This page is somewhat variable, "under construction" as they say. I commented about global warming hysteria back in 2009 and there cited my own competence to comment.
For a general overview of the opposition to global warming, see William Happer, The Truth About Greenhouse Gases, in First Things 214 (2011/July-August), p. 33 ff. He hits many of the main points, but there is a lot more than he can cover in his space limitations. As always with the periodical First Things, there are no citations to backup in the technical literature. Happer is actually a real physicist (at Princeton, in a highly regarded department). Not all in the global-warming business have training that solid (see Bill McKibben, below).
A few things to remember: yes, temperatures may be rising --- a little. But that would be good (see Happer's article above). There were warm periods in the heyday of Greco-Roman civilization and the high middle ages, and cool periods in the Dark Ages and the Little Ice age, all embarrassing to the AGW thesis. Knowledgeable people tell me the principal greenhouse gas is not carbon dioxide but water-vapor, from ocean evaporation. Finding backup will take me a while. The USAF Handbook of Geophysics? It will take both concentration of gas components and their opacities at various frequencies. And a model of radiative transfer between the earth and space.
The general public was never as exercised about global warming as the activists, and so when the chief activists were caught messing with the data, hiding data, corrupting peer review, the public has gone back to sleep. For details, google "Climate Research Unit", "University of East Anglia", or "IPCC".
James Delingpole has followed the controversy over global warming, and covers some of what came out when emails from the Climate Research Unit were leaked in 2009: "Manipulation of evidence ... doubts about whether the world really is heating up ... suppression of evidence ... Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period," as well as plain malice against climate skeptics.
On the other side, we occasionally see tracts like Bill McKibben's recent opinion piece in the Washington Post, "A link between climate change and Joplin tornadoes? Never!" It is all sarcasm and post-hoc-propter-hoc, without a single number, without citation to any technical backup, without the hint of a model that could link tornadoes to global warming. This sort of writing passes for responsible journalism, but one could not pass a remedial critical thinking course with sarcasm in place of actual arguments. He is credited with being a scholar in residence at Middlebury, but there is no evidence that he has any scientific training; he's not in a science department there. He may be a competent scientist, but no evidence of that turns up quickly in google; in particular, no CV, no educational background. Is McKibben capable of numerical solution of partial differential equations, for example? Does he know how fragile such computations are? We don't know.
It is possible to find one's way around in science without having credentials; Lord Monckton is an example. The issue is not whether someone has a faculty position but whether he can do calculations; some without credentials still calculate accurately, some who can calculate don't.
2011-05-28 ff.
Some have joked that environmentalism in general and global warming in particular
are for their enthusiasts a religion,
and this was meant in a pejorative and ironic sense.
But those who know a little of the history of religions will recognize environmentalism and global warming instantly as a revival of the aboriginal religion of nature everywhere: In nature religions, your job is to fit into nature naturallly, disturbing nature as little as possible. Nature religion offers remedies and rituals to restore the balance of nature when it is disturbed. History and historical religions don't work that way, and there are other possible basic life orientations than just toward nature and history.
For some technical backup, consult Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History; or the Myth of the Eternal Return, (Princeton University Press, 1959, 2005), and Merold Westphal, God, Guilt, and Death: An Existential Phenomenology of Religion, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984)
Christopher C. Horner, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming and Environmentalism, Washington: Regnery,2007.
Patrick J. Michaels, ed., Shattered Consensus: The True State of Global Warming, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005.
S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery, Unstoppable Global Warming every 1500 years, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007.
Lomborg Bjorn, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World, Cambridge University Press, 2001. Kevin Shapiro reviewed the book in Commentary 112#4 (2001/November) 60. My recollection is that Lomborg is himself a well-established environmentalist, and he enraged fellow-environmentalists with his skepticism of global warming. Shapiro notes that Julian Simon disprove many environmetalist claims, and then asks, moving to Lomborg's book,
But was Simon mistaken? In 1997, the Danish statistician Bjørn Lomborg, a selfdescribed ``old leftwing Greenpeace member,'' set out to disprove Simon's disproofs and confirm the claims of environmental alarmists. But he failed spectacularly---and, what is much more unusual, in The Skeptical Environmentalist he says so. In 25 chapters supplemented and supported by almost 3,000 footnotes, Lomborg takes a fresh look at the data, using the newest publicly available evidence to examine longterm trends in human welfare and the quality of the environment. What he shows is that not only are things not getting worse, they are getting better.
Bjorn Lomborg, Cool It: The Skeptic Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming, NY: AA Knopf, 2007.