Why the hype?...Follow the money my friend.
Indeed Byrd, follow the money. If you actually bother to do so, you will find that there is quite a lot of money available for scientists who wish to challenge the idea that humans are having an effect on climate. Various fossil fuel companies and others with a vested interest in opposing the concept are quite willing to fund this research. The problem is that whenever they do fund the research, and when the scientists actually do the studies, they keep coming to the opposite conclusion.
The case of Richard Muller is quite instructive. He is a well regarded physicist at Berkeley and the Lawrence Livermore Lab, and was a very prominent skeptic of current climate research. He was skeptical first that warming was real (rather than an artifact of poor data analysis), and secondly skeptical that even if warming was real that it was caused by humans putting CO2 into the atmosphere. The Koch brothers (also prominent skeptics) funded him lavishly. With their help he was able to start his own research program and hire a dozen other scientists to assist him.
When he actually did his research, he first discovered that
indeed the climate is warming. At that point he was still skeptical that human activity was the source.
When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn't know what we'd find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections.
Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate. How much of the warming is due to humans and what will be the likely effects? We made no independent assessment of that.
Note that at that point he was still skeptical that humans were a significant cause of warming. So he and his research team next tackled the question of what was the source of this warming.
He finally concluded that greenhouse gases were indeed the cause.
CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.
My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth. Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.
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