Hundreds of the world's top scientists, including a distinguished professor of the Wayne State University School of Medicine, have published a letter stating that man definitely has contributed to global warming and calling for an end to the persecution of scientists who support that argument.
Morris Goodman, Ph.D., distinguished professor of Anatomy, is one of the 255 signers of the letter, published May 6 in Science, the magazine of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The letter is rapidly gaining attention from worldwide media.
Like Dr. Goodman, those who signed the letter are all members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, but stressed the missive does not represent the views of the academy.
"We are deeply disturbed by the recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular," the letter reads. "All citizens should understand some basic scientific facts. There is always some uncertainty associated with scientific conclusions; science never absolutely proves anything. When someone says that society should wait until scientists are absolutely certain before taking any action, it is the same as saying society should never take action. For a problem as potentially catastrophic as climate change, taking no action poses a dangerous risk for our planet."
Like all human beings, the letter continues, scientists make mistakes. However, the scientific process, the writers point out, is designed to find and correct those errors. That process is "inherently adversarial -- scientists build reputations and gain recognition not only for supporting conventional wisdom, but even more so for demonstrating that the scientific consensus is wrong and that there is a better explanation. That's what Galileo, Pasteur, Darwin and Einstein did."
Some scientific conclusions have gained the status of "well-established" theory and are now accepted as fact, the scientists write. Among these are evidence that Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, the Big Bang theory of the development of the universe and Darwin's theory of evolution. Climate change, or global warming, now falls into this category, they write.
The letter authors state that there is "compelling, comprehensive and consistent" objective evidence that humans are changing the planet's climate in ways that threaten societies and ecosystems. Many of the recent assaults on climate science and scientists by "change deniers," they write, are driven by special interests or dogma, not by scientific efforts to provide alternate theories that credibly supports evidence.
While the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and other scientific assessments of climate change have made some mistakes, the authors claim, nothing in recent events changes the "fundamental conclusions" that the planet is warming due to increased concentrations of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. The increased concentration of these gases over the last century is due to human practices, especially deforestation and reliance upon fossil fuels.
"The combination of these complex climate changes threatens coastal communities and cities, our food and water supplies, marine and freshwater ecosystems, forests, high mountain environments, and far more. Much more can be, and has been, said by the world's scientific societies, national academies, and individuals, but these conclusions should be enough to indicate why scientists are concerned about what future generations will face from business-as-usual practices. We urge our policy-makers and the public to move forward immediately to address the causes of climate change, including the unrestrained burning of fossil fuels.
"We also call for an end to McCarthy-like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them. Society has two choices: We can ignore the science and hide our heads in the sand and hope we are lucky, or we can act in the public interest to reduce the threat of global climate change quickly and substantively."
To read the complete letter, visit http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/328/5979/689.