The Science of Climate Change
Senate Floor Statement by
U.S. Sen. James M. Inhofe(R-Okla)
Chairman, Committee on
Environment and Public Works


July 28, 2003

Climate Experts
 

  • Dr. S. Fred Singer, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Virginia, who served as the first Director of the US Weather Satellite Service (which is now in the Department of Commerce) and more recently as a member and vice chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmosphere (NACOA)

     
  • Dr. Tom Wigley, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who found that if the Kyoto Protocol were fully implemented by all signatories, it would reduce temperatures by a mere 0.07 degrees Celsius by 2050, and 0.13 degrees Celsius by 2100. What does this mean? Such an amount is so small that ground-based thermometers cannot reliably measure it.

     
  • Dr. Richard Lindzen, an MIT scientist and member of the National Academy of Sciences, who has specialized in climate issues for over 30 years.

     
  • Jerry Mahlman, Director of NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, who points out that when regional climate models, of the kind relied upon by the IPCC, attempt to incorporate such factors as population growth "the details of future climate recede toward unintelligibility."

     
  • >Gerald North of Texas A&M University in College Station, agrees that the IPCC's predictions are baseless, in part because climate models are highly imperfect instruments. As he said after the IPCC report came out: "It's extremely hard to tell whether the models have improved" since the last IPCC report. "The uncertainties are large."

     
  • Peter Stone, an MIT climate modeler, said in reference to the IPCC, "The major [climate prediction] uncertainties have not been reduced at all."

     
  • Dr. David Wojick, an expert in climate science, who recently wrote in an article in Canada's National Post, "The computer models cannot...decide among the variable drivers, like solar versus lunar change, or chaos versus ocean circulation versus greenhouse gas increases. Unless and until they can explain these things, the models cannot be taken seriously as a basis for public policy."

     
  • Climate modelers from four separate climate modeling centers who wrote in the October 2000 edition of Nature that, "Forecasts of climate change are inevitably uncertain." They go on to explain that, "A basic problem with all such predictions to date has been the difficulty of providing any systematic estimate of uncertainty," a problem that stems from the fact that "these [climate] models do not necessarily span the full range of known climate system behavior."

     
  • NASA scientists Roy Spencer and John Christy whose satellite data, validated independently by measurements from NOAA balloon radiosonde instruments, show that the atmosphere has not warmed as alarmists theorize.

     
  • Dr. Thomas R. Karl, senior scientist at the National Climate Data Center, who corrected the U.S. surface temperatures for the urban heat-island effect and found that there has been a downward temperature trend since 1940. This suggests a strong warming bias in the surface-based temperature record.

     
  • Scientists from the Scripps Institution for Oceanography who concluded that the temperature rise comes first, followed by a carbon dioxide boost 400 to 1,000 years later. This contradicts everything alarmists have been saying about man-made global warming in the 20th century.

     
  • University of Illinois researchers who reported "a net cooling on the Antarctic continent between 1966 and 2000." In some regions, like the McMurdo Dry Valleys, temperatures cooled between 1986 and 1999 by as much as two degrees centigrade per decade.

     
  • Dr. Paul Reiter who convincingly debunks the claim that higher temperatures will induce more deaths and massive outbreaks of deadly diseases in a 2000 study for the Center for Disease Control.

     
  • Dr. David Legates, a renowned professor at the University of Delaware and world's leading expert in the hydrology of climate.

     
  • Over 4,000 scientists, 70 of whom are Nobel Prize winners, who signed the Heidelberg Appeal, which says that no compelling evidence exists to justify controls of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

     
  • I also point to a 1998 recent survey of state climatologists, which reveals that a majority of respondents have serious doubts about whether anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases present a serious threat to climate stability.

     
  • Drs. Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who have just completed the most comprehensive review of temperature records ever.

     
  • Then there is Dr. Frederick Seitz, a past president of the National Academy of Sciences, and a professor emeritus at Rockefeller University.

     
  • Over 17,000 independently verified signers of the Oregon Petition, which reads as follows:

    "We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.

    "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."

     

  • Kenneth Green, D. Env., is Chief Scientist and Director of the Risk and Environment Centre at The Fraser Institute. He most recently wrote Global Warming: Understanding the Debate.

     
  • George H. Taylor, who is the State Climatologist for Oregon, and a faculty member at Oregon State University's College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, manages the Oregon Climate Service, the state repository of weather and climate information. Mr. Taylor is a member of the American Meteorological Society and is past president of the American Association of State Climatologists.
     
  • Pat Michaels is a research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and visiting scientist with the Marshall Institute in Washington, D.C. He is a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists and was program chair for the Committee on Applied Climatology of the American Meteorological Society. Michaels has authored tests on climate and is a contributing author and reviewer of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. According to Nature magazine, Pat Michaels may be the most popular lecturer in the nation on the subject of global warming.

     
  • Freeman Dyson, professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton University, since 1953, is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a member of the U.S. National Academy of Science, and has received numerous international awards;
     
  • Robert Balling, Jr., Professor & Director of the Office of Climatology at Arizona State University who received his Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma, has authored three books on climate;
     
  • Professor Chris Essex of the University of Western Ontario and of the Niels Bohr Institute's Orsted Laboratory and the Canadian Climate Center co-authored Taken by Storm with Professor Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph and the Fraser Institute in Vancouver;
     
  • Dr. John Reilly, of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, who established the benefits of CO2 on flora;
     
  • and many, many others.