'Consensus' on Climate Change Is 'Fake,' Scientists Say

A team of scientists has sent a letter to all U.S. senators warning that a claim there is "consensus" in the scientific community on the climate change issue is false.

The letter dated Oct. 29 reads in part: "You have recently received a letter from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), purporting to convey a 'consensus' of the scientific community that immediate and drastic action is needed to avert a climatic catastrophe. . .

"The claim of consensus is fake, designed to stampede you into actions that will cripple our economy, and which you will regret for many years. There is no consensus, and even if there were, consensus is not the test of scientific validity. Theories that disagree with the facts are wrong, consensus or no."

The five signees of the letter include professors from Princeton University, the University of Virginia and the University of California, Santa Barbara.

The letter refers to an earlier open letter sent to Congress by those five signees and others declaring: "The sky is not falling. The earth has been cooling for 10 years, without help. The present cooling was NOT predicted by the alarmists' computer models, and has come as an embarrassment to them. . .

"We are flooded with claims that the evidence is clear, that the debate is closed, that we must act immediately, etc., but in fact there is no such evidence. It doesn't exist."

The Oct. 29 letter also notes that the American Physical Society, an organization of physicists, did not sign the AAAS letter and states the society is "at this moment reviewing its stance on so-called global warming, having received a petition from its membership to do so. That petition was signed by 160 distinguished members and fellows of the society, including one Nobelist and 12 members of the National Academies. Indeed a score of the signers are Members and Fellows of the AAAS, none of whom were consulted before the AAAS letter to you."

The petition reads in part: "Studies of a variety of natural processes, including ocean cycles and solar variability, indicate that they can account for variations in the Earth's climate on the time scale of decades and centuries. Current climate models appear insufficiently reliable to properly account for natural and anthropogenic contributions to past climate change, much less project future climate.

"The APS supports an objective scientific effort to understand the effects of all processes — natural and human — on the Earth's climate."

The 160 signees of the petition range alphabetically from Harold M. Agnew, former White House science councilor and former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, to Martin V. Zombeck, a physicist formerly with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and include Ivar Giaever, who shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1973.