Global warming is not happening

Gabrielle

Registered
Global warming is not happening

Dr. Kevin Trenberth ("Global Warming: It?s Happening," naturalSCIENCE, December 4, 1997) has severely criticized a feature article in the (Toronto) Globe and Mail newspaper (November 22, 1997). He is wrong on many counts.

Trenberth informs us that "climate is changing." No problem there. Mean temperatures rose steeply in the decades before 1940 and dropped from 1940 to about 1975. Most climatologists agree that these changes were of natural origin--although Trenberth tries to present them as of human origin. But then he claims that "global mean temperature is rising." Not so. The weather satellite data, the only truly global data set we have, actually show a global cooling trend during the past 19 years.

Trenberth then cites his critique of these satellite results. That?s all good and proper, and part of the ongoing scientific debate about global w
arming. But he should have informed the reader of the able response by John Christy and Roy Spencer, who are responsible for the analysis of these data. And he should have also mentioned that balloon-borne weather sondes provide an independent set of data that confirm the satellite results of ongoing global cooling.

In fact, it is the surface data that are suspect, and especially the data that purport to measure the temperature of the sea surface. The oceans cover 70 percent of the Earth, but only a small fraction is actually observed. At least four different techniques are somehow combined to give a "global" value, with grave doubts about the intercalibration. As the mix of data sources changes over time, it is likely to introduce a temperature trend that is largely an artifact.

Trenberth is out of his specialty when he describes some of the imagined consequences of a global warming, such as floods and droughts. Along with Vice President Al Gore, he cites the 1997 North Dakota flood as an examp
le. Trenberth should find himself a better expert, like Harry Lins of the US Geological Survey, who has actually analyzed flood data and reports no increasing trend (Am. Geophys. Union Meeting, December 1997).

Trenberth bemoans the "politicization of science"--and so do we. He refers the reader to the George Brown article in the March 1997 issue of Environment, which is based on a blatantly partisan staff report. The reader is not told about the replies to Brown in the May issue that sets the record straight.

Finally, Trenberth drags out the hoary consensus of "over 2000 IPCC scientists." I have analyzed this fabricated claim in some detail (see Wall Street Journal, July 25, 1997). There are, at best, only about 100 climate scientists in this IPCC listing of economists, political scientists, government functionaries, and public relations specialists. Not that numbers matter, but among the 100 bona-fide experts there are many who disagree with the "consensus"--as determined by several independent
polls. (See also the May 16, 1997 issue of Science.) And there are even some who have publicly expressed their disagreement by signing the "Leipzig Declaration"--which now numbers over 100 signers.

S. Fred Singer
President, The Science & Environmental Policy Project

http://www.sepp.org/
 
Even as climate experts and politicians meet in Buenos Aires to mark the entry into force of the Kyoto Protocol, many sceptical scientists will still be arguing that the international consensus on "global warming" has got it wrong.

Those of us who study the pre-human history of the Earth find the current debate over global warming difficult to fathom. Climate changes - this is what it does.

To expect permanent stability in climate patterns displays a fundamental lack of understanding of the complexity and instability of weather.

If the global climate were not getting warmer, it would be getting cooler; stasis is not an option.

Ice caps either advance or retreat, and thank goodness. Following the last Ice Age, the climate is warming, and sea-level is rising - but well within their historical ranges.

As environments alter, so fauna and flora either adapt
or die out; nature is very unsentimental.

But for the now-infamous and discredited "hockey stick" temperature curve for the last millennium, used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to add body to the case for Kyoto, most observers would not have suspended belief over claims that today's weather is the "mostest" "on record".

Time dependent

This expression is simply a lie. We know from the geological (and archaeological) record that weather variations and extremes are the norm.

Such extremes occur gradually and rapidly, and obviously were not human-induced (anthropogenic). How then can they represent a threat greater than that of terrorism, as the UK's chief scientist, Professor Sir David King, maintains, except to minds unwilling to accept the inevitability of planetary change?


On thin ice: "Fauna and flora either adapt or die out"
The factors influencing climate and sea-level change are multiple and complex, whether slow or rapid. I still cannot
comprehend how anyone can hope to model even present day phenomena, never mind into the future; we still cannot predict next week's weather with any accuracy.

The real question then is not whether climate and sea level changes are occurring and are good or bad things; they have been occurring naturally for billions of years. Nor is the question whether these changes are actually taking place; a moot point at best, as there are conflicting data, but the question is utterly dependent on the time frame.

Rather, environmentalists ask whether climate change is anthropogenic, and if so, can it be stopped. I have come across no rigorous proof that wasteful human pollution has caused any significant climate change.


