Natural Forces, Not Man, Causing Global Warming, Scientist Says

(by Kevin Mooney, March 5, 2008, CNSNews.com) – Natural forces, not human activity, are primarily responsible for any global warming taking place, prominent atmospheric and space physicist Fred Singer declared Monday at the Heartland Institute’s 2008 International Conference on Climate Change in New York City.

What’s more, the preponderance of scientific evidence about natural forces causing global warming is so great that the issue is settled, Singer said.

“The science is settled in the sense that we have evidence that most of the climate change taking place today is caused by natural forces and not by human activity,” Singer said during his luncheon address at the conservative Heartland Institute.

As was previously reported by the Cybercast News Service, Singer is a long-time critic of the “alarmist” view of global warming.

He was among 100 speakers and panelists taking part in the climate conference, which was attended by scientists from a dozen countries, including Australia, Canada, England, France, New Zealand, Russia and Sweden.

The conference is designed to give so-called “contrarian” scientists the opportunity to freely express their views on climate change. In a letter to the conference, Heartland Institute President Joseph Bast praised the scientists for taking a stand against political correctness and for protecting the scientific method at personal cost to themselves.

A summary of “Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate,” Singer’s latest report, was released at the conference. Singer discussed some of the study’s major findings in his address.

The report, published by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), is a rejoinder to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Singer said.

The IPCC, he said, has failed to produce any hard evidence suggesting that humans are largely responsible for the planet’s current warming cycle.

The same information and data used by the U.N. IPCC was also applied in the NIPCC’s exercise, Singer said.

However, in contrast to the U.N. study, an effort was made in his work to “connect the dots” between greenhouse model outputs and actual observations, Singer explained. In the end, no significant amount of warming resulting from human activity could be detected, he said.

The consequences of these results are “far reaching,” especially as they pertain to public policy, said Singer. Since natural variability is responsible for climate change, it logically follows that warming and cooling periods are unstoppable and that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, he noted.

Unfortunately, the political class has already attached itself to another set of assumptions that sees a strong correlation between man-made emissions and global warming, said Singer.

For this reason, “the train is already moving in the opposite direction” with all three leading presidential candidates embracing views that do not hold up under scientific scrutiny, he said.

Marc Morano, a spokesman for Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), agrees with Singer. “Consensus is a political construction,” Morano said in an interview with Cybercast News Service. Nevertheless, the alarmist view that argues in favor of substantial human contribution to global warming is actually losing supporters, he said.

On average, there are anywhere from two to four new scientists per week in the English-speaking world who are publicly announcing their skepticism about claims that human activity is primarily responsible for climate change, said Morano. (Disclosure: Marc Morano is a former investigative reporter for Cybercast News Service.)

Most of the speakers gathered for the conference agree that there is no genuine consensus on global warming and man-made emissions.

In fact, international survey results show that almost half of the climate scientists polled in 2003 disagreed with what is often portrayed as being “the consensus” view, according to a booklet published by the Heartland Institute.

Most recently, Dr. Joanne Simpson, an atmospheric scientist who previously served with the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, outlined her views in a blog cautioning against excessive reliance on climate models.

“Since I am no longer affiliated with any organization or receive any funding, I can speak quite frankly,” she wrote.

“For more than a decade now ‘global warming’ and its impacts has become the primary interface between our science and society. … There is no doubt that atmospheric greenhouse gases are rising rapidly and little doubt that some warming and bad ecological events are occurring,” Simpson added.

“However, the main basis of the claim that man’s release of greenhouse gases is the cause of the warming is based almost entirely upon climate models,” she said. “We all know the frailty of models concerning the air-surface system. We only need to watch the weather forecasts.”

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