This planet of ours is obviously not warming as fast as some alarmists believe. Image courtesy of NASA.
Joel Kontinen
In September 2011 Ivar Giaever, a Nobel winning physicist, resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) as a protest to its policy statement that regards the evidence for climate warming as incontrovertible.
Last week 16 prominent scientists published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, criticising the tendency to regard climate warming as a fact that cannot be criticised. They pointed out that the global climate has actually not warmed in over ten years.
“In spite of a multidecade international campaign to enforce the message that increasing amounts of the ‘pollutant’ carbon dioxide will destroy civilization, large numbers of scientists, many very prominent, share the opinions of Dr. Giaever. And the number of scientific ‘heretics’ is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts,” they write.
However, many scientists have been reluctant to express their views, as they have feared repercussions from the scientific community. Climate scientists have tended to embrace the same strategy as leading Darwinists of the Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed fame.
The Wall Street Journal article points out that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant and that its harmful effects have been greatly exaggerated.
Later, William Happer, a physics professor at Princeton University, disclosed that many other scientists would also have wanted to include their names in the op-ed.
Last week the journal Nature reported on a more comprehensive climate study than the previous ones. It revealed that the “climate system may be less sensitive to greenhouse-gas warming than many models have predicted.”
In other words, globally, climate is warming more slowly than previously assumed.
Sources:
No Need to Panic About Global Warming The Wall Street Journal 27 January 2012.
Warming, but not as much. Nature 481 (7382), 413. (26 January 2012).
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