32,000 deniers

That's the number of scientists who are outraged by the Kyoto Protocol's corruption of science

Question: How many scientists does it take to establish that a consensus does not exist on global warming? The quest to establish that the science is not settled on climate change began before most people had even heard of global warming.

The year was 1992 and the United Nations was about to hold its Earth Summit in Rio. It was billed as -- and was -- the greatest environmental and political assemblage in human history. Delegations came from 178 nations -- virtually every nation in the world -- including 118 heads of state or government and 7,000 diplomatic bureaucrats. The world's environmental groups came too -- they sent some 30,000 representatives from every corner of the world to Rio. To report all this, 7,000 journalists converged on Rio to cover the event, and relay to the publics of the world that global warming and other environmental insults were threatening the planet with catastrophe.

In February of that year, in an attempt to head off the whirlwind that the conference would unleash, 47 scientists signed a "Statement by Atmospheric Scientists on Greenhouse Warming," decrying "the unsupported assumption that catastrophic global warming follows from the burning of fossil fuels and requires immediate action."

To a scientist in search of truth, 47 is an impressive number, especially if those 47 dissenters include many of the world's most eminent scientists. To the environmentalists, politicians, press at Rio, their own overwhelming numbers made the 47 seem irrelevant.

Knowing this, a larger petition effort was undertaken, known as the Heidelberg Appeal, and released to the public at the Earth Summit. By the summit's end, 425 scientists and other intellectual leaders had signed the appeal.

These scientists -- mere hundreds -- also mattered for nought in the face of the tens of thousands assembled at Rio. The Heidelberg Appeal was blown away and never obtained prominence, even though the organizers persisted over the years to ultimately obtain some 4,000 signatories, including 72 Nobel Prize winners.

The earnest effort to demonstrate the absence of a consensus continued with the Leipzig Declaration on Global Climate Change -- an attempt to counter the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. Its 150-odd signatories also counted for nought. As did the Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship in 2000, signed by more than 1,500 clergy, theologians, religious leaders, scientists, academics and policy experts concerned about the harm that Kyoto could inflict on the world's poor.

Then came the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine's Petition Project of 2001, which far surpassed all previous efforts and by all rights should have settled the issue of whether the science was settled on climate change. To establish that the effort was bona fide, and not spawned by kooks on the fringes of science, as global warming advocates often label the skeptics, the effort was spearheaded by Dr. Frederick Seitz, past president of the National Academy of Sciences and of Rockefeller University, and as reputable as they come.

The Oregon petition garnered an astounding 17,800 signatures, a number all the more astounding because of the unequivocal stance that these scientists took: Not only did they dispute that there was convincing evidence of harm from carbon dioxide emissions, they asserted that Kyoto itself would harm the global environment because "increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."

The petition drew media attention, but little of it was for revealing to the world that an extraordinary number of scientists hold views on global warming diametrically opposite to those they are expected to hold. Instead, the press focussed on presumed flaws that critics found in the petition. Some claimed the petition was riddled with duplicate names. They were no duplicates, just different scientists with the same name. Some claimed the petition had phonies. There was only one phony: Spice Girl Geri Halliwell, planted by a Greenpeace organization to discredit the petition and soon removed. Other names that seemed to be phony -- such as Michael Fox, the actor, and Perry Mason, the fictional lawyer in a TV series -- were actually bona fide scientists, properly credentialled.

Like the Heidelberg Appeal, the Oregon petition was blown away. But now it is blowing back. Original signatories to the petition and others, outraged at Kyoto's corruption of science, wrote to the Oregon Institute and its director, Arthur Robinson, asking that the petition be brought back.

"E-mails started coming in every day," he explained. "And they kept coming. " The writers were outraged at the way Al Gore and company were abusing the science to their own ends. "We decided to do the survey again."

Using a subset of the mailing list of American Men and Women of Science, a who's who of Science, Robinson mailed out his solicitations through the postal service, requesting signed petitions of those who agreed that Kyoto was a danger to humanity. The response rate was extraordinary, "much, much higher than anyone expected, much higher than you'd ordinarily expect," he explained. He's processed more than 31,000 at this point, more than 9,000 of them with PhDs, and has another 1,000 or so to go -- most of them are already posted on a Web site at petitionproject.org.

Why go to this immense effort all over again, when the press might well ignore the tens of thousands of scientists who are standing up against global warming alarmism?

"I hope the general public will become aware that there is no consensus on global warming," he says, "and I hope that scientists who have been reluctant to speak up will now do so, knowing that they aren't alone."

At one level, Robinson, a PhD scientist himself, recoils at his petition. Science shouldn't be done by poll, he explains. "The numbers shouldn't matter. But if they want warm bodies, we have them."

