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teacher in Germany, Ernst-Georg Beck, argued against there having been any increase in atmospheric
from the work of Keeling and others. What was the evidence that Beck pointed to? A hodgepodge of
CO
2
records that were either compromised by systematic errors or taken from heavily polluted urban
locations, where CO
2
levels are not representative of the overall ambient global levels. Keeling's son
Ralph, a respected atmospheric scientist in his own right, charitably assessed Beck's paper as having
“serious conceptual oversights that would have been spotted by any reasonably qualified reviewer.”
20
Other commentators weren't as kind.
21
To return to where things stood when I was completing my Ph.D. in the mid-1990s: No serious,
well-credentialed, actively publishing climate scientists could be found clinging to the lower rungs of
the ladder of denial. But you could find quite a few legitimately standing on the middle and upper
rungs: Yes, there is warming, and some of it almost certainly is anthropogenic in nature. But just how
much of it is due to human activity? How much of it might simply be due to natural variability? The
implications of these very legitimate questions were potentially far-reaching. If the “noise”—that is,
the natural variability—was large enough to have explained a substantial share of twentieth-century
warming, it might mean that a relatively small amount of warming could be attributed to human
influence. That would in turn imply that the sensitivity of the climate to increasing greenhouse gas
concentrations might be at the lower end of the range of uncertainty. Some of this uncertainty persists
today.
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Words and Music by GREG CAMP. Copyright © 1999 WARNER-TAMERLANE PUBLISHING CORP. and SQUISH MOTH
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