ORIGINAL ARTICLE

List of scientists opposing the mainstream scientific assessment of global warmingFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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A majority of earth and climate scientists are convinced by the evidence that humans are significantly contributing to global warming.[1][2]
This is a list of notable scientists who have made statements that conflict with the mainstream scientific understanding of global warming as summarized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and endorsed by other scientific bodies.

Establishing the mainstream scientific assessment, climate scientists agree that the global average surface temperature has risen over the last century. The scientific consensus and scientific opinion on climate change were summarized in the 2001Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The main conclusions on global warming were as follows:

1. The global average surface temperature has risen 0.6 ± 0.2 °C since the late 19th century, and 0.17 °C per decade in the last 30 years.[3]
2. "There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities", in particular emissions of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane.[4]
3. If greenhouse gas emissions continue the warming will also continue, with temperatures projected to increase by 1.4 °C to 5.8 °C between 1990 and 2100.[A] Accompanying this temperature increase will be increases in some types of extreme weather and a projected sea level rise.[5] The balance of impacts of global warming become significantly negative at larger values of warming.[6]

These findings are recognized by the national science academies of all the major industrialized nations.[7]

Listing criteria: The notable scientists listed in this article have made statements since the publication of the Third Assessment Report which disagree with one or more of these 3 main conclusions. Each scientist included in this list has published at least one peer-reviewed article in the broad field of natural sciences, although not necessarily in a field relevant to climatology. To be included on this list it is not enough for a scientist to be merely included on a petition, survey, or list. Instead, the scientist must make their own statement.



Contents  [hide] 

• 1 Peer review
• 2 Scientists questioning the accuracy of IPCC climate projections
• 3 Scientists arguing that global warming is primarily caused by natural processes
• 4 Scientists arguing that the cause of global warming is unknown
• 5 Scientists arguing that global warming will have few negative consequences
• 6 See also
• 7 Notes
• 8 References
• 9 Further reading
• 10 External links

Peer reviewAs of August 2012, fewer than 10 of the statements in the references for this list are part of the peer-reviewed scientific literature. The rest are statements from other sources such as interviews, opinion pieces, online essays and presentations. Academic papers almost never reject the view that human impacts have contributed to climate change. In 2004, a review of published abstracts from 928 peer-reviewed papers addressing "global climate change" found that none of them disputed the IPCC's conclusion that "Earth's climate is being affected by human activities" and that "most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations"[8] A 2013 survey of 3984 abstracts from peer-reviewed papers published between 1991 and 2011 that expressed an opinion on anthropogenic global warmingfound that 97.1% agreed that climate change is caused by human activity.[9] (see also Scientific opinion on climate change and Surveys of scientists' views on climate change).

Scientists questioning the accuracy of IPCC climate projectionsScientists in this section have made comments that it is not possible to project global climate accurately enough to justify the ranges projected for temperature and sea-level rise over the next century. They may not conclude specifically that the current IPCC projections are either too high or too low, but that the projections are likely to be inaccurate due to inadequacies of current global climate modeling.

• Judith Curry, climatologist and chair of the school of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology[10]
• Freeman Dyson, professor emeritus of the School of Natural Sciences, Institute for Advanced Study; Fellow of the Royal Society [11]
• Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan emeritus professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and member of the National Academy of Sciences[12][13][14]

• Nils-Axel Mörner, retired head of the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics department at Stockholm University, former chairman of the INQUA Commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution (1999–2003).[15]
• Garth Paltridge, retired chief research scientist, CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research and retired director of the Institute of the Antarctic Cooperative Research Centre, visiting fellow ANU[16]
• Peter Stilbs, professor of physical chemistry at Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. [17]
• Philip Stott, professor emeritus of biogeography at the University of London[18]
• Hendrik Tennekes, retired director of research, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute [19]
• Fritz Vahrenholt, German politician and energy executive with a doctorate in chemistry[20]

Scientists arguing that global warming is primarily caused by natural processes
Graph showing the ability with which aglobal climate model is able to reconstruct the historical temperature record, and the degree to which those temperature changes can be decomposed into various forcing factors. It shows the effects of five forcing factors: greenhouse gases, man-madesulfate emissions, solar variability, ozonechanges, and volcanic emissions.[21]
Scientists in this section have made comments that the observed warming is more likely attributable to natural causes than to human activities. Their views on climate change are usually described in more detail in their biographical articles.

