Posted by Marc Morano – Marc_Morano@EPW.Senate.Gov - 9:14 PM ET - May 15,

Climate Momentum Shifting: Prominent Scientists
Reverse Belief in Man-made Global Warming - Now
Skeptics


Growing Number of Scientists Convert to Skeptics After Reviewing New Research

Following the U.S. Senate's vote today on a global warming measure (see today's AP
article: Senate Defeats Climate Change Measure,) it is an opportune time to examine
the recent and quite remarkable momentum shift taking place in climate science. Many
former believers in catastrophic man-made global warming have recently reversed
themselves and are now climate skeptics. The names included below are just a sampling
of the prominent scientists who have spoken out recently to oppose former Vice President
Al Gore, the United Nations and the media driven “consensus” on man-made global
warming.

The list below is just the tip of the iceberg. A more detailed and comprehensive sampling
of scientists who have only recently spoken out against climate hysteria will be
forthcoming in a soon to be released U.S. Senate report. Please stay tuned to this website,
as this new government report is set to redefine the current climate debate.

In the meantime, please review the list of scientists below and ask yourself why the
media is missing one of the biggest stories in climate of 2007. Feel free to distribute the
partial list of scientists who recently converted to skeptics to your local schools and
universities. The voices of rank and file scientists opposing climate doomsayers can serve
as a counter to the alarmism that children are being exposed to on a daily basis. (See
Washington Post April 16, 2007 article about kids fearing of a “climactic Armageddon” )
The media's climate fear factor seemingly grows louder even as the latest science grows
less and less alarming by the day. (See Der Spiegel May 7, 2007 article: Not the End of
the World as We Know It ) It is also worth noting that the proponents of climate fears are
increasingly attempting to suppress dissent by skeptic. (See UPI May 10, 2007 article:

U.N. official says it's 'completely immoral' to doubt global warming fears )
Once Believers, Now Skeptics – ( Link to web version

epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm
d_id=927b9303-802a-23ad-494b-dccb00b51a12&Region_id=&Issue_id= )

Geophysicist Dr. Claude Allegre, a top geophysicist and French Socialist who has
authored more than 100 scientific articles and written 11 books and received numerous
scientific awards including the Goldschmidt Medal from the Geochemical Society of the
United States, converted from climate alarmist to skeptic in 2006. Allegre, who was one
of the first scientists to sound global warming fears 20 years ago, now says the cause of
climate change is "unknown" and accused the “prophets of doom of global warming” of
being motivated by money, noting that "the ecology of helpless protesting has become a
very lucrative business for some people!" “Glaciers’ chronicles or historical archives
point to the fact that climate is a capricious phenomena. This fact is confirmed by
mathematical meteorological theories. So, let us be cautious,” Allegre explained in a
September 21, 2006 article in the French newspaper L'EXPRESS. The National Post in
Canada also profiled Allegre on March 2, 2007, noting “Allegre has the highest
environmental credentials. The author of early environmental books, he fought successful
battles to protect the ozone layer from CFCs and public health from lead pollution.”
Allegre now calls fears of a climate disaster "simplistic and obscuring the true dangers”
mocks "the greenhouse-gas fanatics whose proclamations consist in denouncing man's
role on the climate without doing anything about it except organizing conferences and
preparing protocols that become dead letters." Allegre, a member of both the French and

U.S. Academy of Sciences, had previously expressed concern about manmade global
warming. "By burning fossil fuels, man enhanced the concentration of carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere which has raised the global mean temperature by half a degree in the last
century," Allegre wrote 20 years ago. In addition, Allegre was one of 1500 scientists who
signed a November 18, 1992 letter titled “World Scientists' Warning to Humanity” in
which the scientists warned that global warming’s “potential risks are very great.”
Geologist Bruno Wiskel of the University of Alberta recently reversed his view of
man-made climate change and instead became a global warming skeptic. Wiskel was
once such a big believer in man-made global warming that he set out to build a “Kyoto
house” in honor of the UN sanctioned Kyoto Protocol which was signed in 1997. Wiskel
wanted to prove that the Kyoto Protocol’s goals were achievable by people making small
changes in their lives. But after further examining the science behind Kyoto, Wiskel
reversed his scientific views completely and became such a strong skeptic that he
recently wrote a book titled “The Emperor's New Climate: Debunking the Myth of
Global Warming.” A November 15, 2006 Edmonton Sun article explains Wiskel’s
conversion while building his “Kyoto house”: “Instead, he said he realized global
warming theory was full of holes and ‘red flags,’ and became convinced that humans are
not responsible for rising temperatures.” Wiskel now says “the truth has to start
somewhere.” Noting that the Earth has been warming for 18,000 years, Wiskel told the
Canadian newspaper, “If this happened once and we were the cause of it, that would be
cause for concern. But glaciers have been coming and going for billions of years."
Wiskel also said that global warming has gone "from a science to a religion” and noted
that research money is being funneled into promoting climate alarmism instead of
funding areas he considers more worthy. "If you funnel money into things that can't be
changed, the money is not going into the places that it is needed,” he said.

