Bytes and Blogs IV

BPSDB

• Lots of bad news
• Where we are, a summary
• Some Good news
• Denier Watch
• Some Debunking
• The solution

Lots of bad news

Tibetan glaciers rapidly melting speaks for itself in terms of ‘what’. The ‘why’ it matters is that a billion people from China to Afghanistan depend on the melt waters to feed themselves for at least part of the year. Factor in  “China’s crops at risk from massive erosion” “Over a third of China’s land is being scoured by serious erosion that is putting its crops and water supply a risk.”

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Evolution & Climate Deniers: The Redux Edition

I am reminded with some frequency that the term “Denier” is offensive. I am aware of that. Why does no one raise the question of whether the term is accurate? Shouldn’t that be the real question?

This question keeps coming up and in returning to it I will not simply be rehashing the same old arguments. Rather I hope to demonstrate that there are solid political reasons to use the term Denier when it is accurate and appropriate.

 It’s not that simple
 Leaving “skeptics” and “deniers”
 The politics of naming
 It’s an ugly word

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Paul Revere – Alarmist!

Paul Revere - Alarmist!

.BPSDB

What if climate change / global warning Deniers¹ (as opposed to doubters or skeptics) had been around in 1775? No, this is not a cheap way to try and cast climate change scientists as revolutionary heroes, but rather a serious way to reveal some truths about the Denier arguments.

What I have done below is take some of the popular Denier arguments and substitute an appropriate Revolutionary War reference. Have a look at them (compare to actual Denier myths)

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Skeptics Society debunks climate “skeptics” and other tales …

.BPSDB

• Climate “skeptics” get debunked on Skeptics Society site
• Gunter’s Gas
• Meme Watch: Carbon Black
• It’s not just length that matters
• A climate of change

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Climate “Skeptics” get debunked on Skeptics Society site

In what can only be described as delicious irony the Skeptics Society has published a debunking of  the ghastly Oregon Petition. The Oregon Petition is the source of the fraudulent claim that (variously) 32,000, 17,000 or 60,000 scientists reject climate science. Misleading by Petition Just What is the Consensus on Global Warming? looks at the petition as a petition with no reference to whether it’s scientific claims are valid or not. He  concludes:

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Bytes and Blogs III

Climate change has real impacts today

Greenfyre’s

• was right about “The data is all corrupt!” meme
• was right about Richard Keen
• has more on ‘the global warming has stopped’ meme
• has been following Hansen’s ferret
• wonders if the Denier’s will report these …

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Pandas, Polar Bears, and Penguins

There is no question that people are very interested in and concerned about species such as pandas, polar bears, penguins and similar species under threat from anthropogenic climate change.

Watching various social networking sites you can see articles about these species quickly become ‘popular’ as they are variously noted, dugg, hugged, buzzed, stumbled, etc (ie voted for by other members). At the same time articles about climate science, educating about climate change, and climate policy generally languish with little attention paid to them.

See the disconnect?

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‘Skeptic’ scientist is CENSORED! … or not.

The Denialosphere¹ is all atwitter (when isn’t it?).  Roy Spencer has had two papers rejected by Geophysical Research Letters. Marohasy has the basic non-story with a sensationalistic title “How To Censor a Climate Sceptic” and no mention of censorship in the actual post. No such problem in the rest of the Denialosphere.

The course is clear! Spencer must put the full paper, as submitted, and with the reviewers and editors comments on-line to reveal the gross perfidity and vile machinations of the GLR. There can be no other way but to reveal the rot of this pestilent conspiracy to the light of day! Expose the jackbooted thugs of the scientific kleptocracy to public opprobrium. Seriously, but more below.

A few points I’d like to discuss with reference to this:

• What are the facts
• It’s not censorship
• The realities of publishing research papers
• Spencer must vindicate himself (or try)
  

What are the facts?

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Bytes and Blogs II

The Coming Ice Age

Notes from the blogosphere

• New Denier¹ Memes
• One Dead Meme (we hope)
• More ‘Global Cooling’ debunked (and quantifying crackpots)
• Confusing the Global Warming Signal

New Denier Memes

1)  “We prevented the next ice age”

The Way Things Break barely got the prediction posted and the meme was already taking off.  This one springs from a new study that the earth was headed for a new ice age … in 10,000 years. Luckily climate change may save us.

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Mind prisons and prisms: CO2 lag and Global Warming

Mind prisons and prisms are ways of thinking, the mental models that we use to understand the world. They determine what we think of information by shaping how we think about it.