• Khabibullo Abdusamatov, mathematician and astronomer at Pulkovo Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences[22]
• Sallie Baliunas, astronomer, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics[23][24]
• Robert M. Carter, former head of the school of earth sciences at James Cook University[25]
• Ian Clark, hydrogeologist, professor, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa[26]
• Chris de Freitas, associate professor, School of Geography, Geology and Environmental Science, University of Auckland[27]
• David Douglass, solid-state physicist, professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Rochester[28]
• Don Easterbrook, emeritus professor of geology, Western Washington University[29]
• William M. Gray, professor emeritus and head of the Tropical Meteorology Project, Department of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University[30]
• William Happer, physicist specializing in optics and spectroscopy, Princeton University[31]
• Ole Humlum, professor of geology at the University of Oslo[32]
• Wibjörn Karlén, professor emeritus of geography and geology at the University of Stockholm.[33]
• William Kininmonth, meteorologist, former Australian delegate to World Meteorological Organization Commission for Climatology[34]
• David Legates, associate professor of geography and director of the Center for Climatic Research, University of Delaware[35]
• Tad Murty, oceanographer; adjunct professor, Departments of Civil Engineering and Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa[36]
• Tim Patterson, paleoclimatologist and professor of geology at Carleton University in Canada.[37][38]
• Ian Plimer, professor emeritus of Mining Geology, the University of Adelaide.[39]
• Arthur B. Robinson, biochemist and former faculty member at the University of California, San Diego[40]
• Nicola Scafetta, research scientist in the physics department at Duke University[41][42]
• Tom Segalstad, head of the Geology Museum at the University of Oslo[43]
• Fred Singer, professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia[44][45][46]
• Willie Soon, astrophysicist, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics[47]
• Roy Spencer, principal research scientist, University of Alabama in Huntsville[48]
• Henrik Svensmark, Danish National Space Center[49]
• Jan Veizer, environmental geochemist, professor emeritus from University of Ottawa[50]

Scientists arguing that the cause of global warming is unknownScientists in this section have made comments that no principal cause can be ascribed to the observed rising temperatures, whether man-made or natural. Their views on climate change are usually described in more detail in their biographical articles.

• Syun-Ichi Akasofu, retired professor of geophysics and founding director of the International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska Fairbanks.[51]
• Claude Allègre, politician; geochemist, emeritus professor at Institute of Geophysics (Paris).[52]
• Robert C. Balling, Jr., a professor of geography at Arizona State University.[53]
• 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.[54][55]
• Petr Chylek, space and remote sensing sciences researcher, Los Alamos National Laboratory.[56]
• David Deming, geology professor at the University of Oklahoma.[57]
• Ivar Giaever, professor emeritus at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.[58]
• Vincent R. Gray, New Zealander physical chemist with expertise in coal ashes[59]
• Antonino Zichichi, emeritus professor of nuclear physics at the University of Bologna and president of the World Federation of Scientists.[60]

Scientists arguing that global warming will have few negative consequencesScientists in this section have made comments that projected rising temperatures will be of little impact or a net positive for human society and/or the Earth's environment. Their views on climate change are usually described in more detail in their biographical articles.

