Consensus" on Man-Made Global Warming shattered

According to the  Physics & Society, the journal of the American Physical Society, the debate on climate change ( man-made or natural, warming vs cooling ) is long from over. It has published a story "Climate Sensitivity Revisited," a debate.

Physics & Society says: “There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution.  Since the correctness or fallacy of that conclusion has immense implications for public policy and for the future of the biosphere, we thought it appropriate to present a debate within the pages of P&S.”

"Global mean surface temperature has not risen since 1998 and may have fallen since late 2001.  The present analysis suggests that the failure of the IPCC's models to predict this and many other climatic phenomena arises from defects in its evaluation of the three factors whose product is climate sensitivity: radiative forcing delta F; the no-feedbacks climate sensitivity parameter k; and the feedback multiplier f.

The American Physical Society itself has issued a statement: It stands by its belief that human-emitted CO2 is "changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the earth's climate" and notes that Physics & Society is not peer-reviewed.

The journal then offers both the Monckton paper and a response by David Hafemeister and Peter Schwartz, of the California Polytechnic Institute.  P&S also issued an open invitation to “further contributions from the physics community.”

The warming debate is far from over, but an actual debate looks likely.  Reputations and huge bundles of cash have been bet on man-made warming, including billions in government funding for climate research.  The UN’s reputation—and perhaps its future—are on the line.

see Article and the original science page from the American Physical Society.

Robert H. Essenhigh of Ohio State, supports a  different view.  In a Ohio State Press Release called Global Warming is Natural and that it may end within 20 Years he cites a 1995 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a panel formed by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme in 1988 to assess the risk of human-induced climate change.

In the report, the IPCC wrote that some 90 billion tons of carbon as carbon dioxide annually circulate between the earth's ocean and the atmosphere, and another 60 billion tons exchange between the vegetation and the atmosphere.

Compared to man-made sources' emission of about 5 to 6 billion tons per year, the natural sources would then account for more than 95 percent of all atmospheric carbon dioxide, Essenhigh said.

Some scientists believe that the human contribution to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, however small, is of a critical amount that could nonetheless upset Earth's environmental balance (the tipping point) .  But Essenhigh feels that, mathematically, that hypothesis hasn't been adequately substantiated.

See post Al Gore: Planetary Triage?  Or Essenhigh: False Alarm? and Wild Card?  Global Warming ?  Or Global Cooling?  Ahead