Astrophysicist Dr. Nir Shaviv, one of Israel's top young award winning scientists,

recanted his belief that manmade emissions were driving climate change. ""Like many
others, I was personally sure that CO2 is the bad culprit in the story of global warming.
But after carefully digging into the evidence, I realized that things are far more
complicated than the story sold to us by many climate scientists or the stories regurgitated
by the media. In fact, there is much more than meets the eye,” Shaviv said in February 2,
2007 Canadian National Post article. According to Shaviv, the C02 temperature link is
only “incriminating circumstantial evidence.” "Solar activity can explain a large part of
the 20th-century global warming" and "it is unlikely that [the solar climate link] does not
exist,” Shaviv noted pointing to the impact cosmic- rays have on the atmosphere.
According to the National Post, Shaviv believes that even a doubling of CO2 in the
atmosphere by 2100 "will not dramatically increase the global temperature." “Even if we
halved the CO2 output, and the CO2 increase by 2100 would be, say, a 50% increase
relative to today instead of a doubled amount, the expected reduction in the rise of global
temperature would be less than 0.5C. This is not significant,” Shaviv explained. Shaviv
also wrote on August 18, 2006 that a colleague of his believed that “CO2 should have a
large effect on climate” so “he set out to reconstruct the phanerozoic temperature. He
wanted to find the CO2 signature in the data, but since there was none, he slowly had to
change his views.” Shaviv believes there will be more scientists converting to man-made
global warming skepticism as they discover the dearth of evidence. “I think this is
common to many of the scientists who think like us (that is, that CO2 is a secondary
climate driver). Each one of us was working in his or her own niche. While working
there, each one of us realized that things just don't add up to support the AGW
(Anthropogenic Global Warming) picture. So many had to change their views,” he wrote.

Mathematician & engineer Dr. David Evans, who did carbon accounting for the
Australian Government, recently detailed his conversion to a skeptic. “I devoted six
years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian government to estimate
carbon emissions from land use change and forestry. When I started that job in 1999 the
evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty conclusive, but
since then new evidence has weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause.
I am now skeptical,” Evans wrote in an April 30, 2007 blog. “But after 2000 the evidence
for carbon emissions gradually got weaker -- better temperature data for the last century,
more detailed ice core data, then laboratory evidence that cosmic rays precipitate low
clouds,” Evans wrote. “As Lord Keynes famously said, ‘When the facts change, I change
my mind. What do you do, sir?’” he added. Evans noted how he benefited from man-
made climate fears as a scientist. “And the political realm in turn fed money back into the
scientific community. By the late 1990's, lots of jobs depended on the idea that carbon
emissions caused global warming. Many of them were bureaucratic, but there were a lot
of science jobs created too. I was on that gravy train, making a high wage in a science job
that would not have existed if we didn't believe carbon emissions caused global warming.
And so were lots of people around me; and there were international conferences full of
such people. And we had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we
felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to
save the planet! But starting in about 2000, the last three of the four pieces of evidence
outlined above fell away or reversed,” Evans wrote. “The pre-2000 ice core data was the
central evidence for believing that atmospheric carbon caused temperature increases. The
new ice core data shows that past warmings were *not* initially caused by rises in
atmospheric carbon, and says nothing about the strength of any amplification. This piece
of evidence casts reasonable doubt that atmospheric carbon had any role in past
warmings, while still allowing the possibility that it had a supporting role,” he added.
“Unfortunately politics and science have become even more entangled. The science of
global warming has become a partisan political issue, so positions become more
entrenched. Politicians and the public prefer simple and less-nuanced messages. At the
moment the political climate strongly supports carbon emissions as the cause of global
warming, to the point of sometimes rubbishing or silencing critics,” he concluded. (Evans
bio link )

Climate researcher Dr. Tad Murty, former Senior Research Scientist for Fisheries
and Oceans in Canada, also reversed himself from believer in man-made climate
change to a skeptic. “I stated with a firm belief about global warming, until I started
working on it myself,” Murty explained on August 17, 2006. “I switched to the other
side in the early 1990's when Fisheries and Oceans Canada asked me to prepare a
position paper and I started to look into the problem seriously,” Murty explained. Murty
was one of the 60 scientists who wrote an April 6, 2006 letter urging withdrawal of
Kyoto to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper which stated in part, "If, back in the
mid-1990s, we knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would almost certainly
not exist, because we would have concluded it was not necessary.”

