2014 SkS Weekly Digest #9

SkS Highlights

Dana's The epidemic of climate science false balance in the media garnered the most comments of the articles posted on SkS during the past week. Bob Lacatena's A Hack by Any Other Name — Part 2 drew the second highest number of comments.  Global warming continues, but volcanoes are slowing down the warming of the atmosphere by John Abraham attracted the thrid highest. 

Toon of the Week

 2014 Toon 9

   h/t to I Heart Climate Scientists.

Quote of the Week

"The impacts of climate change that have already occurred are very evident, they're widespread, they have consequences," Chris Field, a professor in the Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University and the co-chair of the IPCC working group drafting the report, said in a meeting with reporters Monday.

Climate Change 'Very Evident,' So Let's Deal With It, World Panel Says by Kate Shepard, The Huffington Post, Feb 24, 2014 

SkS in the News

CNN's Carol Costello begins her broadcast segment, Why are we still debating climate change? with:

There is no debate.  

Climate change is real. And, yes, we are, in part, to blame.

There is a 97% consensus among scientific experts that humans are causing global warming. Ninety-seven percent!

The link is to Dana Nucciteli's article, Survey finds 97% of climate science papers agree warming is man-made posted on Climate Consensus-the 97% hosted by The Guardian.

In his Comment is Free/The Guardian blog post, Australia’s most effective pseudoscience: climate change denial, Ketan Joshi links to the peer reviewed paper, Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature by Cook et al posted on the Environmental Research Letters (ERL) website. The Consensus Project (TCP) is set forth in this paper.

Joshi also embeds and links to the SkS graphic, The Consensus Gap, created by John Cook.

David Appell concludes his Qurak Soup blog post, Dr. Patrick Moore Just Misled Congress with a link to the SkS article, CO2 was higher in the late Ordovician.

In his Op-Ed, The Myths of Charles Krauthammer: The Drinking Game, posted on Live Science, Michael Mann links to Dana's SkS article, Nazis, shoddy science, and the climate contrarian credibility gap.

Phil Plait links to a previous article about the TCP in his Bad Astronomy/Slate post, Climate Change Deniers Lose Their Coo. He also refers readers to the Climate Consensus - the 97% blog by SkS contributors, Dana Nuccitelli and John Abraham, that is hiosted on The Guardian. 

John Cook's article, ‘It’s been hot before’: faulty logic skews the climate debate, originally posted on The Conversation was reposted on the blog site, Hermit's Holler.The article includes Cook's original toon:

John Cook's Cartoon: People died of cancer before cigarettes were invented.

Graahm Readfearn links to a previous article about the TCP in his Planet OZ/Guardian post, Australia's renewables adviser scrapes the bottom of the climate denialist barrel  and to the SkS article, Guest post: scrutinising the 31,000 scientists in the OISM Petition Project

In his Care2 post, Green Your Life with 5 Environmental Apps for Your Phone, Kevin Matthews states:

I don’t know whether it’s more preposterous that people continue to deny climate change, or  that I’ve somehow maintained friendships with some of these people.  Frustratingly, in social situations where people dismiss global warming, I sometimes  get too flustered to offer up a good argument. Thankfully, Skeptical Science is a useful tool for  dismantling just about any argument a denier can offer up. With this app, I can  find all of the relevant science and counterpoints at my fingertips to hopefully  win over a skeptic… or failing that, at least I won’t sound like an idiot. 

SkS Spotlights 

The Global Legislators Organisation (GLOBE International) is an international organisation comprising national parliamentarians from over 80 countries committed to developing and overseeing the implementation of laws in pursuit of sustainable development.

On Feb 27, GLOBE International released the 4th edition of the GLOBE Climate Legislation Study – produced in partnership with the Grantham Research Institute at the London School of Economics.

SkS Week in Review 

Next Week on SkS

Posted by John Hartz on Sunday, 2 March, 2014


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