• Craig D. Idso, faculty researcher, Office of Climatology, Arizona State University and founder of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change [61]
• Sherwood Idso, former research physicist, USDA Water Conservation Laboratory, and adjunct professor, Arizona State University[62]
• Patrick Michaels, senior fellow at the Cato Institute and retired research professor of environmental science at the University of Virginia[63]

See alsoGlobal warming portal

• Global warming controversy
• Global warming conspiracy theory
• Hockey stick controversy
• List of authors from the IPCC AR4 WGI report
• List of climate scientists
• Merchants of Doubt
• Oregon petition
• Project Steve

Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson has been roundly criticized for insisting global warming is not an urgent problem, with many climate scientists dismissing him as woefully ill-informed. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Dyson explains his iconoclastic views and why he believes they have stirred such controversy.by michael d. lemonick

On March 3, The New York Times Magazine created a major flap in the climate-change community by running a cover story on the theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson that focused largely on his views of human-induced global warming.

Basically, he doesn’t buy it. The climate models used to forecast what will happen as we continue to pump CO2 into the atmosphere are unreliable, Dyson claims, and so, therefore, are the projections. In an interview withYale Environment 360, his first since the Times article appeared, Dyson contends that since carbon dioxide is good for plants, a warmer planet could be a very good thing. And if CO2 does get to be a problem, Dyson believes we can just do some genetic engineering to create a new species of super-tree that can suck up the excess.

These sorts of arguments are advanced routinely by climate-change
Freeman Dyson
skeptics, and dismissed just as routinely by those who work in the field as clueless at best and deliberately misleading at worst. Dyson is harder to dismiss, though, in part because of his brilliance. He’s on the faculty at the Institute for Advanced Study, where as a young physicist he hobnobbed with Albert Einstein. When Julian Schwinger, Sin-Itiro Tomonaga and Richard Feynman shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in physics for quantum electrodynamics, Dyson was widely acknowledged to be almost equally deserving — but the Nobel Committee only gives out three prizes for a given discovery.

Nevertheless, large numbers of climate modelers and others who actually work on climate change — as Dyson does not — rolled their collective eyes at assertions they consider appallingly ill-informed. In his interview withYale Environment 360, Dyson also makes numerous assertions of fact — from his claim that warming today is largely confined to the Arctic to his contention that human activities are not primarily responsible for rising global temperatures — that climate scientists say are flat-out wrong.

Many climate scientists were especially distressed that the Times gave his views such prominence. Even worse, when the profile’s author, Nicholas Dawidoff, was asked on NPR’s “On The Media” whether it mattered if Dyson was right or wrong in his views, Dawidoff answered, “Oh, absolutely not. I don’t care what he thinks. I have no investment in what he thinks. I’m just interested in how he thinks and the depth and the singularity of his point of view.”

This is, to put it bluntly, bizarre. It matters a great deal whether he’s right or wrong, given that his views have been trumpeted in such a prominent forum with essentially no challenge. So I visited Dyson in his Princeton office in May to probe a little deeper into his views on climate change.

Yale Environment 360: First of all, was that article substantially accurate about your views?

Freeman Dyson: It’s difficult to say, “Yes” or “No.” It was reasonably accurate on details, because they did send a fact-checker. So I was able to correct the worst mistakes. But what I could not correct was the general emphasis of the thing. He had his agenda. Obviously he wanted to write a piece about global warming and I was just the instrument for that, and I am not so much interested in global warming. He portrayed me as sort ofListen to the full interview (43 min.)
obsessed with the subject, which I am definitely not. To me it is a very small part of my life. I don’t claim to be an expert. I never did. I simply find that a lot of these claims that experts are making are absurd. Not that I know better, but I know a few things. My objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it’s rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have. I think that’s what upsets me.

e360: So it’s a sense you get from the way the argument is conducted that it’s not being done in an honest way.