Botanist Dr. David Bellamy, a famed UK environmental campaigner, former
lecturer at Durham University and host of a popular UK TV series on wildlife,
recently converted into a skeptic after reviewing the science and now calls global
warming fears "poppycock." According to a May 15, 2005 article in the UK Sunday
Times, Bellamy said “global warming is largely a natural phenomenon. The world is
wasting stupendous amounts of money on trying to fix something that can’t be fixed.”
“The climate-change people have no proof for their claims. They have computer models
which do not prove anything,” Bellamy added. Bellamy’s conversion on global warming
did not come without a sacrifice as several environmental groups have ended their
association with him because of his views on climate change. The severing of relations
came despite Bellamy’s long activism for green campaigns. The UK Times reported
Bellamy “won respect from hardline environmentalists with his campaigns to save
Britain’s peat bogs and other endangered habitats. In Tasmania he was arrested when he
tried to prevent loggers cutting down a rainforest.”

Climate scientist Dr. Chris de Freitas of The University of Auckland, N.Z., also
converted from a believer in man-made global warming to a skeptic. “At first I accepted
that increases in human caused additions of carbon dioxide and methane in the
atmosphere would trigger changes in water vapor etc. and lead to dangerous ‘global
warming,’ But with time and with the results of research, I formed the view that, although
it makes for a good story, it is unlikely that the man-made changes are drivers of
significant climate variation.” de Freitas wrote on August 17, 2006. “I accept there may
be small changes. But I see the risk of anything serious to be minute,” he added. “One
could reasonably argue that lack of evidence is not a good reason for complacency. But I
believe the billions of dollars committed to GW research and lobbying for GW and for
Kyoto treaties etc could be better spent on uncontroversial and very real environmental
problems (such as air pollution, poor sanitation, provision of clean water and improved
health services) that we know affect tens of millions of people,” de Freitas concluded. de
Freitas was one of the 60 scientists who wrote an April 6, 2006 letter urging withdrawal
of Kyoto to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper which stated in part, “Significant
[scientific] advances have been made since the [Kyoto] protocol was created, many of
which are taking us away from a concern about increasing greenhouse gases.”

Meteorologist Dr. Reid Bryson, the founding chairman of the Department of
Meteorology at University of Wisconsin (now the Department of Oceanic and
Atmospheric Sciences, was pivotal in promoting the coming ice age scare of the 1970’s
( See Time Magazine’s 1974 article “Another Ice Age” citing Bryson: & see Newsweek’s
1975 article “The Cooling World” citing Bryson) has now converted into a leading global
warming skeptic. In February 8, 2007 Bryson dismissed what he terms "sky is falling"
man-made global warming fears. Bryson, was on the United Nations Global 500 Roll of
Honor and was identified by the British Institute of Geographers as the most frequently
cited climatologist in the world. “Before there were enough people to make any
difference at all, two million years ago, nobody was changing the climate, yet the climate
was changing, okay?” Bryson told the May 2007 issue of Energy Cooperative News. “All
this argument is the temperature going up or not, it’s absurd. Of course it’s going up. It
has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re
coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the
air,” Bryson said. “You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling
carbon dioxide,” he added. “We cannot say what part of that warming was due to
mankind's addition of ‘greenhouse gases’ until we consider the other possible factors,
such as aerosols. The aerosol content of the atmosphere was measured during the past
century, but to my knowledge this data was never used. We can say that the question of
anthropogenic modification of the climate is an important question -- too important to
ignore. However, it has now become a media free-for-all and a political issue more than a
scientific problem,” Bryson explained in 2005.

Global warming author and economist Hans H.J. Labohm started out as a man-made
global warming believer but he later switched his view after conducting climate research.

Labohm wrote on August 19, 2006, “I started as a anthropogenic global warming
believer, then I read the [UN’s IPCC] Summary for Policymakers and the research of
prominent skeptics.” “After that, I changed my mind,” Labohn explained. Labohn coauthored
the 2004 book “Man-Made Global Warming: Unraveling a Dogma,” with
chemical engineer Dick Thoenes who was the former chairman of the Royal
Netherlands Chemical Society. Labohm was one of the 60 scientists who wrote an April
6, 2006 letter urging withdrawal of Kyoto to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper
which stated in part, “’Climate change is real’ is a meaningless phrase used repeatedly by
activists to convince the public that a climate catastrophe is looming and humanity is the
cause. Neither of these fears is justified. Global climate changes all the time due to
natural causes and the human impact still remains impossible to distinguish from this
natural ‘noise.’”

