
© Murdo MacleodThe 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley aka Christopher Monckton is seen by his home at Carie, Loch Rannoch, Scotland.
They've been compared to "flat earthers" and even "Holocaust deniers". And, as the recent "Climategate" email scandal reveals, they have been blacklisted in certain professional circles. Scientists who disagree with the current consensus on Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) are dismissed by some colleagues and politicians as ignorant and irrelevant. Though there are certainly cranks out there who lend credence to this stereotype, not everyone who rejects the idea that global warming is a planetary crisis brought about by burning fossil fuels deserves to be vilified.
There are numerous myths surrounding those who are wrongly labeled "deniers". Most of them can be distilled into six basic accusations:
1. "Deniers" believe the climate has not warmed.No one questions that there has been a slight, but unmistakable increase in global temperature since the end of the "Little Ice Age" in the early nineteenth century. Global average surface temperature has risen approximately 0.9°C since 1850. But not all scientists attribute this change to the human addition of CO
2 and other greenhouse gases to the air. Those who oppose the prevailing view on AGW point out that since temperatures began to increase well before CO
2 levels were considered significant (c. 1940), a considerable part of this warming is due to natural variations in the climate.
Such variations in the past have brought about abrupt climate changes with large swings in temperature.
Numerous articles have appeared in scientific journals over the last several years documenting a warm bias in official temperature measurements. This bias, which may account for up to half of the reported warming, is due largely to changes in land cover - especially the geographic expansion of cities which creates "urban heat islands." An ongoing survey of over 1000 climate reporting stations in the United States, shows that 69% are poorly sited resulting in errors of 2°C to 5°C or more (
www.surfacestations.org). Surface data has also been impaired from station dropout. Over two-thirds of the world's stations were dropped from the climate network around 1990. Most of them were colder, high latitude and rural stations.