Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Global Warming Skeptics Conference Up

2009 Heartland Institute Conference Proceedings are now on the web.
"Some of the left’s leading spokespersons also have expressed concern over global warming. Alexander Cockburn wrote in The Nation, “vast amounts of money will be uselessly spent on programs that won’t work against an enemy that doesn’t exist. Meanwhile, real and curable environmental perils are scanted or ignored. Hysteria rules the day, drowning really useful environmental initiatives. ...”

If the scientific community were convinced that we could reliably forecast future climates, or that the consequences of some warming would be catastrophic, then perhaps no price would be too high to pay to save the Earth. But that is not what the scientific community is telling us. According to the most recent international poll of climate scientists,

* Most climate scientists believe global warming “is a process already underway.”

* But that “consensus” drops to below 60 percent when climate scientists are asked if “climate change is mostly the result of anthropogenic causes.”

* 65 percent of climate scientists do not believe “climate models can accurately predict climate conditions in the future.”

* 68 percent do not believe “the current state of scientific knowledge is able to provide reasonable predictions of climatic variability on time scales of ten years.”

* 73 percent do not believe it is possible to predict climate “on time scales of 100 years.”

* About 70 percent of climate scientists think “climate change might have some positive effects for some societies.”

* Finally, on the question that might matter the most, climate scientists are perfectly split over the question of whether they know enough about global warming to turn it over to policymakers to take action, with 44 percent saying we do and 46 percent saying we do not.
Consensus, my ass. But wait. There's more.

"This extensive disagreement within the scientific community is not reflected in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Why is that? Maybe because, to quote Alexander Cockburn again, “the IPCC has the usual army of functionaries and grant farmers, and the merest sprinkling of actual scientists with the prime qualification of being climatologists or atmospheric physicists.”

Indeed, it was recently acknowledged that 80 percent of the contributors to the latest IPCC report are not climate scientists at all
."

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home