Arguments
Explaining climate change science & rebutting global warming misinformation
Scientific skepticism is healthy. Scientists should always challenge themselves to improve their understanding. Yet this isn't what happens with climate change denial. Skeptics vigorously criticise any evidence that supports man-made global warming and yet embrace any argument, op-ed, blog or study that purports to refute global warming. This website gets skeptical about global warming skepticism. Do their arguments have any scientific basis? What does the peer reviewed scientific literature say?
Q&A: Is Antarctica gaining or losing ice?
Posted on 4 November 2015 by Guest Author
This is a re-post from Robert McSweeney at Carbon Brief dealing with recent confusion over a paper claiming Antarctic land ice gains up to 2008
A new study from scientists at NASA has whipped up a storm in the media by claiming that gains in East Antarctica ice have been outweighing losses in the West Antarctic and the Antarctic Peninsula.
The research has been covered widely by newspapers and websites, prompting a range of headlines, from, “Antarctica is gaining ice. Here’s why that’s not actually good news”, in Newsweek to, “Expanding Antarctica eases threat from rising sea levels”, in the Times.
A Daily Express headline even suggested the research questioned the fundamentals of climate change: “What global warming? Antarctic ice is INCREASING by 135 billion tonnes a year, says NASA.”
With other outlets reporting that scientists are disputing the new study’s results, confusion is rife.
So, what did the study actually find? How does it fit with other research? What does it mean for sea levels? Carbon Brief answers some of the questions the new research raises.
What did the new study do?
The study, published in the Journal of Glaciology, calculates the changes in ice over the entire Antarctic ice sheet from 1992 to 2008. The ice sheet comprises three parts: East Antarctica, West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula.
Map of Antarctica and its regions: the Antarctic Peninsula (green), the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (blue), and the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (red). Numbers indicate specific basins within each ice sheet. Source: Zwally et al. (2015)
Arbitrary focus on hurricane wind speed has birthed a new climate myth
Posted on 3 November 2015 by John Abraham
As humans warm the planet through the emission of heat-trapping gases, we expect weather to change. Some ways it has changed are clear and measurable. For instance, heat waves and droughts are setting in faster and are more severe. We are also seeing more intense precipitation events that lead to more flooding.
But what about storms? We know that hotter ocean waters add fuel to storms, particularly typhoons and hurricanes. That tends to make them stronger. Also, the added heat increases rainfall and the rising seas make us more vulnerable to storm surge. But it isn’t this straightforward. Hurricanes need the right conditions to form and there is evidence that those conditions will become less likely. So, the general rule of thumb is, there may be fewer typhoons and hurricanes, but they will become more intense.
But that is the future, what has the past looked like? A recent paper has just been published which looks at this issue. Now, with good satellite and measurement coverage, we have a good sense of past storm trends. Are we in a hurricane drought or are there plenty of storms occurring now? To answer this, it depends on how you define hurricanes and their strength. Currently, storms are binned to 5 knot wind speeds (grouped together). However, the wind speeds are uncertain to 10 knots. So there is a good deal of uncertainty of the actual strength of a specific storm.
If we look at landfall hurricanes in the USA, the last major hurricane was Wilma in 2005. That hurricane had winds above 96 knots. The 9-year drought for hurricanes of this strength is pretty rare. But what if we define major hurricanes differently, using different thresholds? Then the drought becomes less significant. Furthermore, with an even better measure (pressure) the current hurricane drought disappears because Irene and Sandy made landfall in 2011 and 2012 and had very low pressures.
Homogenization of Temperature Data: An Assessment
Posted on 2 November 2015 by Kevin C
The homogenization of climate data is a process of calibrating old meteorological records, to remove spurious factors which have nothing to do with actual temperature change. It has been suggested that there might be a bias in the homogenization process, so I set out to reproduce the science for myself, from scratch. The results are presented in a new report: "Homogenization of Temperature Data: An Assessment".
