global warming
tlambert | April 19, 2005 A new organization Climatechangeissues.com has sprung into existence in Australia to support solutions to the unresolved issues of climate change which are based on sound science, use market mechanisms and trade liberalisation as a key driver of economic growth and poverty reduction.
They are funded by organizations, individuals, companies and foundations who support a balanced approach to public policy debate and who encourage reliance on markets to improve public welfare, raise standards of living and achieve sustainable development.
Their website contains the usual collection of…
tlambert | April 18, 2005 Via Chris Mooney I find this comprehensive Mother Jones feature on the science and politics of global warming. I found it interesting to compare this handy chart of forty think tanks that have received scads of money from ExxonMobil and have denied the existence of global warming with my own table of think tanks that have received money from Microsoft and have attacked Open Source Software.
tlambert | April 15, 2005 Reading and listening to global warming sceptics can get a little
tedious because they keep trotting out the same discredited arguments.
So I've come up with a little game you can play to make it more
interesting. I call it Global Warming Sceptic Bingo! Just tick the
box when they use the argument next to it. Get four in a row and you
win! A good talk to try it on is Bob Carter's (At 37:00 on the 11
April 2005 Counterpoint
href="http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/counterpoint/default.htm">here.)
In the 70s
scientists were predicting an ice age #
There is no
such thing as…
tlambert | April 9, 2005 Chris Mooney has posted a transcript of a talk he gave at Rutgers on way that a misguided balance in science reporting between mainstream science and fringe beliefs misleads people.
Michael Duffy has presented a radio program on climate change that doesn't have that problem. He has a range of panellists whose opinions on anthropogenic global warming range all the way from "it isn't happening" to "it doesn't matter". Where can you get panellists like that? The Lavoisier group, of course.
Duffy opened the program with this howler: "Few people, for instance, are aware that 99% of…
tlambert | March 27, 2005 William Connolley lists another ten global warming myths.
PZ Myers delivers a righteous smackdown to Paul from Wizbang for Paul's profoundly ignorant attacks on evolution. (Paul's responds by calling evolution a cult.) As well as having totally demolished\* the theory of evolution, Paul has also done for global warming:
Which is more plausible:
The established theory: CFC's (et al) don't destroy ozone at seal level, (or we would not have smog) they magically hold there electron stripping potential till they get to a higher altitude where they strip electrons off ozone and blah blah…
tlambert | March 25, 2005 Go and read this most excellent post by William Connolley debunking many of the popular myths about global warming.
tlambert | February 27, 2005 According to this profile, Miranda Devine (last seen making stuff up in an attempt to debunk the Lancet study), once worked for the textile physics division of CSIRO. So she should know that one purpose of peer review is to weed out scientific papers that are inaccurate or where the conclusions are not properly supported by the evidence offered. She went on to write an opinion column where accuracy and supporting your claims are not important, so perhaps that explains why in her latest screed she seems to believe that peer review is a tool to silence dissent. Devine takes on the…
tlambert | February 23, 2005 Via Chris Brook and Anthony Cox, I find that Melanie Philips took the same combination of ignorance of science and utter certainty that the scientists are wrong that she used to "prove" that global warming was a scam and conducted a grossly irresponsible scare campaign against vaccination. On this issue, for once, Tech Central Station is on the side of the angels, with several articles debunking the scare.\* My favourite one is by Iain Murray, who writes:
[A Cardiff University report] examined the public's understanding of the issues surrounding the MMR vaccine, which has been…
tlambert | February 14, 2005 Chris Mooney has an excellent article on how "balanced" coverage of scientific issues can misinform readers:
Moreover, the question of how to substitute accuracy for mere "balance" in science reporting has become ever more pointed as journalists have struggled to cover the Bush administration, which scientists have widely accused of scientific distortions. As the Union of Concerned Scientists, an alliance of citizens and scientists, and other critics have noted, Bush administration statements and actions have often given privileged status to a fringe scientific view over a well-documented,…
tlambert | February 13, 2005
William Connolley has an interesting post on a new reconstruction of temperatures over the past 2000 years. It's the blue line in the graph to the right. It suggests that things were colder in the past than the hockey stick reconstruction (MBH in the diagram). The usual suspects will no doubt try to argue that this somehow disproves anthropogenic global warming, despite the finding that temperatures since the 90s are unprecedented.
