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7am News
Despite
some evidence that the world may be getting warmer, many
scientists and the Bush administration still doubt the overall
existence of so-called global warming.
Experts
do generally agree that the world, in the past century,
has grown 0.5 to 1 degree warmer on average – a phenomenon
they say is responsible for eroding beaches and melting
ice caps.
But
mostly the debate centers on whether human activity is responsible
for the phenomenon or whether the Earth is naturally warming
after billions of years.
Some
of the holdouts on estimates of worst-case scenarios in
the future are very notable, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported
Tuesday.
They
include the hurricane forecaster William M. Gray, an atmospheric
scientist at Colorado State University; Richard S. Lindzen,
a highly regarded professor of meteorology at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, and John Christy, a University
of Alabama researcher, the paper said.
Gray
says that the recent upswing in hurricanes has absolutely
nothing to do with rising global temperatures. Global warming
could no more explain the increase in storm frequency, he
says, than it could explain the quiet hurricane periods
of the 1970s and '80s, the paper said.
Lindzen
questions whether a consensus has really formed around the
notion of global warming. He has likened the greenhouse
issue to the eugenics movement of the 1920s, which held
that certain mental defects could be explained by a gene
disorder, said the paper.
Lindzen
has argued that the eugenics movement, which led to a restrictive
immigration law, was fed by a false perception of scientific
consensus and that a similarly false perception of consensus
is helping shape the public attitude toward greenhouse warming,
the Inquirer said.
Surface
readings have shown significant warming, especially in the
last 10 years, but satellite data provide a somewhat different
picture.
Using
microwave profiles of the bottom five miles of the atmosphere,
Christy and NASA's Roy Spencer have compiled a record showing
only a tiny increase in global temperature since 1979, the
paper said.
Warming
in the Northern Hemisphere has been counterbalanced by cooling
in the Southern Hemisphere, the researchers say.
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