global warming
tlambert | August 11, 2008John Mashey emails me a link to a video a Naomi Oreskes talk about the Western Fuels Association's PR campaign against the global warming science.
Mashey's summary of her talk:
Naomi is an award-winning geoscientist/science historian, a Professor at
UCSD and as of July, promoted to Provost of of the Sixth College there. She
is also a meticulous researcher, as seen from past books, and from having
reviewed a few chapters of the book she mentions in the talk. She unearthed
some fascinating memos, although of course, impossible to replicate the
exhaustive database of tobacco documents.
If you…
nisbetmc | August 11, 2008In case you were wondering, Gore's much anticipated follow up book--where he is scheduled to detail his proposed policy actions--is due out about five months into the next administration.
tlambert | August 7, 2008Clif at Sadly No mocks some blogger who thinks that because the draft report Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States used a photoshopped picture of flood to illustrate a flood, rather than a picture of a real flood, this casts doubt on the science. Following the links I get to Anthony Watts who reckons that it was photoshopped "for better impact" -- I guess he thinks beautiful clean fake water has a better impact than the disgusting brown water you get in a real flood. From Watts I find, surprise surprise, that this story originated at Climate "mountains out of molehills" Audit…
tlambert | August 3, 2008Robert Grumbine writes
Since I'm an ice guy, I'm saddened that a place with ice in its name turned out to be unreliable. Still, I wandered over there and took a look at the first article ... The article was by Joseph D'Aleo ... In very short order, I found a major error, a cherry pick, and an error or at least misleading graphic. I stopped there.
tlambert | August 2, 2008You can now sign the "Sue Us" peition, which calls for those people who keep threatening to Sue Gore and Hansen to do so. See also Frank Bi's post on promoting the petition.
tlambert | August 1, 2008Tamino has written three posts explaining what is wrong with Roy Spencer's calculations of a low climate sensitivity. See Part 1, Part 2and Part 3.
Brief summary: 90 days of data is not enough to estimate climate sensitivity.
cmooney | August 1, 2008I didn't realize I was going to have the cover story of the latest New Scientist with this in-depth article I did about the climate-tornado relationship. Essentially, the bottom line is this--it's even more complicated than the climate-hurricane relationship. And so for all those politicians, environmentalists, and bloggers out there who want to use tornadoes (and especially this extremely active U.S. tornado year) as an excuse to talk about global warming...well, the science provides a slender foundation for them indeed.
You can't read the full New Scientist article online, but let me lay…
grrlscientist | July 31, 2008
Everyone knows that the White House has been forcing scientists to only talk about research that conforms with GW's agenda, and the political cartoonists have been busily committing these shameful lies to paper in a form that we all can appreciate. One of those cartoons is pictured above. Thanks to a blog pal of mine, now is your opportunity to choose your favorite cartoon in the Union for Concerned Scientists' Scientific Integrity Editorial Cartoon Contest. They have 12 cartoons there for you to choose between -- good luck! I am still trying to figure out which one I want to vote for (the…
tlambert | July 31, 2008Frank Bi suggests on open letter to John Coleman, Christopher Monckton, and Owen McShane, who have been threatening to sue Al Gore and James Hansen challenging them to bring it on.
nisbetmc | July 31, 2008That's the question raised by National Post columnist Vanessa Farquharson. While male writers and bloggers focus on a Pandora's box of looming catastrophe, a storyline that likely leads to a sense of fatalism, female writers and bloggers focus more on practical adaptation and mitigation strategies that citizens can start doing today:
"...It's interesting to note that, for whatever reason, most of the voices behind this apocalyptic panic are male. But a growing collective of female bloggers are now writing about peak oil, more often in the context of how many strawberries we should dehydrate…
nisbetmc | July 31, 2008
From Canada's The National Post:
Faced with an unflattering image as a global environmental disaster area, the oil sands sector is stepping up its offensive to counteract critics. The sector has re-branded the Oil Sands Developers Group, a Fort McMurraybased coalition of 28 companies developing the business, and put forward its president, Don Thompson, to get out the message that reality on the ground is different from that portrayed by green groups and others who want development stopped...
