• Gore’s Climate Reality Finale — What Do You Think? | ThinkProgress. Joe Romm asks:
  

  “I’m interested in your thoughts on Gore’s final presentation in “24 Hours of Reality.”  For those who missed it, here it is:

  Video streaming by Ustream

  I do think it is important to judge this as a communications effort aimed at three groups — activists, those who already are concerned about global warming, and the plausibly persuadable — the audience I aim for, but obviously a broader slice of the public than Climate Progress reaches…”

• David Mitchell: The Burden of Proof « Climate Denial Crock of the Week.
• NYTimes.com Strikes False Balance On Climate Change | ThinkProgress

The Politics of Climate Change

• Obama White House Warned Solyndra Bad For Re-Election | NationofChange
• President Obama Faces Scorn in Response to Hasty Loans to Solyndra Corporation | NationofChange
• Solyndra, Risk, and Risk Aversion | Jared Bernstein | On the Economy
• Five Biggest Right-Wing Lies about Solyndra | NationofChange

Energy

• Mark Ruffalo | Thank God for Fracking | NationofChange

Economics

• Brad DeLong defines “the long run” — Marginal Revolution
• Waiting for the Long Run

The Rick Perry Watch

• The Texas miracle crashes and burns | The Zingularity

The Other Stuff (Misc. Politics,News, Opinion, etc. well almost anyway)

• 9/11: It’s All Our Fault | Dispatches from the Culture Wars Reminds us who Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Fallwell blamed for 9/11.
• Vaccines: Resdev/Vaccine Testing and Approval Process
• Ali Soufan on the Maddow Show | Dispatches from the Culture Wars  —”Former FBI interrogator Ali Soufan was on the Rachel Maddow show and gave a very important interview about torture and interrogation. He exposed many of the false claims being put out by the defenders of torture.”

  Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

• The Election of 2012: Why The Most Important Issues May Be Off The Table (But Should Be On It) | NationofChange

The post What I'm Reading Saturday, September 17, 2011 appeared first on Rationally Thinking Out Loud.

Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist Resigns Over Global Warming | Fox News.

This is much ado about nothing.

But Fox and now the denial blogosphere will make a big deal of this as part of their partisan effort to try and sow public doubt about global warming theory pushing the denial meme that climate scientists are still debating the science. (Hint, no they aren’t, the science is settled)

Interestingly Fox while emphasizing that the scientist, Dr. Ivar Giaever, was a Nobel Prize winner makes no mention that Drs. Leo Esaki and Brian D. Josephson, who won the Nobel Prize with him are part of the 100 Nobel Laureates Warn Our Planet! effort as signatories behind this statement:

The most profound danger to world peace in the coming years will stem not from the irrational acts of states or individuals but from the legitimate demands of the world’s dispossessed. Of these poor and disenfranchised, the majority live a marginal existence in equatorial climates. Global warming, not of their making but originating with the wealthy few, will affect their fragile ecologies most. Their situation will be desperate and manifestly unjust.

It cannot be expected, therefore, that in all cases they will be content to await the beneficence of the rich. If then we permit the devastating power of modern weaponry to spread through this combustible human landscape, we invite a conflagration that can engulf both rich and poor. The only hope for the future lies in co-operative international action, legitimized by democracy.

It is time to turn our backs on the unilateral search for security, in which we seek to shelter behind walls. Instead, we must persist in the quest for united action to counter both global warming and a weaponized world.

These twin goals will constitute vital components of stability as we move toward the wider degree of social justice that alone gives hope of peace.

Some of the needed legal instruments are already at hand, such as the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Convention on Climate Change, the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. As concerned citizens, we urge all governments to commit to these goals that constitute steps on the way to replacement of war by law.

To survive in the world we have transformed, we must learn to think in a new way. As never before, the future of each depends on the good of all.

Months ago you might recall (actually probably not because it was pretty insignificant too) that the denial blogosphere was all abuzz with the news that the Dr. Harold Lewis had resigned from APS over pretty much the same thing, a general disagreement over the official APS position regarding global warming and APS chose to issue a statement on Lewis’s comments as he resigned (APS Comments on Harold Lewis’ Resignation of his Society Membership). Dr. Lewis apparently thought that the Climategate non scandal was a big deal and threw a hissy fit over the APS’s non attention to the matter.

