Alt-Truth
gregladen | December 14, 2013In an ongoing effort to discredit mainstream climate science, climate contrarians have incorrectly asserted that there is a “pause” in the rate of global warming. This was never true, but now, it is even less true.
(Originally Published Here)
To any objective observer, the Earth is now a world warmed. The decade 2001–2010 was the hottest decade on record, and every single month since March 1985 has been warmer than the 20th century average. The present year promises to be the sixth warmest year on record. Already this year, our fellow Americans out West have been confronted by record…
gregladen | November 13, 2013That nefarious leech of an organization, the Heartland Institute, the one that put up the billboards implying that people who think climate change is important are mad bombers, has done something really offensive, again. They made a fake packet of information with fake stuff about climate change and sent it to teachers and other educators, as well as graduate students, to try to trick them into passing the lies and deceptions on to their students. According to the National Center for Science Education:
Around Halloween, thousands of science teachers, science professors, and graduate…
gregladen | November 9, 2013At this moment, there is a guest post over at WUWT blog downplaying the size, strength, wind speeds, overall effects, and even the death toll of Super Typhoon Haiyan. Even as the monster storm steams across the sea to it's next landfall (probably as a huge wet tropical storm, in northern Vietnam and southern China), Anthony Watts and his crew are trying to pretend this monster storm didn't happen, and instead, that it was a run of the mill typhoon.
At the moment, nobody is really saying that Haiyan's strength, size, power, or even existence is specifically the direct result of global warming…
gregladen | October 29, 2013This from The Big E at MPP:
The LA Times recently instituted a policy change: they no longer print letters to the editor from climate change deniers. The LA Times believes that peer-reviewed work by established scientists have overwhelmingly proven that our planet is warming and this is leading to significant climate change.
And those scientists have provided ample evidence that human activity is indeed linked to climate change. Just last month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — a body made up of the world’s top climate scientists — said it was 95% certain that we fossil-fuel-…
gregladen | October 2, 2013First, get a list of over a dozen things you want to say. They don't have to be true, and many, even most, of them can be versions of each other. Then, when you are in the debate, do this:
Scientist: “If there’s one thing you should take away from this discussion, it’s...
Denialist [interrupting]: Thing one, thing two, thing three, thing four, thing five.
Scientist: “Actually, that thing four you said, that’s not really true ..
Denialist [interrupting]: Thing six, thing seven, thing eight, thing nine, thing ten.
Scientist: We can’t be sure of everything but one thing we are pretty sure of…
gregladen | October 2, 2013Popular Science, one of the longest running and, well, popular, magazines that deals with science has a website. Last Tuesday, on-line editor Suzanne LaBarre announced that Popular Science would no longer have comment sections on most of its pages. The reason sited was that "Comments can be bad for science." She noted:
A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another…
gregladen | August 25, 2013Apparently, there is a Faith Healer [who] Convinces Followers To Never Vaccinate, [and] Now Church [is] The Center Of Measles Outbreak
The Eagle Mountain International Church in Newark, Texas, run by Kenneth Copeland Ministries, has long been a strong anti-vaccination stronghold. Now, it is the epicenter of a major outbreak of Measles in the United States.
And, here is a poll that asks: Should anti-vaccine parents be held liable if their child spreads an illness?
Say an unvaccinated child has the measles and passes the disease onto a baby who’s too young to be vaccinated. If that baby gets…
gregladen | August 23, 2013These things are all connected.
A couple of days ago a good ally in the climate change fight ... the fight to make people realize that climate change is not some librul conspiracy to raise taxes on the rich ... goofed. It was a minor goof, barely a goof at all. We do not yet know the nature of the goof but it was somewhere between saying something in a slightly clumsy manner and a bit of misremembering something that happened in 2005 during an interview. That's it. Nothing else to see here.
But that goof has been wrenched form its context and turned into a senseless and embarrassingly…
gregladen | August 15, 2013Every northern summer Arctic Sea ice melts away and reforms for winter, but how much melts away seems to be increasing on average, at a rate that surprises climate scientists.
