What sides are...?

Question

What sides are involved in the issue of global warming? What are their viewpoints?

Answer 1

More than 400 scientists challenge claims by former Vice President Al Gore and the United Nations about the threat of man-made global warming, a new Senate minority report says.

The scientists — many of whom are current or former members of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that shares the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Mr. Gore for publicizing a climate crisis — cast doubt on the "scientific consensus" that man-made global warming imperils the planet.

The sites below explain it all..

Answer 2

On one side you have:

99% of the scientists in the world, most all world leaders, and most of the people in the world (including many conservatives).  Also: The National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Institute of Physics, the American Chemical Society, the American Meteorological Association, etc.

They say global warming is real, and mostly caused by us.

On the other you have a few "skeptical" scientists, and right wing extremists driven by politics.  They say a variety of contradictory things.  That global warming isn't happening, that it's all a giant conspiracy, or it's driven by the Sun, or cosmic rays.  They can't even convince each other.

This is not a hard call.

"There's a better scientific consensus on this [climate change] than on any issue I know...  Global warming is almost a no-brainer at this point.  You really can't find intelligent, quantitative arguments to make it go away."

Dr. Jerry Mahlman, NOAA

Good websites for more info:

http://profend.com/global-warming/

http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/sci...

http://www.realclimate.org

"climate science from climate scientists"

http://environment.newscientist.com/chan...

Answer 3

Among scientists, there are four main camps:

* The Warmers or Alarmists - These are guys like Jim Hanson at NASA GISS, Phil Jones at Climatic Research Unit at University of East Anglia (keepers of the temperature record used by the IPCC) and Michael Mann, the creator of the "Hockey Stick" chart promoted by the IPCC.  Gavin Schmidt, also from NASA, is another alarmist.  Schmidt and Mann are both heavily involved in a public relations style website called RealClimate.org.  RealClimate is registered by a PR firm and is known for censoring comments and only telling one side of the science.

http://www.giss.nasa.gov/

http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/

http://realclimate.org

* The Luke Warmers - These are guys like Roger A Pielke of University of Colorado (probably the most prolific and respected climatologist) and William Cotton of Colorado State University.  These guys believe the science predicting warming from increased atmospheric CO2 is strong but that negative feedbacks reduce the effect.  They believe mankind is changing the climate but that most of the change comes from land use changes (agriculture, sprawling cities and suburbs) and that global warming will not be catastrophic.  Stephen Schwartz of Brookhaven National Laboratory has published a new estimate of climate sensitivity using ocean heat content (a metric proposed by Pielke) and he concludes that climate sensitivity to rising CO2 is about one-third of the IPCC estimate.  John Christy and Roy Spencer also belong in this group.  They are responsible for finding a significant negative feedback over the tropics first hypothesized by Richard Lindzen from MIT.

http://climatesci.colorado.edu/

http://climatesci.colorado.edu/2007/03/1...

http://climatesci.colorado.edu/2007/05/2...

http://www.ecd.bnl.gov/steve/pubs/HeatCa...

http://www.marshall.org/pdf/materials/41...

* The Skeptics - These guys are currently unconvinced by the science.  In fact, they think climate scientists (with a few exceptions) are generally pretty poor scientists.  Richard Lindzen, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at MIT testified before Congress that the smart students went into physics, math or computer science and not climate science.  Stephen McIntyre audits climate science and regularly finds mistakes.  McIntyre broke Mann's "Hockey Stick" and showed that Mann had hidden results contrary to his conclusions - which is extremely unethical in science.  McIntyre continues to audit climate science and he finds that many of them do not observe the standards of science to archive and share their data so their results can be reproduced. Anthony Watts is leading an effort to photograph and document the quality of weather stations around the globe.  He has photos of about 1/3 of US stations and only 15% of them meet the minimum standards of a quality station.  The others have a warm bias.  Watts believe up to half of the observed warming may not be real.  See the photos for yourself.  Some of them are on top of parking lots!

http://www-eaps.mit.edu/faculty/lindzen/...

http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/researc...

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=2221

http://surfacestations.org

* The Deniers - these are guys who deny global warming will be a problem but they have taken money from Exxon/Mobil and many people will not even consider their science.  These are people like Steven Milloy, Patrick Michaels and Fred Singer.  

http://junkscience.com/

I cannot list everyone in the debate, but these are some of the main players.  For more information, you can go to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sci...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warm...

Answer 4

deniers and believers are the sides. Very polarizing topics leads to more cut and dry sides

i deny our impact's current status for various reasons

people who believe in it have also valid reasons

arrogance can also be found on both sides when people make big accusations (i am guilty of this sometimes as well).

dont try to form an opinion here, research it yourself and find your own conclusion because this is not exactly a level headed place for this topic

Answer 5

There are no "sides." global warming and its human origins are proven facts. That some people, for religious or political reasons, don't want to accept the facts is irrelevant. There is no "debate."