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The Growing Consensus on Global Warming

A few days ago there was some question as to whether a growing majority of scientists agree that there such a thing as global warming, and that humans are contributing to it (ergo, this round of global warming is not like past cycles).

If you’ve already decided that you don’t believe scientists or polls or any news that comes from mainstream media, then just ignore this posting.

One example of this growing consensus is found in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC is a sort of clearing house for peer reviewed research and writing on global warming; it synthesizes all this material and comes up with recommendations.

Here’s how one scientist describes the IPCC method of deliberations:

Q: The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report isn’t an original document. It’s a political document, a consensus of many, many studies that’s edited by politicians, is it not?

A: Dessler: Well, no. The Summary for Policymakers is gone over in a plenary session, line by line, and you have scientists in the room and then country representatives can object to various statements. But the document ultimately is written by scientists, and they can walk out. It’s a compromise of something the scientists can live with and the governments can live with. And generally, that almost always involves watering down the science, not the other way around. So to the extent there is political interference in the Summary for Policymakers, it’s to make the science less alarming than the scientists actually wanted. And there’s a reason the IPCC does this, and the reason is, they want buy-in from all the member governments. That way, the government can’t turn around and say they don’t believe this, because that government has agreed to every line in the summary. That’s why the IPCC allows the summary to have some interference from governments, so governments cannot distance themselves from it.

According to Naomi Oreskes of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the

IPCC is not alone in its conclusions. In recent years, all major scientific bodies in the United States whose members’ expertise bears directly on the matter have issued similar statements. For example, the National Academy of Sciences report, Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions, begins: “Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise.” The report explicitly asks whether the IPCC assessment is a fair summary of professional scientific thinking, and answers yes: “The IPCC’s conclusion that most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations accurately reflects the current thinking of the scientific community on this issue.”

Others agree. The American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) all have issued statements in recent years concluding that the evidence for human modification of climate is compelling.

The left-wing Guardian (London) worries that the effort to build consensus may water the science too much while the right-leaning Weekly Standard (London) criticizes The Guardian’s reporting and argues that the debate over climate change has been so politicized as to be untrustworthy. The Weekly Standard apparently believes there’s a growing consensus, too, but one that it distrusts and dislikes.

There’s evidence that until recently, the Bush Administration had suppressed climate change findings that contradicted its position against the Kyoto accords (see this report by the Union of Concerned Scientists). So it’s a bit surprising that President Bush, shortly after the release of the latest IPCC report, announced a change of heart, apparently acknowledging this growing scientific consensus. Most of the main newspaper dailies and networks covered this (including the Weekly Standard; I imagine the Washington Times did too, but I can’t access its archives).

According to the New York Times

President Bush, fending off international accusations that he was ignoring climate change, proposed for the first time on Thursday to set ”a long-term global goal” for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and he called on other high-polluting nations to join the United States in negotiations aimed at reaching an agreement by the end of next year.

If carried through, such an agreement would be the first in which the United States, the world’s biggest source of the emissions that scientists say are warming the planet, has committed itself to a specific target for cutting them.

It would be a major shift for Mr. Bush, who has resisted such absolute goals in part for economic reasons. The president has also steadfastly rejected the so-called Kyoto Protocol, which limits greenhouse gas emissions, on the grounds that two other major polluters — China and India — are not bound by the accord in the same way as the United States would be if it joined. The proposal, delivered in a speech at the United States Agency for International Development here, reflects the difficulties the Bush administration is facing in grappling with climate change as the scientific consensus has continued to build in favor of action to control the buildup of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere.

Oreskes makes this sensible point:

The scientific consensus might, of course, be wrong. If the history of science teaches anything, it is humility, and no one can be faulted for failing to act on what is not known. But our grandchildren will surely blame us if they find that we understood the reality of anthropogenic climate change and failed to do anything about it.

Written by Ayschlay

21 Responses to “The Growing Consensus on Global Warming”

  1. ~J~ Says:

    July 6th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
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    A-

    I’m not a scientist, but I do have common sense and my common sense tells me things like this have been going on for eons.

