ESA Position » Letters from the President:
ESA's President submitted this letter to the Wall
Street Journal in response to an April 12, 2006 op-ed
by Richard Lindzen
Re: Lindzen, Richard “Climate of Fear”, April 12, 2006
Climate science – put facts before rhetoric.
Human alteration of the global climate presents important and difficult challenges for the future. As Professor Lindzen admits, this is the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community that studies climate change and its impacts. Could this consensus be wrong? A massive body of careful, documented, repeatable evaluation of observations and experiments says that it is not. There is no doubt that the atmospheric concentration of the greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, has increased more than 30% since the beginning of the industrial revolution. There is no doubt that the source of this carbon dioxide is the burning of fossil fuels. There is no doubt that, globally, six of the ten warmest years in the instrumental record were in the last decade. There is no doubt that many lines of evidence point to the role of increased greenhouse gases in recent global warming. And there is no doubt that the most sophisticated climate models project more warming in the future, especially if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to rise.
In the face of this evidence, Professor Lindzen's argument that his colleagues in the scientific community are simply money-grubbing alarmists is ridiculous. The scientific consensus on climate change is strong because more and more and more evidence supports its core elements. Almost every climate scientist is testing the consensus against the strongest evidence available, because success in science is based on observing and analyzing the real world, not on argumentative posturing.
Lindzen asserts that scientists forget about objectivity in order to increase chances of funding. Yet most climate science is federally funded, casting doubt on Lindzen's assertion. Why would scientists pursue research on topics that are politically contentious for the Administration, the party controlling both houses of Congress, and many of the nation's largest corporations? The only reasonable answer is integrity and a dedication to finding the truth.
Nancy B. Grimm
President, Ecological Society of America
