This week’s top news story has been hiding in plain sight on the Internet for two years.
Even so, a September, 2010 report from Deutsche Bank Group entitled “Climate Change: Addressing the Major Skeptic Arguments,” is big news. In Earth Preservers’ opinion, the report has the potential to be a game-changer because it has the clearest, simplest explanation for why man-made climate change is real.
“(This report’s) clear conclusion is that the primary claims of the skeptics do not undermine the assertion that human-made climate change is already happening and is a serious long term threat.
“To us,” report continues, “the most persuasive argument in support of climate change is that the basic laws of physics dictate that increasing carbon dioxide levels in the earth’s atmosphere produce warming. (This will be the cause irrespective of other climate events.) The only way that warming can be mitigated by natural resources is if there are countervailing ‘feedback mechanisms’, such as cooling from increased cloud cover caused by the changing climate.
“A key finding of the current research is that there has far been no evidence of such countervailing factors. In fact, most observed and anticipated feedback mechanisms are actually working to amplify the warming process, not cool it.”
The report goes on to answer each argument skeptics make in the often rancorous public debate in the US over whether climate change is real, among them:
* Global average temperatures have not risen since 1998
* Climate models are defective and therefore cannot provide reliable projections of future climate trends.
What makes the Deutsche Bank report compelling reading isn’t so much that the information is new. Rather, it’s the way Mark Fulton, Global Head of Climate Change Investment Research, and his team at DB Climate Change Advisors, have presented the information, the source of which is the Columbia Climate Center at the Earth Institute, Columbia University. Each of the skeptics’ arguments is answered simply and directly.