The 3% - some well-known climate sceptics
Ian Plimer
Ian Rutherford Plimer is an Australian geologist, Professor Emeritus of Earth Sciences at the University of Melbourne. He was previously a Professor of Mining Geology at the University of Adelaide and the director of multiple mineral exploration and mining companies. He has published many scientific papers, six books and is one of the co-editors of Encyclopedia of Geology. He has been a critic of both creationism and the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change.
His views on climate change are best described in an interview on ABCNewswire in June 2009:
Carbon dioxide has an effect on the atmosphere and it has an effect for the first 50 parts per million and once it's done its job then it's finished and you can double it and quadruple it and it has no effect because we've seen that in the geological past, and we've seen it in times gone by when the carbon dioxide content was 100 times the current content. We didn't have runaway global warming, we actually had glaciation, so there's immediately a disconnect. So carbon dioxide is absolutely vital for living on earth; it's plant food, all of life lives off carbon dioxide. To demonise it shows that you don't understand school child science.
|
These views conflict with the classic views on the role of carbon expressed over 150 years ago by John Tyndall and Svante Arrhenius which represent the scientific consensus on the subject today. Plimer says that climatic researchers are “bedazzled” by the prospect of funding and that the IPCC is too much involved in activism and politics. He is critical of what he terms “greenhouse gas politics” and says that extreme environmental changes are inevitable. He says that volcanic eruptions are responsible for releasing more carbon dioxide (CO2) than human activity. Other well credentialled scientists and geologists have reviewed similar data and have reached different conclusions.
Bjorn Lomborg
Bjørn Lomborg is a Danish author and President of a think tank founded by him, the Copenhagen Consensus Centre. He is a former director of the Danish government's Environmental Assessment Institute (EAI) in Copenhagen. He argues that many of the costly measures and actions adopted by scientists and policy makers to meet the challenges of global warming will ultimately have minimal impact on the world's rising temperature.
His issue is not with the reality of climate change, but rather with the economic and political approaches being taken (or not taken) to meet the challenges of that climate change. He says that “the truth about climate change is nuanced: it is real, and in the long term it will be a problem, but its impact is less than we might believe .. (W)e are too eager to believe the problem is far worse than science shows, and – conversely – that our solutions are far easier than reality dictates”. (Tweet, 18 Dec 2018).
Jordan Peterson
Jordan Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist and a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. Environmental science in general and climate change in particular are not within the fields of his expertise, but that has not inhibited him from speaking about them. He doubts the scientific consensus on climate change, and says that he is very sceptical of the models used to predict it, saying that you can’t trust the data because too much ideology is involved.
He once carried out work for the UN that involved an extensive review of the climate change literature, and based on the modelling, he came to doubt the climate change narrative.
Michael Mann is an American climatologist and geophysicist, currently director of the Earth System Science Centre at Pennsylvania State University. His contribution has been to the scientific understanding of historic climate change based on the temperature record of the past thousand years. He has pioneered techniques to find patterns in past climate change, and to isolate climate signals from what may be termed “noisy data”.
He says of Peterson that whilst he has impressive credentials, his claims about climate change are vacuous and ill-founded, in that he interprets data to match his own preconceived bias and preconceptions, a phenomenon known as confirmation bias. He says that Peterson’s views fall short of the expansive evidence of climate change, that he is intellectually arrogant outside of his own field, and that he doesn’t do the work.
Nils-Axel Mörner
Nils-Axel Mörner is the former head of the paleogeophysics and geodynamics department at Stockholm University. He is a critic of the IPCC and the notion that global sea levels are rising. Mörner's claim that sea levels are not rising has been criticised for ignoring correctly calibrated satellite altimeter records, all of which show that sea levels are rising.[1]
Patrick Moore
Patrick Moore is a Canadian industry consultant, and former activist and president of Greenpeace Canada. He has a PhD from the University of British Columbia, his subject being the Administration of Pollution Control in British Columbia: A Focus on the Mining Industry (1974). These days he is highly critical of Greenpeace, and for their part they distance themselves from him, regarding him as a lobbyist. Moore is cited by Donald Trump in support of his views that the consensus view of climate change by mainstream science is fake news and fake science.
Over the years Moore is recorded as saying that “there is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the past 100 years” and that the climatic changes caused by CO2 emissions are insignificant. “CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but it is in the atmosphere at four one hundredths of a percent. How can we something in the atmosphere that is invisible, tasteless, odourless, colourless at 0.04% be the most powerful agent in the universe at this point in time?” Tyndall and Arrhenius provided the answer over 150 years ago.
On 15 October 2015, Moore gave the 2015 Annual Global Warming Policy Foundation Lecture during which he expressed the view that “carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is the stuff of life, the staff of life, the currency of life, indeed the backbone of life on Earth”, so it should be celebrated.
