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Another Scientific Warming Skeptic Makes News

By Kennedy Maize

Washington, D.C., September 16, 2011 — Add another prominent name to the list of know-nothing, scientifically illiterate skeptics of the conventional wisdom about global warming. Ivar Giaever, co-winner of the 1973 Nobel Prize in physics, has resigned as a Fellow from the American Physical Society over the scientific group’s political position on manmade global warming.

In an email to APS executive officer Kate Kirby this month, Giaever wrote, “I cannot live with the [APS] statement” on warming. That statement asserts, “The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.”

Giaever, who shared the Nobel with Leo Esaki and Brian Josephson for their work on tunnelling phenomena in solids and is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, said the APS statement is scientific nonsense. He wrote: “The claim (how can you measure the average temperature of the whole earth for a whole year?) is that the temperature has changed from [around] 288.0 to [around] 288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me that the temperature has been amazing stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this ‘warming’ period.”

Last year, Giaever told the New York Times that global warming has become dogma and “can’t be discussed — just like religion — there is NO unusual rise in the ocean level, so what, where and what, is the big problem?” In 2008, Giaever was one of a number of prominent scientists who support the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama. He was one of 70 Nobelists who endorsed Obama in an October 29, 2008 open letter.

The key point I want to make here is that the question of global warming is not science versus ignorance, as so many in the school of manmade mischief want us to believe. There is plenty of room for scientific debate and dissent. It serves no purpose to deny that science cuts in many ways on the subject of how the climate work. The proponents of manmade global warming are in denial if they say the science is “incontrovertible.”

Also on the global warming front, this week saw Al Gore’s 24-hour climate telethon (somebody had to replace Jerry Lewis) and a funny YouTube send-up from the conservative Competititve Enterprise Institute.

NPR on Morning Edition today was featuring a story about how Arctic ice has thinned to the lowest level ever recorded. To its credit, the story mentions — but never seems to understand just what it means — that the historical record for the thickness of Arctic ice goes WAY BACK to 2007. In other words, we are wringing our hands about the demise of the Arctic ecosystem, which we know has existed for thousands of years, on five years of data. And that passes for science?