Paleoclimatologist Tim Patterson, of Carlton University in Ottawa converted from
believer in C02 driving the climate change to a skeptic. “I taught my students that CO2
was the prime driver of climate change,” Patterson wrote on April 30, 2007. Patterson
said his “conversion” happened following his research on “the nature of paleocommercial
fish populations in the NE Pacific.” “[My conversion from believer to
climate skeptic] came about approximately 5-6 years ago when results began to come in
from a major NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada)
Strategic Project Grant where I was PI (principle investigator),” Patterson explained.
“Over the course of about a year, I switched allegiances,” he wrote. “As the proxy results
began to come in, we were astounded to find that paleoclimatic and paleoproductivity
records were full of cycles that corresponded to various sun-spot cycles. About that time,
[geochemist] Jan Veizer and others began to publish reasonable hypotheses as to how
solar signals could be amplified and control climate,” Patterson noted. Patterson says his
conversion “probably cost me a lot of grant money. However, as a scientist I go where
the science takes me and not were activists want me to go.” Patterson now asserts that
more and more scientists are converting to climate skeptics. "When I go to a scientific
meeting, there's lots of opinion out there, there's lots of discussion (about climate
change). I was at the Geological Society of America meeting in Philadelphia in the fall
and I would say that people with my opinion were probably in the majority,” Patterson
told the Winnipeg Sun on February 13, 2007. Patterson, who believes the sun is
responsible for the recent warm up of the Earth, ridiculed the environmentalists and the
media for not reporting the truth. "But if you listen to [Canadian environmental activist
David] Suzuki and the media, it's like a tiger chasing its tail. They try to outdo each other
and all the while proclaiming that the debate is over but it isn't -- come out to a scientific
meeting sometime,” Patterson said. In a separate interview on April 26, 2007 with a
Canadian newspaper, Patterson explained that the scientific proof favors skeptics. “I
think the proof in the pudding, based on what (media and governments) are saying, (is)
we're about three quarters of the way (to disaster) with the doubling of CO2 in the
atmosphere," he said. “The world should be heating up like crazy by now, and it's not.
The temperatures match very closely with the solar cycles."

Physicist Dr. Zbigniew Jaworowski, chairman of the Central Laboratory for the
United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Radiological Protection in
Warsaw, took a scientific journey from a believer of man-made climate change in the
form of global cooling in the 1970’s all the way to converting to a skeptic of current
predictions of catastrophic man-made global warming. “At the beginning of the 1970s I
believed in man-made climate cooling, and therefore I started a study on the effects of
industrial pollution on the global atmosphere, using glaciers as a history book on this
pollution,” Dr. Jaworowski, wrote on August 17, 2006. “With the advent of man-made
warming political correctness in the beginning of 1980s, I already had a lot of experience
with polar and high altitude ice, and I have serious problems in accepting the reliability of
ice core CO2 studies,” Jaworowski added. Jaworowski, who has published many papers
on climate with a focus on CO2 measurements in ice cores, also dismissed the UN IPCC
summary and questioned what the actual level of C02 was in the atmosphere in a March
16, 2007 report in EIR science entitled “CO2: The Greatest Scientific Scandal of Our
Time.” “We thus find ourselves in the situation that the entire theory of man-made global
warming—with its repercussions in science, and its important consequences for politics
and the global economy—is based on ice core studies that provided a false picture of the
atmospheric CO2 levels,” Jaworowski wrote. “For the past three decades, these well-
known direct CO2 measurements, recently compiled and analyzed by Ernst-Georg Beck
(Beck 2006a, Beck 2006b, Beck 2007), were completely ignored by climatologists—and



not because they were wrong. Indeed, these measurements were made by several Nobel
Prize winners, using the techniques that are standard textbook procedures in chemistry,
biochemistry, botany, hygiene, medicine, nutrition, and ecology. The only reason for
rejection was that these measurements did not fit the hypothesis of anthropogenic
climatic warming. I regard this as perhaps the greatest scientific scandal of our time,”
Jaworowski wrote. “The hypothesis, in vogue in the 1970s, stating that emissions of
industrial dust will soon induce the new Ice Age, seem now to be a conceited
anthropocentric exaggeration, bringing into discredit the science of that time. The same
fate awaits the present,” he added. Jaworowski believes that cosmic rays and solar
activity are major drivers of the Earth’s climate. Jaworowski was one of the 60 scientists
who wrote an April 6, 2006 letter urging withdrawal of Kyoto to Canadian prime minister
Stephen Harper which stated in part: "It may be many years yet before we properly
understand the Earth's climate system. Nevertheless, significant advances have been
made since the protocol was created, many of which are taking us away from a concern
about increasing greenhouse gases."