Some 32,000 scientists is more than the number of environmentalists that descended on Rio in 1992. Is this enough to establish that the science is not settled on global warming? The press conference releasing these names occurs on Monday at the National Press Center in Washington. You'll know soon enough if anyone shows up.

LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com - Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and author of The Deniers. www.energyprobe.org

Furthermore, the government normally does not require me to get my tire replaced by Bob. I'm still free to be stooopid and not avail myself of Bob's already-existing technology.

I always worry when I venture into the realm of analogy that the imperfection of all analogies will cause people to miss my point.

My point was -- and even if there's a law against scare tactics -- if there's a problem we have to address, of any kind, it's probably important to know the full range of possibilities that the problem could cause. Perhaps a medical condition with an uncertain prognosis is a better analogy. If you had that, shouldn't the doctor tell you everything that could happen, ranging from "no problem" to "agonizing, disfiguring , painful death"? To their credit, most doctors are honest, and they encourage hope and active participation of the patient in a course of treatment. (In the case of medical conditions, sometimes there isn't a surefire way to treat it, and sometimes risky unproven treatments are tried. And sometimes those work, and sometimes they don't. And sometimes they even cause more damage than doing nothing would. When facing uncertainty, nothing is certain. Does that mean doing nothing is always the right thing to do? I'd say the right thing to do is to get all the information you can, weigh risk vs. benefit, make a decision about a course of action based on those considerations, monitor the condition, make changes to the plan if necessary, etc.)

The way many skeptics seem to be addressing global warming is like making sure someone is really sick before considering any treatments at all.

You do not include any such consideration for items on the right side of the ledger, including positive feedbacks of solar irradiance or that effects of aerosols, cloud effects or particulates are so misunderstood by the IPCC that the actual anthropological effect on temp is negative.

I'm not sure where that would have fit. I've posted the standard radiative forcing diagram many times, and I acknowledge what the uncertainties could mean.

There'd still have to be more negative feedbacks, as yet unidentified, to add up to negative forcing. And its currently warming, so the "balance sheet" ought to be positive at this point in time. That doesn't mean further warming couldn't cause sufficient cloud cover change to reverse it. Research is ongoing on that, isn't it?

You refuse to acknowledge that the temperature data is being manipulated by the IPCC contributors to the point that it is dishonest.

All the temperature data? Modern or paleo? Every IPCC contributor involved with temperature data? Most of them? No, I won't acknowledge that, it's ridiculous. I'll acknowledge that there are flaws, sometimes significant, in some studies. I will further acknowledge that skeptics have overexploited and overemphasized these flaws for their own ends. I will also acknowledge that the skeptics rarely acknowledge when flawed studies have been supplanted by more recent, better, and more definitive results.

Deliberate dishonesty has to be definitively proven. I won't acknowledge such until it is.

You won’t acknowledge that the only place that major “global warming” exists, and I mean their 5+F forecasts, is in the completely unreliable GCMs, which have no, and I mean NO, track record of success in reality.

I acknowledge, as would anyone following along, that the GCMs are modified to generate the full range of scenarios, and that as I stated before, the high end scenarios are unlikely.

As for no track record of success:

Climate models and their evaluation

FAQ 8.1 and the figure included is a nice summary.

I agree I expand the set of important scenarios to include those where CO2 might add some temp, but where the effects of that are benign or even beneficial.

My interpretation of current trends is that the globe is past the point of benign or beneficial, particularly when consideration of the rate of change is included in the evaluation.

The alarmists are very like a surgeon suggesting that you have some part of your body removed “just in case” it might be a problem later on, even though there is no strong reason to believe there will ever be a problem

I disagree (and I also already used a medical analogy in a different post). Your case is as if the body part was asymptomatic. More accurately, there are symptoms, but their potential severity is unclear, as is the course of treatment.

The difference is that I will include as possibilities that the bureaucratic IPCC policymakers have it all wrong, and that they ignore the much higher costs (economic, opportunity cost, technology, beneficial side effects, etc.) by their excessive focus on the disaster scenerios.

You have every right to do so. I in turn have the right to maintain that the IPCC has got it basically right, and that further warming at the current rate or an accelerated rate has very little up-side.

I'll give you a quick bottom line. I believe it's probably going to warm at least 2.5 C this century. I think summer Arctic ice will be absent by 2025. I believe that many countries/regions which rely on glacial runoff as their primary water supply will be facing significant water shortages by 2040, some areas sooner. I believe that the ongoing Australian drought is a harbinger of things to come for other central continent agricultural areas. I believe that by 2020, there will have been at least one massive, unprecedented, killer heat wave in the United States corresponding to one or two unprecedentedly warm summers, worse than the 1936 event.

Sorry for not being balanced because I believe those things will happen.

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