global warming
sheril | January 24, 2009
DeSmogBlog will be putting out a book and it sounds like the publisher is ready for a title. Our co-blogger there, Richard Littlemore is taking suggestions and I encourage Intersection readers to add your ideas to the mix...
Head over to provide feedback on the titles already being considered, vote, rewrite, or submit your own contenders. The three top possibilities win one of the great climate science books from the DSB library.
Here's the list so far*:
Climate of Change
A look into the world of global warming science and it's opposition
Climate of Denial
Climate Science Fiction
Exposing…
nisbetmc | January 22, 2009
Call it a case of extreme optimistic bias: Many climate advocates point to polls that show when the public is asked directly, a majority say they are "concerned" about global warming and favor action. But what's missing from this poll assessment is where global warming sits relative to other political priorities. When you examine this comparison, public support for action turns up as soft, even among Dems and Independents, suggesting that it will be very difficult for Obama to rally the needed public input to pass meaningful legislation through Congress.
One way to assess the strength of…
sheril | January 22, 2009The Antarctic Wilkins Ice Shelf hangs by a thread. Its thinnest point is now reported at 500 metres wide and it could go at any time according to David Vaughan, a glaciologist with the British Antarctic Survey. This will be the tenth shelf lost because of a warmer planet.
Look folks, the 'debate' on climate change is over and we cannot afford to sit idly by while 'observing the effects' (an analogy to Nero comes to mind). In the name of national security, it's past time to move beyond lip service by making plans to adapt and prepare ourselves.
cmooney | January 21, 2009My latest Science Progress column is a response to Seed's interview with the outgoing science adviser. All I can say is wow, Dr. Marburger, you really don't get it, and maybe you never will.
Either way, we Bush administration science critics remain entirely unimpressed with your inability to even properly characterize (much less answer) our arguments. And that wind of change that you might feel around you right now--we're part of it. You're not.
You can read the full column here.
sheril | January 20, 2009
With inauguration day in mind, there is no doubt President Obama has made excellent choices for his science and energy team, but as I wrote over at DeSmog, do not declare victory quite yet... There are also signs that the administration could falter when it comes to dealing with global warming in the strongest possible fashion. In particular, other high level picks suggest there may be serious impending battles in the White House over climate policy. Here is an excerpt:
While global warming may be the world's greatest threat, the climate in Washington, DC is probably tepid at best…
tlambert | January 20, 2009Eos has just published the results of a survey of 3146 Earth Scientists conducted by Peter Doran and Maggie Kendall Zimmerman. The graph below shows the results for this question:
Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?
The 97% of active climatologists is 75 out of the 77 in the survey. Doran and Zimmermann say:
While respondents' names are kept private, the authors noted that the
survey included participants with well-documented dissenting opinions
on global warming theory.
I'm guessing that Lindzen and Spencer are the two…
tlambert | January 19, 2009Today's Australian has a piece by Bob Carter predicting global cooling
Global atmospheric temperature reached a peak in 1998, has not warmed since 1995 and, has been cooling since 2002. Some people, still under the thrall of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change's disproved projections of warming, seem surprised by this cooling trend, even to the point of denying it. But why?
Well, look at this graph from my previous post. When you want to talk about climate trends, you need to use at a bare minimum ten years and not cherry pick your starting point.
Carter continues:
There are two…
cmooney | January 17, 2009You can watch here, and here's the embedded video:
Topics discussed:
Chris's optimism vs. Carl's skepticism on Obama's science policy
Weighing the costs of environmental regulation
Stop the presses! Did NASA just discover life on Mars?
The Sanjay Gupta controversy
Carl predicts artificial life in 2009
The future for science writing
Again, the whole thing is here.
tlambert | January 16, 2009When discussing Jon Jenkin's use of a ridiculous sixth-degree poynomial fit to temperatures to argue that they were steeply trending down, I suggested that local regression (loess) was a much better method for showing trends. I was going to get around to plotting one, but Tamino has saved me the trouble by producing a loess smooth on GISS temperatures.
See Tamino's post for more graphs, including one showing how Dennis Avery misrepresented temperature trends even worse than Jenkins did.
cmooney | January 15, 2009I have a new piece on Slate exploring precisely this question. Here's the core of it:
If the war on science is over, we're now entering the postwar phase of reconstruction--the scientific equivalent of nation-building. The Bush science controversies were just one manifestation of a deeper and long-standing gulf between the science community and the broader American public, one with roots stretching back to our indigenous tradition of anti-intellectualism (as so famously described by historian Richard Hofstadter in his classic work from 1963) and Yankee distrust of expertise and authority. So…
tlambert | January 15, 2009Today's Australian included a double feature in its war on science. And they were both news stories, not opinion pieces. First up is John Stapleton. Last month Stapleton wrote a story arguing that winter was evidence against global warming. So how does Stapleton write a story about a heat wave here in Australia. Well, it's evidence against global warming:
It's a scorcher, but 70-year record stands
Much of inland Australia sweltered as towns from Ivanhoe and Pooncarie in far-western NSW to Onslow in the Pilbara, Kerang in Victoria and Marree in South Australia hit 45C yesterday.
