Energy Probe

Lawrence Solomon

Jay attempted to refute my claim that the 2500 scientists associated with the IPCC report were reviewers, not authors.  He not only insisted that the 2500 were authors, he claimed to have counted them himself.

In fact, the IPCC's own documents – even their own public relations documents – refute Jay's belief. For example, the IPCC report reproduced here (LP-link to the ipcc pdf in EP's sources) could not be clearer in stating that the IPCC effort included some 2500 scientific  expert reviewers  and just half as many authors (some 800 contributing authors and 450 lead authors).

Jay seems to believe that Edward Wegman, the statistician who refuted the now notorious hockey stick graph, supports the claims of those who are alarmed by man-made sources of CO2 . Jay does not realize that Dr. Wegman last year signed a petition protesting the shoddy science put forward by the "science is settled" camp. In a Dec. 13 2007 letter to the Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the United Nations, Dr. Wegman and other distinguished scientists begin by stating that climate change is a natural phenomenon and conclude with: "Attempts to prevent global climate change from occurring are ultimately futile, and constitute a tragic misallocation of resources that would be better spent on humanity's real and pressing problems."

Jay also cites another scientist in my book, Duncan Wingham, in implying that I wrongly described him as being sceptical of the science. Like all the scientists in my book, Dr. Wingham accepts that the Earth has been warming. The controversy is over the cause of the warming: Is the warming the result of natural causes, such as the end of the ice age, or is it man-made? Stated Dr. Wingham: (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/24/ice_shelf_collapse) "I am not denying global warming. For instance, Greenland, in the northern hemisphere, does seem to be going. But Greenland's ice cap - Greenland is quite far south - is a last survivor from the ice age and only its height protects it. The more that cap melts, the more it will continue to melt as it gets lower and warmer. But Antarctica is different. Even in the Arctic I am sceptical of some claims that 40 per cent of the sea ice has already vanished, and that what remains is drastically thinning.

"Sparse data from subs in some parts of the Arctic do seem to show a thinning trend, but our preliminary observations using satellite data point to large growth and decay from year to year and place to place, by as much a meter in just a few years. Here too natural variability is considerable. No one doubts that the ultimate fate of Arctic ice looks a grim one, but I believe we have too few data to be confident of how fast it will meet its fate."

Is the science on climate change settled? The scientists who I profiled in The Deniers think not.