Fact is any contrary data is dismissed via intellectual superiority. Here's a list of a few who believe its just another natural process :
Position: Global warming is primarily caused by natural processes
Attribution of climate change, based on Meehl et al. (2004), which represents the consensus view
1979-2009: Over the past 3 decades, temperature has not correlated with sunspot trends. The top plot is of sunspots, while below is the global atmospheric temperature trend. El Chichón and Pinatubo were volcanoes, while El Niño is part of ocean variability. The effect of greenhouse gas emissions is on top of those fluctuations.
1860-1980: In contrast, earlier there was apparent similarity between trends in terrestrial sea surface temperatures and sunspots (related to solar magnetic activity: TSI varies slightly while UV and indirectly cosmic rays vary somewhat more).
Both consensus and non-consensus scientific views involve multiple climate change influences including solar variability and internal forcings, plus human influences such as greenhouse gas emissions and land use change.[20] However, they can differ in which factor(s) gets considered quantitatively major versus more minor.[20][21]
Individuals in this section conclude that the observed warming is more likely attributable to natural causes than to human activities.
Khabibullo Abdusamatov, mathematician and astronomer at Pulkovo Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences:
"Global warming results not from the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, but from an unusually high level of solar radiation and a lengthy – almost throughout the last century – growth in its intensity."[22][23][24] "Had global temperatures directly responded to concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, they would have risen by at least 0.1 degrees Celsius in the past ten years — however, it never happened."[25] "By 2041, solar activity will reach its minimum according to a 200-year cycle, and a deep cooling period will hit the Earth approximately in 2055-2060. It will last for about 45-65 years and by mid-21st century the planet will face another Little Ice Age.”[25]
Sallie Baliunas, astronomer, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics:
"Most of the increase in the air's concentration of greenhouse gases from human activities--over 80 percent--occurred after the 1940s. That means that the strong early 20th century warming must be largely, if not entirely, natural."[26]"The coincident changes in the sun's changing energy output and temperature records on earth tend to argue that the sun has driven a major portion of the 20th century temperature change."[26]
"[T]he recent warming trend in the surface temperature record cannot be caused by the increase of human-made greenhouse gases in the air."[27]"One can have surface warming from a variety of reasons. So the key layer of air to look at is the one-to-five-mile up layer of air. ... Now, this is the layer of air sensitive to the human-made warming effect, and the layer that must warm at least as much as the surface according to the computer simulations. Yet, the projected warming from human activities can't be found in the low troposphere in any great degree."[26]
George V. Chilingar, Professor of Civil and Petroleum Engineering at the University of Southern California:
"The authors identify and describe the following global forces of nature driving the Earth’s climate: (1) solar radiation ..., (2) outgassing as a major supplier of gases to the World Ocean and the atmosphere, and, possibly, (3) microbial activities ... . The writers provide quantitative estimates of the scope and extent of their corresponding effects on the Earth’s climate [and] show that the human-induced climatic changes are negligible."[28]
Ian Clark, hydrogeologist, professor, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa:
"That portion of the scientific community that attributes climate warming to CO2 relies on the hypothesis that increasing CO2, which is in fact a minor greenhouse gas, triggers a much larger water vapour response to warm the atmosphere. This mechanism has never been tested scientifically beyond the mathematical models that predict extensive warming, and are confounded by the complexity of cloud formation – which has a cooling effect. ... We know that [the sun] was responsible for climate change in the past, and so is clearly going to play the lead role in present and future climate change. And interestingly... solar activity has recently begun a downward cycle."[29]
Chris de Freitas, Associate Professor, School of Geography, Geology and Environmental Science, University of Auckland:
"There is evidence of global warming. ... But warming does not confirm that carbon dioxide is causing it. Climate is always warming or cooling. There are natural variability theories of warming. To support the argument that carbon dioxide is causing it, the evidence would have to distinguish between human-caused and natural warming. This has not been done."[30]
David Douglass, solid-state physicist, professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Rochester:
"The observed pattern of warming, comparing surface and atmospheric temperature trends, does not show the characteristic fingerprint associated with greenhouse warming. The inescapable conclusion is that the human contribution is not significant and that observed increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases make only a negligible contribution to climate warming."[31]
Don Easterbrook, emeritus professor of geology, Western Washington University:
"Temperatures during most of the last 10,000 years were somewhat higher than at present until about 3,000 years ago. For the past 700 years, the Earth has been coming out of the Little Ice Age and generally warming with alternating warm/cool periods. ... Georef lists 485 papers on the Medieval Warm period and 1413 on the Little Ice Age for a total of 1,900 published papers on the two periods. Thus, when Mann et al. (1998) contended that neither event had happened and that climate had not changed in 1000 years (the infamous hockey stick graph), geologists didn't take them seriously and thought either (1) the trees they used for their climate reconstruction were not climate sensitive, or (2) the data had been inappropriately used."[32]
