TechPulse 360

Global warming doubters have mounted a furious attack recently on the science of global warming. But these 21st Century luddites are making a cardinal mistake – inferring from minor oversights and mistakes the collapse of decades of established science.

"The best current view from science still makes it nearly certain that man-made CO2 is respsonbile for most fo the warming of the past century," says Stanford University professor Robert Dunbar.

Climatologists and scientists at top universities reveal how hollow their arguments are. In e-mail exchanges, TechPulse 360 queried several of these experts on key points being used by right wingers and Republicans in Congress, including Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe, who once described the Internet as a series of vacuum tubes.

Among the doubters’ key weapons is a series of e-mail and documents stolen in November from the climate research unit of the University of East Anglia in Britain. The copied cache of data includes more than 1,000 e-mail, 2,000 documents and technical software code. The climate research unit supplied some of the temperature measurements and calculations used in the influence Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on global warming. The U.N.-sponsored report, issued in 2007, concludes the burning of fossil fuels in power plants and cars contributes to climate change and needs to be curtailed worldwide.

Naysayers complain the purloined e-mail catch scientists manipulating data and conspiring to silence critics.

Robert Dunbar, a professor of earth science at Stanford University, disagrees. He says the e-mail offer signs of scientists frustrated with those who dismiss global warming science, but provide no evidence of manipulation.

More proof of global warming lies in the oceans, where one-third of CO2 is collected. This leads to acidification. "It just isn't open for argument - the science is too simple," says Dunbar.

In his e-mail, Dunbar, who in the past has submitted scientific data to the university, noted that he spent eight hours reading the messages. “I didn’t see evidence of purposeful manipulation of data or cherry-picking to tell a predetermined story,” he said. “There was talk of not including certain articles in the IPCC review, but in the end they were included.”

He adds that the critical university temperature records are one of several independent records, and they are almost identical to the ones generated by NOAA and NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

“There are still some uncertainties, but the best current view from science still makes it nearly certain that man-made CO2 is responsible for most of the warming of the past century,” Dunbar writes. “I haven’t seen anything in recent revelations from the East Anglia e-mails or the AR4 that changes this basic conclusion. I also note that the professional skeptics remain a fairly small well-connected group with an agenda that seems to differ from the scientific method.”

Dunbar takes a separate tact as well to illustrate the dangers of global warming. “The real kicker is this: even if we were uncertain about the validity of man-induced (temperature) rise, no one can credibly question the science behind ocean acidification. CO2 has risen in the atmosphere. We know this rise comes from fossil fuel burning. We know about one-third has dissolved into the ocean. We have measured the pH change this has caused. It just isn’t open for argument – the physics is too simple. In the landscape of impacts, some scientists feel that the consequences of ongoing ocean acidification on ocean community health are severe. So even, if warming was highly uncertain, the ocean side of the story alone should be a compelling argument for mitigation.”

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