Lawerence Solomon writing for the Financial Times:
"Only an insignificant fraction of scientists deny the global warming crisis. The time for debate is over. The science is settled."
So said Al Gore ... in 1992. Amazingly, he made his claims despite much evidence of their falsity. A Gallup poll at the time reported that 53% of scientists actively involved in global climate research did not believe global warming had occurred; 30% weren't sure; and only 17% believed global warming had begun. Even a Greenpeace poll showed 47% of climatologists didn't think a runaway greenhouse effect was imminent; only 36% thought it possible and a mere 13% thought it probable.
Today, Al Gore is making the same claims of a scientific consensus, as do the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] and hundreds of government agencies and environmental groups around the world. But the claims of a scientific consensus remain unsubstantiated. They have only become louder and more frequent.
More than six months ago, I began writing this series, The Deniers. When I began, I accepted the prevailing view that scientists overwhelmingly believe that climate change threatens the planet. I doubted only claims that the dissenters were either kooks on the margins of science or sell-outs in the pockets of the oil companies.
Somewhere along the way, I stopped believing that a scientific consensus exists on climate change. Certainly there is no consensus at the very top echelons of scientists -- the ranks from which I have been drawing my subjects -- and certainly there is no consensus among astrophysicists and other solar scientists, several of whom I have profiled. If anything, the majority view among these subsets of the scientific community may run in the opposite direction. Not only do most of my interviewees either discount or disparage the conventional wisdom as represented by the IPCC, many say their peers generally consider it to have little or no credibility.
Read the whole thing.
(HT Instapundit)
1 comment:
Both sides are getting the debate all wrong.
The issue isn't the scientific veracity of any given global warming theory. After all, we see that we just get dueling experts trotted out for both sides.
The issue is wise stewardship of the environment, and on that all should agree.
Quite frankly, let's err on the side of caution when it comes to the environment. Given human nature, it seems that societies have a tendency to only react to a problem once it gets to be intolerably bad. Why not take action before then? That's the wise and prudent course. And sure, if you do take action to preempt an environmental crisis, you probably will never know with absolute certainty what you prevented. But it will still be the correct thing to have done.
It's like with health...if you exercise and eat moderately, you'll never know exactly what problems you prevented yourself from having, but you'll benefit nevertheless.
So global warming theories have at least focused a larger percentage of the population on the issues of protecting the environment, which is not a bad thing. It sure beats waiting until there is a real problem and then trying to recover from that.
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