But there are some who see variation from year to year, and there is variation, in a rather unrealistic way. Here is a graph comparing how climate science denialists view arctic sea ice over time, compare to how "climate realists" (i.e., smart people who can read graphs and such) see it:
Go HERE to see the source and learn more about what is behind this graph.
gregladen | July 30, 2013This is a very important political ad because it involves climate change and climate change denialism in the political process. This (involvement) needs to happen in every single campaign from now on, for every single office. This is a start. A slow start, but at least a start.
There is important context for this ad that you can get HERE from Peter Sinclair.
gregladen | July 21, 2013Michael Mann initiated a defamation lawsuit agains t the National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute some time ago, and it has been trudging along int he courts. Two very important decisions came down in the Washington DC Superior Court in Professor Mann's favor. I'm not going to try to describe this to you because there are others who know much more about these things than I do, but I encourage you to read Climate Science Watch's summary and update here: DC Court affirms Michael Mann's right to proceed in defamation lawsuit against National Review and CEI
It is interesting to…
gregladen | June 19, 2013Science is good at seeing things that you can’t really see. For example, science can provide an accurate three dimensional model of a critically important molecule even though no one has ever directly seen what this molecule looks like. That three dimensional model of the molecule can be used to understand things such as a) how life works and b) how to address some important disease.
Science can measure the exact proportions of each of several elements that are invisible that make up the air. We can sense the air but we can’t see Nitrogen vs. Oxygen vs. CO2 in the air, while Science can.…
gregladen | June 19, 2013... or Climate Noobs Bork Climate-science?
... or Can't News Be Correct?
(add your own below)
The thing is, CNBC, which is supposed to be a news station, is fueling public misunderstanding of climate science. This is bad journalism, and virtually criminal given the importance of climate change and the need for good science based policy related to climate change. We are long past the point where we can tolerate false balance, astro-turfing, and rating mongering. We need to have a good public understanding of climate science, we need it now, and we need "news" organizations like CNBC to stop…
gregladen | June 6, 2013I have two items for you. First is a video produced by Media Matters on Right Wing Science. I especially love Bill Nye's facial expressions as he is assailed with unbelievable stupidity:
And now, also from Media Matters, this fun infographic. Share it around!
gregladen | May 20, 2013There is a book called "The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania" produced by the Heartland Institute. The Heartland Institute is famous for doing all that work to prove that smoking is not bad for you, and more recently, that climate change is not real or is not important or is not human-caused etc. etc. Heartland is a libertarian "think" tank that receives money form big corporate interests like Tobacco and Petroleum and then uses that money to advance the interests of those corporate entities, regardless of the actual truth of the situation. They also use…
gregladen | May 16, 2013An important study has just been published1 examining the level of consensus among scientists about climate change.
The issue at hand is this: What is the level of agreement in the scientific community about the reality of climate change and about the human role in climate change? The new paper, Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature, address this question and the answer is very clear. The number of climate scientists who question the reality of global warming or the human role in global warming is vanishingly small.
This is not the first…
gregladen | May 7, 2013Here is a presentation by Genie Scott of the National Center for Science Education.
Far more people are climate change deniers than evolution deniers, but both camps use similar strategies to promote their views. Genie Scott explores the connections, the similarities, and the divergent ideologies. Where: New York. When: 10/23/2011. Hosted by the New York City Skeptics.
gregladen | April 30, 2013Published on Apr 30, 2013
Science education is under assault again. Not just evolution education, but climate change education. NCSE policy director Dr. Minda Berbeco traces the history of science denial, the links between evolution- and climate change deniers, recent legislation targeting both, the role of the Next Generation Science Standards, and more. Where: East Bay Atheists, Berkeley, CA. When: 4/21/2013
gregladen | April 29, 2013What do UFO's, the belief that magnetism causes climate change but atmospheric gasses are not related, child molestation, and academic sock puppeting have in common with sea level rise? To find out, set aside some time to carefully read this: UFOs, Sea Level Rise And The Magnetism Of Climate Science Denial and then click on this.
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