2012/07/30/The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic
- when: 2012/07/30 (2012/07/30)
- author: Richard A. Muller (Wikipedia)
- source: New York Times
- topics: global warming global warming/skepticism global warming/anthropogenic
- link: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of-a-climate-change-skeptic.html?pagewanted=all
- title: The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic
- summary: «Call me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I'm now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.»
Excerpt
It's a scientist's duty to be properly skeptical. I still find that much, if not most, of what is attributed to climate change is speculative, exaggerated or just plain wrong. I've analyzed some of the most alarmist claims, and my skepticism about them hasn't changed.
Hurricane Katrina cannot be attributed to global warming. The number of hurricanes hitting the United States has been going down, not up; likewise for intense tornadoes. Polar bears aren't dying from receding ice, and the Himalayan glaciers aren't going to melt by 2035. And it's possible that we are currently no warmer than we were a thousand years ago, during the "Medieval Warm Period" or "Medieval Optimum," an interval of warm conditions known from historical records and indirect evidence like tree rings. And the recent warm spell in the United States happens to be more than offset by cooling elsewhere in the world, so its link to "global" warming is weaker than tenuous.