Historical weather station records are a key source of information about temperature change over the last century. However the records were originally collected to track the big changes in weather from day to day, rather than small and gradual changes in climate over decades. Changes to the instruments and measurement practices introduce changes in the records which have nothing to do with climate.
On the whole these changes have only a modest impact on global temperature estimates. However if accurate local records or the best possible global record are required then the non-climate artefacts should be removed from the weather station records. This process is called homogenization.
The validity of this process has been questioned in the public discourse on climate change, on the basis that the adjustments increase the warming trend in the data. This question is surprising in that sea surface temperatures play a larger role in determining global temperature than the weather station records, and are subject to a larger adjustments in the opposite direction (Figure 1). Furthermore, the adjustments have the biggest effect prior to 1980, and don't have much impact on recent warming trends.
Figure 1: The global temperature record (smoothed) with different combinations of land and ocean adjustments.
I set out to test the assumptions underlying temperature homogenization from scratch. I have documented the steps in this report and released all of the computer code, so that others with different perspectives can continue the project. I was able to test the underlying assumptions and reproduce many of the results of existing homogenization methods. I was also able to write a rudimentary homogenization package from scratch using just 150 lines of computer code. A few of the tests in the report are described in the following video.
2015 SkS Weekly Digest #44
Posted on 1 November 2015 by John Hartz
SkS Highlights... Toon of the Week... Quote of the Week... He Said What?... SkS in the News... Coming Soon on SkS... Poster of the Week... SkS Week in Review... and 97 Hours of Consensus
SkS Highlights
2015: A Very Bad Year for the Global Warming Policy Foundation by Taminio (Open Mind) attracted the highest number of comments of the articles posted on SkS during the past week. Global warming could be more devastating for the economy than we thought by Dana Nuccitelli (Climate Consensus - the 97%) and Interview with Gavin Schmidt by Roz Pidcock (Carbon Brief) each garnered the second highest number of comments.
Toon of the Week
Hat tip to I Heart Climate Scientists
2015 SkS Weekly News Roundup #44
Posted on 31 October 2015 by John Hartz
A chronological listing of the news articles posted on the Skeptical Science Facebook page during the past week.
Sun, Oct 25
- Climate finance dispute slows UN talks as time runs short for Paris by Alister Doyle & Megan Rowling, Reuters, Oct 23, 2015
- Marco Rubio’s Ideas About Climate and Energy Are Terrifyingly Stupid by Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine, Oct 19, 2015
- Migration needs a home in global climate deal - UN experts by Megan Rowling, Thomson Reuters Foundation, Oct 23, 2015
- More torrential rain falls on top of overflowing waters in Texas by Ben Brumfield, CNN, Oct 25, 2015
- Is Naomi Klein Right That We Must Choose Between Capitalism and the Climate? by Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine, Oct 23, 2015
- ExxonMobil Targets Journalists and Activists After Climate Change Investigation by Melissa Cronin, Motherboard, Oct 24, 2015
- Turnbull government selling Australia short on climate change – Bill Shorten by Shalailah Medhora, The Guardian, Oct 25, 2015
- Climate change lacks 'the immediacy of now' in conflict zones - experts by Rachel Stern, Thomson Reuters Foundation, Oct 23, 2015
2015: A Very Bad Year for the Global Warming Policy Foundation
Posted on 30 October 2015 by Guest Author
This is a re-post from tamino at Open Mind
Desperate to hold on to the “pause” that never happened in global warming, David Whitehose has penned a piece for the Global Warming Policy Foundation(GWPF). What he really shows is that it’s a very bad year indeed for the GWPF.
He objects to this graph:
It shows global temperature year-to-date (using data from NOAA) for 2015 (that’s the one way at the top) compared to the same for the next six hottest years on record. David Whitehouse doesn’t like that — because it shows, in graphic terms, how much hotter this year has been than its predecessor, and just how likely it is that 2015 will be the new #1 hottest. A fact which even David Whitehouse admits.
