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Comments 65451 to 65500:

  1. Measurements show Earth heating up, think tanks & newspapers disagree
    Interestingly I raised a number of questions for CBDunkerson, Composer99 and DSL to answer but they have chosen not to respond. While I suspect that KR and I disagree on many things I would comment again that at least his comments are well and politely made in contrast to some others. This approach, of reasoned argument well put, is completely necessary for a truly scientific approach, which recognises differences of opinion and weighs up evidence in a calm manner. My replies to his points are: 1. I completely agree with his comment on cherry picking, although I think it is unfair to say that this is solely a skeptic tendency. In many ways that was one of the points of my comments on this article. 2. I would also agree completely with the comment on ocean heat content. But surely to measure this we use a measure of temperature first, in order to calculate the heat content. Would it not have been much simpler if the authoress of this article had just shown us ocean temperature in the first place, when it is warming that we are discussing, rather than putting it in another less obvious form which also makes it impossible for us to judge by how much the oceans have warmed? 3. I note there is no comment on ice cover or sea level. Does KR agree with me that if we are debating whether or not the world has warmed, it is very odd to use these measures as a proxy for temperature when we could use the temperature record itself? 4. I have not pooh-poohed the satellite readings, indeed I think they are highly relevant as they are part of the subject we are discussing, the temperature. My point is that they do not support the global warming view, certainly not in its most alarming form. 5. I would agree that the human eye is extremely good at finding patterns, often incorrectly. But it is not me that seeks to do so. The authoress of this article claims to see a warming pattern. I do not. 6. I make no comment here about long term statistics etc. because the article has chosen to focus on short term statistics and the claim is made that these support the global warming hypothesis. My point is that you can equally interpret the statistics in another and opposite way. Kevin C comments that the reason for not just looking at temperature is that temperature is only a very crude measure of energy. But this is no excuse for using even cruder measures, such as ice cover and sea level, which may move totally independently of average global temperature.
  2. Measurements show Earth heating up, think tanks & newspapers disagree
    I do not belly-laugh at the SkS blogs or comments often. But I did today. Great relief. May I be equally serious ... There seems to be a crocodile invested river in India which carries the notice: "Swimming forbidden. Survivors will be prosecuted" Can anyone rework this to apply to denialists?
  3. Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate
    "No "skeptic" site does anything like this" Actually CO2Science does reference papers - but obviously in the sure confidence that the "skeptic" is not going to actually check since the papers often seem to state a diametrically different opinion to what CO2"science" says they do.
  4. Climate change policy: Oil's tipping point has passed
    I know China imports coking coal but it has a hell of a lot of thermal coal. Furthermore as price goes up, there are very large estimate resources that could be upgraded to reserves as they become economic. Praying that we will run out of coal before seriously damaging climate doesnt isnt prudent policy. The best chance for not extracting those coals would be an alternative cheaper energy source.
  5. Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate
    Elsa@14 A quick look around the interweb reveals the following: Phil Jones - BA Environmental Sciences - Lancaster MSc --- Newcastle (UK) PhD Hydrology - Newcastle (UK) Sounds science like to me. What do you believe someone needs to create a temperature series? And has not Muller recently produced a very similar series?
  6. Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate
    william, sadly a large percentage of climate deniers can and do deny all of those things. Indeed, denying AGW is just a continuation of much deeper rooted delusions. The people who insist 'peak oil is a myth' are a case in point... consumption of a finite resource won't eventually peak and then decline? It is sheer insanity, but they passionately believe it.
  7. Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate
    Elsa, the letter of reply printed here is just that, a letter. If you want an item-by-item scientific response to each of the unsubstantiated assertions made in the first letter then look at the science. An easy way to do so is to click on "Arguments" in the top menu bar. The Intermediate and Advanced versions of each rebuttal include links to the relevant papers in the scientific literature. No "skeptic" site does anything like this. Now ask yourself why.
  8. Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate
    What a gem:
    I am grateful to DSL for pointing me in the direction of a number of interactive sites with temperature data. I had raised the question of temperature over the last 10 years so that is what I searched for (2001 to 2011, global mean land temperature). The result gives a graph with a series of fluctuations and a trend line that is almost completely flat. Unfortunately I cannot seem to copy and paste it into here but insofar as it shows anything about trends it is not supportive of the view that the world got warmer (or cooler) in this period.
