The Timaru Herald, New Zealand, 19 May, 2007 -- Climate change will be considered a joke in five years time, meteorologist Augie Auer told the annual meeting of Mid Canterbury Federated Farmers in Ashburton this week.  "The Greens are really going to go after you because you put out 49 per cent of the country's emissions. Does anybody ask 49 per cent of what? Does anybody know how small that number is?

 Reid A. Bryson holds the 30th PhD in Meteorology granted in the history of American education.   He has authored five books and more than 230 other publications and was  identified by the British Institute of Geographers as the most frequently cited climatologist in the world. (ED: a  pithy Bryson quote about global warming follows)   "All this argument (if) the temperature (is) going up or not, it’s absurd,  Of course it’s going up.  It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the air."

"Only an insignificant fraction of scientists deny the global warming crisis. The time for debate is over. The science is settled."

So said Al Gore ... in 1992. Amazingly, he made his claims despite much evidence of their falsity. A Gallup poll at the time reported that 53% of scientists actively involved in global climate research did not believe global warming had occurred; 30% weren't sure; and only 17% believed global warming had begun. Even a Greenpeace poll showed 47% of climatologists didn't think a runaway greenhouse effect was imminent; only 36% thought it possible and a mere 13% thought it probable.

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Somewhere along the way, I stopped believing that a scientific consensus exists on climate change. Certainly there is no consensus at the very top echelons of scientists -- the ranks from which I have been drawing my subjects -- and certainly there is no consensus among astrophysicists and other solar scientists, several of whom I have profiled. If anything, the majority view among these subsets of the scientific community may run in the opposite direction.

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