His “argument” is that the “pause” (the one that never happened) hasn’t ended, mainly because not every month this year so far has been the hottest on record. To make that argument, he switches from NOAA data to NASA data. He also points out that only 5 of 9 months (so far this year) have been hotter than the same month last year (he doesn’t bother with “by how much”). He also blames the record-breaking year-to-date (in NOAA and NASA data, and HadCRUT4 to boot) on the current el Nino. It’s true that el Nino years tend to be hotter … which is why 1998 was so hot, and why deniers usually start their “no warming since” graphs with 1998. Finally, he emphasizes that there’s uncertainty in global temperature, of about 0.1 deg.C.
Which is funny, because when deniers were in “full pause mode” (the pause that never happened) they didn’t talk about uncertainty. And yes, they started their “pause” meme with 1998 and because of 1998 being such a hot year.
What’s also funny is the “not the hottest month every month” argument. Suppose you played a baseball game — nine innings — and in the first inning you only scored th 2nd-most runs in league first-inning history, in the second inning you only scored the 2nd-most runs in league second-inning history, etc. etc. After nine innings, you’ve scored the most total runs in one game in league history. But that’s worthless; I guess, according to David Whitehouse, your offensive scoring is in a “pause” (you know, the one that never happened).
What’s not funny is David Whitehouse simply denying the truth:
Newest Entry in Inside Climate News’ #ExxonKnew Story is a Doozy
Posted on 29 October 2015 by greenman3610
This is a re-post from Climate Crocks
Leveraging the Skeptical Science Glossary for references
Posted on 28 October 2015 by BaerbelW
If you are a long-time reader of Skeptical Science you'll be aware of the glossary functionality which automatically displays definitions of scientific terms when you have the cursor hover above an underlined term. This neat functionality was created and announced by Bob Lacatena and went live in February 2013.
The Skeptical Science team has had on and off discussions about the need for a kind of bibliography for all the scientific papers we regularly reference in our blog posts and rebuttals. During one of these discussions Phil mentioned that it would be nice to have the relevant reference immediately displayed in a pop-up-box. And so, the penny dropped and we realised that we already had this functionality available at Skeptical Science: the glossary!
I went ahead and did a quick test to see if the idea could work out and added an entry for Cook et al. (2013) to the glossary. Once the entry had been added and a page found where the spelling of the "term" - i.e. the reference - fitted the glossary entry, this immediately worked as intended and the citation was displayed in the right-hand margin of the page as soon as the cursor hovered above the reference:
You should be able to test this yourself with the above reference to our consensus study. Hover the cursor above it and see what happens! If it doesn't work, check your glossary settings via the "Look up a Term" panel shown at the bottom of this page:
Global warming could be more devastating for the economy than we thought
Posted on 27 October 2015 by dana1981
A new study published in Nature by scientists at Stanford and UC Berkeley has made waves for its finding that thus far we have dramatically underestimated the damage human-caused climate change will do to the global economy.
By looking at data from 160 countries across the 50-year period from 1960 to 2010, the authors found that an average local temperature of 13°C (55°F) is economically optimal, particularly for agricultural productivity. That temperature roughly reflects the current climate in many wealthy countries like the USA, Japan, France, and China.
If regional temperatures are cooler, then warming benefits the local economy, but past that peak temperature, warming reduces economic productivity. The robustness of this result is particularly interesting. The study found that it held true for both rich and poor countries, and that the relationship held for both the 1960–1989 and 1990–2010 time frames.
Global relationship between annual average temperature and change in log gross domestic product (GDP) per capita during 1960–2010 with 90% confidence interval, broken down by poor and rich countries, agricultural and non-agricultural GDP, and time frames (1960–1989 and 1990–2010). Source: Burke et al. (2015), Nature.
Interview with Gavin Schmidt
Posted on 26 October 2015 by Guest Author
This is a re-post from Carbon Brief by Roz Pidcock
Schmidt has been the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies since June, 2014. He is the principal investigator for the GISS ModelE Earth system model. In 2014, he gave a TED Talk on the “emergent patterns of climate change”, which has been viewed more than one million times online. He was one of the founding scientists of RealClimate.