The whole event was seen by the climate science community as much ado about nothing at the time and I will expect the response amongst the professionals that matter will be the same this time too. As for the APS we will just have to wait and see if they have anything to say about Dr. Giaever’s resignation.

The post Fox News Hypes the Resignation of a Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist Over Global Warming appeared first on Rationally Thinking Out Loud.

The post Are cosmic rays causing global warming? – YouTube appeared first on Rationally Thinking Out Loud.

Professor writes book challenging man-made global warming beliefs

By R. Nicole Blanton

Published on: Tuesday, August 30, 2011 Modified on: Tuesday, August 30, 2011

A UH professor aims to refute claims that the Earth is in a permanent warming period in his new book.

Larry Bell, an endowed professor of space architecture, said he blames misrepresented statistics and misleading politicians for the widespread belief in global warming in his book, “Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind The Global Warming Hoax.”

“The notion of carbon dioxide being a pollutant is silly because carbon dioxide is what makes plants grow; it’s what whales breathe,” Bell said.

“There’s a lot of shenanigans with words.”

via Professor writes book challenging man-made global warming beliefs // thedailycougar.com.

Right off the bat the “Carbon Dioxide is Plant Food” argument isn’t at all creditable and has been thoroughly debunked (see Skeptical Science: CO2 is Plant Food for starters and here debunking / Good for Plant Growth Myth for even more debunking links) but what really blew me away was the second part,…”it’s what whales breathe.” I am thinking that has to be a misquote because no college professor, in any subject, worth his salt could think that a mammal (whales are mammals you know) much less a fish breathes CO2. Animals breathe oxygen and exhale CO2. Plants take in CO2 (they don’t really breathe per se) and give off (exhale) Oxygen in a process we all know (except for Larry Bell that is) as photosynthesis).

There is more denial stupidity and ignorance in the article about his jokers book but I’ll have to get back to it some other time. Thanks to Tropical Storm Irene I’m working from a lap top as I sit on a sidewalk downtown where they have power and a few wifi hotspots.

But I have to ask did that guy really say CO2 is what whales breathe? How did he ever et beyond 10th grade biology?

The post The dumbest quote ever from a climate change denier. appeared first on Rationally Thinking Out Loud.

Anti-global warming Sen. Inhofe formally endorses Perry

By NBC’s Carrie Dann

TULSA, Okla. — Sen. Jim Inhofe, a strident conservative voice in the Senate and a vocal skeptic of global warming, formally endorsed Gov. Rick Perry on Monday, calling him “the only guy who can really win this thing.”

“The one thing that he has that nobody else has is this background of experience, not just him being an administrator but doing the right thing, cutting down the deficit, increasing jobs. And he’s done everything right,” Inhofe said, adding, “No one out there running is as aware as to the cost of all the overregulation that we’re experiencing right now.”

Nah, seriously I was never going to vote for him anyway. As I’ve already said here before both directly and indirectly I think Rick Perry is arguably the worst candidate for President of the United States I have seen in my lifetime. I think his  getting the endorsement from Inhofe, the lead climate change denier in congress, falls under the “why am I not surprised” category.

The post Well that does it for me, I am definitely NOT voting for Rick Perry appeared first on Rationally Thinking Out Loud.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

"Let me finish tonight with science and the Republican Party. Two out of the three presidential candidates generally considered frontrunners for the Republican Party nomination believe the moon is made of green cheese. Does that cause you concern?

You’d think it would. After all, astronauts have been to the moon and have brought back rocks that seem utterly cheese-free. And no giant space mice have been observed nibbling at lunar craters.

Ah, but Rick Perry and Michelle Bachman – the frontrunners in question – don’t believe NASA ever landed men on the moon. As for space mice, the Governor and Congresswoman think they may just be lurking out of sight on the moon’s dark side.

I’m kidding, of course. As far as I know, neither Perry nor Bachman really harbor any such thoughts about our planet’s satellite. If they did, they’d be laughed right out of any presidential contest. Wouldn’t they? I mean… the moon made of green cheese? NASA landings faked? That’s way too crazy for the White House, right? That’s out there where the buses don’t stop. Yeah…

Trouble is, both Bachman and Perry profess other beliefs just as crazy. For instance, neither seems to accept Charles Darwin’s idea that species – including the human species – evolve over time. Instead, they pretend there’s a scientific controversy involving evolution where none exists.