In the process, he relied on many of the aspects considered, debunked and refuted on the next page, such as the role of Milankovitch cycles as being responsible for the Earth’s temperature changes, sea levels being higher during the Mediaeval Warm Period than they are now, the fact that there has been little net change in sea levels in the past thousands of years, the fact that there have been short warming cycles in the past (though his are of the 30 year variety), that plants need CO2 and are capable of growing much faster at higher levels of CO2, the role of volcanoes in the early production of CO2 and that over the past 150 million years there has not been enough addition of CO2 to the atmosphere to offset the gradual losses due to burial of sediments, and that it is the “power of the elites that have converged around the [idea of] catastrophic human-caused climate change that so many alleged world leaders must participate in the charade”.[2]
Christopher Monckton
Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, is a British consultant, policy adviser, writer, columnist, public speaker and hereditary peer. While not formally trained in science, he is one of the most cited and widely published climate sceptics, having even been invited to testify to the U.S. Senate and Congress on several occasions.
For a comprehensive rebuttal of his views, see this presentation under the rubric Monckton myths, by Professor John Abraham, Professor of thermal sciences at the University of St. Thomas School of Engineering, Minnesota. Professor Abraham has compiled many examples where Monckton blatantly misrepresents the very scientists whose work he cites.
Professor Richard Lindzen, lead author of Chapter 7, "Physical Climate Processes and Feedbacks," of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Third Assessment Report on climate change, who has criticised the scientific consensus about climate change and what he has called "climate alarmism."
Frequently cited quote by Professor Lindzen
“What historians will definitely wonder about in future centuries is how deeply flawed logic, obscured by shrewd and unrelenting propaganda, actually enabled a coalition of powerful special interests to convince nearly everyone in the world that CO2 from human industry was a dangerous, planet-destroying toxin. It will be remembered as the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world - that CO2, the life of plants, was considered for a time to be a deadly poison”: https://www.azquotes.com/author/30824-Richard_Lindzen
This notwithstanding, Professor Lindzen has enunciated views expressing acceptance of the elementary tenets of climate science, agreeing that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, calling people who dispute that point "nutty." He has agreed that the level of it is rising because of human activity and that this should warm the climate. However in his view, decreasing tropical cirrus clouds in a warmer world will allow more longwave radiation to escape the atmosphere, counteracting that warming: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/science/earth/clouds-effect-on-climate-change-is-last-bastion-for-dissenters.html cited in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lindzen#cite_note-nytgillis-74 In other words, Professor Lindgren would seem not to doubt the basic proposition that CO2 is responsible for inducing at least some degree of global warming. He simply has an alternative hypothesis which he postulates will be responsible for moderating its effect.
[1] Nerem; et al. (2007). "Comment on "Estimating future sea level change from past records" by Nils-Axel Mörner". Global and Planetary Change. 55 (4): 358–60. doi:10.1016/j.gloplacha.2006.08.002.
For a critique of his views, see Nils-Axel Mörner is Wrong About Sea Level Rise
https://skepticalscience.com/Nils-Axel-Morner-wrong-about-sea-level-rise.html Posted 6 December 2011 by dana1981
[2] For a further critique of his stance, see https://www.desmogblog.com/patrick-moore
The critique on Monckton by Professor John Anderson (see below) applies equally to many of Moore's preferred arguments: https://skepticalscience.com/Monckton_Myths_arg.htm
Bjorn Lomborg
Bjørn Lomborg is a Danish author and President of a think tank founded by him, the Copenhagen Consensus Centre. He is a former director of the Danish government's Environmental Assessment Institute (EAI) in Copenhagen. He argues that many of the costly measures and actions adopted by scientists and policy makers to meet the challenges of global warming will ultimately have minimal impact on the world's rising temperature.
His issue is not with the reality of climate change, but rather with the economic and political approaches being taken (or not taken) to meet the challenges of that climate change. He says that “the truth about climate change is nuanced: it is real, and in the long term it will be a problem, but its impact is less than we might believe .. (W)e are too eager to believe the problem is far worse than science shows, and – conversely – that our solutions are far easier than reality dictates”. (Tweet, 18 Dec 2018).
Jordan Peterson
Jordan Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist and a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. Environmental science in general and climate change in particular are not within the fields of his expertise, but that has not inhibited him from speaking about them. He doubts the scientific consensus on climate change, and says that he is very sceptical of the models used to predict it, saying that you can’t trust the data because too much ideology is involved.
He once carried out work for the UN that involved an extensive review of the climate change literature, and based on the modelling, he came to doubt the climate change narrative.
Michael Mann is an American climatologist and geophysicist, currently director of the Earth System Science Centre at Pennsylvania State University. His contribution has been to the scientific understanding of historic climate change based on the temperature record of the past thousand years. He has pioneered techniques to find patterns in past climate change, and to isolate climate signals from what may be termed “noisy data”.
He says of Peterson that whilst he has impressive credentials, his claims about climate change are vacuous and ill-founded, in that he interprets data to match his own preconceived bias and preconceptions, a phenomenon known as confirmation bias. He says that Peterson’s views fall short of the expansive evidence of climate change, that he is intellectually arrogant outside of his own field, and that he doesn’t do the work.