"Glaciers advanced from about 1890–1920, retreated rapidly from ~1925 to ~1945, readvanced from ~1945 to ~1977, and have been retreating since the present warm cycle began in 1977. ... Because the warming periods in these oscillations occurred well before atmospheric CO2 began to rise rapidly in the 1940s, they could not have been caused by increased atmospheric CO2, and global warming since 1900 could well have happened without any effect of CO2. If the cycles continue as in the past, the current warm cycle should end soon and global temperatures should cool slightly until about 2035, then warm about 0.5°C from ~2035 to ~2065, and cool slightly until 2100."[33]
William M. Gray, Professor Emeritus and head of The Tropical Meteorology Project, Department of Atmospheric Science, 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."[34] "I am of the opinion that [global warming] is one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American people."[35] "So many people have a vested interest in this global-warming thing—all these big labs and research and stuff. The idea is to frighten the public, to get money to study it more."[36]
William Happer, physicist specializing in optics and spectroscopy, Princeton University:
"All the evidence I see is that the current warming of the climate is just like past warmings. In fact, it's not as much as past warmings yet, and it probably has little to do with carbon dioxide, just like past warmings had little to do with carbon dioxide"[37]
William Kininmonth, meteorologist, former Australian delegate to World Meteorological Organization Commission for Climatology:
"There has been a real climate change over the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries that can be attributed to natural phenomena. Natural variability of the climate system has been underestimated by IPCC and has, to now, dominated human influences."[38]
David Legates, associate professor of geography and director of the Center for Climatic Research, University of Delaware:
"About half of the warming during the 20th century occurred prior to the 1940s, and natural variability accounts for all or nearly all of the warming."[39]
"Many records reveal that the 20th century is likely not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium, although it is clear that human activity has significantly impacted some local environments."[40]
Tad Murty, oceanographer; adjunct professor, Departments of Civil Engineering and Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa:
[Global warming] "is the biggest scientific hoax being perpetrated on humanity. There is no global warming due to human anthropogenic activities. The atmosphere hasn’t changed much in 280 million years, and there have always been cycles of warming and cooling. The Cretaceous period was the warmest on earth. You could have grown tomatoes at the North Pole"[41]
Tim Patterson, paleoclimatologist and Professor of Geology at Carleton University in Canada:
"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?"[42][43]
Ian Plimer, Professor emeritus of Mining Geology, The University of Adelaide:
"Natural climate changes occur unrelated to carbon dioxide contents. We've had many, many times in the recent past where we've rapidly gone into a greenhouse and the carbon dioxide content has been far, far lower than the current carbon dioxide content. It was only 1,100 years ago where Greenland was populated. It was called Greenland because it was green. There were crops, there were cattle there. ... We only have to have one volcano burping and we have changed the whole planetary climate... It looks as if carbon dioxide actually follows climate change rather than drives it".[44]
Tom Segalstad, head of the Geology Museum at the University of Oslo:
"The IPCC's temperature curve (the so-called 'hockey stick' curve) must be in error, because the Medieval warm period (the "Climate Optimum") and the Little Ice Age both are absent from their curve, on which the IPCC bases its future projections and recommended mitigation. All measurements of solar luminosity and 14C isotopes show that there is at present an increasing solar radiation which gives a warmer climate (Willson, R.C & Hudson, H.S. 1991: The Sun's luminosity over a complete solar cycle. Nature 351, 42-44; and Coffey, H.E., Erwin, E.H. & Hanchett, C.D.: Solar databases for global change models. www.ngdc.noaa.gov/stp/SOLAR/solarda3.html). Warmer climate was previously perceived as an optimum climate and not catastrophic. ... On a wet basis the Earth's atmosphere consists by mass of ~73.5% nitrogen, ~22.5% oxygen, ~2.7% water, and ~1.25% argon. CO2 in air is in minimal amount, ~0.05% by mass, and with minimal capacity (~2%) to influence the "Greenhouse Effect" compared to water vapor"[45]
Nicola Scafetta, research scientist in the physics department at Duke University, wrote a booklet proposing a phenomenological theory of climate change based on the physical properties of the data. Scafetta describes his conclusions writing:
"At least 60% of the warming of the Earth observed since 1970 appears to be induced by natural cycles which are present in the solar system. A climatic stabilization or cooling until 2030–2040 is forecast by the phenomenological model."[46][47]
Nir Shaviv, 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."[48]
