Hendrik Tennekes

Atmospheric scientist Dr. Hendrik Tennekes, a scientific pioneer in the development of numerical weather prediction and former director of research at The Netherlands' Royal National Meteorological Institute, and an internationally recognized expert in atmospheric boundary layer processes

List cites a few blog posts

Arguments Condensed:

• Models might be wrong
• Climate modellers are incompetant
• Scientific conspiracy
• Accepts human co2 induced warming

Quotes

• "I am of the opinion that most scientists engaged in the design, development, and tuning of climate models are in fact software engineers. They are unlicensed, hence unqualified to sell their products to society."
• "I agree with IPCC that there is a likely link between fossil fuel consumption and increased temperatures"

Chris Schoneveld

Dutch Geologist Dr. Chris Schoneveld, a retired exploration geophysicist, has become an outspoken skeptic regarding the human influence on climate over the past four years.

List cites a comment to a media article and there's also a blog comment
He has a profile page here: http://www.atheistnexus.org/profile/ChrisSchoneveld
And a long message/letter:

Arguments Condensed

• Climate's changed before
• It's uncertain

Quotes:

• "There has never been a UN-organized conference on climate change where skeptics were invited for the sake of balance to present their case"
• "As long as the causes of the many climate changes throughout the Earth's history are not well understood, one cannot unequivocally separate natural causes from possibly manmade ones."
• "Who are the geologists that the IPCC is relying on? Is the IPCC at all concerned about the frequency and recurrence of ice ages? Who are the astronomers that advise the IPCC on other cause of possible climate change (sun spots or earth’s elliptical orbit, tilt and wobble of its axis) so as to ascertain that we are not just experiencing a normal trend related to interglacial warming or variation in solar radiation?"
  
  

Classifying Arguments

To move towards classifying skeptics I thought to first try and categorize their arguments at a very high level, so looking at maybe half a dozen different groups that all arguments can be put into. A good example of grouping arguments can be seen in the structured heirarchy of Creationist Claims. Those are field based categories though, I want to group the fundamental argument types.

So far I have come up with a preliminary 5 groups:

• Data Based: "I am skeptical because of this simple fact...."
• Ignorance based Arguments: "I am skeptical because we don't know enough"
• Theory Based: "I am skeptical because I know of an equally good/better theory to explain it."
• Political: "I am skeptical because Al Gore flies in a private jet"
• Conspiracy: "I am skeptical because they are in it for the taxes and grants"

I'll update this in future as I think it can be improved, but here is some more detail and explaintions about these categories:

Data Based

• It hasn't warmed since 1998 (literally true, but in context of climate, wrong)
• Human co2 is a tiny % of co2 emissions (literally true but irrelevant)
• Water vapor is the most powerful greenhouse gas (literally true but irrelevant)
• Volcanoes emit more co2 than man (false)

These are simple claims about basic data. It's pretty simple to check whether these are true or not. Usually such claims are at least literally true, but misleading in some way - ie strawmen, or omitting an important fact.

Because these claims are so easy to verify, it is a real red flag when someone who should know better uses them as an argument.

Ignorance based Arguments

• Climate is all chaotic and we don't understand it at all
• Uncertainty mentioned in IPCC reports, some paper, temperature records
• Models are unreliable
• The concept of global temperature is meaningless

Usually made by people who stick to Political Arguments. The result of such arguments is that the arguer doesn't have to get into the science. They might argue that any theory of climate is as good as any other.

Theory based arguments

• It's the Sun
• Imminent global cooling
• The greenhouse effect is a myth
• co2 was higher in the 40s [2]
• (insert personal climate theory)

These arguments go beyond simple claims based on data. These are alternative theories contradicting the mainstream. They have to explain why they don't accept the mainstream theory. This often occurs in three ways:

• This has simply overturned the mainstream theory.
• An Ignorance based Argument: They claim that their theory is no less likely than the mainstream one because so little is known, etc.
• A Conspiracy Argument: For example Ernst Beck who coined the "co2 was higher in the 40s" theory uses a Conspiracy Argument to explain the existance and acceptance of the mainstream theory.

Note that the first and third cases are making positive assertions about how the climate works (or some aspect of it) and therefore they can no longer make Ignorance based Arguments in these areas. For example if they are going to claim "recent warming on earth is caused by the sun" as a fact they then can't turn around later and claim "The concept of global temperature is meaningless" without contradicting themselves.