The accusation is that the hockey stick-shaped temperature track is built from selective data sets


More details

One would be better off asking the question whether volcanic eruptions alter the weather; there at least we can answer "yes".

The only pro
of of anthropogenic climate change ever offered, which to my mind is fallacious, is that temperature has increased with Western industrialisation; before industrialisation, the hockey stick would negate the Medieval Climate Optimum and Little Ice Age.

There is a closer correlation between this latest warming and universal suffrage. In science, temporal coincidence between events is no proof of a causal link.

Media 'scare'

So, as we enter the third millennium, we should preoccupy ourselves not with the silly question of whether at outrageous expense we could predictably influence the weather, least of all by focusing on just a single component. Instead, we should consider how to adapt ourselves to the inevitability of natural climate and sea-level change.

The issue thus framed would completely alter the capital expenditure question facing policy makers, away from tinkering with the emissions from the cleaner, industrialised nations (thereby delaying modelled anthropogenic glob
al warming by little more than a decade), and towards more pragmatic solutions.


With further warming, crop production can move to higher latitudes
These might include the abandonment of sub-sea level lands condemned to flooding (including the Netherlands), shifting to Mediterranean crops in northern Europe, the re-cultivation of cold terrains (eg Greenland), and the aggressive reforestation as a microclimate control strategy to rehabilitate dry lands.

As for oil, it will almost certainly be too expensive to use as a mass energy source within 25 years.

Global warming is indeed a scam, perpetrated by scientists with vested interests, but in need of crash courses in geology, logic and the philosophy of science.

It provides the media with a new scare story, which has been picked up by the focus groups and turned into the new religion, offering us hell if we don't all change our ways. However, believing in anthropogenic global warming is not enough, but that is all it c
an offer.

The author, Dr Martin Keeley, is Visiting Professor in Petroleum Geology, at University College London, UK.



http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4066189.stm
 
Canadian Premiere: Al Gore's Hot Air

Al Gore is in for the cold shoulder should he ever pay a visit to the oil and gas rich Canadian province of Alberta.

"I don't listen to Al Gore in particular because he's a Democrat, and not only that, he's about as far left as you can go," says Ralph Klein, the province's Conservative premier.

He was reacting to Gore's comments in Rolling Stone that processing oil sands is a huge waste of energy that also harms the landscape of Western Canada.

"For every barrel of oil they extract there, they have to use enough natural gas to heat a home for four days?It's truly nuts. But you know, junkies find veins in their toes. It seems reasonable to them because they've lost sight of the rest of their lives."

Gore's remarks had Klein, who recently returned from a trip to Washington to promote Alberta's oil and gas industr
y, seeing red.

"I don't know what he proposes the world to run on," the premier retorted. Maybe hot air."

NewsMAX.COM
 
Czech president derogates UN global-warming panel

Czech president Vaclav Klaus has criticized the UN panel on global warming, claiming that it was a political authority without any scientific basis, Czech media reported Friday.

Klaus told the Hospodarske noviny daily that the panel did not include "neutral scientists, a balanced group of scientists."

"These are politicized scientists who arrive there with one-sided opinion and assignment," he told interviewers.

According to the Czech president, "each serious person and scientist" says that global warming is a myth.

His comments came a week after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) presented its much-anticipated report which contained a stark warning about global warming and blamed man-made emissions for the problem.

The IPCC report, compiled by some 600 scientists from 40 countries, said it is "very likely" that man-made greenhouse gases have caused the rise in temperatures, reflecting a 90-per-cent certainty in the scientific community and an upgrade from a "likely," or two-thirds certainty given in the last IPCC report six years ago.

The British government described the UN panel report, presented in Paris on February 2, a blow to the "climate change deniers."

US President George W Bush turned away from climate change scepticism in this year's State of the Union speech proposing that the US cut petrol use to fight both global warming and foreign oil dependency, and his administration endorsed the UN panel report.

According to Klaus, "other top-level politicians" do not express their global warming doubts because "a whip of political correctness strangles [their] voice".
 
They're already calling skeptics "global warming deniers" and either shouting them down or making them lose their jobs. Yes, it is similar.

This is all part of a plan for one-world government.
 
FYI-I SENT THIS OUT TO PEOPLE IN MY ADDRESS BOOK. I ALSO SAVED IT TO RESEND A FEW MORE TIMES BEFORE THE ELECTION " IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN." DO WITH IT WHAT YOU WILL AND THANKS FOR THE LINK 3Ks.

You have heard and will continue to hear about "Global Warming". This is nothing more than a scare tactic used by a political party to try and gain voters. Sure the Earth is going through "natural" changes, it always does.

