My position on human induced climate change (or, "global warming" as it has come to be known) has always been clear. First, we must not panic nor induce panic in others. Panic is not a constructive reaction (anyone remember the "global cooling" scare of the 80s? What happened to that?). Second, we must be open to the fact that there is much we don't know about the earth's climate and what makes it "tick". Just today, I saw a report that too many trees growing in the tundra areas may be bad for the climate, something about decreasing the reflective character of the ice and increasing the effects of solar radiation. But wait a minute, I thought that part of the carbon dioxide problem was not having enough trees? The point is we still don't know many things about this planet we live on and it seems every day we learn something new that turns upside down what we thought we knew before. But we do know that earth's climate is dynamic, that warming and cooling trends have happened before and will certainly happen again. Whether or not man contributes to that is still very much in question.

So it's my position that before we come to a conclusion and take drastic action one way or another, we must first get the facts. Which is why this one particular article interests me. This mentions a number of prominent scientists - from a French socialist to an astrophysicist to a renowned meteorologist - who have all evaluated and re-evaluated the available data and come to the conclusion that there is no reason to panic, and that the role of man in the earth's climate is not as big as many believe.

Geophysicist and socialist Dr Claude Allegre says: "the cause of climate change is unknown" and that "the ecology of helpless protesting has become a very lucrative business for some people!" Just 20 years ago, Allegre wrote this: "By burning fossil fuels, man enhanced the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which has raised the global mean temperature by half a degree in the last century." It would appear that Dr Allegre did not give in to panic, but instead chose to continue evaluating the data at hand, coming to a much different conclusion.

Geologist Bruno Wiskel once set out to build a “Kyoto house” in honor of the UN sanctioned Kyoto Protocol. Wiskel reversed his scientific views completely and became such a strong skeptic, that he recently wrote a book titled “The Emperor's New Climate: Debunking the Myth of Global Warming.” A November 15, 2006 Edmonton Sun article explains Wiskel’s conversion while building his “Kyoto house”: “Instead, he said he realized global warming theory was full of holes and ‘red flags,’ and became convinced that humans are not responsible for rising temperatures.”

Astrophysicist Dr Nr Shaviv: "Like many others, I was personally sure that CO2 is the bad culprit in the story of global warming. But after carefully digging into the evidence, I realized that things are far more complicated than the story sold to us by many climate scientists or the stories regurgitated by the media. In fact, there is much more than meets the eye,”

Australian gov't Mathematician/Engineer Dr David Evans: “I devoted six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian government to estimate carbon emissions from land use change and forestry. When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty conclusive, but since then new evidence has weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause. I am now skeptical,"

Climate researcher Dr Tad Murty: “I stated with a firm belief about global warming, until I started working on it myself,”

These are just a few. There are many more mentioned in the article. I salute these scientists for keeping an open mind and being willing to acknowledge what the evidence shows. Undoubtedly they will come under great scrutiny from the mainstream science world. So what they're saying takes courage. I'm open to the notion that man is causing global warming. I just want to see proof of that before I go endorsing things like Kyoto, things that would absolutely cripple our economy and put lots of people out of work and in a lower income bracket. To me, that's too much to risk on a simple theory that's "full of holes and red flags". I hope that others would adopt a similar way of thinking, and I certainly hope that one day we will discover the proof that will lay this debate to rest.