See also "Consensus' What Consensus" at http://mclean.ch/climate/What_consensus_col.pdf .

In this article you will find that the consensus started out as an exaggeration (or was it fabrication?) by the media and the then head of the IPCC. Surveys of meteorologists and climatologists have indicated that a majority, but hardly an "overwhelming majority", believe that humans have had a substantial influence on climate. The survey by Oreskes assumed a level playing field for all climatologists whatever their views and directions of research, which is patently false, and it used a search text that is more likely to be used by one side of the debate.

The only consensus from the IPCC comes from the handful of authors who wrote any particular section of text and from the government representatives that approved the document prior to publication. Only 5 expert reviewers explicitly supported the claim that human activity has had a significant influence on climate since 1950.

Comment by John McL | February 28, 2008

Bob: Great article! Since this year is the coldest in quite some time, and has in fact "erased" the last 100 years of global warming (using the same logic and statistics that gave us GW in the first place), I wonder if the "consensus" will now return to a new ice age? Good thing we haven't removed too much CO2 from the atmosphere. We're going to need it to keep warm … until the next round of man-made hysteria.

Comment by Phillip Ellis Jackson | February 28, 2008

Well written, but silly.

There is no mention of the recent data taken from Antarctic ice cores which confirm that present GHG concentrations are much higher than at any time in the last 650,000 years. They began their dramatic increase, as we would expect, with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and have run away from our control. I refuse to believe that it is necessary to be a 'denier' to be a legitimate conservative. A mechanical engineer should sit and listen politely when atmospheric scientists are talking. Astronomers have already discounted any possibility that the orbit of the earth has anything to do with observed conditions. They also dismiss the suggestion that the sun is causing the present phenomena by radiating additional energy.

Of course those practitioners who fail to conform to well established peer review standards within the climatology community will find that their papers are not published in the best journals. They, along with the occasional biologist who rejects evolutional theory, earn and deserve the same fate that a mathematician who rejected Euclid would endure.

I recommend, as soon as you have time, that you enter "arctic ice melting' into Google, and spend a week reading what you find there.

Comment by JDBishop5 | February 29, 2008

Google is not a source authorty. It's a trashpile of popular opinion that can be useful if you actually search the content instead of simply count the number of references. If you searched "WMD and Iraq" prior to 2002, you would have seen absolute certainty that Iraq possessed WMD. Google, in and of itself, does not define the truth of an issue.

But since we need to look at 'additional data' for some reason, I recommend "Forget global warming: Welcome to the new Ice Age" by Lorne Gunter, National Post Published: Monday, February 25, 2008

Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.

The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average."

China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them. (South America had one of its coldest winters ever in 2007 and International Falls, Minnesota set a new January low temp record of 40 below zero…Brrr…Janc)

There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.

In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.

And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its "lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.

The ice is back.

Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.

OK, so one winter does not a climate make. It would be premature to claim an Ice Age is looming just because we have had one of our most brutal winters in decades.

But if environmentalists and environment reporters can run around shrieking about the manmade destruction of the natural order every time a robin shows up on Georgian Bay two weeks early, then it is at least fair game to use this winter's weather stories to wonder whether the alarmist are being a tad premature.

And it's not just anecdotal evidence that is piling up against the climate-change dogma.

According to Robert Toggweiler of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University and Joellen Russell, assistant professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona — two prominent climate modellers — the computer models that show polar ice-melt cooling the oceans, stopping the circulation of warm equatorial water to northern latitudes and triggering another Ice Age (a la the movie The Day After Tomorrow) are all wrong.

"We missed what was right in front of our eyes," says Prof. Russell. It's not ice melt but rather wind circulation that drives ocean currents northward from the tropics. Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind's effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by over-emphasizing the role of manmade warming on polar ice melt.

But when Profs. Toggweiler and Russell rejigged their model to include the 40-year cycle of winds away from the equator (then back towards it again), the role of ocean currents bringing warm southern waters to the north was obvious in the current Arctic warming.

Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as "a drop in the bucket." Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to "stock up on fur coats."

He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.

The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbors froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.

It's way too early to claim the same is about to happen again, but then it's way too early for the hysteria of the global warmers, too.

Comment by Phillip Ellis Jackson | February 29, 2008

You cite an article containing a man's opinion, but which tell us nothing about the man. Thus we cannot determine wether he is to be trusted as a source.

What do you have to say about the following scientific source of actual data?

I call your attention to the particular sentence I cite below.

"The analysis highlights the fact that today’s rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, at 380 parts per million by volume, is already 27 percent higher than its highest recorded level during the last 650,000 years,"

The entire article follows and may be found at the cited address.

http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2005/1128ice.shtml.