CB: We’ll kick off with something topical. So NASA has just announced that Arctic sea ice has reached its annual minimum, and is the fourth lowest on record. What is the significance of this, do you think? And how does it fit in with what we know about global ice cover?
GS: So, the thing to remember is that the ice in the Arctic is undergoing a long-term decline, and while there are ups and downs in any one particular year, the main thing to be looking at is the trend, and the trend has been solidly one of decline for the last 30 or 40 years, and that’s very, very significant. The loss of extent is something like 10% per decade, for the minimum. That’s really very large, and they’re already seeing huge impacts from that change in climatology in the Arctic – in terms of the biology, the ecosystems, people living there, erosion… Everything is being affected in the Arctic by this, and this year’s change is exactly on trend.
CB: Is there any good news at all with Arctic sea-ice? There was a NASA study that suggested that, perhaps, older, multi-year sea ice was recovering a bit since the 2012 low. Is that happening?
GS: So, what you are seeing is, again, some of that inter-annual variability that is driven by, you know, the vagaries of the weather in any particular summer season. It’s not in any sense a recovery, but, obviously, once you have a really exceptional year – the one you had in 2012 – anything after that is going to look like it’s a recovery, but the long-term trends are very, very dramatic. The sea-ice thickness has gone down by over 40%, the amount of old ice – so this is the thick, ridged ice that’s been around for multiple seasons – has gone down to historic lows. So, it’s not going down to the extent where it’s all going to disappear this year or next year, but the decline is very significant and is steady.
2015 SkS Weekly Digest #43
Posted on 25 October 2015 by John Hartz
SkS Highlights... El Niño Watch... Toon of the Week... Quote of the Week... He Said What?... SkS in the News... SkS Spotlights... Poster of the Week... Rebuttal Article Update... Coming Soon on SkS... SkS Week in Review... 97 Hours of Consensus
SkS Highlights
The Brave New World of Ecomodernism by Josh Halpern (who blogs and tweets as Eli Rabett) garnered the most comments of the articles posted on SkS during the past week. Tracking the 2C Limit - September 2015 by Rob Honeycutt drew the scond highest number of comments.
El Niño Watch
It has choked Singapore with smoke, triggered Pacific typhoons and left Vietnamese coffee growers staring nervously at dwindling reservoirs. In Africa, cocoa farmers are blaming it for bad harvests, and in the Americas, it has Argentines bracing for lower milk production and Californians believing that rain is finally, mercifully on the way.
El Nino is back and in a big way.
A huge El Nino spreads wide range of mayhem around the world, Bloomberg/The Japan Times, Oct 23, 2015
Toon of the Week
2015 SkS Weekly News Roundup #43
Posted on 24 October 2015 by John Hartz
A chronological listing of the news articles posted on the Skeptical Science Facebook page during the past week.
Sun, Oct 18
- Arctic 2015: The Sixth Sense, Iceland Monitor, Oct 16, 2015
- Arctic 2015: Where the world is melting, by Ragnar Axelsson, Iceland Monitor, Oct 16, 2015
- Arctic 2015: Arctic warming twice as much as elsewhere by Orri Páll Ormarsson, Iceland Monitor, Oct 17, 2015
- Arctic 2015: Things are not looking good! by Orri Páll Ormarsson, Iceland Monitor, Oct 17, 2015
- The Carbon Brief Interview: Dr Gavin Schmidt by Roz Pidcock, The Carbon Brief, Oct 15, 2015
- U.S. exports its greenhouse-gas emissions — as coal. Profitable coal. by Joby Warrick, The Washington Post, Oct 15, 2015
- Why You Didn’t See It Coming by K.C. Cole, Nautilus, Oct 15, 2015
- How do you make conservatives care about climate change? An expert shares tips. by Heather Smith, Grist, Oct 16, 2015
Tracking the 2C Limit - September 2015
Posted on 23 October 2015 by Rob Honeycutt
The latest temperature anomaly coming out of GISS is, same as last month, 0.81°C. Adjusting that for our preindustrial baseline we show we're now at 1.062°C over preindustrial times.
