Thursday, January 17, 2008

More Scientists Skeptical of Man-Caused Global Warming Speak Out

There is a growing list of scientists expressing their skepticism over the presumption of man-caused global warming and climate change. As it becomes more politically acceptable to express doubt, I think this trend will continue.
Peter


Below are the latest scientists to be added to the over 400 scientists who dispute man-made global warming claims: (Marc Morano)

1. Chemist and Biochemist Dr. Michael F. Farona, an emeritus professor of chemistry at the University of Akron and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, critiqued the news media for inadequate reporting about global warming and expressed climate skepticism. “Data, numbers, graphs, trends, etc., are generally missing in supposedly scientific reports on global warming. These articles are usually long on opinions and short on hard data. Phrases such as ‘scientists agree that ...’ scientists doubt that ...’ do not belong in a scientific article. There are more data in Michael Crichton's novel ‘State of Fear’ than in all the global warming articles combined that I have read,” Farona wrote on January 3, 2008.

“There have been at least four interglacial periods, where the glaciers have advanced and retreated. The last ice age ended about 10,000 years ago and, in the case of North America, left the Great Lakes in the glacier's retreat. The glaciers are still retreating, so there should not be any great surprise that the sea level is rising. The industrial revolution is about 150 years old, compared to 10,000 years of warming. Can human activities have really made a significant contribution to rising temperatures in that amount of time?” Farona asked.

“We know that the east coast of the U.S. was flooded during the previous interglacial period, so sea level rising and coastal flooding are not unique to this interglacial period. Why now the draconian predictions of coastal flooding as if this has not happened before?” he continued. “What is the relationship between an increased level of carbon dioxide and temperature? Can it be predicted that an increase of so many parts per billion of carbon dioxide will cause an increase of so many degrees? I have not seen any answers to the questions posed above, leading me to adopt a somewhat skeptical view of blaming global warming on human activities.

What puzzles me is the reluctance of climatologists to provide scientific data supporting their dire predictions of the near future if we don't change our ways,” Farona concluded.


2. Award winning meteorologist Brian Sussman, a member of the American Meteorological Society (AMS), former member of the AMS Education Advisory Committee, and formerly of KPIX-TV CBS in San Francisco, is the author of the forthcoming book “Global Whining: A Denier’s Handbook.” “Mankind's burning of fossil fuels is allegedly warming the planet. This hypothesis couldn't stand the test of an eighth grade science fair. And if you dare poke holes in the hypothesis you're branded a 'denier,’” Sussman told EPW on January 3, 2008. “Well fine. I'd rather be called a 'denier' than try to push a scheme that would make Karl Marx green with envy,” Sussman added.


3. Climate statistician Dr. William M. Briggs, who specializes in the statistics of forecast evaluation, serves on the American Meteorological Society's Probability and Statistics Committee and is an Associate Editor of Monthly Weather Review. Briggs, a visiting mathematics professor at Central Michigan University and a Biostatistician at New York Methodist Hospital, has a new paper coming out in the peer-reviewed Journal of Climate which finds that hurricanes have not increased number or intensity in the North Atlantic.

Briggs, who has authored numerous articles in meteorological and climatological journals, has also authored another study looking on tropical cyclones around the globe, and finds that they have not increased in number or intensity either. Briggs expressed skepticism about man-made global warming fears in 2007. "There is a lot of uncertainly among scientists about what's going on with the climate," Briggs wrote to EPW on December 28, 2007. "Most scientists just don't want the publicity one way or another. Generally, publicity is not good for one's academic career. Only, after reading [UN IPCC chairman] Pachauri's asinine comment [comparing scientists skeptical of man-made climate fears to] Flat Earthers, it's hard to remain quiet," Briggs explained.

"It is well known that weather forecasts, out to, say, four to five days, have skill; that is, they can beat just guessing the average. Forecasts with lead times greater than this have decreasing to no skill," Briggs wrote. "The skill of climate forecasts---global climate models---upon which the vast majority of global warming science is based are not well investigated, but what is known is that these models do not do a good job at reproducing past, known climates, nor at predicting future climates. The error associated with climate predictions is also much larger than that usually ascribed to them; meaning, of course, that people are far too sure of themselves and their models," he concluded.

4. Hydrologist and geologist Mike McConnell of the U.S. Forest Service is a professional Earth scientist who has studied atmospheric pollution, post-wildfire mitigation planning, and groundwater surface water modeling. In 2007, McConnell dissented from the view that mankind has created a climate crisis. “Climate change is a climate system that we have no real control over,” McConnell wrote on December 27, 2007. “Our understanding on the complexities of our climate system, the Earth itself and even the sun are still quite limited. Scaring people into submission is not the answer to get people to change their environmental ways,” McConnell explained. He also dismissed claims that the human race was “the cause of our global warming.”

McConnell wrote, “There is no real basis for this. There is a growing body of scientific literatures outlining that this not to be the case.” He concluded, “Now, if Earth was suffering under an accelerated greenhouse effect caused by human produced addition of CO2, the troposphere should heat up faster than the surface of the planet, but data collected from satellites and weather balloons do not support this fundamental presumption even though we are seeing higher CO2. We ought to see near lockstep temperature increments along with higher CO2 concentration over time, especially over the last several years. But we're not.”

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