New Research in Science Shows Highest CO2 Levels In 650,000 Years

With the first in-depth analysis of the air bubbles trapped in the “EPICA Dome C” ice core from East Antarctica, European researchers have extended the greenhouse gas record back to 650,000 years before the present. This 210,000-year extension of atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane records — encompassing two full glacial cycles — should help scientists better understand climate change and the nature of the current warm period on Earth.
The record may also aid researchers in reducing uncertainty in predictions of future climate change and help to clarify when humans began significantly changing the balance of greenhouse gasses in Earth’s atmosphere.
EPICA is the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica. The new ice core, initially described in 2004, is from a site in East Antarctica known as EPICA Dome C. This work represents a long-term European research collaboration and appears in two studies and an accompanying “Perspective” article in the 25 November 2005 issue of the journal Science, published by AAAS.
One study chronicles the stable relationship between climate and the carbon cycle during the Pleistocene (390,000 to 650,000 years before the present). The second one documents atmospheric methane and nitrous oxide levels over the same period.
The analysis highlights the fact that today’s rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, at 380 parts per million by volume, is already 27 percent higher than its highest recorded level during the last 650,000 years, said Science author Thomas Stocker of the Physics Institute of the University of Bern, in Bern, Switzerland, who serves as the corresponding author for both papers.
“We have added another piece of information showing that the timescales on which humans have changed the composition of the atmosphere are extremely short compared to the natural time cycles of the climate system,” Stocker explained.
The new work confirms the stable relationship between Antarctic climate and the greenhouse gasses carbon dioxide and methane during the last four glacial cycles. The new ice core analysis also extends this relationship back another two glacial cycles, to a time when the warm “interglacial” periods were milder and longer than more recent warm periods, according to the European researchers.
The fact that carbon dioxide and methane levels were lower during the relatively mild warm periods of the two additional cycles, compared to the warmer warm periods of the last 400,000 years, is especially interesting for the study of climate sensitivity, which is a measure of how the climate system reacts when atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations double, explained Science author Dominique Raynaud from LGGE in Grenoble, France.
The new atmospheric and climate records from the EPICA Dome C ice core also indicate that the response of the natural carbon cycle to climate warming remains the same over time — in terms of the mechanism involved and the degree to which greenhouse gasses further amplify climate change, explained Science author Jean Jouzel from LSCE and Institut Pierre Simon Laplace in France.
The EPICA Dome C ice core contains hundreds of thousands of years’ worth of atmospheric air samples within tiny bubbles trapped in the ice. The air bubbles form when snowflakes fall, and they contain a record of global greenhouse gas concentrations.
The new ice core record described in the two Science papers provides some overlap with a similar record from the Vostok ice core — now, the second longest ice core record — and extends the Vostok record by 210,000 years.
The nitrous oxide record in EPICA Dome C is more fragmented and less clear than the carbon dioxide and methane records due to artifacts in the ice that appear related to the dust levels.
The new ice core analysis provides insights on our present interglacial warm period through a glimpse into Antarctic climate and greenhouse gas concentrations during the most recent warm period that is relatively similar to our current warm period. Known as Marine Isotope Stage 11 or MIS 11, this analog warm period occurred between 420,000 and 400,000 years and is not completely covered by the Vostok record.
The similarities between our current warm period and MIS 11 are primarily due to a similar configuration of the orbits of the Earth around the Sun: the relative positions of the Earth and Sun are thought to be the key driver of ice age cycles.
“MIS 11 shows us that the climate system can indeed reside in a warm period for 20,000 or 30,000 years, something that we can’t say based on the last three warm phases which are no longer than about 10,000 years each,” said Stocker.
We are now about 10,000 years into our current warm period.
The new papers also document MIS 13 and 15 — two warm periods more distant than MIS 11 that may have been about as long. The idea that MIS 13 and 15 were long warm periods contrasts the argument scientists have made in the past suggesting that our current warm period is exceptionally long.
The authors note, however, that the records for MIS 13 and 15 are not as clear as they are for MIS 11. One complicating factor is that the ice core records do not exactly match records from marine sediments that are used to help date the ice core data.
New insights important for understanding the impact early human activities such as land clearing and rice culture had on atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, the topic of several recent studies, are also now available, thanks to the methane and carbon dioxide records from the EPICA Dome C ice core. The new record shows that natural variability can result in significant oscillations in greenhouse gasses during some interglacial periods and raises the possibility that early human activities may not be responsible for the greenhouse gas variability seen as early as 10,000 years ago, writes Ed Brook from Oregon State University in Corvallis, Oregon in a related “Perspective” article.
The greenhouse gas record from EPICA Dome C during past ice ages also provides indirect evidence for abrupt climate change in the past, the authors found. This suggests that abrupt climatic events on time scales relevant to societies may be common features of the last climatic cycles.
The stable relationship between carbon dioxide, methane and Antarctic climate over the last 650,000 years highlights one of the major unsolved mysteries of climate change — the origins of climate-greenhouse gas relationships. Organic decomposition in subtropical wetlands remains a strong candidate for explaining the climate-methane relationship. On the other hand, oceans seem to play a critical role in the climate-carbon dioxide relationship; and the new work strengthens the idea that high latitude Southern Ocean processes are important for controlling glacial-interglacial variations in carbon dioxide, according to the “Perspective” author who says that retrieval and analysis of even older ice cores may provide more definitive answers.
“Stable Carbon Cycle-Climate Relationship During the Late Pleistocene,” by U. Siegenthaler, T.F. Stocker, E. Monnin, D. Lüthi, J. Schwander and B. Stauffer at University of Bern in Switzerland; D. Raynaud and J.-M. Barnola at Laboratoire de Glaciologie et de Géophysique de l'Environnement (CNRS) St Martin d'Hères Cedex, France; H. Fischer at Alfred-Wegener-Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) in Bremerhaven, Germany; V. Masson-Delmotte and J. Jouzel at LSCE and Institut Pierre Simon Laplace in France.
“Atmospheric Methane and Nitrous Oxide of the Late Pleistocene from Antarctic Ice Cores,” by R. Spahni, T. Stocker, G. Hausammann, K. Kawamura, J. Flückiger and Jakob Schwander at University of Bern, in Bern, Switzerland; J. Chappellaz, L. Loulergue and D. Raynaud at Laboratoire de Glaciologie et de Géophysique de l'Environnement (CNRS) in St Martin d'Hères Cedex, France; V. Masson-Delmotte, J. Jouzel at LSCE and Institut Pierre Simon Laplace in France. K. Kawamura is now at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California- San Diego in La Jolla. J. Flückiger is now at Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, University of Colorado at Boulder.
The accompanying “Perspective” article “Tiny Bubbles Tell All,” is by E. Brook from Oregon State University in Corvallis, Ore.
The work described in the Siegenthaler et al. and Spahni et al. Science papers is a contribution to the “European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica” (EPICA), a joint ESF (European Science Foundation)/EC scientific program, funded by the European Commission and by national contributions from Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
The researchers acknowledge long-term financial support by the Swiss NSF, the University of Bern and the Swiss Federal Agency of Energy, and EC Project EPICA-MIS. Support was also provided by the French program PNEDC (INSU-CNRS).
This news release is available in German and in French.
Daniel B. Kane
28 November 2005

Comment by JDBishop5 | February 29, 2008

The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is of no real consequence while there is no evidence that it makes a significant contribution to warming.

The IPCC's so-called evidence for its claim that human activity (i.e. carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel) has caused significant since 1950 (why not before?) is pitifully weak. See http://mclean.ch/climate/IPCC_evidence.pdf .

Comment by John McL | February 29, 2008

"The IPCC’s so-called evidence for its claim that human activity (i.e. carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel) has caused significant since 1950 (why not before?) is pitifully weak."

If it is a real question, the answer is easily found.

Feedback and albedo acting together.

From Scientific American

http://www.pbs.org/saf/1404/features/thermostat.htm

The Ice-Albedo Effect

The Arctic is a unique landscape, covered by snow and ice for much of the year. And paradoxical as it may seem, it's precisely this frozen quality that helps make it more susceptible to warming.
Snow and ice are white and very reflective. They have what scientists call a very high albedo - that's a measure of how much light a surface reflects. Between 70 and 80 percent of the sun's rays that hit this kind of frozen surface are bounced right back out into space. So the land or water beneath the snowy blanket doesn't get a chance to absorb much of that solar radiation.
Now imagine that a little bit of heat is added to the system. That's exactly what is happening in the real world; scientists say that the average temperature in Alaska has risen 4 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1950s. With warmer temperatures, some of the snow and ice melts, exposing the darker land or water underneath. These surfaces have much lower albedos - open water reflects less than 10 percent of the solar energy that hits it, for example. So more heat is absorbed by the landscape.
Then a feedback loop kicks in. More heat is absorbed by the darker surface, so more snow and ice melt. More of the darker surface is exposed, leading to the absorption of even more heat, more snow and ice melt, and so on. Just a small temperature rise can set this feedback cycle into motion. The opposite effect is possible too; a small temperature decrease would lead to more snow and ice, would lead to more solar radiation being bounced back to space, would lead to colder temperatures, would lead to more snow and ice, and so on. Scientists describe the onset of past ice ages in this way.
The very fact that the Arctic is frozen a good part of the year makes it fragile and easy to be drastically affected by global warming. Adding freshwater to the oceans as it melts from glaciers on the land surface will change the salinity of the seas, which can affect global ocean circulation patterns. Ecosystems are very different when frozen or thawed. Current conditions in many parts of the Arctic are fairly waterlogged, with water held close to the surface of the land. That's because just below ground level lies frozen soil, the so-called permafrost layer. But as permafrost thaws, water drains more easily and the landscape becomes more productive. The treeline migrates northward. As temperatures warm, the undecomposed peat in the landscape will begin to breakdown and emit the carbon that has been locked in the ground for millennia. It's another feedback system; warming will lead to increased levels of carbon dioxide reaching the atmosphere where it can act as a greenhouse gas and lead to more warming. The cycle is complex, though, and scientists aren't sure how the variety of factors involved will interact.

