(Oct. 07, 2010) Energy Probe’s Executive Director, Lawrence Solomon, will be heading to Guelph at the end of the month to give a speech on climate change skepticism. But not everyone agrees with him, writes Rob O’Flanagan in the Guelph Mercury.

GUELPH — Human beings may not be contributing to climate change.

Whether you find this statement wildly irresponsible or wildly reassuring, it is what Larry Solomon, a skeptic of climate change science, believes.

Leading climate-change expert Barry Smit of the University of Guelph says he and the vast majority of his kind around the world believe quite the opposite.

“My position is that the science isn’t settled on climate change and that there’s absolutely no reason, based on the science, to fear man-made C02 emissions,” said Solomon, a National Post columnist, executive director of Energy Probe, and author of The Deniers, a book about reputable scientists who question climate-change science. He will speak in Guelph on Oct. 20.

Solomon said a kind of mass hysteria with “quasi-religious” attributes has swirled around the climate-change issue for years. He admits that Energy Probe likely contributed to the hysteria, having accepted climate-change science without question until recently.

Opinion on the issue of global warming is starting to shift, he said, with public opinion polls in countries around the world showing that the “the public has actually swung against the view that humans are responsible for the warming,” he said.

“The public no longer accepts that the warming is caused by their SUVs.”

But Smit, a geography professor and Canada Research Chair in global environmental change, said the connection between greenhouse gases and the earth’s climate is “unequivocal” and “accepted by almost every legitimate scientist.”

“That human activities are changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere, that’s pretty well universally accepted by almost any reasonable scientist,” Smit added. “We’ve got hard measurements of the changes in carbon dioxide concentrations, of methane concentration, of nitrous oxide concentration in the atmosphere. And we know where they came from.”

Just as the scientific community ultimately accepted the earth was round, they accept that human activity has increased greenhouse gases, he said.

As to what the implication of these increased gas levels is on the earth’s climate, Smit said the scientific community is as strong as ever in the view that these changes in the atmosphere over the past two centuries are responsible for the gradual changing of the earth’s climate, including changes in average temperature.

“That doesn’t mean that there are not other forces influencing the dynamics of climate,” he added. “The climate scientists know that were it not for the greenhouse gases, the earth would actually be getting cooler, gradually.”

The notion that the climate science community can’t make up its mind on climate change is untrue, Smit suggested.

“My reading of the climate science community is it is more confident now in the basic science of climate change than it ever was,” Smit asserted. “Evidence for it is even more overwhelming than it ever was.”

Predictions of climate change and its effects have underestimated the speed and magnitude of change, he added. The much more rapid than expected depletion of glaciers and polar ice caps is evidence of faulty predictions about climate-change impacts, as is the rapid migration and spread of the pine beetle.

But Solomon insists there is ever-growing doubt, especially in the past year, over whether temperatures have increased in the past century or so. Questions are now being raised over whether “that basic data has been massaged.”

The raw data is now being re-evaluated in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in an effort to arrive at valid conclusions, he said. This comes in the aftermath of the so-called “Climategate” controversy which alleged misconduct and data manipulation within the climate science community.

“So I think now there is also doubt about whether the temperatures actually have been increasing the way we’ve been led to believe,” Solomon said.

Solomon will conduct a U of G seminar on Oct. 20. Global Warming: The Science is not Settled, is sponsored by the Department of Food, Agricultural and Resource Economics. Glenn Fox, a professor of food, agricultural and resource economics, said debate around the science of global warming has become much more common recently, and Solomon’s thinking on the subject is important and timely.

“I think he’s got an important message,” said Fox, who is on the board of directors of the Energy Probe Research Foundation.

He said there has been a “significant shift” away from a monolithic opinion on global warming. A university environment is a place where vigorous scientific inquiry takes place, and where all sides of an issue can and should be examined.

“There are a number of people on campus who have had various roles and responsibilities in climate change research, and I think that Larry’s message is, there are some ways in which science has been politicized, and that has been to the detriment of science. And we need to understand how this politicization has had its effect.”

Solomon said audiences are receptive to his ideas and those of the skeptical scientists because it is clear they are “not kooks and not people in the pay of Exxon.”

But Smit said skeptics of climate change are often speaking on behalf of members of the fossil fuel industry who don’t want to change, and who protect their immediate interests by undermining the science. A similar tactic was used by the tobacco industry, sowing doubt in the minds of the public and stalling policy action, with disastrous consequences for human health.

Solomon’s lecture will take place on Oct. 20, at 2:30 p.m. in room 124 of the Richards Building on campus.

Rob O’Flanagan, Guelph Mercury, October 7, 2010