What are some controversies of the theory of global warming?

Answer 1

The controversies are largely political rather than scientific. Virtually all climate scientists concur human activity is responsible for most of the current measured temperature change.

Here is a typical list of "controversies."

1. The sun is the source of earth's heat, and the cause of current warming.

While it is true the sun warms earth's surface (earth's interior is instead warmed by the slow decay of long lived nuclear isotopes), there has been no significant change in solar output over the past four decades. Nor has there been any particularly unusual solar activity in the past four hundred years, since Galileo first began making telescopic solar observations.

2. Man cannot alter his environment.

This is patently absurd.

3. Since past climate change was NOT the result of human activity, the present climate change cannot possibly be the result of human activity.

4. Earth is actually cooling.

This is contradicted by average global temperature measurements.

5. Science is unreliable, and climate scientists in particular are all liberal idiots conspiring to demolish the global economy.

6. Plants and animals evolved before, they can rapidly adapt to new changes.

7. Ice ages were predicted in the 1970s.

The statement above is largely false. Whereas one or two popular press articles concerned oncoming ice ages, these were not considered incipient, nor are there peer reviewed papers in climate science journals predicting ice ages on the basis of human carbon emissions.

8. "Climategate" proves evil scientists colluded to destroy western civilization.

Back in reality, none of the e-mail stolen from East Anglia University implicate scientists in any malfeasance or wrong doing whatsoever, according to four independent investigations. Furthermore, subsequent analysis of the temperature data also reveal earth has been warming at an accelerated rate.

Finally, climate models run by four major independent laboratories (National Center for Atmospheric Research, Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and Research, and the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology) all indicate a strong positive correlation between anthropogenic CO2 and global warming.

9. Volcanoes emit more CO2 than humans.

Completely false. USGS data indicates humans now emit more than 100 times as much CO2 as all earth's volcanoes and ocean out gassing combined. The statement came from a conflation of something Rush Limbaugh once said about Chlorofluorocarbons (CFS) with CO2--which also happened to be false.

Many of these controversies have been manufactured by the Heartland Institute, a Propaganda organ of the oil industry. This same group was earlier responsible for promoting the myth there was no connection between cigarettes and lung cancer.