    Of course, this only make sense if you ignore ocean temperature increases & ice melt and cherry-pick your ten or eleven year period. It's not like we have another comment by elsa on another post here at Skeptical Science actually suggesting we ignore other indicators of warming such as increases in ocean heat content or increases in ice melt. Oh, wait... we do.
  9. Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate
    Let's take our eye off the right hand and concentrate on what the left hand is doing. They don't believe in anthropogenic climate change. Fine. Even if they can deny climate change evidence, they can't have their heads so far in the sand that they don't recognize the reality of peak oil, of coal fired power stations spewing out masses of pollution, of the destruction the west is causing to the environment and society of oil rich countries, of the number of our own and their young people that are killed in energy wars, of the money we spend on oil coming back to buy up main street, wall street, air ports and sea ports - making us tenants in our own countries. To the Denyers. "Forget climate change if you must". Simply look at our own short and long term interests. http://mtkass.blogspot.com/2010/10/forget-climate-change.html
  10. Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate
    elsa - You have made a number of claims based upon 10 year trends. While 10 trends are (currently) low, do they mean anything? No. Before making any more such claims, I would suggest you read the thread on Separating signal and noise in climate warming, in particular the referenced Santer 2011 paper. Given the noise and variation (not the same thing, mind you, see Foster and Rahmstorf 2011) it requires 17 years of data to separate any significant trend from the noise. So - what do we see with 17 years of data? You see this plot (linear trends from raw data, which was then smoothed with 60 month running mean for clarity). Showing trends with slopes of 0.156, 0.106, 0.081, and 0.149 C per decade - not even close to flat. Your '10 year trends' are cherry-picking. I do not know if you are simply unaware of proper statistical treatment in the presence of noise (if so, follow the links), or you are aware and and hence are trolling - but such short time periods don't establish anything about what's happening in the climate.
  11. Measurements show Earth heating up, think tanks & newspapers disagree
    I am hoping this will not be seen as political but, having made having made a thorough review of GWPF pronouncemnents of recent years for my MA degree, I decided that the it would be more appropriate to call it the "Global Wonky Policy Foundation". See http://lackofenvironment.wordpress.com/category/global-warming-policy-foundation/
  12. Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate
    In the true spirit of the "butwhattabout" brigade, the discussion has again been hijacked by a mysterious claim of significance in a phony 10-year flatline (check your residiuals on that flatline claim, Sparky). It doesn't work for 6 or 12, Nature is not a decadal digital creature, but somehow someone has swamped another thread with claims that it is a definitive issue. It isn't. It's a trick from the bag of make-believer beans. The true significance is in the 12-month run from June 2009-June 2010 setting the complete all-time 12-month running period in the historical records (even higher with the new HadCrut). The true significance is the 10-foot thick layer of freshwater in the Beaufort Gyre. The rest is 'lies, damned lies, and statistics'.
  13. Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate
    pbjamm: You are right - it does not meet my own criteria, but unfortunately I was unable to cpoy and paste the graph onto here, so I had no alternative but to leave it out.
  14. Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate
    At the same time, take into account that solar input has been "unusually low" for the past half decade.
  15. Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate
    Elsa, my point with the links was that you can pick whatever trend you want for the short run. Take a broader view. Find fault with this analysis.
  16. Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate
    Hmmm, ok that link was wrong. Gotta take beginning of year vs end of year into account; Past 10 years
  17. Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate
    elsa@34 You have asserted a fact (The result gives a graph with a series of fluctuations and a trend line that is almost completely flat) without providing any reference to your source. In previous statements you were concerned with the lack of science content in the rebutal letter. Does your assertion meet your own standard of science content? I am not saying that you are wrong about the graph, jsut that you have provided nothing at all to back up your claim.
  18. Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate
    Last I checked, 2001 to 2011 was 11 years. Not 10. Instructions for including links to pages / images can be found by clicking the link reading 'Click for tips on posting images or hyperlinks' at the bottom of the comments box. Ten years with trend
  19. Dikran Marsupial at 04:16 AM on 3 February 2012
    Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate
    elsa be aware that looking at temperature trends over a timescale as short as a decade is statistically meaningless - the data is too noisy on this scale to expect to get a statistically significant trend whether it is actually warming or not. The only reason that anyone is discussing the trend over the last decade is because it suits the skeptic position, provided you forget about what we have learned about statistics over the last century or so.
  20. Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate
    #34: 2011 saw one of the strongest La Ninas since the 50's. La Ninas lower the measured surface temperature significantly. It will increase once we hit ENSO neutral conditions, and once the next El Nino hits, we will likely see a new global average temperature record, just like we saw in 2010, despite the lowest solar activity in more than 100 years.