Dyson: I think the difference between me and most of the experts is that I think I have a much wider view of the whole subject. I was involved in climate studies seriously about 30 years ago. That’s how I got interested. There was an outfit called the Institute for Energy Analysis at Oak Ridge. I visited Oak Ridge many times, and worked with those people, and I thought they were excellent. And the beauty of it was that it was multi-disciplinary. There were experts not just on hydrodynamics of the atmosphere, which of course is important, but also experts on vegetation, on soil, on trees, and so it was sort of half biological and half physics. And I felt that was a very good balance.

And there you got a very strong feeling for how uncertain the whole business is, that the five reservoirs of carbon all are in close contact — theYou can learn a lot from [models], but you cannot learn what’s going to happen 10 years from now.”atmosphere, the upper level of the ocean, the land vegetation, the topsoil, and the fossil fuels. They are all about equal in size. They all interact with each other strongly. So you can’t understand any of them unless you understand all of them. Essentially that was the conclusion. It’s a problem of very complicated ecology, and to isolate the atmosphere and the ocean just as a hydrodynamics problem makes no sense.

Thirty years ago, there was a sort of a political split between the Oak Ridge community, which included biology, and people who were doing these fluid dynamics models, which don’t include biology. They got the lion’s share of money and attention. And since then, this group of pure modeling experts has become dominant.

I got out of the field then. I didn’t like the way it was going. It left me with a bad taste.

Syukuro Manabe, right here in Princeton, was the first person who did climate models with enhanced carbon dioxide and they were excellent models. And he used to say very firmly that these models are very good tools for understanding climate, but they are not good tools for predicting climate. I think that’s absolutely right. They are models, but they don’t pretend to be the real world. They are purely fluid dynamics. You can learn a lot from them, but you cannot learn what’s going to happen 10 years from now.

What’s wrong with the models. I mean, I haven’t examined them in detail, (but) I know roughly what’s in them. And the basic problem is that in the case of climate, very small structures, like clouds, dominate. And you cannot model them in any realistic way. They are far too small and too diverse.

So they say, ‘We represent cloudiness by a parameter,’ but I call it a fudge factor. So then you have a formula, which tells you if you have so much cloudiness and so much humidity, and so much temperature, and so much pressure, what will be the result... But if you are using it for a different climate, when you have twice as much carbon dioxide, there is no guarantee that that’s right. There is no way to test it.

We know that plants do react very strongly to enhanced carbon dioxide. At Oak Ridge, they did lots of experiments with enhanced carbon dioxide and it has a drastic effect on plants because it is the main food source for the plants... So if you change the carbon dioxide drastically by a factor of two, the whole behavior of the plant is different. Anyway, that’s so typical of the things they ignore. They are totally missing the biological side, which is probably more than half of the real system.

e360: Do you think it’s because they don’t consider it important, or they just don’t know how to model it?

Dyson: Well, both. I mean it’s a fact that they don’t know how to model it. And the question is, how does it happen that they end up believing their models? But I have seen that happen in many fields. You sit in front of a computer screen for 10 years and you start to think of your model as beingThe whole livelihood of all these people depends on people being scared.”real. It is also true that the whole livelihood of all these people depends on people being scared. Really, just psychologically, it would be very difficult for them to come out and say, “Don’t worry, there isn’t a problem.” It’s sort of natural, since their whole life depends on it being a problem. I don’t say that they’re dishonest. But I think it’s just a normal human reaction. It’s true of the military also. They always magnify the threat. Not because they are dishonest; they really believe that there is a threat and it is their job to take care of it. I think it’s the same as the climate community, that they do in a way have a tremendous vested interest in the problem being taken more seriously than it is.

e360: When I wrote my first story about this in 1987, I had to say this is all theoretical, we haven’t actually detected any signal of climate change. Now, people point to all sorts of signals, which are just the sort of things that were being predicted, based in part on the models. They made predictions and they’ve tested the predictions by seeing what happened in the real world, and they seem to be at least in the same direction, and in about the same magnitude, they were predicting. So isn’t that a hint that there is something right about the models?

