Global warming dissenters dash scientific 'consensus'

U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee minority report

The Republican minority of the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee released a report with a growing list of over 650 international experts who soundly debunk the claim that there exists a "consensus" in science that human activity is causing a global warming.

The introduction to the 231-page Senate minority report states, "The chorus of skeptical scientific voices grew louder in 2008 as a steady stream of peer-reviewed studies, analyses, real world data and inconvenient developments challenged the U.N.'s and former Vice President Al Gore's claims that the 'science is settled.'"

The report includes links to dozens of news reports, statements and studies, and concludes, "Developments further secured 2008 as the year the 'consensus' collapsed."

The majority of the 231 pages, however, is composed of statements from the 650 scientists, meteorologists and experts who remain skeptical that carbon dioxide – or any other product of human activity – is endangering the earth through generating global warming.

Yesterday, a prominent Princeton physicist and former top government scientist – who says he was fired by Al Gore for resisting the vice president's alarmist agenda – asked to be added to the list of global warming dissenters.

Dr. William Happer

"I am convinced that the current alarm over carbon dioxide is mistaken," said William Happer, who began serving as the director of the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Energy under the first President Bush in July of 1991. "Fears about
man-made global warming are unwarranted and are not based on good science."

But when Happer testified before Congress under the Clinton administration in 1993, saying, "I think that there probably has been some exaggeration of the dangers of ozone and global climate change," he lost his government position.

"I had the privilege of being fired by Al Gore, since I refused to go along with his alarmism," Happer told Senate leaders yesterday.

Happer had stated of Gore shortly after his firing in 1993, "I was told that science was not going to intrude on policy."

The Senate minority's report includes testimony from several scientists who also claim that sound science is being buried when it conflicts with the global warming political agenda.

For example, the report quotes Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner: "I am a skeptic. … Global warming has become a new religion."

"Creating an ideology pegged to carbon dioxide is a dangerous nonsense," says environmental scientist Delgado Domingos of Portugal, the founder of the
Numerical Weather Forecast group, "The present alarm on climate change is an instrument of social control, a pretext for major businesses and political battle. It became an ideology, which is concerning."

The minority report also quotes several news outlets, however, who contend global warming skeptics are few and untrustworthy.

"The scientific debate is over," said CNN's Miles O'Brien, in 2007. "We're done."

O'Brien, the Senate report also notes, said in 2006 that scientific skeptics of man-made catastrophic global warming "are bought and paid for by the fossil fuel industry, usually."

Andrew Dessler of the eco-publication Grist Magazine is quoted by the report as stating, "While
some people claim there are lots of skeptical climate scientists out there, if you actually try
to find one, you keep turning up the same two dozen or so. These skeptics are endlessly recycled by the denial machine, so someone not paying close attention might think there are lots of them out there – but that's not the case."

The ranking minority member of the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., however, points to the growing list of scientists his office has accumulated.

"The endless claims of a 'consensus' about man-made global warming," Inhofe said in announcing the minority report, "grow less and less credible every day."

Probably in agreement with Inhofe's statement would be the more than 31,000 scientists, including more than 9,000 Ph.D.s, who have signed a massive separate petition project that challenges the belief in global warming.

Art Robinson, a research professor of chemistry and co-founder of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, said the Petition Project's signers simply state their agreement with the statement:

"There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth."

The Petition Project's website includes both a list of scientists by name as well as a list of scientists by state.