Who said global warming is a myth

Can you settle the score? Proctor, London, UK. Upwards of skeptics most of whom are not scientists took part in the second annual International Conference on Climate Change—sponsored by the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank—in March Most skeptics attribute global warming—few if any doubt any longer that the warming itself is occurring, given the worldwide rise in surface temperature—to natural cycles, not emissions from power plants, automobiles and other human activity.

But green leaders maintain that even if some warming is consistent with millennial cycles, something is triggering the current change.

But scientists have not been able to validate any such reasons for the current warming trend, despite exhaustive efforts. And a raft of recent peer reviewed studies—many which take advantage of new satellite data—back up the claim that it is emissions from tailpipes, smokestacks and now factory farmed food animals, which release methane that are causing potentially irreparable damage to the environment. To wit, the U. National Academy of Sciences, www.

Those who contribute the least greenhouse gases will be most impacted by climate change. Evidence is building that net cloud feedback is likely positive and unlikely to be strongly negative.

Sea level rise is now increasing faster than predicted due to unexpectedly rapid ice melting. The oceans are warming and moreover are becoming more acidic, threatening the food chain. Humans emit times more CO2 than volcanoes.

Direct measurements find that rising CO2 is trapping more heat. When Greenland was 3 to 5 degrees C warmer than today, a large portion of the Ice Sheet melted. Methane plays a minor role in global warming but could get much worse if permafrost starts to melt. Excess CO2 from human emissions has a long residence time of over years. CO2 levels are measured by hundreds of stations across the globe, all reporting the same trend.

Multiple lines of independent evidence indicate humidity is rising and provides positive feedback. Jupiter is not warming, and anyway the sun is cooling. Hundreds of flowers across the UK are flowering earlier now than any time in years. The 'decline' refers to a decline in northern tree-rings, not global temperature, and is openly discussed in papers and the IPCC reports. CO2 is increasing rapidly, and is reaching levels not seen on the earth for millions of years. Warming leads to increased evaporation and precipitation, which falls as increased snow in winter.

The sun has not warmed since and so cannot be driving global warming. The ocean is absorbing massive amounts of CO2, and is becoming more acidic as a result. Monckton used the IPCC equation in an inappropriate manner. An Independent Review concluded that CRU's actions were normal and didn't threaten the integrity of peer review. The actual data show high northern latitudes are warmer today than in Antarctic sea ice has grown in recent decades despite the Southern Ocean warming at the same time.

Humans are small but powerful, and human CO2 emissions are causing global warming. Microsite influences on temperature changes are minimal; good and bad sites show the same trend. If the dropped stations had been kept, the temperature would actually be slightly higher.

Scientific studies have determined that current technology is sufficient to reduce greenhouse gas emissions enough to avoid dangerous climate change. Albedo change in the Arctic, due to receding ice, is increasing global warming. This is a detail that is complex, local, and irrelevant to the observed global warming trend. Soot stays in the atmosphere for days to weeks; carbon dioxide causes warming for centuries.

Spencer's model is too simple, excluding important factors like ocean dynamics and treats cloud feedbacks as forcings. Jim Hansen had several possible scenarios; his mid-level scenario B was right. This is a complex aerosol effect with unclear temperature significance. This argument ignores the cooling effect of aerosols and the planet's thermal inertia. Arctic sea ice loss is three times greater than Antarctic sea ice gain.

The 'OISM petition' was signed by only a few climatologists. Volcanoes have had no warming effect in recent global warming - if anything, a cooling effect. Weather is chaotic but climate is driven by Earth's energy imbalance, which is more predictable. An independent inquiry found CRU is a small research unit with limited resources and their rigour and honesty are not in doubt. Tuvalu sea level is rising 3 times larger than the global average. Benny Peiser, the Oreskes critic, retracted his criticism.

Trenberth is talking about the details of energy flow, not whether global warming is happening. A number of independent measurements find extensive ice loss from Antarctica and Greenland. An independent inquiry went back to primary data sources and were able to replicate CRU's results. Melting ice leads to more sunlight being absorbed by water, thus heating the Arctic. By breathing out, we are simply returning to the air the same CO2 that was there to begin with.

Temperature errors in the Great Lakes region are not used in any global temperature records. There is no scientific basis for claims that the planet will begin to cool in the near future. The sun has just had the deepest solar minimum in years. That humans are causing the rise in atmospheric CO2 is confirmed by multiple isotopic analyses. Greenhouse warming is adding times more heat to the climate than waste heat. This possibility just means that future global warming could be even worse. The warming trend over to is greater than warming from both to and to This detail is irrelevant to the observation of global warming caused by humans.

Glaciers are sliding faster into the ocean because ice shelves are thinning due to warming oceans. Positive feedback won't lead to runaway warming; diminishing returns on feedback cycles limit the amplification.