  21. Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate
    Research shows that more than 97% of scientists actively publishing in the field agree that climate change is real and human caused. He means climatologists actively publishing. For 'scientists actively publishing' the number is closer to 90%.
  22. Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate
    I am grateful to DSL for pointing me in the direction of a number of interactive sites with temperature data. I had raised the question of temperature over the last 10 years so that is what I searched for (2001 to 2011, global mean land temperature). The result gives a graph with a series of fluctuations and a trend line that is almost completely flat. Unfortunately I cannot seem to copy and paste it into here but insofar as it shows anything about trends it is not supportive of the view that the world got warmer (or cooler) in this period.
  23. Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate
    @andylee - The media's job is deliver news to its constituency, and become profitable by selling sympathetic advertising. They are bound by the legal statutes. After that, their business is selling, not telling. The media has done more to sell this controversy than all the blogs and think-tanks put together. Right now, anti-science syndrome and anti-intelligence disorder ... sells.
  24. Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate
    elsa... I also find with a little searching that Dr Jones is an "ISI highly cited researcher." This is a highly coveted distinction few scientists achieve.
  25. Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate
    CBD#25: "there can be a 'debate' about ... " There is considerable overlap among those who hold the extremist positions in those 'debates' and those who buy the tripe that Mr. Murdoch peddles. "Sunday morning news shows ... are less likely to degenerate into people shouting at each other," said Cassino. "Viewers pick up more information from this sort of calm discussion than from other formats. Unfortunately, these shows have a much smaller audience than the shouters."
  26. Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate
    Elsa, It's odd that despite your complaints about the lack of hard scientific evidence in this letter, your comments here rely heavily on opinion, "gut instinct," hand-waving, innuendo and slander. In short, you present plenty of "views." But facts? Not so much. It's also odd that despite your complaints about the civility of individual commenters, you seem to have no problem accusing scientists you disagree with of incompetence or worse. That doesn't seem very civil to me. If you don't want to be seen as a tone-tolling hypocrite, perhaps you should try living up to your own high standards. Also, demanding "real data" on the Internet's best self-service portal for exactly that makes you seem kind of...well, lazy. The literature supporting AGW is voluminous and goes back more than a century. Ultimately, the only person who can get you to understand this literature is you. But to do this, you'll need to put aside a few pet assumptions and develop some humility. Unfortunately, it seems you'd prefer to spend your time searching Phil Jones' background for reasons to dismiss him. Again, that's not scientific. It's also not particularly civil. Or ethical.
  27. Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate
    elsa... "Phil Jones is one I have looked at in particular and it seems to me he has very little in the way of a proper scientific background..." Really? Is that so? Well a quick google scholar search tells me that Dr Jones has something in the neighborhood of 150 published peer-reviewed papers on various topics on climate change. How many do you have?
  28. Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate
    In an ideal world, the media should act as a bridge to translate evidence and inform their readers responsibly and impartially, who would then digest it and collectively modify their behaviour to live sustainably. This to me is called common-sense. However, it is a rude shock to me that the world does not in fact work this way. Instead, the truth is smothered and distorted by dishonourable people for many reasons, and the vitriol and lies spouted by the far right in comments sections and on youtube is just shocking. Thanks to the Net and to sites such as this one, we can bypass the mainstream media and get close to the evidence, but it requires above average intelligence and mental skill to make sense of everything. The majority of people perhaps just don't know or care enough to find out things for themselves, and instead are content to form opinions based on a constant drip of ubiquitous background propaganda. Once a belief set is formed, it seems that it sticks through hell or high water (pun intended!) If the media can't or won't do their job to help educate Humanity and pull together, then what will? A direct strike by a Category 6 hurricane on the Whitehouse? People having to swim to work? Who or what is driving the insanity of denialism, and why? Is it really so unacceptable to transform the way we live to make a better world to live in, or does it really matter if we are the last generations to enjoy our planet?
  29. The Latest Denialist Plea for Climate Change Inaction
    Phlia: You can bet your sweet bippy that the many of the arguments advanced by the Climate Denial Spin Machine have undergone testing in Focus Groups. The Spin Machine has virtually unlimited funds at its disposal.
