Climate warming skeptics: Is the research too political?

Some say findings of human-caused global warming say more about politics than about science.

from the October 4, 2007 edition

Page 3 of 4

Page 1 | Page 2 | 3 | Page 4

In fact, the authors refused to change the wording. (A write-up of the Paris meeting is available at www.iisd.ca/climate/ipwg1/.) The authors and other delegates reminded China that their task was to draft a summary "for" not "by" policymakers. "The scientists determine what is said, but the governments determine how it's said," Trenberth says. "What we have to do is make sure it's consistent with the science."

As for a worldwide conspiracy, IPCC's Dr. Manning asks why 113 nations would endorse a fiction that's beneficial to none. He says he's never met a senior politician who is eager to deal with climate change. "A lot of politicians would breathe a huge sigh of relief if someone could actually say, 'No, we've got it wrong,' " he says.

Dissenting studies were weighed

But is dissent being quashed? Where the literature indicates a range of possibilities – the role of aerosols in climate change, for example – the full report discusses these issues at length. Even studies included in the just-released "Documented Doubts of Man-Made Global Warming Scares," a list by the Hudson Institute purporting to cast doubt on the consensus on human-driven climate change, were considered in the IPCC report.

"Those studies are taken into account," Trenberth says. "Every one of them."

The reason for the dearth of dissenting views may be quite mundane. According to one science historian, in the peer-reviewed scientific literature – the backbone of science and the source material for the IPCC report – hardly a dissenting voice is heard.

Naomi Oreskes, a professor of history at the University of California, San Diego, and an adjunct professor of geosciences at Scripps Institution of Oceanography there, searched for the keywords "global climate change" in a large database, a compilation of scientific journals. Of the 928 papers she found, not one questioned whether global warming was human-induced or if it was real. (The studies she found are a large representative sample, Dr. Oreskes says. She puts the total number of papers on global climate change at about 11,000.)

"The basic reality of anthropogenic global climate change is no longer a subject of scientific debate," she concludes.

Her study implies that since the IPCC must draw from scientific literature, it didn't find many papers that argued against human-driven change. Contrarian studies didn't make it through science's portal to respectability: scientific journals.

Maybe the scientific community does have it wrong about climate change, Oreskes says. After all, the majority has been incorrect before. But in this case, the contrarians are not, as they often paint themselves, on science's vanguard, she says. The discussion of global warming among scientists is not new – it's been going on for half a century, Oreskes says. The skeptics have had their day in court, she says: "It's just that nobody agrees with them."

Let us hear from you. Do you think climate-change skeptics are raising persuasive points or ignoring strong scientific evidence? Write us at: letters@csmonitor.com .

The first set of letters commenting on this series ran Sept. 26 . Another appears today .

1 | 2 | Page 3 | 4 | Next Page