Dyson: Of course. No doubt that warming is happening. I don’t think it is correct to say “global,” but certainly warming is happening. I have been to Greenland a year ago and saw it for myself. And that’s where the warming is most extreme. And it’s spectacular, no doubt about it. And glaciers are shrinking and so on.

But, there are all sorts of things that are not said, which decreases my feeling of alarm. First of all, the people in Greenland love it. They tell you it’s made their lives a lot easier. They hope it continues. I am not saying none of these consequences are happening. I am just questioning whether they are harmful.

There’s a lot made out of the people who died in heat waves. And there is no doubt that we have heat waves and people die. What they don’t say is actually five times as many people die of cold in winters as die of heat in summer. And it is also true that more of the warming happens in winter than in summer. So, if anything, it’s heavily favorable as far as that goes. It certainly saves more lives in winter than it costs in summer.

So that kind of argument is never made. And I see a systematic bias in the way things are reported. Anything that looks bad is reported, and anything that looks good is not reported.

A lot of these things are not anything to do with human activities. Take the shrinking of glaciers, which certainly has been going on for 300 years and has been well documented. So it certainly wasn’t due to human activities, most of the time. There’s been a very strong warming, in fact, ever since the Little Ice Age, which was most intense in the 17th century. That certainly was not due to human activity.

And the most serious of almost all the problems is the rising sea level. But there again, we have no evidence that this is due to climate change. A good deal of evidence says it’s not. I mean, we know that that’s been going on forAnything that looks bad is reported, and anything that looks good is not reported.”12,000 years, and there’s very doubtful arguments as to what’s been happening in the last 50 years and (whether) human activities have been important. It’s not clear whether it’s been accelerating or not. But certainly, most of it is not due to human activities. So it would be a shame if we’ve made huge efforts to stop global warming and the sea continued to rise. That would be a tragedy. Sea level is a real problem, but we should be attacking it directly and not attacking the wrong problem.

e360: Another criticism that’s been leveled is that your thoughts and predictions about the climate models are relatively unsophisticated, because you haven’t been in close contact with the people who are doing them. But if you sit down and actually talk to the people about what goes into the models today and what they are thinking about and how they think about clouds, you might discover that your assumptions about what they are doing are not correct. Is that plausible? Do you think it might inform you better to actually sit down with these people and find out what they are doing today?

Dyson: Well, it depends on what you mean by sitting down with people. I do sit down with people. I don’t go over their calculations in detail. But I think I understand pretty well the world they live in.

I guess one thing I don’t want to do is to spend all my time arguing this business. I mean, I am not the person to do that. I have two great disadvantages. First of all, I am 85 years old. Obviously, I’m an old fuddy-duddy. So, I have no credibility.

And, secondly, I am not an expert, and that’s not going to change. I am not going to make myself an expert. What I do think I have is a better judgment, maybe because I have lived a bit longer, and maybe because I’ve done other things. So I am fairly confident about my judgment, and I doubt whether that will change. But I am certainly willing to change my mind about details. And if they find any real evidence that global warming is doing harm, I would be impressed. That’s the crucial point: I don’t see the evidence...

And why should you imagine that the climate of the 18th century — what they call the pre-industrial climate — is somehow the best possible?

e360: I don’t think people actually believe that. I think they believe it’s the one during which our modern civilization arose. And that a rapid change to a different set of circumstances wouldn’t be worse in a grand sense, but it would be very badly suited to the infrastructure that we have got.

Dyson: That’s sort of what I would call part of the propaganda — to take for granted that any change is bad.

e360: It’s more that any change is disruptive. You don’t think that’s reasonable?

Dyson: Well, disruptive is not the same as bad. A lot of disruptive things actually are good. That’s the point. There’s this sort of mindset that assumes any change is bad. You can call it disruptive or you can call it change. But it doesn’t have to be bad.

e360: One thing is that if the temperature change projections are accurate for the next 100 years, it would be equivalent to the change that took us out of the last Ice Age into the present interglacial period, which is a very dramatic change.

