Now that's what I'm talking about. This is the way a global warming
debate post should be. Don posts the actual information that answers
Seth's questions. He even manages to refrain from name calling and
ridicule.
Earlier I stated that I thought the only global warming posts that would
be relevant to this forum were astronomy related posts. I've changed my
mind on this. I now think, since astronomy is a science, it is also
relevant for postings to cover things like good science vs. bad science,
the effect politics has had on science, and when you've got one group of
scientists with one opinion and another group with another opinion, how
can we decide what to believe. My conclusions so far on global warming
are that it is so rife with politics and anterior motives that unless we
ourselves can do the actual research, we have no way to tell whose side
is correct from a scientific perspective. We can only go by whose
argument is the most convincing and this will usually fall along the
same lines as our politics or other belief systems.
Don J. Colton Wrote:
I am no fan of Exxon-Mobil but they contribute to both sides of the
political spectrum and BP is big environmental supporter being the
largest producer of wind power electric generation in the U. S. I think
both sides of the argument are getting major funding to support their
views.
"Please name them. Drs. Baliunus & Soon don't count; they are discussed
in detail below. Please provide better examples than them."
Mathematician & engineer Dr. David Evans as noted below:
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 1990's, 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!
Once Believers, Now Skeptics:
Geophysicist Dr. Claude Allegre, a top geophysicist and French Socialist
who has authored more than 100 scientific articles and 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" 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 manmade 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."
Geologist Bruno Wiskel of the University of Alberta recently reversed
his view of man-made climate change and instead became a global warming
skeptic. Wiskel was once such a big believer in man-made global warming
that he set out to build a "Kyoto house" in honor of the UN sanctioned
Kyoto Protocol which was signed in 1997. Wiskel wanted to prove that
the Kyoto Protocol's goals were achievable by people making small
changes in their lives. But after further examining the science behind
Kyoto, Wiskel reversed his scientific views completely and became such a
strong skeptic, that he recently wrote a book titled "The Emperor's New
Climate: Debunking the Myth of Global Warming." A November 15, 2006
Edmonton Sun article explains Wiskel's conversion while building his
"Kyoto house": "Instead, he said he realized global warming theory was
full of holes and 'red flags,' and became convinced that humans are not
responsible for rising temperatures." Wiskel now says "the truth has to
start somewhere." Noting that the Earth has been warming for 18,000
years, Wiskel told the Canadian newspaper, "If this happened once and we
were the cause of it, that would be cause for concern. But glaciers have
been coming and going for billions of years." Wiskel also said that
global warming has gone "from a science to a religion" and noted that
research money is being funneled into promoting climate alarmism instead
of funding areas he considers more worthy. "If you funnel money into
things that can't be changed, the money is not going into the places
that it is needed," he said.
Astrophysicist Dr. Nir Shaviv, one of Israel's top young award winning
scientists, recanted his belief that manmade 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 February 2, 2007 Canadian National Post
article. According to Shaviv, the C02 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.
Mathematician & engineer Dr. David Evans, who did carbon accounting for
the Australian Government, 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
1990's, 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 )
Climate researcher Dr. Tad Murty, former Senior Research Scientist for
Fisheries and Oceans in Canada, also reversed himself from believer in
man-made climate change to a skeptic. "I stated 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 1990's 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."
Botanist Dr. David Bellamy, a famed UK environmental campaigner, former
lecturer at Durham University and host of a popular UK TV series on
wildlife, recently converted into a skeptic after reviewing the science
and now calls global warming fears "poppycock." According to a May 15,
2005 article in the UK Sunday Times, Bellamy said "global warming is
largely a natural phenomenon. The world is wasting stupendous amounts
of money on trying to fix something that can't be fixed." "The
climate-change people have no proof for their claims. They have computer
models which do not prove anything," Bellamy added. Bellamy's conversion
on global warming did not come without a sacrifice as several
environmental groups have ended their association with him because of
his views on climate change. The severing of relations came despite
Bellamy's long activism for green campaigns. The UK Times reported
Bellamy "won respect from hardline environmentalists with his campaigns
to save Britain's peat bogs and other endangered habitats. In Tasmania
he was arrested when he tried to prevent loggers cutting down a
rainforest."
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."
Meteorologist 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 1970's ( 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. In
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.
Global warming author and economist Hans H.J. Labohm 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 a 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," Labohn explained. Labohn
co-authored the 2004 book "Man-Made Global Warming: Unraveling a Dogma,"
with 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, of Carlton University in Ottawa
converted from believer in C02 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 were 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 warm up 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."
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
1970's 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 C02 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, seem 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."
Paleoclimatologist Dr. Ian D. Clark, professor of the Department of
Earth Sciences at University of Ottawa, 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 C02. 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.
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 C02 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 acknowledgez 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.