Arctic Meltdown, Earth Meltdown?
Scientists say the Arctic is changing right now. They point to rises in temperatures, decreases in the extent of annual snow and ice cover, thinning of glaciers and sea ice. That's too bad for the Arctic, but does it really affect the majority of us who live at lower latitudes and may never see the land of the midnight sun? In a word, yes. Polar regions play a major role in the climate of the entire planet.
On average, the north and south poles receive less solar radiation than areas near the equator. Because of the tilt of our spherical planet's axis, the sun's rays hit the poles at a more oblique angle than they do in the tropics. And because of albedo, the icy polar regions are also reflecting more of whatever solar radiation reaches them back to space than are equatorial regions. There's more solar radiation leaving the atmosphere in the arctic than there is entering. So the atmosphere at the Earth's surface in the Arctic will be colder, on average, than it is at lower latitudes. This global temperature gradient causes atmospheric circulation, with heat flowing from the equatorial regions toward the poles. The atmosphere strives for equilibrium, that is, for all areas on the globe to be about the same temperature. Warm ocean currents also carry heat to the higher latitudes.
Basically all of the earth's weather is caused by these circulation patterns. And they're driven by the fact that the poles are currently heat sinks. If the Arctic warms up, the temperature gradient from the equator to the North Pole would get weaker, and that would cause weaker circulation patterns. The weather is notoriously hard to predict - just think about your local five-day forecast - so it's impossible to say what a future with weaker atmospheric circulation will look like. But it will definitely be different than the world we live in now.

Comment by JDBishop5 | February 29, 2008

If you want to claim that albedo is a major factor then the first one to look at is cloud cover. The pattern of cloud cover in the exotropics (latitude more than 20 degrees either N or S and beyond to the respective poles) started changing in about 1999. (see http://mclean.ch/climate/cloud_cover_main.htm )

Cloud tends to suppress radiation but whether that means a warming or cooling influence depends on which way the (net) radiation was going. Cloudy days tend to be cooler, unless you are in the Arctic regions where cloud might mean the days are warmer.

It seems extraordinary that so little cloud data is available and yet it has a substantial impact on temperature.

Comment by John McL | February 29, 2008

Ah well, faith is an uncontrollable thing I see.

Do you imagine that you consideration has not been fully considered by those of us who spend all day, every day, studying this problem in depth? Every time we refine our data with better evidence, the problem is shown to be much worse than we previously thought.

I wonder, do you have grandchildren? Do you love them?

This is an interesting recent article on your problem from Salon.

I wish I had written it.

Enjoy!

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/02/27/global_warming_deniers/print.html

The cold truth about climate change

Deniers continue to insist there's no consensus on global warming. Well, there's not. There's well-tested science and real-world observations.
By Joseph Romm

Feb. 27, 2008 | The more I write about global warming, the more I realize I share some things in common with the doubters and deniers who populate the blogosphere and the conservative movement. Like them, I am dubious about the process used by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to write its reports. Like them, I am skeptical of the so-called consensus on climate science as reflected in the IPCC reports. Like them, I disagree with people who say "the science is settled." But that's where the agreement ends.

The science isn't settled — it's unsettling, and getting more so every year as the scientific community learns more about the catastrophic consequences of uncontrolled greenhouse gas emissions.

The big difference I have with the doubters is they believe the IPCC reports seriously overstate the impact of human emissions on the climate, whereas the actual observed climate data clearly show the reports dramatically understate the impact.

But I do think the scientific community, the progressive community, environmentalists and media are making a serious mistake by using the word "consensus" to describe the shared understanding scientists have about the ever-worsening impacts that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions are having on this planet. When scientists and others say there is a consensus, many if not most people probably hear "consensus of opinion," which can — and often is — dismissed out of hand. I've met lots of people like CNBC anchor Joe Kernen, who simply can't believe that "as old as the planet is" that "puny, gnawing little humans" could possibly change the climate in "70 years."

Well, Joe, it is more like 250 years, but yes, most of the damage to date was done in the last 70 years, and yes, as counterintuitive as it may seem, puny little humans are doing it, and it's going to get much, much worse unless we act soon. Consensus of opinion is irrelevant to science because reality is often counterintuitive — just try studying quantum mechanics.

Fortunately Kernen wasn't around when scientists were warning that puny little humans were destroying the Earth's protective ozone layer. Otherwise we might never have banned chlorofluorocarbons in time.

Consensus of opinion is also dismissed as groupthink. In a December article ignorantly titled "The Science of Gore's Nobel: What If Everyone Believes in Global Warmism Only Because Everyone Believes in Global Warmism?" Holman W. Jenkins Jr. of the Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote:

What if the heads being counted to certify an alleged "consensus" arrived at their positions by counting heads?
It may seem strange that scientists would participate in such a phenomenon. It shouldn't. Scientists are human; they do not wait for proof. Many devote their professional lives to seeking evidence for hypotheses, especially well-funded hypotheses, they've chosen to believe.

Less surprising is the readiness of many prominent journalists to embrace the role of enforcer of an orthodoxy simply because it is the orthodoxy. For them, a consensus apparently suffices as proof of itself.

How sad that the WSJ and CNBC have so little conception of what science really is, especially since scientific advances drive so much of the economy. If that's what Jenkins thinks science is, one would assume he is equally skeptical of flossing, antibiotics and even boarding an airplane.

(Note to WSJ: One reason science works is that a lot of scientists devote their whole lives to overturning whatever is the current hypothesis — if it can be overturned. That's how you become famous and remembered by history, like Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin and Einstein.)

In fact, science doesn't work by consensus of opinion. Science is in many respects the exact opposite of decision by consensus. General opinion at one point might have been that the sun goes around the Earth, or that time was an absolute quantity, but scientific theory supported by observations overturned that flawed worldview.

One of the most serious results of the overuse of the term "consensus" in the public discussion of global warming is that it creates a simple strategy for doubters to confuse the public, the press and politicians: Simply come up with as long a list as you can of scientists who dispute the theory. After all, such disagreement is prima facie proof that no consensus of opinion exists.

So we end up with the absurd but pointless spectacle of the leading denier in the U.S. Senate, James Inhofe, R-Okla., who recently put out a list of more than 400 names of supposedly "prominent scientists" who supposedly "recently voiced significant objections to major aspects of the so-called 'consensus' on man-made global warming."

As it turned out, the list is both padded and laughable, containing the opinions of TV weathermen, economists, a bunch of non-prominent scientists who aren't climate experts, and, perhaps surprisingly, even a number of people who actually believe in the consensus.

But in any case, nothing could be more irrelevant to climate science than the opinion of people on the list such as Weather Channel founder John Coleman or famed inventor Ray Kurzweil (who actually does "think global warming is real"). Or, for that matter, my opinion — even though I researched a Ph.D. thesis at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography on physical oceanography in the Greenland Sea.

What matters is scientific findings — data, not opinions. The IPCC relies on the peer-reviewed scientific literature for its conclusions, which must meet the rigorous requirements of the scientific method and which are inevitably scrutinized by others seeking to disprove that work. That is why I cite and link to as much research as is possible, hundreds of studies in the case of this article. Opinions are irrelevant.

A good example of how scientific evidence drives our understanding concerns how we know that humans are the dominant cause of global warming. This is, of course, the deniers' favorite topic. Since it is increasingly obvious that the climate is changing and the planet is warming, the remaining deniers have coalesced to defend their Alamo — that human emissions aren't the cause of recent climate change and therefore that reducing those emissions is pointless.

Last year, longtime Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn wrote, "There is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any measurable contribution to the world's present warming trend. The greenhouse fearmongers rely entirely on unverified, crudely oversimplified computer models to finger mankind's sinful contribution."

