Why Scientists Disagree about Global Warming

Rather than rely exclusively on United Nation’s IPCC for scientific advice, policymakers should seek out advice from independent, nongovernment organizations and scientists who are free of financial and political conflicts of interest.

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In 2017, The Heartland Institute is mailing some 200,000 copies of the second edition of Why Scientists Disagree about Global Warming to K-12 and college science teachers across America. Read the cover letter of that mailing here.

On April 3, 2017, Heartland Institute President Joseph Bast issued a statement in response to a news release issued by Democratic Reps. Raul Grijalva of Arizona, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson of Texas, and Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia which encouraged teachers to throw away the materials with out looking at them.

On April 4, 2017, Heartland Institute President Joseph Bast wrote a follow-up response to the liberal Democrats, which applies to many erroneous criticisms of this mailing.

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The most important fact about climate science, often overlooked, is that scientists disagree about the environmental impacts of the combustion of fossil fuels on the global climate. There is no survey or study showing “consensus” on the most important scientific issues, despite frequent claims by advocates to the contrary.

Scientists disagree about the causes and consequences of climate for several reasons. Climate is an interdisciplinary subject requiring insights from many fields. Very few scholars have mastery of more than one or two of these disciplines. Fundamental uncertainties arise from insufficient observational evidence, disagreements over how to interpret data, and how to set the parameters of models. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), created to find and disseminate research finding a human impact on global climate, is not a credible source. It is agenda-driven, a political rather than scientific body, and some allege it is corrupt. Finally, climate scientists, like all humans, can be biased. Origins of bias include careerism, grant-seeking, political views, and confirmation bias.

Probably the only “consensus” among climate scientists is that human activities can have an effect on local climate and that the sum of such local effects could hypothetically rise to the level of an observable global signal. The key questions to be answered, however, are whether the human global signal is large enough to be measured and if it is, does it represent, or is it likely to become, a dangerous change outside the range of natural variability? On these questions, an energetic scientific debate is taking place on the pages of peer-reviewed science journals.

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