Page 1929 - Week 07 - Thursday, 31 May 1990
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Let us have a little look at what scientists around the world say about Dr James Hansen and his 99 per cent confidence. Dr Fred Wood, senior associate in the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, stated, "This is an extreme position not held by most. Most of the scientists that I have talked to, including many mainstream scientists who do their research in detection" - not just collecting details from a book, but out there collecting data - "do not agree with Hansen".
Dr Patrick Michaels, professor of environmental science at the University of Virginia and a member of the executive board of the American Association of State Climatologists, has rejected the claim that there is a global warming resulting from man-made emissions of greenhouse gases.
In January 1990, just this year, National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration scientists, Karl, Baldwin, Burgin and others, reported on a study of temperature measurements at 1,219 stations in the US taken between 1900 and 1984. They reported that they could find no long-term upward trend in temperatures.
In Australia, Dr Edward Bryant, senior lecturer in the department of geography at Wollongong University, stated that there was no reliable evidence of global heating. He said:
There is certainly no evidence that established a warming trend ... the greenhouse scenario cannot address the fact that our present temperatures are only returning to the values of the 13th century when there was little large-scale, global industrialisation and certainly no greenhouse gas build-up.
Indeed, the current proponents of the greenhouse effect cannot explain the decrease in global temperatures from 1940 for some four decades, using their theory. Conveniently, that is left aside.
Dr Jeremy Marais, of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography of La Jolla, California, who is acknowledged as the "dean" of climatologists in the USA, stated:
I think we can write off what is sometimes claimed, that the greenhouse effect is here now. I don't believe that it is here at all yet.
It should be said that indeed the earth has a greenhouse effect. If it did not, we would be boiled to a crisp. But the question is whether we have a warming trend. The scientific evidence shows that we do not. Dr Kevin Trenberth of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Colorado was reported as saying that the warming trend had been exaggerated. I could go on and on highlighting the difficulties and the lack of science in this area, but
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