An excerpt:
...There's a lot less to that "scientific consensus" than meets the eye.About the author:
When millennial climate change patterns are mentioned, many people point to the "2,500 scientists from 130 countries" who have agreed that global warming is caused by the greenhouse effect. Yet not even the International Panel of Climate Change to which these people refer presents definitive scientific proof that the present warming is mostly caused by the greenhouse effect. It is simply an assumption that has morphed into a fact.
Since the physics behind CO2's greenhouse effect has long been well known, the IPCC made the assumption that post-1900 warming was caused by it. They assembled a large number of scientists, mostly meteorologists and physicists (but, interestingly, not many climatologists), and tried to prove their hypothesis using supercomputer models. They have continued to work in this way despite important new evidence from ice-core data showing that temperature rises tend to precede CO2 increases by about 1,000 years. With all of the media attention that this assumption now enjoys, natural temperature changes have been mostly forgotten. Yet in reality they persist; they're simply not being studied. This is the single greatest failing of the IPCC.
Mr. Akasofu is the former director of the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska. This essay is adapted from an article appearing in the Sept. 2007 issue of the Far Eastern Economic Review.
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