global warming
cmooney | January 12, 2006The three way debate/discussion on science and politics hosted by the Smith Family Foundation on Tuesday night was an interesting event, to say the least. It was in some ways a difficult discussion for me, because the other participants, Ronald Bailey and Wesley Smith, are much more inclined than I to mix it up about the ethics of different kinds of research, especially when it comes to future biomedical advances and whether they should go forward without restriction. I, on the other hand, simply take the stance that while ethical viewpoints may differ, that's no excuse for either side to…
tlambert | January 11, 2006John Fleck discovers that Benny Peiser's ability to understand papers in climate research hasn't improved since last year:
So I wrote [the paper's author] and asked if he felt their work supported a solar explanation for the warming of the last 100 years. His response:
As you have noticed, because the time resolution of peat deposition (in our study) is not high enough to discuss the dynamic of temperatures on interannual/interdecadal scales, we did not address the cause of the ongoing global warming in the past century.
After publishing Plimer's silly article on global warming, the…
tlambert | January 8, 2006Tim Blair professes not to give a damn about global warming but also reckons it a scam and has over twenty rather confused posts in just the last month attacking the concept. In his latest post he seems to think that only the Arctic is warming, quoting John Christy.
"It just doesn't look like global warming is very global," said John Christy, director of UAH's Earth System Science Center.
"The carbon dioxide from fossil fuels is distributed pretty evenly around the globe and not concentrated in the Arctic, so it doesn't look like we can blame greenhouse gases for the overwhelming bulk of…
tlambert | January 5, 2006Peter Gleick argues that global warming skeptics are practising pseudo-science because no matter how much evidence piles up for warming, their position does not change. John Quiggin says that the latest evidence ends the scientific debate. Evidence for this can be found at Backseat Driving , where Brian Schmidt finds that warming skeptics just won't put their money where their mouths are and bet against future warming when when offered odds.
Meanwhile the Australian has printed a rather silly article by Ian Plimer:
Does it matter if sea level rises a few metres or global temperatures rise a…
tlambert | December 18, 2005I wrote earlier about a particularly dumb argument against global warming--the argument that an unusually cold day shows that global warming just isn't happening. Well, there doesn't seem to be an argument dumb enough that someone can't make it dumber. Take it away, Tim Blair:
Comical protest news from Montreal:
Thousands of people ignored frigid temperatures to lead a worldwide day of protest against global warming.
Was it unusually cold that day in Montreal? Well, no. December 3 was slightly warmer than the average December day in Montreal.
Wait, there's more!
Global warming protests…
tlambert | November 19, 2005Iain Murray finally admits to the existence of anthropogenic global warming:
When I began working on global warming issues several years ago I was firmly of the belief that it was stuff and nonsense. As the scientific facts became clearer, however, my view has changed. It is quite apparent now that the Earth is warming and that mankind has quite a lot to do with it.
Oddly enough however, his policy recommendations don't seem to have changed:
So simply saying that the world is warming and that we know some of this is due to greenhouse gases isn't enough to justify drastic action that may…
tlambert | August 18, 2005James Annan finally has takers for his bet on global warming. The news was published in Nature, but for those without a subscription, here is the gist of it:
James Annan, who is based at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology in Yokohama, has agreed a US$10,000 bet with Galina Mashnich and Vladimir Bashkirtsev, two solar physicists who argue that global temperatures are driven by changes in the Sun's activity and will fall over the next decade. The bet, which both sides say they are willing to formalize in a legal document, came after other climate sceptics refused to wager…
tlambert | August 17, 2005By now everyone knows that last June the UAH (University of Alabama
Huntsville) team led by Roy Spencer and John Christy released updates to
their satellite derived lower troposphere temperature trends. These
trends, which come from their "TLT" dataset use data from the Microwave
Sounding Unit (MSU) packages that have been flying aboard NOAA's Polar
Orbiting Environmental (POES) satellites since late 1978. This dataset
uses combinations of nadir (straight-down) and off-nadir views of MSU
Channel 2 to create a "synthetic" channel that isolates a lower and
thinner portion of the atmosphere…
tlambert | July 17, 2005RealClimate has some responses from scientists to Barton's letters, including the replies from the three scientists that Barton sent his letters to, Mann, Bradley and Hughes. Of note is that the fact that Mann has released the source code for his multiproxy reconstruction. I imagine that the hacky team will insist that he hasn't released all of his code or that it won't compile or that satellite balloon data doesn't show warming, etc etc.
tlambert | July 15, 2005John A, one of the bloggers at Climate Audit writes:
You should know that Lambert's scientific knowledge is *ahem* "challenged". Ask him if he's discovered what entropy is and how it applies to closed thermodynamic systems.
What a guy.
