
Wall Street Journal article questions decades of scientific evidence demonstrating elevated atmospheric-CO2 causes global warming
Claim:
We do not know if CO2 is the cause of global warming
Reviews of content from
Claim:
We do not know if CO2 is the cause of global warming
Human-caused climate change is already accelerating Greenland’s melting and is predicted to continue to accelerate it in the future. In addition to Greenland, most glaciers around the planet are also melting at an accelerating pace. This melt, in addition to the expansion of the ocean as it warms, contributes to elevate sea level at an accelerating rate, threatening coastal cities around the globe.
Scientists who reviewed the article found that it builds on a collection of misleading and false claims. For instance, Koonin states that “Greenland’s ice sheet isn’t shrinking any more rapidly today than it was eighty years ago”. Contrary to the claim, scientific studies using airborne and satellite altimetry observations show considerable thinning has occurred along the margin of the Greenland ice sheet since 2003.
“The article’s claim that the U.S. is near herd immunity rests on two numbers: 1) the detection of infections by testing (claimed to be 10 – 25 percent) and 2) the infection fatality rate (claimed to be 0.23 percent). Using the same number of deaths as the author indicates that 0.15%/0.6% = 25% of the U.S. population has been infected, rather than two-thirds as the author claims. Thus, the author’s argument that 55 – 66 percent of the U.S. population has already been infected and has immunity is not supported by available data.”
Claim:
Sea-level rise does not seem to depend on ocean temperature, and certainly not on CO2
“The article has almost nothing to do with the modern state of sea-level science. The author tries to call into question that global warming causes sea-level rise, and does so by cherry-picking a short segment of data from 1915-1945, a time when data quality is poor and the warming signal small—a bizarre approach that could never pass scientific peer review and is apparently aimed at misleading a lay audience.”
“This is a very simplistic, almost naive op-ed on climate change impacts. Some assertions such as the one about CO2 being good for plants demonstrates that the authors do not know or understand how increasing CO2 is good or bad for plants, they are just repeating something they heard.”
Claim:
no one really knows if last year (2016) was a (global temperature) record
Claim:
the warming is not nearly as great as the climate change computer models have predicted.
“The article speaks about scientific questions under an “opinion” banner—as if questions about the role of CO2 in the Earth system could be a matter of opinions. For the major final conclusion “With more CO2 in the atmosphere, the challenge [to feed additional 2.5 billion people] can and will be met.”, there is absolutely no scientific credibility, nor support in the scientific literature—it is pure fantasy.”