ARKist

One of the country’s leading environmental research scientists Friday called “noisy” global warming contrarian scientists “outliers” and likened them to “retrovirus experts who don’t think HIV causes AIDS.”

Richard Somerville (left), distinguished professor emeritus and research professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, and author of The Forgiving Air: Understanding Environmental Change, was participating in a discussion on the earth’s atmosphere during the afternoon Leonard Lopate show on WNYC public radio, in New York City. Listen to this segment here.

A listener had asked about “a group of scientists that dispute the idea that a rise [in the earth’s] temperature is due to increased Co₂. Their conjecture is: a strong correlation between solar flares and a rise in temperature,” he said.

Somerville strongly disagreed: “There is an overwhelming scientific consensus that the recent warming, the warming in the last four to five decades, has been due overwhelmingly to human activities and in part to human production of greenhouse gases,” he said.

“The alternative explanations such as solar activity, have been tested time and time again. They failed quantitatively. Does the Sun matter? Yes, it does. But we could put numbers on these things. There’s a lot of science that has been done.

“You can always find outliers. You can find retrovirus experts who don’t think HIV causes AIDS. But in this case, a tiny number of very noisy contrarian scientists dispute the mainstream consensus, claims that have been examined time and time again, and it’s overwhelmingly likely that they [the contrarians’ claims] are incorrect,” Somerville said.

Also on the program was Joel S. Levine, senior research scientist at NASA Langley Research Center, who said he agreed “100 percent” with Somerville.

“The consensus that global warming is due to CO₂ primarily, and the buildup of CO₂, due to human activities, is a major conclusion of the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change (IPPC). The IPCC consists of several hundred scientists from over 100 countries, working for almost two decades, using computer models, using observations. It’s not the consensus of one or two scientists or even one country,” said Levine (right).

“This is an international panel of the top climate scientists on Planet Earth. They issue reports every few years, and the last one was issued in 2007. The conclusion is there is unambiguous evidence that human activities are responsible for the buildup of CO_2, and CO2 buildup in the atmosphere is responsible for global warming,” according to Levine.

Somerville was a coordinating lead author (a chapter head) on the IPCC’s 2007 report. The group’s next climate change report is expected to be finalized in 2014.

The IPCC and former Vice President Al Gore were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”

Contrarian groups, which have been around since the late 1980s, have been a steady drumbeat of opposition, mounting public information campaigns and “obstructing meaningful efforts to mitigate climate change,” according to the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCC), which promotes environmental solutions to global warming.

These groups profoundly “influenced the Bush Sr. Administration’s climate change policy,” the UCC says. (Left, melting iceberg: by Wildimages, Flickr.com)

Although funding for global warming skeptic organizations is murky, the UCC contends that funding comes from a range of private industries, many of which have deserted contrarian groups since the late 1990s, beginning with British Petroleum in 1997.

The UCC singles out the Western Fuels Association (WFA), which the UCC says receives funding from coal and utility company members. This association , says the UCC, “is a cooperative of coal-dependent utilities in the western states that works in part to discredit climate change science and to prevent regulations that might damage coal-related industries.”

Contrarian organizations include, according to the UCC: Global Climate Coalition, George Marshall Institute, Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP), Greening Earth Society, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change. Many of their titles belie their mission, the UCC says.

The UCC has identified key themes of such skeptic organizations: “Global warming is real but too expensive to do anything about”; “the Kyoto Protocol is fundamentally [or fatally] flawed”; “there is no scientific basis for global warming claims and the IPCC is a hoax”; “CO₂ emissions are good for the planet and coal is the best energy source we have”; “CO₂ levels will help plants and that’s good.”

These are primarily claims that climate scientists and the IPCC have debunked, Somerville and Levine said Friday on the Lopate show. (Right, Leonard Lopate: WNYC)

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