In fact, the evidence is amazingly strong. Moreover, if the relatively complex climate models are oversimplified in any respect, it is by omitting amplifying feedbacks and other factors that suggest human-caused climate change will be worse than is widely realized.

The IPCC concluded last year: "Greenhouse gas forcing has very likely (>90 percent) caused most of the observed global warming over the last 50 years. This conclusion takes into account … the possibility that the response to solar forcing could be underestimated by climate models."

Scientists have come to understand that "forcings" (natural and human-made) explain most of the changes in our climate and temperature both in recent decades and over the past millions of years. The primary human-made forcings are the heat-trapping greenhouse gases we generate, particularly carbon dioxide from burning coal, oil and natural gas. The natural forcings include fluctuations in the intensity of sunlight (which can increase or decrease warming), and major volcanoes that inject huge volumes of gases and aerosol particles into the stratosphere (which tend to block sunlight and cause cooling).

A 2002 study by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences warned, "Abrupt climate changes were especially common when the climate system was being forced to change most rapidly." The rapidly growing greenhouse warming we ourselves are causing today thus increases the chances for "large, abrupt and unwelcome regional or global climatic events."

Over and over again, scientists have demonstrated that observed changes in the climate in recent decades can only be explained by taking into account the observed combination of human and natural forcings. Natural forcings alone just don't explain what is happening to this planet.

For instance, in April 2005, one of the nation's top climate scientists, NASA's James Hansen, led a team of scientists that made "precise measurements of increasing ocean heat content over the past 10 years," which revealed that the Earth is absorbing far more heat than it is emitting to space, confirming what earlier computer models had shown about warming. Hansen called this energy imbalance the "smoking gun" of climate change, and said, "There can no longer be genuine doubt that human-made gases are the dominant cause of observed warming."

Another 2005 study, led by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, compared actual ocean temperature data from the surface down to hundreds of meters (in the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian oceans) with climate models and concluded:

A warming signal has penetrated into the world's oceans over the past 40 years. The signal is complex, with a vertical structure that varies widely by ocean; it cannot be explained by natural internal climate variability or solar and volcanic forcing, but is well simulated by two anthropogenically [human-caused] forced climate models. We conclude that it is of human origin, a conclusion robust to observational sampling and model differences.
Such studies are also done for many other observations: land-based temperature rise, atmospheric temperature rise, sea level rise, arctic ice melt, inland glacier melt, Greeland and Antarctic ice sheet melt, expansion of the tropics (desertification) and changes in precipitation. Studies compare every testable prediction from climate change theory and models (and suggested by paleoclimate research) to actual observations.

How many studies? Well, the IPCC's definitive treatment of the subject, "Understanding and Attributing Climate Change," has 11 full pages of references, some 500 peer-reviewed studies. This is not a consensus of opinion. It is what scientific research and actual observations reveal.

Ignoring all the evidence, doubters and deniers keep asserting that the cause of global warming isn't human emissions, but is instead natural forcings, primarily the sun. Last year, brief presidential candidate Fred Thompson commented on claims that planets like Mars were supposedly also warming — an idea debunked by RealClimate. Thompson said sarcastically:

I wonder what all those planets, dwarf planets and moons in our SOLAR system have in common. Hmmmm. SOLAR system. Hmmmm. Solar? I wonder. Nah, I guess we shouldn't even be talking about this. The science is absolutely decided. There's a consensus. Ask Galileo.
The view that the sun is the source of observed global warming seems credible mainly to people who are open to believing that the entire scientific community has somehow, over a period of several decades, failed to adequately study, analyze and understand the most visible influence on the Earth's temperature. Such people typically cannot be influenced by the results of actual research and observations. Those who can should visit Skeptical Science, which discusses deniers' favorite arguments. In one discussion, the site explains that the "study most quoted by skeptics actually concluded the sun can't be causing global warming." Doh!

And that brings us to a recent study by the Proceedings of the Royal Society, which examined "all the trends in the Sun that could have had an influence on the Earth's climate," such as sunlight intensity and cosmic rays. The study found that in the past 20 years, all of those trends "have been in the opposite direction to that required to explain the observed rise in global mean temperatures."

Those trying to prove the sun is the sole cause of warming have a double challenge. First they would have to show us a mechanism that demonstrates how the sun explains recent warming, even though the data shows solar activity has been declining recently. (In the past, increased warming was associated with an increase in solar activity). They would also have to find an additional mechanism that is counteracting the well-understood warming caused by rising emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases. The doubters have done neither.

But then the doubters aren't interested in things like data and observations and peer-reviewed research. If they were, why would they keep pointing out that, historically, global temperature rise precedes a rise in carbon dioxide emissions by a few hundred years — as if that were a reason to cast doubt on the impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases? Rep. Joe Barton said to Al Gore:

I have an article from Science magazine that explains a rise in CO2 concentrations actually lagged temperature by 200 to 1000 years. CO2 levels went up after the temperature rose. Temperature appears to drive CO2, not vice versa. You're not just off a little. You're totally wrong.
Yes, historically, glacial periods appear to end with an initial warming started by changes in the Earth's orbit around the sun. This in turn leads to increases in carbon dioxide (and methane), which then accelerate the warming, which increases the emissions, which increases the warming. That amplifying feedback in the global carbon cycle is what drives the global temperature to change so fast.

But while this fact seems to make doubters less worried about the impact of human emissions, it makes most scientists more worried. As famed climatologist Wallace Broecker wrote in Nature in 1995:

The paleoclimate record shouts out to us that, far from being self-stabilizing, the Earth's climate system is an ornery beast which overreacts even to small nudges.
That is, you need a trigger to start the process of rapid climate change. Historically, that has been orbital changes, or sometimes, massive natural releases of greenhouse gases.

Now humans have interrupted and overwhelmed the natural process of climate change. Thanks to humans, carbon dioxide levels are higher than they have been for millions of years. Even more worrisome, carbon dioxide emissions are rising 200 times faster than at any time in the last 650,000 years.

If the "Earth's climate system is an ornery beast which overreacts to even small nudges," what will happen to people foolish enough to keep punching it in the face?

That brings us to another problem with the word "consensus." It can mean "unanimity" or "the judgment arrived at by most of those concerned." Many, if not most, people hear the second meaning: "consensus" as majority opinion.

The scientific consensus most people are familiar with is the IPCC's "Summary for Policymakers" reports. But those aren't a majority opinion. Government representatives participate in a line-by-line review and revision of these summaries. So China, Saudi Arabia and that hotbed of denialism — the Bush administration — get to veto anything they don't like. The deniers call this "politicized science," suggesting the process turns the IPCC summaries into some sort of unscientific exaggeration. In fact, the reverse is true. The net result is unanimous agreement on a conservative or watered-down document. You could argue that rather than majority rules, this is "minority rules."

Last April, in an article titled "Conservative Climate," Scientific American noted that objections by Saudi Arabia and China led the IPCC to remove a sentence stating that the impact of human greenhouse gas emissions on the Earth's recent warming is five times greater than that of the sun. In fact, lead author Piers Forster of the University of Leeds in England said, "The difference is really a factor of 10."

How decent of the IPCC not to smash the last hope of deniers like Fred Thompson, whose irrational sun worshiping allows them to ignore the overwhelming evidence that human emissions are the dominant cause of climate change.

How else does the IPCC lowball future impacts? The 2007 report projects sea level rise this century of 7 to 23 inches. Yet the IPCC itself stated that "models [of sea level rise] used to date do not include uncertainties in climate-carbon cycle feedbacks nor do they include the full effect of changes in ice sheet flow."