Both also reject the consensus of over 90% of climate scientists worldwide that human activity is warming our planet to dangerously disruptive levels. One of Rick Perry’s first pronouncements upon entering the presidential contest was to declare any such scientific consensus a hoax. Bachman seems to agree.

That would be a massive global charade involving not just the world’s scientists but the governments of virtually every nation as well. If they wanted to be taken the least bit seriously, anyone making such an extraordinary claim would have to back it up with extraordinarily compelling evidence. Wouldn’t they?

Perry and Bachman offer no such evidence. Not a shred. Any rational person would consider such wild, unsupported claims an embarrassment and the folks who made them unfit for high office. Yet here they are, Perry and Bachman, frontrunners for the Republican presidential nomination.

That ought to tell us something – and it’s not something good – about the current Republican Party. And if either of these two were to actually move into the White House, it would say something even more tragic about our body politic. President and crazy are not two words we want connected."

"President and Crazy are not two words we want connected." What an important line!

The post President and Crazy are not two words we want connected appeared first on Rationally Thinking Out Loud.

Maessen finishes his video with a great admonition…

“…Skepticism doesn’t start with the viewpoints and claims of others and being skeptical about those doesn’t make you a skeptic. Being a skeptic starts with examining YOUR own viewpoints, the positions YOU hold, and the claims YOU make, and the quality of the evidence YOU use for those. If you are not doing that like the people behind the blog Whats Up With That then you can’t call yourself a true skeptic.”

I could ‘t agree more.

Be sure to visit and subscribe to Collin Maessen’s blog and his YouTube Channel.

The post A Call For Scepticism appeared first on Rationally Thinking Out Loud.

Within hours of the audio of this talk hitting the internet the climate change denial blogosphere was all a flutter with their typical ad hominems. This from the serial liar and propagandist Marc Morano leading the charge…

Gore Unhinged! Loses it on skeptical claims: ‘It may be volcanoes.’ Bullshit! ‘It may be sun spots.’ Bullshit! ‘It’s not getting warmer.’ Bullshit!’ — Climate Depot Responds!

"Climate Depot Responds! " Geez, what sanctimonious sycophantic bull shit. I can’t imagine there being even a speck of scientific bona fides anywhere in his résumé.

For more on Marc Morano:

• Lies, Conservatives and Statistics: Marc Morano’s Fantasy
• Esquire; This Man Wants to Convince You Global Warming Is a Hoax
• NYTimes: Dissenter on Warming Expands His Campaign
• DeSmogBlog: Marc Morano
• Marc Morano—SourceWatch

In so many respects Marc Morano (once upon a time a producer for Rush Limbaugh) is the prototypical climate change denial propagandist bullshiter that Vice President Al Gore is railing about. All of a sudden one day years ago I stated getting these poorly composed poorly designed emails from him when he was Senator Jim Inhofe’s Communications Director for the United States Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works, essentially Inhofe’s point man in the distribution of climate change denial nonsense. I figured he had scoured the WordPress.com blogging community (where this blog first started out) for blogs on climate change and global warming so he could spam them in the hope that some of the ones that he would hit on there would spread his disinformation around.

For those that want to really understand just what Vice President Al Gore is so ticked off about let me recommend:

• Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming
  by Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. Conway
  
• Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming
  by James Hoggan & Richard Littlemore
• Doubt is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health
  by David Michaels
• The Republican War on Science
  by Chris Mooney

The post Al Gore finally calls out the climate deniers for all their lies deception and bullshit,… appeared first on Rationally Thinking Out Loud.

….by looking at climate change as a clean energy generation problem were in fact setting ourselves up not to solve it.

A provocative and interesting quote he gives us at the end of his talk from Paul Hawken

Our economy now by and large operates as Paul Hawken has said by stealing the future, selling it in the present and calling it GDP.

The post Alex Steffen TEDTalk on: The shareable future of cities appeared first on Rationally Thinking Out Loud.

I thought,…you’re kidding me right?

Wadda bunch of hooey.

Before I take this op-ed apart for what it is or should I really say it isn’t a little bit about Matt Patterson. A quick check around the net tells me he’s a political writer (aka propagandist) for a number of right wing web sites in the Brietbart network as well as writing for the more respectable but still hard right American Thinker. Now for my ad hominem,… the guys a manipulative lying jerk (well maybe that isn’t an ad hominem since I going to establish why he’s a manipulative liar).

