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The global warming controversy concerns the public debate over whether global warming is occurring, how much has occurred in modern times, what has caused it, what its effects will be, whether any action can or should be taken to curb it, and if so what that action should be. In the scientific literature, there is a strong consensus that global surface temperatures have increased in recent decades and that the trend is caused by human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases. No scientific body of national or international standing disagrees with this view, though a few organizations with members in extractive industries hold non-committal positions, and some have attempted to convince the public that climate change is not happening, or if the climate is changing it is not because of human influence, attempting to sow doubt in the scientific consensus.
Svante August Arrhenius was a Swedish scientist. Originally a physicist, but often referred to as a chemist, Arrhenius was one of the founders of the science of physical chemistry. He received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1903, becoming the first Swedish Nobel laureate. In 1905, he became director of the Nobel Institute, where he remained until his death.
The carbon cycle is the biogeochemical cycle by which carbon is exchanged among the biosphere, pedosphere, geosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere of the Earth. Carbon is the main component of biological compounds as well as a major component of many minerals such as limestone. Along with the nitrogen cycle and the water cycle, the carbon cycle comprises a sequence of events that are key to make Earth capable of sustaining life. It describes the movement of carbon as it is recycled and reused throughout the biosphere, as well as long-term processes of carbon sequestration to and release from carbon sinks. Carbon sinks in the land and the ocean each currently take up about one-quarter of anthropogenic carbon emissions each year.
Numerical climate models use quantitative methods to simulate the interactions of the important drivers of climate, including atmosphere, oceans, land surface and ice. They are used for a variety of purposes from study of the dynamics of the climate system to projections of future climate. Climate models may also be qualitative models and also narratives, largely descriptive, of possible futures.
Richard Siegmund Lindzen is an American atmospheric physicist known for his work in the dynamics of the middle atmosphere, atmospheric tides, and ozone photochemistry. He has published more than 200 scientific papers and books. From 1983 until his retirement in 2013, he was Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a lead author of Chapter 7, "Physical Climate Processes and Feedbacks," of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Third Assessment Report on climate change. He has disputed the scientific consensus on climate change and criticizes what he has called "climate alarmism."
James Edward Hansen is an American adjunct professor directing the Program on Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He is best known for his research in climatology, his 1988 Congressional testimony on climate change that helped raise broad awareness of global warming, and his advocacy of action to avoid dangerous climate change. In recent years he has become a climate activist to mitigate the effects of global warming, on a few occasions leading to his arrest.
Raymond T. Pierrehumbert is the Halley Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford. Previously, he was Louis Block Professor in Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago. He was a lead author on the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC and a co-author of the National Research Council report on abrupt climate change.
Ian Rutherford Plimer is an Australian geologist, professor emeritus of Earth Sciences at the University of Melbourne, previously a professor of mining geology at the University of Adelaide, and the former director of multiple mineral exploration and mining companies. His career has focused largely on the famous Broken Hill ore deposit—a large zinc-lead-silver mine in Australia and has published four first-authored peer-reviewed articles and co-authored eight articles on topics in mining and mineral exploration. He is also one of the co-editors of 2005 edition of Encyclopedia of Geology. He has been a critic of creationism, and has given several media interviews and written six books where he denies the existence of anthropogenic causes of climate change.
Mark Diesendorf is an Australian academic and environmentalist, known for his work in sustainable development and renewable energy. He currently teaches environmental studies at the University of New South Wales, Australia. He was formerly professor of environmental science and founding director of the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology, Sydney and before that a principal research scientist with CSIRO, where he was involved in early research on integrating wind power into electricity grids. His most recent book is Sustainable Energy Solutions for Climate Change.
Twisted: The Distorted Mathematics of Greenhouse Denial is a 2007 book by Ian G. Enting, who is the Professorial Research Fellow in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematics and Statistics of Complex Systems (MASCOS) based at the University of Melbourne. The book analyses the arguments of climate change deniers and the use and presentation of statistics. Enting contends there are contradictions in their various arguments. The author also presents calculations of the actual emission levels that would be required to stabilise CO2 concentrations. This is an update of calculations that he contributed to the pre-Kyoto IPCC report on Radiative Forcing of Climate.
Connor Court Publishing is an Australian publishing company based in Brisbane, Queensland. The company, founded in September 2005 by Anthony Cappello, publishes all sorts of commercial books – including many biographies, books on politics and in particular – climate change denial, culture and education.
The carbonate–silicate geochemical cycle, also known as the inorganic carbon cycle, describes the long-term transformation of silicate rocks to carbonate rocks by weathering and sedimentation, and the transformation of carbonate rocks back into silicate rocks by metamorphism and volcanism. Carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere during burial of weathered minerals and returned to the atmosphere through volcanism. On million-year time scales, the carbonate-silicate cycle is a key factor in controlling Earth's climate because it regulates carbon dioxide levels and therefore global temperature.
Heaven and Earth: Global Warming – The Missing Science is a popular science book published in 2009 and written by Australian geologist, professor of mining geology at Adelaide University, and mining company director Ian Plimer. It disputes the scientific consensus on climate change, including the view that global warming is "very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (man-made) greenhouse gas concentrations" and asserts that the debate is being driven by what the author regards as irrational and unscientific elements.
The history of the scientific discovery of climate change began in the early 19th century when ice ages and other natural changes in paleoclimate were first suspected and the natural greenhouse effect was first identified. In the late 19th century, scientists first argued that human emissions of greenhouse gases could change Earth's energy balance and climate. Many other theories of climate change were advanced, involving forces from volcanism to solar variation. In the 1960s, the evidence for the warming effect of carbon dioxide gas became increasingly convincing. Some scientists also pointed out that human activities that generated atmospheric aerosols could have cooling effects as well.
Berrien Moore III is the former director of the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space at the University of New Hampshire and the founding director of Climate Central. In June 2010, he accepted a set of linked positions at the University of Oklahoma: Vice President, Weather & Climate Programs, Director, National Weather Center, and Dean, College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences. He holds the Chesapeake Energy Corporation Chair in Climate Studies. Moore was a coordinating lead author of the final chapter of the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an organisation that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Among his other honors are the 2007 Dryden Lectureship in Research from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal. Moore holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Virginia.
Climate change feedbacks are important in the understanding of global warming because feedback processes amplify or diminish the effect of each climate forcing, and so play an important part in determining the climate sensitivity and future climate state. Feedback in general is the process in which changing one quantity changes a second quantity, and the change in the second quantity in turn changes the first. Positive feedback amplifies the change in the first quantity while negative feedback reduces it.
Lorraine Lisiecki is an American paleoclimatologist. She is a professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She has proposed a new analysis of the 100,000-year problem in the Milankovitch theory of climate change. She also created the analytical software behind the LR04, a "standard representation of the climate history of the last five million years".
The soil carbon feedback concerns the releases of carbon from soils in response to global warming. This response under climate change is a positive climate feedback. There is approximately two to three times more carbon in global soils than the Earth's atmosphere, which makes understanding this feedback crucial to understand future climate change. An increased rate of soil respiration is the main cause of this feedback, where measurements imply that 4 °C of warming increases annual soil respiration by up to 37%.
Philippe Ciais is a researcher of the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l'Environnement (LSCE), the climate change research unit of the Institut Pierre Simon Laplace (IPSL). He is a physicist working on the global carbon cycle of planet Earth, climate change, ecology and geosciences.