That is, since no existing climate models fully account for the kinds of feedbacks we are now witnessing in Greenland and Antarctica, such as dynamic acceleration of ice sheet disintegration or greenhouse gases released by melting tundra, the IPCC is forced to ignore those realities. The result is that compared to the "consensus" of the IPCC, the ice sheets appear to be shrinking "100 years ahead of schedule," as Penn State climatologist Richard Alley put it in March 2006

According to both the 2001 and 2007 IPCC reports, neither Greenland nor Antarctica should lose significant mass by 2100. They both already are. Here again, the conservative nature of the IPCC process puts it at odds with observed empirical realities that are the basis of all science.

It's no surprise then that three scientific studies released in the past year — too late for inclusion by the IPCC — argue that based on historical data and recent observations, sea level rise this century will be much higher than the IPCC reports, up to 5 feet or more. Even scarier, the rate of sea level rise in 2100 might be greater than 6 inches a decade!

And it's no surprise at all that sea-level rise from 1993 and 2006 — 1.3 inches per decade as measured by satellites — has been higher than the IPCC climate models predicted.

The deniers are simply wrong when they claim that the IPCC has overestimated either current or future warming impacts. As many other recent observations reveal, the IPCC has been underestimating those impacts.

Since 2000, carbon dioxide emissions have grown faster than any IPCC model had projected.
The temperature rise from 1990 to 2005 — 0.33°C — was "near the top end of the range" of IPCC climate model predictions.
"The recent [Arctic] sea-ice retreat is larger than in any of the (19) IPCC [climate] models" — and that was a Norwegian expert in 2005. Since then, the Arctic retreat has stunned scientists by accelerating, losing an area equal to Texas and California just last summer.
"The unexpectedly rapid expansion of the tropical belt constitutes yet another signal that climate change is occurring sooner than expected," noted one climate researcher in December.
This last point, though little remarked on in the media, should be as worrisome as the unexpectedly rapid melting of the ice sheets. As a recent study led by NOAA noted, "A poleward expansion of the tropics is likely to bring even drier conditions to" the U.S. Southwest, Mexico, Australia and parts of Africa and South America. Also: "An increase in the width of the tropics could bring an increase in the area affected by tropical storms." And finally: "An expansion of tropical pathogens and their insect vectors is almost certainly sure to follow the expansion of tropical zones."

Why are recent observations on the high side of model projections? First, as noted, most climate models used by the IPCC omit key amplifying feedbacks in the carbon cycle. Second, it was widely thought that increased human carbon dioxide emissions would be partly offset by more trees and other vegetation. But increases in droughts and wildfires — both predicted by global warming theory — seem to have negated that. Third, the ocean — one of the largest sinks for carbon dioxide — seems to be saturating decades earlier than the models had projected.

The result, as a number of studies have shown, is that the sensitivity of the world's climate to human emissions of greenhouse gases is no doubt much higher than the sensitivity used in most IPCC models. NASA's Hansen argued in a paper last year that the climate ultimately has twice the sensitivity used in IPCC models.

The bottom line is that recent observations and research make clear the planet almost certainly faces a greater and more imminent threat than is laid out in the IPCC reports. That's why climate scientists are so desperate. That's why they keep begging for immediate action. And that's why the "consensus on global warming" is a phrase that should be forever retired from the climate debate.

– By Joseph Romm

Comment by JDBishop5 | March 1, 2008

JDBishop,

You call my article silly, presumably because it failed to convince you AGW theory is, in any degree, bogus. More likely you came to this debate already convinced and with a mission of debunking anything we ‘deniers’ have to say. However, if you read my statement of purpose at the start of the article, you know I never set out to settle this argument because it is not yet one that can be settled by anyone. If anything, my purpose is to stimulate debate; not end it. You make some good points and some bad ones, and are as guilty as the rest of us in making statements exceeding proof.

For example, you are correct that ice core data indicate CO2 levels may be at an all time high. However, that data disagrees with geological and tree data indicating there have been periods of higher CO2. The one distinct advantage the ice cores have is they represent data that is far older than trees and more coherent than rock samples. Yet, trees may prove the better barometer in near-time. Most of the geological data tends to be more jumbled than ice cores, making it harder to pin down exact sequence when CO2 was higher. However, that does not invalidate the point that, in at least some of these samples and at some point in the geologic past as expressed in those samples, CO2 almost certainly was higher than it is today. The ice cores are being taken to prove a negative, but the rocks and trees say otherwise. Taken together all this may tell us is that CO2 entrapment in these various deposits may depend on mechanisms besides atmospheric CO2 content, especially the ice cores. Assume all these samples were exposed to the same CO2 levels. It stands to reason that some of them captured CO2 more efficiently and some of them less. In that case, the ones indicating higher levels are the more probably accurate as they cannot capture CO2 that is not there. The only way to test for that is to wait to see if the known (and assumed higher) CO2 content of today produces higher tree, rock, and ice CO2 several hundred years into our future. In any case, this just underscores my point the science isn’t mature enough to give a definitive answer and is constantly revising.

I agree with you that the lag of CO2 with respect to temperature in the past does not preclude it acting as a positive feedback mechanism now. What I dispute is it has been in any manner proven as powerful a determinant as portrayed. The modelers make it one simply because it is the only significant candidate they can actually model with the tools they have available, but only in terms of how much CO2 is and perhaps will be in the atmosphere. What they haven’t been able to show is it has driven global temperature in the near past. They studiously ignore the sun as a better candidate for this primarily because we don’t have enough information or tools with which to model the sun; an effort many times more challenging than modeling our atmosphere. I have no doubt if they had the tools and data to do that, CO2 would be quickly discarded as just too uninteresting. Thus, our science sometimes takes its direction from what we are capable more than what we can hypothesize.

The bottom line is skeptics don’t have to disprove AGW – you have to prove it. You demand we turn our world on its head to satisfy your fear. It is you who insist we pay whatever it takes and put limits on our activities on the flimsiest of evidence. So it is you who are going to have to convince us of the need. All we have to prove is AGW theory is riddled with questions that haven’t been answered and hijacked by people with agendas other than just science.

And, I do study this science very closely and have been following it now for two decades. As you can see above, I give it credit where credit is due. As an engineer and long-time science-junkie I have the deepest respect for real-science. However, there is a difference between respecting science and worshipping it, between skeptical inquiry and blind obedience. I do not surrender my objectivity to someone more credentialed just because climate happens to be his specialty, I require proof. Or at least enough of it that enduring those costs make sense.

Comment by Bob Stapler | March 1, 2008

I have a low opinion of those who offer no argument of their own but quote the work o fothers at great length. It seems that the forum poster cannot think for his/herself and wants to present an "argument by proxy".

Joseph Romm's article, which is quoted above, says that consensus is irrelevant in science. That's true and anyway as I showed earlier there is no demonstrable consensus among scientists.

Romm also says "The IPCC concluded last year: 'Greenhouse gas forcing has very likely (>90 percent) caused most of the observed global warming over the last 50 years. This conclusion takes into account … the possibility that the response to solar forcing could be underestimated by climate models.' " As I also noted above, the evidence for that claim is woeful.

Anecdotal evidence of warming is not an issue, it's the attribution to human activities that is unsupported. There is very solid case for natural climate forces to be responsible for warming since at least 1950. Why would the IPCC be reluctant to admit that? One reason might be that its charter directs it to assess the risk, impacts and mitigations with respect to "human-induced climate change".