Political Arguments

• Al Gore's house has a runway of Private Jets
• I am skeptical because environmentalists don't live in mud huts

These arguments have no bearing on the science. I have distain for these arguments. I generally ignore them, but I include them as a group here because often these arguments are made by the same skeptics. As noted above these arguments are often made in conjunction with Ignorance based Arguments.

Conspiracy based arguments

The Journal of Inactivism has an interesting genealogy of climate conspiracy theories which lists the various conspiracies used by skeptics to explain why manmade global warming is such a prominent theory. Highlights include:

• In the 80s we get "Mainstream scientists are soviet stooges", it's a "soviet plot" [1]
• A "doctrine to replace marxism" [1]
• Scientists "artifically sustain debate" (ie "commit fraud") for funding and grants [1]
• Politicians use it to increase taxes [1]
• I've heard Margret Thatcher get blamed for it somewhere

I will probably revisit this list at some point and update it. Some arguments can be seperated out better and I might be missing some categories. Ideas/corrections are welcome.

References
[1] F. Bi. 2008. Towards a genealogy of climate conspiracy theories. Intl. J. Inact., 1:37–42

[2]E. Beck. 2007. 180 years of atmospheric CO2 gas analysis by chemical methods., Energy & Environment, Volume 18 No. 2

Philip Stott

UK Professor Emeritus of Biogeography Philip Stott of the University of London
List cites this EPW blog post

He also has a blog

Arguments Condensed

• climate's changed before
• We know very little about climate
• It hasn't warmed since 1998 (although specifically he says "since at least 2001")

Quote

• "But, finally, we must return to basic science. Climate is the most complex, coupled, non-linear, semi-chaotic system known. The claim by UK MPs that they can manage climate predictably is the ultimate folie de grandeur. In such a system, both doing something (i.e., emitting gases) and not doing something (i.e., not emitting gases) at the margins are equally unpredictable as to outcomes." [ref]
• "Interestingly, the world average surface temperature has now exhibited no ‘global warming’ since at least 2001" [ref]

Notes:

• He argues mainly from politics, only occasionally wading into trying to justify his claims scientifically

Ernst-Georg Beck

German scientist Ernst-Georg Beck, a biologist, authored a February 2007 paper entitled 180 Years of Atmospheric C02 Analysis by Chemical Methods that found
levels of atmospheric CO2 levels were not measured correctly

A paper published to the Journal "Energy and Environment":
http://www.biokurs.de/treibhaus/180CO2_supp.htm

There are also other statements made on the same website, eg:
http://www.biokurs.de/treibhaus/CO2-Dateien/CO2-no-climate-driver.pdf [ref1]
http://www.biokurs.de/treibhaus/CO2-Dateien/7-kern-PIKe.pdf [ref2]

Arguments Condensed

• Atmospheric co2 level was higher in the early 20th century
• Ice core co2 histories are wrong
• Scientific conspiracy
• Human co2 is a tiny % of co2 emissions (2)
• Ocean acidification is of no concern (3)

Notes:

• There's a gold mine of claims on that site, just about every claim under the sun can be found.
• In the PDF above he compares co2 concentrations with temperature of antarctica over 200 years and concludes "there is no connection"
• (2) [ref2] "A reduction of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions by 1% means 26GT/year instead of about 29 GT CO2/year (= 3% of the whole natural CO2 emissions). The 26,7% are still negligible compared to the natural emissions of oceans and biomass."
• (3) [ref2] "A pH-range of sea water of 8,2-7,7 is a normal range and was still measured during the warm period since 1920 and 1930 [4]. A pH higher than 7 is still alkaline."

"analysis" of list so far

About 24 entries have been added. It was decided that 5 of them shouldn't be on the list as they didn't show any convincing skepticism of manmade global warming.

That leaves 19. There are a number of issues with doing any meaningful analysis on this, including:

1. There are only 19
2. The 19 are not a random sample from the list.
3. There are probably gaps where I didn't see an argument used
4. They are represented unequally. Some have whole websites full of arguments, some only a single short letter of arguments.

This is the reason for quotes around "analysis" in the title. What follows is simply an interest/trivia look at an aspect of the entries so far.