If you breakdown Patterson’s piece he’s basically saying Climate Change Theory is on the ropes facing collapse because of two recent developments (somehow he manages to completely ignore the recent news that global warming denier challenges to the paleoclimate temperature record, the hockey stick, took a near fatal body blow this past spring when the great white hope Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project gave a preliminary report before congress that reported that the temperature record is accurate. See the L. A. Times article for a peek at what that is all about:

Critics’ review unexpectedly supports scientific consensus on global warming

A UC Berkeley team’s preliminary findings in a review of temperature data confirm global warming studies.

The two points that Patterson says (that he thinks) are going to overturn everything are:

1. The work of Charles Monnett who lead the polar bear research project that Al Gore cited in "An Inconvenient Truth" which said the polar bear drownings could be on the increase thanks to polar ice melting in the Arctic has been called into question and…

2. Recent work by Drs. Roy Spencer and Danny Braswell has found that the greenhouse effect has been vastly overestimated by climate scientists.

To the first point with a quick check around the net I find that there is no scientific challenge to Charles Monnett’s Polar Bear Research and that the controversy is all about him being suspended for problems in how he manages the project financially. AP reports that Scientist suspension is about project’s management. This is essentially a red herring, a type of straw man argument that Patterson is creating out of some real questionable financial management moves that Dr. Charles Monnett has made. While we don’t know yet what the investigation will bring, Dr. Charles Monnett may very well be a crook or he may be just an incompetent manager or he may be innocent of all charges but nothing I can find anywhere indicates that the scientific data and analysis he produced is in question. For all we know right now there is no connection between his problematic management and the science than there would be if we found out he had hundreds of dollars of unpaid parking tickets. The US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Enforcement and Regulation even issued a statement saying Dr. Monnett was being investigated for administrative matters, involving “collateral duties involving contracts.” Indeed there might even be some questions as to whether Dr. Monnett has been setup and the investigation is all part of an effort to speed up the issuing of Arctic drilling permits (Something Does Not Add Up).

On the second point Patterson is again being very deceptive. One single paper (unless it is startlingly spectacular is not going to take down the current thinking and opinion of the worlds climate scientists in one fell swoop and given the criticism this particular paper is getting from the scientific community (not the denial press and blogosphere mind you) it doesn’t look like this paper is that important at all.

Patterson makes the point that the paper was accepted and published in a peer reviewed journal but the journal Remote Sensing is a geographers journal not one dedicated to atmospheric and climate science and there are also complaints about the statistical integrity of the paper since there is little or no discussion of the uncertainties involved (in other words no consideration of the likelihood of results really being real) nor were the methods used in the paper discussed to the point where they could be replicated and tested by others. And according to Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University "He’s taken an incorrect model, he’s tweaked it to match observations, but the conclusions you get from that are not correct."

Cutting to the chase the overwhelming majority of the scientists in the climate science community are very critical to completely dismissive of the paper. In fact Stephanie Pappas, in her article for LiveScience, Climate Change Debunked? Not So Fast, on the Spencer Braswell paper wrote that "no climate scientist contacted by LiveScience agreed". The paper was for the most part ignored until James Taylor a lawyer (not a climate scientist) who writes political climate change disinformation on behalf of the Heartland Institute (a libertarian, public policy think tank that argue that global warming is not occurring and, further, that warming would be beneficial if it did occur) wrote an op-ed piece for Forbes. Patterson (a James-Taylor-Hearltand-like wannabe who I have written about before here years ago) picked up on it and echoed it.

There is no new science here in either bit whatsoever but the Taylor’s and Patterson’s who have politicized the science write the crap they do to try and manipulate and shape public opinion, not to educate it.

Patterson’s implication that this is an earth shaking paper is nothing but his own attempt creative propaganda writing.

Articles of interest worth reading on Dr. Monnett’s problems…

• Polar bear scientist on thin ice in Arctic imbroglio | The Conversation
• New Details on Polar Bear Scientist Investigation | Mother Jones
• AP – Scientist suspension is about project’s management
• Official tells suspended Alaska scientist that probe is about management of polar bear study

Articles of interest worth reading regarding the new Spencer and Braswell paper.