In other words the IPCC was biased from the start, which of course means that it has gathered other scientist of similar thinking into what is essentially a government-funded lobby group that tells governments what to do. That's what you get for buying in to UN organisations! More about the IPCC's failings at http://mclean.ch/climate/IPCC.htm .

I have no time to respond to every comment in Romm's article but his comments about sea level caught my eye. "And it’s no surprise at all that sea-level rise from 1993 and 2006 — 1.3 inches per decade as measured by satellites — has been higher than the IPCC climate models predicted."

That's odd. The IPCC Third Assessment Report (2001) said there had been no change but the Fourth says a sudden jump from 1993, which was when the satellite-based measurement began . Why did the TAR not mention the change from 1993? Maybe it's because the historical sea level data was poor. It was only after 2001 that a method was developed for estimating(!) historical sea levels. This involves correlating recent measured sea level with weather observations and then that relationship with historical weather observations to estimate the sea level.

I can find no information to suggest that the method is accurate but I am very suspicious about its ability to deal with sea level change due to large oscillations (e.g. west and east Pacific during La Nina and El Nino) and it is clear that the method cannot handle the vertical movement of the measurement equipment due to land masses rising and falling, or changes due to marine construction work.

In more recent times I question the accuracy of the satellite-based measuring because it is wide beam microwave. It is calibrated mainly against small islands in the mid Pacific but how well does it perform with sea level between islands of greater size and height, and how well across the entire range of temperatures? The altitude of the satellite must be determined to one part in a billion. That altitude will change due to the gravitational attraction of the mass of water beneath it, but that's the very thing being measured.

JDBishop5 said "Every time we refine our data with better evidence, the problem is shown to be much worse than we previously thought."

My problem is that every time I look closely at an argument for man-made warming I find that one or more of the data, assumptions and techniques are highly suspect and that the evidence supporting the argument in question is much weaker than previously thought.

Comment by John McL | March 1, 2008

"The bottom line is skeptics don’t have to disprove AGW – you have to prove it. You demand we turn our world on its head to satisfy your fear. It is you who insist we pay whatever it takes and put limits on our activities on the flimsiest of evidence. "

You should get out more! Visit the Arctic, Antarctic, at least 25 major glaciers (both mountainous and coastal), and spend some extended time with some of us here in China. Unless you are an idiot, which you clearly are not, you will need no more proof. Apparently you are one of those who cannot accept facts unless you see them for yourself. The proof you demand is all about you, and easily found.

I wonder if you have calculated the 'cost' of your being so slow to understand what is going on? Again I ask, do you have grandchildren? Do you love them? Depending on where you live, the 'cost' may very well include the deaths of those grandchildren as it is clearly now demanding, and will continue to demand, the deaths of growing multitudes worldwide.

A personal story and experience of mine may bring some of this home. In the summer of 1985 I landed a de Havilland Beaver at the foot of the Columbia Glacier in Prince William Sound, Alaska and gathered a few small pieces of floating ice for our group's cocktails. Today the foot of that glacier is over 14 kilometers back up its valley. Such change is outrageously rapid, and is occurring without significant exception globally.

Recently the world price of cereals went up by 25% in one day. Cereal, rice, and wheat production has been dropping throughout the world every year for a long time. The ice and snow burden of the Himalayas will lose at least 80% of its mass during the next 22 years. Contemplate the 'cost' of that hard data for a moment.

Comment by JDBishop5 | March 1, 2008

"My problem is that every time I look closely at an argument for man-made warming I find that one or more of the data, assumptions and techniques are highly suspect and that the evidence supporting the argument in question is much weaker than previously thought."

*** Exactly! We have a scientific "consensus" based on "assumptions" with "data" that, at best, spans a few decades, that purports to tell us with certainty that man is responsible for global climate change (ice age or global warming, take your pick).

Even completely reliable data devoid of dubious assumptions/modeling that spans several centuries is a blink of an eye in geological terms. And yet, like the arguments in the 1970s that we can't wait to act against the coming ice age, we're told today that we can't wait to act against the coming global warming. Only, nature isn't completely cooperating with the year-to-year anecdotal observations upon which we all base our "knowledge", so now we just talk about "climate change" so either cooling or heating will support these assumptions.

Once again I refer you to the article I wrote 18 months ago in the IC archives on “An Even More Inconvenient Truth” that talks about the political agendas behind many of these assumptions.

But hey, why let common sense get in the way of action? Let’s all get together and do something NOW, because, you know, it will show we all really really really care about things, even if our actions have no practical impact other than to screw up people’s lives. At least Al Gore won’t think we’re bad people.

Comment by Phillip Ellis Jackson | March 1, 2008

"Recently the world price of cereals went up by 25% in one day."

*** So, for 100 years of daily, relentless (except for those years when it didn't rise) "global warming", the increase in world temperature (assuming it could be accurately measured world-wide before the space age) had NO REAL EFFECT on cereal prices, then WAMMO, in ONE DAY it went up by 25% due to GLOBAL WARMING!!!

I'm convinced! And here I thought that biofuels were impacting world food prices. Silly me.

Comment by Phillip Ellis Jackson | March 1, 2008

"A personal story and experience of mine may bring some of this home."

*** This is why it's pointless to discuss GW with the True Believers. Anyone who would use "personal experience" to prove or disprove climate change has no friggin idea of what the issue is all about. Look at the edge of a glacier and see it retreat. It must be melting. Forget that the ice may have thickened elsewhere. Same amount of ice, maybe even more, just distributed differently.

But hey, when science is all about "consensus", then it's just the accumulation of opinions that matter. If we think it's melting, and enough people agree, it MUST be melting. No further investigation, critical thought, or study is necessary.

Proponents of man-made global warming believe this as a matter of faith. And like any religious belief, objective thought, actual facts (vs. "consensus" opinions), are irrelevant to the True Believers.

Comment by Phillip Ellis Jackson | March 1, 2008

Biofuels are impacting world food prices, and they require much more energy to produce than they provide.

So, also, is the global shortage of water which is dramatically affecting cereal production and will soon nearly eliminate agriculture in the "breadbasket" of China, Southeast Asia, and India. That is the major food supply for nearly 3 billion people. The shortage of water, and the changing weather patterns we are seeing world wide, are, arguably, the result of disruptions in atmospheric circulation patterns caused by the melting and disappearance of Arctic Ocean ice.

The assertion above that 'Arctic ice is back' is not supported by very recent satellite data available from the Ice Center in Colorado, free, for the asking.

http://nsidc.org/news/press/2007_seaiceminimum/20071001_pressrelease.html

In fact, September 2007 measurements revealed a shocking loss of about 20% of the ice cap between 2005 and the same period two years later. Perhaps some of you think NSIDC has a political agenda? Maybe they have doctored the data?

This discussion has become tedious as many participants here seem ready to ascribe political motivations to those with whom they disagree. Additionally, few of you seem willing to investigate the actual data. None, for example, have referenced the European Antarctic Ice Core Records I mentioned above some days ago. In the face of that 650,000 year library of information, several of you prattle on about the scientific data containing only a brief 'snap shot.' It would be illuminating for several of you to venture on to an accredited campus, and attend regular lectures for several years.

Comment by JDBishop5 | March 1, 2008

"Once again I refer you to the article I wrote 18 months ago in the IC archives on “An Even More Inconvenient Truth” that talks about the political agendas behind many of these assumptions."

OK. I've read it carefully.

