Global warming ‘consensus’: 31,000 scientists disagree

Al Gore and global warm-mongers have won many converts with their claim that 2,500 scientific reviewers of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report constitutes a “consensus” among scientists that man-made warming is destroying Earth.

UPDATE 09-03-08: Liberals have been spinning this story like crazy. See my take on their efforts.
Click here.

Not only have many of those reviewers made it known that they disagree with the U.N. conclusions, but now there is a petition circulated by Dr. Arthur Robinson, director of the Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine, signed by more than 31,000 scientists who dispute the theory of man-made global warming. The petition states, in part:

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses 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 31,000 signers all hold scientific credentials; approximately 9,000 of them hold scientific Ph.D.s.

Robinson held a press conference earlier this month. Although members of the media and Congress were invited, attendance was light.

Robinson points out that over the past 150 years, scientists have found that global temperatures have been predicted with 79 percent accuracy by the sunspot index, which precedes climate changes by about 10 years. CO2, by comparison, has been only 22 percent accurate, and that number has rapidly declined in the past decade as temperatures have dipped and CO2 has continued to rise.

In fact, 70 percent of the Earth’s warming in the past hundred years occurred before 1940, while nearly all of humanity’s industrial emissions have occurred after that date. Since 1940, the climate has only risen 0.2 Celsius.

Robinson notes that the U.N. has never produced any direct evidence that mankind is causing warming, but that the IPCC report is only a summary, written by a handful of authors, of discussions among scientists invited to a U.N. conference.