The current El Niño continues to grow and is now predicted to have a 95% probability of continuing into the Spring of 2016.
Ironically, the University of Alabama, Huntsville (UAH) satellite temperature data is still showing little sign of warming now 5 months into the warming you see above in the equatorial upper-ocean anomaly. I've asked other more knowledgeable folks about this and everyone is in agreement this is probably about right, but we should start seeing the satellite data begin spiking in the next month or so. With the Pacific "blob" off the coast of California, I would guess much more heat is entering the atmosphere than even during the 1998 el Nino, as such we would expect a similar or greater spike in the satellite data. If not, something must be amiss.
CO2 was higher in the late Ordovician - intermediate rebuttal
Posted on 22 October 2015 by howardlee
This is an update to the 'CO2 was higher in the late Ordovician' myth rebuttal
What the science says...
During the Ordovician, solar output was 4% lower than current levels, and there was a large continent over the South Pole. Consequently, CO2 levels at around 1,000 to 2,300 ppm were actually low enough to promote glaciation in the southern continent of Gondwana. Ample geological and geochemical evidence points to strong weathering in parallel with the cooling of the Ordovician climate. Since rock weathering reduces atmospheric CO2, this again reinforces the scientific fact that CO2 is a strong driver of climate.
CO2 was high in the cold late Ordovician: "To the consternation of global warming proponents, the Late Ordovician Period was also an Ice Age while at the same time CO2 concentrations then were nearly 12 times higher than today - 4400 ppm. According to greenhouse theory, Earth should have been exceedingly hot. Instead, global temperatures were no warmer than today. Clearly, other factors besides atmospheric carbon influence earth temperatures and global warming." (Monte Hieb)
Older scientific papers inferred very high CO2 levels in the Ordovician, generating a paradox of a cold climate during a time of high greenhouse gas levels. But recent work has shown that atmospheric CO2 was much lower than the myth claims, and it kept falling through the Ordovician. It was less than 8 times preindustrial values towards the end (see the graph below), which may sound very high, but with a 4% fainter sun back then and with a large continent over the South Pole, it was low enough to trigger a major continental ice sheet.
The Ordovician was a time of mountain building (the Taconic/Caledonian orogeny) and violent ashy volcanic eruptions as the continents of Laurentia, Baltica and Avalonia began to collide. Mountain building, lots of fresh volcanic ash and erosion tend to accelerate the weathering of silicate rocks, which draws down CO2 from the atmosphere, cooling the planet on a timeframe of hundreds of thousands to millions of years. And indeed, strontium isotopes confirm a large increase in the contribution of weathered volcanic rocks into ocean waters between about 470 and 450 million years ago. Neodymium isotopes (a proxy for ancient sea level change) show that ice sheets were in place in the late Ordovician.
The latter half of the Ordovician also saw the development of Earth's earliest plant-dominated terrestrial biosphere. Those early moss-like plants accelerated rock weathering rates, simultaneously drawing down CO2 and supplying nutrients like phosphorous to the oceans, which fertilized plankton activity, which further reduced CO2 as their carbon-rich remains sank to the sea bed. The climate cooled so much that it crossed a "tipping point" 444 million years ago, triggering the Hirnantian Glaciation, which was so severe it resulted in one of the biggest mass extinctions since animals first evolved. For more on that see this article.
Carbon pollution: the good, the bad, the ugly, and the denial
Posted on 21 October 2015 by dana1981
The anti-climate policy ‘fact blurring’ advocacy group Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) recently published a report on ‘the good news’ about rising carbon dioxide, written by Indur Goklany. Goklany has a background in electrical engineering and has been a US delegate to the IPCC. He has also in the pastreceived $1,000 per month from the Heartland Institute and had two books published by the Cato Institute, among other affiliations with fossil fuel-funded think tanks.
Goklany’s affiliation with and funding from these think tanks is relevant due to the nature of the GWPF report, which essentially argues that carbon pollution is the best thing since sliced bread.
