For my own benefit as much as anyone else’s I thought I’d record some of the interesting climate change material I come across. It is an experiment and if I tire of it – or find it forced – I’ll give it up. Here goes #1.
I thought this brief history of climate change by the BBC was excellent.
This piece from The Guardian shows the complexity of arguing against the claim that warming stopped in 1998. I have argued in another post that it did not stop but this is really beside the point – temperatures could decline for a decade without in any way refuting the AGW hypothesis because of short term variability that masks trends. For the same reason I have ambivalent reactions to claims that heating occurred only it occurred in the oceans. Possibly true but perhaps irrelevant.
Barry Brook provides an excellent podcast on the economics of nuclear power and 4th generation technologies. By the way Weathervane reports that Republican Senators has urged a solution to US GGE problems that involves building 100 nuclear power plants in 20 years, electrifying half the US car fleet and using solar panels on existing structures.
Finally Joseph Romm in Physics World urges scientists to engage more with the public to counteract the forces of delusionist darkness which are increasingly winning over US Republicans.
Tim Lambert at Deltoid has discussed climate blogger Steve McIntyre’s accusations of ‘cherrypicking’ against UK dendrochronolgist Keith Briffa who derived a hockey stick temperature record by inspecting tree rings in a Russian forest. The ratback right have been quick to claim that this disproves entirely the AGW hypothesis – an absurd claim anyway on the basis of one data set. But things get worse. Deep Climate now report that the apparently intemperate comments by McIntyre seem to be totally false – in unpublished work with a larger sample of trees the same ‘hockey stick’ temperature record is unmasked! Rather than attacking Briffa it was clear that McIntyre should have published his claims in a refereed journal. It is probably questionable that this will ever happen.
Update: John Mashey in the comments thread below cites the Sceptical Science website for an exhaustive discussion of the common denialist myths.
UNSW’s Michael Ashley who did the lovely review of Ian Plimer’s book in the Australian chimed in with some pithy comments re McIntyre’s claims:
http://rabett.blogspot.com/2009/10/some-people-not-me-one-michael-ashley.html
And it is well worth perusing (Australian) John Cook’s website Skeptical Science, especially:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php
It lists 70 of the most popular wrong memes about climate science, each wit ha link to a good discussion for a a general audience, backed by good references to key peer-reviewed articles in creible journals.
When someone writes a mass of wrong memes (which take 10X more words or charts to show the errors), and you are in a character-count-constrained setup like letters-to-editor, you can just point at the webpage, then list the numbers.
That may not stop some people from endless repetition, but thoughtful onlookers get the point, especially as they see a list of the common memes, see that each is repeated so often that they’re cataloged, and are so dumb as to not even be worth addressing from scratch.