Twenty years ago we were being told by the same "political party" to be prepared. "Prepared for what?" you say! Prepared for the next "ICE AGE" ! We were warned that we have, at most, 10 years before we slip into the deep-freeze.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for conservation of our resources here on Earth. I'm an avid outdoorsman and fisherman. We have a motto to "leave it the way you found it."

Billions have been spent on improving our water and air quality here in the United States and that is great, we are all better off for it. But the changes in our lifestyle and culture that are being proposed in the name of so-called "Global Warming" are taking it a bit to far.


Take this simple test to find out the truth. If you agree with me, send this to people that might give a hoot one way or the other:

GLOBAL WARMING TEST
 
The Great Global Warming Swindle
Channel 4 Thursday 8 March at 9pm

In a polemical and thought-provoking documentary, film-maker Martin Durkin argues that the theory of man-made global warming has become such a powerful political force that other explanations for climate change are not being properly aired.

The film brings together the arguments of leading scientists who disagree with the prevailing consensus that a 'greenhouse effect' of carbon dioxide released by human activity is the cause of rising global temperatures.

Instead the documentary highlights recent research that the effect of the sun's radiation on the atmosphere may be a better explanation for the regular swings of climate from ice ages to warm interglacial periods and back again.

The film argues that the earth's climate is always changing, and that rapid warmings and coolings took place long before the burning of fossil fuels. It argues that the present single-minded focus on reducing carbon emissions not only may have little impact on climate change, it may also have the unintended consequence of stifling development in the third world, prolonging endemic poverty and disease.

The film features an impressive roll-call of experts, including nine professors – experts in climatology, oceanography, meteorology, environmental science, biogeography and paleoclimatology – from such reputable institutions as MIT, NASA, the International Arctic Research Centre, the Institut Pasteur, the Danish National Space Center and the Universities of London, Ottawa, Jerusalem, Winnipeg, Alabama and Virginia.

The film hears from scientists who dispute the link between carbon dioxide levels and global temperatures.

continued at link
 
The film brings together the arguments of leading scientists who disagree with the prevailing consensus that a 'greenhouse effect' of carbon dioxide released by human activity is the cause of rising global temperatures.

Long ago, there was a "consensus" that the Earth was flat!

Then, there was a "consensus" that the Sun revolved around the Earth!
 
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=2f4cc62e-5b0d-4b59-8705-fc28f14da388

Allegre's second thoughts

The Deniers -- The National Post's series on scientists who buck the conventional wisdom on climate science

LAWRENCE SOLOMON, Financial Post
Published: Friday, March 02, 2007

Claude Allegre, one of France's leading socialists and among her most celebrated scientists, was among the first to sound the alarm about the dangers of global warming.

"By burning fossil fuels, man increased the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which, for example, has raised the global mean temperature by half a degree in the last century," Dr. Allegre, a renowned geochemist, wrote 20 years ago in Cles pour la geologie.." Fifteen years ago, Dr. Allegre was among the 1500 prominent scientists who signed "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity," a highly publicized letter stressing that global warming's "potential risks are very great" and demanding a new caring ethic that recognizes the globe's fragility in order to stave off "spirals of environmental decline, poverty, and unrest, leading to social, economic and environmental collapse."

In the 1980s and early 1990s, when concern about global warming was in its infancy, little was known about the mechanics of how it could occur, or the consequences that could befall us. Since then, governments throughout the western world and bodies such as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have commissioned billions of dollars worth of research by thousands of scientists. With a wealth of data now in, Dr. Allegre has recanted his views. To his surprise, the many climate models and studies failed dismally in establishing a man-made cause of catastrophic global warming. Meanwhile, increasing evidence indicates that most of the warming comes of natural phenomena. Dr. Allegre now sees global warming as over-hyped and an environmental concern of second rank.

His break with what he now sees as environmental cant on climate change came in September, in an article entitled "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" in l' Express, the French weekly. His article cited evidence that Antarctica is gaining ice and that Kilimanjaro's retreating snow caps, among other global-warming concerns, come from natural causes. "The cause of this climate change is unknown," he states matter of factly. There is no basis for saying, as most do, that the "science is settled."

Dr. Allegre's skepticism is noteworthy in several respects. For one, he is an exalted member of France's political establishment, a friend of former Socialist president Lionel Jospin, and, from 1997 to 2000, his minister of education, research and technology, charged with improving the quality of government research through closer co-operation with France's educational institutions. For another, Dr. Allegre has the highest environmental credentials. The author of early environmental books, he fought successful battles to protect the ozone layer from CFCs and public health from lead pollution. His break with scientific dogma over global warming came at a personal cost: Colleagues in both the governmental and environmental spheres were aghast that he could publicly question the science behind climate change.

