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Another Side
Tue Oct 11, 2005
Listen in RealAudio 
Hi, I’m Bryan Yeaton with The Weather Notebook’s weekly Climate Change series.
I am under the impression that there is climate change taking place. The question is, how much of that can be attributed to anthropogenic warming and anthropogenic sources?
Dr. David Legates is the Delaware State Climatologist, and one of a number of scientists who feels we may be getting the Global Warming story wrong.
In particular, if you look at the warming, it goes back to about 1850. Well, most of the anthropogenic sources didn’t start until mid 1900’s, about 1940’s or so. So, there’s a lot of warming that took place before that, which cannot be attributed to the anthropogenic, which makes if difficult to say, well how much of the warming do we see now, is maybe a demise of the little ice age, how much is solar variability? How much is anthropogenic? How much is natural fluctuation?
I’m still convinced that solar variability is the biggest driving factor of climate and we can explain quite a bit of climate variability particularly in the last hundred years with sort of increase in the output of the sun.
Legates’ views are not the mainstream, and he has received backlash because of that.
What we find is a lot of people purport to talk for the IPCC and talk for a consensus. And yet we’ve had people go out and say that under anthropogenically warm water we have conclusive evidence that we will have more hurricanes, more intense hurricanes, whatever. Of course, now we are into a more intense cycle. If this is a cycle were to go 30 years on - 30’s years off, intensity then it may not be anthropogenically driven at all.
Our Climate Change series is supported by Environmental Defense. Regular support for The Weather Notebook comes from Subaru of America.
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