"The climatic variability attributable to solar activity is larger than could be expected from the typical 0.1% changes in the solar irradiance observed over the decadal to centennial time scale [Beer et al., 2000; Soon et al., 2000]. ... Over the solar cycle, the interplanetary magnetic field varies considerably, such that the amount of tropospheric ionization changes by typically 5%. Svensmark [1998, 2000], Marsh and Svensmark [2000a] as well as Palle Bago and Butler [2000] have shown that the variations in the amount of low altitude cloud cover (LACC) nicely correlate with the cosmic ray flux (CRF) reaching Earth over two decades. A recent analysis has shown that the latitudinal variations of the LACC are proportional to the latitudinal dependence of the low altitude ion concentrations [Usoskin et al., 2004]."[49]
"Recent theoretical and experimental studies (Dickenson, 1975; Harrison and Aplin, 2001; Eichkorn et al., 2002; Yu, 2002; Tinsley and Yu, 2003) relate the CRF to the formation of charged aerosols, which could serve as cloud condensation nuclei (CCN), as demonstrated independently by ground-based and airborne experiments (Harrison and Aplin, 2001; Eichkorn et al., 2002)."[50]
Fred Singer, Professor emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia:
"The greenhouse effect is real. However, the effect is minute, insignificant, and very difficult to detect."[51][52] “It’s not automatically true that warming is bad, I happen to believe that warming is good, and so do many economists.”[53]
"The current warming cycle is not unusual. ... The Earth consistently goes through a climate cycle marked by alternating warmer and cooler periods over 1,500 years (plus or minus 500 years)." "When the sun is less active, its solar wind weakens and provides less shielding for the Earth from the cosmic rays that bounce around space." "We have a number of shorter-term proxies (cave stalagmites, tree rings from trees both living and buried, boreholes and a wide variety of other temperature proxies) that testify to the global nature of the 1,500- year climate cycles. ... Models that posit a human impact on the climate must better take this evidence into account before any conclusions are drawn regarding humanity’s ability to prevent future climate change."[52]
"The IPCC summary report presents selected facts and omits important information. The summary (correctly) reports that climate has warmed by 0.3 °C to 0.6 °C in the last 100 years, but does not mention that there has been little warming if any (depending on whose compilation is used) in the last 50 years, during which time some 80% of greenhouse gases were added to the atmosphere. ... The summary does not make it explicit that the IPCC time scale for warming has now been stretched out — doubled, in fact, from 2050 to 2100 — making any possible impact less dramatic. The summary also does not mention an authoritative U.S. government statement; it quotes a global warming as low as 0.5 °C by 2100 — only half of the IPCC's lowest 1995 prediction."[54]
Willie Soon, astrophysicist, 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."[55]
Roy Spencer, principal research scientist, University of Alabama in Huntsville:
"I predict that in the coming years, there will be a growing realization among the global warming research community that most of the climate change we have observed is natural, and that mankind’s role is relatively minor".[56]
"It has been calculated theoretically that, if there are no other changes in the climate system, a doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration would cause less than 1 deg C of surface warming (about 1 deg. F). This is NOT a controversial statement…it is well understood by climate scientists. (As of 2008, we were about 40% to 45% of the way toward a doubling of atmospheric CO2.) BUT…everything else in the climate system probably WON’T stay the same! For instance, clouds, water vapor, and precipitation systems can all be expected to respond to the warming tendency in some way, which could either amplify or reduce the manmade warming."[21]
"A confusion between forcing and feedback (loosely speaking, cause and effect) when observing cloud behavior has led to the illusion of a sensitive climate system, when in fact our best satellite observations (when carefully and properly interpreted) suggest an IN-sensitive climate system... Finally, if the climate system is insensitive, this means that the extra carbon dioxide we pump into the atmosphere is not enough to cause the observed warming over the last 100 years — some natural mechanism must be involved ... my favorite candidate: the Pacific Decadal Oscillation."[21]
Philip Stott, professor emeritus of biogeography at the University of London:
"...the myth is starting to implode. ... Serious new research at The Max Planck Society has indicated that the sun is a far more significant factor..."[57]
Henrik Svensmark, Danish National Space Center:
"Our team ... has discovered that the relatively few cosmic rays that reach sea-level play a big part in the everyday weather. They help to make low-level clouds, which largely regulate the Earth’s surface temperature. During the 20th Century the influx of cosmic rays decreased and the resulting reduction of cloudiness allowed the world to warm up. ... most of the warming during the 20th Century can be explained by a reduction in low cloud cover."[58]
We find that the observed variation of 3–4% of the global cloud cover during the recent solar cycle is strongly correlated with the cosmic ray flux. ... The effect is larger at higher latitudes in agreement with the shielding effect of the Earth's magnetic field on high-energy charged particles.[59]
Variations in the cosmic-ray influx due to solar magnetic activity account well for climatic fluctuations on decadal, centennial and millennial timescales ... to reconcile abundant indications of the Sun's influence on climate (e.g. Herschel 1801, Eddy 1976, Friis-Christenen 1997) with the small 0.1% variations in the solar cycle measured by satellites. ... The connection offers a mechanism for solar-driven climate change much more powerful than changes in solar irradiance.[60]
Jan Veizer, environmental geochemist, Professor Emeritus from University of Ottawa:
"At this stage, two scenarios of potential human impact on climate appear feasible: (1) the standard IPCC model ..., 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."[61] |