The bad outweighs the good
Professor Colin Prentice, expert in climate change impacts on the biosphere at Imperial College London, put together a nice summary of what the report gets right and wrong. While the GWPF report is correct that there are some benefits from rising carbon dioxide levels, as Prentice notes,
The good news should not blind us to the negative implications of continued unabated climate change, and the multidecadal lead times required for policies to have any discernible effect on CO2 and climate. These are the reasons propelling international pressure for long-term carbon neutrality, and nothing that Goklany says in his report invalidates them.
In short, the report selectively considers only the evidence that supports its argument that carbon pollution is terrific. The report also argues against a strawman, portraying its opponents as claiming that there are no benefits associated with global warming. In reality, climate scientists and economists consider all climate change impacts, both good and bad, in their overall assessments. Unfortunately the bad consequences far outweigh the good, as even the GWPF’s own economic advisor Richard Tol has concluded. As climate scientist Richard Betts noted,
Assessments of the impacts of climate change on ecosystems and crops do include CO2 effects as well as physical climate effects, and while there are uncertainties in both, current understanding suggests that CO2 effects on photosynthesis will tail off while the impacts of climate change itself continue. The harms may well outweigh the benefits, especially when we remember that sea level rise is an inevitable consequence of a warming world. There are no good reasons to assume that that the effect of CO2 on plants is some sort of “get out of jail free” card.
‘CO2 is plant food’ is an oversimplification
The GWPF report mostly focuses on what’s sometimes called ‘global greening,’ associated with carbon dioxide fertilization of plants. It’s essentially the ‘CO2 is plant food’ oversimplification, tackled by Professor Sarah Green in the Denial101x lecture below.
Sarah Green Denial101x lecture on climate change agricultural impacts.
In short, if all else is equal, higher carbon dioxide is generally better for plant growth. The problem is that when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels rise in the real world, we can’t hold everything else constant the way we can in a greenhouse. Temperatures rise, and the resulting extreme heat can have severely detrimental impacts on plant growth, particularly for certain crops like maize. That rise in temperatures also amplifies droughts, the increase of water vapor in the atmosphere intensifies floods, and so on.
To evaluate the impact of rising carbon dioxide and the associated climate changes on crop yields, all these factors need to be considered. While rising carbon dioxide may have benefited agricultural productivity so far, most studies project a decline in crop yields starting in 2030, and climate change poses many other dangerous risks, as summarized in the latest IPCC report.
Summary of projected changes in crop yields, due to climate change over the 21st century. Source: IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, Working Group II.
The Brave New World of Ecomodernism
Posted on 20 October 2015 by Guest Author
Josh Halpern blogs and tweets as Eli Rabett
Recently the Guardian has featured a back and forth about Ecomodernism. Ecomodernism holds that not only are humans driving the future of our world, but through technology can decouple our future from natural ecosystems. In this process the world would turn into urban enclaves surrounded by mechanically farmed agricultural lands and islands reserved for nature. It is a vision of naive young urban professionals.
George Monbiot touched on some of the practical problems of Ecomodernism and this paper published a response from the proponents. In the words of Mark Lynas, one of the authors of their manifesto, the British launch of Ecomodernism turned into “a screw up of epic proportions” used by Owen Patterson to bash environmentalists of all stripes. To date, the discussion about Ecomodernism has been based on considerations of practicality, but there are hidden depths which lead me to oppose this program on all levels.
New UN climate deal text: what’s in, what’s out
Posted on 19 October 2015 by Guest Author
This is a re-post from Carbon Brief by Sophie Yeo
The UN has released the latest draft of the text that will eventually be hammered into an international climate change agreement in Paris this December.
The text, written by co-chairs Dan Reifsnyder from the US and Ahmed Djoghlaf from Algeria, bears many of the hallmarks of its two previous incarnations. There is the same flurry of square brackets (231, to be precise, indicating that there at least 231 points still up for negotiation) and deluge of acronyms and the same core issues running throughout the document.
