You most probably have heard of them once or twice before. They appear here and there, suddenly out of nowhere. They are loud, they are convincing and they are very persistent in their messaging - Climate skeptics!
A recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, found that only 57 percent of Americans believe there is strong scientific evidence for global warming, down from 77 percent in 2006.
It would appear that climate skeptics did a great job in confusing the public about the real issues at stake.
Some climate skeptics will go as far as to say that there is no such thing as “global warming”, that we don’t need to change and we are all overreacting because the Earth is actually “cooling.”
The Associated Press wanted to clear up the confusion in a recent article titled “AP IMPACT: Statisticians reject global cooling” By Seth Borenstein. In this article, AP asked several independent statisticians to look at a set of data and see if they could find any trends. They did not disclose what the data was. Unsurprisingly the experts found no true temperature declines over time. (Read full article here)
"To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous," said Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution at Stanford.
Ben Santer, a climate scientist at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Lab, called the "global cooling" efforts "a concerted strategy to obfuscate and generate confusion in the minds of the public and policymakers" ahead of international climate talks in December in Copenhagen.
Now it is more important than ever, with the climate summit in Copenhagen coming up, to be well-informed about the real implications these “confusions” about Climate Change can have for us and for future generations.
