Posted on 02/03/2007 9:05:42 PM PST by A. Pole
OTTAWA -- For the majority of scientists, the debate about climate change -- if it ever really existed -- has long been over.
Friday's release of the much anticipated political summary by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world's paramount scientific authority on global warming, appeared to bring further closure. The group is now more than 90 per cent certain that fossil fuels are contributing heavily to global warming. This figure goes beyond the last IPCC report, published in 2001, which referred to "new and stronger evidence" of human liability.
"There's been a cautious weighing of the evidence going back 20 years now," said Richard Peltier, a University of Toronto physicist and lead author of a chapter on paleoclimate trends.
Some skeptics in politics and the media - many of whom continue to place figurative quotation marks around the term global warming - poured cold water on the latest summary even before its release. They criticized the 12-page summary as a political document written by governments, not scientists.
It's all white noise to nearly all experts who specialize in climate change. They consider the debate finished. The overwhelming evidence points to rising temperatures, they say, and the major role of human activities such as fossil fuel burning and deforestation.
Peltier believes proof of human-induced climate change is now "indisputable," with agreement among 90 to 95 per cent of scientists working in the field.
"There's a small number who are still agnostic on the issue," he said. "The media has done an enormous disservice by presenting the evidence (on both sides of the climate-change debate) as equal."
A Fraser Institute report being released Monday is expected to argue that the IPCC summary is a political document that fails to reflect debates among scientists.
"There is no compelling evidence that dangerous or unprecedented changed (in climate) are underway ... the available data allow the hypothesis to be credibly disputed," said a January draft assessment from the Vancouver think tank, leaked on Wednesday to a Canadian climate change website.
IPCC contributors have lauded the full report - to be released this spring - as one of the largest pieces of peer-reviewed scientific research in history. Peltier said several rounds of review took place, involving thousands of scholars worldwide. The data gathered by the group's 140 lead authors was doggedly scrutinized, with every argument levelled by skeptical reviewers catalogued and archived for the public record.
"The whole process attempts to deal head-on with criticisms," Peltier said. "There's no attempt to sideline them."
Some skeptics seem to have softened their stance in light of the IPCC release. A congressional committee heard this week from several American scientists accusing the Bush administration of political interference and censorship in climate change research.
But President George W. Bush called global warming a "serious challenge" during his recent state of the union speech. And Friday, after the release of the climate change report, his energy secretary called the debate over climate change finished, given the evidence supporting humankind's role in warming the planet.
In Ottawa, the revelation of a 2002 letter by then-opposition leader Stephen Harper to Canadian Alliance members questioning the science behind global warming drew fire from opposition parties this week. Harper has promised more vigilant government action in recent days, dispatching Environment Minister John Baird to meet scientists in Paris.
Andrew Weaver, an IPCC report author, and professor at the University of Victoria's School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, argues there was never any debate among major researchers.
"The community has been saying the same thing all along," he said. "The so-called denialist crowd - I'm not going to call them skeptics, because all scientists are skeptics - they would say things like: Oh, the satellite measurements show there's actual cooling."
As recently as 15 years ago, however, a large portion of mainstream science organizations wasn't convinced. The U.S.-based National Academy of Sciences claimed in 1991 that "there was no evidence yet" that climate change was a pressing danger. Surveys of climatologists that same year showed lukewarm support for the concept.
Remaining doubts among most skeptics waned during the 1990s. The same academy told the Bush administration in June 2001 that the IPCC accurately reflected the scientific consensus on greenhouse gas emissions and rising temperatures. In 2005, the heads of 11 national science academies, including the Royal Society of Canada, signed a joint statement affirming human responsibility for global climate change. Ninety Canadian climate experts signed an open letter to now Prime Minister Harper in April 2006, pleading for a national climate change strategy. One month later, the American government's main climate change science program reported "clear evidence of human influences" on greenhouse gas levels, compared to natural causes.
Ok, I'll bite. Why?
is is supposed to it...
Global warming is clearly no more than an incidental concern for the environmental movement, which for the most part refuses to reconsider its opposition to nuclear power and is still content to let India and China take a pass on CO2 limits. When most of the global warming crowd is patently not serious about its own issue, we are entitled to a little skepticism.
BUMP
Get on board people.
The correct term is "Global Climate Change".
That covers it all.
If it's too hot, cold, wet, dry, stable or unstable,
it's Bush's fault.
Outstanding links. Pages have been archived so as not to disappear.
"The public perception of science and scientists as relatively unbiased, and unprejudiced is taking a beating."
I on the other hand think it is GREAT that they are taking a beating in their believability! They will need to start having their methods and statistics reviewed instead of rubber stamped by others feeding from the same trough.
FACTS matter little to followers of the RELIGION of Global Warming...
#####
This is a tenet of the only religion that is routinely taught in public schools. The Religion of Liberalism.
Well. said.
Need more coffee.
Global Warming is the new sponsored religion of socialism.
