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Two Altercation readers came to my defense today about my claim that human-influenced climate change is an undisputed fact, supported by the consensus, if not the unanimity, of the scientific literature:

Name: Kramer Hometown: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Dear Dr. Alterman: I'm not exactly sure what Brad's background is, or what the literature he's describing is, but, within the peer reviewed scientific literature, the fact of human induced climate change is taken as beyond dispute. A recent study in the journal Science makes this point pretty strongly. If you look in the Science Citation Index (a relatively authoritative index of the peer reviewed literature) between 1993 and 2003 using the keywords 'climate change' you get 928 results. Of these results there is not a single paper (right, that's 0/928) which argues that changes in climate over the last ~150 years are not influenced by human activity. There are, of course, some papers that take no position (say a paper that studies climate change in the Cenozoic). But, it's worth emphasizing again, everyone who published in the peer reviewed literature in this period who had an opinion about whether humans have caused 'global warming' believed they had. I lay no particular claim to have done this work myself (although I was a coauthor on one of those papers - I'm currently a PhD student in an Earth Sciences department) but just wanted to write in to emphasize that, if anything is settled in the Earth Sciences, this is it. There is (and to give him credit perhaps it is this to which Brad is referring) significant disagreement about the magnitude of the human influence on climate and its specifics (e.g. will Buffalo get more or less snow over the next 100 years than it has over the last) but there just isn't over the first question: have humans influenced the climate over the last ~150 years. Suggesting otherwise is incorrect.

Name: Rick
Hometown: Iowa
Re: Brad's global warming.
Brad submits that he's read the oil-company sponsored studies, the religious kook studies, even the environmentalist (studies? diatribes?). Perhaps he should pick up an atmospheric chemistry text and a thermodynamics text. It's really quite simple. The more carbon is in the atmosphere, the more solar heat (energy) is retained in the atmosphere (the greenhouse effect, accepted by everyone other than the flat earth crowd). Simplistically speaking, weather and climate is the earth's way of dissipating/evening-out this energy (converting it to mechanical energy, for example). No one knows exactly how global climate change will manifest itself, but human impact on greenhouse gases is accepted and documented. The arguments occurring among those seriously involved in studying climate change have to do with the what/where/when and is it too late? The "does it" or "did we" argument is already settled. Sooner or later, it will become common knowledge that "global warming" is an unfortunate misnomer. Predicting tomorrow's high temperature will always be nearly impossible, but chaotic weather patterns (including altered ocean currents, ice-ages, drought, massive hurricanes) that will devastate, perhaps extinguish, Earth's species should be self-evident even to the most well read among us.