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RESULTS		Results 301 – 325 of 367
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Headline	Author	Published	Section
'Mars and Pluto are warming too' No they aren't -- and what if they were?	Coby Beck	19 Dec 2006	Gristmill
(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide) Objection: Global warming is happening on Mars and Pluto as well. Since there are no SUVs on Mars, CO2 can't be causing global warming. Answer: Warming on another planet would be an interesting coincidence, but it would not necessarily be driven by the same causes. The only relevant factor the earth and Mars share is the sun, so if the warming were real and related, that would be the logical place t ...
Topics: climate, climate change skepticism, climate science, How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic (all these topics)

New polling data on global warming ... It's disheartening	Andrew Dessler	19 Dec 2006	Gristmill
... can be found here (hat tip to pollster.com). Here's the important result: American voters tend to see Global Warming as a serious problem but are divided as to whether it's caused by human activities or long-term planetary trends. This is important because: As with most issues, the understanding of why something is happening has a huge impact on perceptions about the issue. Among those who believe human activity is the primary cause of Global Warming, 71% cons ...
Topics: climate, climate change skepticism, climate science (all these topics)

Top 10 climate stories of 2006: Part II Heat, hotness, and hotitude	Andrew Dessler	19 Dec 2006	Gristmill
Here are the second five of my 'Top 10 climate stories of 2006,' in no particular order. (The first five are here.) 2005 was hot: In early 2006, it was revealed that 2005 was a statistical tie with 1998 for the hottest year of the past 400. However, 1998 was warmed by the biggest El Nino of the 20th century, while 2005 had no such help. That means something else contributed to making 2005 so warm, and that something was almost certainly human activity. With a mild ...
Topics: climate, climate science (all these topics)

'Current global warming is just part of a natural cycle' This idea is just one short step above appealing to magic	Coby Beck	18 Dec 2006	Gristmill
(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide) Objection: Current warming is just part of a natural cycle. Answer: While it is undoubtedly true that there are natural cycles and variations in global climate, those who insist that current warming is purely natural -- or even mostly natural -- have two challenges. First, they need to identify the mechanism behind this alleged natural cycle. Absent a forcing of some sort, there will be no change ...
Topics: climate, climate change skepticism, climate science, How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic (all these topics)

'Vineland was full of grapes' Or was it an early advertising campaign?	Coby Beck	18 Dec 2006	Gristmill
(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide) Objection: Newfoundland was so warm in the Medieval Warm Period that when the Vikings landed they called it Vineland and brought boatloads of grapes back to Europe. Answer: Once again: you can't draw conclusions about global climate from an anecdote about a single region, or even a few regions. You need detailed analysis of proxy climate indicators from around the world. These proxy reconstructions have sh ...
Topics: climate, climate change skepticism, climate science, How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic (all these topics)

'The hockey stick is broken' Well, no ... but who's playing hockey anyway?	Coby Beck	17 Dec 2006	Gristmill
(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide) Objection: The Hockey Stick graph -- the foundation of global warming theory -- has been shown to be scientifically invalid, perhaps even a fraud. Answer: The first order of business here is to correct the mischaracterization of this single paleoclimate study as the "foundation" of global warming theory. What's going on today is understood via study of today's data and today's best sci ...
Topics: climate, climate change skepticism, climate science, How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic (all these topics)

'Global warming is nothing new' Yes, the last ice age started thawing over 20,000 years ago, but that stopped a long time ago	Coby Beck	16 Dec 2006	Gristmill
(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide) Objection: Global warming has been going on for the last 20,000 years. Answer: It is true that 20,000 years ago the temperature was some 8 to 10� C colder than it is today. But to draw a line from that point to today and say, "look, 20K years of global warming!" is dubious and arbitrary at best. If you have look at this graph of temperature, starting at a point when we were finishing the ...
Topics: climate, climate change skepticism, climate science, How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic (all these topics)

'Greenland used to be green' Don't judge a book by its cover, much less a land by its name	Coby Beck	16 Dec 2006	Gristmill
(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide) Objection: When the Vikings settled it, Greenland was a lovely, hospitable island, not the frozen wasteland it is today. It was not until the Little Ice Age that it got so cold they abandoned it. Answer: First, Greenland is part of a single region. It can not be necessarily taken to represent a global climate shift. See the post on the Medieval Warm Period for a global perspective on this time period. Br ...
Topics: climate science, climate change skepticism, climate, How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic (all these topics)

