptics are endlessly recycled by the denial machine, so someone not paying close attention might think there are lots of them out there -- but that's not the case. (LINK)
The Washington Post asserted on May 23, 2006 that there were only "a handful of skeptics" of man-made climate fears. (LINK)
UN special climate envoy Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland on May 10, 2007 declared the climate debate "over" and added “it's completely immoral, even, to question” the UN’s scientific “consensus." (LINK)
ABC News Global Warming Reporter Bill Blakemore reported on August 30, 2006: "After extensive searches, ABC News has found no such [scientific] debate" on global warming. (LINK)
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Brief highlights of the report featuring over 400 international scientists:
Israel: Dr. Nathan Paldor, Professor of Dynamical Meteorology and Physical Oceanography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has authored almost 70 peer-reviewed studies and won several awards. "First, temperature changes, as well as rates of temperature changes (both increase and decrease) of magnitudes similar to that reported by IPCC to have occurred since the Industrial revolution (about 0.8C in 150 years or even 0.4C in the last 35 years) have occurred in Earth's climatic history. There's nothing special about the recent rise!"
Russia: Russian scientist Dr. Oleg Sorochtin of the Institute of Oceanology at the Russian Academy of Sciences has authored more than 300 studies, nine books, and a 2006 paper titled "The Evolution and the Prediction of Global Climate Changes on Earth." "Even if the concentration of ‘greenhouse gases' double man would not perceive the temperature impact," Sorochtin wrote.
Spain: Anton Uriarte, a professor of Physical Geography at the University of the Basque Country in Spain and author of a book on the paleoclimate, rejected man-made climate fears in 2007. "There's no need to be worried. It's very interesting to study [climate change], but there's no need to be worried," Uriate wrote.
Netherlands: Atmospheric scientist Dr. Hendrik Tennekes, a scientific pioneer in the development of numerical weather prediction and former director of research at The Netherlands' Royal National Meteorological Institute, and an internationally recognized expert in atmospheric boundary layer processes, "I find the Doomsday picture Al Gore is painting - a six-meter sea level rise, fifteen times the IPCC number - entirely without merit," Tennekes wrote. "I protest vigorously the idea that the climate reacts like a home heating system to a changed setting of the thermostat: just turn the dial, and the desired temperature will soon be reached."
Brazil: Chief Meteorologist Eugenio Hackbart of the MetSul Meteorologia Weather Center in Sao Leopoldo - Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil declared himself a skeptic. "The media is promoting an unprecedented hyping related to global warming. The media and many scientists are ignoring very important facts that point to a natural variation in the climate system as the cause of the recent global warming," Hackbart wrote on May 30, 2007.
France: Climatologist Dr. Marcel Leroux, former professor at Université Jean Moulin and director of the Laboratory of Climatology, Risks, and Environment in Lyon, is a climate skeptic. Leroux wrote a 2005 book titled Global Warming - Myth or Reality? - The Erring Ways of Climatology. "Day after day, the same mantra - that ‘the Earth is warming up' - is churned out in all its forms. As ‘the ice melts' and ‘sea level rises,' the Apocalypse looms ever nearer! Without realizing it, or perhaps without wishing to, the average citizen in bamboozled, lobotomized, lulled into mindless acceptance. ... Non-believers in the greenhouse scenario are in the position of those long ago who doubted the existence of God ... fortunately for them, the Inquisition is no longer with us!"
Norway: Geologist/Geochemist Dr. Tom V. Segalstad, a professor and head of the Geological Museum at the University of Oslo and formerly an expert reviewer with the UN IPCC: "It is a search for a mythical CO2 sink to explain an immeasurable CO2 lifetime to fit a hypothetical CO2 computer model that purports to show that an impossible amount of fossil fuel burning is heating the atmosphere. It is all a fiction."
Finland: Dr. Boris Winterhalter, retired Senior Marine Researcher of the Geological Survey of Finland and former professor of marine geology at University of Helsinki, criticized the media for what he considered its alarming climate coverage. "The effect of solar winds on cosmic radiation has just recently been established and, furthermore, there seems to be a good correlation between cloudiness and variations in the intensity of cosmic radiation. Here we have a mechanism which is a far better explanation to variations in global climate than the attempts by IPCC to blame it all on anthropogenic input of greenhouse gases. "
Germany: Paleoclimate expert Augusto Mangini of the University of Heidelberg in Germany, criticized the UN IPCC summary. "I consider the part of the IPCC report, which I can really judge as an expert, i.e. the reconstruction of the paleoclimate, wrong," Mangini noted in an April 5, 2007 article. He added: "The earth will not die."
Canada: IPCC 2007 Expert Reviewer Madhav Khandekar, a Ph.D meteorologist, a scientist with the Natural Resources Stewardship Project who has over 45 years experience in climatology, meteorology and oceanography, and who has published nearly 100 papers, reports, book reviews and a book on Ocean Wave Analysis and Modeling: "To my dismay, IPCC authors ignored all my comments and suggestions for major changes in the FOD (First Order Draft) and sent me the SOD (Second Order Draft) with essentially the same text as the FOD. None of the authors of the chapter bothered to directly communicate with me (or with other expert reviewers with whom I communicate on a regular basis) on many issues that were raised in my review. This is not an acceptable scientific review process."
Czech Republic: Czech-born U.S. climatologist Dr. George Kukla, a research scientist with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, expressed climate skepticism in 2007. "The only thing to worry about is the damage that can be done by worrying. Why are some scientists worried? Perhaps because they feel that to stop worrying may mean to stop being paid," Kukla told Gelf Magazine on April 24, 2007.
India: One of India's leading geologists, B.P. Radhakrishna, President of the Geological Society of India, expressed climate skepticism in 2007. "We appear to be overplaying this global warming issue as global warming is nothing new. It has happened in the past, not once but several times, giving rise to glacial-interglacial cycles."
USA: Climatologist Robert Durrenberger, past president of the American Association of State Climatologists, and one of the climatologists who gathered at Woods Hole to review the National Climate Program Plan in July, 1979: "Al Gore brought me back to the battle and prompted me to do renewed research in the field of climatology. And because of all the misinformation that Gore and his army have been spreading about climate change I have decided that ‘real' climatologists should try to help the public understand the nature of the problem."
Italy: Internationally renowned scientist Dr. Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists and a retired Professor of Advanced Physics at the University of Bologna in Italy, who has published over 800 scientific papers: "Significant new peer-reviewed research has cast even more doubt on the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused global warming."
New Zealand: IPCC reviewer and climate researcher Dr. Vincent Gray, an expert reviewer on every single draft of the IPCC reports going back to 1990 and author of The Greenhouse Delusion: A Critique of "Climate Change 2001: "The [IPCC] ‘Summary for Policymakers' might get a few readers, but the main purpose of the report is to provide a spurious scientific backup for the absurd claims of the worldwide environmentalist lobby that it has been established scientifically that increases in carbon dioxide are harmful to the climate. It just does not matter that this ain't so."
South Africa: Dr. Kelvin Kemm, formerly a scientist at South Africa's Atomic Energy Corporation who holds degrees in nuclear physics and mathematics: "The global-warming mania continues with more and more hype and less and less thinking. With religious zeal, people look for issues or events to blame on global warming."
Poland: Physicist Dr. Zbigniew Jaworowski, Chairman of the Central Laboratory for the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Radiological Protection in Warsaw: ""We thus find ourselves in the situation that the entire theory of man-made global warming-with its repercussions in science, and its important consequences for politics and the global economy-is based on ice core studies that provided a false picture of the atmospheric CO2 levels."
Australia: Prize-wining Geologist Dr. Ian Plimer, a professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Adelaide in Australia: "There is new work emerging even in the last few weeks that shows we can have a very close correlation between the temperatures of the Earth and supernova and solar radiation."
Britain: Dr. Richard Courtney, a UN IPCC expert reviewer and a UK-based climate and atmospheric science consultant: "To date, no convincing evidence for AGW (anthropogenic global warming) has been discovered. And recent global climate behavior is not consistent with AGW model predictions."
China: Chinese Scientists Say C02 Impact on Warming May Be ‘Excessively Exaggerated' - Scientists Lin Zhen-Shan's and Sun Xian's 2007 study published in the peer-reviewed journal Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics: "Although the CO2 greenhouse effect on global climate change is unsuspicious, it could have been excessively exaggerated." Their study asserted that "it is high time to reconsider the trend of global climate change."
Denmark: Space physicist Dr. Eigil Friis-Christensen is the director of the Danish National Space Centre, a member of the space research advisory committee of the Swedish National Space Board, a member of a NASA working group, and a member of the European Space Agency who has authored or co-authored around 100 peer-reviewed papers and chairs the Institute of Space Physics: "The sun is the source of the energy that causes the motion of the atmosphere and thereby controls weather and climate. Any change in the energy from the sun received at the Earth's surface will therefore affect climate."
Belgium: Climate scientist Luc Debontridder of the Belgium Weather Institute's Royal Meteorological Institute (RMI) co-authored a study in August 2007 which dismissed a decisive role of CO2 in global warming: "CO2 is not the big bogeyman of climate change and global warming. "Not CO2, but water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas. It is responsible for at least 75 % of the greenhouse effect. This is a simple scientific fact, but Al Gore's movie has hyped CO2 so much that nobody seems to take note of it."
Sweden: Geologist Dr. Wibjorn Karlen, professor emeritus of the Department of Physical Geography and Quaternary Geology at Stockholm University, critiqued the Associated Press for hyping promoting climate fears in 2007. "Another of these hysterical views of our climate. Newspapers should think about the damage they are doing to many persons, particularly young kids, by spreading the exaggerated views of a human impact on climate."
USA: Dr. David Wojick is a UN IPCC expert reviewer, who earned his PhD in Philosophy of Science and co-founded the Department of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie-Mellon University: "In point of fact, the hypothesis that solar variability and not human activity is warming the oceans goes a long way to explain the puzzling idea that the Earth's surface may be warming while the atmosphere is not. The GHG (greenhouse gas) hypothesis does not do this." Wojick added: "The public is not well served by this constant drumbeat of false alarms fed by computer models manipulated by advocates."
# # #
Background: Only 52 Scientists Participated in UN IPCC Summary
The over 400 skeptical scientists featured in this new report outnumber by nearly eight times the number of scientists who participated in the 2007 UN IPCC Summary for Policymakers. The notion of "hundreds" or "thousands" of UN scientists agreeing to a scientific statement does not hold up to scrutiny. (See report debunking "consensus" LINK) Recent research by Australian climate data analyst Dr. John McLean revealed that the IPCC's peer-review process for the Summary for Policymakers leaves much to be desired. (LINK)
Proponents of man-made global warming like to note how the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the American Meteorological Society (AMS) have issued statements endorsing the so-called "consensus" view that man is driving global warming. But both the NAS and AMS never allowed member scientists to directly vote on these climate statements. Essentially, only two dozen or so members on the governing boards of these institutions produced the "consensus" statements. This report gives a voice to the rank-and-file scientists who were shut out of the process. (LINK)
The most recent attempt to imply there was an overwhelming scientific "consensus" in favor of man-made global warming fears came in December 2007 during the UN climate conference in Bali. A letter signed by only 215 scientists urged the UN to mandate deep cuts in carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. But absent from the letter were the signatures of these alleged "thousands" of scientists. (See AP article: - LINK )
UN IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri urged the world at the December 2007 UN climate conference in Bali, Indonesia to "Please listen to the voice of science."