• Real Climate: “Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedback”
• Climate Change Debunked? Not So Fast | Global Warming & Cloud Cover | Climate Change Skeptics | LiveScience
• Climate Scientists Debunk Latest Bunk by Denier Roy Spencer | ThinkProgress
• Just Put the Model Down, Roy
• No, new data does not “blow a gaping hole in global warming alarmism”
• On the Misdiagnosis of Surface Temperature Feedbacks from Variations in Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance
• Pielke Sr. on new Spencer and Braswell paper « Wott’s Up With That?
• Global Warming Debunked! Or…not. | Climate Central

Comments on some of the other disinformation Matt Patterson generates can be found here: Matt Patterson | Media Matters for America

The post Matt Patterson & The New York Post Clueless About The Climate appeared first on Rationally Thinking Out Loud.

Anyway John Moore in a July 16th 2009 op-ed article (aren’t all articles in the Canadian Post op-ed) writes:

One world government and global warming/climate change/whatever

I knew I was poking the bear when I sent my most recent column (Climate skeptic arguments don’t hold ice, July 14) to my editor here at the National Post. The [Financial] Post publishes almost weekly columns about the fiction of climate change so understandably some readers are well persuaded that the whole global warming house of cards is already tumbling down. The torrent of e-mails and some 48 on-line comments later and I have a new appreciation of just how fiercely some hold on to their denier status.

[…]

Ya just gotta read the whole piece, its great.

Maybe it’s just guilty pleasure and I shouldn’t really say this but I just love seeing the readers of CP get a stick in their eye.

The post I Love John Moore’s Article in The Canadian Post appeared first on Rationally Thinking Out Loud.

Thanks Peter (and Tim). I added this great video essay to my own list of debunking references : “The Great Global Warming Swindle”? Shams & Lies

The post From: Climate Denial Crock of the Week: The Big Swindle Movie appeared first on Rationally Thinking Out Loud.

Nuclear Energy: Expensive, Dangerous, Not Cost-Effective

16 Aug 08 — Amory Lovins and Imran Sheikh have penned a new report on nuclear energy as a fossil fuel option, concluding that nuclear is still dangerous and complicated, not particularly reliable, creates a pollution problem that lasts for many millennia and is therefore a waste of money that could be spent more productively on renewable energy.

Perhaps most devastating to the free market fans, Lovins and Sheikh note that “nuclear power plants are unfinanceable in the private capital market because of their excessive costs and financial risks and the high uncertainty of both.”

“During the nuclear revival now allegedly underway, no new nuclear project on earth has been financed by private risk capital, chosen by an open decision process, nor bid into the world’s innumerable power markets and auctions. No old nuclear plant has been resold at a value consistent with a market case for building a new one.”

The hat tip here goes to Steve Milloy, Junk Scientist extraordinaire and unreconstructed PR guy, who pointed to the Lovins’ paper in a hyperventilating screed on the Fox News wire. Thanks Steve.

By the way for anyone who wasn’t already aware of it do you know all those google ads you see at the time where there is this guy who wants to debate Al Gore in regard to Global Warming Global Climate Disruption*** and more recently Canada’s David Suzuki? Well Richard Littlemore has accepted that challenge and wants to take on the British nobleman Christopher Walter, Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley! Read all about it:Monckton vs. Littlemore: A Debate in the Waiting.

The post Is Nuclear Energy is a Viable Economically Wise Answer to Our Energy Problem? appeared first on Rationally Thinking Out Loud.

It seems that in virtually any long winded debate you get in to with a group of Global Warming Global Climate Disruption*** Deniers eventually after you won all the arguments and debunked all their pseudo-science and non-science eventually one of them will throw up the argument that even if Global Climate Disruption is taking place we (the U.S.) are not the worst offenders, China is (although not by much in terms of total contribution, and very certainly not so on a per capita basis).

Well today I read something that I’ve long suspected in regard to China’s contribution. The article in the blog Celsius I read today reported that:

China Olympics Diary: 1/3 of Chinese Emissions Attributable to Western Consumption

…the real culprit in rising Chinese emissions may be the rest of us.

A recent study by Carnegie Mellon University economics professor, Christopher L. Weber suggests that as much as 1.7 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions, or roughly 1/3 of China’s emissions, are related to goods being exported and consumed in the West.

“We found that in 2005, fully one-third of China’s greenhouse gas emissions were due to production of exports. This proportion has risen quickly, from 12 percent in 1987 and only 21 percent in 2002,” said Weber, a research professor in Carnegie Mellon’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. – Science Daily

Record pollution and smog aside, China’s contribution to climate change is cause for great concern….

