Originally Posted by GGDub
Roody, please read my posts more carefully, I said policy makers are spinning it, not the scientists. I fully agree that on both sides there have been gross distortion of facts, and yes up until about a year ago that was grossly distorted on the denying side.
Here's a citation of a paper which argues there is no global warming which appeared in a peer-reviewed journal, note the date, it was in the last five years, well before Gore did his movie.
de Freitas, C.R., 2002: Are observed changes in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere really dangerous? Bulletin of Canadian Petroleum Geology, 50 (2), 297-327.
I know what you are going to point out, that its in the Bulletin of Canadian Petroleum Geology, but it is a peer-reviewed journal and he is not funded by energy companies. I imagine it showed up in this journal because no climate science journal wanted to touch it. He argued that one couldn't measure CO2 fluxes from natural sources well enough to be able to say if the current concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is any higher than in the past 1000 years. He made some really good points about stuff I've already mentioned (measurement error, both direct and indirect) but in the end, I believe he failed to address key facts like our ability to detect anthropogenic CO2 through C14 and O18 isotopes plus failing to take into account that while we're emmitting a lot of CO2, we're also destroying vast tracts of forest which would help to fix it.
Again be careful saying "there is no scientific evidence to refute global warming", there is evidence out there, however, its far outweighed by the evidence for global warming.
The name of the Danish scientist is Henrik Svensmark. They found that cosmic rays from the sun react with gases in the lower atmosphere to form the cloud condensation nuclei. At the same time they had found that a changes in the sun's magnetic field had reduced the amount of cosmic rays reaching Earth in this past century, which could be leading to less cloud cover and hence more heat reaching the ground, causing the Earth to warm. They never attempted to refute anthropogenic global warming but simply wanted to add to our understanding of what governs the Earth's climate.