“Denial” is a venomous term applied to those skeptical about the role of humans in global climate change, meant to equate climate change skeptics with Holocaust deniers. True believers in the theory of man-made climate change can’t understand how anyone can question the “overwhelming evidence” that mankind is causing dangerous global warming. Who can be opposed to saving the planet?
According to Dr. David Suzuki, a Canadian environmentalist,
“Despite the international scientific community’s consensus on climate change, a small number of critics continue to deny that climate change exists or that humans are causing it. Widely known as climate change “skeptics” or “deniers,” these individuals are generally not climate scientists and do not debate the science with the climate scientists…”
But there are more than a few climate skeptics and many are scientists.
Dr. Art Robinson led a team that completed the Global Warming Petition Project in 2007. The Project compiled a list of more than 31,000 US-based scientists skeptical of the theory of dangerous man-made warming. While most petition signers are not climatologists, they are respected scientists from different disciplines and include more than 9,000 PhDs.
Project signers stated,
“There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”
President Obama attacked climate skeptics in his June address at Georgetown University, stating,
“…but I don’t have much patience for anyone who denies that this challenge is real. We don’t have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society.”
The pro-Obama political group Organizing for Action has mounted a “Call Out the Climate Change Deniers” campaign. The effort urges citizens to target more than 100 skeptics in Congress and “call them out” on Twitter.
Former Vice President Al Gore recently ripped the US news media at the Brookings Institution, saying that the media was “frightened” and “intimidated” by climate deniers.
“They get swarmed by these deniers online and in letters and pickets and all that if they even mention the word climate, and so they very timidly, they get frightened and they’re afraid to mention the word climate.”
In fact, most of the media is strongly biased in support of human-caused climate change. Earlier this month, Paul Thornton, opinion editor at The Los Angeles Times, made it clear that skeptical climate change articles are considered to be “in error” and do not get printed by The Times.
Most TV meteorologists don’t accept the theory of man-made climate change. In 2010, George Washington University conducted a survey of US television meteorologists who were members of the American Meteorological Society and the National Weather Service, receiving 517 responses. Sixty-three percent of the respondents judged that global warming was caused “mostly by natural changes in the environment,” while 27 percent agreed with the statement “global warming is a scam.”
These meteorologists are under attack by the climate inquisitors. The organization Forecast the Facts was formed in 2012 to focus on “accountability for broadcast meteorologists.” The organization initiates letter writing campaigns and petitions to TV stations in an effort to censor weathercasters who express global warming skepticism.
Mr. Gore and others assert that skeptics are “paid by the large fossil fuel polluters.” But anyone who knows the world’s leading skeptical scientists, Dr. Richard Lindzen of MIT, Dr. Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama-Huntsville, Dr. William Happer of Princeton, Dr. Willie Soon of Harvard, and many others, understand that this is nonsense.
Unpaid volunteers have played a major role in challenging the theory of man-made warming. Meteorologist Anthony Watts and Dr. Roger Pielke, Sr. organized hundreds of volunteers to audit US temperature stations, finding significant errors in the US temperature record. Canadians Stephen McIntyre and Dr. Ross McKitrick exposed methodological errors in Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick Curve. Watts put it well:
“The theory was wrong, the evidence has changed, and thousands of volunteers have exposed it.”
The reason citizens are increasingly skeptical about the theory of man-made global warming is not because of oil-company funded propaganda. It’s because the science is faulty. A close look at the science shows a strong case for climate change dominated by natural factors, not man-made emissions.
- Proxy evidence shows that Earth was warmer 1,000 years ago during the Medieval Warm Period than it is today.
- Physicists agree that water vapor, not carbon dioxide, is Earth’s dominant greenhouse gas.
- Satellite data shows that, while Arctic sea ice is near a 30-year low, Antarctic Sea ice is near a 30-year high.
- More than double the number of polar bears roam the Arctic today than in 1960.
- Historical records show that droughts, floods, and storms are neither more frequent nor more severe today than past decades.
- Tidal gauges show that sea levels are rising at about 7‒8 inches per century, not the 20 feet projected by some climate alarmists.
- And contrary to model predictions, global surface temperatures have been flat for more than 15 years.
Universities support the dogma of man-made climate change and take a dim view of skeptics. Debates about climate science are few since university environmental science departments decline to debate. A young professor of physical science must support the theory man-made warming to gain tenure.
Some months back, the Department of Meteorology and Climate Science at San Jose State University posted an image of two scholars threatening to burn my book, The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism. Recall a line from the movie Jaws: “It proves that you wealthy college boys don’t have the education enough to admit when you’re wrong.”
Originally published in The Washington Times
Steve Goreham is executive director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of the book The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania.