Many reputable scientists are skeptical or dismissive of claims that humanity is the cause of global warming. Since this issue will sadly waste resources that would better be spent elsewhere, I thought I’d update my list of quotes and evidence, in the hopes that others might see the light of reason. For more extensive collections and lists of expert skeptics, see these posts.
Regarding Melting Glaciers:
“Available records dating back to 1897 and direct observation by the authors over a 4-year period [i.e. 1935-1938] indicate that Grinnell Glacier has been reduced to about half the size it was in 1900, and that the recession during recent years has been most rapid.” -Gibson and Dyson (1939) Bulletin of the Geological Society of America, vol. 50, 681-696.
In other words, some glaciers were drastically shrinking well before human industry added most of the man-made CO2 to the atmosphere. This is also consistent with the observation that snowcaps on Mt. Kilimanjaro were already greatly receding in the early 1900s.
(Commenting on reports by other researchers that Greenland’s glaciers are melting.) “Scientists who want to attract attention to themselves, who want to attract great funding to themselves, have to [find] a way to scare the public…and this you can achieve only by making things bigger and more dangerous than they really are.” –Petr Chylek, professor of Physics and Atmospheric Science, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Halifax Chronicle-Herald, August 22, 2001.
“A new study has found that warmer winters and cooler summers, bringing increased precipitation, could be causing some glaciers to increase in size. Newcastle University researchers found that the western Himalayas’ Upper Indus Basin was experiencing more snow and rainfall, which has implications for the water supplies of about 50 million people in Pakistan. The study appears in the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate (BBC News online).” –August 25th , 2006 report from Greenwire. [Emphasis added]
On Scientific Uncertainty and the Inability to Predict Climate:
“The greenhouse effect must play some role. But those who are absolutely certain that the rise in temperatures is due solely to carbon dioxide have no scientific justification, it’s pure guesswork.” –Henrik Svensmark, director of the Centre for Sun-Climate Research, Danish National Space Center, Copenhagen Post, October 4, 2006.
“The bad news is that the climate models on which so much effort is expended are unreliable because they still use fudge-factors rather than physics to represent important things like evaporation and convection, clouds and rainfall. Besides the general prevalence of fudge-factors, the latest and biggest climate models have other defects that make them unreliable. With one exception, they do not predict the existence of El Nino. Since El Nino is a major feature of the observed climate, any model that fails to predict it is clearly deficient. The bad news does not mean the climate models are worthless. They are, as Manabe said thirty years ago, essential tools for understanding climate. They are not yet adequate tools for predicting climate.” –Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson, quoted in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming, pg. 113.
“If long-term trends are accepted as a valid measure of climate change, then the air temperature and ice data do not support the proposed polar amplification of [CO2-induced] global warming. The potential importance of large-amplitude variability and numerous feedbacks involved in Arctic atmosphere-ice-ocean interactions implies that the Arctic poses severe challenges to generating credible model-based projections of climate change.” –Akasofu Polyakov and seven other colleagues from the International Arctic Research Center (2002, Eos, vol. 83, no. 47, 547-548).
“Even Mr. Gore qualified his statement [that the 'debate in the scientific community is over'] on ABC a few minutes after he made it, clarifying things in an important way. When Mr. Stephanopolous confronted Mr. Gore with the fact that the best estimates of rising sea levels are far less dire than he suggests in his movie, Mr. Gore defended his claims by noting that scientists ‘don’t have any models that give them a high level of confidence’ one way or the other and went on to claim–in his defense–that scientists ‘don’t know. They just don’t know.’” –MIT Sloan Professor of Meteorology Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, “There is No ‘Consensus’ on Global Warming.” Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2006.
Other Statements on ‘Scientific Consensus’ and Al Gore:
“The most recent survey of climate scientists, following the same methodology as a published study from 1996, found that while there had been a move towards acceptance of anthropogenic global warming, only 9.4% of respondents ’strongly agree’ that climate change is mostly the result of anthropogenic [human] sources. A similar proportion ’strongly disagree’. Furthermore, only 22.8% of respondents ’strongly agree’ that the IPCC reports accurately reflect a consensus within climate science.” –Professor Dennis Bray, GKSS Forschungszentrum, Geesthacht, Germany, submitted to Science on December 22, 2004. (As reported in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism, pg 83).
“[Al] Gore’s circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic. It is simply incredible that they, and his film [An Inconvenient Truth], are commanding public attention.” –Professor Bob Carter, Marine Geophysical Laboratory, James Cook University, Australia.