The science has continued to grow loud and clear in 2007. In addition to the growing number of scientists expressing skepticism, an abundance of recent peer-reviewed studies have cast considerable doubt about man-made global warming fears. A November 3, 2007 peer-reviewed study found that "solar changes significantly alter climate." (LINK) A December 2007 peer-reviewed study recalculated and halved the global average surface temperature trend between 1980 - 2002. (LINK) Another new study found the Medieval Warm Period "0.3C warmer than 20th century" (LINK)
A peer-reviewed study by a team of scientists found that "warming is naturally caused and shows no human influence." (LINK) - Another November 2007 peer-reviewed study in the journal Physical Geography found "Long-term climate change is driven by solar insolation changes." (LINK ) These recent studies were in addition to the abundance of peer-reviewed studies earlier in 2007. - See "New Peer-Reviewed Scientific Studies Chill Global Warming Fears" (LINK )
With this new report of profiling 400 skeptical scientists, the world can finally hear the voices of the "silent majority" of scientists.
FULL SENATE REPORT: U.S. Senate Report: Over 400 Prominent Scientists Disputed Man-Made Global Warming Claims in 2007
December 20, 2007
This report is in the spirit of enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot who reportedly said, "Skepticism is the first step towards truth."
[Disclaimer: The following scientists named in this report have expressed a range of views from skepticism to outright rejection of predictions of catastrophic man-made global warming. As in all science, there is no lock step single view.]
Atmospheric scientist Dr. Nathan Paldor, Professor of Dynamical Meteorology and Physical Oceanography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has authored almost 70 peer-reviewed studies and won several awards. "First, temperature changes, as well as rates of temperature changes (both increase and decrease) of magnitudes similar to that reported by IPCC to have occurred since the Industrial revolution (about 0.8C in 150 years or even 0.4C in the last 35 years) have occurred in Earth's climatic history. There's nothing special about the recent rise!" Paldor told EPW on December 4, 2007. "Second, our ability to make realizable (or even sensible) future forecasts are greatly exaggerated relied upon by the IPCC. This is true both for the numerical modeling efforts (the same models that yield abysmal 3-day forecasts are greatly simplified and run for 100 years!)," Paldor explained. "Third, the rise in atmospheric CO2 is much smaller (by about 50%) than that expected from the anthropogenic activity (burning of fossil fuels such as oil, coal and natural gas), which implies that the missing amount of CO2 is (most probably) absorbed by the ocean. The oceanic response to increasing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere might be much slower than that of the atmosphere (and is presently very poorly understood). It is quite possible that after an ‘adjustment time' the ocean (which contains far more CO2 than the atmosphere) will simply increase its biological activity and absorb the CO2 from the atmosphere (i.e. the atmospheric CO2 concentration will decrease)," he added. "Fourth, the inventory of fossil fuels is fairly limited and in one generation we will run out of oil. Coal and natural gas might take 100-200 years but with no oil their consumption will increase so they probably won't last as long. The real alternative that presently available to humanity is nuclear power (that can easily produce electricity for domestic and industrial usage and for transportation when our vehicles are reverted to run on electricity). The technology for this exists today and can replace our dependence on fossil fuel in a decade! This has to be made known to the general public who is unaware of the alternative for taking action to lower the anthropogenic spewing of CO2. This transformation to nuclear energy will probably rake place when oil reserves dwindle regardless of the CO2 situation," he wrote. Paldor also noted the pressure for scientists to bow to the UN IPCC view of climate change. "Many of my colleagues with whom I spoke share these views and report on their inability to publish their skepticism in the scientific or public media," he concluded. (LINK)
Dr. Denis G. Rancourt, Professor of Physics and an Environmental Science researcher at the University of Ottawa, believes the global warming campaigns do a disservice to the environmental movement. "Promoting the global warming myth trains people to accept unverified, remote, and abstract dangers in the place of true problems that they can discover for themselves by becoming directly engaged in their workplace and by doing their own research and observations. It trains people to think lifestyle choices (in relation to CO2 emission) rather than to think activism in the sense of exerting an influence to change societal structures," Rancourt wrote in a February 27, 2007 blog post. Rancourt believes that global warming "will not become humankind's greatest threat until the sun has its next hiccup in a billion years or more (in the very unlikely scenario that we are still around,)" and noted that even if C02 emissions were a grave threat, "government action and political will cannot measurably or significantly ameliorate global climate in the present world." Rancourt believes environmentalists have been duped into promoting global warming as a crisis. "I argue that by far the most destructive force on the planet is power-driven financiers and profit-driven corporations and their cartels backed by military might; and that the global warming myth is a red herring that contributes to hiding this truth. In my opinion, activists who, using any justification, feed the global warming myth have effectively been co-opted, or at best neutralized," Rancourt wrote. Rancourt also questioned the whole concept of a global average temperature, noting, "Averaging problems aside, many tenuous approximations must be made in order to arrive at any of the reported final global average temperature curves." He further explained: "This means that determining an average of a quantity (Earth surface temperature) that is everywhere different and continuously changing with time at every point, using measurements at discrete times and places (weather stations), is virtually impossible; in that the resulting number is highly sensitive to the chosen extrapolation method(s) needed to calculate (or rather approximate) the average." "The estimates are uncertain and can change the calculated global warming by as much as 0.5 C, thereby removing the originally reported effect entirely," he added. Finally, Rancourt asserted that in a warm world, life prospers. "There is no known case of a sustained warming alone having negatively impacted an entire population," he said, adding, "As a general rule, all life on Earth does better when it's hotter: Compare ecological diversity and biotic density (or biomass) at the poles and at the equator." Rancourt added, "Global warming is strictly an imaginary problem of the First World middle class." (LINK)
Czech-born U.S. climatologist Dr. George Kukla, a research scientist with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University expressed climate skepticism in 2007. "The only thing to worry about is the damage that can be done by worrying. Why are some scientists worried? Perhaps because they feel that to stop worrying may mean to stop being paid," Kukla told Gelf Magazine on April 24, 2007. "What I think is this: Man is responsible for a PART of global warming. MOST of it is still natural," Kukla explained. (LINK) Kukla "said that the accelerating warming of the Earth is not caused by man but by the regularities of the planets' circulation around the Sun," according to a June 4, 2007 article in the Prague Monitor. "The changes in the Earth's circulation around the Sun are now extremely slow. Moreover, they are partially being compensated by the human impact on the climate. I think we will know more in about 50 years," Kukla said. Kukla is viewed as a pioneer in the study of solar forcing of climate changes. (LINK) & (LINK)
One of India's leading geologists, B.P. Radhakrishna, President of the Geological Society of India, expressed climate skepticism in 2007. "There is some evidence to show that our planet Earth is becoming warmer and that human action is probably partly responsible, especially in the matter of greenhouse gas emissions. What is in doubt, however, is whether the steps that are proposed to be taken to reduce carbon emission will really bring down the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere and whether such attempts, even carried out on a global scale, will produce the desired effect," Radhakrishna wrote in an August 23, 2007 essay. "We appear to be overplaying this global warming issue as global warming is nothing new. It has happened in the past, not once but several times, giving rise to glacial-interglacial cycles. We appear to be now only in the middle of an interglacial cycle showing a trend toward warming as warming and cooling are global and have occurred on such a scale when humans had not appeared on the planet. If we read geology correctly, the earth we live on is not dead but is dynamic and is continuously changing. The causes of these changes are cosmogenic and nothing we are able to do is likely to halt or reverse such processes," he explained. "Warming of the climate, melting of glaciers, rise in sea levels and other marked changes in climate - these do not pose immediate threats and there is besides, no way of controlling such changes even if we want to. Exercises at mitigation of these likely disasters are, however, possible and mankind, in all likelihood, will gradually adjust itself to the changed conditions. This has happened before; men and animals have moved to greener pastures and adapted themselves to the changed situations," he added. (LINK)
Climatologist Dr. John Maunder, past president of the Commission for Climatology who has spent over 50 years in the "weather business" all around the globe, and who has written four books on weather and climate, says "the science of climate change will probably never be fully understood." "It is not always true that the climate we have now (wherever we live) is the best one ... some people (and animals and crops) may prefer it to be wetter, drier, colder, or warmer," Maunder wrote on his website updated on November 27, 2007. "Climatic variations and climatic changes from WHATEVER cause (i.e. human induced or natural) clearly create risks, but also provide real opportunities. (For example, the 2007 IPCC report - see below - shows that from 1900 to 2005, significantly increased precipitation has been observed in eastern parts of North and South America, northern Europe, and northern and central Asia)," he explained. (LINK)
Glaciologist Nikolai Osokin of the Institute of Geography and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences dismissed alarmist climate fears of all of the world's ice melting in a March 27, 2007 article. "The planet may rest assured," Osokin wrote. "This hypothetical catastrophe could not take place anytime within the next thousand years," he explained. "Today, scientists say that the melting of the permafrost has stalled, which has been proved by data obtained by meteorological stations along Russia's Arctic coast," Olokin added. "The (recent) period of warming was tangible, but now it may be drawing to a close. Most natural processes on the earth are cyclical, having a shorter or longer rhythm. Yet no matter how these sinusoids look, a temperature rise is inevitably followed by a decline, and vice versa." (LINK)
Atmospheric Physicist Dr. Garth W. Paltridge, an Emeritus Professor from University of Tasmania, is another prominent skeptic. Paltridge who was a Chief Research Scientist with the CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research before taking up positions in 1990 as Director of the Institute of Antarctic and Southern Ocean Studies at the University of Tasmania and as CEO of the Antarctic Cooperative Research Center. Paltridge questioned the motives of scientists hyping climate fears. "They have been so successful with their message of greenhouse doom that, should one of them prove tomorrow that it is nonsense, the discovery would have to be suppressed for the sake of the overall reputation of science," Paltridge wrote in an April 6, 2007 op-ed entitled "Global Warming - Not Really a Done Deal?" Paltridge is best known internationally for his work on atmospheric radiation and on the theoretical basis of climate change. He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science. Paltridge also worked with the National Climate Program Office. "Even as it is, the barriers to public dissemination of results that might cast doubt on one aspect or another of accepted greenhouse wisdom are extraordinarily high. Climate scientists rush in overwhelming numbers to repel infection by ideas not supportive of the basic thesis that global warming is perhaps the greatest of the threats to mankind and that it is caused by human folly - the burning of fossil fuels to support our way of life," Paltridge explained. "In a way, their situation is very similar to that of the software engineers who sold the concept of the Y2K bug a decade ago. The ‘reputation stakes' have become so high that it is absolutely necessary for some form of international action (any action, whether sensible or not) to be forced upon mankind. Then, should disaster not in fact befall, the avoidance of doom can be attributed to that action rather than to the probability that the prospects for disaster were massively oversold," he added. "Pity the politicians who (we presume) are trying their best to make an informed decision on the matter. Of course politicians realize that those clamoring for their attention on any particular issue usually have other un-stated agendas. But they may not recognize that scientists too are human and are as subject as the rest of us to the seductions of well-funded campaigns. One of the more frightening statements about global warming to be heard now from the corridors of power is that ‘the scientists have spoken'. Well maybe they have - some of them anyway - but the implication of god-like infallibility is a bit hard to take," he concluded.