Mind Prisons are suffocating models that blind us, confining us to a single, often inaccurate perception of reality. A Mind Prison prevents us from understanding even though a situation fits patterns we already know well. Mind Prisons cue our thinking to distort what we think of the facts and not be open to recognizing more appropriate mental models.

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Bytes and Blogs I

Just a short note to share a few of the days finds.

Johnny Rook over a Climaticide Chronicles has what he aptly called “Stunning Photos of Retreating Glaciers.”

“Are changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born”

W.B. Yeats Easter 1916

Lord knows how I missed this one “The narrow temperature window that gave us modern human civilization” at Climate Progress, but it really is a “must read.”

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“Global Cooling” myth gets fried

The Pan is getting cooler ... really!

The climate change / global warming Denier “Global Cooling” myth just get’s more and more obviously ridiculous every day.

Just a week ago I blogged about the recent Denier spam fest about media reports of local cold snaps.  Several of the points I made then have gotten more empirical support since, so this is a quick update.

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Global Warming – Did You Know?

Good, fast paced visually exciting video with lots of information about the livestock industry’s impact on climate change.

At under four minutes this is high impact education that you can share in a lot of places. It is produced by MEATtheFACTS.org and you should link to them if you are going to direct people.

for ratexla 😉

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David Bellamy: victim! but of who?

David Bellamy

Botanist and environmentalist David Bellamy was a relatively successful broadcaster until 1994 when his broadcasting career tanked.  More recently he has been a climate change / global warming Denier who got some attention when some sloppy writing on his part led to a major new Denier myth.

Now we learn that Bellamy is the new Denier martyr because he was the victim of a vicious witch hunt by Enviro-Nazis Global Warming storm troopers. In the Daily Express where we are told “BBC SHUNNED ME FOR DENYING CLIMATE CHANGE.” In a nutshell, Bellamy was a “skeptic” so the BBC tossed him out.

Interesting. Just one or two problems with this story.

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The $500,000 Climate Carny Scam

Ultimate Global Warming Challenge

The Ultimate Global Warming Challenge! “$500,000 will be awarded to the first person to prove, in a scientific manner, that humans are causing harmful global warming.” That’s the challenge on Steven Milloy’s junkscience website. An easy $500,000 for someone, right? So why no takers?

The name Steven Milloy should be familiar as the former tobacco spinmeister mentioned in “Smoke and CO2: How to Spin Global Warming.” He is well known to climate rationalists as a major climate change / global warming Denier¹.

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Drinking the iced Kool-aid

Time series of area of perennial sea ice

According to recent posts in the Denialosphere¹ the Arctic ice is well on it’s way to a full recovery.

Here are a few examples, Anthony Watts Arctic sea ice continues rebound, Another Global Warming Hoax Deconstructed “a gigantic 30 per cent increase in Arctic sea ice coverage”,74 Years Since Oct Snowfalls – Deprogramming Global Warming “the Arctic ice extent was 30 per cent greater”, but the meme is hardly limited to them. Just fire up your favourite search engine to see how wide spread this Denier meme is.

One gets the impression that the Arctic can return to work any day now. Is that  what’s actually happening? Of course not, it’s the Denialosphere. I’ve blogged about their attempt to spin this one before, but let’s see what they are up to now.

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Evolution / Global Warming Deniers just don’t get it

Evolution is a hoax I tell you!

All too often we are “treated” to yet another story about some ‘study’ that has definitively refuted Evolution or Anthropogenic Climate Change. Generally the mere claim tells you with 99.99% certainty that the ‘study’ is wrong or grossly misrepresented.

The very idea that a single study could disprove either is improbable in the extreme. The naive belief that it could betrays a profound misunderstanding of science in general, and most particularly the science supporting both concepts. The popularity of these claims with their respective audiences tells us a lot about how little they understand what they are talking about.

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Global Warming is Over … Again

That’s right! The Denialosphere is all a twitter again as parts of the earth have been experiencing some

Global Cooling

record cold from London to Florida. Climate change is over! as long as you are willing to ignore reality in at least four ways.

So certain are they of this absurdity that Marc Morano was apparently willing to spend a significant portion of his life compiling 12 pages of irrelevant news stories. As a tribute to this waste of time Jennifer Morahasey has kindly published them as “News Reports for October Indicate Global Cooling.”

You will recall Morahasey has recently brightened our lives with such great comic pieces as the Denier Top Ten and even reprinted Lorne Gunter’s delusions of adequacy, so this promises to be good.

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