Arguments
Skeptical Science Housekeeping: flags, printable versions, icons and links... lots of links
Posted on 22 April 2010 by John Cook
The business of upgrading and developing Skeptical Science continues slowly but surely. The most significant update is a new page listing the latest climate articles. This displays all the most recent links from the Global Warming Links directory. The page lets you customise which links to view. You can view just the last week, month or year (I'll extend this later to include all time and paginate the results). You can narrow it to either skeptic or pro-AGW links. And what I find most useful - you can view only certain types of links such as mainstream media or peer-reviewed. So this allows you to check out all the skeptic peer-reviewed papers published in the last month. Or if you want to keep up with current views, check out the skeptic articles published in mainstream media over the last week.
Of course, the list isn't as comprehensive as I would like. I've been setting aside regular time to add new peer-reviewed papers but there is only so many hours in a day. So please feel free to submit any climate links you happen to come by - especially mainstream media articles and peer-reviewed papers. Note with the peer-reviewed papers that you enter the correct year of publication. Plus I've begun adopting a convention with all paper titles that I add (Author Year) at the end of the title - this isn't necessary but offers useful context when perusing paper titles. The peer-review database is growing steadily.
Most of you have probably noticed a long line of flags now adorning the top of the website header. This was an excellent suggestion from Richard Hawkins who thought all the translations should be more prominent and accessible. Considering the huge efforts by all the volunteers who are translating the skeptic arguments into other languages, I heartily agree.
I've reshuffled the left margin, compressing all the various social media buttons and feeds into a single line of icons (another worthy design suggestion from Richard Hawkins). The iPhone app/donation button are a little unbalanced but this will balance out better once the Android app is released (which apparently is not too far away - more on this soon).
Lastly, I've added a printable version of the entire list of skeptic arguments and the short rebuttals (thanks to Anna Haynes for the suggestion). Something useful to carry around in your pocket if you don't have an iPhone :-)
'Is the basin-wide warming in the North Atlantic Ocean related to atmospheric carbon dioxide and global warming?' is hardly 'skeptical', unless you think that 'skeptical' means 'doesn't think EVERYTHING is CO2 related'!
They conclude that CO2 warming contributes ~half of Atlantic warming - I don't see how this makes them a 'skeptical' paper, they're simply adding to a body of evidence on AMO & climate...
Both the links are to the same (mainstream media) list.
The peer reviewed feature is great, though I notice that the classification isn't 100%. For instance, one of the 'peer reviewed pro-AGW' items is a BBC blogger sounding off about how the 'evils of Climategate' are being whitewashed.
On the flags, I'd suggest translating the tooltips into the relevant languages. "View skeptic arguments in Portugese" isn't much help to someone who doesn't speak English and might not recognize the flag of Portugal, but speaks the language... like say, most of Brazil.
These organisations have a well-known political tilt. Two other organisations share that tilt, the Wall Street Journal and the Australian, which published 1 "sceptic" story each.
Now, can anyone tell me if these were balanced with "positive" stories about climate science?
I thought so.
Thank you very much for the collated links to peer-reviewed papers. This is a valuable service and it will be very helpful for students and others less familiar with the list of reputable journals to find appropriate material. Don't worry too much about the skeptic, neutral, pro-AGW classifications, we can figure it out. Although I would probably fall in the 'pro-AGW' camp, I definitely am not really pro-AGW. It actually would be much better if the deniers were right and we had nothing to worry about. Unfortunately, we definitely do.
If anyone misses the Skeptic of the Week feature, I can easily add that back in - I just commented out the code.
Can you publish statistics on the number of articles published in each "camp" for comparative purposes? For example a plot of number of articles in a category for each month, with the option of comparing graphs side by side.
Also, it would be helpful for the Peer Reviewed articles if it listed the actual journal/conference it was published, not just springerlink.com, which could be any number of journals.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/comments.xml
Sorry also if this is a duplicate of a recent similar report here. I know I've seen a problem very like this recently but can't remember where.
Whatever, the programmer who wrote the feed generator needs a bloody good talking to - XML's been around long enough that this sort of basic mistake should not be being made any more.
That would be me :-) Every little bit of Skeptical Science was built from the ground up - no pre-packaged blog scripts at all - so inevitably it's a little unpolished. With only so many hours in the day, I tend to take a 'bare minimum policy' - do whatever programming is required to get the job done. As Doug Bostrom said when he helped me improve the website's security, my code is 'idiosyncratic'.
I'll look further into escaping non-XML compliant characters.
Good work on the site by the way.