NEW YORK- Willie Soon, a Harvard University astrophysicist and geophysicist with a string of peer-reviewed papers and books to his credit is “embarrassed and puzzled” by the shallow science in reports that claim that civilization faces a climate crisis of unprecedented proportion.

Soon was one of about 700 scientists, economists and policy analysts in attendance at the Heartland Institute’s second International Conference Climate Change held in early March in New York City.

“We have a system [for peer reviewing scientific literature] that is truly, truly appalling,” Soon told conference attendees in a presentation in which he attacked the veracity of global warming claims made by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Soon is not alone in his assertion that the funding and peer-review processes have been hijacked by IPCC scientists and administrators. Former New Hampshire governor, John Sununu, who was George H.W. Bush’s chief of staff and holds a PhD in mechanical engineering, also lamented what he called the “restrictive distribution of research funds” through federal agencies variously engaged in the global warming debate. Sununu and Soon agreed that global warming alarmists from the political and scientific arenas have, in Sununu’s words, “taken control of who gets funding, who gets published, who gets acclaimed and who gets demonized.”

Soon and Sununu’s sentiments were echoed by the retired senior atmospheric scientist with the National Aeronautic and Space Administration. John Theon accused Dr. James Hansen, who heads NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies of “embarrassing NASA” with his increasingly strident assertions of apocalyptic destruction caused by global warming. Hansen has even suggested that scientists who doubt the existence or destructive powers of global warming should be subjected to Nuremberg-style trials.

Press reports to the contrary, many more scientists – climatologists, astrophysicists and geophysicists – disagree with global warming alarmists than agree with them. The latest to join the chorus of doubters is Dr. David Evans, a rocket scientist and consultant to the Australian government’s greenhouse office from 1999 to 2005.

Dr. Evans built Australia’s land use change and forestry carbon accounting compliance model, called FullCAM. It is designed to measure carbon flows in plants, mulch, debris, soil and agricultural products using several inputs, including climate data, plant physiology and satellite data. But now, in a by-lined essay posted on the Internet by The Australian, Australia’s leading electronic newspaper, Dr. Evans writes that “since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming.”

In his March 22 posting in The Australian, Dr. Evans wrote that the all important greenhouse gas signature – a smoking gun of sorts that would prove greenhouse gases are the cause of the earth’s warming trend – has never been found.

“The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hot spot about 10 kilometers up in the atmosphere over the tropics,” Dr. Evans explained. “We have been measuring the atmosphere for decades using weather balloons with thermometers that radio back the temperature as the balloon ascends through the atmosphere. They show no hot spot.”

There being no hot spot, Dr. Evans has concluded that carbon emissions are not a significant cause of global warming. But global warming alarmists have been undeterred by his conclusion; arguing instead that the thermometers are inaccurate or that wind sheer in the atmosphere may have fouled the readings. “If you believe that you’d believe anything,” Evans retorted.

“There is,” Evans wrote, “no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming. None. There is plenty of evidence that global warming has occurred, and theory suggests that carbon emissions should raise temperatures, though by how much is hotly disputed. But there are no observations by anyone that implicate carbon emissions as a significant cause of recent global warming.”

Even more startling than Dr. Evans’ absolution for carbon is his claim that satellite data indicate that the earth entered a cooling period in 2001. “Satellite data is the only temperature data e can trust,” he wrote, “but it only goes back to 1979.” Dr. Evans distrusts land-based readings because they are distorted by what he calls the “urban heat island,” large areas where temperatures are pushed upward by heat generated by cities and industries that generate heat.

Evans also argues that new ice cores taken from the polar ice caps reveal that during the last six global warming cycles, which span a half million years, temperature rises occurred on average 800 years before the accompanying rise in atmospheric carbon which “says something important about which was cause and which was effect.”

What may be most interesting about new and undisputed ice core data is that former Vice President, Al Gore, chose to ignore it completely in his 2005 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, in which he suggested that ice core data was his main reason for believing that carbon emissions cause global warming. “In any other political context our cynical and experience press corps would surely have called this dishonest and widely questioned the politician’s assertion,” Dr. Evans wrote.

“Until now the global warming debate has merely been an academic matter of little interest,” he observed. “Now that it matters, we should debate the causes of global warming. So far that debate has jut consisted of a simple sleight of hand: show evidence of global warming, and while the audience is stunned at the implications, simply assert that it is due to carbon emissions. In the minds of the audience, the evidence of global warming has occurred becomes conflated with an alleged cause, and the audience hasn’t noticed that the cause was merely asserted, not proved. If there really was any evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming, don’t you think we would have heard about it by now?”

Dr. Ed Berry, a retired atmospheric physicist now living in northwest Montana who attended the Heartland conference, said in a subsequent Daily Inter Lake interview that he and hundreds of his colleagues now believe that the global warming hypothesis is “dead, scientifically.” He told Inter Lake reporter, Jim Mann, that the computer models used to support global warming are notoriously inaccurate because they cannot account for the wide and ever-changing array of greenhouse gases, much less fluctuations in radiation, solar energy, ocean currents and the influences of cloud cover.

Dr. Berry is deeply concerned about the political turn the global warming debate has taken, particularly in the cap and trade bureaucracy that lawmakers are attempting to devise, which he says is little more than a tax on energy production and consumption.

“Clearly, Al Gore is good at what he does,” Berry said of the former Vice President’s influence over the current direction of the entire global warming debate. “Now it’s up to scientists with different views to make them known.”