[…]

Well I don’t know about putting their “Record pollution and smog aside” (a video series I also learned about this past week via Celsius profiles The Most Polluted City on the Planet – Linfen, China and it appalling if not scary to watch) but to those fellow Americans of mine who want to shirk, avoid, or ignore the American contribution to Global Climate Disruption really need to examine their foolish idiotic logic.

The post 1/3 of Chinese Emissions Attributable to Western Consumption appeared first on Rationally Thinking Out Loud.

The Most Terrifying Video You’ll Ever See

(My thanks to Fundie Watch: What’s the Worst That Could Happen? who discovered it and passed it on from Marti Abernathey’s blog: Makes Sense To Me)

Wonderingmind42 who I’ve learned from his profile is a high school science teacher origionally posted this video back on June 08, 2007 and since that time has also produced even more video answering his critics entitled

Patching Holes #1

Patching Holes #2

The post What's the Worst That Could Happen? appeared first on Rationally Thinking Out Loud.

The right wing blogosphere within hours then lit up it excitment ringing bells and blowing whistles like an old fashioned pinball machine. Amongst all the hoopla they were outraged that this news was for the most part being ignored by what they call the MainStream Media and some of the more radical global warming denial extremists were saying this would turn the whole picture coming from the consensus opinion of Global Warming on its head and they were calling for the resignation or firing of NASA’s James Hanson accusing both him and NASA of wilfully covering up or withholding critical information regarding global warming (geez lousie Mcintyre’s data about the correction had only been out for a couple of hours at that point so that’s proof of some conspiracy and cover up, get real will ya!)

When the news first came out I couldn’t read it directly since the McIntyre’s ClimateAudit.org site crashed (most likely due to the increase in in traffic by Rush Limbaugh touting this finding but blamed by the more hysterical right wingers on a DOS attack that must have come from a conspiracy of Global Warming promoters). What I did read was one particular extremist right wings booger’s comments (Noel Sheppard of Newsbusters.org) that said:

"McIntyre has been crunching the numbers used to determine such things as published by GISS, and has identified that the data have recently changed such that four of the top ten warmest years in American history occurred in the 1930s, with the warmest now in 1934 instead of the much-publicized 1998."

I read that and thought wow if that is correct that ‘the top ten warmest years in American history occurred in the 1930s’ that will turn the whole mainstream scientific consensus on Global Warming on it’s head!

But hold it, wait a second, he’s talking about the …

‘the top ten warmest years in American history ‘

Think again and compare the phrases "Global Warming" and "the top ten warmest years in American history".

Isn’t it Global Warming we talking about not just American Warming? If this rejiggering of the American data for the 1930s that McIntyre has done is accurate and valid shouldn’t we see how this fits in and changes the predictive models that the climate science community has developed before we go jumping to conclusions and accusing NASA of withholding information and news from the public?

And regardless of all that the warm period Steven McIntyre (who does not have an advanced degree and has just two published articles in the journal Energy and Environment which is not even carried in the ISI listing of peer-reviewed journals) is talking about temperature in the 1930s that is old news and no one is hiding it now or have they ever.

In fact the Global Warming Denial crowd has been citing the 1930s period ad nauseam for ages now. The Conservative whoops sorry my mistake, Cybercast News Service was reporting this same stuff last August: A Bit of History for Global Warmers: Look at 1930. The infamous GWD leader Sen. James Inhofe often cites Exxon funded research that tells us how the 1930s were so warm and that’s proof that global warming is bogus.

For what it’s worth climate scientists have always included the warm period of the 1930s in developing their climate model and the climb in the warm temperatures recorded globally in the 1990s that have been attributed to Green House Gasses would have been even higher if it weren’t for the Global Dimming effect from the Mt Pinatubo eruption in 1991.

I said I’ll wait to see what comes of McIntyre’s rejiggering of the numbers and look to see if his research first of all gets published and peer reviewed and beyond that if it changes anything that the thousands of climate scientists that subscribe to the mainstream scientific consensus have to say.