    Check out this link and you will read something that says scientists have found DNA of plants, spiders etc. in Greenland, where there shouldn’t be any found according to today’s science.

    Here, I’ll quote the entire article:

    Scientists who probed two kilometers (1.2 miles) through a Greenland glacier to recover the oldest plant DNA on record said Thursday the planet was far warmer hundreds of thousands of years ago than is generally believed.
    DNA of trees, plants and insects including butterflies and spiders from beneath the southern Greenland glacier was estimated to date to 450,000 to 900,000 years ago, according to the remnants retrieved from this long-vanished boreal forest.

    That contrasts sharply with the prevailing view that a lush forest of this kind could only have existed in Greenland as recently as 2.4 million years ago, according to a summary of the study, which is published Thursday in the journal Science.

    The samples suggest the temperature probably reached 10 degrees C (50 degrees Fahrenheit) in the summer and -17 C (1 F) in the winter.

    They also indicated that during the last period between ice ages, 116,000-130,000 years ago, when temperatures were on average 5 C (9 F) higher than now, the glaciers on Greenland did not completely melt away.

    “These findings allow us to make a more accurate environmental reconstruction of the time period from which these samples were taken,” said Martin Sharp, a glaciologist at the University of Alberta, Canada, and a co-author of the paper.

    “What we’ve learned is that this part of the world was significantly warmer than most people thought.”

    In a separate paper, also published in Science, European experts said they had analysed the world’s deepest ice core, enabling them to reconstruct patterns of warming and glaciation over the past 800,000 years.

    The 3,260-metre (10,595-feet) core was drilled into the East Antarctica icesheet at the Franco-Italian base, Dome C. The drillers, gathered in a venture called the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA) stopped just 15 metres (48.75 feet) short of the bedrock.

    Using traces of the hydrogen isotope deuterium in air bubbles trapped in the ice layers, the scientists built a record of greenhouse-gas concentrations over the aeons, which in turn provides a record of temperature.

    They found the temperature varied widely, by as much as 15 C (27 F) over the 800,000 years. In the last Ice Age, which ended around 11,000 years ago, the temperature was 10 C (18 F) lower than today.

    The EPICA team had previously analysed the Dome C core to a depth equivalent to 650,000 years ago.

    In the seventies we were being warned about global cooling, which never happened. My common sense, non-scientific brain, tells me this is cyclical and is caused by the sun. Hot spots or whatever.

    Please tackle the question of why Mars is going through the same kind of “global warming” we are and there are no people and no carbon emissions we know about. I’ve asked this questions many times and not received an answer.

  2. ~J~ Says:

    July 6th, 2007 at 12:14 pm
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    If there were a growing consensus that everyone should jump off into the Grand Canyon does it mean it’s correct?

  3. Ayschlay Says:

    July 6th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
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    Yes, J, science is all about discovery and surprises that unsettle previous assumptions. But should we be so dismissive of science that we don’t really trust car engines, that perhaps air hydraulic engineering is just guess work so we’ll no longer fly, that gravity is “just a theory” and that we may as well believe we have little spiritual suction cups that keep us attached to the earth?

    As for common sense–it changes over time, and varies a great deal across the world.

    It used to be common sense to attribute lightning to God or the gods, or to worry about witches.

    It’s common sense to American women to shave their legs and underarms; that’s not common sense in other regions.

  4. Ayschlay Says:

    July 6th, 2007 at 12:24 pm
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    But the argument that about global warming is nothing like collective suicide.

    But I see your point. Majorities aren’t always correct, we know (just think about our history of slavery). But there’s consensus by deliberation and voting (like a school board vote), consensus by culture (norms like incest is evil, smiling is pleasant) and consensus by sharing and comparing research, and arguing interpretations of the data, out of which comes a theory–a set of testable propositions that holds up to scrutiny and testing (at least until some major discovery occurs)

    I’m referring only to the last.

  5. ~J~ Says:

    July 6th, 2007 at 12:28 pm
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    And consensus is really compromise. Not everyone is happy with the result but they can live with it.

  6. ~J~ Says:

    July 6th, 2007 at 12:37 pm
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    I don’t mistrust science as far as car engines etc go, but I do know if I planned a big outdoor picnic at my house based on a five day weather forecast I would also make plans to have the party inside just in case.