Following the link, we find an anonymous person defending McKitrick's false claim that average temperature has no physical meaning. I had explained that the physical meaning of the average temperature of two bodies was the equilibrium temperature you obtain when you let heat flow from the hotter body to the cooler one and that this was just the weighted…
tlambert | July 8, 2005William Connolley has been reading the House of Lords report on The Economics of Climate Change and he's not impressed:
Because they decided to talk nonsense about the Great Hockey Stick debate. They manage to say: "We sought evidence that refuted the claims of McIntyre and McKitrick, but have not come across any detailed rebuttal." But this is where they have degenerated into bald-faced lying. Because had they contacted Mann (clearly they didn't) he would have pointed them to such. For heavens sake, its on the web at RC: Dummies guide to the latest "Hockey Stick" controversy has some info…
tlambert | June 22, 2005Is this Wall Street Journal editorial clueless or dishonest? Read RealClimate's detailed rebuttal.
Update: David Appell calls it "intellectually dishonest". Sounds about right.
Update 2: Chris Mooney piles on.
tlambert | June 12, 2005Writing in the Australian, Christopher Pearson likens mainstream climate science to creationism
When Charles Darwin unveiled the theory of evolution, the world at once divided into rationalists and creationists. The theory that man-made greenhouse gas is causing potentially catastrophic climate change is another great divider. On one side are the sceptics, who want compelling evidence. On the other are the true believers.
Now there are some interesting parallels in the debates about evolution and global warming, but they don't go the way Pearson insinuates. In both cases, the domination of…
tlambert | May 25, 2005 I wrote earlier on Zbigniew Jaworowski's piece claiming that measurements of pre-industrial CO2 were wrong. Now Jim Easter has written a masterful post, detailing twenty-two false or misleading statements made by Jaworowski. Go and read, it's beautiful work.
tlambert | May 18, 2005 In a comment to my previous post on Benny Peiser's claim that Naomi Oreskes article on the scientific consensus was wrong, Meyrick made a good case that Peiser had conducted a different search than Oreskes:
Think I've finally worked out how to replicate Oreskes' search. There are 2 fundemental differences between Peiser search and Oreskes.
1. Oreskes excluded the "Social Sciences Citation Index" and the "Arts & Humanities Citation Index", Peiser does not.
2. Oreskes set the search limits to include only "Article"s, whereas Peiser set the search limits to include "All document types…
tlambert | May 10, 2005 In April, New Scientist published a letter from David Bellamy denying global warming and claiming:
Indeed, if you take all the evidence that is rarely mentioned by the Kyotoists into consideration, 555 of all the 625 glaciers under observation by the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, Switzerland, have been growing since 1980.
It's not hard to go to the WGMS web site and see that his claim is not even close to being true, as explained in subsequent letters. Now George Monbiot has tracked down the source of Bellamy's claim. He got it from a crackpot web site ("The next ice age…
tlambert | May 6, 2005 Dennis Bray has replied to my post on his study.
I am very disapointed in his response. He writes:
For the two groups, the 'sceptics' and the 'saviours' there seems to have been equal access. If any one knows of other postings I would be interested to note how far the survey was distributed. The purpose of the survey was to attempt to gain an objective view of the state of the science not to provide fodder any camp of activists, but no measurement instrument (survey) is prefect, in any science.
While no study is perfect, this study is so imperfect as to be useless. Since it was posted…
tlambert | May 5, 2005 Chris Mooney has some comments on the Peiser/Oreskes dispute about the scientific literature on climate change.
I asked Benny Peiser for his list of 34 abstracts that "reject or doubt the view that human activities are the main drivers of the 'the observed warming over the last 50 years'." (mentioned in his letter to Science).
Peiser wrote back:
I have attached those ISI abstracts which question that there is a complete "consensus" as defined by Oreskes. Please note that the most important difference to the Oreskes study is not that there are, contrary to her claim, a few abstracts…
tlambert | May 1, 2005 In a report on a climate change seminar, Bernd Ströher and Benny Peiser write:
Particularly revealing were the almost sensational results of a survey conducted by Prof. Bray among some 500 German and European climate researchers. The results show impressively that the much-repeated claim of a "scientific consensus" on anthropogenic global warming is a carefully constructed piece of fiction: According to the survey results, some 25% of European climate researchers who took part in the survey still doubt whether most of the moderate warming during the last 150 years can be attributed to human…
tlambert | April 30, 2005 To mark the centenary of the publication of Einstein's famous equation, Spiked has surveyed
over 250 renowned scientists, science communicators, and educators - including 11 Nobel laureates - asking what they would teach the world about science and why, if they could pick just one thing.
They certainly have surveyed some renowned scientists and their answers are worth reading. But if you look at the complete list, you'll see these renowned scientists (links show where they've have mentioned on this blog): Sallie Baliunas, Timothy Ball, Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, John Brignell, Hans…