Arguments
2012 SkS Weekly Digest #50
Posted on 17 December 2012 by John Hartz, dana1981
SkS goes to Washington
As reported by Forecast the Facts, The Escalator was featured in a speech on the floor of the US Senate this week by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI). The full transcript of the excellent speech can be viewed here.
SkS Highlights
In IPCC Draft Report Leaked, Shows Global Warming is NOT Due to the Sun, Dana skillfully exposes the absurdity of assertions made by a climate denier about what is causing global warming. As shown in a subsequent section of this digest, Dana’s article has been both reprinted and cited by numerous other websites and authors. Kudos to Dana for another job well done!
Toon of the Week
Quote of the Week
The I.P.C.C. has won accolades over the years, most notably the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. But the reports have also become political lightning rods. Climate-change contrarians, though they publish very little in the relevant scientific literature, use the Internet to mount persistent attacks on the I.P.C.C. Being a human enterprise, the I.P.C.C. has certainly made mistakes, and these get magnified by people attempting to generate doubt about the overall body of climate science.
A Contrarian Spin on the Next Big Climate Report by Justin Gillis, New York Times, Dec 14, 2012
The Week in Review
- Thawing of Permafrost Expected to Cause Significant Additional Global Warming, Not yet Accounted for in Climate Predictions by John Hartz
- Doha Climate Summit Ends With No New CO2 Cuts or Funding by John Hartz
- IPCC Draft Report Leaked, Shows Global Warming is NOT Due to the Sun by Dana
- This is Global Warming - A Lesson for Monckton and Co. by Dana
- 2012 SkS Bi-Weekly News Roundup #9 by John Hartz
- Participate in Citizen Science with the new SkS BOINC team by Steve Brown
- AGU 2012 - Solving the Climate Problem by Dana
- New research from last week 49/2012 by Ari Jokimäki
- 2012 SkS Bi-Weekly News Roundup #8 by John Hartz
Coming Soon
- New research from last week 50/2012 (Ari Jokimäki)
- Add Frame and Stone to the List of Papers Validating IPCC Warming Projections (Dana)
- Solar Cycle Model fails to predict the recent warming (Hans Petter Jacobsen)
- 2012 SkS Bi-Weekly News Roundup #10 (John Hartz)
- Italian flag curry (gws)
- Subcap Methane Feedbacks. Part 3: Methane from beneath the ice (Andy S)
- 2012 SkS Bi-Weekly News Roundup #11 (John Hartz)
- Arctic continues to break records in 2012: Becoming warmer, greener region with record losses of ummer sea ice and late spring snow (John Hartz)
- Lukewarmerism, a.k.a. Ignoring Inconvenient Evidence (Dana)
- Food Security: the first big hit from Climate Change will be to our pockets (John Mason)
- Putting an End to the Myth that Renewable Energy is too Expensive (Dana)
- Drost, Karoly, and Braganza Find Human Fingerprints in Global Warming (Dana)
- Mexican Climate Legislation and Other Hopeful News (Dana)
- The Dirt on Climate (jg)
- Grace under Pressure (Doug Bostrom)
- Axis of Evil (Rob Honeycutt)
SkS in the News
This was a very big week for SkS in the news. Dana's IPCC Draft Report Leaked, Shows Global Warming is NOT Due to the Sun was re-posted and/or linked to by The Guardian, New York Times Green, New York Times Dot Earth, Huffington Post, Climate Progress, Mother Jones, Climate Crocks, Carbon Brief, Grist, Daily Beast, DeSmogBlog, Graham Readfearn, Der Spiegel, Maribo, Learn from Nature, Alternative Energy in the 21st Century, and Motherboard. It was also Tweeted by Michael Mann and Chris Mooney, among many others. Winston Churchill once said,
"A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on."
Not this time; we got the truth's pants on in record time and nipped this myth in the bud before the contrarians were able to misinform the public. In a Google search for the 'IPCC leak' story, the top 7 results are good articles, most of which link to our Skeptical Science post. Watts' original misinformative post only comes in at #8 on the list. Well done to all climate realists who helped communicate the facts and immediately defeat this misinformation.
John Cook was also interviewed by ABC Radio News in helping to debunk this myth.
John Cook's PhD research into the effectiveness of communicating the consensus in terms of convincing people to accept the climate science evidence — which John stresses are still preliminary results, but which he presented at the AGU 2012 Fall Meeting — was highlighted by Live Science, Planet 3.0, and The Daily Star.
Rob Painting's Past 150,000 Years of Sea Level History Suggests High Rates of Future Sea Level Rise was re-posted on Climate Progress.
Senator Whitehouse's excellent presentation incluing The Escalator noted above was praised by Dan Kahan.
Dana's This is Global Warming - A Lesson for Monckton and Co. was re-posted by Environment Guru.
In a story about climate denial in Indiana politics, several SkS resources were referenced by Daily Kos, Nation of Change, and PR Watch.
SkS Spotlights
The National Environment Research Center (NERC) is the UK's main agency for funding and managing research, training and knowledge exchange in the environmental sciences. Its work covers the full range of atmospheric, Earth, biological, terrestrial and aquatic science, from the deep oceans to the upper atmosphere and from the poles to the equator.
Working internationally, NERC has bases at some of the most hostile places on the planet. It operates a fleet of research ships and aircraft and invests in satellite technology to monitor gradual environmental change on a global scale. It provides forewarning of, and solutions to, the key environmental challenges facing society.
Keep up the fantastic work!
Let's hope that it's a trend that catches on.
This video from 6:00 to 9:00 when Sen Whitehouse explains the escalator, is the key fragment for us to watch. He does an excellent job in choosing strong and precise words to describe the denialism surrounding the temp data. A classic speech well worth watching.
Winston didn't say it first, I always thought it was Mark Twain but I found this article..
"A lie can travel halfway round the world while the truth is putting on its shoes".
- This quote has been attributed to Mark Twain, but it has never been verified as originating with Twain. This quote may have originated with Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1834-92) who attributed it to an old proverb in a sermon delivered on Sunday morning, April 1, 1855. Spurgeon was a celebrated English fundamentalist Baptist preacher. His words were: "A lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on."
(I imagine that sensible guy/fellow Utahn Huntsman gives up on the anti-science GOP well before the next election)
Read about it here and here. The comment thread to the original pledge reveals an interesting trend. I checked just first few comments. The commenters that mock the pledge and LOL it, receive most "up" votes...
Using this site's search function, on the term "Bjorn Lomberg", I receive numerous hits to comments, but these results do not indicate the original article to which they apply and do not provide a hyperlink to the original comment or thread. Is it possible to tweak the search engine, so that returned comments include some way to at least navigate back to the original post?
I was looking for information to rebut a post at The Conversation, in which someone has referred to Lomberg as a "world renowned expert on economics of climate change" and I'm sure there is material here that would help, but I can't get to it using the search function.
I feel your pain, as I frequently have exactly the same problem.
One way around it that usually works is to copy a word string from the search return for which you want the original thread. Paste the string into G00gle, and include in the search field "site:http://www.skepticalscience.com/".
Where SkS's engine fails to deliver the URL, G00gle usually succeeds.
vrooomie @ 14, on my tight budget, that is a luxury I will have to forego. With any luck, the State Library service will be able to track down a copy for me.