    Meteorology is far from an exact science, and Mr. Gore is not a scientist. Why scare people about something they can do nothing but pay for carbon offsets that mean they can use as much of the resources they wish as long as they pay a corporation, one of which is run by Mr. Gore, to use those resources? It seems rather hypocritical to me. If someone is truly interested in saving the planet he or she will go back to a primitive lifestyle and promote that.

    I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but it makes no sense to me.

    Weather has been happening since the Great Flood and will continue until this world is gone, and Man cannot change it. And certainly not by scaring everyone about it.

  7. Ayschlay Says:

    July 6th, 2007 at 12:48 pm
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    The work of scientists revealed the origins of the Depression-era dustbowl, and farming practices now work to prevent such another disaster. Erosion and ground water management was not the product of compromising between kinds of research–but a winnowing of research, of finding out through repeated testing what caused the dustbowl.

    Same thing’s happening right now with autism–an explosion of discovery and now all sorts of research programs–people testing each other’s ideas, not horse-trading them (if I give up the environmental factor I get to keep the genetic factor).

    Scientific consensus is not the same thing as political consensus. It works in a different way. Sure, politics can affect the science, as the articles I cite note, but science is not just another kind of politics.

  8. ~J~ Says:

    July 6th, 2007 at 3:24 pm
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    I’m going to put you on the spot again, A, and ask you to tell me your theory of why Mars is experiencing the same type of “global warming” despite the fact their environment is different from earth’s.

    It’s a direct question to you and I’d like to see your answer.

  9. Ayschlay Says:

    July 6th, 2007 at 3:33 pm
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    J, I don’t know this story. Please share your source with me and I’ll try to get up to speed. Thanks.

  10. david Says:

    July 6th, 2007 at 4:41 pm
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    I think we’re missing the point, at least slightly. There can be no doubt that climate changes are a naturally occuring event. I can look out my window and see the mountains above Albuquerque that were caused by glaciers. I can find fossels of sea creatures in New Mexico. However, the issue is (in my mind) not whether man is contributing to global warming, but rather to what extent. It does not seem possible, given the earth’s population, that humans contribute nothing to global warming. The question I have is how much is man contributing to the problem? Second, if man is exacerbating the problem, is it the industrialized nations or is it the 3rd world nations that still rely heavily on fossel fuels. I have no answers, but this is the direction I would like to see the scientists take. Is it possible to separate the naturally occuring phenomenon from the acts of man?

  11. ~J~ Says:

    July 6th, 2007 at 6:22 pm
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    Ayschlay,

    Here’s one source that speaks to both sides of the issue but confirms warming on Mars. The disagreement is to whether or not it’s the same type of warming on earth.

  12. Big Mo Says:

    July 6th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
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    I DO believe the earth is getting warmer, due to a natural cycle.

    I DO NOT believe mankind is the cause, nor do I believe we even have the ability to do so.

    Therefore, I have a huge problem with this so-called “concensus.”

    1) It shuts down debate and questioning, and castigats anyone whith a contrary opinion or finding as a tool of “big oil” or “big business” or what have you. Even if their studies ARE funded by such organizations, they’re dismissed as not being “pure.”

    2) It throws the scientific method out the window. Science is about testing and restesting and restesting. Why do we have to stop now because a certain group of activists, politicians, scientists and media have shouted “Concensus!!”?

    3) How much of the so-called consensus actually supports man-caused global warming, and not just global warming as a natural, cycical pattern?

    4) How much of the so-called concensus is actually political in nature, and who stands to gain? Yes, I am very serious about that. Human nature being what it is, you’d be incredibly naive to think that all of this “consensus” is as pure as the wind-driven snow. (Look, if liberals think everything surrounding the iraq war stinks, how can you possibly suspend your disbelief concerning a worldwide “consensus” of this magnitude?)

    Again, I do beleiv the world is warming due to natural cycle, as best illustrated in the important, but imperfect, book, Global Warming Every 1500 Years. I do not believe mankind is the cause.

