as well as a senior fellow in research and economic development at George Mason University, explains “that climate models have done remarkably poorly in replicating the evolution of global temperature during the past several decades, and that high-end climate horror stories emanating from these lousy models are largely unsupported by observations. Further, they managed to ignore a spate of published science demonstrating that the sensitivity of temperature to carbon dioxide changes was substantially overestimated in those models. . . .”21
Richard S. Lindzen is a distinguished senior fellow at Cato’s Center for the Study of Science, emeritus professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and previously professor of dynamic meteorology at Harvard University. Lindzen is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and fellow of both the American Meteorological Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He received the Jule G. Charney Award for “highly significant research” in the atmospheric sciences from the American Meteorological Society and the Distinguished Engineering Achievement Award from the Engineer’s Council in 2009. “Lindzen’s pioneering research in atmospheric dynamics has led to his conclusion that the sensitivity of surface temperature to increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide is considerably below that necessary to generate disastrous climate change.”22
Patrick Moore, Greenpeace cofounder and Canadian ecologist, testified before the United States Senate that “there is ‘little correlation’ to support a ‘direct causal relationship’ between CO2 emissions and rising global temperatures. ‘There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the past 100 years. If there were such a proof, it would be written down for all to see. No actual proof, as it is understood in science, exists.’ ” Moore “also criticized the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for claiming ‘it is extremely likely’ that human activity is the ‘dominant cause’ for global warming, noting that ‘extremely likely’ is not a scientific term. Moore warned the statistics presented by the IPCC are not the result of mathematical calculations or statistical analysis, and may have been ‘invented’ to support the IPCC’s ‘expert judgement.’ ”23
Roy W. Spencer “received his Ph.D. in meteorology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1981. Before becoming a Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville in 2001, he was a Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, where he and Dr. John Christy received NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for their global temperature monitoring work with satellites. Dr. Spencer’s work with NASA continues as the U.S. Science Team leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite.”24
During a presentation at the Heartland Institute’s Ninth International Conference on Climate Change in Las Vegas, Spencer explained that “[t]oo many people think that all areas of science are created equal and that scientists objectively look for the answers, but no, there’s two kinds of scientists, male and female. Other than that they’re the same as everybody else, and in many instances [in the climate sciences] more biased than your average person. . . . Spencer went on to criticize the temperature data of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) because it has never taken into account the phenomenon of urban heat island effect.”25
Indeed, Spencer pointed to the thermometer-related algorithms as one of the problems in measuring heat. “A lot of us still think that a lot of the warming we are seeing in the thermometer record is just urban heat island effect. In fact, Las Vegas, here, even though it’s built in the desert basically . . . in the last forty years or so, nighttime temperatures here have risen by ten degrees Fahrenheit because of urbanization. This is an effect that they can’t take out of the thermometer record. Their algorithms can’t take it out because you can’t separate it from global warming. If you’ve got a long-term warming trend because of urbanization there’s no way NOAA can take out that effect because it’s indistinguishable from other temperature readings.”26
In the end, Spencer argues, very little is really known about global warming, also known as climate change. “After working on global warming for the last 20 plus years, what do we know about it now? The longer you go [into the research] you get more questions than you get answers. So, what do we really know about it? Almost nothing.”27
There are many more highly educated and experienced experts who raise a variety of substantive issues and questions about man-made