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Katharine Hayhoe, PhD, who wrote the December AITSE piece Climate Change: Anthropogenic or Not?, is an atmospheric scientist and director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. She is senior author of the book A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions.
I am a senior research geologist who has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers on palaeo-environmental and palaeo-climatic topics and also author of the book, Climate: the Counter Consensus.
Quite clearly, Dr. Hayhoe and I are both credible professional scientists. Given our training and research specializations, we are therefore competent to assess the evidence regarding the dangerous global warming that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) alleges is being caused by industrial carbon dioxide emissions.
Yet at the end of her article Dr. Hayhoe recommends for further reading the websites RealClimate.org and SkepticalScience.com, whereas here at the outset of writing my own article I recommend the websites wattsupwiththat.com and Home | The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) (Global Warming Policy Foundation). To knowledgeable readers, this immediately signals that Dr. Hayhoe and I have diametrically opposing views on the global warming issue.
The general public finds it very hard to understand how such strong disagreement can exist between two equally qualified persons on a scientific topic, a disagreement that is manifest also on the wider scene by the existence of equivalent groups of scientists who either support or oppose the views of the IPCC about dangerous anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming (DAGW).
In this article I shall try to summarize what the essential disagreement is between these two groups of scientists, and show how it has come to be misrepresented in the public domain.
Why even look at that article? The variation in CO2 level is about 100 ppm, 180 ppm to 280 ppm, for the glacial to interglacial cycles. CO2, as well as CH4 is a greenhouse gas. We have raised the level from 280 ppm to almost 400 ppm through the burning of fossil fuel, how can we not have started warming the globe?
Given the inertia in the ocean and atmospheric system, the consequences that we are experiancing today are the results of what was in the atmosphere 30 to 50 years ago. So, in the very near future, we are going to experiance even more warming. And an increased 'weirding' of our weather.
Note that I made a flat out prediction. Increased warming, with some peak years that eclipse 1998, 2005, and 2010 by 2020. Now you and others have been braying about a flattening of the warming, even though 9 of the last ten years have been the warmest on record. Some here are even predicting a cooling. In spite of the fact that over the last ten years we have had a lower TSI and a couple of really strong La Nina's.
So, Ian, are you going to predict a cooling? After all, if the CO2 has no effect, then why should it warm?