Climate Scientist Dr. Ben Herman, past director of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics and Head of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Arizona, questioned how the UN IPCC could express 90% confidence that humans have warmed the planet. "That conclusion was really surprising to me, it having come from a world wide group of supposedly outstanding climate experts," Herman wrote in an April 6, 2007 article in Climate Science. Herman, who is currently studying several satellite based remote sensing projects to monitor ozone, temperature, water vapor, and aerosols from space, noted that the climate models are not cooperating with predictions of a man-made climate catastrophe. "Now, the models also predict that the mid tropospheric warming should exceed that observed at the ground, but satellite data contradicts this," Herman wrote. (LINK)
Prof. Francis Massen of the Physics Laboratory in Luxemburg and the leader of a meteorological station examined the UN IPCC's Summary for Policymakers (SPM). "The SPM conceals that the methane concentration in the atmosphere has been stable for seven years (and nobody knows exactly why); not one climatic model foresaw this," Massen wrote in a February 2007 article entitled "IPCC 4AR SPM: Gloom and Doom." (translated) Massen noted there is an "unrestrained contest among media, environmental groups and politicians" to paint as dire a picture as possible of future climate conditions following the UN summary. Massen called some of the climate reporting "absolute rubbish." "It seems that in the climatic area a new faith fight has broken out, which has all characteristics of historical Religion," he added. (LINK)
Chief Meteorologist Eugenio Hackbart of the MetSul Meteorologia Weather Center in Sao Leopoldo - Rio Grande do Sul - Brazil declared himself a skeptic. "The media is promoting an unprecedented hyping related to global warming. The media and many scientists are ignoring very important facts that point to a natural variation in the climate system as the cause of the recent global warming," Hackbart wrote on May 30, 2007. "I believe we have the duty to inform people about the true facts of global warming. It is interesting that is this global warming era of hysteria we just lived a very cold week with snow in the higher elevation of Southern Brazil and that the next week could be even colder with low temperatures not seen in this part of the globe during the month of May in the last 20 to 30 years. It is not only South Africa that is freezing. South America is under a sequence of cold blasts not seen since the very cold climatic winter of 2000 (La Niña)," Hackbart concluded. In a June 5, 2007 article, Hackbart noted that the "historical cold events in Southern Brazil (in 1957, 1965, 1975, 1984, 1996 and 2006) have another aspect in common. They all took place around the 11-year sun cycle solar minimum. (LINK) & (LINK)
Ocean researcher Dr. John T. Everett, a former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) administrator and UN IPCC lead author and reviewer, who led work on five impact analyses for the IPCC including Fisheries, Polar Regions, Oceans and Coastal Zones. Everett, who is also project manager for the UN Atlas of the Oceans, received an award while at NOAA for "accomplishments in assessing the impacts of climate change on global oceans and fisheries." Everett, who publishes the website http://www.climatechangefacts.info/index.htm also expressed skepticism about climate fears in 2007. "It is time for a reality check," Everett testified to Natural Resources Committee in the U.S. Congress on April 17, 2007. "Warming is not a big deal and is not a bad thing," Everett emphasized. "The oceans and coastal zones have been far warmer and colder than is projected in the present scenarios of climate change," Everett said. "In the oceans, major climate warming and cooling is a fact of life, whether it is over a few years as in an El Niño or over decades as in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation or the North Atlantic Oscillation. Currents, temperatures, salinity, and biology changes rapidly to the new state in months or a couple years. These changes far exceed those expected with global warming and occur much faster. The one degree F. rise since about 1860, indeed since the year 1000, has brought the global average temperature from 56.5 to 57.5 degrees. This is at the level of noise in this rapidly changing system," Everett explained. "I would much rather have the present warm climate, and even further warming, than the next ice age that will bring temperatures much colder than even today. The NOAA PaleoClimate Program shows us that when the dinosaurs roamed the earth, the earth was much warmer, the CO2 levels were 2 to 4 times higher, and coral reefs were much more expansive. The earth was so productive then that we are still using the oil, coal, and gas it generated," he added. "More of the warming, if it comes, will be during winters and at night and toward the poles. For most life in the oceans, warming means faster growth, reduced energy requirements to stay warm, lower winter mortalities, and wider ranges of distribution," he explained. "No one knows whether the Earth is going to keep warming, or since reaching a peak in 1998, we are at the start of a cooling cycle that will last several decades or more," Everett concluded. Everett also worked for the National Marine Fisheries Service Division Chief for Fisheries Development in the 1970s and he noted that the concern then was about how predicted global cooling would impact the oceans. (LINK) & (LINK)
Physicist Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu, the former director of both University of Alaska Fairbanks' Geophysical Institute and International Arctic Research Center who has twice been named in "1000 Most Cited Scientists," released a scientific study of the Arctic on March 2007 that concluded the recent warming was likely "natural" and not manmade. (LINK) Akasofu, an award winning scientist who has published more than 550 professional journal articles and authored or co-authored 10 books, also recently blasted the UN IPCC process. "I think the initial motivation by the IPCC (established in 1988) was good; it was an attempt to promote this particular scientific field," Akasofu said in an April 1, 2007 interview. "But so many [scientists] jumped in, and the media is looking for a disaster story, and the whole thing got out of control," Akasofu added. The article continued: "Akasofu said there is no data showing that ‘most' of the present warming is due to the man-made greenhouse effect, as the members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change wrote in February. "If you look back far enough, we have a bunch of data that show that warming has gone on from the 1600s with an almost linear increase to the present," Akasofu said. The article concluded: "Akasofu said scientists who support the man-made greenhouse gas theory disregard information from centuries ago when exploring the issue of global warming. Satellite images of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean have been available in the satellite era only since the 1960s and 1970s. ‘Young researchers are interested in satellite data, which became available after 1975,' he said. ‘All the papers since (the advent of satellites) show warming. That's what I call 'instant climatology.' I'm trying to tell young scientists, 'You can't study climatology unless you look at a much longer time period.'" (LINK)
Physicist Dr. Gerhard Gerlich, of the Institute of Mathematical Physics at the Technical University Carolo-Wilhelmina in Braunschweig in Germany, and Dr. Ralf D. Tscheuschner co-authored a July 7, 2007 paper titled "Falsification of the Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within the Frame of Physics." The abstract of the paper reads in part, "(a) there are no common physical laws between the warming phenomenon in glass houses and the fictitious atmospheric greenhouse effects; (b) there are no calculations to determine an average surface temperature of a planet; (c) the frequently mentioned difference of 33 C is a meaningless number calculated wrongly; (d) the formulas of cavity radiation are used inappropriately; (e) the assumption of a radiative balance is unphysical; (f) thermal conductivity and friction must not be set to zero, the atmospheric greenhouse conjecture is falsified." Gerlich and Tscheuschner's study concluded, "The horror visions of a risen sea level, melting pole caps and developing deserts in North America and in Europe are fictitious falsification of the consequences of fictitious physical mechanisms, as they cannot be seen even in the climate model computations. The emergence of hurricanes and tornados cannot be predicted by climate models, because all of these deviations are ruled out. The main strategy of modern CO2-greenhouse gas defenders seems to hide themselves behind more and more pseudo explanations, which are not part of the academic education or even of the physics training." (LINK)
Geologist/Geochemist Dr. Tom V. Segalstad, a professor and head of the Geological Museum at the University of Oslo and formerly an expert reviewer with the UN IPCC, expressed skepticism of climate fears in 2007. A July 7, 2007 article in Canada's Financial Post read, "In the real world, as measurable by science, CO2 in the atmosphere and in the ocean reach a stable balance when the oceans contain 50 times as much CO2 as the atmosphere. ‘The IPCC postulates an atmospheric doubling of CO2, meaning that the oceans would need to receive 50 times more CO2 to obtain chemical equilibrium,' explains Prof. Segalstad. ‘This total of 51 times the present amount of carbon in atmospheric CO2 exceeds the known reserves of fossil carbon-- it represents more carbon than exists in all the coal, gas, and oil that we can exploit anywhere in the world.'" The article continued, "Also in the real world, Prof. Segalstad's isotope mass balance calculations -- a standard technique in science -- show that if CO2 in the atmosphere had a lifetime of 50 to 200 years, as claimed by IPCC scientists, the atmosphere would necessarily have half of its current CO2 mass. Because this is a nonsensical outcome, the IPCC model postulates that half of the CO2 must be hiding somewhere, in ‘a missing sink.' Many studies have sought this missing sink -- a Holy Grail of climate science research-- without success. ‘It is a search for a mythical CO2 sink to explain an immeasurable CO2 lifetime to fit a hypothetical CO2 computer model that purports to show that an impossible amount of fossil fuel burning is heating the atmosphere,' Prof. Segalstad concludes. ‘It is all a fiction.'" (LINK)
Geologist Dr. David Kear, the former director of geological survey at the Department of Science and Industrial Research in New Zealand, called predictions of rising sea level as a result of man-made global warming "science fiction," and said the basic rules of science are being ignored. "When youngsters are encouraged to take part in a school science fair the first thing they are told to do is check the results, then re-check them, something NIWA [National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research] appear to have forgotten to do," Kear said in a April 13, 2007 article. "In looking at the next 50 years, why have they not studied the past 50 years and applied their findings to the predictions? One would think this was a must," Kear explained. The article continued, "First global warming predictions made in 1987 estimated an annual rise in sea levels of 35mm. That scared the world but since then, the figure has continued to be reduced by ‘experts.'" Kear concluded, "Personal beliefs on climate change and rising sea levels should be delayed until just one of the many predictions made since 1985 on the basis of carbon additions to the atmosphere comes true." (LINK)
Solar Physicist and Climatologist Douglas V. Hoyt, who coauthored the book The Role of the Sun in Climate Change, and has worked at both the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), has developed a scorecard to evaluate how accurate climate models have been. Hoyt wrote, "Starting in 1997, we created a scorecard to see how climate model predictions were matching observations. The picture is not pretty with most of the predictions being wrong in magnitude and often in sign." (LINK) A March 1, 2007 blog post in the National Review explained how the scoring system works. "[Hoyt] gives each prediction a ‘yes-no-undetermined score.' So if the major models' prediction is confirmed, the score at the beginning would be 1-0-0. So how do the models score when compared with the evidence? The final score is 1-27-4. That's one confirmed prediction, 27 disconfirmed, and 4 undetermined," the blog noted. Hoyt has extensively researched the sun-climate connection and has published nearly 100 scientific papers in such areas as the greenhouse effect, aerosols, cloud cover, radiative transfer, and sunspot structure. (LINK) To see Hoyt's climate model scorecard, go here: (LINK)
