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| Climate change |
The influential and widely discussed 2018 report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes generally that the Earth is warming; that any increased warming will raise sea levels, harm coral reefs, and reduce crop production; that the warming is primarily man-made, the result of increasing amounts of trapped greenhouse gases, (especially carbon dioxide) in the upper atmosphere; and that it makes scientific and economic sense to reduce CO2 emissions now with petroleum-based energy taxes and regulations before more environmental damage is done.
There is a broad consensus among climatologists that global warming is fact and requires a strong political response in order to prevent weather and economic-related calamities from occurring within the next 10 or 20 years. However, there is also a strong minority position among some scientists and economists that is both skeptical of prevailing climate change science and also of the necessity for any governmental response to the alleged environmental dangers.
The scientific evidence on warming is reasonably clear: There has been a slightly more than 1 degree Celsius increase in atmospheric temperature since 1880 up to the present. Over those many decades, there have been periods of warming; periods of cooling; periods where no major changes have occurred; and, more recently, a relatively sustained period of warming. Most climate scientists expect the current warming trend to continue (absent any CO2 reductions) into the foreseeable future with substantial weather related problems (costs) if the warming advances another half degree Celsius or more.
There are several problems with this scenario. The first is that if the current warming trend moderates somewhat, stops all together, or reverts to a period of modest cooling, then few of the calamitous events predicted will occur within the IPCC benchmark 2030-2040 time-frame. The second is that it is still unclear whether warming actually generates more severe weather patterns as is frequently assumed. For example, the incidence of severe tornado activity (F3+) in the U.S. trends downward over the last 5 decades and 2018 — perhaps the warmest year on record — marked a 13 year low.
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Here is a question that I cannot answer, but there must be an answer somewhere online: who are these "climate scientists" or "climatologists"? Is there a list of them in one place?
ReplyDeleteOur author above says, "There is a broad consensus among climatologists...". Really? How does he know this? Where is the list of these "climatologists" and where is the polling data establishing this broad consensus?
Once we have this list of "climatologists" I want to know who their employers are. I suspect (but do not know) that they are nearly all employed by government or at least dependent upon government funding. Call me cynical. Call me suspicious. I certainly am.
The best advice I can give (I'm admittedly ignorant) is go to "Watts Up With That" and sniff around.
DeleteIn 2011, several university professors coded abstracts from 4,014 papers in the ISI Web of Science database that investigated the man-made global warming controversy. A very robust 97.2 concluded that global warming is occurring and that there is an important man-made component. (This is probably why the media often reports that "97% of scientists agree that global warming is man-made".) Several points here: There is always a publication bias for confirming some hypothesis rather than rejecting it; it is not obvious that the papers were written by "scientists"; and, yes, a good guess would be that most writers are academics doing "research" and that the research is government funded to some extent.
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