Is There A Scientific Controversy Over Global Climate Change ?

Since he declared his presidency a few days ago, Rick Perry has said a lot of things meant to appeal to the teabaggers and the corporations -- the only two groups that he cares anything about. One of his latest pronouncements involves global climate change ( or "global warming" as many prefer to call it).

Perry said, "I do believe that the issue of global warming has been politicized. I think there are a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data so that they will have dollars rolling into their projects. I think we're seeing it almost weekly or even daily, scientists who are coming forward and questioning the original idea that man-made global warming is what is causing the climate to change."

Perry is right about the first of his three charges -- that global warming has been politicized. In fact, he is one of those doing it. Instead of actually taking a hard look at the available science, he and most of his Republican colleagues have turned global warming into campaign fodder, hoping to win points with the anti-science crowd (for votes) and the oil& energy corporations (for campaign donations).

That leaves two charges -- that scientists have manipulated data, and that there is a widespread and ongoing controversy in the scientific community over the science of global warming. The data manipulation charge stems from 2009 when e-mails were stolen from Climatic Research United at the University of East Anglia and released on the internet. Skeptics of global warming used the stolen e-mails to claim that the scientists were manipulating data.

The problem is that the charges were not true. Several investigations (including inquiries by the British Parliament, the U.S. Department of Commerce, Penn State University, and the InterAcademy Council) have all concluded that while some scientists did make rude remarks about the global warming deniers, no information was falsified or manipulated. This has been widely reported, but the deniers and the politicians are not about to let the facts deter them from their cover-up of the oil & energy industries.

That leaves the charge that there is wide-spread disagreement among scientists over whether global warming is man-made or not. Let's look at what the experts are saying. First we have this from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change:

"Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations. The observed widespread warming of the atmosphere and ocean, together with ice mass loss, support the conclusion that it is extremely unlikely that global climate change of the past 50 years can be explained without external forcing, and very likely that it is not due to known natural causes alone." 

Then there is this from the U.S. Global Change Research Program:

"Observations show that warming of the climate is unequivocal. The global warming observed over the past 50 years is due primarily to human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases. These emissions come mainly from the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and gas), with important contributions from the clearing of forests, agricultural practices, and other activities."

And then, agreeing that human activity is the primary cause of global warming, a committee formed by the National Research Council and the National Academy of Sciences had this to say:

"Although the scientific process is always open to new ideas and results, the fundamental causes and consequences of climate change have been established by many years of scientific research, are supported by many different lines of evidence, and have stood firm in the face of careful examination, repeated testing, and the rigorous evaluation of alternative theories and explanations."

The cold hard fact is that an overwhelming majority of scientists agree that global warming has been caused primarily by human activity. A 2009 survey in a publication of the American Geophysical Union (Eos)  asked a wide range of scientists if human activity was responsible for global warming. About 82% of them said yes, and when they narrowed that down to scientists involved in climate research that jumped up to 97.4%. This is verified by a 2010 survey in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the official publication of the United States National Academy of Sciences, which showed that between 97% and 98% of climate researchers said human activity has caused global warming.

And even the 2% to 3% of scientists who disagreed don't necessarily disagree completely. They just believe that other human activities may contribute as well as carbon emissions, or that some natural occurrences may share responsibility with human activity, or question whether extreme weather incidents can conclusively be linked to global warming.

The fact is that there is overwhelming consensus in the scientific community that global warming is real, is caused by human activity, and largely by carbon emissions. The Republicans, like Rick Perry, would like for people to believe they are just on one side of a scientific disagreement. But that is just not true. They are opposing what 97% to 98% of scientists believe is a certainty, and they are doing it to keep their friends (and campaign donors) in the oil & energy industries from having to spend some money to curtail the carbon emissions causing the problem.

They have decided that current corporate profits are more important than the health and safety of future generations -- and they are using misstatements, half-truths, and outright lies  to accomplish their goals. They have traded their consciences for dollars.