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The 10 Most-Respected Global Warming Skeptics. Joe Weisenthal. Jul 30, 2009, 5:01 PM. Business Insider.

The 10 Most-Respected Global Warming Skeptics

Joe Weisenthal

 

Jul 30, 2009, 5:01 PM

The media portrays climate scientists as having delivered a final verdict on global warming.

They haven’t.

There remain some holdouts who say this consensus is little more than conformity to a politically correct idea. Perhaps even more surprising is that a few of these global-warming skeptics are actually respected!

No matter where you stand on this debate, you should know who the major skeptics are and what they think.

START HERE >

Freeman Dyson

Physicist Freeman Dyson has been a giant in his field for decades. But the British-born, Princeton-based professor has gained notoriety for his “heretical” views on climate change. While he does acknowledge the mechanism by which man-made greenhouse gasses can influence the climate, he claims current models are way too simplistic to capture what’s really going on in the real world. In March, he was featured in the NYT Magazine for his controversial views.

Bjorn Lomborg

Bjorn Lomborg is a Danish-based scientist, famous for his book The Skeptical Environmentalist. Like Dyson, he’s not an outright denier, but rather he thinks the current approach to global warming is misguided and that the costs of drastic, short-term action are too high. Instead, he thinks we should focus on becoming more adaptable, while putting more effort into such real-world tragedies as AIDS and malaria.

Myron Ebell

Myron Ebell may be enemy #1 to the current climate change community. Ebell works for the free-market thinktank Competitive Enterprise Institute and, according to his own bio, has been called a climate “criminal” and a leading pusher of misleading ideas.

Kiminori Itoh

Japanese scientist Kiminori Itoh is the author of Lies and Traps in the Global Warming Affair. Like many others, Itoh does not reject the notion of global warming entirely, but instead claims that the causes are far more complex than the anti-carbon crowd would have you believe. You can read an introduction to his views here at Climate Science.

Ivar Giaever

Ivar Giaever, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, isn’t a thought leader, per se, in the climate skeptics scene — but the mere fact that he has come out as being a skeptic and has a Nobel Prize makes him important. His big beef is that climate change orthodoxy has become a “new religion” for scientists, and that the data isn’t nearly as compelling as it should be to get this kind of conformity.

Will Happer

Will Happer is another, highly-respected physicist out of Princeton who compares the anti-CO2 crowd to the prohibitionists prior to the passage of the 18th Amendment. While he does acknowledge long-term warming, he thinks the influence of CO2 is vastly overstated, and that the benefits of a modest reduction in it will be negligible.

In testimony to Congress, he used the following analogy what he means:

The earth’s climate really is strongly affected by the greenhouse effect, although the physics is not the same as that which makes real, glassed-in greenhouses work. Without greenhouse warming, the earth would be much too cold to sustain its current abundance of life. However, at least 90% of greenhouse warming is due to water vapor and clouds. Carbon dioxide is a bit player. There is little argument in the scientific community that a direct effect of doubling the CO2 concentration will be a small increase of the earth’s temperature — on the order of one degree. Additional increments of CO2 will cause relatively less direct warming because we already have so much CO2 in the atmosphere that it has blocked most of the infrared radiation that it can. It is like putting an additional ski hat on your head when you already have a nice warm one below it, but your are only wearing a windbreaker. To really get warmer, you need to add a warmer jacket. The IPCC thinks that this extra jacket is water vapor and clouds.

Ian Plimer

Australian professor Ian Plimer is the author of Heaven + Earth, a book that purports to debunk all of the major global warming “myths.”

Here’s the blurb for his book, laying out his general beliefs:

The Earth is an evolving dynamic system. Current changes in climate, sea level and ice are within variability. Atmospheric CO2 is the lowest for 500 million years. Climate has always been driven by the Sun, the Earth’s orbit and plate tectonics and the oceans, atmosphere and life respond. Humans have made their mark on the planet, thrived in warm times and struggled in cool times. The hypothesis tha humans can actually change climate is unsupported by evidence from geology, archaeology, history and astronomy. The hypothesis is rejected. A new ignorance fills the yawning spiritual gap in Western society. Climate change politics is religious fundamentalism masquerading as science. Its triumph is computer models unrelated to observations in nature. There has been no critical due diligence of the science of climate change, dogma dominates, sceptics are pilloried and 17th Century thinking promotes prophets of doom, guilt and penance. When plate tectonics ceases and the world runs out of new rocks, there will be a tipping point and irreversible climate change. Don’t wait up.

Michael Crichton

The famous author Michael Crichton has, of course, passed away, but through his fiction and non-fiction writings he remains an important popularizer of scientific ideas, so we’re including him. His 2005 speech to the National Press Club arguing for global warming skepticism can be found here.

Here’s what he says about scientific consensus:

Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics.  Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world.  In science, consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

Alan Carlin

Alan Carlin is an EPA economist who wrote a paper calling global warming a “hoax.” It’s not really important what he said or what he believed or even whether his argument makes any sense at all. What’s important is that he’s become a right-wing celebrity over the belief that he was censored by the EPA for being a heretic (hence getting to appear on Glenn Beck)

Patrick Michaels

Patrick Michaels is a CATO scholar and a GMU professor who’s widely quoted as a global warming skeptic. His basic belief is that we’re in a long-term warming trend and that Carbon Dioxoide has got little to do with it, as each additional greenhouse gas molecule has less and less of an effect.