Dr. Boris Winterhalter, retired Senior Marine Researcher of the Geological Survey of Finland and former professor of marine geology at University of Helsinki, criticized the media for what he considered its alarming climate coverage. "It is with great regret that I find media apt to grab any prophesy for catastrophes by ‘reputed scientists' without hesitation," Winterhalter wrote on his website. Winterhalter, one of the 60 signatories in a 2006 letter urging withdrawal of Kyoto to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, also wrote, "The effect of solar winds on cosmic radiation has just recently been established and, furthermore, there seems to be a good correlation between cloudiness and variations in the intensity of cosmic radiation. Here we have a mechanism which is a far better explanation to variations in global climate than the attempts by IPCC to blame it all on anthropogenic input of greenhouse gases." "To state that sea level rises or falls due to global change is completely out of proportion. There are far too many factors affecting this planet from the inside and the outside to warrant the idea that man is capable of influencing these natural processes," he added. (LINK)
Particle Physicist Jasper Kirkby, a research scientist at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, believes his research will reveal that the sun and cosmic rays are a "part of the climate-change cocktail." Kirkby runs a CLOUD (Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets) project that examines how the sun and cosmic rays impact clouds and subsequently the climate. In a February 23, 2007 Canadian National Post article, CERN asserted, "Clouds exert a strong influence on the Earth's energy balance, and changes of only a few per cent have an important effect on the climate." According to the National Post article, "Dr. Kirkby has assembled a dream team of atmospheric physicists, solar physicists, and cosmic ray and particle physicists from 18 institutes around the world, including the California Institute of Technology and Germany's Max-Planck Institutes, with preliminary data expected to arrive this coming summer. The world of particle physics is awaiting these results with much anticipation because they promise to unlock mysteries that can tell us much about climate change, as well as other phenomena." Kirkby once said his research into the sun and cosmic rays "will probably account for somewhere between a half and the whole of the increase in the Earth's temperature that we have seen in the last century." (LINK)
Solar physicists Galina Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtsev, of the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics of the Siberian Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences, believe the climate is driven by the sun and predict global cooling will soon occur. The two scientists are so convinced that global temperatures will cool within the next decade they have placed a $10,000 wager with a UK scientist to prove their certainty. The criteria for the $10,000 bet will be to "compare global temperatures between 1998 and 2003 with those between 2012 and 2017. The loser will pay up in 2018," according to an April 16, 2007 article in Live Science. (LINK) Bashkirtsev and Mashnich have questioned the view that the "anthropogenic impact" is driving Earth's climate. "None of the investigations dealing with the anthropogenic impact on climate convincingly argues for such an impact," the two scientists noted in 2003. Bashkirtsev and Mashnich believe the evidence of solar impacts on the climate "leave little room for the anthropogenic impact on the Earth's climate." They believe that "solar variations naturally explain global cooling observed in 1950-1970, which cannot be understood from the standpoint of the greenhouse effect, since CO2 was intensely released into the atmosphere in this period." (LINK)
Physics Professor Emeritus Dr. Howard Hayden of the University of Connecticut and author of "The Solar Fraud: Why Solar Energy Won't Run the World," debunked fears of a man-made climate disaster during a presentation in April. "You think SUVs are the cause of glaciers shrinking? I don't think so," Hayden, who retired after 32 years as a professor, said, according to an April 25, 2007 article in Maine Today. "Don't believe what you hear out of Hollywood and Washington, D.C.," Hayden said. According to the article, Hayden argued that "climate history proves that Gore has the relationship between carbon dioxide concentration and global warming backwards. A higher concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, he said, does not cause the Earth to be warmer. Instead," he said, "a warmer Earth causes the higher carbon dioxide levels." Hayden explained, "The sun heats up the Earth and the oceans warm up and atmospheric carbon dioxide rises." According to the article, Hayden "said humans' contribution to global carbon dioxide levels is virtually negligible." Hayden is also the editor of a monthly newsletter called "The Energy Advocate." (LINK)
Internationally renowned scientist Dr. Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists and a retired Professor of Advanced Physics at the University of Bologna in Italy, who has published over 800 scientific papers, questioned man-made global warming fears. According to an April 27, 2007 article at Zenit.org, Zichichi "pointed out that human activity has less than 10% impact on the environment." The article noted that Zichichi "showed that the mathematical models used by the [UN's] IPCC do not correspond to the criteria of the scientific method. He said the IPCC used ‘the method of 'forcing' to arrive at their conclusions that human activity produces meteorological variations.'" Zichichi said that based upon actual scientific fact "it is not possible to exclude the idea that climate changes can be due to natural causes," and he added that it is plausible that "man is not to blame." According to the article, "He also reminded those present that 500,000 years ago the Earth lost the North and South Poles four times. The poles disappeared and reformed four times, he said. Zichichi said that in the end he is not convinced that global warming is caused by the increase of emissions of ‘greenhouse gases' produced through human activity. Climate changes, he said, depend in a significant way on the fluctuation of cosmic rays." Zichichi also signed a December 2007 open letter to the United Nations stating in part "Significant new peer-reviewed research has cast even more doubt on the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused global warming." (LINK) & (LINK) & bio: (LINK)
Renowned Astronomer Sir Patrick Moore, a fellow of the UK's Royal Astronomical Society, host of the BBC's Sky at Night program since 1957 and author of over 60 books on astronomy called global warming concern ‘rubbish' in an interview with The Sun in 2005. "I think it's a lot of rubbish! From 1645-1715 the sun was inactive and we had a 'Little Ice Age,'" Moore said. "Then the sun went back to normal and the world warmed up," he concluded. Moore most recently co-authored two books published in 2006: 50 Years in Space: What We Thought Then What We Know Now; and Bang! The Complete History of the Universe. (LINK)
Atmospheric scientist Dr. James P. Koermer, a Professor of Meteorology and the director of the Meteorological Institute at Plymouth State University dismissed man-made global warming fears. "Global warming hysteria is based to a large extent on the unproven predictions of climate models. These numerical models are based on many simplified approximations of very complicated physical processes and phenomena," Koermer wrote to EPW on December 3, 2007. "My biggest concern is their [computer models'] lack of ability to adequately handle water vapor and clouds, which are much more important as climate factors than anthropogenic contributors. Until we can realistically simulate types of clouds, their optical thicknesses, and their altitudes, which we have a difficult time doing for short-term weather forecasts, I can't have much faith in climate models," Koermer wrote. "Another major reason that I remain skeptical is based on what I know about past climate changes that occurred before man walked on earth. I am more amazed with how relatively stable climate has been over the past 15,000 or so years, versus the large changes that frequently appeared to take place prior to that time. I also can't ignore some of the recent evidence presented by some very well respected astrophysicists on solar variability. Most meteorologists including me have always been taught to treat the sun's output as a constant--now I am not so sure and I am intrigued by their preliminary findings relating to climate," he concluded. (LINK)
Renowned agricultural scientist Dr. Norman Borlaug, known as the father of the "Green Revolution" for saving over a billion people from starvation by utilizing pioneering high yield farming techniques, is one of only five people in history who has been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom ,and the Congressional Gold Medal. Borlaug also declared himself skeptical of man-made climate fears in 2007. "I do believe we are in a period where, no question, the temperatures are going up. But is this a part of another one of those (natural) cycles that have brought on glaciers and caused melting of glaciers?" Borlaug asked, according to a September 21, 2007 article in Saint Paul Pioneer Press. The article reported that Borlaug is "not sure, and he doesn't think the science is, either." Borlaug added, "How much would we have to cut back to take the increasing carbon dioxide and methane production to a level so that it's not a driving force?" We don't even know how much." (LINK)
Astronomer Dr. Jeff Zweerink of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) studies gamma rays, black holes, and neutron stars and has declared himself a skeptic of man-made climate fears. "Many natural phenomena significantly affect the global climate. Atmospheric conditions are impacted by tectonic activity, erosion, and changes in Earth's biomass, for example," Zweerink wrote on December 18, 2006. "While politicians and activists focus on the effects of fossil fuel burning the breeding and domestication of cows and cultivation of rice, for example, actually does more harm than driving too many SUV's," Zweerink added. (LINK)
Computer modeler Dr. Donald DuBois, who holds a PhD in Philosophy of Science, has spent most of his career modeling computer networks for NASA's International Space Station, GE Space Systems, the Air Force, and the Navy. DuBois is very skeptical of climate computer models predicting doom. "I know something about how misleading models can be, and the fact that their underlying assumptions can completely predetermine the results of the model. If the major climate models that are having a major impact on public policy were documented and put in the public domain, other qualified professionals around the world would be interested in looking into the validity of these models," DuBois wrote to EPW on May 17, 2007. "Right now, climate science is a black box that is highly questionable with unstated assumptions and model inputs. It is especially urgent that these models come out in the open considering how much climate change legislation could cost the United States and the world economies. Ross McKitrick's difficulty in getting the information from [Michael] Mann on his famous ‘hockey stick' [temperature] curve is a case in point which should be a scandal not worth repeating. The cost of documenting the models and making them available would be a trifle; the cost of not doing so could be astronomical," DuBois wrote. "I headed up a project to model computer networks (to see how they will perform before they are built) for NASA's International Space Station (including the ground stations around the globe). If I had suggested a $250 million network for the ISS and said that I was basing this recommendation on my modeling but the models were not available for inspection, I would have been laughed out of the auditorium in Houston."
