climate change
sastyk | February 25, 2010Mother Jones notes that in private interviews, Glenn Beck, fiery loon of the right, privately seems to believe in anthropogenic climate change.
Last week he mocked climate scientists for being "alarmists" who believe that "we're all going to die in a fiery flood." Not long ago he touted the global warming chapter of his An Inconvenient Book as "kryptonite against your Gore-worshipping psycho friends." And in May 2007 he hosted an hour-long television special, Exposed: The Climate of Fear, featuring an all-star lineup of climate change denialists and promising the "other side of the climate…
hrynyshyn | February 23, 2010It's hard to know just when George F. Will parted ways with reality. Some argue he abandoned respect for historical accuracy years ago. But it's only in the last year or so, thanks to a series of bafflingly misinformed column on climate change, that it became clear to all but his most loyal readers that he no longer cares about getting it right.
Still, you have to appreciate his way with words. In this past weekend's affront to the traditions of evidence-based commentary -- a column that has been eviscerated by most of the better science-oriented bloggers who pay attention to such things --…
hrynyshyn | February 17, 2010In the past couple of days a pernicious little meme has appeared in two leading North American newspapers. I refer to the notion that there is such a thing as "settled science." First, on a column about climatology Monday the Globe and Mail's Margaret Wente asked not-so-rhetorically "So much for the science being settled. Now what?" The following day the Wall Street Journal's editorial page weighed in with a review of "what used to be called the 'settled science' of global warming."
Both offerings betrayed a solid lack of understanding, not only of recent events involving recent allegations…
hrynyshyn | February 16, 2010Covering climatology may not be the biggest challenge facing today's mainstream news outlets and the journalists they employ, but it certainly has exposed a serious weakness in conventional news reporting. That weakness, as I implied in my previous post, is a pathological fear of taking sides, even then the "sides" in question are reality and fantasy.
Part of the problem is endemic to much of what passes for science journalism, which is too often practiced by journalists who know so little about the subject they're covering that they can't properly evaluate the reliability or trustworthiness…
illconsidered | February 16, 2010I know this is old news, but I just found the youtubes of this debate. You will recall how Plimer declined to answer some very straightforward requests for evidence of a handful of his most egregious fabrications that George Monbiot put to him as a precondition of a debate. Well, not because Plimer decided to be forthcoming, the debate went ahead in December with no preconditions.
It can be viewed in three parts below.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:
If you don't have time for it all (~24 minutes) I would recommend starting at part 2.
Is anyone impressed with Plimer's evasivness. He might as…
pronald | February 12, 2010I hear it is snowing in 49 out of 50 states today. And this, just after the big snow in Washington. Is climate change to blame?
According to climate scientists, we cannot extrapolate based on the events of 1 week.
Still, even if we choose to discount the dramatic weather of this week, it is increasingly clear that the climate is changing and that we must rethink agriculture.
Population experts anticipate the addition of another roughly 3 billion people to the planet's population by mid-21st century. However, the amount of arable land has not changed appreciably in more than half a…
illconsidered | February 12, 2010I never said much about Copenhagen finding it all rather predictably depressing. But in case you did not follow it closely the youtube audio below sums it all up admirably in the style of Dr Suess!
(h/t to Climate Extremist)
hrynyshyn | February 12, 2010Via the ever-vigilant Stoat, I draw your attention to a letter to the Netherlands parliament from by 55 Netherlands scientists. Along with the usual "the science remains sound" defense of our understanding of anthropogenic global warming, it provides some useful perspective:
The writing of IPCC reports and its quality control remains the work of humans. A guarantee for an error free report is an unachievable ideal, however much an error free report is highly desired
Just as a thousand private emails are bound to include a few intemperate remarks and elucidation of wishful thinking, the…
illconsidered | February 12, 2010And this one is a beauty.
Of course, like models, all analogies are wrong but some are useful! I think this hits the nail on the head in terms of CRU's perspective but I grant you it does not describe well any of the probable things that might be in the heads of the Climate Audit crowd. Undoubtably, some are sincere crusaders.
I really do prefer to take people at face value, but some impressive bit of researching over at Deep Climate kinda makes it hard to believe in the whole "gee, we're just asking" schtick Steve McIntyre puts out to the general public.
Check out the very substantial Part…
hrynyshyn | February 11, 2010It gives me no pleasure to pass on the facts about the lack of respect for the truth shown by climate change pseudo-skeptics. But there's simply no getting around it.
Last year, in his book Science as a Contact Sport, veteran climatologist Stephen Schneider made much of the misuse of a quote that actually did come from his lips about the temptation to "offer up scary scenarios" and the need to stay honest. The problem was he ended his observation on conflicting messaging priorities by saying, "I hope that means being both" but that line almost never makes it into stories by denialists citing…
sastyk | February 11, 2010Once upon a time, before I descended into parenthood and dull stability, I was out with a group of friends who had, let's just say, been drinking quite a bit. One of the young men in this group proposed to two others that they do something that was, to put it bluntly, totally moronic and likely to get them into enormous trouble. One of the gentlemen to whom this had been proposed thought for a moment, and then observed that this was likely to bring down the authorities upon them. The third gentleman responded to this with, "Yeah, but it would be awesome!" After a brief moment's…
illconsidered | February 11, 2010For most of us, the F in FOI stands for "freedom". It seems for Steve McIntyre, it stands for "form letter".
