Despite sceptics' noise, scientific consensus is growing on global warming, page 1

The noise has been loudest on the internet, where websites give voice to people who believe scientists are suppressing evidence to protect their careers.

Unfortunately for the sceptics, and for everyone else, the evidence for human-induced climate change is stronger than ever. Scientists the Herald spoke to were candid in their assessment that there was little room for doubt that global warming is happening and that the only changes in the past few months have been political changes.

"It looks as though the population believes climate change is serious and there seems to be momentum behind the issue, and there are some people who don't like that," says Chris Mitchell, head of the CSIRO's Climate, Weather and Ocean Prediction group. "There are still plenty of creationists around, and there are people who believe tobacco is not linked to serious health effects, and so there are still people who choose to ignore or doubt the amount of evidence for climate change."

Andy Pitman, an editor of the prestigious international Journal Of Climate, says there are good reasons why global warming sceptics cannot get a run in peer-reviewed scientific literature. "We would kill, literally kill, for a good paper that proved the science on global warming was wrong," Pitman says. "Then I could retire and accept my chair at Harvard. Unfortunately, that's not going to happen, and there's vast amounts of evidence why."

Pitman, who is also a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (ABC) and director of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of NSW, says the reasons are simple: "In essence, the models we use to predict climate have been proven right." In the past decade, he says, refinements in computer simulations have allowed scientists to accurately predict climate in four dimensions: time, latitude, longitude and depth of the atmosphere.

"You feed in the greenhouse gas concentrations that we've seen, and the models predict extremely well the climate variations we've seen. If you don't do that, you get nothing. The mathematical probability of it being a chance mistake, or the wrong numbers, is astronomical."

The claim, often cited by sceptics, that atmospheric temperature did not appear to match the levels predicted by climate models was revised by a reassessment of the data last year. The research, partly carried out in Australia, ended up reinforcing the accuracy of existing climate models. Claims that solar activity may be causing recent global warming, reinforced in State Parliament by the Treasurer, Michael Costa, have been comprehensively demolished in peer-reviewed journals.

As weak spots in climate modelling have been eliminated one by one, commentators who do not believe carbon emissions lead to global warming have been retreating to smaller and smaller islands of resistance, says Pitman.

This is also the view of the Australian Academy of Science, established in 1954 along the lines of Britain's Royal Society. Its president, Kurt Lambeck, told the Herald: "If there's been any change at all recently, it's that the observational evidence suggests we're moving away from the lower limits of the ABC projections towards more serious scenarios. I've certainly seen no evidence of scientists holding back on their views or suppressing findings or anything approaching that."

Concerned that debate about climate change is being muddied by slanted media reporting of the issue, the academy recently established a committee to try to present the clearest information to the public. "I think there is healthy scepticism and then there's unhealthy scepticism," Lambeck says. "What you do see is people who will claim that simply because they have a PhD in engineering, that they are an expert on climate modelling."

But labelling people "climate dangerous isn't helpful either, Lambeck says. "The other side of the coin is the danger that people who want to discuss the legitimate scientific issues in public becoming less if they are going to be called dangers. We do need to keep giving scientists the freedom to [go] back and forth on these issues and apply their scepticism."

The CSIRO's Mitchell says any remaining doubt among Australian researchers of climate change would have surfaced in peer-reviewed literature. "The fact is that a lot of the people working at the coalface of climate change research spend more time concerned they are underestimating some of the issues rather than exaggerating them."
ARCTIC MELTDOWN SPECIAL REPORT MONDAY

THE Arctic sea ice is shrinking at an alarming rate, with some scientists now predicting summer ice might disappear within 10 or 15 years. No one knows exactly what to expect, with fears of some kind of "tipping point", and scientists are scrambling to assess the effect on wildlife and global weather patterns.

But the retreat of the ice will also open up shipping routes and unlock what are believed to be vast reserves of oil, gas and coal - the very fossil fuels, ironically, which contribute to global warming. The five Arctic powers - Canada, Russia, the US, Norway and Denmark - are now in a "Cold Rush" to chart the continental shelf and argue in the United Nations for rights over millions of square kilometres of the shelves beneath the Arctic Ocean.

The Herald's Environment Editor, Marian Wilkinson, has just returned from a trip to the Arctic on a Canadian icebreaker. Her special reports will appear in Monday's newspaper and on ABC1's Four Corners program on Monday night at 8.30.
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the climate change sceptics are being exposed for the fraud they commit by denying that Global warming is man made, particularly american made/western made