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 (h/t to Stefanie) An anti-nuclear, Toronto-based, urban-loving, 1970s peace activist
who opposes subsidies to the oil industry might be the last person
expected to detail cracks in the science of global warming.
But
Lawrence Solomon has done just that in a short book with a long
subtitle: The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up
against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud (and
those who are too fearful to do so).
The spark for the book came
after an American TV reporter compared those who question the Kyoto
Protocol to Holocaust deniers. But Solomon wondered about that so he
sought out the experts in specific fields to garner their views.
Consider Dr. Edward Wegman, asked by the U.S. Congress to assess the
famous "hockey stick" graph from Michael Mann, published by the UN's
International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which purported to show
temperatures as mostly constant over the past 1,000 years -- except for
a spike in the last century.
The IPCC claimed the hockey stick
"proved" unique 20th-century global warming. But it didn't. Wegman, who
drew on the initial skepticism of two Canadians who questioned Mann's
statistical handling, found that his "hockey stick" was the result of a
statistical error -- the statistical model had mined data to produce
the hockey stick and excluded contrary data.
That mistake
occurred not because Mann was deceptive or a poor scientist; he's an
expert in the paleoclimate community as were those who reviewed his
paper. But that was the problem: The paleoclimate scientists were
trapped in their own disciplinary ghetto and not up to speed on the
latest, most appropriate statistical methods.
Is Wegman the
scientific equivalent of medical quack? No. His CV includes eight
books, more than 160 published papers, editorships of prestigious
journals, and past presidency of the International Association of
Statistical Computing, among other distinctions.
Opinions in The
Deniers vary dramatically and Solomon, a non-scientist, does not try to
settle the disputes. He instead attempts to give readers insight into
how non-settled and fragmentary the science is on climate change.
For
example, think the polar icecaps are melting? That's true at the North
Pole but it's not certain at the South Pole, according to Dr. Duncan
Wingham. A portion of Antarctica's northern peninsula is melting. But
that's a tiny slice of the 14-million-square-kilometre continent. And
confounding evidence exists. Since the inception of the South Pole
research station in 1957, recorded temperatures have actually fallen.
Wingham
is cautious. He doesn't deny global warming might exist. But his data
show the Antarctic ice sheet is growing, not shrinking, and the chapter
on why ice measurements are tricky is another fine, informative part of
The Deniers.
Is Wingham a flake, a denier in league with
flat-earthers? Only if you think the chair of the department of space
and climate physics and head of earth sciences at University College
London, and a member of the Earth Observation Experts Group, among
other qualifications, qualifies for such a label.
The most intriguing part of The Deniers is the attempt by dozens of
credible scientists to point out what should be common-sense obvious:
The sun might affect Earth's climate.
"We understand the
greenhouse effect pretty well," Solomon writes, "we know little about
how the sun -- our main source of energy driving the climate -- affects
climate change."
But the IPCC refuses to even consider the sun's
influence on Earth's climate -- it conceives of its mission only to
investigate possible man-made effects upon climate. But that's akin to
a hit-and-run investigation where police rule out all cars except one
model before they even question witnesses.
No one who reads The Deniers will be able to claim a scientific
consensus exists on global warming. (Some scientists even argue the
planet's climate is about to cool.)
But it might leave honest
readers with this question: So what? Why not spend billions to reduce
possible human-induced climate change just in case?
Because, as
Antonio Zichichi (a professor emeritus at the University of Bologna and
author of more than 800 papers) argues, global warming is only one
alleged calamity that faces the world's poor. As Solomon writes in his
interview with Zichichi, "every dollar and hour diverted to a crisis
that might not exist has real and tragic costs."
The "deniers"
and The Deniers matter because the book is about the search for
scientific explanations for a complex phenomenon by eminent scientists
in a better position than most to judge whether a consensus exists on
global warming. Their collective verdict, much varied in the
particulars, is "No." Source
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