Letter to Climate Skeptics

Thanks to David Brin for his insightful article on global warming skeptics and deniers in SKEPTIC Vol. 15, No. 4, and for his excellent reply to critics in SKEPTIC Vol. 16, No. 1. I was saddened but not surprised by the three letters you published from deniers of anthropogenic global warming. These letters were so filled with misconceptions and false arguments that it is hard to know where to begin to reply. Brin's reminder that 99% of climate scientists recognize the reality of global warming should be sufficient rebuttal, but here are three more relevant points.

(1) The majority of criticisms were aimed at climate modeling, which is indeed a complex and difficult problem. Models in the absence of data would not be compelling. The prediction that increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide would cause global warming goes back a century to Svante Arrhenius, and was more clearly shown by the NASA GISS climate models in the 1970s. However, the problem was not generally recognized until the temperature measurements (data) began to reveal a sharp upward trend. The climate models fit the data very well, but even in the absence of models the increasing temperatures are obvious and unprecedented....