The Great Global Warming Scam

Antarctic Ice Extent 9/21/2005

Surely, someone should go to jail for the lies and fraud perpetrated in the name of global warming! What has been said by the supporters of the idea that man is the dominating factor in heating the atmosphere by CO₂ emissions would be enough to cause Trofim D. Lysenko to blush!

Well, okay, now that I have given away what I think about Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), a few words of justification and sweet reason are needed to justify my emotional reaction. The general justifications for believing in AGW are quite often in the form of appeals to authority, with the authorities being mentioned, more often than not, being the official U.S. government agencies in charge of temperature data: the National Climatic Data Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NCDC/NOAA), and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (GISS/NASA). Pretty hefty customers to accuse of being fraud artists! After citing such authorities the supporters of AGW then often say that “the science is settled”, as if all scientists of note believe in AGW.

When hearing or reading things like this, I automatically think of such eminent skeptics as Prof. Richard Lindzen of MIT and Prof. Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology. This then gave me the idea that if I used Google to search for the names of AGW skeptics, I could produce a much longer list of eminent contrarians to demonstrate that the science is not in fact settled. (If you can appeal to your authorities, I can appeal right back at you with my authorities!) When I started doing that, I discovered that Wikipedia had beat me to it. I reproduce their list below, with the occasional comments after some of their names and titles being my own. The names of these scholars are also links to their curricula vitae. Wikipedia breaks them into two groups: those who question the accuracy of IPCC (see here and here) climate projections, and those who argue that global warming is caused primarily by natural processes. Since they are all skeptics of AGW, no matter how they got there, I am going to lump them all into a single list.

• Khabibullo Abdusamatov, astrophysicist at the Pulkovo Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
• Sallie Baliunas, astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
• Timothy Ball, professor emeritus of geography, University of Winnipeg
• David Bellamy, botanist
• Lennart Bengtsson, meteorologist, Reading University
• Robert M. Carter, former head of the school of earth sciences at James Cook University
• John R. Christy, Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Science and Director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville
• Ian Clark, hydrogeologist, professor, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa
• Judith Curry, professor and former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology: Dr Curry was once a proponent AGW who was converted to the skeptic side.
• Chris de Freitas, associate  professor, School of Geography, Geology and Environmental Science, University of Auckland
• David Douglass, solid-state physicist, professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Rochester
• Freeman Dyson, professor emeritus of the School of Natural Sciences, Institute for Advanced Study; Fellow of the Royal Society: Freeman Dyson is one of the most prominent names in physics, whom many feel should have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work in quantum field theory.
• Don Easterbrook, emeritus professor of geology, Western Washington University
• Ivar Giaever, professor emeritus at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, professor-at-large at the University of Oslo, the president of Applied Biophysics, and co-winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics.
• William M. Gray, professor emeritus and head of the Tropical Meteorology Project, Department of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University
• William Happer, physicist specializing in optics and spectroscopy, Princeton University
• Ole Humlum, professor of geology, University of Oslo
• Wibjörn Karlén, professor emeritus of geography and geology, University of Stockholm
• William Kininmonth, meteorologist, former Australian delegate to World Meteorological Organization Commission for Climatology
• Steven E. Koonin, theoretical physicist and director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University
• David Legates, associate professor of geography and director of the Center for Climatic Research, University of Delaware
• Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan emeritus professor of atmospheric science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and member of the National Academy of Sciences
• Craig Loehle, ecologist and chief scientist at the National Council for Air and Stream Improvement
• Anthony Lupo, professor of atmospheric science, University of Missouri
• Nils-Axel Mörner, retired head of the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics Department at Stockholm University, former chairman of the INQUA Commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution (1999–2003)
• Tad Murty, oceanographer; adjunct professor, Departments of Civil Engineering and Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa
• Garth Paltridge, retired chief research scientist, CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research and retired director of the Institute of the Antarctic Cooperative Research Centre, visiting fellow  Australian National University
• Tim Patterson, paleoclimatologist and professor of geology, Carleton University in Canada
• Ian Plimer, professor emeritus of mining geology, the University of Adelaide
• Denis Rancourt, former professor of physics, University of Ottawa, research scientist in condensed matter physics, and in environmental and soil science
• Arthur B. Robinson, American politician, biochemist and former faculty member at the University of California, San Diego
• Murry Salby, atmospheric scientist, former professor at Macquarie University
• Nicola Scafetta, research scientist in the physics department at Duke University
• Harrison Schmitt, geologist, Apollo 17 Astronaut, former U.S. Senator.
• Tom Segalstad, geologist; associate professor, University of Oslo
• Nir Shaviv, professor of physics focusing on astrophysics and climate science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
• Fred Singer, professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia
• Willie Soon, astrophysicist, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
• Roy Spencer, meteorologist; principal research scientist, University of Alabama in Huntsville
• Peter Stilbs, professor of physical chemistry at Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm
• Philip Stott, professor emeritus of biogeography at the University of London
• Henrik Svensmark, physicist, Danish National Space Center
• George H. Taylor, retired director of the Oregon Climate Service, Oregon State University
• Hendrik Tennekes, retired director of research, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute
• Anastasios Tsonis, distinguished professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
• Fritz Vahrenholt, German politician and energy executive with a doctorate in chemistry
• Jan Veizer, environmental geochemist, professor emeritus from University of Ottawa
• Les Woodcock, professor emeritus of chemical thermodynamics, the University of Manchester; former NASA scientist

This list is not exhaustive, but is a list of the most prominent scientists who do not believe in man-made global warming. With such a large list of prominent scientists who are nonbelievers in AGW, one would have to be very disingenuous indeed to claim that “the science is settled”.

All of the above took over one-thousand words to describe, and we have not even begun to scratch the surface of this subject. I will write considerably more about this in future posts.

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