{Corruption has appeared throughout the land and sea by [reason of] what the hands of people have earned so He may let them taste part of [the consequence of] what they have done that perhaps they will return [to righteousness]}. (Surat Ar-Rum 30:41).
The international scientific community agrees that Planet Earth has a continuously-changing climate and that our globe has passed by several and different climatic ages throughout its 4.54 billion years.
The major scientific institutions in the world also have a firm belief in the existence of evidenced indicators which prove there is a current climate change taking place on Planet Earth.
Some scientists agree that there is a kind of climate change yet it’s a cooling one and not a “Global Warming”, while others reject the climate change theory as a whole.
The scientific consensus is that the global average surface temperature has risen over the last century. This scientific consensus on climate change was summarized in the 2001 Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The main conclusions on global warming were as follows:
- The global average surface temperature has risen 0.6 ± 0.2 °C since the late 19th century, and 0.17 °C per decade in the last 30 years.
- There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities, in particular emissions of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane.
- If greenhouse gas emissions continue the warming will also continue, with temperatures projected to increase by 1.4 °C to 5.8 °C between 1990 and 2100.
- Accompanying this temperature increase will be increases in some types of extreme weather and a projected sea level rise. The balance of impacts of global warming becomes significantly negative at larger values of warming.
These findings are recognized by the national science academies of all the major industrialized nations.
Even though, there is a number of scientists and specialists who disagree with this understanding of global warming as summarized by the IPCC and endorsed by other scientific bodies.
The scientists who rejected the publication of the IPCC Third Assessment Report oppose and disagree with one or more of the report’s main conclusions.
A group of the scientists who reject the climate change theory believe that the observed warming is more likely to be attributable to natural causes than to human activities.
One of the scientists who believe in this is Habibullo Ismailovich Abdussamatov; the well-known Uzbek astrophysicist and the supervisor of the Astrometria Project of the Russian section of the International Space Station and the head of Space Research Laboratory at the Saint Petersburg-based Pulkovo Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Another group of professional climate change skeptics express that it isn’t possible to project global climate accurately enough to justify the ranges projected for temperature and sea-level rise over the next century.
They may not conclude specifically that the current IPCC projections are either too high or too low, but that the projections are likely to be inaccurate due to inadequacies of current global climate modeling.
One of the scientists who adhere to this category is the American atmospheric physicist professor Richard Siegmund Lindzen who is the guest of Al Jazeera English’s program “Head to Head“, enjoy the episode: