Myth of Consensus Explodes: APS Opens Global Warming Debate

by Kal El on July 22, 2008 · Comments

Who you gonna trust? Physicists, or Al Gore, who flies around on a private jet, telling us little people to stop spewing carbon while his home uses about 19 times the average electricty per month?

The American Physical Society, an organization representing nearly 50,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on climate change and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in human-induced global warming. The APS is also sponsoring public debate on the validity of global warming science. The leadership of the society had previously called the evidence for global warming “incontrovertible.”

In a posting to the APS forum, editor Jeffrey Marque explains,”There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution.”

The APS is opening its debate with the publication of a paper by Lord Monckton of Brenchley, which concludes that climate sensitivity — the rate of temperature change a given amount of greenhouse gas will cause — has been grossly overstated by IPCC modeling. A low sensitivity implies additional atmospheric CO2 will have little effect on global climate.

Larry Gould, Professor of Physics at the University of Hartford and Chairman of the New England Section of the APS, called Monckton’s paper an “expose of the IPCC that details numerous exaggerations and “extensive errors”

In an email to DailyTech, Monckton says, “I was dismayed to discover that the IPCC’s 2001 and 2007 reports did not devote chapters to the central ‘climate sensitivity’ question, and did not explain in proper, systematic detail the methods by which they evaluated it. When I began to investigate, it seemed that the IPCC was deliberately concealing and obscuring its method.”

According to Monckton, there is substantial support for his results, “in the peer-reviewed literature, most articles on climate sensitivity conclude, as I have done, that climate sensitivity must be harmlessly low.”

Monckton, who was the science advisor to Britain’s Thatcher administration, says natural variability is the cause of most of the Earth’s recent warming. “In the past 70 years the Sun was more active than at almost any other time in the past 11,400 years … Mars, Jupiter, Neptune’s largest moon, and Pluto warmed at the same time as Earth.”

Mars and Jupiter are warming too??? Oh no!!! Better send Al Gore to Jupiter first, since both are bloated gas giants.

Hat tip goes to theDailyTech.

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  • jennyjen
    I still think global warming is complete bullshit! If it is in fact real, then why was 2007 the coolest year on record in the past 100 years?
    The sun makes up 99.9% of the mass in the solar system. .05% is Jupiter and the other .05% is the rest of the solar system. Its awfully big-headed of us to think that we (humans) can change the weather!
  • Matthew
    Please do some reporting before simply posting a story from another site blindly. I belong to the APS, and am disappointed by the sort of press this 'story' is generating. The climate change policy has not been updated. It can be found here: http://www.aps.org/policy/statements/07_1.cfm

    The story that is referenced here was in a newsletter and reflected the opinions of the authors alone, not those of the APS.
    As of this writing (July 22, 2008, @9:30pm PST) there is a statement on the APS website stating as much.  It reads as follows:


    APS Position Remains Unchanged
    The American Physical Society reaffirms the following position on climate change, adopted by its governing body, the APS Council, on November 18, 2007:
    "Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth's climate."
    An article at odds with this statement recently appeared in an online newsletter of the APS Forum on Physics and Society, one of 39 units of APS.  The header of this newsletter carries the statement that "Opinions expressed are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the APS or of the Forum."  This newsletter is not a journal of the APS and it is not peer reviewed.
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