But Dr. Allegre had allegiances to more than his socialist and environmental colleagues. He is, above all, a scientist of the first order, the architect of isotope geodynamics, which showed that the atmosphere was primarily formed early in the history of the Earth, and the geochemical modeller of the early solar system. Because of his path-breaking cosmochemical research, NASA asked Dr. Allegre to participate in the Apollo lunar program, where he helped determine the age of the Moon. Matching his scientific accomplishments in the cosmos are his accomplishments at home: Dr. Allegre is perhaps best known for his research on the structural and geochemical evolution of the Earth's crust and the creation of its mountains, explaining both the title of his article in l' Express and his revulsion at the nihilistic nature of the climate research debate.


Calling the arguments of those who see catastrophe in climate change "simplistic and obscuring the true dangers," Dr. Allegre especially despairs at "the greenhouse-gas fanatics whose proclamations consist in denouncing man's role on the climate without doing anything about it except organizing conferences and preparing protocols that become dead letters." The world would be better off, Dr. Allegre believes, if these "denouncers" became less political and more practical, by proposing practical solutions to head off the dangers they see, such as developing technologies to sequester C02. His dream, he says, is to see "ecology become the engine of economic development and not an artificial obstacle that creates fear."
 
Global warming: the bogus religion of our age
by PROF. RICHARD LINDZEN

The world is heading for environmental catastrophe — or so we are constantly being told by the politicians and self-appointed experts.

They warn us that unless we take drastic action, the earth will soon be devastated by climate change and global warming.

Entire species will be lost, crops will be obliterated, floods and famine will sweep across the planet, and western economies will slide into depression.

Tonight, Channel 4 will broadcast The Great Global Warming Swindle, which suggests that the whole subject has become such a political hot potato that other explanations for climate change are not being properly examined.

Certainly, there have been many sweeping predictions of global ruin, few more emphatic than the report from Sir Nicholas Stern into the economics of climate change, which states with an air of unchallengeable conviction: 'The scientific evidence is now overwhelming. Climate change presents very serious global risks and it demands an urgent global response.'

His study, commissioned by the Government in July 2005 and published amid much Whitehall hype in October 2006, seemed to carry all the more weight because Stern is one of the most senior civil servants in Britain, the head of the Government's economic service.

His conclusions appeared to be based on powerful scientific authority, since his team of 20 or so officials had drawn on a wide range of published papers and data.

Tony Blair has described it as the most important document produced during his ten years as Prime Minister, and urged that the Stern blueprint, with its calls for more regulation and taxation, be adopted in full.

'The disaster is not set to happen in some science fiction future, but in our lifetimes,' said Blair, who went on to claim that the 'the world faces nothing more serious, more urgent and more demanding of its leadership than climate change.'

All this has helped put the Stern report at the very forefront of the debate. The central theme of it is that there is a near universal consensus of opinion within the scientific community about the dangers of climate change. But this is not true.

There is no such unanimity among scientists.

Throughout the 550 pages of his document, Stern continually strikes a confident note, as if there were no dispute about the issues.

Completely divorced from scientific reality


Yet this self-assured stance is completely divorced from scientific reality. It is an inconvenient truth for Stern and his political allies that there is, in fact, precious little hard evidence to back up his sweeping claims.

In a revealing recent comment, Stern admitted that when he was appointed by the Government, he 'had an idea what the greenhouse effect was but wasn't really sure'.

This lack of understanding of science shines through every chapter of his report.

He is guilty of misreading the data, of distorting the evidence to suit his political masters' dogma, of throwing numbers about with reckless abandon, of promoting alarmism in place of rational discussion, and of reinventing climate history.

There are fundamental misconceptions throughout the document. He seems to think that climate prediction is a mature science stretching back to the early 19th century, hence the confident tone science stretching back to the early century, hence the confident tone of his pronouncements.

But in reality climate prediction is a relatively modern science, which has emerged only in recent decades thanks partly to the emergence of computers.

So there are no easy certainties about the past — or the future.

Stern states boldly that the scale of global warming has been unprecedented for at least the past 1,000 years, but he cannot possibly be sure on this point because data from previous centuries is unreliable.

At most, we have a 50-year span of accurate measurements. The only genuine global records of temperature come from weather balloons, since 1958, and from microwave sounding units, since 1978.

What they indicate is a very gently warming trend, nothing approaching the apocalyptic vision of Sir Nicholas.

Moreover, this minor trend could have easily have been caused by irregularities such as volcanic eruptions or El Nino events (major fluctuations in ocean temperatures in the Pacific which affect climate).