Sure enough the next day Climate Scientist Gavin Schmidt wrote an article on the Real Climate web site entitled 1934 and all that; Another week, another ado over nothing which basically confirmed what I was thinking might be the case in that the changes in U.S. data didn’t do much of anything to change the global climate picture at all:

…In the global mean, 2005 remains the warmest (as in the NCDC analysis). CRU has 1998 as the warmest year but there are differences in methodology, particularly concerning the Arctic (extrapolated in GISTEMP, not included in CRU) which is a big part of recent global warmth. No recent IPCC statements or conclusions are affected in the slightest.

Sum total of this change? A couple of hundredths of degrees in the US rankings and no change in anything that could be considered climatically important (specifically long term trends).

However, there is clearly a latent and deeply felt wish in some sectors for the whole problem of global warming to be reduced to a statistical quirk or a mistake. This led to some truly death-defying leaping to conclusions when this issue hit the blogosphere. One of the worst examples (but there are others) was the ‘Opinionator’ at the New York Times (oh dear). He managed to confuse the global means with the continental US numbers, he made up a story about McIntyre having ‘always puzzled about some gaps’ (what?) , declared the the error had ‘played havoc’ with the numbers, and quoted another blogger saying that the ‘astounding’ numbers had been ‘silently released’. None of these statements are true. Among other incorrect stories going around are that the mistake was due to a Y2K bug or that this had something to do with photographing weather stations. Again, simply false.

But hey, maybe the Arctic will get the memo. (My Emphasis)

And then very shortly after that Tim Lambert wrote in the ScienceBlogs.com Deltoid Blog Global warming totally disproved again (August 10, 2007 2:33 PM):

How much difference did the adjustment make to the US temperature series? Well, it changed this:

to this:

Not much difference. The right hand end of the red curve has moved down a little bit, but this decade is still the warmest ever recorded in the US. The change to the global temperature series is imperceptible.

And the next day he wrote regarding the right wing hysteria Did NASA report that 1998 was the warmest in the US?:

Because of the corrections to the GISS data 1998 and 1934 went from being in a virtual tie, to being in a virtual tie.. This, of course, has not stopped global warming denialists from endlessly hyping it as a big change….

…NASA’s data about 1998 being the warmest in the US was not "much-ballyhooed". Because NASA actually reported that it wasn’t as warm as 1934. In 2001, NASA’s James Hansen wrote:

The U.S. annual (January-December) mean temperature is slightly warmer in 1934 than in 1998 …

In comparing temperatures of years separated by 60 or 70 years the uncertainties in various adjustments (urban warming, station history adjustments, etc.) lead to an uncertainty of at least 0.1°C. Thus it is not possible to declare a record U.S. temperature with confidence until a result is obtained that exceeds the temperature of 1934 by more than 0.1°C.

As it turns out even Steven McIntyre while disagreeing with Gavin Schmidlt’s characterization of the data change as no big deal has said himself:

"My own view has been that matter is certainly not the triviality that Gavin Schmidt would have you believe, but neither is it any magic bullet."

My thinking on this … the extreme right wing and Global Warming Denial blogosphere will milk this for all it’s worth (to them) while in reality it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in the whole scheme of things supporting the scientific consensus of Anthropogenic Global Warming. All the hot air the right wing bloggers are pumping out surrounding this issue however might make 2007 the hottest year on record by far.

The post Sorting Through the Global Warming Denial Hot Air & Hoopla Surrounding the Revisions to NASA's GISS Temperature Data appeared first on Rationally Thinking Out Loud.

Milloy is now giving us The Ultimate Global Warming Challenge:

I see this as just a desperation Hail Mary Pass publicity stunt from one of the leading Global Warming Deniers out there in debate over whether global warming is anthropogenic in origin debate. It just another one of The Stupid Things Partisans Sometimes Say and Do.

In much the same way that Hovind’s Challenge gives creationists something to cling too I think The Ultimate Global Warming Challenge will give the Global Warming Deniers that are still aroundsomething to hang on too. What we are going to hear now is desparate Global Warming Deniers without a logic arguement to stand on citing that no one has ever won The Ultimate Global Warming Challenge.

And no one probably ever will.

As Naomi Oreskes (a Professor of History and Science Studies at the University of California San Diego) is quoted saying in the online article Global Warming: How Do Scientists Know They’re Not Wrong? :

Best predictor wins

Contrary to popular parlance, science can never truly "prove" a theory. Science simply arrives at the best explanation of how the world works.

Global warming can no more be "proven" than the theory of continental drift, the theory of evolution or the concept that germs carry diseases.

