Studies: Global warming, climate science far from settled

In the face of repeated assertions that the science on global warming is settled, ongoing studies and developments in the area leave some insisting that claim remains true, while others say the science is anything but.

According to Gallups annual environmental poll, the percentage of Americans saying they worry a great deal or a fair amount about global warming has fallen from a high of 66 percent in 2008 to a stable 51 percent in 2011. Furthermore, 43 percent of Americans say the seriousness of global warming is exaggerated in the news.

A breakdown of global warming poll data shows that the issue remains mainly ideological, with 72 percent of Democrats saying they worry about global warming compared to 51 percent of Independents and 31 percent of Republicans.

As the global warming debate becomes more politicized in individual attitudes, state governments, Congress and even within the United Nations, the possibility of the science becoming truly settled appears unlikely.

In a study published July 25 in the science journal Remote Sensing, William Braswell and Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and a former senior scientist for climate studies at NASAs Marshall Space Flight Center, suggest the Earths atmosphere is more efficient at releasing energy into space than models used to forecast climate change have been programmed to believe.

The result, Spencer says, is that climate forecasts are warming substantially faster than the atmosphere.

At the peak, satellites show energy being lost while climate models show energy still being gained, Spencer said.

In short, Forbes reports, while global warming theory states that carbon dioxide emissions should be trapping a certain amount of heat in the earths atmosphere and preventing it from escaping into space, real-world measurements show far less heat is being trapped than computer models predict.

However, after the study was released, Stephanie Pappas, writing for LiveScience, said no scientist contacted by the organization found it credible.

This is a very bad paper and is demonstrably wrong, Richard Somerville, a scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego, told The Associated Press. It is getting a lot of attention only because of noise in the blogosphere.

Writing at Business Insider, James Delingpole says the one question climate change believers should be made to answer is this: Whatever happened to global warming?