Anton Uriarte, a professor of Physical Geography at the University of the Basque Country in Spain and author of a book on the paleoclimate, rejected man-made climate fears. "It's just a political thing, and the lies about global warming are contributing to the proliferation of nuclear energy," Uriarte said according to a September 2007 article in the Spanish newspaper El Correo. "There's no need to be worried. It's very interesting to study [climate change], but there's no need to be worried," Uriarte wrote. "Far from provoking the so-called greenhouse effect, [CO2] stabilizes the climate." Uriarte noted that "the Earth is not becoming desertified, it's greener all the time." Uriarte says natural factors dominate the climate system. "The Earth being spherical, the tropics always receive more heat than the poles and the imbalance has to be continually rectified. They change places because of the tilt of the earth's axis. And, moreover, the planet isn't smooth, but rough, which produces perturbations in the interchange of air masses. We know the history of the climate very well and it has changed continuously," he wrote. "It's evident that the Earth is a human planet, and that being so, it's quite normal that we influence the atmosphere. It's something else altogether to say that things will get worse. I believe that a little more heat will be very good for us. The epochs of vegetational exuberance coincided with those of more heat," he explained. "In warm periods, when there are more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere - more CO2 and water vapour - climate variability is less. In these periods greenhouse gases, which act as a blanket, cushion the differences between the tropics and the poles. There is less interchange of air masses, less storms. We're talking about a climate which is much less variable," he added. (Translation) (LINK)
Professor David Noble of Canada's York University is a committed environmentalist and a man-made global warming skeptic. Noble now believes that the movement has "hyped the global climate issue into an obsession." Noble wrote a May 8 essay entitled "The Corporate Climate Coup" which details how global warming has "hijacked" the environmental left and created a "corporate climate campaign" which has "diverted attention from the radical challenges of the global justice movement." (LINK)
Award-winning quaternary geologist Dr. Olafur Ingolfsson, a professor from the University of Iceland who has conducted extensive expeditions and field research in the both the Arctic and Antarctic, chilled fears that the iconic polar bear is threatened by global warming. Ingolfsson was awarded the prestigious "Antarctic Service Medal of the United States" by the National Science Foundation. "We have this specimen that confirms the polar bear was a morphologically distinct species at least 100,000 years ago, and this basically means that the polar bear has already survived one interglacial period," Ingolfsson said according to a December 10, 2007 article in the BBC. The article explained, "And what's interesting about that is that the Eeemian - the last interglacial - was much warmer than the Holocene (the present)." Ingolfsson continued, "This is telling us that despite the on-going warming in the Arctic today, maybe we don't have to be quite so worried about the polar bear. That would be very encouraging." Ingolfsson is optimistic about the polar bears future because of his research about the Earth's history. "The polar bear is basically a brown bear that decided some time ago that it would be easier to feed on seals on the ice. So long as there are seals, there are going to be polar bears. I think the threat to the polar bears is much more to do with pollution, the build up of heavy metals in the Arctic. This is just how I interpret it. But this is science - when you have little data, you have lots of freedom," he concluded. (LINK)
Over 100 Prominent International Scientists Warn UN Against 'Futile' Climate Control Efforts in a December 13, 2007 open letter. "Attempts to prevent global climate change from occurring are ultimately futile, and constitute a tragic misallocation of resources that would be better spent on humanity's real and pressing problems," the letter signed by the scientists read. (LINK) The scientists, many of whom are current and former UN IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) scientists, sent an open letter to the UN Secretary-General questioning the scientific basis for climate fears and the UN's so-called "solutions." "It is not possible to stop climate change, a natural phenomenon that has affected humanity through the ages. Geological, archaeological, oral and written histories all attest to the dramatic challenges posed to past societies from unanticipated changes in temperature, precipitation, winds and other climatic variables," the scientists wrote. "In stark contrast to the often repeated assertion that the science of climate change is ‘settled,' significant new peer-reviewed research has cast even more doubt on the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused global warming," the open letter added. [EPW Note: Several other recent peer-reviewed studies have cast considerable doubt about man-made global warming fears. For most recent sampling see: New Peer-Reviewed Study finds 'Solar changes significantly alter climate' (11-3-07) (LINK) & "New Peer-Reviewed Study Halves the Global Average Surface Temperature Trend 1980 - 2002" (LINK) & New Study finds Medieval Warm Period '0.3C Warmer than 20th Century' (LINK) - New Peer-Reviewed Study Finds: "Warming is naturally caused and shows no human influence." (LINK) - A November peer-reviewed study in the journal Physical Geography found "Long-term climate change is driven by solar insolation changes" LINK ) For a more comprehensive sampling of peer-reviewed studies earlier in 2007 see "New Peer-Reviewed Scientific Studies Chill Global Warming Fears" (LINK ) - For a detailed analysis of how "consensus" has been promoted, see: Debunking The So-Called "Consensus" On Global Warming - LINK - ] The scientists' letter continued: "The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued increasingly alarming conclusions about the climatic influences of human-produced carbon dioxide (CO2), a non-polluting gas that is essential to plant photosynthesis. While we understand the evidence that has led them to view CO2 emissions as harmful, the IPCC's conclusions are quite inadequate as justification for implementing policies that will markedly diminish future prosperity. In particular, it is not established that it is possible to significantly alter global climate through cuts in human greenhouse gas emissions." "The IPCC Summaries for Policy Makers are the most widely read IPCC reports amongst politicians and non-scientists and are the basis for most climate change policy formulation. Yet these Summaries are prepared by a relatively small core writing team with the final drafts approved line-by-line by government representatives. The great majority of IPCC contributors and reviewers, and the tens of thousands of other scientists who are qualified to comment on these matters, are not involved in the preparation of these documents. The summaries therefore cannot properly be represented as a consensus view among experts," the letter added. [EPW Note: Only 52 scientists participated in the UN IPCC Summary for Policymakers in April 2007, according to the Associated Press. - LINK - An analysis by Australian climate researcher Dr. John Mclean in 2007 found the UN IPCC peer-review process to be "an illusion." LINK ] The letter was signed by renowned scientists such as Dr. Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists; Dr. Reid Bryson, dubbed one of the "Fathers of Meteorology"; Atmospheric pioneer Dr. Hendrik Tennekes, formerly of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute; Award winning physicist Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu of the International Arctic Research Center, who has twice named one of the "1000 Most Cited Scientists"; Award winning MIT atmospheric scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen; UN IPCC scientist Dr. Vincent Gray of New Zealand; French climatologist Dr. Marcel Leroux of the University Jean Moulin; World authority on sea level Dr. Nils-Axel Morner of Stockholm University; Physicist Dr. Freeman Dyson of Princeton University; Physicist Dr. Zbigniew Jaworowski, chairman of the Scientific Council of Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Poland; Paleoclimatologist Dr. Robert M. Carter of Australia; Former UN IPCC reviewer Geologist/Geochemist Dr. Tom V. Segalstad, head of the Geological Museum in Norway; and Dr. Edward J. Wegman, of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Other scientists (not already included in this report) who signed the letter include: Don Aitkin, PhD, Professor, social scientist, retired Vice-Chancellor and President, University of Canberra, Australia; Geoff L. Austin, PhD, FNZIP, FRSNZ, Professor, Dept. of Physics, University of Auckland, New Zealand; Chris C. Borel, PhD, remote sensing scientist, U.S.; Dan Carruthers, M.Sc., wildlife biology consultant specializing in animal ecology in Arctic and Subarctic regions, Alberta, Canada; Hans Erren, Doctorandus, geophysicist and climate specialist, Sittard, The Netherlands; William Evans, PhD, Editor, American Midland Naturalist; Dept. of Biological Sciences, University of Notre Dame, U.S.; R. W. Gauldie, PhD, Research Professor, Hawai'i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology, School of Ocean Earth Sciences and Technology, University of Hawai'i at Manoa; Albrecht Glatzle, PhD, sc.agr., Agro-Biologist and Gerente ejecutivo, INTTAS, Paraguay; Fred Goldberg, PhD, Adj Professor, Royal Institute of Technology, Mechanical Engineering, Stockholm, Sweden; Louis Hissink M.Sc. M.A.I.G., Editor AIG News and Consulting Geologist, Perth, Western Australia; Andrei Illarionov, PhD, Senior Fellow, Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, U.S.; founder and director of the Institute of Economic Analysis, Russia; Jon Jenkins, PhD, MD, computer modelling - virology, Sydney, NSW, Australia; Olavi Kärner, Ph.D., Research Associate, Dept. of Atmospheric Physics, Institute of Astrophysics and Atmospheric Physics, Toravere, Estonia; Jan J.H. Kop, M.Sc. Ceng FICE (Civil Engineer Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers), Emeritus Professor of Public Health Engineering, Technical University Delft, The Netherlands; Professor R.W.J. Kouffeld, Emeritus Professor, Energy Conversion, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands; Salomon Kroonenberg, PhD, Professor, Dept. of Geotechnology, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands; The Rt. Hon. Lord Lawson of Blaby, economist; Chairman of the Central Europe Trust; former Chancellor of the Exchequer, U.K.; Douglas Leahey, PhD, meteorologist and air-quality consultant, Calgary, Canada; William Lindqvist, PhD, consulting geologist and company director, Tiburon, California, U.S.; A.J. Tom van Loon, PhD, Professor of Geology (Quaternary Geology), Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland; former President of the European Association of Science Editors; Horst Malberg, PhD, Professor for Meteorology and Climatology, Institut für Meteorologie, Berlin, Germany; Alister McFarquhar, PhD, international economist, Downing College, Cambridge, U.K.; Frank Milne, PhD, Professor, Dept. of Economics, Queen's University, Canada; Asmunn Moene, PhD, former head of the Forecasting Centre, Meteorological Institute, Norway; Alan Moran, PhD, Energy Economist, Director of the IPA's Deregulation Unit, Australia; John Nicol, PhD, physicist, James Cook University, Australia; Mr. David Nowell, M.Sc., Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society, former chairman of the NATO Meteorological Group, Ottawa, Canada; Brian Pratt, PhD, Professor of Geology, Sedimentology, University of Saskatchewan, Canada; Harry N.A. Priem, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Planetary Geology and Isotope Geophysics, Utrecht University; former director of the Netherlands Institute for Isotope Geosciences; Colonel F.P.M. Rombouts, Branch Chief - Safety, Quality and Environment, Royal Netherlands Air Force; R.G. Roper, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Sciences, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology, U.S.; Arthur Rorsch, PhD, Emeritus Professor, Molecular Genetics, Leiden University, The Netherlands; Rob Scagel, M.Sc., forest microclimate specialist, principal consultant, Pacific Phytometric Consultants, B.C., Canada; Gary D. Sharp, PhD, Center for Climate/Ocean Resources Study, Salinas, CA, U.S.; L. Graham Smith, PhD, Associate Professor, Dept. of Geography, University of Western Ontario, Canada; Peter Stilbs, TeknD, Professor of Physical Chemistry, Research Leader, School of Chemical Science and Engineering, KTH (Royal Institute of Technology), Stockholm, Sweden; Len Walker, PhD, power engineering, Pict Energy, Melbourne, Australia; Stephan Wilksch, PhD, Professor for Innovation and Technology Management, Production Management and Logistics, University of Technology and Economics Berlin, Germany; and Raphael Wust, PhD, Lecturer, Marine Geology/Sedimentology, James Cook University, Australia. Also, "Other professional persons knowledgeable about climate change who expressed support for the open letter to the UN Secretary General" included meteorological researcher and spotter for the National Weather Service Allan Cortese; Water resources engineer Don Farley; Dr. David A. Gray of Messiah College, a former researcher in electromagnetic waves in the atmosphere; Barrie Jackson, associate professor of Chemical Engineering at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada; Raymond J. Jones, PhD, FATSE, OAM. retired, Agronomist, Townsville, Australia; J.A.L. Robertson, M.A. (Cantab.), F.R.S.C., nuclear-energy consultant, Deep River, ON, Canada; J.T.Rogers, PhD, FCAE, nuclear engineer; energy analyst, Ottawa, Canada; John K. Sutherland, PhD in Geology (Manchester University), New Brunswick, Canada; Noor van Andel, PhD Energy Physics, Burgemeester Stroinkstraat, The Netherlands; Arthur M. Patterson, P.Eng, Geological Engineer. Extensive experience in the Canadian Arctic; Agronomist Pat Palmer of New Zealand; and Alois Haas emeritus Prof. PhD, nuclear chemistry. (LINK) (See attachment one for full text of letter and complete list of signatories at end of this report.)