Stern's report 'ignores the evidence that does not suit his ideology'


In support of his gloomy thesis, Stern, like all global warming enthusiasts, ignores the evidence that does not suit his ideology. He glosses over the fact that, according to a host of historical accounts, Europe was far warmer in the Middle Ages than it is today, or that the 17th century was much colder, prompting what was known as 'The Little Ice Age', when the Thames was often frozen over for months at a time.

Stern also refers to 'significant melting of and an acceleration of ice floes' near the coast of Greenland because of global warming.

Yet several reputable scientific studies have shown that the mass of the Greenland ice sheet is actually expanding, while Stern also fails to note that the temperature of Greenland is now lower than it was in 1940 and little changed from the first measurements in the 1780s.

Environmentalists are fond of jerking heartstrings with pictures of polar bears struggling on supposedly melting icebergs, but it is estimated that there are now 22,000 polar bears compared with 5,000 in 1940.

Nor can we be sure that any long-term changes in our climate are due to mankind. There are any number of other possibilities and the programme tonight examines the possibility that the sun's radiation is primarily responsible for climate change.

Indeed, the climate can fluctuate without any external cause at all — something again ignored by Stern, who wants only to indulge in the fashionable notion that western capitalism is entirely to blame for every drought and disaster.

Further, Stern takes no account of the capacity of mankind to adapt to, and improve his, environment.

There can be little dispute that, more than a century after the peak of the 19th-century industrial revolution, Britain is a cleaner, healthier, less polluted country than it was in the late Victorian age, when smog, disease and slums were rife.

Genuine science is about gathering evidence and testing the veracity of theories, not cheerleading for a particular ideology.

That is what is so disturbing about the current debate on global warming. Healthy scepticism, which should be at the heart of all scientific inquiry, is treated with contempt.

Far from being the powerful masterpiece that Blair claimed, Stern's report is manifestly incompetent.

It is another dodgy dossier, where assertions are presented as facts and data is twisted to suit a political purpose.

I agree with the economist critic who noted: 'If a student of mine were to hand in this report as a masters thesis, perhaps if I were in a good mood, I would give him D for diligence, but more likely I would give him an F for fail.' We are shifting away from science and into the realm of religious fanaticism, where the followers of the creed, brimming with self-righteous fury, believe that they are in possession of a higher truth.

Like a religion, environmentalism is suffused with hatred for the material world and again, like religion, it requires devotion rather than intellectual rigour from its adherents.

It is intolerant of dissent; those who question the message of doom are regarded as heretics, or 'climate change deniers', to use green parlance.

And, just as in many religions, the route to personal salvation lies in the performance of superstitious rituals, such as changing a lightbulb or arranging for a tree to be planted after every plane journey.

What is so tragic is the way that this dubious ideology has achieved such dominance in our public life.

Politicians love the green agenda, of course, because it means more control, more regulation, more taxes, more summits, and more opportunities for displays of self-important zeal.

The tragedy is that the likes of Sir Nicholas Stern are using bogus science to push forward this agenda.

Richard Lindzen is Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
 
Climatologists will tell you that the 11th to 13th centuries were so warm that Greenland really WAS a "Green land". They grew wine in Kent in England. Viking remains in Greenland tell historians that toward the end, the diet changed from land based animals to fish, their skeletons became shorter from poorer diets then they either died out completely or left.
You can't tell me man was responsible for those changes back then.

The 'little ice age' from the 13th century to 1830 or so was so cold they roasted Oxen on the completely frozen over Thames river, and some people reckon we might still be leaving that event.
OTOH, that little ice age started with a period of really bad storms and chaos, floods in France and the like. We're apparently getting more and worse Hurricanes now than in previous decades, Rita, Latrina and the like.
The North Atlantic current is definitely showing signs of slowing, by 10% at last report, the immense cold water columns submarines used to pass through all the time in the North Atlantic from cold water dropping into the depths as warmer water moved in from the equator are also fading.

Think about it.

As for the Ozone hole, my physics teacher pointed out to us 20 years ago that it needs a certain form of ultraviolet to form Ozone, which needless to say disappears every Winter at the poles. Hence, every Winter you get this hole appearing.
He also said that it was discovered a century before when researchers with primitive ultraviolet measuring equipment saw an increase at the poles.
Again, we can hardly be respnsible for it then, I think fluorine/chlorine compounds were unknown or little more than a lab curiosity then.
 
Scientists: Gore Goes Too Far in 'An Inconvenient Truth'

Several experts on climate change, including both proponents and skeptics of the man-made global warming theory, question former Vice President Al Gore's assertions in his Academy Award-winning documentary film "An Inconvenient Truth."

"I don't want to pick on Al Gore," said Don J. Easterbrook, a geologist at Western Washington University, told an annual meeting of the Geological Society of America, according to a report in The New York Times. "But there are a lot of inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to temper that with real data."

