Tuesday, January 22, 2008

 

Global Warming Experts. I just came across some good evidence for why you can't trust the experts when it comes global warming. The Royal Society has a report which relies on claims of authority and accusations of biased funding, omits key facts, and so forth.
There are some individuals and organisations, some of which are funded by the US oil industry, that seek to undermine the science of climate change and the work of the IPCC. They appear motivated in their arguments by opposition to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol, which seek urgent action to tackle climate change through a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

Often all these individuals and organisations have in common is their opposition to the growing consensus of the scientific community that urgent action is required through a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. But the opponents are well-organised and well-funded. For instance, a petition was circulated between 1999 and 2001 by a campaigning organisation called the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (OISM), which called on the US Government to reject the Kyoto Protocol. The petition claimed that “proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind”.

These extreme claims directly contradict the conclusions of the IPCC 2001 report, which states that “reducing emissions of greenhouse gases to stabilize their atmospheric concentrations would delay and reduce damages caused by climate change”....

It is crazy to say that skeptics are better funded than proponents, who have entire governments behind them, and the liberal sentiments of environmental scientists, not to mention all the environmental lobbying groups. It is also irrelevant.

Misleading arguments 3. There is little evidence that global warming is happening or, if it is happening, it is not very much. Some parts of the world are actually becoming cooler. Increased urbanisation could be responsible for much of the increase in observed temperatures. Satellite temperature records do not show any global warming. If there has been global warming recently, it would not even be a unique occurrence within the past 1000 years. Europe has been much warmer in the past....

The IPCC report recognised that “temperature changes have not been uniform globally but have varied over regions and different parts of the lower atmosphere”. For instance, some parts of the Southern Hemisphere oceans and parts of Antarctica have not warmed in recent decades. The report also noted that there have been two major periods of warming globally: 1910 to 1945 and since 1976. It concluded that “it is virtually certain that there has been a generally increasing trend in global surface temperature over the 20th century, although short-term and regional deviations from this trend occur”.

Europe has indeed been much warmer in the past-- in medieval times, for example. And the world did cool, from 1945 to 1976. And is it just *parts* of Antarctica that have not warmed (as opposed to "have cooled"-- as I recall, there isn't much change, but some of the tiny change is cooling).

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