  30. Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate
    NYJ and elsa - I can tell you from personal experience that it takes a whole lot more time and effort to debunk a Gish Gallop of myths than it does to create one. Writing "global warming stopped 10 years ago" takes about 5 seconds and no intellectual effort whatsoever. Debunking that one-sentence myth can take several hours and paragraphs, depending on how thorough you want to be. In short, the scientists responding to the 'skeptic' letter were under no obligation to put any more effort into their response. The 'skeptic' letter was unsubstantiated nonsense myths, so the response really doesn't require anything more than pointing out the myths are just that - myths. If you want some detail as to why the myths are wrong, see the Skeptical Science debunking of the WSJ letter.
  31. The Latest Denialist Plea for Climate Change Inaction
    Dana’s excellent article continues to garner attention by other pro-science writers. For example: “Top sites Media Matters* and Skeptical Science quickly counter-argued the nonsense put forth in the WSJ piece with some thoughtful pieces looking at the simple facts of the matter and the bias of the op-ed contributors.” Source: “WSJ Non-Climate-Science Propaganda Eviscerated by Climate Science Facts” by Zachary Sahan, Planetsave, Feb 1, 2012 *The Media Matters article, “The Journal Hires Dentists To Do Heart Surgery” can be accessed here.
  32. Measurements show Earth heating up, think tanks & newspapers disagree
    MarkR: "CO2 forcing should also rise linearly." To be complete, that does not translate to Linear Warming over the long run.
  33. Measurements show Earth heating up, think tanks & newspapers disagree
    #32 victull: at the region we're looking at, the Stefan-Boltzmann response is pretty close to linear. From 273 K up to 300 K, a linear fit explains most of the variance, R^2 is over 0.99. One way is to look at ΔF/ΔT (F = flux [W m-2]) for known changes in flux. If you fit a linear trend based on the change from 273-274 K, then expand that out for 5 K of warming your answer is only ~2% smaller than the real change predicted by S-B. Pretty close to linear! CO2 is expected to rise at least exponentially in the long run, so the CO2 forcing should also rise linearly.
  34. Measurements show Earth heating up, think tanks & newspapers disagree
    elsa - If I was unclear in my previous comment, my apologies, although I believe it's rather straightforward. Cherry-picking data - particularly short term data (as 'skeptics' do) - is statistically unsupportable, and may be a sign of a lack of statistics background, confirmation bias, or an intent to distort the issue for others. Ocean heat content is a temperature measure, and even by your criteria is clearly something to pay attention to. Ice cover, glacial melting, sea level rise and others are interplays with temperature and other things (precipitation, land run-off), but those influences are estimable, and hence estimates of (and the tracks of) temperature are determinable from them. As to satellite measures, which you also pooh-pooh - the trend lines you seem to dislike are the statistics of those measures, and if you for some reason don't approve of statistics, I fail to see how you are discussing science or evidence. The human eye is extremely good at finding patterns, often incorrectly - the 'cost' of mistakenly seeing a bear in the woods is trivial compared to the cost of not not seeing a bear that is actually there, and we tend to a lot of pattern false positives. Statistical analysis helps overcome the biases of the 'eyecrometer'. --- Long term temperature statistics, cryosphere measurements, ocean heat content and level - all of the evidence agrees, all supports the observation of ongoing climate change and global warming. The only way to not see this in the data is to, in fact, cherry-pick it, look at insignificant short terms or subsets of the data, such as: Yet we can see that in 2008 the temperature was no higher than it had been 10 years earlier.. You have, in that very statement, supported the thesis of the thread - that cherry-picking is required in order to deny the full body of the evidence.
  35. wonderful world at 01:49 AM on 3 February 2012
    Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate
    @greencooling I agree with most of what you said but calling bolt a 'convicted racist' isn't entirely right, there was a civil case. Considering the findings I am surprised he isn't in a criminal court. The judge that found against bolt in the case of eatock vs. bolt commented that he had been dishonest and wrote that bolt had made ommissions and written untruths and distortions, thats just to start with. Bolts dishonesty regarding his reporting on climate change may not be as offensive but it certainly follows a trend. Anybody interested look up Eatock vs. Bolt
  36. Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate
    muoncounter wrote: "Debate? One side has a full record of evidence, the other side has a cherry-picked few years." We now live in a world where there can be a 'debate' about whether the universe is more than 6000 years old, whether Barrack Obama is a Kenyan born secret muslim, and/or whether Rupert Murdoch 'news' outlets are biased. People whose entire worldview is founded on lies and delusion can 'debate' anything... and never lose, because the facts disproving their position don't exist in their reality.
  37. Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate
    elsa: "The facts that seem under debate here are whether or not there has been warming in the last 10 years or so. That is something on which it would be interesting to see some real data" Ok, elsa, look at the simple linear temperature trend since 1997, 1998, and 1999 in GISS, HadCru, RSS, and UAH. These are generated from the data. As far as Phil Jones goes, data is withheld all the time in many areas of science. I seriously doubt if most of those who have been critical of Jones would be any less critical--or believe what he has to say any more--if the data had been wide open from day one. Some folks have entrenched but evidence-free beliefs about the way things are. It's very difficult to loosen up this entrenchment (and that's my professional opinion as an educator). It's even worse when someone invests themselves publicly in a belief. "I would completely agree with your comment about evidence, unfortunately there is none in this letter. That is one of the reasons that I am critical of it." And are you just as critical of the letter that preceded it? If not, I'd have to question your motivations. You point to Watson as well and tell us that we learn nothing from his signature. Not true. Watson, you claim, has been critical of the IPCC in the past, but here he signs Trenberth's letter that, in part, claims, "It would be an act of recklessness for any political leader to disregard the weight of evidence and ignore the enormous risks that climate change clearly poses." Is Watson an idiot for not reading what he signs his name to, or does he now agree with Trenberth that the situation is serious? We actually learn quite a bit from Watson's signature (if signatures are a meaningful way of determining truth for you).
  38. Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate
    @Elsa #14 "Phil Jones is one I have looked at in particular and it seems to me he has very little in the way of a proper scientific background" This and the rest of your post is ....what shall i say....a little bit ridiculous? Please have a look at this and take your time to read and understand the publications where Phil Jones has participated. http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/pubs/byauthor/jones_pd.htm
  39. Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate
    elsa, if you're looking for data, peruse the threads in this site and examine the links to the scientific literature contained therein. Above all, please refrain from the tired, creationist-style game of equating denialist handwaving (the WSJ letter by Lindzen et al) with statements backed by solid empirical support (the reply letter posted in this OP).
  40. Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate
    For anyone who thinks that the IPCC has been exaggerating the possible impacts of warming, I suggest a long hard look at this collection of graphs showing Arctic sea ice extent, area and volume. In particular, look at the fifth line of graphs. Comparing actual measurements of ice extent against a background of the modelled projections. Anyone who wants to accuse modellers of having overstated expected impacts of warming must qualify their statements or accusations with a standard rider "Well, of course, except for Arctic ice."
  41. Measurements show Earth heating up, think tanks & newspapers disagree
    Kevin C @30 The issue is the real magnitude of the warming imbalance and at what equilibrium temperature it will close. CERES gives a positive imbalance but what is its magnitude? CO2 effect is logarithmic and other feedbacks have unknown trajectories. Heat loss via Stefan Boltzmann is exponential (with absolute Temperature to the fourth power).
  42. Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate
    elsa#14: "The facts that seem under debate here are whether or not there has been warming in the last 10 years or so." Debate? One side has a full record of evidence, the other side has a cherry-picked few years. One side has a trend lasting many years, the other side has 'if we connect these two points, the trend is down.' One side has measures with statistical significance, the other has 'because we say so.' That's not a debate, its an avalanche. "That is something on which it would be interesting to see some real data" Try the 'most used climate myths' on this website. There are a number of 'warming stopped in ___ ' threads. Or look at the BEST threads. All are just rife with real data. While you're at it, consider Arctic ice melt and world glacier mass loss; explain how these symptoms can possibly be happening if there's been no warming.
  43. Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate
    A couple things. First, my understanding is that this letter was not "printed" but only appeared on-line. The original denier piece was actually printed. WSJ is one of the few papers left where the print version actually is widely read. Perhaps someone with access to the printed copy can verify this. Second, skept.fr @16 wrote "Op-eds in WSJ are not a scientific debate." This is 100 percent true, but we all know that the original op-ed will be endlessly quoted and cited by deniers in the coming months if not years for consumption by the general public and policy elites as "evidence."
  44. Measurements show Earth heating up, think tanks & newspapers disagree
    Composer99 and Daniel Bailey. Human-caused climate change denialists are using the latest generation of the technology - the Koch-eyecrometer. It has negative resolution, but that doesn't matter... it's associated wet-wear has less computational capacity than a Commodore 64, so the requirement for discrimination has always been moot.
  45. Measurements show Earth heating up, think tanks & newspapers disagree
    Elsa: The reason for not just looking at temperature is that temperature is only a very crude measure of energy. The same amount of energy required to raise the temperature of the whole of the Earth's oceans by 0.1 degree, would raise the temperature of the Earth's atmosphere by 100 degrees, because the heat capacity of water is so much greater than that of air. The problem we are facing is that we have changed the earth's energy balance - more energy is coming in than going out. The size of that change is the critical factor. The energy balance at the top of the atmosphere has remained positive over the whole of the last decade, as evidenced by both the CERES satellite data and the rising total heat content of the Earth system. In other words the earth is still accumulating energy. (The commonly used term is 'warming' - if you think that term is misleading, feel free to stick to energy.) In the short term, depending on where the energy goes, it can have very different effects in terms of temperatures, but over the long term the extra energy will permeate the whole system (or worse, slosh about). So the energy is the more fundamental measure.
  46. Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate
    elsa@14 A view is a perspective. The broader one's view the better the perspective. So how does one broaden the view? Read the published scientific literature...most of it is accessible if not easily understood. And if not places like this will give a "heads up" as to to what is happening with regards to our current understanding rather that what we knew 10 years ago. Reality unfolds much faster than we can grasp let alone manage. A letter to WJS from "either side" cannot begin to touch the reality of the situation. With regards to the IPCC report of 2007 I am pessimistic and skeptical. I hope to be proven wrong...after all a pessimist is never disappointed..either I was right or if I was wrong all the better.
  47. Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate
    Chriskoz@6 Andrew Bolt's primary affiliation is with Rupert Murdoch (is that the truth or was your news limited?), and has distinguished himself as a purveyor of far right propaganda and a convicted rascist. He's very well known for these views here, yet sadly does appear on the ABC Insiders show, and with Australia's richest person, mining magnate and Monckton fan Gina Reinhart, increasing her stake in Fairfax (publishers of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age) this week, progressive commentators are very concerned she is doing this precisely in order to have the likes of Bolt given a broader audience.... Gina also owns a big slice of channel 10 TV on which Andrew consequently hosts the "Bolt Report", but fortunately few Aussies are stupid enough to watch this and it does poorly in the ratings... Completely agree Bolt is paid to promote these views, and we should all be worried about the depth of the pockets that feed him and his ilk, but having truth on our side is needless to say a significant advantage.
  48. 2012 SkS Weekly Digest #4
    How long have you been a reader of SkS? Since September 2009. How did you become aware of its existence? Not sure but probably from a link within someone’s comment on another website, maybe at RealClimate. How many times a week do you visit the site? Daily, or sometimes more often on weekends. What issues would you like to discuss in future editions of the Weekly Digest? I spend a fair amount of my time countering anti-science arguments made by the Denialati on my national news site and occasionally elsewhere. What I look for here is concise arguments that I can use against their usual rhetoric. For example, your “Escalator” (SkepticsvRealistsv3.gif) has been immensely useful in this respect. I also appreciate your educational articles with links to peer-reviewed papers. I have invested 3000+ hours reading published climate literature and serious blogs such as this one over the past few years. I’ve also taken a physics, chemistry & climate course to help me understand this area of interest (it’s not my profession), but I still learn from SkS articles, especially those by Dana. I like the weekly “new research” article. I’ve found commenters’ links to various studies over the years very helpful too (my thx to them).
  49. Those who contribute the least greenhouse gases will be most impacted by climate change
    Comparisons of greenhouse gas per capita plays down the total greenhouse gas emissions of a country. It allows a high population growth as long as greenhouse gas per capita reduces, even if total greenhouse gasses increase considerably. Why is the comparison per capita and not per square kilometer? A country is responsible for managing all of its square kilometers in terms of sustainable population and greenhouse emissions. I know I am talking population levels and controls, but it needs to be done sometime. In 88 years Australia is projected to have 100 million people, and even with a small carbon footprint that is still a lot of emissions. If highly populated countries lncrease the carbon footprint , the total emissions are frightening.
  50. Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate
    #14 elsa : "Without an explanation all that we get is a sort of “’tis, ‘tisn’t” argument that is not really a debate." Op-eds in WSJ are not a scientific debate. Scientific debate occurs in scientific publications and workshops. For a recent example, Dessler 2011 have answered to Spencer and Braswell 2011 and Lindzen and Choi 2011. So, you must read these papers (with replies) and conclude which is the more convincing from a scientific point of view. Same is true for all domains of the climate observation and modelization.

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