Myth of Consensus Explodes
APS Opens Global Warming Debate
DailyTech
Michael Asher July 16, 2008 9:35 PM
“Considerable Presence” of Skeptics
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
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
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