Climate warming skeptics: Is the research too political?

In May, based on the work of hundreds of scientists from around the world, the United Nations issued a groundbreaking report on Earth's climate.

Its findings were sobering:

Most of the increase in temperatures seen in the last 50 years, it said, is very likely – with more than 90 percent certainty – to be due to greenhouse gases produced by human activities.

The report, with two others this year from the UN-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are considered to be the definitive distillations of humankind's understanding of human-driven climate change.

"The IPCC reflects the consensus of the vast majority of scientists in the field, and you can assess this by looking at the journals, the meetings, the conference proceedings, etc." says Gavin Schmidt, a climate scientist at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, in an e-mail.

Yet a small but vocal minority continues to question the reports' conclusions. Because the IPCC is an organ of the United Nations, they say, the reports are politically skewed.

"We hear over and over the assertion that there is a consensus that 'global warming' is man-made and a crisis. Says who?" writes Joseph Bast, president of The Heartland Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to discovering "free-market solutions to social and economic problems," on its website.

Others say the authors are biased; dissent is quashed during the report's drafting, they charge. "Some of my comments and reviews were sort of rejected," says John Christy, a state climatologist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville and an IPCC contributing author who has doubts about humans' role in the observed warming. "I'm sure that [I] wasn't the only one."

The most vehement argue that evidence proving that human activity is causing global warming simply doesn't exist. "We've had a Greenhouse Theory with no evidence to support it – except a moderate warming turned into a scare by computer models," says S. Fred Singer, a professor emeritus of environmental science at the University of Virginia and vocal climate skeptic, in the press release for a study titled "Challenge to Scientific Consensus on Global Warming," published by the Hudson Institute.

In reply, IPCC authors point to what they characterize as the lengthy, exhaustive, and transparent process behind the reports.

'We can't ignore anything'

"The thing about the IPCC report which is not adequately appreciated by many is how rigorous and comprehensive the overall process is," says Kevin Trenberth, head of the National Center for Atmospheric Research's climate analysis section and a coordinating lead author on one chapter of the IPCC report. "We have to weigh all the evidence, but we can't ignore anything."

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