The recent escalation of attacks on the science of climate change and on scientists working in this field by the small number of climate deniers and their political supporters has drawn a sharply worded response from 255 members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, including at least 11 Nobel laureates. In an essay published in the May 7th issue of the journal Science as the Lead Letter, the scientists say:
"We are deeply disturbed by the recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular."
The essay continues:
"There is compelling, comprehensive, and consistent objective evidence that humans are changing the climate in ways that threaten our societies and the ecosystems on which we depend."
In recent months, a small minority of vocal climate deniers have been emboldened by minor errors identified in some of the international scientific assessments of climate change and by the publication of private email exchanges from some in the climate community. A recent independent commission in the UK, chaired by Lord Ron Oxburgh to review this debate, concluded that, "We found absolutely no evidence of impropriety whatsoever." The Science essay explicitly and strongly addresses these issues, saying:
" there is nothing remotely identified in the recent events that changes the fundamental conclusions about climate change:
The essay also includes a sharply worded rebuke to politicians who have recently threatened climate scientists whose scientific conclusions disagree with their political inclinations.
"We also call for an end to McCarthy-like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them."
It is hard to get 255 members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences to agree on pretty much anything, making the import of this letter even more substantial. Moreover, only a small fraction of National Academy members were asked to sign (the signatories are all members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences but were not speaking on its behalf). Because of a desire to produce a statement quickly, the coordinators of the letter focused on those sections of the NAS most familiar with climate science and the ongoing debate. But the NAS (and Academies of Sciences and other professional scientific societies from dozens of other nations) has previously published a long set of assessments and reviews of the science of climate change, which support the conclusions laid out in the Science essay.
And in the concluding paragraph of the essay, this group of leading scientists argues for taking action to deal with the risks of climate change:
"Society has two choices: we can ignore the science and hide our heads in the sand and hope we are lucky, or we can act in the public interest to reduce the threat of global climate change quickly and substantively."
In the end, we have only three choices: we can act to mitigate the risks of climate change by reducing greenhouse gas emissions, we can expand efforts to adapt to a changing climate, or we can suffer the consequences of doing nothing. The only real question is, what is the balance among these three options.
Are the climate deniers going to go away? No. Nothing will convince them, since science hasn't. There are still people -- a lot of people -- who do not believe in evolution, or plate tectonics, or the Big Bang theory. But the longer that policymakers hesitate to act, the more the balance will shift to suffering. I believe that history will prove those delaying action to be dangerously wrong, at a time when it is urgent that society be courageously right.
Peter H. Gleick is one of the 255 signers of the Lead Letter in the May 7th issue of the journal Science.
Climate deniers deny that the climate is more affected by solar cycles and cloud cover distribution than the trace gas that is CO2.
Gotta love climate change denier alarmism, or not. Amongst other things that you AnnaFr are apparently unaware of is that breathing does not increase the atmospheric CO2 concentration.
AnnaFr: "Climate deniers deny that the climate is more affected by solar cycles and cloud cover distribution than the trace gas that is CO2. "
Nope, climate change deniers like you apparently instead deny the Greenhouse Effect (without which the Earth would be frozen over), that solar cycles cannot explain current global warming, and that water vapor cannot be a global warming forcing agent.
5. Junk science -- quoting disreputed sources that reinforce denier preconceptions, or using simple but wrong aphorisms (confusing weather and climate, or saying the climate is always changing)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-sandler/climate-deniers-are-pollu_b_549894.html
PS I think you reversed a pair of clauses in that last sentence. What I see daily are climate deniers *asserting* what you claim they deny:
"Climate deniers deny that the climate is more affected by solar cycles and cloud cover distribution than the trace gas that is CO2."
Or else you have a truly novel denial script.
Yeah - that demon methane... or was it those demon CFC's? No, wait, maybe it's that demon nitrous oxide... or demon ozone...
Dman those demons.
Did you photoshop it yourself, Peter?
Classic denier logic. But see my latest post about precisely this kind of denier trickery: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-h-gleick/remarkable-insight-into-t_b_569076.html
Monckton's degrees are in Classics and Journalism, and at least per the bios I'm familar with he has never had salaried employment as anything remotely resembling a professional mathematician - which makes sense, since again he has no math degrees or anything remotely related to one. Perhaps you are referring to this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternity_puzzle
If so, you've got a decidedly expansive conception with respect to what a "mathematician" is.
something usually assigned to the literal right..
shows up here over and over!
On a per-molecule basis methane causes more global warming than CO2; there is much more CO2 emissions than methane emissions however.
Educating consumers is critical. But in the long run, we must also educate policymakers, and urge them to act.
I too thank Erika for her thoughtful question; it is indeed rare.
Since you are interested in '. . .[urging policy] makers to act.' is it not appropriate to question the form that action takes? Is skepticism towards political/economic restructuring somehow a betrayal of reason (as in how dare I question the science)? or do politicians betray their social contract by creating the image of one objective problem (AGW) with one objective solution (cap/trade)? While Erica's question was undoubtedly thoughtful there are, in fact, other less simple questions with less simple answers posted on this thread.
