Claire Parkinson, climatologist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center said,
"many scientists who don’t buy into the “mainstream” position on climate change are reluctant to voice their opinions"
A Closer Look at Climate Change Skepticism
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Good article. Your link totally agrees with me. You didn't even read what you posted. You just hoped this article would defend climate change deniers but it totally doesn't. LOL.
scientist-skeptics who do take a public stand often have ties to industry and conservative ideology.
For instance, Patrick Michaels, a climatologist who writes skeptical books about global warming, is a visiting scientist at the George C. Marshall Institute, a nonprofit organization sustained in part by oil and gas companies. He also is a fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, DC. S. Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist whom many consider to be the godfather of climate change denial, also is linked to numerous conservative and industry organizations.
In 2009 the U.S. Senate Environment & Public Works Committee published a report4 listing more than 7005 scientist-skeptics expressing a spectrum of dissenting views, many questioning the role of anthropogenic emissions in climate change, although a few are quoted denying climate change altogether. James Inhofe (R–OK), ranking minority member of the committee that produced the report, represents the extreme right wing of his party and has received nearly a million dollars in donations from oil and coal companies since 2000.6
The list was compiled by Inhofe’s staff without prior consent by the scientists themselves; Parkinson says some have requested to be taken off the list. Moreover, only 15% of the scientists listed had published in the refereed literature on subjects related to climate science.
Parkinson, who says she has never taken money from the fossil fuel industry, says she respects skeptical viewpoints but leans more toward the mainstream view. Given her analysis of the data, she concludes the Earth has, in general, warmed since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution and that greenhouse gas emissions are at least partly to blame. Virtually all scientists agree with at least the first of those conclusions, she says—even the skeptics.
Roger Pielke Sr., a meteorologist and senior research scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder—who is often associated with the skeptical side of the climate debate but prefers to be called a “climate realist”—agrees. Like Parkinson, Pielke identifies himself as a political independent who doesn’t take funding from the fossil fuel industry. In his view, those who frame the climate change debate as one that pits the IPCC against those who don’t believe global warming is real or that humans have anything to do with it are wrong on both counts. Global warming is happening, he says, and it can’t be explained entirely by natural forces.
Even Michaels concurs. “Of course there’s a warming trend,” he says. “All you have to do is connect the dots. And I can point you to five truly independent papers in world-class journals—not the crackpot stuff you see in unreferenced websites—that must lead you to conclude that slightly less than half of global warming is due to carbon dioxide.”
Mainstream scientists put the blame for climate change almost entirely on greenhouse gases, but scientist-skeptics differ widely in terms of their alternative explanations. Some, such as Tim Patterson, a paleoclimatologist at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, emphasize natural “forcings” on the climate, especially solar cycles that affect how much radiation strikes the earth. Others cite man-made influences including industrial emissions of black soot, which warms the air by absorbing sunlight. Still others propose that multiple factors—black soot, land use changes, and more—compound the effects of greenhouse gases on global and regional climate.
Yet acknowledging so many possible causes of climate change leaves policymakers without any obvious solutions. And whereas mainstream scientists believe reducing greenhouse emissions is the key, skeptics aren’t unified around any alternate strategy. However, at least one—Pielke—supports a modest, politically acceptable carbon tax to fund alternative energy research.9
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