Is Climate Change Science Settled? No Way, Say Scientists
Carbon dioxide is not a threat to the planet, say scientists who doubt the global warming theory
March 26, 2019
When the global warming movement started gaining momentum in the early 1990s, proponents began insisting that climate change science is irrevocably settled and the issue is not up for debate. It’s irrefutable, they said, that human-caused climate change is real, and carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases resulting from the use of fossil fuels are an urgent threat and must be stopped.That’s still the refrain today, but this rigid stance doesn’t sit well with the numerous scientists who don’t agree and who worry about the billions being spent to prevent a tiny amount of anticipated warming—efforts that may in the end bring about little, if any, change.These so-called skeptics say the climate has historically had warm periods and cool periods and will continue to do so—that’s simply how the climate cycles—and that man-made CO2 is not a pollutant, nor is it on track to cause apocalyptic climate change, as the global warming movement maintains.“In general, science is never settled, it’s always an ongoing organic process. But they’re trying to abuse the authority of science in order to pursue policy objectives that, for one reason or another, they think are important,” says climatologist and author Patrick Michaels, the director of the Center for Study of Science at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.“There has really been no recent convincing evidence that what we would call the view of cataclysmic global warming has any support. I mean, the Earth’s surface temperature continues to warm at a very modest rate. It didn’t warm at all, depending on whose record you look at, from the late 1990s to about 2014—and the only way that a warming was deduced from that record was to change the data, not the observation.” ...