In the slideshow presentation that is the central part of "An Inconvenient Truth," Gore lays out what most researchers consider to be the worst-case scenario for global warming, with total melting of polar ice caps, a sea-level rise of 20 feet and catastrophic flooding and droughts.

"He's a very polarizing figure in the science community," Roger A. Pielke Jr., an environmental scientist at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado, told the Times. "Very quickly, these discussions turn from the issue to the person, and become a referendum on Mr. Gore."

Current scientific consensus holds that human industrial activity has sharply increased the amounts of carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gases" in the atmosphere, and that average temperatures worldwide will rise for at least the next century — but at a much more gradual rate than that depicted in "An Inconvenient Truth."

"Climate change is a real and serious problem," said Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish political scientist and statistician whose book "The Skeptical Environmentalist" challenges many of the catastrophic assertions made by proponents of the global-warming theory. "The cacophony of screaming does not help."
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/s...7a5aa6ed6&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

From a Rapt Audience, a Call to Cool the Hype
Al Gore’s film on global warming depicted a bleak future.

By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: March 13, 2007

Hollywood has a thing for Al Gore and his three-alarm film on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth,"� which won an Academy Award for best documentary. So do many environmentalists, who praise him as a visionary, and many scientists, who laud him for raising public awareness of climate change.

Don J. Easterbrook, a geology professor, has cited “inaccuracies"� in “An Inconvenient Truth."�

But part of his scientific audience is uneasy. In talks, articles and blog entries that have appeared since his film and accompanying book came out last year, these scientists argue that some of Mr. Gore’s central points are exaggerated and erroneous. They are alarmed, some say, at what they call his alarmism.

“I don’t want to pick on Al Gore,"� Don J. Easterbrook, an emeritus professor of geology at Western Washington University, told hundreds of experts at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America. “But there are a lot of inaccuracies in the statements we are seeing, and we have to temper that with real data."�

Mr. Gore, in an e-mail exchange about the critics, said his work made “the most important and salient points"� about climate change, if not “some nuances and distinctions"� scientists might want. “The degree of scientific consensus on global warming has never been stronger,"� he said, adding, “I am trying to communicate the essence of it in the lay language that I understand."�

Although Mr. Gore is not a scientist, he does rely heavily on the authority of science in “An Inconvenient Truth,"� which is why scientists are sensitive to its details and claims.

Criticisms of Mr. Gore have come not only from conservative groups and prominent skeptics of catastrophic warming, but also from rank-and-file scientists like Dr. Easterbook, who told his peers that he had no political ax to grind. A few see natural variation as more central to global warming than heat-trapping gases. Many appear to occupy a middle ground in the climate debate, seeing human activity as a serious threat but challenging what they call the extremism of both skeptics and zealots.

Kevin Vranes, a climatologist at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado, said he sensed a growing backlash against exaggeration. While praising Mr. Gore for “getting the message out,"� Dr. Vranes questioned whether his presentations were “overselling our certainty about knowing the future."�

Typically, the concern is not over the existence of climate change, or the idea that the human production of heat-trapping gases is partly or largely to blame for the globe’s recent warming. The question is whether Mr. Gore has gone beyond the scientific evidence.

“He’s a very polarizing figure in the science community,"� said Roger A. Pielke Jr., an environmental scientist who is a colleague of Dr. Vranes at the University of Colorado center. “Very quickly, these discussions turn from the issue to the person, and become a referendum on Mr. Gore."�

“An Inconvenient Truth,"� directed by Davis Guggenheim, was released last May and took in more than $46 million, making it one of the top-grossing documentaries ever. The companion book by Mr. Gore quickly became a best seller, reaching No. 1 on the New York Times list.

Mr. Gore depicted a future in which temperatures soar, ice sheets melt, seas rise, hurricanes batter the coasts and people die en masse. “Unless we act boldly,"� he wrote, “our world will undergo a string of terrible catastrophes."�

He clearly has supporters among leading scientists, who commend his popularizations and call his science basically sound. In December, he spoke in San Francisco to the American Geophysical Union and got a reception fit for a rock star from thousands of attendees.

“He has credibility in this community,"� said Tim Killeen, the group’s president and director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a top group studying climate change. “There’s no question he’s read a lot and is able to respond in a very effective way."�

Some backers concede minor inaccuracies but see them as reasonable for a politician. James E. Hansen, an environmental scientist, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a top adviser to Mr. Gore, said, “Al does an exceptionally good job of seeing the forest for the trees,"� adding that Mr. Gore often did so “better than scientists."�

Still, Dr. Hansen said, the former vice president’s work may hold “imperfections"� and “technical flaws."� He pointed to hurricanes, an icon for Mr. Gore, who highlights the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and cites research suggesting that global warming will cause both storm frequency and deadliness to rise. Yet this past Atlantic season produced fewer hurricanes than forecasters predicted (five versus nine), and none that hit the United States.