We'll just take the costs out of energy company's huge government subsidies.
I'm thinking more like Enron Part 2.
http://www.worldscinet.com/ijmpb/24/2410/S021797921005555X.html
Non-paywall draft and discussion at Rabett Run:
http://rabett.blogspot.com/2010/05/unto-us-paper-is-given-unto-us.html
We'll just take the costs out of energy company's huge government subsidies.
You do understand that your statement here makes no sense... right?
That won't be necessary, offering corporations an alternate product from which to profit is a capitalistic solution.
A similar situation exists today with the fraudulent "man-made climate change" idea, and despite all the howling from the global warmers, it is quite impossible to make a physical impossibility such as "greenhouse warming of the Earth" to become a reality, no matter how bitter the attacks on critics (or the sensible) become.
Howl all you want.
Brian G Valentine
Arlington, Virginia
bgvalentine@verizon.net
The "greenhouse warming of the Earth" - aka the Greenhouse Effect - IS a reality, no matter how idiotic the attacks on science (or reality) become.
The "greenhouse effect" just doesn't exist - as it is presented, it violates the second law by providing a means to cool the stratosphere while warming the troposphere without the expenditure of work.
This is a long standing misconception, and it is not going away easily. Nevertheless, it is an old wives tale.
And then the 1970s arrived with their threats of a looming ice age -- http://anhonestclimatedebate.wordpress.com/2009/08/02/climate-change-alarmism-timelin/
Try not to get whiplash when you read that timeline. It's like watching a tennis match: ice age/global warming, ice age/global warming...
Really. So do now you agree that the evidence the scientific evidence for AGW is overwhelming?
mooseandskwerl: "Try not to get whiplash when you read that timeline."
Here's the problem with that timeline: it is deeply misleading. For example, in the 1970s there was no scientific consensus for global cooling. To the contrary, the scientific consensus back then was that much more research was needed before coming to a consensus about global cooling and global warming. Compare with today - more than a third of a century of climate science research later - where the scientific consensus is that global warming is real.
Yes, again you are - as evidenced for example by the fact that you are apparently under the mistaken impression that the timeline that you presented here means anything of substantive value with respect to the actual timeline of the scientific consensus on global climate change.
Hence my sarcasm, which went whoosh right over your head.
Well, pretty simple: Because there were almost no papers that predicted cooling. From 1965 to 1979, a period of 15 years, there were exactly 7 research papers that predicted cooling--about one every other year. And some of those predictions were very long term, as in 10,000 years or more.
Second point: In contrast, nearly 50 papers during the same period predicted warming. And, remember, climate science was in its infancy.
Third point: Most of those articles were about OBSERVED cooling, not PREDICTED cooling. Two very different things, don't you think?
Final point: The primary reason for the observed cooling was particulate pollution. The cooling effects of that pollution temporarily overwhelmed the warming effects of GHGs (Philipona 2009). But we did something about that--tough laws significantly reduced particulate pollution, with the result that GHG-related warming was no longer being conteracted.
Net-net, your apparent point that the same so-called "scientists" who now wail about warming were wailing about cooling 40 years ago is wrong on every possible level.
that the agw argument doesn't amount to a hill of beans..
er i meant rice: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYLmLW4k4aI&feature=player_embedded
presented by strangers on YouTube..
or not.
for example..
the claim that YouTube stranger makes that "CO2 Contributed by Human Activity: 12 to 15ppm"..
is false.
say fumes..
when are you going to finally acknowledge.. your repeated statements to the contrary.. that greenhouse gases send longwave radiation back to Earth?
you'll never understand.. even the basics of global warming science.. until you understand that basic fact of physics.. you know.
Lindzen argued that the distribution of clouds would shift automatically (the iris effect) so as to counteract the effect of increasing CO2, but after 15 years of study, no evidence for this theory has been found. Instead the resulting changes in clouds appear to slightly increase the effect of adding CO2, increasing warming.
Okay, climate deniers- why isn't the climate changing?
Pachauri's claims that the IPCC's 2007 report is the gold standard and relies solely on peer-reviewed literature do not hold up under scrutiny: 21 out of 44 chapters FAIL the peer-review smell test for their reliance on "press releases, newspaper and magazine clippings, working papers, student theses, discussion papers, and literature published by green advocacy groups." See: http://www.noconsensus.org/ipcc-audit/findings-main-page.php and http://nofrakkingconsensus.blogspot.com/2010/04/climate-bible-gets-21-fs-on-report-card.html.
By still clinging to your "denier" insult meme, you just make yourselves sound like hysterical and close-minded knuckledraggers.
So, for example, the two sites you link to are global warming denier sites because they deny the scientific consensus on AGW - it's right there in their domain names. And evidently unlike you, I don't take "report cards" from websites that deny reality seriously.