The sun was much cooler during the Ordovician. The Siddall paper was retracted because its predicted sea level rise was too low. Investment in renewable energy creates more jobs than investment in fossil fuel energy.

In the s and s, the science began to mature as researchers unearthed the most prominent factors such as the cooling influence of aerosols and the warming influence of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide — concepts which have stood up to decades of rigorous testing.

Yet even at that early stage, a scientific consensus was emerging on warming, not cooling, in the near future. This was made clear by a study called "The Myth of the s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus," which conducted a survey of the peer-reviewed literature from to The research team found that of the 71 related research papers, 44 indicated warming while only 7 indicated cooling 20 did not make projections either way.

So why then was there such an outsized influence in the social consciousness from these few cooling papers? For one thing, the paper suggests, ice ages make for very compelling and memorable headlines. But those stories often included contradictory evidence as well, and other news coverage at the time did focus on warming theories. Selecting and highlighting past inaccuracies in science, even if they are the exception and not the rule, is an expedient way for politicians and opponents of climate action to sow doubt about the credibility of climate science.

In short, while a handful of scientists did predict cooling a half a century ago, that is a drop in the bucket compared to the tens of thousands of peer-reviewed scientific papers since then which substantiate that humans are heating the climate. A common talking point among climate change skeptics is either "the temperature record is unreliable" or "the temperature record is rigged. One of the variables they have to account for is a phenomenon called the Urban Heat Island effect.

Simply put, large cities — which are expanding — heat up the local atmosphere due to the concentration of dark surfaces, buildings and industries releasing heat. The concern is this extra heat may "contaminate" surface temperature trends. Scientists have studied this phenomena thoroughly and the surprising conclusion is that the warming trend in the temperature record of urban sites, in general, is similar to rural sites.

So the urban heat island effect is real but not very substantial. The temperature records are carefully fine-tuned by data experts to account for factors including the urban heat island effect, instrument sites being relocated, and instrument type changes.

While each organization has its own unique methods for data gathering and analysis, the resulting temperature records are largely in sync. Considering how complex modeling the climate is, most model projections of future temperature, even the rather primitive climate computer models of the s, 80s and 90s, were impressively accurate. This lends extra credibility to the much more advanced climate models of today in predicting future changes.

A recent study evaluated 17 climate model projections published between and , with forecasts ending on or before The researchers found 14 of the 17 model projections were consistent with observed real-world surface temperatures, when they factored in the actual rise in greenhouse gas emissions.

Here's the assessment of the lead scientist on the study, Dr. Zeke Hausfather: "Climate models have by and large gotten things right.

He concluded, "The CMIP3 simulations continue to be spot on remarkably , with the trend in the multi-model ensemble mean effectively indistinguishable from the trends in the observations.

In the graph below, the model projection is the black line and the colored lines are the actual temperature datasets from various agencies. As you can see, the magnitude and pace of temperature change consistently match. To be sure, evaluating global temperature projections are not the only gauge of a model's accuracy.

Models can be expected to be accurate on general trends, such as whether global temperatures will warm, overall rainfall increase or hurricanes get stronger. However, when it comes to predicting regional changes and other specific types of events, the climate models are far from perfect. Future projections like whether rainfall will increase or decrease in San Francisco, or whether more or fewer hurricanes will hit Florida, are still uncertain and on the edge of climate models' current ability.

Many scientists speculate that we are now entering the beginning of a Grand Solar Minimum — a period with decreased solar energy which could last a few decades. There is a general acknowledgement that this speculation may be true, but there is a lack of scientific consensus because of limited understanding of longer-term solar cycles.

If this happens it certainly would not be the first time. The period indeed corresponds with a decrease in temperature, but was embedded in a much longer-term cooling period called the Little Ice Age from about the s through the mid s. While it seems logical to assume the cooling during the Little Ice Age may have been due to a decrease in solar activity, leading theories actually point more so to volcanic activity.

With that said, a scientific collaboration to reconstruct past temperatures, called PAGES2K , indicates that global average temperatures decreased by no more than a couple of tenths of a degree Celsius during the Maunder Minimum.

During that time the solar irradiance decreased by one-quarter of one percent. Several studies have been conducted on the potential impact of a Grand Solar Minimum in the coming decades.

The consensus of these studies finds that global average temperatures would decrease by no more than around half a degree Fahrenheit, but likely less. In contrast, human-caused climate change has already warmed the planet by 2 degrees Fahrenheit since the late s, and climate scientists forecast we could see about 4 degrees Fahrenheit of additional warming by So, while a Grand Solar Minimum is possible, our best science tells us it would do nothing more than make a small dent in the overall warming trend.

According to NASA, that amount of cooling would be balanced by just three years of greenhouse gas emissions and the warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions from the human burning of fossil fuels is six times greater than a possible decades-long cooling from a prolonged Grand Solar Minimum.

And any impact of cooling would be short-lived, with temperatures bouncing right back after the minimum ends.