I must tell you in all honesty. You article has no scientific merit whatever and would earn you a ticket out of any graduate program I can think of. In fact, it is an intellectual disgrace. I would give you an F in even my most introductory classes, and wonder how you had gotten past the admissions process. You have pasted together a collection of smart remarks and statements of feeling and have not supported your thesis, whatever that may be, with any data at all.

It is authentic right wing gibberish. You display a modicum of intelligence. Abandon your glands and go to school.

Comment by JDBishop5 | March 2, 2008

I have commented before, but will do so for the benefit of JDBishop5 who seems to be new to the party here, that among the MANY dubious "facts" of AGW is this notion that the models used to create these predictions are robust, proven, and beyond questioning. In other words, as long as the data input to the models is trustworthy, then the output of these models is rock solid and represents an irrefutable foundation upon which to create public policy.

Baloney.

JDBishop5, if you have an extensive background in mathematical modeling including boundary condition assumptions, model sensitivity, model predictive capacity and variability, and all the other aspects that comprise the discpline of building robust models, then I'm all ears. But until then, even if you can demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that all of the variables that are used as inputs to our climate models are accurate to within a few parts per thousand, it really doesn't matter. The models give results that are barely to be believed within an order of magnitude. Indeed, the models cannot even reliably take HISTORICAL data and accurately predict HISTORICAL results. For example, they can't even take data from 1900-1950 and predict with a high degree of certainty the temperatures in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. In plain English, the models can't give the right answer even when we already know the answer they should arrive at. This is known as model validation and the climate models can't even pass that test.

The industries I work in (hydrocarbon processing) are pretty unforgiving when it comes to the models they used for advanced predictive control: if your process control model can't validate itself using historical data, let alone predicting current conditions, you can pack your bags. Nobody is going to entrust a one-million-dollar-per-day refinery to you.

Now, remind me again why would I start radically impacting a global economy worth trillions based on a half-baked climate model?

Not so long ago we had an actual climate scientist (username Paul_Bovis) comment on another AGW essay posted here on IC.

http://www.intellectualconservative.com/2007/11/16/how-to-increase-your-carbon-footprint/

Interestingly, Mr. Bovis expressed significant skepticism as well, and confirmed what we have all heard anecdotally; namely, that it is not "fashionable" for a climate scientist to express doubt in AGW. Consequently, this myth of "consensus" hasn't been bolstered by a legitimately convinced majority…it has been bolstered by those within the climate sciences who are legitimately afraid to speak up for CL (Career Limiting) reasons.

If the only ones speaking out are AGW proponents - because the rest are afraid for what it will mean to their career - then of course there will be an "apparent" concensus. Kind of like a Soviet election.

Comment by Steve Sabin | March 2, 2008

Steve Saban,

We may never know which of us has the superior understanding of climate modeling.

As you say, and is surely obvious, climate modeling does not rise to the standard of that we have available for the controlled chemical reaction proceeding within a refinery where inputs are measured with precision.

However, to answer you question, "Now, remind me again why would I start radically impacting a global economy worth trillions based on a half-baked climate model?"

It is because as we tighten our admittedly inadequate initial predictive capabilities regarding this problem, we continue to discover that our estimates were incorrect on the conservative side. Thus, the cost of taking your approach, "wait and see," seems to be the starvation death of billions of people, and a continued acceleration of what we now know to be the most rapid extinction of species in the world's history.

Of course, I am asking you to find other work. Aye, there's the rub.

Comment by JDBishop5 | March 2, 2008

Bishop — Reread my article again, more carefully. It's about how POLITICAL AGENDAS distort the MAN MADE GLOBAL WARMING DEBATE!

Since you’ve questioned my ability to provide this analysis, here are my credentials: I have a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Chicago, a Masters Degree in public policy from the State University of New York at Albany (full scholarship — room, board, and tuition), and a BA from SUNY Albany (graduating Magna Cum Laude). I’ve taught graduate level courses on public policy at DePaul University and the University of Chicago. I’ve worked in Washington DC for the top political firm (Cassidy and Associates), reporting to Bob Beckel who ran Walter Mondale’s campaign, Jimmy Carter’s Press Secretary, a former member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, several former congressmen of both political parties, and two former cabinet officers. I was the primary staff support for the final negotiations of an international treaty, dealing directly with individuals like John Negroponte. I also ran the government affairs office of a Trade Association for 11 years, dealing with state as well as national issues. I’ve been personally briefed on legislation by the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and gave expert testimony before a Federal Judge on a civil rights case. I was staff to a US congressman during his election campaign (I wrote his speeches and developed his issues). I was the chief of staff to the committee that re-wrote the charter for the City of Dallas. I was Executive Director of 6 public-private sector management studies of governmental institutions that documented $125 million in taxpayer savings, certified by a Big 8 accounting firm. For this I was invited to the White House twice to receive personal recognition from two different Presidents of the United States, whose staff used my program to help develop a national template for other communities to follow.

This is the education and experience I draw upon to frame my judgments. Now kindly illuminate us as to YOUR credentials. For the record, just exactly what is your training/background in global climatology that allows you to speak with authority on this subject anyway, particularly from the point of confusing personal observations with scientific analysis?

Oh, and when you do, kindly tell us all why you know more about this subject than the following people:

• Sallie Baliunas, astronomer, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics: “[T]he recent warming trend in the surface temperature record cannot be caused by the increase of human-made greenhouse gases in the air.” Baliunas and Soon wrote that “there is no reliable evidence for increased severity or frequency of storms, droughts, or floods that can be related to the air’s increased greenhouse gas content.”

• Reid Bryson, emeritus professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison: “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.”

• Robert M. Carter, geologist, researcher at the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Australia: “The essence of the issue is this. Climate changes naturally all the time, partly in predictable cycles, and partly in unpredictable shorter rhythms and rapid episodic shifts, some of the causes of which remain unknown.”

• George V. Chilingar, Professor of Civil and Petroleum Engineering at the University of Southern California: “The authors identify and describe the following global forces of nature driving the Earth’s climate: (1) solar radiation …, (2) outgassing as a major supplier of gases to the World Ocean and the atmosphere, and, possibly, (3) microbial activities … . The writers provide quantitative estimates of the scope and extent of their corresponding effects on the Earth’s climate [and] show that the human-induced climatic changes are negligible.”

• Ian Clark, hydrogeologist, professor, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa: “That portion of the scientific community that attributes climate warming to CO2 relies on the hypothesis that increasing CO2, which is in fact a minor greenhouse gas, triggers a much larger water vapour response to warm the atmosphere. This mechanism has never been tested scientifically beyond the mathematical models that predict extensive warming, and are confounded by the complexity of cloud formation - which has a cooling effect. … We know that [the sun] was responsible for climate change in the past, and so is clearly going to play the lead role in present and future climate change. And interestingly… solar activity has recently begun a downward cycle.”

• Don Easterbrook, emeritus professor of geology, Western Washington University: “global warming since 1900 could well have happened without any effect of CO2. If the cycles continue as in the past, the current warm cycle should end soon and global temperatures should cool slightly until about 2035″

• William M. Gray, Professor of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University: “This small warming is likely a result of the natural alterations in global ocean currents which are driven by ocean salinity variations. Ocean circulation variations are as yet little understood. Human kind has little or nothing to do with the recent temperature changes. We are not that influential.” “I am of the opinion that [global warming] is one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American people.” “So many people have a vested interest in this global-warming thing—all these big labs and research and stuff. The idea is to frighten the public, to get money to study it more.”