"All science is fallible," Oreskes told LiveScience. "Climate science shouldn’t be expected to stand up to some fantasy standard that no science can live up to."

Instead, a variety of methods and standards are used to evaluate the viability of different scientific explanations and theories.

One such standard is how well a theory predicts the outcome of an event, and climate change theory has proven to be a strong predictor.

The effects of putting massive amounts of carbon dioxide in the air were first predicted in 1896 by Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius.

Noted oceanographer Roger Revelle’s 1957 predictions that carbon dioxide would build up in the atmosphere and cause noticeable changes by the year 2000 have been borne out by numerous studies, as has Princeton climatologist Suki Manabe’s 1980 prediction that the Earth’s poles would be first to see the effects of global warming.

In 1988, NASA climatologist James Hansen outlined three scenarios of how the global average temperature might rise over the next 30 years. Nearly 20 years later, the observed rise has followed his medium-range scenario with high accuracy.

Hansen’s model predictions are "a shining example of a successful prediction in climate science," said climatologist Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University.

Schmidt says that predictions by those who doubted global warming have failed to come true.

"Why don’t you trust a psychic? Because their predictions are wrong," he told LiveScience. "The credibility goes to the side that gets these predictions right."

In another article on the LiveScience.com website, Global Warming or Just Hot Air? A Dozen Different Views, Naomi Oreskes is again quoted as having said in an editorial piece in The Washington Post in 2004:

"Many people have the impression that there is significant scientific disagreement about global climate change. It’s time to lay that misapprehension to rest. There is a scientific consensus on the fact that Earth’s climate is heating up and human activities are part of the reason. We need to stop repeating nonsense about the uncertainty of global warming and start talking seriously about the right approach to address it.

"The basic picture is clear, and some changes are already occurring. A new report by the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment-a consortium of eight countries, including Russia and the United States-now confirms that major changes are taking place in the Arctic, affecting both human and non-human communities, as predicted by climate models."

I think that Oreskes saying "We need to stop repeating nonsense about the uncertainty of global warming and start talking seriously about the right approach to address it" sums it up. The scientific debate is on global warming being real and anthropogenic in origin is over in much the same way as the scientific debate on creationism is too. Of what debate still remains 99% of it comes from politically aligned or motivated organizations (such as CEI, Heartland, Steven Milloy of JunkScience.com etc etc.) and not the scientific community. We need to stop all this partisan Baghdad Bob ranting on the right and shift the debate to just what to do about it.

The post The Ultimate Global Warming Challenge: A desperation Hail Mary Pass publicity stunt from Steven Milloy appeared first on Rationally Thinking Out Loud.

Lately it seems to me that the Global Warming Denial crowd seems to hauling out or citing William Gray (wikipedia), the popularly famous hurricane forecaster as a scientist that maybe can rescue their failing cause.

Given that my own personal un-scientific belief is that the global warming hurricane linkage is overstated primarily due to the way the press hypes it I was genuinely interested in just what he really has to the overarching topic of global warming. And I ‘ll be damned that while it not hard at all to find out that he’s a skeptic regarding anthropogenic global warming (in fact he quite militant about it) it’s been virtually impossible for me to find out why.

When he makes a statement regarding global warming he never cites any research he done (which is understandable, he a hurricane forecaster not a climatologist) or any research done by climatologists that helped him from his opinions. In fact what he often seems to say in varying different forms is:

"I’ve been in meteorology over 50 years…and I am of the opinion that [global warming] is one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American people."

So that’s it?

So what!

So we should just take his opinion on pure faith based on his 50 years?

I’m not dumb, I’m not stupid, tell me what the science was that you did or studied in that 50 years that lead you to your line of thinking! What he doing throwing out that line about being a meteorologist for over 50 years is just a fallacious Argument from Authority.

I had a teacher when I was a kid that it seemed whenever you asked him a question about something he just taught he would always respond saying that he had been a teacher for 30 years and that was why we should listen to him. No explanation, no clarification, no understanding, we should just take what he says as gospel because he’s got "X number of years" experience in the subject and that should be good enough. He was a really really bad teacher. The only thing I remember learning from his classes back then was just how bad some teachers can be.

In fact in my search to find out just what was behind William Gray’s thinking what I did find was a critical article on the RealClimate.org web site entitled Gray and Muddy Thinking about Global Warming.

The post Just who is William M. Gray? appeared first on Rationally Thinking Out Loud.