The top 5 arguments used by the 19 entries and the breakdown are:

It's the sun (6) Bob Breck, John L. Casey, Art Horn, Dr. Cal Evans, Mike Thompson, Richard Mourdock

water vapor is the most powerful greenhouse gas (6) Bob Breck, Dr. Martin Hertzberg, Dr. Robert H. Essenhigh, Frank Britton, Art Horn, Dr. Cal Evans

CO2 concentration is small (5) Bob Breck, Dr. Martin Hertzberg, Hans Schreuder, Frank Britton, Dr. Cal Evans

It hasn't warmed since 1998 (5) Bob Breck, Dr. Wilson Flood, Allan M.R. MacRae, Bill Steffen, Joseph Conklin

human co2 is a tiny % of co2 emissions (4) Dr. Robert H. Essenhigh, Frank Britton, Art Horn, Mike Thompson

As #3 and #4 points out, the reason many of the same names are present is probably due to unequal representation.

A relevant hypothesis I have held for a long time, not based on the above, is that whatever makes a person susceptible to believing one of the worst arguments (I consider the above to be some of the worst), they will be susceptible to all of them.

ie if a person is not skeptical of the "human co2 is a tiny % of co2 emissions" and readily believes it, then they will very likely also be taken in by the "water vapor is the most powerful greenhouse gas" argument. At least I see little reason why a person would believe one and not the other.

So I suspect to see a pattern like the above where a person using one argument will tend to also be using the other.

Skepticalscience directly covers 4 of the 5 above arguments, with "CO2 concentration is small" covered in related topics. It is interesting that the worst arguments are perhaps the most popular, but perhaps this is explained by the simplicity of the arguments and the relatively few people who look into them in any detail.

So a classification system for skeptics will probably contain a large group consisting of people that believe these type of arguments. There are many other skeptics who would distance themselves from such arguments and so would have to placed in different groups.

Bruce Schwoegler

Atmospheric scientist Bruce Schwoegler, former U.S. Navy meteorologist and Boston broadcast meteorologist, rejected man-made climate fears.

List cites a letter to the list creators.

Arguments condensed

• "significant global warming is a concern"
• "there is a likely relationship between human induced impacts and climate change"
• It's all too complicated!

Quotes:

"But has anyone truly ascertained the scope, depth and outcome in our planetary system which is rife with natural checks and balances? Quantifying them and resultant interactions remains mostly a game of my theory versus yours"

Notes

I added this one for variation. It is a position of 'we don't know enough to conclude anything'. This position is in contradiction of the position of skeptics who claim to know that warming is not due to greenhouse effect enhancement (such as the EPW he is writing to for example...). He also mentions significant global warming as a concern, at odds with skeptics who have the position that warming is beneficial (although this depends on what "significant" is).

trivia: I hit my first duplicate just now. I almost started doing John L. Casey again, fortunately I got deja-vu just in time.

Bob Breck

Chief Meteorologist Bob Breck of WVUE-TV

No link for this one, the list cites a letter to the list creators.
But I found a blogspot blog (join the family) of his:
http://bobbreck.blogspot.com/

Seems to contain more arguments than the letter, so most of the below are from the blog:

Arguments condensed

• Ice age predicted in the 70s
• It's the sun
• It's ocean cycles
• It hasn't warmed since 1998
• Dr James Hansen predicted cooling in the 70s
• They're in it for the money
• CO2 concentration is small (from http://bobbreck.blogspot.com/2008/12/fronts-keep-coming.html)
• Water vapor is the most powerful greenhouse gas

There's probably more..

Dr. Wilson Flood

Dr. Wilson Flood, of the Royal Society of Chemistry and a chemistry education
consultant

Cites this article and this one

Arguments Condensed:

• It hasn't warmed since 1998
• co2 won't double by 2100
• climate sensitivity is 0.18K/wm-2 (roughly calculated by dividing 33C by 150wm-2...I suspect the last figure is calculated by surface radiation minus outgoing radiation)

Quotes:

"Of all the scientific disciplines, chemistry equips us best to grasp the essentials of the global warming debate"

Georgia D. Brown

Geologist Georgia D. Brown, an instructor of Geology & Oceanography at College of
Lake County in Illinois, who co-authored a 1993 peer-reviewed study on the CO2
content in the magma from Kilauea Volcano in Hawaii in the prestigious journal
American Mineralogist

Cites a letter (?!) to a website

"Arguments" Condensed

• I talk to my students about this topic every semester, not just when we are covering glacial geology, but at different points throughout the term. I want them to know that they shouldn't take every alarmist claim at face value. Fear is a means of controlling a population, and since the cold war has ended, the government needed new fuel for its control fire.

yea sorry, but that's all the "argument" we get. A real scrape of the barrel. Disappointing. In fact it's not even clear if she is skeptical of manmade global warming. Read the letter and see for yourself.