Dutch Geologist Dr. Chris Schoneveld, a retired exploration geophysicist, has become an outspoken skeptic regarding the human influence on climate over the past four years. "If global warming is just a consequence of natural climatic fluctuations similar to well-documented, geologically caused climate changes, wouldn't we rather adapt to a warming world than to spend trillions of dollars on a futile exercise to contain carbon dioxide emissions?" Schoneveld wrote in the October 1, 2007 International Herald Tribune. "As long as the causes of the many climate changes throughout the Earth's history are not well understood, one cannot unequivocally separate natural causes from possibly man-made ones. The so-called scientific consensus discourages healthy debate between believers in global warming and skeptics. There has never been a UN-organized conference on climate change where skeptics were invited for the sake of balance to present their case," he explained. (LINK) Schoneveld also critiqued the UN IPCC process on February 3, 2007. "Who are the geologists that the IPCC is relying on? Is the IPCC at all concerned about the frequency and recurrence of ice ages? Who are the astronomers that advise the IPCC on other cause of possible climate change (sun spots or earth's elliptical orbit, tilt and wobble of its axis) so as to ascertain that we are not just experiencing a normal trend related to interglacial warming or variation in solar radiation?" he asked. (LINK)
Atmospheric scientist Dr. Hendrik Tennekes, a scientific pioneer in the development of numerical weather prediction and former director of research at The Netherlands' Royal National Meteorological Institute, and an internationally recognized expert in atmospheric boundary layer processes, took climate modelers to task for their projections of future planetary doom in a February 28, 2007 post on Climate Science. "I am of the opinion that most scientists engaged in the design, development, and tuning of climate models are in fact software engineers. They are unlicensed, hence unqualified to sell their products to society. In all regular engineering professions, there exists a licensing authority. If such an authority existed in climate research, I contend, the vast majority of climate modelers would vainly attempt certification. Also, they would be unable to obtain insurance against professional liability," Tennekes said. (LINK) Tennekes also unleashed on the promoters of climate fears in a January 31, 2007 article. "I worry about the arrogance of scientists who claim they can help solve the climate problem, provided their research receives massive increases in funding", he wrote. "I am angry about the Climate Doomsday hype that politicians and scientists engage in. I am angry at Al Gore, I am angry at the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists for resetting its Doomsday clock, I am angry at Lord Martin Rees for using the full weight of the Royal Society in support of the Doomsday hype, I am angry at Paul Crutzen for his speculations about yet another technological fix, I am angry at the staff of IPCC for their preoccupation with carbon dioxide emissions, and I am angry at Jim Hansen for his efforts to sell a Greenland Ice Sheet Meltdown Catastrophe," he explained. (LINK) Tennekes has also blasted Gore and the UN in the Dutch De Volskrant newspaper on March 28, 2007. "I find the Doomsday picture Al Gore is painting - a six-meter sea level rise, fifteen times the IPCC number - entirely without merit," Tennekes wrote. "I protest vigorously the idea that the climate reacts like a home heating system to a changed setting of the thermostat: just turn the dial, and the desired temperature will soon be reached. We cannot run the climate as we wish," Tennekes said. "Whatever the IPCC staff thinks, it is not at all inconceivable that decreasing solar activity will lead to some cooling ten years from now," he concluded. (LINK)
Chemical engineer Thomas Ring, who has a degree from Case Western Reserve University, declared "we should not fear global warming" in 2007. "Warming of the Earth has never been catastrophic; in fact, humankind has always fared better in warmer than cooler periods, with less hardship and illness and improved agriculture," Ring wrote on November 28, 2007. Ring called for "solid, objective and unbiased research, rather than fear-mongering based on a nonscientific ‘consensus.'" "What's responsible for prior periods of warmth in 600 BC, 1000 and 1912 to 1943, all when there was no or little man-made CO2? It's most likely the sun, whose radiation varies to the fourth power of its temperature," he wrote. "Atmospheric water vapor is, however, 0.9 percent, 25 times as much as CO2. Water vapor is a "radiator" that is three times more powerful than CO2, but its larger effect has been ignored in the global warming debate," he concluded. (LINK)
Harvard-educated Physicist Arthur E. Lemay, a renowned computer systems specialist, declared his climate skepticism in 2007. "Recent studies show that there are far better explanations for the earth's warming before 1998. The variations in the sun's radiant energy and production of cosmic rays are far more persuasive than the greenhouse gas theory," Lemay wrote on December 5, 2007 in the Jakarta Post during the UN Climate Conference in Bali. "The solar theory explains it, the greenhouse gas theory does not. In science, when observations do not support a theory, it is the theory which needs to be discarded. So, all this blather about reducing CO2, the Kyoto Protocol and the Bali conference are all a waste of money," Lemay explained. "Of course, the global warming alarmists cannot tolerate the solar theory because we cannot do anything about it, and no government wants to spend billions of dollars for nothing," he wrote. "It's time for Indonesia and other developing countries to demand an explanation as to why CO2 reduction is being mandated when it is not the problem," he concluded. (LINK) & (LINK)
Geophysicist Dr. Claude Allegre, a top Geophysicist and French Socialist who has authored more than 100 scientific articles, written 11 books, and received numerous scientific awards including the Goldschmidt Medal from the Geochemical Society of the United States, converted from climate alarmist to skeptic in 2006. Allegre, who was one of the first scientists to sound global warming fears 20 years ago, now says the cause of climate change is "unknown" and accused the "prophets of doom of global warming" of being motivated by money, noting that "the ecology of helpless protesting has become a very lucrative business for some people!" "Glaciers' chronicles or historical archives point to the fact that climate is a capricious phenomena. This fact is confirmed by mathematical meteorological theories. So, let us be cautious," Allegre explained in a September 21, 2006 article in the French newspaper L'EXPRESS. The National Post in Canada also profiled Allegre on March 2, 2007, noting, "Allegre has the highest environmental credentials. The author of early environmental books, he fought successful battles to protect the ozone layer from CFCs and public health from lead pollution." Allegre now calls fears of a climate disaster "simplistic and obscuring the true dangers" and mocks "the greenhouse-gas fanatics whose proclamations consist in denouncing man's role on the climate without doing anything about it except organizing conferences and preparing protocols that become dead letters." Allegre, a member of both the French and U.S. Academy of Sciences, had previously expressed concern about man-made global warming. "By burning fossil fuels, man enhanced the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which has raised the global mean temperature by half a degree in the last century," Allegre wrote 20 years ago. In addition, Allegre was one of 1500 scientists who signed a November 18, 1992 letter titled "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity" in which the scientists warned that global warming's "potential risks are very great." Allegre mocked former Vice President Al Gore's Nobel Prize in 2007, calling it "a political gimmick." Allegre said on October 14, 2007, "The amount of nonsense in Al Gore's film! It's all politics; it's designed to intervene in American politics. It's scandalous." (LINK)
Astrophysicist Dr. Howard Greyber, a Fellow Royal Astronomical Society and member of the International Astronomical Union, called warming fears "unwarranted hysteria" and chastised a newspaper columnist's views on global warming. "When [columnist] Thomas Friedman touts carbon dioxide as the cause of global warming in his column, I respond as a physicist that he cannot comprehend that it is still not proven that carbon dioxide emissions actually are causing global warming. Correlation does not prove Causation," Greyber wrote on September 20, 2007 in the International Herald Tribune. "The Earth's climate changes all the time. Did carbon dioxide emissions cause the Medieval Warm Period, when Vikings raised crops on Greenland's coast? What caused the cold climate from 1700 to 1850? In 1975, articles were published predicting we were entering a New Ice Age. Reputable scientists oppose this unwarranted alarmist hysteria," he noted. "Understanding climate change is an extremely difficult scientific problem. Giant computers generating climate models cannot be trusted so far. As any computer person knows, garbage in means garbage out. If research suggests subtle variations in our Sun's radiation reaching Earth are causing global climate change, what would Friedman recommend?" Greyber concluded. (LINK)
Astrophysicist Dr. Nir Shaviv, one of Israel's top, young, award-winning scientists of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, recanted his belief that man-made emissions were driving climate change. "Like many others, I was personally sure that CO2 is the bad culprit in the story of global warming. But after carefully digging into the evidence, I realized that things are far more complicated than the story sold to us by many climate scientists or the stories regurgitated by the media. In fact, there is much more than meets the eye," Shaviv said in a February 2, 2007 Canadian National Post article. According to Shaviv, the CO2 temperature link is only "incriminating circumstantial evidence." "Solar activity can explain a large part of the 20th-century global warming" and "it is unlikely that [the solar climate link] does not exist," Shaviv noted, pointing to the impact cosmic- rays have on the atmosphere. According to the National Post, Shaviv believes that even a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere by 2100 "will not dramatically increase the global temperature." "Even if we halved the CO2 output, and the CO2 increase by 2100 would be, say, a 50% increase relative to today instead of a doubled amount, the expected reduction in the rise of global temperature would be less than 0.5C. This is not significant," Shaviv explained. Shaviv also wrote on August 18, 2006 that a colleague of his believed that "CO2 should have a large effect on climate" so "he set out to reconstruct the phanerozoic temperature. He wanted to find the CO2 signature in the data, but since there was none, he slowly had to change his views." Shaviv believes there will be more scientists converting to man-made global warming skepticism as they discover the dearth of evidence. "I think this is common to many of the scientists who think like us (that is, that CO2 is a secondary climate driver). Each one of us was working in his or her own niche. While working there, each one of us realized that things just don't add up to support the AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) picture. So many had to change their views," he wrote.
Research physicist Dr. John W. Brosnahan develops remote-sensing instruments for atmospheric science for such clients as NOAA and NASA and has published numerous peer-reviewed research, as well as developed imaging Doppler interferometry for sensing winds, waves, and structure in the atmosphere. "Of course I believe in global warming, and in global cooling -- all part of the natural climate changes that the Earth has experienced for billions of years, caused primarily by the cyclical variations in solar output," Brosnahan wrote to EPW on December 10, 2007. "I have not seen any sort of definitive, scientific link to man-made carbon dioxide as the root cause of the current global warming, only incomplete computer models that suggest that this might be the case," Brosnahan explained. "Even though these computer climate models do not properly handle a number of important factors, including the role of precipitation as a temperature regulator, they are being (mis-)used to force a political agenda upon the U.S. While there are any number of reasons to reduce carbon dioxide generation, to base any major fiscal policy on the role of carbon dioxide in climate change would be inappropriate and imprudent at best and potentially disastrous economic folly at the worst," he concluded.
