Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
CONTRARIAN VIEWS ON GLOBAL WARMING
Previous chapters have presented mainstream scientifi c views on
climate change—the established, the uncertain, and the unknown.
Not every scientist or economist would agree with every fi nding, but
most have a secure footing in the published and peer-reviewed litera-
ture.
Consensus does not imply unanimity. We fi nd today a small and
vocal group of contrarian scientists who argue that the consensus on
climate change is poorly grounded and that policies to slow warming are
not warranted. In 2012, an opinion piece by “sixteen scientists” was
published in
The Wall Street Journal
titled, “No Need to Panic about Global
criticisms in a succinct statement.
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The basic message of the article was that the globe is not warming,
that models are wrong, and that delaying policies to slow climate change
for 50 years will have no serious economic or environment conse-
quences. I will analyze four of their claims as typical of the contrarian
viewpoint.
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A fi rst claim of contrarians is that the planet is not warming. The
sixteen scientists wrote, “Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack
of global warming for well over 10 years now.”
It is easy to get lost in the tiniest details here. Most people will ben-
efi t from stepping back and looking at the record of actual temperature
measurements. I showed the global temperature history in Figure 8.
I do not need any complicated statistical analysis to see that tempera-
tures are rising, and furthermore that they are higher in the past de-
cade than they were in earlier decades.
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Moreover, climate scientists have moved far beyond global mean
surface temperature in looking for evidence of human-caused climate
change. Scientists have found several indicators that point to a warm-
ing world with humans as the major cause, including melting of glaciers
and ice sheets; changes in ocean heat content, rainfall patterns, atmo-
spheric moisture, and river runoff; rising sea levels; stratospheric cool-
ing; and the shrinking of Arctic sea ice. Those who look only at global