• George Kukla, retired Professor of Climatology at Columbia University and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said in an interview: “What I think is this: Man is responsible for a PART of global warming. MOST of it is still natural.”

• David Legates, associate professor of geography and director of the Center for Climatic Research, University of Delaware: “About half of the warming during the 20th century occurred prior to the 1940s, and natural variability accounts for all or nearly all of the warming.”

• Marcel Leroux, former Professor of Climatology, Université Jean Moulin: “The possible causes, then, of climate change are: well-established orbital parameters on the palaeoclimatic scale, … solar activity, …; volcanism …; and far at the rear, the greenhouse effect, and in particular that caused by water vapor, the extent of its influence being unknown. These factors are working together all the time, and it seems difficult to unravel the relative importance of their respective influences upon climatic evolution. Equally, it is tendentious to highlight the anthropic factor, which is, clearly, the least credible among all those previously mentioned.”

• Tad Murty, oceanographer; adjunct professor, Departments of Civil Engineering and Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa: global warming “is the biggest scientific hoax being perpetrated on humanity. There is no global warming due to human anthropogenic activities. The atmosphere hasn’t changed much in 280 million years, and there have always been cycles of warming and cooling. The Cretaceous period was the warmest on earth. You could have grown tomatoes at the North Pole”

• Tim Patterson, paleoclimatologist and Professor of Geology at Carleton University in Canada: “There is no meaningful correlation between CO2 levels and Earth’s temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO2 levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years. On the basis of this evidence, how could anyone still believe that the recent relatively small increase in CO2 levels would be the major cause of the past century’s modest warming?”

• Ian Plimer, Professor of Mining Geology, The University of Adelaide: “We only have to have one volcano burping and we have changed the whole planetary climate… It looks as if carbon dioxide actually follows climate change rather than drives it”.

• Frederick Seitz, retired, former solid-state physicist, former president of the National Academy of Sciences: “So we see that the scientific facts indicate that all the temperature changes observed in the last 100 years were largely natural changes and were not caused by carbon dioxide produced in human activities.”

• Nir Shaviv, astrophysicist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: “[T]he truth is probably somewhere in between [the common view and that of skeptics], with natural causes probably being more important over the past century, whereas anthropogenic causes will probably be more dominant over the next century. … [A]bout 2/3’s (give or take a third or so) of the warming [over the past century] should be attributed to increased solar activity and the remaining to anthropogenic causes.” His opinion is based on some proxies of solar activity over the past few centuries.

• Fred Singer, Professor emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia: “The greenhouse effect is real. However, the effect is minute, insignificant, and very difficult to detect.” “It’s not automatically true that warming is bad, I happen to believe that warming is good, and so do many economists.”

• Willie Soon, astrophysicist, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics: “[T]here’s increasingly strong evidence that previous research conclusions, including those of the United Nations and the United States government concerning 20th century warming, may have been biased by underestimation of natural climate variations. The bottom line is that if these variations are indeed proven true, then, yes, natural climate fluctuations could be a dominant factor in the recent warming. In other words, natural factors could be more important than previously assumed.”

• Philip Stott, professor emeritus of biogeography at the University of London: “…the myth is starting to implode. … Serious new research at The Max Planck Institute has indicated that the sun is a far more significant factor…”

• Henrik Svensmark, Danish National Space Center: “Our team … has discovered that the relatively few cosmic rays that reach sea-level play a big part in the everyday weather. They help to make low-level clouds, which largely regulate the Earth’s surface temperature. During the 20th Century the influx of cosmic rays decreased and the resulting reduction of cloudiness allowed the world to warm up. … most of the warming during the 20th Century can be explained by a reduction in low cloud cover.”

• Jan Veizer, environmental geochemist, Professor Emeritus from University of Ottawa: “At this stage, two scenarios of potential human impact on climate appear feasible: (1) the standard IPCC model …, and (2) the alternative model that argues for celestial phenomena as the principal climate driver. … Models and empirical observations are both indispensable tools of science, yet when discrepancies arise, observations should carry greater weight than theory. If so, the multitude of empirical observations favours celestial phenomena as the most important driver of terrestrial climate on most time scales, but time will be the final judge.”

Scientists in the following section conclude it is too early to ascribe any principal cause to the observed rising temperatures, man-made or natural.

• Syun-Ichi Akasofu, retired professor of geophysics and Director of the International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska Fairbanks: “[T]he method of study adopted by the International Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) is fundamentally flawed, resulting in a baseless conclusion: Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations. Contrary to this statement …, there is so far no definitive evidence that ‘most’ of the present warming is due to the greenhouse effect. … [The IPCC] should have recognized that the range of observed natural changes should not be ignored, and thus their conclusion should be very tentative. The term ‘most’ in their conclusion is baseless.”

• Claude Allègre, geochemist, Institute of Geophysics (Paris): “The increase in the CO2 content of the atmosphere is an observed fact and mankind is most certainly responsible. In the long term, this increase will without doubt become harmful, but its exact role in the climate is less clear. Various parameters appear more important than CO2. Consider the water cycle and formation of various types of clouds, and the complex effects of industrial or agricultural dust. Or fluctuations of the intensity of the solar radiation on annual and century scale, which seem better correlated with heating effects than the variations of CO2 content.”

• Robert C. Balling, Jr., a professor of geography at Arizona State University: “[I]t is very likely that the recent upward trend [in global surface temperature] is very real and that the upward signal is greater than any noise introduced from uncertainties in the record. However, the general error is most likely to be in the warming direction, with a maximum possible (though unlikely) value of 0.3 °C. … At this moment in time we know only that: (1) Global surface temperatures have risen in recent decades. (2) Mid-tropospheric temperatures have warmed little over the same period. (3) This difference is not consistent with predictions from numerical climate models.”

• John Christy, professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, contributor to several IPCC reports “I’m sure the majority (but not all) of my IPCC colleagues cringe when I say this, but I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see. Rather, I see a reliance on climate models (useful but never “proof”) and the coincidence that changes in carbon dioxide and global temperatures have loose similarity over time.”

• William R. Cotton, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Colorado State University said in a presentation, “It is an open question if human produced changes in climate are large enough to be detected from the noise of the natural variability of the climate system.”

• Chris de Freitas, Associate Professor, School of Geography, Geology and Environmental Science, University of Auckland: “There is evidence of global warming. … But warming does not confirm that carbon dioxide is causing it. Climate is always warming or cooling. There are natural variability theories of warming. To support the argument that carbon dioxide is causing it, the evidence would have to distinguish between human-caused and natural warming. This has not been done.”

• David Deming, geology professor at the University of Oklahoma: “The amount of climatic warming that has taken place in the past 150 years is poorly constrained, and its cause–human or natural–is unknown. There is no sound scientific basis for predicting future climate change with any degree of certainty. If the climate does warm, it is likely to be beneficial to humanity rather than harmful. In my opinion, it would be foolish to establish national energy policy on the basis of misinformation and irrational hysteria.”

• Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and member of the National Academy of Sciences: “We are quite confident (1) that global mean temperature is about 0.5 °C higher than it was a century ago; (2) that atmospheric levels of CO2 have risen over the past two centuries; and (3) that CO2 is a greenhouse gas whose increase is likely to warm the earth (one of many, the most important being water vapor and clouds). But–and I cannot stress this enough–we are not in a position to confidently attribute past climate change to CO2 or to forecast what the climate will be in the future.” “[T]here has been no question whatsoever that CO2 is an infrared a