“We need to be more careful in describing the hurricane story than he is,"� Dr. Hansen said of Mr. Gore. “On the other hand,"� Dr. Hansen said, “he has the bottom line right: most storms, at least those driven by the latent heat of vaporization, will tend to be stronger, or have the potential to be stronger, in a warmer climate."�

In his e-mail message, Mr. Gore defended his work as fundamentally accurate. “Of course,"� he said, “there will always be questions around the edges of the science, and we have to rely upon the scientific community to continue to ask and to challenge and to answer those questions."�

He said “not every single adviser"� agreed with him on every point, “but we do agree on the fundamentals"� — that warming is real and caused by humans.

Mr. Gore added that he perceived no general backlash among scientists against his work. “I have received a great deal of positive feedback,"� he said. “I have also received comments about items that should be changed, and I have updated the book and slideshow to reflect these comments."� He gave no specifics on which points he had revised.

He said that after 30 years of trying to communicate the dangers of global warming, “I think that I’m finally getting a little better at it."�

While reviewers tended to praise the book and movie, vocal skeptics of global warming protested almost immediately. Richard S. Lindzen, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, who has long expressed skepticism about dire climate predictions, accused Mr. Gore in The Wall Street Journal of “shrill alarmism."�

Some of Mr. Gore’s centrist detractors point to a report last month by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body that studies global warming. The panel went further than ever before in saying that humans were the main cause of the globe’s warming since 1950, part of Mr. Gore’s message that few scientists dispute. But it also portrayed climate change as a slow-motion process.

It estimated that the world’s seas in this century would rise a maximum of 23 inches — down from earlier estimates. Mr. Gore, citing no particular time frame, envisions rises of up to 20 feet and depicts parts of New York, Florida and other heavily populated areas as sinking beneath the waves, implying, at least visually, that inundation is imminent.

Bjorn Lomborg, a statistician and political scientist in Denmark long skeptical of catastrophic global warming, said in a syndicated article that the panel, unlike Mr. Gore, had refrained from scaremongering. “Climate change is a real and serious problem"� that calls for careful analysis and sound policy, Dr. Lomborg said. “The cacophony of screaming,"� he added, “does not help."�

So too, a report last June by the National Academies seemed to contradict Mr. Gore’s portrayal of recent temperatures as the highest in the past millennium. Instead, the report said, current highs appeared unrivaled since only 1600, the tail end of a temperature rise known as the medieval warm period.

Roy Spencer, a climatologist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, said on a blog that Mr. Gore’s film did “indeed do a pretty good job of presenting the most dire scenarios."� But the June report, he added, shows “that all we really know is that we are warmer now than we were during the last 400 years."�

Other critics have zeroed in on Mr. Gore’s claim that the energy industry ran a “disinformation campaign"� that produced false discord on global warming. The truth, he said, was that virtually all unbiased scientists agreed that humans were the main culprits. But Benny J. Peiser, a social anthropologist in Britain who runs the Cambridge-Conference Network, or CCNet, an Internet newsletter on climate change and natural disasters, challenged the claim of scientific consensus with examples of pointed disagreement.

“Hardly a week goes by,"� Dr. Peiser said, “without a new research paper that questions part or even some basics of climate change theory,"� including some reports that offer alternatives to human activity for global warming.

Geologists have documented age upon age of climate swings, and some charge Mr. Gore with ignoring such rhythms.

“Nowhere does Mr. Gore tell his audience that all of the phenomena that he describes fall within the natural range of environmental change on our planet,"� Robert M. Carter, a marine geologist at James Cook University in Australia, said in a September blog. “Nor does he present any evidence that climate during the 20th century departed discernibly from its historical pattern of constant change."�

In October, Dr. Easterbrook made similar points at the geological society meeting in Philadelphia. He hotly disputed Mr. Gore’s claim that “our civilization has never experienced any environmental shift remotely similar to this"� threatened change.

Nonsense, Dr. Easterbrook told the crowded session. He flashed a slide that showed temperature trends for the past 15,000 years. It highlighted 10 large swings, including the medieval warm period. These shifts, he said, were up to “20 times greater than the warming in the past century."�

Getting personal, he mocked Mr. Gore’s assertion that scientists agreed on global warming except those industry had corrupted. “I’ve never been paid a nickel by an oil company,"� Dr. Easterbrook told the group. “And I’m not a Republican."�

Biologists, too, have gotten into the act. In January, Paul Reiter, an active skeptic of global warming’s effects and director of the insects and infectious diseases unit of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, faulted Mr. Gore for his portrayal of global warming as spreading malaria.