Mathematician & Engineer Dr. David Evans, who did carbon accounting for the Australian Government and is head of the group "Science Speak," recently detailed his conversion to a skeptic. "I devoted six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian government to estimate carbon emissions from land use change and forestry. When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty conclusive, but since then new evidence has weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause. I am now skeptical," Evans wrote in an April 30, 2007 blog. "But after 2000 the evidence for carbon emissions gradually got weaker -- better temperature data for the last century, more detailed ice core data, then laboratory evidence that cosmic rays precipitate low clouds," Evans wrote. "As Lord Keynes famously said, ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?'" he added. Evans noted how he benefited from climate fears as a scientist. "And the political realm in turn fed money back into the scientific community. By the late 1990s, lots of jobs depended on the idea that carbon emissions caused global warming. Many of them were bureaucratic, but there were a lot of science jobs created too. I was on that gravy train, making a high wage in a science job that would not have existed if we didn't believe carbon emissions caused global warming. And so were lots of people around me; and there were international conferences full of such people. And we had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet! But starting in about 2000, the last three of the four pieces of evidence outlined above fell away or reversed," Evans wrote. "The pre-2000 ice core data was the central evidence for believing that atmospheric carbon caused temperature increases. The new ice core data shows that past warmings were not initially caused by rises in atmospheric carbon, and says nothing about the strength of any amplification. This piece of evidence casts reasonable doubt that atmospheric carbon had any role in past warmings, while still allowing the possibility that it had a supporting role," he added. "Unfortunately politics and science have become even more entangled. The science of global warming has become a partisan political issue, so positions become more entrenched. Politicians and the public prefer simple and less-nuanced messages. At the moment the political climate strongly supports carbon emissions as the cause of global warming, to the point of sometimes rubbishing or silencing critics," he concluded. (Evans bio link )
Yury Zaitsev, an analyst with Russia's Institute of Space Studies, rejected man-made global warming fears in 2007. "Paleoclimate research shows that the chillier periods of the Earth's history have always given way to warmer times, and vice versa. But it is not quite clear what causes this change," Zaitsev wrote on September 28, 2007 in the Russian publication RIA Novosti. "Yury Leonov, director of the Institute of Geology at the Russian Academy of Sciences, thinks that the human impact on nature is so small that it can be dismissed as a statistical mistake," Zaitsev explained. "Until quite recently, experts primarily attributed global warming to greenhouse gas emissions, with carbon dioxide singled out as the chief culprit. But it transpires that water vapor is just as bad," he wrote. "Sun-related phenomena have fairly regular and predictable consequences on the Earth. Of course, they exert influence on humans and other species and, to some extent, on the environment, altering atmospheric pressure and temperature. But they are not likely to contribute much to climate change. This is a global process and is the result of global causes. For the time being, we are far from understanding them fully," he added. (LINK)
Climate researcher Dr. Tad Murty, former Senior Research Scientist for Fisheries and Oceans in Canada and former director of Australia's National Tidal Facility and professor of earth sciences, Flinders University, reversed himself from believer in man-made climate change to a skeptic. "I started with a firm belief about global warming, until I started working on it myself," Murty explained on August 17, 2006. "I switched to the other side in the early 1990s when Fisheries and Oceans Canada asked me to prepare a position paper and I started to look into the problem seriously," Murty explained. Murty was one of the 60 scientists who wrote an April 6, 2006 letter urging withdrawal of Kyoto to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper which stated in part, "If, back in the mid-1990s, we knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would almost certainly not exist, because we would have concluded it was not necessary."
French climatologist Dr. Marcel Leroux, former professor at University of Jean Moulin and former director of the Laboratory of Climatology, Risks, and Environment (CNRS) in Lyon, is a climate skeptic. Leroux wrote a 2005 book titled Global Warming - Myth or Reality? - The Erring Ways of Climatology. "Hardly a week goes by without some new scoop ... filling our screens and the pages of our newspapers," Leroux wrote in his book. The media promotes the view that "global warming caused by the greenhouse effect is our fault, just like everything else, and the message/slogan/misinformation becomes even more simplistic, ever cruder! It could not be simpler: if the rain falls or draught strikes; if the wind blows a gale or there is none at all; whether it's heat or hard frost; it's all because of the greenhouse effect, and we are to blame. An easy argument, but stupid!" he explained. "The Fourth Report of the IPCC might just as well decree the suppression of all climatology textbooks, and replace them in our schools with press communiqués. ... Day after day, the same mantra - that ‘the Earth is warming up' - is churned out in all its forms. As ‘the ice melts' and ‘sea level rises,' the Apocalypse looms ever nearer! Without realizing it, or perhaps without wishing to, the average citizen in bamboozled, lobotomized, lulled into mindless acceptance. ... Non-believers in the greenhouse scenario are in the position of those long ago who doubted the existence of God ... fortunately for them, the Inquisition is no longer with us!" he wrote. "The possible causes, then, of climate change are: well-established orbital parameters on the paleoclimatic scale, ... solar activity, ...; volcanism ...; and far at the rear, the greenhouse effect, and in particular that caused by water vapor, the extent of its influence being unknown. These factors are working together all the time, and it seems difficult to unravel the relative importance of their respective influences upon climatic evolution. Equally, it is tendentious to highlight the anthropogenic factor, which is, clearly, the least credible among all those previously mentioned," he added.
Climate scientist Dr. Chris de Freitas of the University of Auckland, N.Z., also converted from a believer in man-made global warming to a skeptic. "At first I accepted that increases in human-caused additions of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere would trigger changes in water vapor, etc. and lead to dangerous ‘global warming,' but with time and with the results of research, I formed the view that, although it makes for a good story, it is unlikely that the man-made changes are drivers of significant climate variation," de Freitas wrote on August 17, 2006. "I accept there may be small changes. But I see the risk of anything serious to be minute," he added. "One could reasonably argue that lack of evidence is not a good reason for complacency. But I believe the billions of dollars committed to GW research and lobbying for GW and for Kyoto treaties etc could be better spent on uncontroversial and very real environmental problems (such as air pollution, poor sanitation, provision of clean water and improved health services) that we know affect tens of millions of people," de Freitas concluded. De Freitas was one of the 60 scientists who wrote an April 6, 2006 letter urging withdrawal of Kyoto to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper which stated in part, "Significant [scientific] advances have been made since the [Kyoto] protocol was created, many of which are taking us away from a concern about increasing greenhouse gases."
Atmospheric scientist Dr. Gerhard Kramm of the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks expressed climate skepticism in 2007. "The IPCC would never be awarded by the Nobel Prize in Physics because most of the statements of the IPCC can be assessed as physical misunderstanding and physical misinterpretations," Kramm wrote in a letter to the Associated Press on October 21, 2007. "There is no scientific certainty, even though the Associated Press distributes this message always every day," Kramm wrote in his letter, criticizing the news outlet. "The change in the radiative forcing components since the beginning of the industrial era is so small (2 W/m^2, according to the IPCC 2007) that we have no pyrgeometers (radiometers to measure the infrared radiometer emitted by the earth and the atmosphere) which are able to provide any empirical evidence of such a small change because their degrees of accuracy are too less," he wrote. "By far, most of [the IPCC] members can be considered, indeed, as members of a Church of Global Warming. They are not qualified enough to understand the physics behind the greenhouse effect and to prove the accuracy of global climate models (see, for instance, the poor publication record of Dr. [RK] Pachauri, the current Chairman of the IPCC). However, in science it would be highly awkward to vote which results are correct and which are wrong," he added. "A decrease of the anthropogenic CO2 emission to the values below of those of 1990 would not decrease the atmospheric CO2 concentration. This concentration would increase further, however the increase would be lowering. As illustrated in Slide 38, it might be that the atmospheric CO2 concentration tends to an equilibrium concentration of somewhat higher than 500 ppmv. Here, equilibrium means that the increase of natural and anthropogenic CO2 emission is equaled by the uptake of CO2 by vegetation and ocean," he concluded. (LINK)
Geologist Georgia D. Brown, an instructor of Geology & Oceanography at College of Lake County in Illinois, rejected climate fears and supported the notion of a coming global cool down. "I talk to my students about this topic every semester, not just when we are covering glacial geology, but at different points throughout the term. I want them to know that they shouldn't take every alarmist claim at face value," Brown wrote on December 13, 2006. "Fear is a means of controlling a population, and since the cold war has ended, the government needed new fuel for its control fire," Brown wrote. (LINK)
Physicist Dr. Laurence I. Gould, chair of the Physics Department at the University of Hartford, former chairman of the New England Section of the American Physical Society, and author of numerous peer-reviewed research, challenged climate fears in 2007. "There is (I have found) a huge problem in getting to learn of both sides of the AGW debate. But this ‘debate' needs to be aired, regardless of what is being presented to scientists and to the public as the ‘truth' about AGW," Gould wrote in a September 20, 2007 editorial titled "Global Warming from a Critical Perspective." "Although I have seen many articles arguing for the reality and danger of anthropogenic greenhouse warming (AGW), I have rarely seen one that presents scientific arguments against the AGW claims," Gould wrote. "The implication [by many in the media] seems to be that anyone who has a contrary argument is not ‘respectable' - yet there are many leading climatologists (such as Richard Lindzen of MIT) who have very good arguments disagreeing," Gould wrote. (LINK) & (LINK)
Russian scientist Alexander G. Egorov, a researcher with the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute in Saint Petersburg, called global warming a temporary inconvenience tied to the natural fluctuation of the sun. According to an October 18, 2007 translated article in Russian Science News, Egorov believes warming is "not more than a natural variation." The article explained that Egorov believes "long-term temperature rising to be just an episode of global history, a consequence of natural fluctuations, which depend on changes in solar activity and surface air pressure. The scientist has analyzed data of monthly average values of surface air pressure between November and April 1923-2005 in cellular mesh points, located northwards from 40th parallel of the northern hemisphere." The article concluded, "If pressure over Atlantic drops, then speed of warm water transfer grows, like in 1920-1940s, when warming was detected in the Arctic. During the 22nd solar cycle, which started in 1986, the pressure over vast territories of the northern hemisphere, including Canada, Greenland, the Arctic Ocean, Eastern Europe, Eastern and Western Siberia, dropped significantly. This stage of natural fluctuations concurs with current climate state, which is usually called the global warming. However, in the next solar cycle the pressure over the Northern Atlantic may change, causing the end of global warming." (LINK)
One of the "Fathers of Meteorology," Dr. Reid Bryson, the founding chairman of the Department of Meteorology at University of Wisconsin (now the Department of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, was pivotal in promoting the coming ice age scare of the 1970s (See Time Magazine's 1974 article "Another Ice Age" citing Bryson: & see Newsweek's 1975 article "The Cooling World" citing Bryson) has now converted into a leading global warming skeptic. On February 8, 2007 Bryson dismissed what he terms "sky is falling" man-made global warming fears. Bryson was on the United Nations Global 500 Roll of Honor and was identified by the British Institute of Geographers as the most frequently cited climatologist in the world. "Before there were enough people to make any difference at all, two million years ago, nobody was changing the climate, yet the climate was changing, okay?" Bryson told the May 2007 issue of Energy Cooperative News. "All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it's absurd. Of course it's going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we're coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we're putting more carbon dioxide into the air," Bryson said. "You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide," he added. "We cannot say what part of that warming was due to mankind's addition of ‘greenhouse gases' until we consider the other possible factors, such as aerosols. The aerosol content of the atmosphere was measured during the past century, but to my knowledge this data was never used. We can say that the question of anthropogenic modification of the climate is an important question -- too important to ignore. However, it has now become a media free-for-all and a political issue more than a scientific problem," Bryson explained in 2005.
UN IPCC reviewer, global warming author, and economist Dr. Hans H.J. Labohm, a lecturer at the Netherlands Defense Academy, started out as a man-made global warming believer but he later switched his view after conducting climate research. Labohm wrote on August 19, 2006, "I started as an anthropogenic global warming believer, then I read the [UN's IPCC] Summary for Policymakers and the research of prominent skeptics." "After that, I changed my mind," Labohm explained. Labohm co-authored the 2004 book Man-Made Global Warming: Unraveling a Dogma with Eindhoven University of Technology emeritus professor of chemical engineer Dick Thoenes who was the former chairman of the Royal Netherlands Chemical Society. Labohm was one of the 60 scientists who wrote an April 6, 2006 letter urging withdrawal of Kyoto to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper which stated in part, "‘Climate change is real' is a meaningless phrase used repeatedly by activists to convince the public that a climate catastrophe is looming and humanity is the cause. Neither of these fears is justified. Global climate changes all the time due to natural causes and the human impact still remains impossible to distinguish from this natural ‘noise.'"
