Just Science Please!

This is a letter to the editor, published in the OMR, in response to another letter my a man named Don Fultz and printed about X-mas time '06.

Denis Diderot, a French philosopher from the 1700’s, once said, “Skepticism is the first step towards truth.” That, Don Fultz, is the first explanation for my thinking from my presentation in the Local Voices column (10-27-06). The other and more important is science. Is your letter (11-04-06), Don, some lame attempt at a rebuttal? For awhile, Mr. Fultz, leave your silly, snide remarks aside and provide data from your informed sources, likely, scientists who have vested interests in alarmism and propped up by the radical left wing media. The success of these alarmists is no more evident than the increase in federal expenditures on climate research from pre-1990 (about $300 million) to today ($1.7 billion). Following the money trail is educational, but research data and source is far more instructive. If this is of any interest to Mr. Fultz, I’d be happy to provide him a place to start. Most liberals proclaim the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, established 1988) to be their bible on this subject. Of coarse, you need not be a scientist to be a member of this group, nor, by their own mandate do they carry out any research, monitor climate related data or other relevant parameters, but lets leave that aside for now. In the 2001 IPCC Third Assessment Report, the consensus (for Don the liberal, that means compromised agreement) was reached that the global average surface temperatures had risen 0.6 plus or minus 0.2 degree C since the late 19th century. The report goes on to use very scientific words like, “most” and “if, to describe the causes and effects of this mild warming. Liberals are attracted to those areas of the report to extrapolate their alarmism.

Galileo said “the crowd of fools who know nothing is infinite”. Below is a list of scientists with records of scholarship not associated, by Don Fultz’s claim, with petroleum web sites, and who come to quite different conclusions than the IPCC as to the causes and effects of warming.
Richard Lindzen, MIT meteorology professor and member of the National Academy of Sciences.

Robert C. Balling, Jr., director of the Office of Climatology and an associate professor of geography at Arizona State University.
Roy Spencer, principal research scientist, University of Alabama in Huntsville.
William M. Gray, Colorado State University.
Willie Soon, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Frederick Seitz, retired, former solid-state physicist, former president of the National Academy of Sciences.
Fred Singer, Professor emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia.
Robert M. Carter, researcher at the Marine Geophysical Lab at James Cook University, Australia.
Tim Patterson, paleoclimatologist and Professor of Geology at Carleton University in Canada.
David Deming, geophysicist, Associate professor of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oklahoma and adjunct scholar with the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs.

There is increasingly strong evidence that the previous research conclusions, including those of the UN, concerning 20th century warming, may have been biased by underestimation of natural climate variations.