But, in many ways, the text is a skeleton of previous versions. At 20 pages, it is about a quarter of the length of the 76-page document released in July, and the 86 pages from February.
In other words, it is the first time that the co-chairs have made substantive reductions to the Paris text.
At UN sessions taking place throughout this year, countries have expressed concern at the slow pace of the negotiations. The text responds to a call for a “step change in the pace of negotiation”, say the co-chairs in a note accompanying the text.
Behind the scenes, diplomats have been engaging in intense discussions to speed along the process. The hope is that countries will start to converge around what should go in and stay out of the final deal.
2015 SkS Weekly Digest #42
Posted on 18 October 2015 by John Hartz
SkS Highlights... El Niño Watch... Toon of the Week... Quote of the Week... He Said What?... SkS in the News... SkS Spotlights... Poster of the Week... Coming Soon on SkS... SkS Week in Review... and 97 Hours of Consensus
SkS Highlights
Skeptical Science honoured by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry by John Cook and Understanding climate feedbacks by Eric Wolff (The Carbon Brief) each attracted the highest number of comments of trhe articles posted on SkS during the past week. Earth’s worst extinction “inescapably” tied to Siberian Traps, CO2, and climate change by Howard Lee garnered the second highest number.
El Niño Watch
New maps show how the 2015 El Nino is shaping up to look a lot like a strong event that occurred in 1997-98 that was dubbed a "super El Nino".
El Nino 2015 starting to look like 'super El Nino' in 1997-98, by Stuart Gary, ABC News (Australia), Oct 16, 2015
2015 SkS Weekly News Roundup #42
Posted on 17 October 2015 by John Hartz
A chronological listing of the news articles posted on the Skeptical Science Facebook page during the past week.
Sun, Oct 11
- 'We Will Stand for Ourselves': Global Movement Stakes Claim for COP21 by Deirdre Fulton, Common Dreams, Oct 8, 2015
- New UN climate deal text: what's in, what's out by Sophie Yeo, The Carbon Brief, Oct 7, 2015
- Exxon's Own Research Confirmed Fossil Fuels' Role in Global Warming Decades Ago by Neela Banerjee, Lisa Song & David Hasemyer, InsideClimate News, Sep 21, 2015
- Exxon Believed Deep Dive Into Climate Research Would Protect Its Business by Neela Banerjee, Lisa Song & David Hasemyer, InsideClimate News, Sep 21, 2015
- Exxon Confirmed Global Warming Consensus in 1982 with In-House Climate Models by Neela Banerjee, Lisa Song & David Hasemyer, InsideClimate News, Sep 22, 2015
- South Carolina's Catastrophic Floods Caused By One of the Most Prolific Rainfall Events in Modern U.S. History by Nick Wiltgen, Weather Underground, Oct 8, 2015
- Area leaders fail to take serious action in face of rising threats from above and below by Doug Pardue and Tony Bartelme, Charleston Post & Courier, Oct 10, 2015
Skeptical Science honoured by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
Posted on 16 October 2015 by John Cook
I’m honoured to be elected as one of ten new Fellows of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. It’s especially cool to be listed with some scientists whom I deeply admire such as Naomi Oreskes, Stephan Lewandowsky and James Powell.
One of the goals when I started Skeptical Science was to restore the good name of skepticism, whose reputation has been sullied by being associated with science denial. The Committee for Skeptical Inquirer have also worked hard to claim back the word skepticism, including the powerful article Deniers are not Skeptics written by a number of prominent skeptics, featuring Mark Boslough, Eugenie Scott, Richard Dawkins and Bill Nigh. They also published my article Taking Back Skepticism.
What to call those who reject mainstream climate science (to borrow the terminology of Associated Press) is a topic of hot debate. There are two key points to remember in this debate, which we emphasise in our free online course, Making Sense of Climate Science Denial.
Firstly, skepticism and denial are polar opposites. A genuine scientific skeptic first considers the full body of evidence then comes to a conclusion. A denialist comes to a conclusion first (usually influenced by ideology), then denies any science that conflicts with their position.
Climate Myth...