Reporting on global warming in the media is far too often of the "he said/she said" type that just leaves the impression with the reader that is controversial and there is no way for the reader to work out what is really happening. So I should point to this article in the Wall Street Journal which does a good job of informing the reader about why scientists believe that people are largely responsible for the current global warming.
My only quibble is this bit:
Earth has warmed 1.4° Fahrenheit over the past 100 years. Skeptics concede that.
Most skeptics concede that, but some of them are still going on about the "urban heat island" effect, even though it makes no difference if you throw out all the data from stations near urban centres.
More like this
(The title of this post is a quote from John Maynard Keynes.) Today I want to look at different responses to new information about global warming.
I'll go first: In my archives I found a Usenet post of mine from 11 Aug 1988. In response to a suggestion that global warming…
There's this notion among the climate denial community that somehow the entire professional climatology community has overlooked an obvious flaw in the science behind anthropogenic global warming. Their hypothesis is that too many of the thermometers used to record temperatures over the last 200…
The Australian continues to display its contempt for science, scientists and the scientific method. They've published this piece of AGW denial by David Evans. Last time I looked at Evans he was saying that new evidence since 1999 had changed his mind about global warming, with this new evidence…
Don't get me wrong. I love NPR. I listen to it for at least four hours a day. But lately I've found the network's embrace of "he said, she said" journalism a little too difficult to swallow. This morning's report on censorship of a scientific report commissioned by the Texas Commission on…
Roger Pielke Sr. has posted a few rebuttals:
http://climatesci.atmos.colostate.edu/2006/05/15/wall-street-journal-qu…
From the linked article:
This assumes an independent identically distributed model (IID), of which the climate is not. Long-term perstence (LTP) needs to be accounted for, and that probability of 0.000004 might well fit into the expected variance. For more info, see:
Scale invariance for Dummies
http://landshape.org/enm/?p=13
"Earth has warmed 1.4° Fahrenheit over the past 100 years. Skeptics concede that."
Not exactly:
"The total warming since measurements have been attempted is thought to be about 0.6 degrees Centigrade."
http://junkscience.com/Greenhouse/
Steve Milloy is the Kent Hovind of "climate skeptics". I think it's safe to consider him nonrepresentative.