To: Cautious_Optimist who wrote (87591 ) 4/24/2012 2:41:26 PM From: longnshort Respond to British climate alarmist recants his alarmismBruce McQuain True confession time I guess . James Lovelock, the maverick scientist who became a guru to the environmental movement with his “Gaia” theory of the Earth as a single organism, has admitted to being “alarmist” about climate change and says other environmental commentators, such as Al Gore, were too. Gee, we’d have never guessed.“The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened,” Lovelock said. So in essence, what Lovelock is saying is a) he was wrong about his predictions and b) in actuality they really don’t know what is happening although they have this theory which isn’t panning out the way they thought it would.Asked if he was now a climate skeptic, Lovelock told msnbc.com: “It depends what you mean by a skeptic. I’m not a denier.” Yeah, neither am I. I’m a skeptic. Climate changes. It has throughout the history of the planet. And we’ve had periods of higher CO2 and higher temperatures in our history, neither of which could be linked to man. Additionally:He said human-caused carbon dioxide emissions were driving an increase in the global temperature, but added that the effect of the oceans was not well enough understood and could have a key role. I am skeptical of his first statement and much more likely to find credence in the second, i.e. it is the oceans of this world that drive climate change, not man. Additionally, it seems to me that, at least to this point, the skeptic’s theory of low sensitivity of the climate to CO2 seems to be more valid than the alarmists theory of high sensitivity. Had the alarmists been right, as Lovelock points out, we should be frying right now.
