31000 scientists sign Oregon GW Skeptic Petition

By Dennis Avery —— Bio and Archives May 24, 2008

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In 1998, Dr. Arthur Robinson, Director of the Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine, posted his first Global Warming skeptic petition, on the Institute’s website (oism.org). It quickly attracted the signatures of more than 17,000 Americans who held college degrees in science. Widely known as the Oregon Petition, it became a counter-weight for the “all scientists agree” mantra of the man-man Global Warming crowd.

Recently, with America being dragged toward Kyoto-style energy limits by cadres of alarmists, Robinson mailed a new copy of the petition to his original signers, asking them to recruit additional qualified scientists. Now his list includes nearly 32,000 American man-made warming skeptics with science qualifications. More than 9,000 hold scientific PhDs. Almost 32,000 thousand skeptics happens to be twelve times as many scientists as the 2,500 scientific reviewers claimed by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to form a scientific consensus. Last week Robinson held a press meeting at the National Press Club in DC, followed by a luncheon on Capital Hill, to which members of Congress and their aides were invited. Not surprisingly, attendance was low. Robinson’s petition states a truth: “There is no convincing evidence that human release of CO2, methane or other greenhouse gases is causing or will cause, in the foreseeable future, catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.” What do these approx 32,000 scientists believe has caused the earth’s warming since 1850 if it isn’t CO2? He points to the sun. Robinson notes that over the past 150 years the sunspot index has predicted the Earth’s temperature changes—with 79 percent accuracy—about ten years before they happen. The sunspots actually predicted the 2007 global temperature decline; the index turned down in 2000. The computer models didn’t foresee it. The correlation between Earth’s temperatures and CO2 is only at the “accidental” level—22 percent and declining sharply over the past decade as the temperatures have refused to increase with the CO2 levels. Robinson says the lack of correlation between CO2 levels and past Earth temperatures proves that CO2 is not dominating our climate. The Oregon chemist warns that “no other major scientific problem has ever been tackled the way the UN has approached global warming.” The UN hosted a big meeting of scientists, he says, and then a small group of “authors” summarized the discussions into a global action plan. But the UN has never produced any evidence that humans are warming our climate. The UN panel says CO2 became the culprit “by the process of elimination” but such a process is neither scientific nor admissible in a court of law. The forecasts of desperate temperature increases all come from computer climate models, notes Robinson. But the computer models keep forecasting more warming than we get. In fact, 70 percent of the earth’s recent warming occurred before 1940, while virtually all of humanity’s greenhouse gas emission has occurred since that date. The Earth’s net warming since 1940 is a tiny 0.2 degree C. “If CO2 isn’t causing our tiny warming, then banning all our energy will simply make people poor and helpless, says Robinson, “The cold spells and heat waves nature will always throw at us, will then indeed, threaten human lives on the planet.”