Hardly 'junk' science: Royal Society examines climate change

Hardly 'junk' science: Royal Society examines climate change

Stephen Hume, Special to the Sun

Published: Monday, October 22, 2007

In the wake of the Nobel Prize awarded Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, skeptics have once again been fussing, fuming and fulminating. Assertions are flying that the evidence for climate change is either bunkum spun by charlatans, a gigantic anti-capitalist hoax or alarmist "junk" science.

So let's give one of the world's most prestigious science academies an opportunity to address some of the counterclaims presented as fact by climate change deniers.

The Royal Society of the United Kingdom was founded in 1660 and consists of 1,400 of the most eminent scientists, engineers and technologists from the U.K. and the Commonwealth. Its list of present and former members reads like the Who's Who of western science. Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Ernest Rutherford, Christian Huygens, Lord Kelvin, Thomas Huxley, Edward Jenner, William Herschel, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Fred Hoyle, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking and so on. These are not "junk" scientists.

Here is what the Royal Society says about the eight most common claims by skeptics:

1. Climate change is nothing to do with humans: "Levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are now 35 per cent greater than they have been for 650,000 years. From the radioactivity and chemical composition of the gas we know that this is mainly due to the burning of fossil fuels, as well as the production of cement and the widespread burning of the world's forests."

2. CO2 makes up only a small part of the atmosphere and so cannot be responsible for global warming: "Even in tiny concentrations [CO2] has a large influence on our climate . . . . Before industrialization CO2 made up about 0.03 per cent of the atmosphere or 280 ppm. Today, due to human influence it is about 380 ppm. Even these tiny quantities have resulted in an increase in global temperatures."

3. Rises in levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are the result of global warming, not the other way around: "The recent steep increase in the level of CO2 -- some 30 per cent in the last 100 years -- is not the result of natural factors. This is because, by chemical analysis, we can tell that the majority of this CO2 has come from the burning of fossil fuels . . . CO2 from human sources is almost certainly responsible for most of the warming over the last 50 years. There is much evidence that backs up this explanation and none that conflicts with it."

4. Observation of temperatures taken by weather balloons and satellites do not support the theory of global warming: "Discrepancies have been found to be related to problems with how the data was gathered and analysed and have now largely been resolved."

5. Computer models which predict the future climate are unreliable and based on a series of assumptions: "While climate models are now able to produce past and present changes in the global climate rather well, they are not, as yet, sufficiently well-developed to project accurately all the detail of the impacts we might see at regional or local levels. They do, however, give us a reliable guide to the direction of future climate change."

6. It's all to do with the sun -- for example, there is a strong link between increased temperatures on Earth with the number of sunspots: "While there is evidence of a link between solar warming and some of the warming in the early 20th century, measurements from satellites show that there has been very little change in underlying solar activity in the last 30 years. There is even evidence of a detectable decline and so this cannot account for the recent rises we have seen in global temperatures."

7. The climate is affected by cosmic rays: "Any effect that cosmic rays could have on the climate is not yet very well understood, but if there is one, it is likely to be small . . . observation of clouds and galactic cosmic rays show that, at most, the possible link between cosmic rays and clouds only produces a small effect."

8. The scale of the negative effects of climate change is often overstated and there is no need for urgent action: "The world's leading authority on climate change has projected a global average temperature increase for this century of two to three degrees. This would mean that the Earth will experience a larger climate change than it has experienced for at least 10,000 years. The impact and pace of this change would be difficult for many people and ecosystems to adapt to . . . . And the impacts of climate change will fall disproportionately upon developing countries and the poor who can least afford to adapt."

For space reasons I've had to reduce these explanations to the brief excerpts above. Readers who want greater detail should go to the Royal Society's website at: www.royalsoc.ac.uk/ and click on the link entitled "Is global warming a swindle?"

shume@islandnet.com