The arguments made by climate change sceptics

Sceptics arguments and the counter arguments.

1. IS TEMPERATURE OF EARTH GETTING WARMER?
2. THE AVERAGE TEMPERATURE HAS STOPPED RISING
3. THE EARTH HAS BEEN WARMER IN THE RECENT PAST
4. COMPUTER MODELS ARE NOT RELIABLE
5. ATMOSPHERE IS NOT BEHAVING AS MODELS WOULD PREDICT
6. CLIMATE IS MAINLY INFLUENCED BY THE SUN
7. CO2 RISES AFTER A TEMPERATURE INCREASE NOT BEFORE
8. LONG-TERM DATA ON HURRICANES AND ARCTIC ICE IS POOR
9. WATER VAPOUR IS BIGGER GREENHOUSE GAS THAN CO2
10. THERE ARE BIGGER PROBLEMS THAN CLIMATE CHANGE

The green inquisition

We're being force-fed vastly over-hyped scare stories which block out sensible solutions to climate change

• 
• • Björn Lomborg
  • guardian.co.uk,
  • Monday July 14, 2008
  • Article history

When it comes to global warming, extreme scare stories abound. Al Gore, for example, famously claimed that a whopping six metres of sea-level rise would flood major cities around the world.

Gore's scientific adviser, Jim Hansen from Nasa, has even topped his protege. Hansen suggests that there will eventually be sea-level rises of 24 metres, with a six-metre rise happening just this century. Little wonder that fellow environmentalist Bill McKibben states that "we are engaging in a reckless drive-by drowning of much of the rest of the planet and much of the rest of creation."

Given all the warnings, here is a slightly inconvenient truth: over the past two years, the global sea level hasn't increased. It has slightly decreased. Since 1992, satellites orbiting the planet have measured the global sea level every 10 days with an amazing degree of accuracy – 3-4mm. For two years, sea levels have declined. (All of the data are available at sealevel.colorado.edu.)

This doesn't mean that global warming is not true. As we emit more CO2, over time the temperature will moderately increase, causing the sea to warm and expand somewhat. Thus, the sea-level rise is expected to pick up again.

This is what the UN climate panel is telling us; the best models indicate a sea-level rise over this century of 18 to 59 centimeters (7-24 inches), with the typical estimate at 30cm.

This is not terrifying or even particularly scary – 30cm is how much the sea rose over the last 150 years.

Simply put, we're being force-fed vastly over-hyped scare stories. Proclaiming six meters of sea-level rise over this century contradicts thousands of UN scientists, and requires the sea-level rise to accelerate roughly 40-fold from today.

Imagine how climate alarmists would play up the story if we actually saw an increase in the sea-level rise.

Increasingly, alarmists claim that we should not be allowed to hear such facts. In June, Hansen proclaimed that people who spread "disinformation" about global warming – CEOs, politicians, in fact anyone who doesn't follow Hansen's narrow definition of the "truth" – should literally be tried for crimes against humanity.

It is depressing to see a scientist – even a highly politicised one – calling for a latter-day inquisition. Such a blatant attempt to curtail scientific inquiry and stifle free speech seems inexcusable.

But it is perhaps also a symptom of a broader problem. It is hard to keep up the climate panic as reality diverges from the alarmist predictions more than ever before: the global temperature has not risen over the past 10 years, it has declined precipitously in the last year and a half, and studies show that it might not rise again before the middle of the next decade. With a global recession looming and high oil and food prices undermining the living standards of the western middle class, it is becoming ever harder to sell the high-cost, inefficient Kyoto-style solution of drastic carbon cuts.

A much sounder approach than Kyoto and its successor would be to invest more in research and development of zero-carbon energy technologies – a cheaper, more effective way to truly solve the climate problem.

Hansen is not alone in trying to blame others for his message's becoming harder to sell. Canada's top environmentalist, David Suzuki, stated earlier this year that politicians "complicit in climate change" should be thrown in jail. Campaigner Mark Lynas envisions Nuremberg-style "international criminal tribunals" against those who dare to challenge the climate dogma. Clearly, this column places me at risk of incarceration by Hansen & Co.

But the globe's real problem is not a series of inconvenient facts. It is that we have blocked out sensible solutions through an alarmist panic, leading to bad policies.

Consider one of the most significant steps taken to respond to climate change. Adopted because of the climate panic, biofuels were supposed to reduce CO2 emissions. Hansen described them as part of a "brighter future for the planet." But using biofuels to combat climate change must rate as one of the poorest global "solutions" to any great challenge in recent times.

Biofuels essentially take food from mouths and puts it into cars. The grain required to fill the tank of an SUV with ethanol is enough to feed one African for a year. Thirty percent of this year's corn production in the United States will be burned up on America's highways. This has been possible only through subsidies that globally will total $15bn this year alone.

Because increased demand for biofuels leads to cutting down carbon-rich forests, a 2008 Science study showed that the net effect of using them is not to cut CO2 emissions, but to double them. The rush towards biofuels has also strongly contributed to rising food prices, which have tipped another roughly 30 million people into starvation.

Because of climate panic, our attempts to mitigate climate change have provoked an unmitigated disaster. We will waste hundreds of billions of dollars, worsen global warming, and dramatically increase starvation.
We have to stop being scared silly, stop pursuing stupid policies, and start investing in smart long-term R&D. Accusations of "crimes against humanity" must cease. Indeed, the real offense is the alarmism that closes minds to the best ways to respond to climate change.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2008.

I'm not climate change's Billy Graham

Climate change denial, I discovered at the Hay festival, shares the same characteristics as religion.