Dyson: Yes, that’s highly unlikely. But it’s possible certainly.

e360: And the further argument is that this would happen much more quickly than that change happened. So it is hard to imagine that, at least in the short run, it could be anything but highly destructive.

Dyson: There’s hidden assumptions there, which I question, that you can describe the climate by a single number. In the case of the Ice Age, thatIf they find any real evidence that global warming is doing harm, I would be impressed.”might be true, that it was cold everywhere. The ice was only in the northern regions, but it was also much colder at the equator in the Ice Age.

That’s not true of this change in temperature today. The change that’s now going on is very strongly concentrated in the Arctic. In fact in three respects, it’s not global, which I think is very important. First of all, it is mainly in the Arctic. Secondly, it’s mainly in the winter rather than summer. And thirdly, it’s mainly in the night rather than at the daytime. In all three respects, the warming is happening where it is cold, not where it is hot.

e360: So, the idea is that the parts that are being disrupted are the parts that are inhospitable to begin with?

Dyson: Mostly. It is not 100 percent. But mostly they are, Greenland being a great example.

e360: Do you mind being thrust in the limelight of talking about this when it is not your main interest. You’ve suddenly become the poster child for global warming skepticism.

Dyson: Yes, it is definitely a tactical mistake to use somebody like me for that job, because I am so easily shot down. I’d much rather the job would be done by somebody who is young and a real expert. But unfortunately, those people don’t come forward.

e360: Are there people who are knowledgeable about this topic who could do the job of pointing out what you see as the flaws?

Dyson: I am sure there are. But I don’t know who they are.

I have a lot of friends who think the same way I do. But I am sorry to say that most of them are old, and most of them are not experts. My views are very widely shared.

Anyway, the ideal protagonist I am still looking for. So the answer to your question is, I will do the job if nobody else shows up, but I regard it as a duty rather than as a pleasure.

e360: Because it is important for you that people not take drastic actions about a problem that you are not convinced exists?

Dyson: Yes. And I feel very strongly that China and India getting rich is the most important thing that’s going on in the world at present. That’s a real revolution, that the center of gravity of the whole population of the world would be middle class, and that’s a wonderful thing to happen. It would be a shame if we persuade them to stop that just for the sake of a problem that’s not that serious.

And I’m happy every time I see that the Chinese and Indians make a strong statement about going ahead with burning coal. Because that’s what it really depends on, is coal. They can’t do without coal. We could, but they certainly can’t.

So I think it is very important that they should not be under pressure. Luckily they are, in fact, pretty self-confident; (neither) of those countries pays too much attention to us.

But that’s my motivation... Anyhow, I think we have probably said enough.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

By RICHARD MCNIDER And JOHN CHRISTY
Updated Feb. 19, 2014 7:31 p.m. ET

In a Feb. 16 speech in Indonesia, Secretary of State John Kerry assailed climate-change skeptics as members of the "Flat Earth Society" for doubting the reality of catastrophic climate change. He said, "We should not allow a tiny minority of shoddy scientists" and "extreme ideologues to compete with scientific facts."

But who are the Flat Earthers, and who is ignoring the scientific facts? In ancient times, the notion of a flat Earth was the scientific consensus, and it was only a minority who dared question this belief. We are among today's scientists who are skeptical about the so-called consensus on climate change. Does that make us modern-day Flat Earthers, as Mr. Kerry suggests, or are we among those who defy the prevailing wisdom to declare that the world is round?

Enlarge Image

Most of us who are skeptical about the dangers of climate change actually embrace many of the facts that people like Bill Nye, the ubiquitous TV "science guy," say we ignore. The two fundamental facts are that carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere have increased due to the burning of fossil fuels, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a greenhouse gas, trapping heat before it can escape into space.