Paleoclimatologist Dr. Ian D. Clark, professor of the Department of Earth Sciences
at University of Ottawa, reversed his views on man-made climate change after further
examining the evidence. “I used to agree with these dramatic warnings of climate
disaster. I taught my students that most of the increase in temperature of the past century
was due to human contribution of C02. The association seemed so clear and simple.
Increases of greenhouse gases were driving us towards a climate catastrophe,” Clark said
in a 2005 documentary "Climate Catastrophe Cancelled: What You're Not Being
Told About the Science of Climate Change.” “However, a few years ago, I decided to
look more closely at the science and it astonished me. In fact there is no evidence of
humans being the cause. There is, however, overwhelming evidence of natural causes
such as changes in the output of the sun. This has completely reversed my views on the
Kyoto protocol,” Clark explained. “Actually, many other leading climate researchers also
have serious concerns about the science underlying the [Kyoto] Protocol,” he added.

Environmental geochemist Dr. Jan Veizer, professor emeritus of University of
Ottawa, converted from believer to skeptic after conducting scientific studies of climate
history. “I simply accepted the (global warming) theory as given,” Veizer wrote on April
30, 2007 about predictions that increasing C02 in the atmosphere was leading to a climate
catastrophe. “The final conversion came when I realized that the solar/cosmic ray
connection gave far more consistent picture with climate, over many time scales, than did
the CO2 scenario,” Veizer wrote. “It was the results of my work on past records, on
geological time scales, that led me to realize the discrepancies with empirical
observations. Trying to understand the background issues of modeling led to realization
of the assumptions and uncertainties involved,” Veizer explained. “The past record
strongly favors the solar/cosmic alternative as the principal climate driver,” he added.
Veizer acknowledgez the Earth has been warming and he believes in the scientific value
of climate modeling. “The major point where I diverge from the IPCC scenario is my
belief that it underestimates the role of natural variability by proclaiming CO2 to be the
only reasonable source of additional energy in the planetary balance. Such additional
energy is needed to drive the climate. The point is that most of the temperature, in both



nature and models, arises from the greenhouse of water vapor (model language ‘positive
water vapor feedback’,) Veizer wrote. “Thus to get more temperature, more water vapor
is needed. This is achieved by speeding up the water cycle by inputting more energy into
the system,” he continued. “Note that it is not CO2 that is in the models but its presumed
energy equivalent (model language ‘prescribed CO2’). Yet, the models (and climate)
would generate a more or less similar outcome regardless where this additional energy is
coming from. This is why the solar/cosmic connection is so strongly opposed, because it
can influence the global energy budget which, in turn, diminishes the need for an energy
input from the CO2 greenhouse,” he wrote.

More to follow…

Related Links:

Senator Inhofe declares climate momentum shifting away from Gore (The Politico op ed)

Scientific Smackdown: Skeptics Voted The Clear Winners Against Global Warming
Believers in Heated NYC Debate

Global Warming on Mars & Cosmic Ray Research Are Shattering Media Driven
"Consensus’

Global Warming: The Momentum has Shifted to Climate Skeptics

Prominent French Scientist Reverses Belief in Global Warming - Now a Skeptic

Top Israeli Astrophysicist Recants His Belief in Manmade Global Warming - Now Says
Sun Biggest Factor in Warming

Warming On Jupiter, Mars, Pluto, Neptune's Moon & Earth Linked to Increased Solar
Activity, Scientists Say

Panel of Broadcast Meteorologists Reject Man-Made Global Warming Fears- Claim 95%
of Weathermen Skeptical

MIT Climate Scientist Calls Fears of Global Warming 'Silly' - Equates Concerns to
‘Little Kids’ Attempting to "Scare Each Other"

Weather Channel TV Host Goes 'Political'-Stars in Global Warming Film Accusing U.S.
Government of ‘Criminal Neglect’

Weather Channel Climate Expert Calls for Decertifying Global Warming Skeptics

ABC-TV Meteorologist: I Don't Know A Single Weatherman Who Believes 'Man-Made
Global Warming Hype'



The Weather Channel Climate Expert Refuses to Retract Call for Decertification for
Global Warming Skeptics

Senator Inhofe Announces Public Release Of "Skeptic’s Guide To Debunking Global
Warming"

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