Here is my suggestion for your Global Warming Center: do something that the rest of the media is not, which is present both sides of the Global Warming debate. The global temperature has risen about one degree in the last century. The media gives the perception that there is scientific agreement that the cause of this increase is due to human activity.

I would like to see AccuWeather present some of the scientific arguments that question whether the cause is man made or due to other influences (e.g. an active solar cycle, normal cyclical warming and cooling, etc.)

Here is a column by Richard Lindzen, an Atmospheric Scientist at MIT. It was in the Wall Street Journal in July. The subject of the column is the lack of agreement in the scientific community about the cause of global warming:

Don't Believe the Hype
Al Gore is wrong. There's no "consensus" on global warming.

BY RICHARD S. LINDZEN
Sunday, July 2, 2006 12:01 a.m.

According to Al Gore's new film "An Inconvenient Truth," we're in for "a planetary emergency": melting ice sheets, huge increases in sea levels, more and stronger hurricanes, and invasions of tropical disease, among other cataclysms--unless we change the way we live now.
Bill Clinton has become the latest evangelist for Mr. Gore's gospel, proclaiming that current weather events show that he and Mr. Gore were right about global warming, and we are all suffering the consequences of President Bush's obtuseness on the matter. And why not? Mr. Gore assures us that "the debate in the scientific community is over."

That statement, which Mr. Gore made in an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC, ought to have been followed by an asterisk. What exactly is this debate that Mr. Gore is referring to? Is there really a scientific community that is debating all these issues and then somehow agreeing in unison? Far from such a thing being over, it has never been clear to me what this "debate" actually is in the first place.

The media rarely help, of course. When Newsweek featured global warming in a 1988 issue, it was claimed that all scientists agreed. Periodically thereafter it was revealed that although there had been lingering doubts beforehand, now all scientists did indeed agree. Even Mr. Gore qualified his statement on ABC only a few minutes after he made it, clarifying things in an important way. When Mr. Stephanopoulos confronted Mr. Gore with the fact that the best estimates of rising sea levels are far less dire than he suggests in his movie, Mr. Gore defended his claims by noting that scientists "don't have any models that give them a high level of confidence" one way or the other and went on to claim--in his defense--that scientists "don't know. . . . They just don't know."

So, presumably, those scientists do not belong to the "consensus." Yet their research is forced, whether the evidence supports it or not, into Mr. Gore's preferred global-warming template--namely, shrill alarmism. To believe it requires that one ignore the truly inconvenient facts. To take the issue of rising sea levels, these include: that the Arctic was as warm or warmer in 1940; that icebergs have been known since time immemorial; that the evidence so far suggests that the Greenland ice sheet is actually growing on average. A likely result of all this is increased pressure pushing ice off the coastal perimeter of that country, which is depicted so ominously in Mr. Gore's movie. In the absence of factual context, these images are perhaps dire or alarming.

They are less so otherwise. Alpine glaciers have been retreating since the early 19th century, and were advancing for several centuries before that. Since about 1970, many of the glaciers have stopped retreating and some are now advancing again. And, frankly, we don't know why.

The other elements of the global-warming scare scenario are predicated on similar oversights. Malaria, claimed as a byproduct of warming, was once common in Michigan and Siberia and remains common in Siberia--mosquitoes don't require tropical warmth. Hurricanes, too, vary on multidecadal time scales; sea-surface temperature is likely to be an important factor. This temperature, itself, varies on multidecadal time scales. However, questions concerning the origin of the relevant sea-surface temperatures and the nature of trends in hurricane intensity are being hotly argued within the profession.
Even among those arguing, there is general agreement that we can't attribute any particular hurricane to global warming. To be sure, there is one exception, Greg Holland of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., who argues that it must be global warming because he can't think of anything else. While arguments like these, based on lassitude, are becoming rather common in climate assessments, such claims, given the primitive state of weather and climate science, are hardly compelling.

