In my testimony to a Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives, I concluded that humans

“The human influence on climate is significant and involves a diverse range of first-order climate forcings, including, but not limited to the human input of CO2″.

Support for this perspective has come from a very distinguished scientist at the University of Virginia, Professor Jim Galloway, who was recently awarded the prestigious 2008 Tyler Environmental Prize.  The University of Virginia reported on this award (see) and wrote:

Since the election of the Rudd Labor government last year Australians seem to be under some sort of delusion that what we do here in Australia will actually have an impact on global climate. These delusions seem to have increased with the release of the Garnaut Climate Change Review Draft Report last Friday.

The front page of the weekend edition of the Sydney Morning Herald suggests that unless we immediately start work on a carbon trading scheme to operate from 2010 – and accept that the price of petrol, gas, power and food will rise – then it will be the end of agriculture in the Murray-Darling Basin by 2100, 5.5 million people will be exposed to dengue virus, it will be the end of the Great Barrier Reef and the beginning of political instability in neighbouring countries.

This is simply not true.

During 2006, the doomsters were predicting that 2007 would be the hottest year on record, so why have we seen no reports about this?

The answer is simple – 2007 turned out to be the coolest year for 30 years. It is also the case that there has been no global warming since 1998. In fact, since 1998, there has been steady cooling.

Even more dramatic is the fact that the most recent computer model predictions indicate that there will be no more global warming for the next ten years. But the doomsters say that, after this ten-year period, global warming will come back with a vengeance. Why?

Certainly, mankind's production of carbon dioxide (CO2) has continued to increase since 1998 and will continue to increase, particularly since countries such as China and India say that their economic growth comes first, so they do not intend worrying too much about CO2 production.

Bjorn Lomborg earned the wrath of many scientists by calling into question the direness of global warming.  Now, in this wide-ranging interview, find out why he claims that Al Gore is 'wildly exaggerating' about climate change and its effects.

Bjorn Lomborg is a Danish political scientist and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, a controversial book about the costs and benefits of reducing carbon emissions and mitigating climate change. He spoke to NEWSWEEK about the Stern Review, Al Gore and his critics.

NEWSWEEK: The Stern Review, a 2006 report on the economics of climate change, concluded that averting the worst impacts of climate change will cost 1 percent of global GDP annually, and that failure to address the problem could cost a projected 20 percent of global GDP.
LOMBORG: It understates the costs of dealing with climate change. It says it's 1 percent. Even the U.N. estimates that it's somewhere between 3 and 5 percent, depending on the time frame. And it dramatically exaggerates the cost of not doing something. Most models show that the costs by the end of the century from global warming say 3 percent of GDP. Basically it's a non-peer reviewed study that was commissioned by the UK government to come out and support the UK government's policy. It tells us a very different story from all of the peer reviewed, published studies that it bases itself on.

BANGLADESH is a flat deltaic country where 80% of the land is less than 12 metres above sea level. Coastal southern Bangladesh is mostly at sea level. Because of the geographical setting and physical characteristics, the country is regularly inundated by riverine and coastal flooding.

Climate change will make the country highly vulnerable to sea level rise, intense cyclones and storm surge flooding. A recent special report entitled "Bangladesh is set to disappear under the waves by the end of the century" by Johann Hari, published in the British daily Independent, has drawn significant attention around the world. It has sent a shockwave through the people, scientists and policy-makers, in Bangladesh.

However, will Bangladesh completely disappear under water by 2100 as claimed in the Independent, which cited National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa)? This issue deserves discussion in the context of the findings of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that was released in 2007, and the scientific developments that have taken place since then.  Read rest…

Twenty-two researchers from nine institutions and four countries collaborated on the report, published in the academic Nature journal’s June issue.   “The generation of magmas in the earth proved far more complicated than anyone imagined,” wrote Henry J. B. Dick, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), which fronted the report.  Researchers found volcanoes “as far as we could survey to the east,” samples of “abundant active hydrothermal venting in a region where current theory predicted their absence.”