Paleoclimatologist Tim Patterson, professor in the department of Earth Sciences at Carleton University in Ottawa converted from believer in CO2's driving the climate change to a skeptic. "I taught my students that CO2 was the prime driver of climate change," Patterson wrote on April 30, 2007. Patterson said his "conversion" happened following his research on "the nature of paleo-commercial fish populations in the NE Pacific." "[My conversion from believer to climate skeptic] came about approximately 5-6 years ago when results began to come in from a major NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) Strategic Project Grant where I was PI (principle investigator)," Patterson explained. "Over the course of about a year, I switched allegiances," he wrote. "As the proxy results began to come in, we were astounded to find that paleoclimatic and paleoproductivity records were full of cycles that corresponded to various sun-spot cycles. About that time, [geochemist] Jan Veizer and others began to publish reasonable hypotheses as to how solar signals could be amplified and control climate," Patterson noted. Patterson says his conversion "probably cost me a lot of grant money. However, as a scientist I go where the science takes me and not where activists want me to go." Patterson now asserts that more and more scientists are converting to climate skeptics. "When I go to a scientific meeting, there's lots of opinion out there, there's lots of discussion [about climate change]. I was at the Geological Society of America meeting in Philadelphia in the fall and I would say that people with my opinion were probably in the majority," Patterson told the Winnipeg Sun on February 13, 2007. Patterson, who believes the sun is responsible for the recent warming of the Earth, ridiculed the environmentalists and the media for not reporting the truth. "But if you listen to [Canadian environmental activist David] Suzuki and the media, it's like a tiger chasing its tail. They try to outdo each other and all the while proclaiming that the debate is over but it isn't -- come out to a scientific meeting sometime," Patterson said. In a separate interview on April 26, 2007 with a Canadian newspaper, Patterson explained that the scientific proof favors skeptics. "I think the proof in the pudding, based on what [media and governments] are saying, [is] we're about three quarters of the way [to disaster] with the doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere," he said. "The world should be heating up like crazy by now, and it's not. The temperatures match very closely with the solar cycles." (LINK)
Physicist Dr. Zbigniew Jaworowski, Chairman of the Central Laboratory for the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Radiological Protection in Warsaw, took a scientific journey from a believer of man-made climate change in the form of global cooling in the 1970s all the way to converting to a skeptic of current predictions of catastrophic man-made global warming. "At the beginning of the 1970s I believed in man-made climate cooling, and therefore I started a study on the effects of industrial pollution on the global atmosphere, using glaciers as a history book on this pollution," Dr. Jaworowski, wrote on August 17, 2006. "With the advent of man-made warming political correctness in the beginning of 1980s, I already had a lot of experience with polar and high altitude ice, and I have serious problems in accepting the reliability of ice core CO2 studies," Jaworowski added. Jaworowski, who has published many papers on climate with a focus on CO2 measurements in ice cores, also dismissed the UN IPCC summary and questioned what the actual level of CO2 was in the atmosphere in a March 16, 2007 report in EIR Science entitled "CO2: The Greatest Scientific Scandal of Our Time." "We thus find ourselves in the situation that the entire theory of man-made global warming-with its repercussions in science, and its important consequences for politics and the global economy-is based on ice core studies that provided a false picture of the atmospheric CO2 levels," Jaworowski wrote. "For the past three decades, these well-known direct CO2 measurements, recently compiled and analyzed by Ernst-Georg Beck (Beck 2006a, Beck 2006b, Beck 2007), were completely ignored by climatologists-and not because they were wrong. Indeed, these measurements were made by several Nobel Prize winners, using the techniques that are standard textbook procedures in chemistry, biochemistry, botany, hygiene, medicine, nutrition, and ecology. The only reason for rejection was that these measurements did not fit the hypothesis of anthropogenic climatic warming. I regard this as perhaps the greatest scientific scandal of our time," Jaworowski wrote. "The hypothesis, in vogue in the 1970s, stating that emissions of industrial dust will soon induce the new Ice Age, seems now to be a conceited anthropocentric exaggeration, bringing into discredit the science of that time. The same fate awaits the present," he added. Jaworowski believes that cosmic rays and solar activity are major drivers of the Earth's climate. Jaworowski was one of the 60 scientists who wrote an April 6, 2006 letter urging withdrawal of Kyoto to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper which stated in part, "It may be many years yet before we properly understand the Earth's climate system. Nevertheless, significant advances have been made since the protocol was created, many of which are taking us away from a concern about increasing greenhouse gases."
A group of German scientists of "several scientific disciplines" formed a new group in 2007 to declare themselves climate change skeptics. The group of scientists issued a proclamation on September 15, 2007 titled "The Climate Manifest of Heiligenroth." The group, which included prominent scientist Ernst-George Beck who authored a groundbreaking February 2007 paper, entitled "180 Years of Atmospheric C02 Analysis by Chemical Methods," (LINK) publicly issued six basic points of skepticism about man-made global warming. They stated that their "motivation was to initiate processes against daily campaigns of media and politics concerning climate." Their six points are: 1) "There is not proven influence on climate by man made emission of CO2; 2) Scenarios on future climate change derived from computer models are speculative and contradicted by climate history; 3) There has been climate change in all times of Earth history with alternating cold and warm phases; 4) The trace gas CO2 dos not pollute the atmosphere, CO2 is an essential resource for plant growth and therefore a precondition for life on Earth; 5) We are committing ourselves to an effective preservation of our environment and support arrangements to prevent unnecessary stress on eco systems; and 6) We strongly warn against taking action using imminent climate catastrophe as a vehicle which will not be beneficial for our environment and will cause economic damage." The declaration was signed by the following: Dr. Herbert Backhaus; Ernst-Georg Beck; Dieter Ber; Paul Bossert; Brigitte Bossert; Helgo Bran; Gunter Ederer; Werner Eisenkopf; Edgar Gartner; Wilfried Heck; Heinz Hofman; Rainer Hoffman; Ferdinand Furst zu Hohenlohe-Bartenstein; Dieter Kramer; Nikolaus Lentz; Dr. Rainer Six; Uwe Tempel; and Heinze Thieme. (LINK)
Paleoclimatologist Dr. Ian D. Clark, professor of the Department of Earth Sciences at University of Ottawa, who has been involved with the International Atomic Energy Agency and co-authored the book Environmental Isotopes in Hydrogeology, which won the Choice Magazine "Outstanding Textbook" award in 1998, reversed his views on man-made climate change after further examining the evidence. "I used to agree with these dramatic warnings of climate disaster. I taught my students that most of the increase in temperature of the past century was due to human contribution of CO2. The association seemed so clear and simple. Increases of greenhouse gases were driving us towards a climate catastrophe," Clark said in a 2005 documentary Climate Catastrophe Cancelled: What You're Not Being Told About the Science of Climate Change. "However, a few years ago, I decided to look more closely at the science and it astonished me. In fact there is no evidence of humans being the cause. There is, however, overwhelming evidence of natural causes such as changes in the output of the sun. This has completely reversed my views on the Kyoto protocol," Clark explained. "Actually, many other leading climate researchers also have serious concerns about the science underlying the [Kyoto] Protocol," he added.
Prominent scientist Professor Dr. Nils-Axel Morner, a leading world authority on sea levels and coastal erosion who headed the Department of Paleogeophysics & Geodynamics at Stockholm University, declared in 2007 "the rapid rise in sea levels predicted by computer models simply cannot happen." Morner called a September 23, 2007 AP article predicting dire sea level rise "propaganda." "The AP article must be regarded as an untenable horror scenario not based in observational facts," Morner wrote to EPW. "Sea level will not rise by 1 m in 100 years. This is not even possible. Storm surges are in no way intensified at a sea level rise. Sea level was not at all rising 'a third of a meter in the last century': only some 10 cm from 1850 to 1940," he wrote. Morner previously noted on August 6, 2007, "When we were coming out of the last ice age, huge ice sheets were melting rapidly and the sea level rose at an average of one meter per century. If the Greenland ice sheet stated to melt at the same rate - which is unlikely - sea level would rise by less than 100 mm - 4 inches per century." Morner, who was president of the INQUA Commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution from 1999 to 2003, has published a new booklet entitled "The Greatest Lie Ever Told," to refute claims of catastrophic sea level rise. (LINK) & (LINK)
Environmental geochemist Dr. Jan Veizer, professor emeritus of University of Ottawa, converted from believer to skeptic after conducting scientific studies of climate history. "I simply accepted the [global warming] theory as given," Veizer wrote on April 30, 2007 about predictions that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere was leading to a climate catastrophe. "The final conversion came when I realized that the solar/cosmic ray connection gave far more consistent picture with climate, over many time scales, than did the CO2 scenario," Veizer wrote. "It was the results of my work on past records, on geological time scales, that led me to realize the discrepancies with empirical observations. Trying to understand the background issues of modeling led to realization of the assumptions and uncertainties involved," Veizer explained. "The past record strongly favors the solar/cosmic alternative as the principal climate driver," he added. Veizer acknowledged the Earth has been warming and he believes in the scientific value of climate modeling. "The major point where I diverge from the IPCC scenario is my belief that it underestimates the role of natural variability by proclaiming CO2 to be the only reasonable source of additional energy in the planetary balance. Such additional energy is needed to drive the climate. The point is that most of the temperature, in both nature and models, arises from the greenhouse of water vapor (model language ‘positive water vapor feedback')," Veizer wrote. "Thus to get more temperature, more water vapor is needed. This is achieved by speeding up the water cycle by inputting more energy into the system," he continued. "Note that it is not CO2 that is in the models but its presumed energy equivalent (model language ‘prescribed CO2'). Yet, the models (and climate) would generate a more or less similar outcome regardless where this additional energy is coming from. This is why the solar/cosmic connection is so strongly opposed, because it can influence the global energy budget which, in turn, diminishes the need for an energy input from the CO2 greenhouse," he wrote.
German scientist Ernst-Georg Beck, a biologist, authored a February 2007 paper entitled 180 Years of Atmospheric C02 Analysis by Chemical Methods that found levels of atmospheric CO2 levels were not measured correctly possibly due to the fact that they measurements did not fit with hypothesis of man-made global warming. The abstract to the paper published in Energy and Environment reads in part, ""More than 90,000 accurate chemical analyses of CO2 in air since 1812 are summarized. The historic chemical data reveal that changes in CO2 track changes in temperature, and therefore climate in contrast to the simple, monotonically increasing CO2 trend depicted in the post-1990 literature on climate-change. Since 1812, the CO2 concentration in northern hemispheric air has fluctuated exhibiting three high level maxima around 1825, 1857 and 1942 the latter showing more than 400 ppm." The paper concluded: "Most authors and sources have summarized the historical CO2 determinations by chemical methods incorrectly and promulgated the unjustifiable view that historical methods of analysis were unreliable and produced poor quality results." (LINK)
Internationally known forecasting pioneer Scott Armstrong of the Wharton School at the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania and his colleague Kesten Green of Monash University in A | | |
