Paper: responses to climate change skeptics

Carr, M., Anderson, r., Brash, K. 2010. Climate change: addressing the major skeptic arguments. DB Climate Change Advisors. Deutsche Bank Group. 

Columbia University just released a comprehensive review of the major claims held by climate change skeptics and their responses. They outline three main categories of challenges:
1. The Earth is not warming.
2. The Earth may be warming, but human activity is not responsible for it.
3. The Earth may be warming, human activity may be responsible, but there is no need to stop it.
The authors give each category careful consideration and provide evidence to refute each one.

Some corrections of commonly held "facts" on the other side of the fence (climate change acceptors) are presented. For example, the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency has published that 55% of the country is below sea-level. They have recently issued a correction that in fact only 20% of the country is below sea-level and 55% of the country is at risk of flooding. (p21) Factual errors such as this one gives fodder for skeptics to challenge climate science. The authors maintain that despite mistakes, the bottom line (climate change) still holds true.

They conclude that scientific debate cannot be held in public media because journalists are not trained to interpret the findings and the public experiences whiplash from the clash of ideas. Instead, science should be debated within the expert community and translated to the public.

I have a copy of this paper if anyone is interested.
Melissa