List of scientists opposing global warming consensus

From The Book of THoTH (Leaves of Wisdom)

This page lists scientists who have expressed doubt regarding the scientific opinion on global warming. The consensus has been summarized by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as follows:

The global average surface temperature has risen 0.6 ± 0.2°C since the late 19th century, and 0.17°C per decade in the last 30 years.
"Most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities", in particular emissions of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane.
If greenhouse gas emissions continue, the warming will continue and indeed accelerate, with temperatures increasing by 1.4°C to 5.8°C between 1990 and 2100, causing sea level rise and increasing extreme weather events like hurricanes. On balance, the impacts of global warming will be significantly negative.

These main points are held by the majority of climate scientists and those doing research in closely related fields; however, there are also a small number of scientists who actively disagree. This page is intended to highlight those scientists who have, since the 2001 IPCC Third Assessment Report, published research or made public comments openly opposing at least one of the conclusions listed above.

Only scientists with a record of scholarship are included, and they must have been making specific statements, not merely participating in a poll or survey of opinion. This list is intended to be comprehensive, but is likely to be incomplete.

1 The Earth is not warming
2 The Earth is warming but the cause is unknown
3 The Earth is warming but mostly due to natural processes
4 Global warming is good for human society
5 See also
6 External links

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The Earth is not warming

Since 2001, no climate scientists have expressed skepticism that warming, of the magnitude described by the IPCC, has occurred.

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The Earth is warming but the cause is unknown

Scientists in this section accept the observations of rising temperatures, but conclude it is too early to ascribe any cause to these changes, man-made or natural.

Richard Lindzen, MIT meteorology professor and member of the National Academy of Sciences: "We are quite confident that [the] global mean temperature is about 0.5 degrees Celsius higher than it was a century ago… [but] we are not in a position to confidently attribute past climate change to carbon dioxide or to forecast what the climate will be in the future..." [1]. But against this, he also said if all else were kept equal, the increase in carbon dioxide should have led to somewhat more warming than has been observed [2] [WSJ: June 26, 2006; Page A14]
Robert C. Balling, Jr., director of the Office of Climatology and an associate professor of geography at Arizona State University: "At this moment in time we know only that: (1) Global surface temperatures have risen in recent decades. (2) Mid-tropospheric temperatures have warmed little over the same period. (3) This difference is not consistent with predictions from numerical climate models." [3] Balling "has received more than $400,000 from the coal and oil industries," according to the Center for Media and Democracy. [4]
Roy Spencer, principal research scientist, University of Alabama in Huntsville: "We need to find out how much of the warming we are seeing could be due to mankind, because I still maintain we have no idea how much you can attribute to mankind." (April 17, 2006) [5]

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The Earth is warming but mostly due to natural processes

Scientists in this section accept the observations of rising temperature, but conclude that natural causes may be more to blame than human activities.

William M. Gray, Colorado State University: "This small warming is likely a result of the natural alterations in global ocean currents which are driven by ocean salinity variations. Ocean circulation variations are as yet little understood. Human kind has little or nothing to do with the recent temperature changes. We are not that influential." Mr. Gray, who has worked in the field for 50 years, has labeled global warming "one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American people." [6][7]
Willie Soon, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics: "[T]here's increasingly strong evidence that previous research conclusions, including those of the United Nations and the United States government concerning 20th century warming, may have been biased by underestimation of natural climate variations. The bottom line is that if these variations are indeed proven true, then, yes, natural climate fluctuations could be a dominant factor in the recent warming. In other words, natural factors could be more important than previously assumed." [8]
Sallie Baliunas, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics: "[T]he recent warming trend in the surface temperature record cannot be caused by the increase of human-made greenhouse gases in the air". [9] In 2003 Baliunas and Soon wrote that "there is no reliable evidence for increased severity or frequency of storms, droughts, or floods that can be related to the air’s increased greenhouse gas content." [10]
Frederick Seitz, retired, former solid-state physicist, former president of the National Academy of Sciences: "So we see that the scientific facts indicate that all the temperature changes observed in the last 100 years were largely natural changes and were not caused by carbon dioxide produced in human activities." [11]
Nir Shaviv, an astrophysicist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: "[T]he truth is probably somewhere in between [the common view and that of skeptics], with natural causes probably being more important over the past century, whereas anthropogenic causes will probably be more dominant over the next century. ... [A]bout 2/3's (give or take a third or so) of the warming [over the past century] should be attributed to increased solar activity and the remaining to anthropogenic causes." His opinion is based on some proxies of solar activity over the past few centuries. [12]
Fred Singer, president of the Science & Environmental Policy Project: has changed his position from "The earth is not warming significantly" (paraphrase) [13] to "The Earth currently is experiencing a warming trend, but there is scientific evidence that human activities have little to do with it" [14].
Robert M. Carter, researcher at the Marine Geophysical Laboratory at James Cook University in Australia. Dr. Carter says, "The essence of the issue is this. Climate changes naturally all the time, partly in predictable cycles, and partly in unpredictable shorter rhythms and rapid episodic shifts, some of the causes of which remain unknown." [15]
Tim Patterson [16], paleoclimatologist and Professor of Geology at Carleton University in Canada. Dr. Patterson states, "There is no meaningful correlation between CO₂ levels and Earth's temperature over this [geologic] time frame. In fact, when CO₂ levels were over ten times higher than they are now, about 450 million years ago, the planet was in the depths of the absolute coldest period in the last half billion years. On the basis of this evidence, how could anyone still believe that the recent relatively small increase in CO₂ levels would be the major cause of the past century's modest warming?" [17]
Jan Veizer, Professor Emeritus, University of Ottawa, writes: "At this stage, two scenarios of potential human impact on climate appear feasible: (1) the standard IPCC model that advocates the leading role of greenhouse gases, particularly of CO₂, and (2) the alternative model that argues for celestial phenomena as the principal climate driver. ... Models and empirical observations are both indispensable tools of science, yet when discrepancies arise, observations should carry greater weight than theory. If so, the multitude of empirical observations favours celestial phenomena as the most important driver of terrestrial climate on most time scales, but time will be the final judge." (In J. Veizer, "Celestial climate driver: a perspective from four billion years of the carbon cycle", Geoscience Canada, March, 2005. [18])

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Global warming is good for human society

This section contains scientists who accept that global warming will occur, but advocate the position that it will be of little impact or a net positive for human society.

Sherwood Idso, President Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, formerly a research physicist at the USDA Water Conservation Laboratory and adjunct professor Arizona State University: "[W]arming has been shown to positively impact human health, while atmospheric CO2 enrichment has been shown to enhance the health-promoting properties of the food we eat, as well as stimulate the production of more of it. ... [W]e have nothing to fear from increasing concentrations of atmospheric CO2 and global warming." ([19] page 30).

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