Nils-Axel Mörner
Nils-Axel Mörner is the former head of the paleogeophysics and geodynamics department at Stockholm University. He is a critic of the IPCC and the notion that global sea levels are rising. Mörner's claim that sea levels are not rising has been criticised for ignoring correctly calibrated satellite altimeter records, all of which show that sea levels are rising.[1]
Patrick Moore
Patrick Moore is a Canadian industry consultant, and former activist and president of Greenpeace Canada. He has a PhD from the University of British Columbia, his subject being the Administration of Pollution Control in British Columbia: A Focus on the Mining Industry (1974). These days he is highly critical of Greenpeace, and for their part they distance themselves from him, regarding him as a lobbyist. Moore is cited by Donald Trump in support of his views that the consensus view of climate change by mainstream science is fake news and fake science.
Over the years Moore is recorded as saying that “there is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the past 100 years” and that the climatic changes caused by CO2 emissions are insignificant. “CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but it is in the atmosphere at four one hundredths of a percent. How can we something in the atmosphere that is invisible, tasteless, odourless, colourless at 0.04% be the most powerful agent in the universe at this point in time?” Tyndall and Arrhenius provided the answer over 150 years ago.
On 15 October 2015, Moore gave the 2015 Annual Global Warming Policy Foundation Lecture during which he expressed the view that “carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is the stuff of life, the staff of life, the currency of life, indeed the backbone of life on Earth”, so it should be celebrated.
In the process, he relied on many of the aspects considered, debunked and refuted on the next page, such as the role of Milankovitch cycles as being responsible for the Earth’s temperature changes, sea levels being higher during the Mediaeval Warm Period than they are now, the fact that there has been little net change in sea levels in the past thousands of years, the fact that there have been short warming cycles in the past (though his are of the 30 year variety), that plants need CO2 and are capable of growing much faster at higher levels of CO2, the role of volcanoes in the early production of CO2 and that over the past 150 million years there has not been enough addition of CO2 to the atmosphere to offset the gradual losses due to burial of sediments, and that it is the “power of the elites that have converged around the [idea of] catastrophic human-caused climate change that so many alleged world leaders must participate in the charade”.[2]
Christopher Monckton
Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, is a British consultant, policy adviser, writer, columnist, public speaker and hereditary peer. While not formally trained in science, he is one of the most cited and widely published climate sceptics, having even been invited to testify to the U.S. Senate and Congress on several occasions.
For a comprehensive rebuttal of his views, see this presentation under the rubric Monckton myths, by Professor John Abraham, Professor of thermal sciences at the University of St. Thomas School of Engineering, Minnesota. Professor Abraham has compiled many examples where Monckton blatantly misrepresents the very scientists whose work he cites.
Professor Richard Lindzen, lead author of Chapter 7, "Physical Climate Processes and Feedbacks," of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Third Assessment Report on climate change, who has criticised the scientific consensus about climate change and what he has called "climate alarmism."
Frequently cited quote by Professor Lindzen
“What historians will definitely wonder about in future centuries is how deeply flawed logic, obscured by shrewd and unrelenting propaganda, actually enabled a coalition of powerful special interests to convince nearly everyone in the world that CO2 from human industry was a dangerous, planet-destroying toxin. It will be remembered as the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world - that CO2, the life of plants, was considered for a time to be a deadly poison”: https://www.azquotes.com/author/30824-Richard_Lindzen
This notwithstanding, Professor Lindzen has enunciated views expressing acceptance of the elementary tenets of climate science, agreeing that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, calling people who dispute that point "nutty." He has agreed that the level of it is rising because of human activity and that this should warm the climate. However in his view, decreasing tropical cirrus clouds in a warmer world will allow more longwave radiation to escape the atmosphere, counteracting that warming: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/01/science/earth/clouds-effect-on-climate-change-is-last-bastion-for-dissenters.html cited in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lindzen#cite_note-nytgillis-74 In other words, Professor Lindgren would seem not to doubt the basic proposition that CO2 is responsible for inducing at least some degree of global warming. He simply has an alternative hypothesis which he postulates will be responsible for moderating its effect.
[1] Nerem; et al. (2007). "Comment on "Estimating future sea level change from past records" by Nils-Axel Mörner". Global and Planetary Change. 55 (4): 358–60. doi:10.1016/j.gloplacha.2006.08.002.
For a critique of his views, see Nils-Axel Mörner is Wrong About Sea Level Rise
https://skepticalscience.com/Nils-Axel-Morner-wrong-about-sea-level-rise.html Posted 6 December 2011 by dana1981
[2] For a further critique of his stance, see https://www.desmogblog.com/patrick-moore
The critique on Monckton by Professor John Anderson (see below) applies equally to many of Moore's preferred arguments: https://skepticalscience.com/Monckton_Myths_arg.htm