The solar cycle actually causes it, the socialists want everyone to believe that CO2, methane and man-made emmissions cause it.
The socialist goal in all this is global redistribution of wealth through the Kyoto Treaty, a hoax that the USA, Australia and a few other sane nations have recognized for what it is.
"To think that policy should always be dictated by political bent and not by objective solutions robs us of all facts and reduces us to a set of knee jerk opinions."
Tell that to the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The activities of the Union of Concerned Scientists deserve special mention. That widely supported organization was originally devoted to nuclear disarmament. As the cold war began to end, the group began to actively oppose nuclear power generation.
Their position was unpopular with many physicists. Over the past few years, the organization has turned to the battle against global warming in a particularly hysterical manner.
In 1989 the group began to circulate a petition urging recognition of global warming as potentially the great danger to mankind. Most recipients who did not sign were solicited at least twice more.
The petition was eventually signed by 700 scientists including a great many members of the National Academy of Sciences and Nobel laureates.--> Only about three or four of the signers, however, had any involvement in climatology.,<---
Interestingly, the petition had -> two pages <- , and on the second page there was a call for --> renewed consideration of nuclear power.
When the petition was published in the New York Times, however,--> the second page was omitted.<--
In any event, that document helped solidify the public perception that "all scientists'' agreed with the disaster scenario. Such a disturbing abuse of scientific authority was not unnoticed.
Well it was -10 below when I got up this morning at 5:45am to do farm chores. It has since dropped to -12 below.
I'll bet none of the grant-sucking EnviroWackos have been up or done any manual labor of any kind at that hour in those conditions.
If this is 'Global Warming,' we're all being sold a bill of goods. (We are.)
Looks like Hitler's 10,000 year Reich is shaping up.
Capitalism is the best economic system in the world, but it doesn't solve "tragedy of the commons" problems particularly well, and presents no motivation to solve those problems. Added to that is the issue that if global warming is a solvable problem (or a problem at all), it will take an enforceable international treaty to solve it.
Somewhere, years ago, I read of an approximate 34-year sun cycle. It's like the sun has a pulse, my source (since forgotten) read. It has a point of high output, and a point of low output, and the extremes are about 17 years apart. My thought was well, that's interesting, lets run some numbers from recent history.
I remember the vicious winter of 1978-79. O'Hare was closed for days (at a time? or several times?). There were so many snow days at my school that there was talk of lengthening the school year (they planned for a few snow days, but they were used up quickly. It was plain nasty (if, like me, you abominate winter weather from the get-go and regard every snowflake as a personal affront-- OK, not quite that bad).
OK, I thought, let's say that was a low period in the sun's output. Let's look forward and back 17 years each way and see what we see.
17 years before was 1961, three years before I was born, so I had to ask around. To give people a reference point, I brought up the start of the Kennedy Administration. Almost uniformly, people told me it was a gorgeous year weatherwise, the sun shone brilliantly upon Inauguration Day, etc. etc.
Seventeen years the other way, 1995, I moved to Texas. I was expecting hot, and got it. However, those around me were complaining that it was unusually hot had had been getting noticeably hotter over the past couple of years. That summer, the alternator in my newish car gave up the ghost, and when I had it replaced, I was informed that they'd had a lot of those, in various makes and models, that year and it seemed to be due to the heat. I wouldn't have thought so given the temps to be found in an engine compartment, but deferred to the wisdom of the tech.
So...let's look some more.
34 years before 1978 (our benchmark for cold weather) was 1944. The summer of 1944 was known for unusual weather patterns that disrupted war planning (remember how they nearly delayed D-Day?) and the winter of '44-45 was among the coldest on record. We can thank the War Department of the era for keeping the records, again as part of the warfighting effort. My late, Michigan-born 101st Airborne uncle told me he'd never seen such an inclement season in all his years before or since, growing up on a farm in similar climate and terrain, as he saw in Bastogne in December '44...leaving aside the rain of lead and steel.
I had more hearsay data going back another two +/-34-year "solar pulses", but my memory fails me at the moment. Do recall that, on the first Earth Day (1973?) the big worry was Global Cooling and the New Ice Age, and if my theory is correct, the data from the next five years would certainly have supported that panic.
I think we are past the peak of the warm pulse (about 1995) and gradually cooling toward the next cold valley, in 2012-13.
If you read this far, thank you for your patience.
As a side note, I think we're going to see some financial indexes based on global warming for both believers and disbelievers to invest in in the next 20 years.
The idiocy of letting India and China not participate in CO2 limits while trying to force the rest of the world to is sickening to me. However, a lot of environmentalists are reconsidering nuclear power.
The majority of scientists have a peer review system that is in place and thorough. There is a lot of incentive to spot fraud and error in fellow scientists works, as it moves you up the pecking order. The problem is not in scientific journals, but rather popular media which seizes on the most sensationalist possible spin, and the least credible scientists.
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