Louis Hissink warns about the dangers of shifting the axis of rotation of a spinning hard disk: Never ever move a hard drive that is…
tlambert | January 21, 2005 Chris Mooney has a well-written review of Michael Crichton's State of Fear. I picked up a copy at the book store and read a couple of pages from the middle. It was like a Tech Central Station column, except that it was a speech by one of the characters, with occasional lame objections by another character. Oh, and it had footnotes. I don't know if you were supposed to imagine Crichton's character speaking the footnotes or what. I didn't buy the speech or the book.
John Quiggin also has a book review. His is of Lomberg's new book.
Over at RealClimate Michael…
tlambert | January 19, 2005 David Tiley has an has an interesting summary of a BBC program on Global Dimming. It seems that, over the past 40 years, while the amount of sunlight reaching the top of the atmosphere has not changed, the amount of sunlight reaching the surface has declined. Despite this, the earth has warmed over the same time span. The BBC program raises the alarming prospect that burning fossil fuels is making aerosols that produce the dimming and global cooling that is partially masking the warming produced by increased greenhouse gasses. That suggests that the greenhouse gasses…
tlambert | January 6, 2005 William Connolley at RealClimate provides a useful summary of the scientific consensus on global warming. He notes That the increase in atmospheric CO2 is anthropogenic is so obvious that few people question it
Of course, Louis Hissink is one of those few people, insisting that the evidence isn't just wrong, but is fraudulent. (I've added the green and red lines to the graph he presents---I'll explain what they are below.)
So far not one scintilla of evidence has been produced to counter the scientific evidence graphed in Figure 2 from Jaworowski's…
tlambert | December 22, 2004 Louis Hissink has responded to my post on the worst argument against global warming, ever: Well yes Tim, the Holy See seemed to need to recalibrate the calendar, and in Medieval times, no one was observing the heavens for the simple fact that telescopes had not yet been invented.
And you didn't think he would be able to top his argument about climate change that was inconsistent with the existence of seasons. This is an argument about astronomy that assumes that you can't see stars without a telescope.
Wait, there's more: What has not occurred to Quiggin, Lambert…
tlambert | December 18, 2004 Not content with printing op-eds by John Lott, the LA Times has published a piece of disinformation by Nick Schultz. The LA Times fails to disclose that Schultz works for a public relations company that has ExxonMobil as a client. The central message of Schultz's piece is that science will never resolve the question of climate change: At some level, science probably will never resolve what to do about global warming. Climate change is complex, with scores of variables and time-frame considerations of decades and even centuries. Both sides have substantial data…
tlambert | December 15, 2004Lavoisier group member Louis Hissink has a response to my post and John Quiggin's on the Lavoisier group. A summary cannot do it justice, so I will quote extensively:
A quick scan of the blogosphere reporting on William Kininmonth's recent book launch on Monday 22 November by the Lavoisier Society showed many still retain a belief in man-made global warming.
So let's get a little more scientific about this issue.
As far as the earth is concerned, and from a geological perspective, 99% of the earth's mass is hotter than 1000 degrees Celsius, and 1% of the earth's mass cooler than 100…
tlambert | December 10, 2004 Excellent news. Some climate scientists have started a blog called RealClimate, something sorely needed to correct the disinformation put about by Tech Central Station and the like. I hope they can do for climate science what The Panda's Thumb does for evolution.
One of the first posts is by Rasmus Benestad on the McKitrick-Michaels paper that got degrees and radians mixed up. Years ago, when McKitrick was first working on the paper Robert Grumbine observed that McKitrick had Treated the records as being independant (I know William knows this, but for…
tlambert | October 13, 2004 The grandly named EnviroTruth web site has section that purports to debunk "myths" about climate change. The "myths" include the usual false claims such as satellite measurements don't show warming, but "myth" number 11 is pretty funny.
Here's "myth" 11:
Those Who Question Whether Human Activity Contributes in Any Significant Fashion to Climate Change are Secretly Funded by Coal, Oil, Gas and Other "Smokestack" Industries.'
Brandon MacGillis of Ozone Action, a Washington DC-based public interest group, refers to global warming doubters as "part of a handful of skeptics, mostly coal…
tlambert | August 11, 2004 (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 was caused by waste heat from power plants, I wrote: Waste heat does not contribute significantly to global warming. It is all (if it's really happening---we probably won't be sure until its too late) caused by the greenhouse effect. I agree with Brad---burning fossil fuels could well be more…