Yohe Refutes Climate Change Skeptics

David PesciFebruary 1, 20122min
The Economics Professor takes some climate change skeptics and their OpEd to task

In The New York TimesDot Earth” blog, Gary Yohe, Huffington Foundation Professor of Economics and Environmental Studies, gets the last word with some climate change skeptics who published an OpEd in The Wall Street Journal recently. The OpEd, signed by 16 researchers from various backgrounds, asserted, among other things that a “lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause.”

Yohe, a senior member of the IPCC, not only published a letter co-signed by 35 other climate researchers in The Wall Street Journal refuting these claims, he is quoted at length in the Dot Earth blog, saying in part: “Proposing delay (of measures to address climate change) for decades is an irresponsible option that is offered by those who (1) really do not understand climate science and, (2) perhaps more importantly, really completely misrepresent the economics of the problem.”