2012 SkS Weekly Digest #42

SkS Highlights

Not content to debunk false assertions made by climate deniers, Dana and the SkS team decided to conduct a pre-emptive strike and pre-bunk a story we knew would be eventually be written by someone in Deniersville. The result is Misleading Daily Mail Article Pre-Bunked by Nuccitelli et al. (2012).  Needless to say, it has drawn a considerable number of comments during the course of the past week. 

Toon of the Week

2012 Toon 42

What say you?

Over the past couple of days, SkS moved its website to a new host server. Did you experience any difficulties during the transition?

Quote of the Week

"The performance by developed countries in activating short-term financial commitments at the Copenhagen Climate Conference can only be described as extremely disappointing. This can only be defined that their action has failed the new additional test,"

Prime Minister Federal Republic of Ethiopia, Mr Hailemariam Dessalegn adressing the second annual conference on Climate Change and Development in Africa.

Source: Africa: Countries Asked to Take Climate Change Seriously, All Africa, Oct 20, 2012

Rebuttal Article Updates

Article: How much is sea level rising?

A new introductoy paragraph for both the Basic and the Intermediate versions of this article was authored by Dana The new paragraph is: 

Gavin Schmidt investigated the source of the specific claim that tide gauges on islands in the Pacific Ocean show no sea level rise, and found that the data show a rising sea level trend at every single station. But what about global sea level rise?

This change was posted on Oct 16, 2012.

Database Updates

The Hadley Centre of the UK Meteorological Office has updated the current version of its temperature record, HadCRUT4, to include data up to the present. Updates to the HadCRUT4, UAH, and BEST data have now been incorporated into the SkS Temperature Trend Calculator.

The Week in Review 

Coming Soon

SkS in the News

This was a heavy week of SkS in the news.

Dana's Misleading Daily Mail Article Pre-Bunked by Nuccitelli et al. (2012) was re-posted by The Guardian, Newsvine, Sea Monster, and Environment Guru, Tweeted by George Monbiot, and was highlighted by Carbon Brief as one of the best debunkings of the Mail article.

A number of articles debunking the Mail piece used SkS graphics - at Climate Progress, Discovery News, Weather Underground, Carbon Brief, Media Matters, CurrentNow Public, and ZME Science.

John Cook's A comprehensive review of research into misinformation was summarized by Zachary Shahan at CleanTechnica.

Skeptical Science was also endorsed by Maggie Koerth-Baker at BoingBoing.

SkS Spotlights

The Yale Project on Climate Change Communication:

  1. Conducts original research on public climate change awareness, attitudes, risk perceptions, policy support, and behavior;
  2. Designs and tests new strategies to engage the public in climate science and solutions;
  3. Empowers educators and communicators with the knowledge and tools to more effectively engage their audiences.

The Yale Project on Climate Change Communication (originally the Yale Project on Climate Change) grew out of a groundbreaking conference on “Americans and Climate Change” that the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies convened in 2005 in Aspen, CO. The conclusions and recommendations from the conference are available online in the conference report "Americans and Climate Change: Closing the gap between science and action."

Related efforts beyond climate per se involve catalyzing inspiring visions of a sustainable world and practical strategies to achieve them via our Visions of a Sustainable World project.

Posted by John Hartz on Monday, 22 October, 2012


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