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Global luke-warming: Is the threat of climate change overstated?

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(Read caption) Residents walk across the frozen Songhua River in front of smoke stacks at Jiamusi, in China's northeast Heilongjiang province. There isn’t just a linear relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature, Watts says, and climate is tremendously complex with hundreds of interactive variables and feedbacks.

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We couldn’t pin down global warming, exactly, so now it’s re-labelled as climate change, which is an incredibly vague loaded term that no-one fully understands. The difficulty of pinning down this “wicked problem” has produced more uncertainty than ever and rendered the subject the purview of politics that has polarized the public and turned the issue into something reminiscent of the dark ages and conjuring up of weather-focused demons.

Amid these dark ages, the voice of former TV meteorologist and meteorological instrumentation specialist Anthony Watts has become unusually controversial. The knee-jerk reaction of a polarized public has been to place him in one of two climate change camps, and to categorize him as a “denier”. But Watts insists his latent climate change scepticism is pragmatic and based on his experience as a meteorologist and a long process of connecting the scientific dots. His message, he says, is misunderstood, and he best describes himself as “lukewarm” on the issue. He believes that climate change is happening, but that there’s no need for panic.

Image Fracking. Tight oil. Do you know your energy vocabulary?
 

Anthony is also the publisher of the most visited website on climate science in the world, www.wattsupwiththat.com 

 

In an exclusive interview with Oilprice.com, Watts discusses:

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