What is not a known fact is by how much the Earth's atmosphere will warm in response to this added carbon dioxide. The warming numbers most commonly advanced are created by climate computer models built almost entirely by scientists who believe in catastrophic global warming. The rate of warming forecast by these models depends on many assumptions and engineering to replicate a complex world in tractable terms, such as how water vapor and clouds will react to the direct heat added by carbon dioxide or the rate of heat uptake, or absorption, by the oceans.

We might forgive these modelers if their forecasts had not been so consistently and spectacularly wrong. From the beginning of climate modeling in the 1980s, these forecasts have, on average, always overstated the degree to which the Earth is warming compared with what we see in the real climate.

For instance, in 1994 we published an article in the journal Nature showing that the actual global temperature trend was "one-quarter of the magnitude of climate model results." As the nearby graph shows, the disparity between the predicted temperature increases and real-world evidence has only grown in the past 20 years.

When the failure of its predictions become clear, the modeling industry always comes back with new models that soften their previous warming forecasts, claiming, for instance, that an unexpected increase in the human use of aerosols had skewed the results. After these changes, the models tended to agree better with the actual numbers that came in—but the forecasts for future temperatures have continued to be too warm.

Enlarge Image

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry during a speech on climate change in Jakarta on Sunday. Agence France-Presse/Getty Images


The modelers insist that they are unlucky because natural temperature variability is masking the real warming. They might be right, but when a batter goes 0 for 10, he's better off questioning his swing than blaming the umpire.

The models mostly miss warming in the deep atmosphere—from the Earth's surface to 75,000 feet—which is supposed to be one of the real signals of warming caused by carbon dioxide. Here, the consensus ignores the reality of temperature observations of the deep atmosphere collected by satellites and balloons, which have continually shown less than half of the warming shown in the average model forecasts.

The climate-change-consensus community points to such indirect evidence of warming as glaciers melting, coral being bleached, more droughts and stronger storms. Yet observations show that the warming of the deep atmosphere (the fundamental sign of carbon-dioxide-caused climate change, which is supposedly behind these natural phenomena) is not occurring at an alarming rate: Instruments aboard NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association satellites put the Mid-Tropospheric warming rate since late 1978 at about 0.7 degrees Celsius, or 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit, per 100 years. For the same period, the models on average give 2.1 degrees Celsius, or 3.8 degrees Fahrenheit, per 100 years (see graph).

The models also fail to get details of the past climate right. For example, most of the observed warming over land in the past century occurred at night. The same models used to predict future warming models showed day and night warming over the last century at nearly the same rates.

Past models also missed the dramatic recent warming found in observations in the Arctic. With this information as hindsight, the latest, adjusted set of climate models did manage to show more warming in the Arctic. But the tweaking resulted in too-warm predictions—disproved by real-world evidence—for the rest of the planet compared with earlier models.

Shouldn't modelers be more humble and open to saying that perhaps the Arctic warming is due to something we don't understand?

While none of these inconsistencies refutes the fundamental concern about greenhouse-gas-enhanced climate change, it is disturbing that "consensus science" will not acknowledge that such discrepancies are major problems. From the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's beginning, that largely self-selected panel of scientists has embraced the notion that consensus on climate change is the necessary path to taking action and reducing man-made carbon emissions around the world. The consensus community uses this to push the view that "the science is settled" and hold up skeptics to ridicule, as John Kerry did on Sunday.

We are reminded of the dangers of consensus science in the past. For example, in the 18th century, more British sailors died of scurvy than died in battle. In this disease, brought on by a lack of vitamin C, the body loses its ability to manufacture collagen, and gums and other tissues bleed and disintegrate. These deaths were especially tragic because many sea captains and some ships' doctors knew, based on observations early in the century, that fresh vegetables and citrus cured scurvy.

Nonetheless, the British Admiralty's onshore Sick and Health Board of scientists and physicians (somewhat akin to the current Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) dismissed this evidence for more than 50 years because it did not fit their consensus theory that putrefaction (or internal decay) caused scurvy, which they felt could be cured by fresh air, exercise and laxatives.

"Consensus" science that ignores reality can have tragic consequences if cures are ignored or promising research is abandoned. The climate-change consensus is not endangering lives, but the way it imperils economic growth and warps government policy making has made the future considerably bleaker. The recent Obama administration announcement that it would not provide aid for fossil-fuel energy in developing countries, thereby consigning millions of people to energy poverty, is all too reminiscent of the Sick and Health Board denying fresh fruit to dying British sailors.

We should not have a climate-science research program that searches only for ways to confirm prevailing theories, and we should not honor government leaders, such as Secretary Kerry, who attack others for their inconvenient, fact-based views.

Messrs. McNider and Christy are professors of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and fellows of the American Meteorological Society. Mr. Christy was a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore. Mr. Christy was a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Vice President Al Gore.

Correction: An earlier version of the attached chart on global temperatures transposed the labels for the balloon and satellite lines.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

July 2013 - Global mean surface temperatures rose rapidly from the 1970s, but have been relatively flat over the most recent 15 years to 2013. This has prompted speculation that human induced global warming is no longer happening, or at least will be much smaller than predicted. Others maintain that this is a temporary pause and that temperatures will again rise at rates seen previously.

The Met Office Hadley Centre has written three reports that address the recent pause in global warming and seek to answer the following questions:

• What have been the recent trends in other indicators of climate over this period?
• What are the potential drivers of the current pause?
• How does the recent pause affect our projections of future climate?

The first paper shows that a wide range of observed climate indicators continue to show changes that are consistent with a globally warming world, and our understanding of how the climate system works.

The second suggests that it is not possible to explain the recent lack of surface warming solely by reductions in the total energy received by the planet, i.e. the balance between the total solar energy entering the system and the thermal energy leaving it. Changes in the exchange of heat between the upper and deep ocean appear to have caused at least part of the pause in surface warming, and observations suggest that the Pacific Ocean may play a key role.

The final paper shows that the recent pause in global surface temperature rise does not materially alter the risks of substantial warming of the Earth by the end of this century. Nor does it invalidate the fundamental physics of global warming, the scientific basis of climate models and their estimates of climate sensitivity.

Links to each of the three papers are below.

 Paper 1: Observing changes in the climate system (PDF, 2 MB)

 Paper 2: Recent pause in global warming (PDF, 1 MB)

 Paper 3: Implications for projections (PDF, 663 kB)

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

MIT Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen Rips UN IPCC Report: ‘The latest IPCC report has truly sunk to level of hilarious incoherence’ — ‘It is quite amazing to see the contortions the IPCC has to go through in order to keep the international climate agenda going’


Former UN IPCC Lead Author Richard Lindzen: 'In attributing warming to man, they fail to point out that the warming has been small, and totally consistent with there being nothing to be alarmed about'

By: Marc Morano - Climate DepotSeptember 28, 2013 12:34 AM

Climate Depot Exclusive

MIT Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen told Climate Depot on September 27, 2013:

I think that the latest IPCC report has truly sunk to level of hilarious incoherence.  They are proclaiming increased confidence in their models as the discrepancies between their models and observations increase.

Their excuse for the absence of warming over the past 17 years is that the heat is hiding in the deep ocean.  However, this is simply an admission that the models fail to simulate the exchanges of heat between the surface layers and the deeper oceans.  However, it is this heat transport that plays a major role in natural internal variability of climate, and the IPCC assertions that observed warming can be attributed to man depend crucially on their assertion that these models accurately simulate natural internal variability.  Thus, they now, somewhat obscurely, admit that their crucial assumption was totally unjustified.

Finally, in attributing warming to man, they fail to point out that the warming has been small, and totally consistent with there being nothing to be alarmed about.  It is quite amazing to see the contortions the IPCC has to go through in order to keep the international climate agenda going.