  13. Ayschlay Says:

    July 7th, 2007 at 2:46 am
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    Big Mo,

    So at first you argued there is no such thing as consensus, and now, okay, there is a consensus, but it’s awful.

    Guess it was a mistake to use the word “consensus” because people are focusing on one particular definition of it, the deliberative kind where folks come to an agreement through horse-trading and compromise.

    If you look at my postings above you’ll see that this is not the definition I was using. Your point number 2 is closer to what I was getting at.

    The implication of your argument is that anytime there’s a consensus among scientists, it must be politicized, and therefore is likely bad or wrong science. If so, and as I said earlier, what then are we to make of all the other areas of science where there is a consensus (a consensus built on testing), as in health, engineering, agriculture, and so on? Are we supposed to throw up our hands and go join the Amish?

    Look, I’m not going to argue that scientists are purely objective, that they are immune to political considerations. In fact, I think those political considerations have been shaping the response to climate change science. If you’re serious about arguing the politics of science, who has the most to lose from the theory that human activity contributes to climate change? The country and its economic enterprises that contribute the most to global warming. It’s in our government’s interest, and its corporate backers, to deny, deny, deny, because the status quo is always cheaper than changing behavior.

  14. Ayschlay Says:

    July 7th, 2007 at 3:01 am
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    Thanks for the National Geographic article, J. This is an interesting test–if human activity contributes to global warming, what are we to make of planets that experience warming but don’t have humans? Clearly, at least according to this article, the jury’s still out, as it is often in new areas of scientific inquiry, so the scientists keep testing, comparing data, and debating models. It’s not a settled matter yet.

    I agree with David that this shouldn’t be an all or nothing sort of a argument–global warming is only a natural phase or humans are completely to blame.

  15. ~J~ Says:

    July 7th, 2007 at 3:04 am
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    That’s the point I’ve been trying to make, Ayschlay. It’s a combination of factors and is not a settled matter.

  16. ~J~ Says:

    July 7th, 2007 at 3:18 am
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    OK, now, no more jerking anyone’s chain on my part.

    Yes, I believe there is probably global warming or global cooling at some time, but I do not believe it is man made.

    The Bible tells me there will come the day when the moon will turn blood red and the sun will be blacked out. There will be famines, earthquakes, pestilences such as giant locusts feeding off those who are not believers during the end days.

    I believe all of this and more. The Bible tells me men will be afraid and will have heart attacks and die from what they will see.

    I believe this is the beginning of that time. How long it takes, I don’t know, but I know as sure as I’m sitting here it’s going to happen and all the conservation methods we use will do nothing to help when the water on earth turns to blood and is poison to drink.

    That’s what I believe and that’s my consensus.

  17. Ayschlay Says:

    July 7th, 2007 at 3:44 am
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    J, if there’s nothing to be done about what’s to come (according to your interpretation of the Bible) then why are so engaged in politics? You must think people can affect the course of our country, ergo you question, challenge, and affirm different positions and people. But why bother if the tribulation’s to come?

    I ask this not so much to challenge your belief; I’m curious how religious beliefs can shape one’s politics.

  18. Ayschlay Says:

    July 7th, 2007 at 3:45 am
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    Finally sleepy–good night.

  19. ~J~ Says:

    July 7th, 2007 at 3:48 am
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    Because I don’t know the day or the hour of the tribulation. That’s why I’m concerned about our politics.

  20. Big Mo Says:

    July 7th, 2007 at 8:23 am
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    Ayschlay - sorry, I was ripping the “concensus” that it is man-caused, not that the earth is warming.

    I guess I did contradict myself in the space of two sentences. My fault for writing somthing after watching to hyperactive boys all day long!

    When I go back and read what I wrote, yes, it didn’t make much sense. Good grief, I’m not doing so well here lately, am I!

    I should have been much, much clearer, and read better what you wrote. My apologies.

    I guess what I was trying to get at is I have a problem with the idea that there’s really a concensus behind *man-caused global warming* as opposed to naturl-cased global warming. That’s all. But I ran off at the mouth, er, fingers, and fumbled my words.

  21. Big Mo Says:

    July 7th, 2007 at 8:24 am
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    and if I would spell better…