Dana' s The Weekly Standard's Lindzen puff piece exemplifies the conservative media's climate failures generated the most comments of the articles posted during the past week. Coming in a close second was Rob Painting's New Study Suggests Future Global Warming at the Higher End of Estimates: 4°C Possible by 2100.
Even today, "there is some degree of uncertainty about natural variability," acknowledged Mark McCaffrey, programs and policy director of the National Center for Science Education based in Oakland, Calif. "If it weren't for the fact that humans had become a force of nature, we would be slipping back into an ice age, according to orbital cycles."
But earth's glacial rhythms are "being overridden by human activities, especially burning fossil fuels," McCaffrey noted. The stories about global cooling "are convenient for people to trot out and wave around," he said, but they miss the point:
"What's clear is we are a force of nature. Human activity – the burning of fossil fuels and land change – is having a massive influence. We are in the midst of this giant geoengineering experiment."
How Newsweek's 'global cooling' story got its legs by Doug Struck, The Daily Climate, Jan 10, 2014
The findings contained in the recently puiblished papers discussed in Dana's article, Global warming is being caused by humans, not the sun, and is highly sensitive to CO2, new research shows have been incorporated into the rebuttals to the myths: It's the sun, Clouds provide negative feedback, and Climate sensitivity is low.
Collin Maessen embeds a link to the SkS article, A Rough Guide to the Jet Stream: what it is, how it works and how it is responding to enhanced Arctic warming in hs Real Sceptic blog post, Winter, Weather, And Climate Science Deniers
The findings of Cowtan and Way (2013) are cited by James Wright in his Precarious Climate blog post, Unofficial deputy PM attacks climate science.
In CNN's Crossfire Dredges Up Climate Change Denial During, Media Matters critically reviews the segment refernced below.
Stephan Lewandowsky features the SkS graphic of Antic sea ice extent in his article, An icebreaker gets stuck in the ice, photos are used to mislead posted on The Conversation. The graph is from the SkS article, Arctic sea ice "recovers" to its 6th-lowest extent in millennia
Eric Holthaus concludes his Quartz article, How global warming can make cold snaps even worse with:
"Skeptical Science (the ‘Snopes’ of climate science) has a comprehensive explainer on Arctic amplification and the jet stream, for those that want to dig deeper on the subject. And, as a PSA, is a great-go to resource when situations like this arise."
The TCP was cited twice by co-host Van Jones on CNN's Crossfire segment titled, Cold Sparks Climate Skeptics.
Coral Davenport reviews four important books about climate change in this weekend's New York Times Sunday Book Review.
THE CLIMATE CASINO Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World by William Nordhaus Yale University
FEVERED Why a Hotter Planet Will Hurt Our Health — and How We Can Save Ourselves by Linda Marsa Rodale
THE MELTING WORLD A Journey Across America’s Vanishing Glaciers by Christopher White St. Martin’s
THE ONCE AND FUTURE WORLD Nature as It Was, as It Is, as It Could Be by J. B. MacKinnon Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Posted by John Hartz on Sunday, 12 January, 2014
 |
The Skeptical Science website by Skeptical Science is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. |