Via Eli Rabett we learn that the Freedom of Information requests (FOI) that are central to the only potentially damnng aspect of the CRU "swifthacking" incident have been released. They can be found here[PDF].
I have not looked at them yet, but Eli points out a very interesting one that begins thus (and we are quoting):
I hereby make a EIR/FOI request in respect to any confidentiality agreements)restricting transmission of CRUTEM data to non-academics involing the following countries…
sastyk | February 10, 2010A lot of big snowstorms get people who do not grasp the difference between weather and climate all excited. Consider the VA Republican party who claimed in an ad last week that if it snows, we can't have global warming. But it isn't just the skeptics and denialists here - among the believers we routinely see people citing weather, such as the lack of snow in Vancouver for the Olympics. I know that people think this helps, but in the great scheme of things, it doesn't - if people hear people who are trying act against global warming using their weather as an explanation without evidence,…
sastyk | February 10, 2010Note: This is a lightly revised version of a post from ye olde blogge (actually ye older blogge, the original Casaubon's Book). At the time I wrote it, I didn't know about Dan Savage's brilliantly funny book on the seven deadly sins _Skipping Towards Gomorrah_ and if I had, I probably wouldn't have written this, since it seems so derivative in retrospect. But since I didn't, and it was a fun one to write, I'm re-running it here.
I got a very funny email from a correspondant who asked that I not use his name when I write this. He tells me that he's newly aware of peak oil and climate change…
sastyk | February 8, 2010Dr. Steven Koonin of the DOE recently spoke about the future of energy and its implications for the goals of the New York State University system. Given that my husband is employed by said system, and in fact teaches Environmental Physics (aka "Here's how to do the math to prove we're doomed ;-)"), this was interesting to me. Neither of us was present for this event, but a friend who was reported that Koonin stated in the presentation, as a representative of the DOE that it unrealistic to expect the US to hold carbon emissions below 450ppm and that 550ppm was the best that could reasonably…
hrynyshyn | February 4, 2010It's not so much that the pseudoskeptics who dominate the climate change denial camp are particularly clever, but they have been rather fortunate, and the forces aligned on the side of science have turned out to be human after all. The result is the denial camp is winning, and those on the defensive have some thinking to do.
First, consider the timing of recent events.
As the year began, climatologists were able to launch what should have been a devastating counterattack to the nonsensical but appealing notion that global warming has been replacing by global cooling. The records show that the…
illconsidered | February 3, 2010ONCE TWO SCIENTISTS--it hardly matters what sort--were walking before dinner beside a pleasant pond with their friend, a reporter for the Dispatch, when they happened to notice a bird standing beside the water.
"I am a skeptic," said the first scientist. "I demand convincing evidence before I make an assertion. But I believe I can identify that bird, beyond all reasonable doubt, as a duck." The journalist nodded silently at this assertion.
"I also am a skeptic," said the second, "but evidently of a more refined sort, for I demand a much higher standard of evidence than you do. I see no…
illconsidered | February 2, 2010As ridiculous as that headline is, it is the theme du jour in the denialosphere....
The chair of the UN's panel on climate change Dr Rajendra Pachauri was written a "racy" romance novel and therefore the IPCC AR4 is unreliable propaganda. Um...okay.
If I wanted the denialists to win the PR battle, I would quietly but urgently try to warn them about going a bit too far in the mud slinging ad hominems.
(see ClimateAudit and WUWT piling on this Telegraph "news" item.)
I mean, really, isn't that a truly laughable thing to get worked up about? Can't just about anyone with the minimal…
sastyk | February 2, 2010An unsurprising but still deeply depressing article from the Guardian observes that not only was Copenhagen, billed as "the last, best hope for change" a dismal failure (duh) but that Mexico City is already a dismal failure.
Dozens of politicians, diplomats, economists, scientists and campaigners contacted by the Guardian agreed that while a global, legally binding treaty remains by far the best way to prevent global warming wreaking havoc on our civilisation, the chances of that treaty being achieved in 2010 are almost nil.
The energy has gone out of the negotiations, said some, with the…
hrynyshyn | February 2, 2010Never mind that the first decade of the 21st century was the warmest on record. Or that 2009 tied for the second-warmest year. Neither of those stories are consuming much airtime and web- and print-space. No, the biggest stories on the climate beat involve allegations of fraudulent activity on the part of some of the world's most experienced climatologists. The latest example concerns the lack of records specifying the location of remote Chinese weather stations and just how much they moved.
As Fred Pearce writes in The Guardian, "It is difficult to imagine a more bizarre academic dispute."…