Another Scientist Active On Climate Recants?
Dear Colleague:
The companies of the Western Business Roundtable are all working in various ways to move climate friendly technologies forward to commercialization.
But we also keep one eye on the evolving science of climate change, which every reputable climatologist admits is still in its infancy as a predictive science.
A recent public "recanting" by a scientist in Australia is worth noting. You can see it here. Dr. David Evans worked for five years for the Australian Greenhouse Office helping to design a carbon accounting system that is used by the Australian Government to calculate its land-use carbon accounts for the Kyoto Protocol.
Some environmental groups object to even publicly posting the views of scientists who do not adhere to the orthodoxy of those demanding radical economic change in the U.S.
But the Roundtable believes that informed public policy is best devised by examining all scientific arguments in a given issue.
Dr. Evans makes four key points in his "recanting," and he writes that "(n)one of these points are controversial. The alarmist scientists agree with them, though they would dispute their relevance."
- "The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it."
- "There is no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming. None."
- "The satellites that measure the world's temperature all say that the warming trend ended in 2001, and that the temperature has dropped about 0.6C in the past year (to the temperature of 1980)."
- "The new ice cores show that in the past six global warmings over the past half a million years, the temperature rises occurred on average 800 years before the accompanying rise in atmospheric carbon. Which says something important about which was cause and which was effect."
We note the fact that an increasing number of scientists active on climate issues are changing their views on this subject. More than 31,000 American scientists recently signed a petition saying that:
"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."
Roundtable members hold a variety of views on the validity of these scientists' beliefs. But we note that this trend is likely to have significant implications for if, when and how the Congress finally deals with this issue.
Sincerely,
Western Roundtable