Reposted from: http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/george_monbiot/2007/05/a_few_hours_before_i.html

George Monbiot

think I might have cracked it. Ever since I started giving lectures on man-made climate change, I've been troubled by the question of how to answer people who don't and won't believe it is happening.

You can tell them that almost all climate scientists believe it is taking place. But climate scientists are part of the conspiracy. You can explain that almost all peer-reviewed scientific papers on the subject accept it. But how does that help if they believe the Daily Mail is the font of all wisdom? You can point out that the effort to dissuade people that climate change is real has been sponsored by fossil fuel companies. In response - and in marvellous contradiction of their professed suspicion of scientists - they then point to the handful of climatologists who have not been sponsored by the oil industry who say that it isn't happening. You can argue that they are cherry-picking their experts and their data, but unless they have an understanding of the scientific process, they don't see what's wrong with that.

At my talk last night, a man in the audience informed me that a belief in climate change is a religion, and that I am its Billy Graham. He pointed out that temperatures on Mars have risen: could that be because of all the people driving their SUVs there? Well full marks for originality: I haven't heard that one more than 100 times since the Martian data was published. But instead of trying to argue with him, this time I asked a question: what would it take to convince you that manmade climate change is taking place?

"Nothing", he said. "The climate has always changed. This is just another natural cycle."

"So even if every scientist of every kind and every persuasion agreed that manmade climate change is happening, you would still place your own opinion above theirs?"

"Yes."

This, I suspect, must now be the position of most of those who still deny that man-made climate change is happening: that there is nothing - no evidence, however compelling, no scientific consensus, however robust - that could persuade them of the opposite case. Could there be a better definition of religion?

Climate change predictions go from bad to worse - IPCC report

IT TOOK three years to write and contains six years' worth of research. The full report, to be published later this year, will contain 11 chapters. One chapter alone, seen by New Scientist, runs to 150 pages and includes more than 850 references. The authors say it will resolve many critical questions about climate change and support the unequivocal language of the summary published last week.

Warming is now an "incontrovertible" fact for two reasons, the scientists say. First, because doubts raised by satellite data - which suggested that recent warming has been far less than surface thermometers indicate - have now been resolved. In short, the thermometers have been shown to be right (New Scientist, 20 August 2005, p 10). In any case, nothing else but global warming can explain the rapid melting of ice round the world.

The declaration that warming is "very likely" to be due to human activity is justified by an increasing agreement between measurements from the real world and the detailed predictions of statistical models of warming. "It is a very rigorous statistical analysis, comparing measurements and models in space and time in a more detailed way than ever before," says Susan Solomon, head of the US group that led the assessment. Key to this has been the observed greater warming over land masses compared with the oceans, and the combination of warming in the lower atmosphere with cooling in the stratosphere.

Researchers also claim to have a better idea of how much warming from greenhouse gases is being masked by dust and smoke aerosols put into the air by human activity. This again improves the match between models and the real world.

The team is also much more confident now about the unique nature of recent warming. The IPCC's 2001 summary report was heavily criticised for including a graph - known as the "hockey stick" - which purported to show that the world is now warmer than for at least the past 1000 years. The claim was based on sporadic proxy data such as tree rings, and was widely attacked. Now a huge amount of extra data collected since 2001 "all supports the interpretation that warming in the past half-century is unusual in at least the last 1300 years", the summary says.

Where does this leave the prognosis for the planet? The report sets the likely range of average temperature changes for a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations - expected around the end of the century - at between 2 and 4.5 °C. This is roughly in line with previous reports, though this time it adds, with a nod to possible positive feedbacks, "values substantially higher than 4.5 °C cannot be excluded".

This amount of warming will likely deliver an ice-free Arctic and a 30 per cent drop in rainfall in many subtropical regions, including a huge area from the Mediterranean and North Africa through the Middle East to central Asia, and another across southern Africa. Meanwhile, higher latitudes will get wetter as the air warms and storm tracks move, and hurricanes will become more intense.

Global warming, the report says, contains a deadly time lag. That's because 80 per cent of the extra heat currently being trapped by man-made greenhouse gases is being drawn into the oceans. As the oceans warm, more of that heat will remain in the air. Even if emissions of greenhouse gases were sharply reduced, the world would continue to warm by 0.1 °C per decade for some time.

From issue 2590 of New Scientist magazine, 10 February 2007, page 9

The solar effect

It is one of the few areas where the sceptics' argument has had some force. What role has the sun played in recent climate change? As if to underline the controversy, last week's debate on this issue lasted some 10 hours.

The IPCC scientists wanted to halve their previous estimate of the maximum possible solar influence on warming over the past 250 years, from 40 per cent to 20 per cent. Government delegations from China and Saudi Arabia refused to accept that, based on new ideas about cosmic rays from outer space.

Cosmic rays ionise the atmosphere, which could, the theory goes, create clouds. Thus, anything that reduces the amount of cosmic rays could diminish cloud cover and so warm the Earth's surface. An increase in solar activity would do just that - by deflecting cosmic rays away from Earth. China and Saudi Arabia were buoyed by claims that small changes in radiation from the sun could be amplified by their potential effect on clouds. Thus, they said, the sun could have a greater effect than the scientists claimed.

Most climate scientists are unconvinced. "Right now there is no evidence," says IPCC author Piers Forster of the University of Leeds, UK. In any case, IPCC scientists believe, most of today's warming can be explained by man-made influences (see Charts). But with a book due from solar-radiation proponent Henrik Svensmark of the Danish National Space Center, this may not be the end of the matter.

reposted from: new scientist
my: highlights / emphasis / key points / comments