No time for fake debates on climate change

Herb Pinder, who is associated with the free market advocacy group the Fraser Institute, did a disservice to your readers by promoting falsehoods about climate change and making untruthful statements about my own scientific work (‘Climate change alarmists ignore nature’s role,’ July 16).

The headline to the piece is false, as climate scientists have spent decades studying natural influences on climate. That research has demonstrated that natural factors cannot explain the warming of the past century. Indeed, the globe should have cooled if natural factors alone were at work.

Pinder dismisses humancaused climate change as “a political construct” when in fact it is the conclusion of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the national academies of Canada and all other industrial nations, and more than 97 per cent of scientists who have published on the topic.

Pinder offers up the usual litany of untruths, specious factoids and misleading sound-bites like: “climate is always changing!” (No. 1 on the Skeptical Science list of standard climate change denier talking points; yes climate has changed in the past, but natural factors cannot explain the magnitude and rate of modern-day global warming) and “global warming has stopped” (No. 9 on the Skeptical Science list. The claim is simply absurd: the last two years were globally the warmest years on record, and in the U.S. we just had our warmest June on record) and “the amount of CO2 we’ve added is too small to influence climate” (No. 30 on the SkS list; global temperatures are very sensitive to atmospheric CO2 concentrations, and we’re well on our way to doubling them).

In attempting to malign my own work, Pinder cites fellow Fraser Institute climate change denier Ross McKitrick, someone with no scientific credentials whose specious claims have been rejected by actual scientists.

Pinder refers to my “models” having been “discredited” by their “increasingly inaccurate forecasts,” insisting McKitrick has shown “Mann’s forecast of sharply increasing temperatures has not occurred despite increasing C02 emissions.” Pinder apparently hasn’t studied his denier talking points carefully enough, however.

McKitrick’s attacks have nothing at all to do with climate models. Instead they concern the well-known “hockey stick” temperature curve I published in the late 1990s that demonstrates recent warming to be unprecedented in at least 1,000 years.

As I recount in “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars,” this work has been attacked by industry-funded climate change deniers like McKitrick for more than a decade owing to the simple, undeniable message it conveys about the dramatic impact human activity is having on Earth’s climate. It has nonetheless stood the test of time.

Pinder fails to note that the highest scientific body in the U.S., the National Academy of Sciences, affirmed my research findings in an exhaustive independent review published in June 2006 (see e.g. ‘Science Panel Backs Study on Warming Climate,’ New York Times, June 22, 2006).

In the decade and a half since our original published work, dozens of groups of scientists have independently reproduced, confirmed, and extended our findings, including most recently an international team of nearly 80 scientists from around the world, publishing in the premier journal Nature Geoscience.

The most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the most authoritative assessment of climate science available, concluded that recent warmth is likely unprecedented over an even longer time frame than we had concluded (at least the past 1,400 years). Of course, the “hockey stick” is only one of numerous independent lines of evidence that have led the world’s scientists to conclude that climate change is a) real, b) caused by the burning of fossil fuels, and c) a grave threat if we do nothing about it.

Readers interested in the truth behind the science, rather than the falsehoods and smears perpetuated by individuals like Pinder, should consult scientistrun websites like skepticalscience.com, or books on the topic like my own Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change.

Let’s get past the fake debate about whether the problem exists, and on to the worthy debate about what to do about it.