But even…
tlambert | January 12, 2009John Quiggin suggests some reasons why the anti-science position on climate change has become an orthodoxy on the Right:
There are many explanations, perhaps so many that the outcome was overdetermined - powerful economic interests such as ExxonMobil, the hubris associated with victories in economic policy and in the Cold War, tribal dislike of environmentalists which translated easily to scientists as a group, and the immunisation to unwelcome evidence associated with the construction of the rightwing intellectual apparatus of thinktanks, talk-radio, Fox News, blogs and so on.
And…
cmooney | January 8, 2009Eric Berger blogs that leading climate researchers are increasingly turning towards the idea that there's going to have to be some sort of backup plan, in case our societies don't (or can't) dramatically cut emissions. This is basically what I said in my Wired feature last year: Geoengineering is starting to win over serious climate scientists because 1) political inaction keeps making the problem worse; 2) new scientific findings keep suggesting that the problem is worse anyway; 3) one geoengineering solution, stratospheric sulfate infusion, is definitely going to work and can be done right…
tlambert | January 7, 2009The Telegraph is hanging on to its lead over the Australian. After publishing a story by Richard Alleyne that misrepresented the work of Ian Fairchild, they have not corrected the story and not published Fairchild's letter of correction. But that's not all. Ben Goldacre reports:
Worse than that, Prof Fairchild has tried to post comments on the article which flatly misrepresents his own research, twice, but his comments have been rejected by the Telegraph's online comment moderators, while 23 other comments have appeared.
It's quite hard to understand both the intellectual and moral reasoning…
tlambert | January 7, 2009Ian Musgrave has written the post I was going to write on Jon Jenkins' article in the Australian, so I just want to emphasize that fitting a degree six (yes, degree six) to temperature data does not produce a meaningful trend line in any way shape or form. Go read.
Note that if the editors at the Australian had bothered to read their own paper just three days earlier they would have known that the Jenkins' claims about the Oregon petition and global cooling were rubbish.
News Limited blogger Grame Redfearn also pointed out the enormous holes in Jenkins' arguments and talked to Australia's…
tlambert | January 6, 2009Keith Windschuttle has just published a hoax article full of pseudo-science in Quadrant. And it wasn't this article by Tim Curtin which contains such gems as the claim that Arrhenius borrowed his formulation of the enhanced greenhouse effect from Malthus (he didn't), that the water vapour from burning fossil fuels is a more important greenhouse gas that CO2 (ignoring the fact that the CO2 stays in the atmosphere 10,000 times as long) and attributing all of the increase in food production in the last thirty years to the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere (I swear that I am not making this up…
tlambert | January 2, 2009The Australian has fallen well behind in the race for the 2009 ward for most consistently wrong media outlet. They've published a piece by Mike Steketee that debunks common denialist arguments. He points out the difference between long and short term trends, that the Oregon petition is very light on climatologists and that climate models have got it right:
Neville Nicholls, of Monash University's School of Geography and Environmental Science, has been studying climate change and climate variability for 35 years and his advice has been drawn on by the IPCC. He says it is basic laboratory…
cmooney | December 31, 2008My last Science Progress column of the year answers the critics of John Holdren, who strike me as being pretty off base. In particular, I explain that Holdren is not some ideologue who wants to use climate policies to wreck the economy; that an ancient bet he and Paul Ehrlich made against Julian Simon (and lost) isn't some big disqualifier; that the term "denier," which Holdren has used, is no big deal, and in fact, is a time-honored part of the English language; and that despite what some say, Holdren obviously knows the difference between science and policy.
Anyways, you can read the full…
tlambert | December 29, 2008Jeremy Jacquot has written a three part debunking of the claims in Joane Nova's "Skeptic's Handbook": Part 1: increasing CO2 won't make much difference, Part 2: warming has stopped and ice cores show that CO2 increases do not cause warming, and Part 3: the hot spot is missing. If all this seems familiar, it's because Nova's handbook is just a rehash of David Evans' wrong-headed column in the Australian. (Nova is Evan's partner and shares the same beliefs about global warming.)
The constant repetition of such discredited arguments has James Hrynyshyn wondering if there is any point:
For the…
tlambert | December 28, 2008You have to think that global warming denialist Matt Drudge must be getting desperate when he touts a column by Christopher "White asbestos is harmless" Booker arguing that winter has disproved man-made global warming:
First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse.…