Challenging the climate change deniers

I was sent last week "Climate chaos? Don't believe it" from The Telegraph. In this article the author disputes the 'facts' of the impending apocalypse of climate change and accuses the UN and its scientists of distorting the truth. The article raises a few useful points but it is generally provocative and just plain wrong. Some folks like Nigel Lawson and this guy don't want to accept climate change.

This author, Christopher Monckton, was infact a policy advisor to Thatcher. His arguments are based substantially on information from JunkScience.com. Junk Science is a front organisation for Steve Milloy, long time tobacco, drug and oil industry lobbyist. For a rebuttal see: realclimate.org

Just because Monckton has a bunch of numbers to back up his hogwash doesn't make it true... the only numbers that count are the peer reviewed published papers within the climate science community. New IPCC report due early 2007 is set to be quite alarming... and that's the official science.

Monbiot and Gore have both been quite clear recently that the doubters are funded by big oil (and tobacco). These doubters are provided useful source data who want to argue against climate change for whatever reason (profits before everything else is the usual cause). See also: Greenpeace.

It is, however true to say that some 'green groups' have been guilty of expressing unjustified certainty about the science of climate change, but as the Royal Society has pointed out, the overwhelming misinformation has come from lobbyists questioning the need to cut CO2 emissions. 2,000 scientists from 100 countries who make up the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change all agree and their latest report due out next year makes very grim reading. It is worth noting that not one of the 928 climate change-related articles published in peer-reviewed journals during the past ten years has doubted the cause of global warming, yet more than half of the published articles in the popular press have done just that.

If there are still doubters it is also worth noting that Zac Goldsmith, deputy chair of the Conservative party's quality of life policy group who says: "Climate change presents us with an uncomplicated choice. If we are wrong about the dangers, these initiatives come with no downside. But if we are right and we fail to act, the consequences don't bear thinking about."

And remember there are more evolution deniers than there are climate change deniers...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/religion/Story/0,,1946370,00.html