Point/Counterpoint: Is Man Causing the Earth to Warm?

The best points for manmade "global warming":    *    The best points against manmade "global warming":“Professor Dr. Fritz Vahrenholt, a social democrat and green activist, decided to author a climate science skeptical book. … Vahrenholt’s skepticism started when he was asked to review an IPCC report on renewable energy. He found hundreds of errors. When he pointed them out, IPCC officials simply brushed them aside. Stunned, he asked himself, ‘Is this the way they approached the climate assessment reports?’ ” (The Telegraph, Feb. 7, 2012)• Contributors to Vahrenholt’s climate science skeptical book include: Nir Shaviv, astrophysicist, professor at the Racah Institute of Physics of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Werner Weber, emeritus professor of physics at the Technical University of Dortmund; and Henrik Svensmark, professor in the Division of Solar System Physics at the Danish National Space Institute in Copenhagen.• “The United Nations issued a dramatic warning [in 2005] that the world would have to cope with 50 million climate refugees by 2010. But now that those migration flows have failed to materialize, the U.N. has distanced itself from the forecasts. On the contrary, populations are growing in the regions that had been identified as environmental danger zones.” (Der Spiegel, April 18, 2011)• “In 2007, the IPCC predicted that rising global temperatures would kill off many species. ... The IPCC [now] admits that there is no evidence climate change has led has led to even a single species becoming extinct thus far.” (Der Spiegel, March 26, 2014)• “A chilly Arctic summer [in 2013] has left 533,000 more square miles of ocean covered with ice than at the same time last year — an increase of 29 percent. The rebound from 2012’s record low comes six years after the BBC reported that global warming would leave the Arctic ice free in summer by 2013.” (Daily Mail, Sept. 28, 2013)• It is now more than 15 years since global average temperature rose significantly. Indeed, “the U.N.’s climate change chief, Rajendra Pachauri, has acknowledged a 17-year pause in global temperature rises.” (The Australian, Feb. 22, 2013)• “A recent study in Nature Climate Change by Francis Zwiers and colleagues of the University of Victoria, British Columbia, found that models have overestimated warming by 100% over the past 20 years.” (Wall Street Journal, Sept. 17, 2013)• “President Obama has explicitly linked a warming climate to ‘more extreme droughts, floods, wildfires and hurricanes.’ The White House warned this summer of ‘increasingly frequent and severe extreme weather events that come with climate change.’ Yet this is not supported by science. ‘General statements about extremes are almost nowhere to be found in the literature but seem to abound in the popular media,’ climate scientist Gavin Schmidt of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies said last month.” (Bjorn Lomborg, Washington Post, Sept. 13, 2013)• “Judith Curry, a climatologist who heads the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, was involved in the third IPCC assessment, which was published in 2001. But now she accuses the organization of intellectual arrogance and bias.” (Monte Morin, science writer, Los Angeles Times, Sept. 22, 2013)• “IPCC vice chair Francis Zwiers, director of the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium at the University of Victoria in Canada, co-wrote a paper published in this month’s Nature Climate Change that said climate models had ‘significantly’ overestimated global warming over the last 20 years.” (Monte Morin article.)• “A new look at NASA satellite data revealed that Earth set a new record for coldest temperature recorded. It happened in August 2010 when it hit -135.8 degrees. Then on July 31 of this year, it came close again: -135.3 degrees.” (Associated Press, Dec. 9, 2013)• “Some experts say their trust in climate science has declined because of the many uncertainties. ‘My own confidence in the data has gone down in the past five years,’ said Richard Tol, an expert in climate change and professor of economics at the University of Sussex in England.” (Reuters, April 16, 2013)• “ ‘I think that the latest IPCC report has truly sunk to level of hilarious incoherence,’ Dr. Richard Lindzen told Climate Depot — a site known for questioning the theory of global warming” (Daily Mail, Sept. 29, 2013). Note: From 1983 until last year, Lindzen was a professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and widely considered the dean of American climatologists.• Other world-renowned scientists who are skeptics or “deniers” include:• Freeman Dyson, one the world’s most admired physicists, a Fellow of the Royal Society, recipient of the Enrico Fermi Award, and the speaker who delivered the Jerusalem-Harvard Lectures at Hebrew University; Roger Pielke Sr., former chairman and member of the American Meteorological Society Committee on Weather Forecasting and Analysis, chief editor of Monthly Weather Review and a fellow of the American Meteorological Society; Denis G. Rancourt, former professor of physics at the University of Ottawa (and, for the record, a left-wing activist); Claude Allegre, member of the French Academy of Sciences, a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences, and former French minister of education (Socialist Party).• “Over 100 Prominent Scientists Warn UN Against ‘Futile’ Climate Control Efforts” on the Web site of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation   *Global warming alarmists have forfeited the debate. Skeptics win by default