Climate Change – Mixed Media

BPSDB

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• The Bill
• Watts Up With Watts?
• Very disappointing
• State of the science 2009
• The Physics that we Know
• Climate Wars
• Global Warming Art
• Just for fun
• Dejas vu all over again

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This 4 1/2 minute movie can seem a bit dry and pedantic at first, but trust me, you’re being set up. Watch it right through to the end. The send up of our Western lifestyle and moral callousness is done superbly.

from GERMANWATCH

Watts Up With Watts?

The latest development: Global warming denier uses the DMCA to silence a critic

Well, the video must have been really on target — it stung Anthony Watts so badly that he initiated a DMCA “takedown” action and got the “Watts Up With Watts” video removed from youtube.com!

The latest Climate Denier Crock of the week takes  on Anthony Watts’ ‘Surface Station Record’ Denier meme …

Watts Up With Watts?

Here’s a link to the NOAA document mentioned, and the one for “Attributing physical and biological impacts to anthropogenic climate change.” A good companion video is  “The “Urban Heat Island” Crock”

This has been added to the Climate Denial Crock of the Week page.

Very disappointing

I have been a major fan of potholer54‘s climate change videos and have promoted them here before, but his latest effort is  well … really bad.

The premise is that he is debunking two badly misleading popular videos about climate change. The problem is that he picks “An Inconvenient Truth” and the Great Global Warming Swindle.”

Two serious criticisms:

1. His set up is that he presents them as more or less equally misleading.
2. He is far more misleading than he accuses Gore of being.

In regard to 1), the fact is that The Swindle is an outrageous abomination filled with distortions, misrepresentations, and outright lies (see here). The Ofcom complaint documenting the flaws in the Swindle runs 176 pages.

In contrast, Gore’s movie has a few minor errors of no particular consequence, as assessed by climate scientists (see Al Gore’s movie and Convenient Untruths).

With regard to 2), his principle beef with “Inconvenient Truth” is that Gore misleads to the audience with respect to potential sea level rise. Without actually documenting Gore making any claim that this will happen soon, he goes on to “debunk” the idea that it will happen soon.

Granted the context of Gore’s statement in the movie makes misunderstanding possible, but the suggestion that Gore is close to lying is false.

Gore correctly asserted that melting of Greenland or the West Antarctic ice sheet would raise sea levels 20ft (6 meters). In the movie, no timescale for that was specified, Convenient Untruths

In fact this false claim about Gore and sea level is debunked in the Climate Denier Crock of the Week: All Wet about Sea Level rise.

I suspect that what Potholer54is doing is trying to present a credible version of the Fallacyof the Middle Ground, ie the notion that given two arguments the truth must lie in the middle. While the suggestion has a warm, fuzzy feel it is simple to illustrate it’s flaw.

• Argument #1: 2+2= 4
• Argumment #2: 2+2=3
• Fallacy of the Middle Ground: the correct answer must be 3.5

The only recommendation I can make about Climate Change: Gore vs. Durkin is that Potholer54 abandon the Middle Ground Fallacy and stick to the objective facts. Until then both All Wet about Sea Level rise and Solar Schmolar are better videos about “The Inconvenient Truth” and “The Swindle” respectively.

State of the science 2009

This is an hour long talk by Real Climate contributor Stefan Rahmstorf (Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research) at the Chaos Communication Conference in Berlin, Dec 30, 2008.

Climate change – State of the science 2009: 507 MB bitorrent download at piratebay (legal I assume).

Some of the Denier memes that he covers in the talk include:

• How do we know the earth’s average temperature
• What caused and what ended the ice ages, as well as quite a bit more on past climate change
• How do we know humans are causing it
• How other GHGs are accounted for
• Why there is a CO2 & warming lags
• How actually the models work very well
• Some basic history of climate science
• The ice has recovered to 1979 levels
• Annual variability (weather vs climate)
• Sea level rise
• Extreme weather and tropical storms
• Who’s causing it (by nation)(ie debunks the India/China bashing)
  lag
• Solar influences (and sunspots)

They address so many of the Denier talking points clearly, succinctly, and in a form more people are willing to digest. What would be totally awesome is if someone who had the skills (presuming it is legal) could edit it down to the clips that answer those questions, and then post them around the net (appropriately titled).

The Physics that we Know

Edge has a video of an “Conversation” (interview? informal talk?)  on Climate Modeling with Real Climate‘s Gavin A. Schmidt.

“There is a simple way to produce a perfect model of our climate that will predict the weather with 100% accuracy. First, start with a universe that is exactly like ours; then wait 13 billion years.

But if you want something useful right now, if you want to construct a means of taking the knowledge that we have and use it to predict future climate, you build computer simulations.”

THE PHYSICS THAT WE KNOW: A Conversation With Gavin Schmidt

Warning: only about 60% of the inteview is on the video, and it is the far more political 40% that is missing. Thankfully the full text is given on the page.

Once the video is finished you can just pick it up in the text version at “The problem is that most of the modeling groups don’t do these kinds of experiments.” a little more than half way down the page.

Climate Wars

Gwynne Dyer’s excellent Ideas series talks “Climate Wars” which I spoke of earlier are available for download on Gwynne Dyer‘s homepage.

Global Warming Art

I’m being a little obtuse in taking the name of the site  Global Warming Art literally, but bear with me for a moment.

The site’s purpose is to share high quality images for use in climate education (“Attention Bloggers, sale in aisle #3). It has not been updated recently and may or may not be a decaying resource. It still has some useful images, and perhaps with a little support it will become active again.

Regardless, I was taken by the site’s name and tried looking at the images as art. It was an interesting exercise … try it.

Just for fun

Ran into this one on youtube and it turned out to be much more delightful than I expected, but I’ll leave the description to Kevin Grandia:

“But Powershift Australia held an event today that brings together the two in what I can only call a celebration of humanity and the beauty we can create with a serious message about the fate of our planet.”  If there was an Oscar for Activism Powershift AU should win it | AlterNet

Power Shift Sydney Flash-dance

Dejas vu all over again …

The recent Republican Idiotfest around the bogus EPA “Carbongate” reminded me of this one:

BILL MAHER: Moronic Conservative Response to Global Warming Science

And Canada’s on-going behaviour as a climate troglodite at the G-8 reminded me of this clip parodying former Australian Howard. Dated, but could be any of many sitting politicians, including many in the Canadian Government:

Clarke and Dawe on climate change

There has been a 50 percent increase in the number of unusually warm nights, and nights with
temperatures that would have fallen into the top tenth percentile during the 1950’s now fall into the top
fifteenth percentile. Almost all of this increase has happened since 1975.   Earth Gauge

We give our consent every moment that we do not resist.

Denier “Challenge” aka Deathwatch Update: Day 261 … still no evidence.

Enjoy 🙂

IMAGE CREDITS:

Mixed media transfer by Matt Callow

Comment Policy

Comments that are not relevant to the post that they appear under or the evolving discussion will simply be deleted, as will links to Denier spam known to be scientific gibberish

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