A general characteristic of Mr. Gore's approach is to assiduously ignore the fact that the earth and its climate are dynamic; they are always changing even without any external forcing. To treat all change as something to fear is bad enough; to do so in order to exploit that fear is much worse. Regardless, these items are clearly not issues over which debate is ended--at least not in terms of the actual science.

A clearer claim as to what debate has ended is provided by the environmental journalist Gregg Easterbrook. He concludes that the scientific community now agrees that significant warming is occurring, and that there is clear evidence of human influences on the climate system. This is still a most peculiar claim. At some level, it has never been widely contested. Most of the climate community has agreed since 1988 that global mean temperatures have increased on the order of one degree Fahrenheit over the past century, having risen significantly from about 1919 to 1940, decreased between 1940 and the early '70s, increased again until the '90s, and remaining essentially flat since 1998.

There is also little disagreement that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have risen from about 280 parts per million by volume in the 19th century to about 387 ppmv today. Finally, there has been no question whatever that carbon dioxide is an infrared absorber (i.e., a greenhouse gas--albeit a minor one), and its increase should theoretically contribute to warming. Indeed, if all else were kept equal, the increase in carbon dioxide should have led to somewhat more warming than has been observed, assuming that the small observed increase was in fact due to increasing carbon dioxide rather than a natural fluctuation in the climate system. Although no cause for alarm rests on this issue, there has been an intense effort to claim that the theoretically expected contribution from additional carbon dioxide has actually been detected.

Given that we do not understand the natural internal variability of climate change, this task is currently impossible. Nevertheless there has been a persistent effort to suggest otherwise, and with surprising impact. Thus, although the conflicted state of the affair was accurately presented in the 1996 text of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the infamous "summary for policy makers" reported ambiguously that "The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate." This sufficed as the smoking gun for Kyoto.

The next IPCC report again described the problems surrounding what has become known as the attribution issue: that is, to explain what mechanisms are responsible for observed changes in climate. Some deployed the lassitude argument--e.g., we can't think of an alternative--to support human attribution. But the "summary for policy makers" claimed in a manner largely unrelated to the actual text of the report that "In the light of new evidence and taking into account the remaining uncertainties, most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations."

In a similar vein, the National Academy of Sciences issued a brief (15-page) report responding to questions from the White House. It again enumerated the difficulties with attribution, but again the report was preceded by a front end that ambiguously claimed that "The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities, but we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability." This was sufficient for CNN's Michelle Mitchell to presciently declare that the report represented a "unanimous decision that global warming is real, is getting worse and is due to man. There is no wiggle room." Well, no.

More recently, a study in the journal Science by the social scientist Nancy Oreskes claimed that a search of the ISI Web of Knowledge Database for the years 1993 to 2003 under the key words "global climate change" produced 928 articles, all of whose abstracts supported what she referred to as the consensus view. A British social scientist, Benny Peiser, checked her procedure and found that only 913 of the 928 articles had abstracts at all, and that only 13 of the remaining 913 explicitly endorsed the so-called consensus view. Several actually opposed it.

Even more recently, the Climate Change Science Program, the Bush administration's coordinating agency for global-warming research, declared it had found "clear evidence of human influences on the climate system." This, for Mr. Easterbrook, meant: "Case closed." What exactly was this evidence? The models imply that greenhouse warming should impact atmospheric temperatures more than surface temperatures, and yet satellite data showed no warming in the atmosphere since 1979. The report showed that selective corrections to the atmospheric data could lead to some warming, thus reducing the conflict between observations and models descriptions of what greenhouse warming should look like. That, to me, means the case is still very much open.

So what, then, is one to make of this alleged debate? I would suggest at least three points.
First, nonscientists generally do not want to bother with understanding the science. Claims of consensus relieve policy types, environmental advocates and politicians of any need to do so. Such claims also serve to intimidate the public and even scientists--especially those outside the area of climate dynamics. Secondly, given that the question of human attribution largely cannot be resolved, its use in promoting visions of disaster constitutes nothing so much as a bait-and-switch scam. That is an inauspicious beginning to what Mr. Gore claims is not a political issue but a "moral" crusade.