“For 12 years, my colleagues and I have protested against the unsubstantiated claims,"� Dr. Reiter wrote in The International Herald Tribune. “We have done the studies and challenged the alarmists, but they continue to ignore the facts."�

Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton who advised Mr. Gore on the book and movie, said that reasonable scientists disagreed on the malaria issue and other points that the critics had raised. In general, he said, Mr. Gore had distinguished himself for integrity.

“On balance, he did quite well — a credible and entertaining job on a difficult subject,"� Dr. Oppenheimer said. “For that, he deserves a lot of credit. If you rake him over the coals, you’re going to find people who disagree. But in terms of the big picture, he got it right."�
 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/03/11/ngreen211.xml

Scientists threatened for 'climate denial'
By Tom Harper, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 12:24am GMT 11/03/2007

Scientists who questioned mankind's impact on climate change have received death threats and claim to have been shunned by the scientific community.

They say the debate on global warming has been "hijacked" by a powerful alliance of politicians, scientists and environmentalists who have stifled all questioning about the true environmental impact of carbon dioxide emissions.

Timothy Ball, a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Canada, has received five deaths threats by email since raising concerns about the degree to which man was affecting climate change.

One of the emails warned that, if he continued to speak out, he would not live to see further global warming.

"Western governments have pumped billions of dollars into careers and institutes and they feel threatened," said the professor.

"I can tolerate being called a sceptic because all scientists should be sceptics, but then they started calling us deniers, with all the connotations of the Holocaust. That is an obscenity. It has got really nasty and personal."

Last week, Professor Ball appeared in The Great Global Warming Swindle, a Channel 4 documentary in which several scientists claimed the theory of man-made global warming had become a "religion", forcing alternative explanations to be ignored.

Richard Lindzen, the professor of Atmospheric Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology - who also appeared on the documentary - recently claimed: "Scientists who dissent from the alarmism have seen their funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves labelled as industry stooges.

"Consequently, lies about climate change gain credence even when they fly in the face of the science."

Dr Myles Allen, from Oxford University, agreed. He said: "The Green movement has hijacked the issue of climate change. It is ludicrous to suggest the only way to deal with the problem is to start micro managing everyone, which is what environmentalists seem to want to do."

Nigel Calder, a former editor of New Scientist, said: "Governments are trying to achieve unanimity by stifling any scientist who disagrees. Einstein could not have got funding under the present system."
 
MINNEAPOLIS - A North Pole expedition meant to bring attention to global warming was called off after one of the explorers got frostbite. The explorers, Ann Bancroft and Liv Arnesen, on Saturday called off what was intended to be a 530-mile trek across the Arctic Ocean after Arnesen suffered frostbite in three of her toes, and extreme cold temperatures drained the batteries in some of their electronic equipment.

"Ann said losing toes and going forward at all costs was never part of the journey," said Ann Atwood, who helped organize the expedition.

On Monday, the pair was at Canada's Ward Hunt Island, awaiting a plane to take them to Resolute, Canada, where they were to return to Minneapolis later this week.

Bancroft, 51, became the first woman to cross the North Pole on a 1986 expedition. She and Arnesen, 53, of Oslo, Norway, were the first women to ski across Antarctica in 2001.

But the latest trek got off to a bad start. The day they set off from Ward Hunt Island, a plane landing near the women hit their gear, punching a hole in Bancroft's sled and damaging one of Arnesen's snowshoes.

They repaired the snowshoe with binding from a ski, but Atwood said the patch job created pressure on Arnesen's left foot, which led to blisters that then turned into frostbite.

Then there was the cold — quite a bit colder, Atwood said, then Bancroft and Arnesen had expected. One night they measured the temperature inside their tent at 58 degrees below zero, and outside temperatures were exceeding 100 below zero at times, Atwood said.

"My first reaction when they called to say there were calling it off was that they just sounded really, really cold," Atwood said.

She said Bancroft and Arnesen were applying hot water bottles to Arnesen's foot every night, but had to wake up periodically because the bottles froze.

The explorers had planned to call in regular updates to school groups by satellite phone, and had planned online posts with photographic evidence of global warming. In contrast to Bancroft's 1986 trek across the Arctic with fellow Minnesota explorer Will Steger, this time she and Arnesen were prepared to don body suits and swim through areas where polar ice has melted.

Atwood said there was some irony that a trip to call attention to global warming was scuttled in part by extreme cold temperatures.

"They were experiencing temperatures that weren't expected with global warming," Atwood said. "But one of the things we see with global warming is unpredictability."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070312/ap_on_sc/polar_trek_1
 
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