[Global Warming]

The Fake Global Warming "Debate"

Despite overwhelming scientific agreement about the facts of global warming (it's happening, it's happening faster than we expected and accelerating geometrically, and it's caused or worsened by human activity), certain vested interests still argue it's a concocted phenomenon. Like proponents of intelligent design, the position is political, not scientific, and the political aim is to place fake counterpoints in news reports to create the appearance of controversy. All to slow the reaction away from burning fossil fuels and other carbon-producing energy sources.

I prefer not to give the arguments face time here, but you can scan through them in a couple of places. The Cato institute has an energy industry hack named Patrick J. Michaels, who has parlayed oil and coal money into a cottage industry attacking global warming. His articles are here. Another is Richard Courtney, editor for a coal trading industry magazine, who is a "greenhouse skeptic." He has no background in science, but does have a very good reason to resist changes to the carbon-producing energy grid. Read a sample of his self-serving "science" here. The Heartland Institute is another group devoted to "common sense environmentalism" (aka environmental destruction). They don't even bother to come up with fake arguments--they just baldly lie.

And so on.

For anyone who wonders what the truth is (which is probably no one reading this blog), the facts are actually unequivocal:

The scientific consensus is clearly expressed in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Created in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environmental Program, the IPCC is charged with evaluating the state of climate science as a basis for informed policy action. In its most recent assessment, the IPCC states unequivocally that the consensus of scientific opinion is that Earth's climate is being affected by human activities: "Human activities . . . are modifying the concentration of atmospheric constituents . . . that absorb or scatter radiant energy. . . . [M]ost of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations."

The IPCC is not alone in its conclusions. In recent years all major scientific bodies in the United States whose members' expertise bears directly on the matter have issued similar statements. A National Academy of Sciences report begins unequivocally: "Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise." The report explicitly asks whether the IPCC assessment is a fair summary of professional scientific thinking, and it answers yes. Others agree. The American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union and the American Association for the Advancement of Science have all issued statements concluding that the evidence for human modification of climate is compelling.

The "controversy" is a political one. Oil and coal producers and their political patrons (many of the most powerful of whom run the US) are unsurprisingly opposed to the science not because it's bad science, but because it's bad for their bank accounts.