Politics

Economics & The Economy

Climate & Climate Politics

  • A tale of two climate articles | The Zingularity

    The funny thing about climate change — and I don’t me funny haha, more like funny eye/roll and groan — is the evidence is so powerful and easy for anyone to understand. Among creationist grifters one aspect of the fleecing is to demand evidence for evolution happening now, right now, and then reject any adaptations or speciations offered. It’s easy to do, the transitions day to day over the life of a person are not dramatic, imagine if they used the same tactics plate tectonics! But when it comes to climate change the evidence is simple, it is indeed happening now, right now, and since everyone has experience with thermometers and outdoor temperatures, it’s easy for the laypublic to understand that evidence.

    The climate change denial industry literally reduces to urging people to ignore their lying eyes and listen to the energy industry scientists and lawyers. One way to do that is to demonize climate scientists and that’s exactly what this story in the Daily Mail is attempting to do in a somewhat feeble manner….

  • An unbelievable angry right wing rant from an ignorant science denier: It is “Global Warming Week” and the press will be full of it « The Greenroom
  • RealClimate: Ice age constraints on climate sensitivity The paper being discussed and criticized here has been seen in the press lately with headlines to the effect that “Global warming much less serious than thought” or something to that effect. Maybe that’s not really the news the press should have been reporting (the emphasis is mine)…

    […] Unfortunately, the media coverage has not been very good. Partly, this is related to some ambiguous statements by the authors, and partly because media discussions of climate sensitivity have a history of being poorly done. The dominant frame was set by the press release which made a point of suggesting that this result made “extreme predictions” unlikely. This is fair enough, but had already been clear from the previous work discussed above. This was transformed into “Climate sensitivity was ‘overestimated’” by the BBC (not really a valid statement about the state of the science), compounded by the quote that Andreas Schmittner gave that “this implies that the effect of CO2 on climate is less than previously thought”. Who had previously thought what was left to the readers’ imagination. Indeed, the latter quote also prompted the predictably loony IBD editorial board to declare that this result proves that climate science is a fraud (though this is not Schmittner’s fault – they conclude the same thing every other Tuesday).

    The Schmittner et al. analysis marks the insensitive end of the spectrum of climate sensitivity estimates based on LGM data, in large measure because it used a data set and a weighting that may well be biased toward insufficient cooling. Unfortunately, in reporting new scientific studies a common fallacy is to implicitly assume a new study is automatically “better” than previous work and supersedes this. In this case one can’t blame the media, since the authors’ press release cites Schmittner saying that “the effect of CO2 on climate is less than previously thought”. It would have been more appropriate to say something like “our estimate of the effect is less than many previous estimates”.

  • Nations Meet to Address Problems of Climate Change – NYTimes.com
  • The Climate Scientists Who Wrote the Hacked Emails Explain the Cherry-Picked Phrases, If That’s Your Thing | ThinkProgress

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