At a press conference on May 19, Arthur Robinson, Ph.D., announced the release of the names of 32,000 scientists who have signed a strongly worded petition dissenting from the alarmist assertions of Al Gore and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Fears of catastrophic human-caused global warming, requiring draconian energy rationing, are the basis for policies supported by all three leading Presidential candidates: Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain.

Al Gore claims that “the debate is over,” and that there are only a “few” remaining “skeptics.”

“In Ph.D. scientist signers alone, the project already includes 15-times more scientists than are seriously involved in the United Nations IPCC project. The very large number of petition signers demonstrates that, if there is a consensus among American scientists, it is in opposition to the human-caused global warming hypothesis rather than in favor of it,” states Robinson. Signers include more than 9,000 Ph.Ds.

Most signatures were obtained by mailing to lists of university professors and a compendium that constitutes a “Who’s Who” of American scientists.

“How many scientists does it take to establish that a consensus does not exist on global warming?” asks Lawrence Solomon (Financial Post 5/17/08). He reviews the history of previous petitions, including the Heidelberg Appeal, which ultimately obtained 4,000 signatures, including 72 Nobel Prize winners. In numbers, the Oregon Petition Project vastly exceeds all others, having gathered some 17,800 signatures in 2001—“all the more astounding because of the unequivocal stand these scientists took.”

“Not only did they dispute that there was convincing evidence of harm from carbon dioxide emissions, they asserted that Kyoto itself would harm the global environment because ‘increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the earth.’”

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