...Negative perceptions of the oil sands as a big engine of global warming have resulted in a series…
grrlscientist | July 30, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, animal migration, ecology, conservation, habitat destruction, global warming, overexploitation
Image: Makoa Farm Horseback Riding Safaris in Tanzania [larger view].
What do salmon, passenger pigeons, American bison and wildebeest have in common? They all are (or were) migratory, and their populations either are declining or have become extinct. In fact, the populations of nearly all migratory animals, from insects to fishes, birds to mammals, are suffering disproportionate population declines that sedentary species are not experiencing. This is hardly…
nisbetmc | July 30, 2008
Last week I noted that McCain is scoring political body blows with a compelling message on energy and that the Obama campaign has not responded to the massive shifts in public preferences that have occurred on the issue since early spring of this year.
The message gap on energy grew wider this week as McCain released his latest television spot (clip above). McCain knows "that we must drill more in America and rescue our family budgets" claims the ad. Obama on the other hand--while staging rallies for adoring and chanting supporters--is personally responsible for rising gas prices and…
tlambert | July 29, 2008The latest Newspoll finds that 84% of Australians accept that climate change is occurring and 96% of those that believe that climate change is occurring think that it is wholly or partly caused by humans. A 1993 ISSP survey found that 32% of Australians don't believe that humans evolved from another species -- the comparable figure in this survey is that 15% of Australians don't accept AGW.
It is a delight to note that the poll was commissioned by the Australian, so they had to, in effect, report that their own noisy campaign against the science has been a dismal failure.
tlambert | July 29, 2008David Appell showed David Evans the AGW signature from the IPCC report that Evans claimed was missing. Evans replied:
Comparing a model to observations doesn't prove the model works. It's encouraging to the model builders, but it's not proof. For instance, the model could just be lucky.
So when Evans wrote:
The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.
He meant that we had found the signature, but Evans didn't think it should count.
tlambert | July 26, 2008Hey, remember when David Bellamy claimed?
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.
And George Monbiot's heroic efforts to track down the source of this claim? Bellamy got it from a crackpot web site ("The next ice age could begin any day"), which got it from Larouche's 21st Century Science, which got from SEPP (presumably S Fred Singer):
The World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich, Switzerland…
tlambert | July 26, 2008Tom Bozzo at Angry Bear gives us a shorter Megan McArdle:
I once heard these terms of art from the electricity industry. No quizzes!
P.S., Al Gore is fat.
Bonus McArdle on Gore:
It is a funny but irrelevant fact that freak cold snaps have occurred several times that Al Gore was giving a big speech on global warming. ... the funny bit is that they happen wherever he is speaking.
tlambert | July 24, 2008A new paper by Chilingar, Khilyuk and Sorokhtin is up to their previous standard.
Here's the abstract:
The writers investigated the effect of CO2 emission on the temperature of atmosphere. Computations based on the adiabatic theory of greenhouse effect show that increasing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere results in cooling rather than warming of the Earth's atmosphere.
Wow! How did they come up with that? Here's their calculation:
To evaluate the effect of anthropogenic emission of carbon dioxide on
global temperature,
one can use the adiabatic model together with the sensitivity…
mikethemadbiologist | July 24, 2008One of the topics I discuss on this blog is the idiocy surrounding Social Security--despite all of the hype, Social Security is not DOOMED!! (To make a longish explanation short, every year for the last fourteen years, Social Security has been predicted to become insolvent in 32 to 36 years. 'Insolvency' will only occur if the economy underperforms on an unprecented scale--including the decade surrounding the Great Depression--for several decades. In that case, a very modest increase in the payroll tax will cover all necessary payouts. There is, however, a general budget crisis that the…
tlambert | July 23, 2008Earlier, I predicted:
You can bet that Glenn Reynolds, Andrew Bolt etc will be falsely claiming that Ofcom ruled that Swindle was not misleading.
And, sure enough, here's Andrew Bolt with a thoroughgoing misrepresentation of the findings:
Great Global Warming Swindle cleared ...
Yes, there was one error, fixed before the documentary showed in Australia: ...
And how shoddy is the case for global warming theory than 37 professors between them cannot convince Ofcom of a single uncorrected error in The Great Global Warming Swindle? ...
In all, this witchhunt against The Great Global Warming…