Irony

"Anyway, keep up the great work! On my end, from here on out, I intend to make it an assignment for my students to visit your website."

The website in question is iceagenow.com, you know the one titled:

Not by Fire but by Ice
THE NEXT ICE AGE - NOW!
Discover What Killed the Dinosaurs . . . and Why it Could Soon Kill Us

Lets revisit part of Brown's argument:
"I want them to know that they shouldn't take every alarmist claim at face value"

Wow.

Allan M.R. MacRae

Professional Engineer Allan M.R. MacRae of Alberta, Canada, authored a scientific
analysis critical of man-made global warming in 2008.

Cites this article and this article

Arguments Condensed:

• It hasn't warmed since 1998
• rate of co2 rise correlates with temperature on annual timescales, therefore co2 doesn't cause warming

Quotes:

"Since ~1945 when CO2 emissions accelerated, Earth experienced ~22 years of warming, and ~40 years of either cooling or absence of warming"

"In fact, strong evidence exists that disproves the IPCC's scientific position. The attached Excel spreadsheet ("CO2 vs T") shows that variations in atmospheric CO2 concentration lag (occur after) variations in Earth's Surface Temperature by ~9 months (Figures 2, 3 and 4). "

Bill Steffen

Meteorologist Bill Steffen of Grand Rapids, Michigan
List cites his blog:
this entry
and another that no longer exists

Arguments Condensed:

• It hasn't warmed since 1998
• co2 is not the only factor. Volcanic eruptions effect climate.

Notes:

• There's a UAH graph on the page, yet still the 1998 argument gets made

Summary to date

So far about 20 names have been added, only about 3% of the total list. I was distracted in January so only 3 names were added, compared to 17 in December. But I plan on doubling the list this month. This is not an attempt to debunk the 650 list, if that were the motivation I would stop now as there is already now plenty of material elsewhere on the internet for anyone objective to find which questions the list.

I am going to continue, get some more names added and to try and group the skeptics. Some of them share similar positions and arguments, some are quite distinct. Perhaps I will find a decent classification system to group these skeptics and any skeptics in future, including blog comment and forum skeptics (they don't have to be semi-famous).

It would be quite interesting to be able to assign a skeptic to a particular group for example and therefore be able to "stereotype" them by other members of that group.

The current method most people employ is to use a personal name to refer to all skeptics (eg "denier", "inactivist", "contrarian", etc). This is not particularly descriptive or representative of the disperse spread of credibility in different skeptics and I believe categories would capture information that could be exploited in debate (and I am essentially an arguer, so this is what I want)

Dr. Martin Hertzberg

Dr. Martin Hertzberg, a retired Navy meteorologist with a PhD in physical chemistry

Cites this media article this media article

However the article doesn't directly quote Hertzberg much and even contradicts him in one case.

The Lynching of Carbon Dioxide -The Innocent Source of Life by Dr. Martin Hertzbergment (PDF) is a better source of arguments directly from him

Arguments Condensed:

• warming causes co2 rise not the other way round
• co2 is already saturated
• CO2 concentration is small
• water vapor is the most powerful greenhouse gas
• Scientists' conclusions are motivated by money.
• Ice age predicted in the 70s (well he says 60s, but same deal)
• It warmed before 1940 when CO2 was low
• CO2 rise is caused by the oceans
• Volcanos emit more co2
• co2 lifetime in atmosphere is only 5 years

Notes:

• Seems to suffer from a focus on co2 emissions rather than co2 concentrations, ie to think emissions should correlate with warming rather than concentration.
• Confuses atmospheric average lifetime of a co2 molecule with the residence time for a pulse of co2 added:
  "The global warming advocates including the IPCC argue that the CO2 we emit into the atmosphere lasts for centuries....The most authoritative study of the lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere was done by a Norwegian, Professor Tom Segalstad of the University of Oslo. The measured lifetime, based on the studies of some 50 independent researchers is at most about 5 years"

An original argument..