Lastly, there is a clear attempt to establish truth not by scientific methods but by perpetual repetition. An earlier attempt at this was accompanied by tragedy. Perhaps Marx was right. This time around we may have farce--if we're lucky.

Mr. Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT.

Copyright � 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

It would be nice to inform the American public on ways that they can reduce CO2 emissions, such as pushing their municipality to provide an intense recycling program, reduce packaging of goods, overcoming the hot trend of drinking bottled water (water is water), as well as using energy efficient lighting and electrical products in their homes. There is a lot that can be done to reduce emissions, cars are the number one pollutant of CO2 and this desperately needs to be dealt with, but it is also important to point out various other ways that people can help our environment/save money.

I think you are doing a great job at covering this topic objectively. Keep up the good work. Ignore the sniping.

I'd like to see AccuWeather present some of the techniques the small group of climate change skeptics (within the scientific community) and their affiliated industries use to try to discredit global warming outside of the scientific community. Then describe the scientific peer review process to let the non-scientific community see exactly how they came to the consensus that climate change is real and that humans are the main cause of it.

Global Warming is being blamed for many extreme changes in the weather and I'm curious if this is really the case. It's (global warming) effects have supposed to have been responsible for the melting of the ice caps north and south poles. If so much evidence is available why aren't more drastic measures being taken to avert any more global warming from taking place as the problem won't go away unless something concrete is implemented and adhered to by all countries. Most importantly what we as individuals can do to alleviate the problem is not so evident and talked about, we need facts and answers to questions about Global Warming. On the government level not much is said about implementing working solutions or even thoughtful concerns by most legislators. Let's wake up and smell the ice melting and the growing ozone layer overwhelming us and our children.

Wow, what is it going to take to get people to come to their senses and take note on what is going on around them? Repeated record breaking warmth, strongest hurricanes / cyclones ever, islands off the coast of India now under water because of rising sea levels.

People put money before common sense. If acknowledging an issue (like Global Warming) will cost someone something, they deny it. They will "spin" it to their benefit, so they do not lose.

If we let this continue on, we will all lose, big!

-George

I cant understand how so many people can jump on the global warming band wagon, when the dont even take anytime researching all the facts.. How anyone believes that al gore or any of the other politicians really know a thing about climate change.. Some of the most admired climatologists are still very skeptical of global warming and the have been raked over the coals for being so.. Grant monies have been taken away and some have been terminated from there positions..

Here are some facts.
7 of the 10 warmest years on record in the last hundred years were all during the 30's and 1940's.. Wow how could that be..

The temperatures of today are far cooler then even 700 to 800 yrs ago.. the nordsman went to greenland at these times for a reason.. It is not in this green state right now.. I dont believe man made greenhouse gases were heavy at this time.. Please explain this Al gore..

I just want people to investigate things and not just take things at faith..

I have a hard time even buying the noaa when the blame the radical hurricane season on global warming and predict another fierce season to fallow, when we end up having one of the tamest on record and the print no retraction on the global warming causes.. shame on you..

Please people smartin up..

George,

Look past your nose and realize that you are toughting things that have been looked at and recorded for how long. No where near the age of the planet. The so called record warmth, strongest hurricanes, etc. , maybe in our lifetime.

From what I understand, the weather was much more brutal in the past (both hot and cold) than what it is now.

Also understand that where many of us live today was once covered by glaciers or or the hills and valleys created by the movement of glaciers.
I'm all for global warming - glaciers make it hard to get around.

Everyone needs to lighten up and realize this topic will be expoited for politcal, monetary and a host of other reasons. The fact is that we have no effect on mother earth (in the sense of cycles that occur on a much larger scale than we can imagine) and we will be long gone before anyone figures this out.

Personally I hope I am gone before the next ice age. In the mean time it gives the scientists something to do and utilize there education, ehich I am all for. They(some) will exploit it as well to further their agendas and secure funding for study after study.

I will say once again - man gives himself way too much credit for having an effect on mother nature.

Everyone relax and take ten years off on this topic - I'm sure we can pick right back up and not have missed much in the mean time.