The Climate Change Climate Change: More Skeptical Inquirers?

Don Mahin, my first graduate student and hydrologist/engineer extraordinaire, sent me this opinion piece by Kimberley A. Strassel in the Wall Street Journal. She claims that the number of climate change - global warming -  skeptics is increasing everywhere.

Here are the first few paragraphs:

Steve Fielding recently asked the Obama administration to reassure him on the science of man-made global warming. When the administration proved unhelpful, Mr. Fielding decided to vote against climate-change legislation.

If you haven't heard of this politician, it's because he's a member of the Australian Senate. As the U.S. House of Representatives prepares to pass a climate-change bill, the Australian Parliament is preparing to kill its own country's carbon-emissions scheme. Why? A growing number of Australian politicians, scientists and citizens once again doubt the science of human-caused global warming.

Strassel reports that the scientific debate about global warming has come roaring back to life in Australia, Europe, Japan, and even the USA.

Consider this:

The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. -- 13 times the number who authored the U.N.'s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world's first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak "frankly" of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history." Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion." A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton's Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists' open letter.)

This is indeed interesting. I do not know Strassel, but she is a conservative and the WSJ is not exactly a strong supporter of anthropogenic global warming, especially if measures to mitigate it have the potential to adversely affect corporate profits. And her piece is an opinion column. So you might be a bit skeptical.

I'll be interested in seeing how this plays out. As for me, I'm still not a skeptic.

"This is what's really happening in Klamath--call it rural cleansing--and it's repeating itself in environmental battles across the country. Indeed, the goal of many environmental groups--from the Sierra Club to the Oregon Natural Resources Council--is no longer to protect nature. It's to expunge humans from the countryside." -- Kimberley A. Strassel, 26 July 2001

Comments

[Polyquats]

Steve Fielding is an independent Senator in the Australian Federal Parliament, who was elected on a tiny percentage of the vote in a preference deal with a major party that went horribly wrong (for the party, and for the country).
His views belong on the loopy far right, which, while common enough in the USA, are rare in Australia. His views on most topics vary from laughable to idiotic.
His antics on his recent visit to the US are not indicative that "a growing number of Australian politicians, scientists and citizens once again doubt the science of human-caused global warming."
Fielding is an absolute embarrassment to thinking people everywhere. But if you think his ideas can find a place in the US, you are welcome to keep him.

[Daniel Collins]

This WSJ piece was picked up by the editor of NZ's equivalent news source (NBR). It's a shame that investigative journalists don't always investigate the actual science when covering science.

[PAUL F MILLER]

The Climate Change Climate Change: More Skeptical Inquirers..? … A query of this variety I feel is valid though I suspect given the vested interest and financial investment by government, industry, academia and NGO, I doubt our world and especially America, will permit full, open, honest, timely disclosure on global climate change to occur. It occurs to me, especially as I enter the initial stages of my elder years, that the topics composing global climate change take on quite different hues, perspectives, morphing as it were before my very eyes, no longer fixed, but very amorphous. Gone is the immediate need to cling to the belief to specify there can be only a select number of causes for such a complex phenomenon as global climate change, thereby discarding man’s ever increasing impact on an incredible number of factors potentially impacting global climate change. This is not to suggest than man is solely accountable for what we perceive today to be negative climate conditions on a global level. I rise to ask, how can anyone thoughtfully discard that as a result of man’s curious nature, he has invented and introduced into our world more than 118,000 chemicals, the overwhelming portion of which we know absolutely nothing about their short or long term impact on any aspect of our environment…? Nor do we even have a real clue as to whether these impacts are positive or negative…? Whether one’s predilection is belief man is solely accountable for global climate change or whether one’s partial to the notion that man is absolved from any accountability for global climate change, tragically the lens through which we view is skewed, distorted, dirty, thereby causing a scotoma, preventing us from seeing anything to the contrary. Would it not be understandable then this topic would lend itself and even promote … Skeptical Inquirers …?