1. human co2 emissions fell 30% from 1929 (1.17 Gt) to 1932 (0.88 Gt).

2. But co2 concentration rose about 1.5ppm in that time.

3. Given 1+2, therefore human co2 emissions aren't causing the rise in co2.

This brilliant argument is described as:

"One of the more dramatic contradictions to the Gore-IPCC hypothesis is one that I came up with myself, and which appealed to Cockburn and to an Australian group of fellow skeptics."

Dr. Christopher L. Castro

note: as far as updates go, lets mark January down as a bad month

Dr. Christopher L. Castro, a Professor of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Arizona

List cites a blog post and a news article
The blog post links through to a series of lectures (some of these are not available..I suspect they will be available nearer the specified date. It would be particularly interesting to see the contents of the global warming ones)

Also there are some presentations here:
http://www.atmo.arizona.edu/~castro/Presentations/

The P-10 contains some interesting info

Arguments Condensed:

• Accepts manmade global warming
• Regional climate modeller
• Global circulation models are inaccurate at regional scale
• Shouldn't be on the list

Notes:

The reason for the "Shouldn't be on the list" tag is there is no indication he doesn't accept GCM results. His arguments concern their ability (or lack of) to be accurate at the regional level.

Quotes:

• "I believe the balance of evidence from the paleoclimate record, recent climate history (particularly since the 1980s), and the anthropogenic attribution GCM experiments (e.g., Meehl et al. type studies) support the conclusion that recent climate change is due, in part, to anthropogenic forcing."

Dr. Robert H. Essenhigh

Dr. Robert H. Essenhigh, a Bailey Professor of Energy Conversion in the department of Mechanical Engineering at Ohio State University, who has published over 45 peer reviewed studies

List cites a freerepublic post that still has a copy of an original news article that is no longer available:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1422147/posts

It starts off badly with "man’s addition to the carbon-dioxide flux in the atmosphere, by fossil-fuel combustion, is essentially irrelevant"

Arguments Condensed:

• Human CO2 is a tiny % of CO2 emissions
• Water vapor is the most powerful greenhouse gas
• The "Arctic Ocean Model" explains warming
• We need the greenhouse effect
• co2 rise is natural
• I am part of a "large minority"

Notes:

• uses the phrase "so-called greenhouse gas". I see this phrase a lot. What does it mean? Are they casting their luck whether co2 is a greenhouse gas? Perhaps they are suggesting the possibility that "greenhouse gases" don't even exist. What is up with this frequently used phrase?
• This author actually puts forward their own explaination for the warming: "And behind that again is the alternative warming concept, most generally known as the Arctic Ocean Model, which is considered by many to be the real driver for the temperature oscillations and has been for the last million years or so.".

Dr. Robert E. Davis

Dr. Robert E. Davis, a Professor at University of Virginia, a former UN
IPCC contributor and past president of the Association of American Geographers,
and past-chair of the American Meteorological Society's Committee on
Biometeorology and Aerobiology

List cites:
http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=051205D

Arguments Condensed:

• Warm records are meaningless because the records are too short
• Can't see global warming in last 150 years of PDO record...
• PDO unreleated to global warming

Notes:

• He says: "The unprecedented great Pacific climate shift of the late 1970s linked to global warming was, in fact, precedented and unrelated to global warming". I guess he's therfore ruling out the PDO as an explaination for the recent (post 70s) warming?

Alan Titchmarch

Horticulturalist Alan Titchmarch, a prominent naturalist who hosts the popular "The Nature of Britain" program on the BBC, received the Royal Horticultural Society’s highest award – the Victoria Medal of Honor – for outstanding services to horticulture.

Links to the following news article:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/10/06/nosplit/bvtvtitchmarsh06.xml

edit: the correct spelling is Titchmarsh I believe.

Arguments condensed:

• Climate's changed before
• Why no warming during the industrial revolution?
• We’ll lose some species, but we’ll gain others.
• Accepts manmade global warming and acting on it.

Notes:

• In the news article he says: "Why didn’t we have global warming during the Industrial Revolution? In those days you couldn’t have seen across the street for all the carbon emissions and the crap coming out of the chimneys."
• Also says: "I’m sure we are contributing to global warming, and we must do all we can to reduce that"