'The Medieval Warm Period was just as warm as today' Repetition of this point has failed to make it any more true	Coby Beck	15 Dec 2006	Gristmill
(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide) Objection: It was just as warm in the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) as it is today. In fact, Greenland was green and they were growing grapes in England! Answer: There is no good evidence that the MWP was a globally warm period comparable to today. Regionally, there may have been places that exhibited notable warmth -- Europe, for example -- but all global proxy reconstructions agree it is warmer ...
Topics: climate, climate change skepticism, climate science, How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic (all these topics)

'It was warmer during the Holocene Climatic Optimum' In fact, the warmth of this period was not global and not like today.	Coby Beck	14 Dec 2006	Gristmill
(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide) Objection: It was warmer during the Holocene Climatic Optimum than it is today -- without any human influence. Answer: Though some temperatures during that period were in the same range as today, they were confined to the northern hemisphere and the summer months. What's more, the cause is understood (orbital forcing similar to what controlled the Ice Ages), just as today's cause is understood (CO2 emissi ...
Topics: climate, climate change skepticism, climate science, How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic (all these topics)

'Hansen has been wrong before' Maybe, but not about the climate!	Coby Beck	14 Dec 2006	Gristmill
(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide) Objection: In 1988, Hansen predicted dire warming over the next decade -- and he was off by 300%. Why in the world should we listen to the same doom and gloom from him today? Answer: While in some instances it is ignorant repetition of misinformation, at its source this story is a plain lie. In 1988, James Hansen testified before the U.S. Senate on the danger of anthropogenic global warming. During that t ...
Topics: climate, climate change skepticism, climate science, How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic, James Hansen (all these topics)

Global warming: worry, don't panic It's a disaster, not a catastrophe	Gar Lipow	02 Dec 2006	Gristmill
A Guardian story suggests that we may have as much as eight degrees of global warming already locked in, in the form of stored heat in the ocean. But a substantial stored-heat backlog in the ocean has been well-known for some time. That it is greater than expected is bad news -- but (as I've confirmed in correspondence with Gavin Schmidt of Real Climate) this does not mean that all or most of that stored heat is going to 'come back' and fry the planet, provided we take act ...
Topics: climate, climate change impacts, climate science (all these topics)

Could the Sun be causing climate change? It's likely not the primary cause	Andrew Dessler	25 Nov 2006	Gristmill
In climate change debates, one hears a lot about the Sun. A favorite argument of those opposed to action is that the warming we're presently experiencing is due to increases in solar output, also known as solar brightening, and not from greenhouse gases. Before critiquing this argument, first remember what the IPCC says about human contribution to climate change: There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is at ...
Topics: climate, climate science (all these topics)

'They predicted global cooling in the 1970s' There was a bit of speculation, but nothing even remotely resembling today's consensus	Coby Beck	24 Nov 2006	Gristmill
(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide) Objection: The alarmists were predicting the onset of an ice age in the '70s. Now it's too much warming! Why should we believe them this time? Answer: It is true that there were some predictions of an "imminent ice age" in the 1970s, but a cursory comparison of those warnings and today's reveals a huge difference.Today, you have a widespread scientific consensus, supported by national academies a ...
Topics: climate, climate change skepticism, climate science, How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic (all these topics)

'If we can't understand the past, how can we understand the present?' Understanding what is happening right under our noses does not require paleoclimate perfection	Coby Beck	23 Nov 2006	Gristmill
(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide) Objection: Climate science can't even fully explain why the climate did what it did in the past. How can they claim to know what is going on today? Answer: There are two requirements for understanding what happened at a particular point of climate change in geological history. One is an internally consistent theory based on physical principles; the other is sufficient data to determine the physical p ...
Topics: climate, climate change skepticism, climate science, How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic (all these topics)

'Chaotic systems are not predictable' Sure, but who says climate is chaotic?	Coby Beck	22 Nov 2006	Gristmill
(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide) Objection: Climate is an inherently chaotic system, and as such its behavior can not be predicted. Answer: Firstly, let's make sure we define climate: an average of weather patterns over some meaningful time period. We may thus discount the chaotic annual fluctuations of global mean temperature. That's weather, and one or two anomalous years does not represent a climate shift. Quite a few people beli ...
Topics: climate, climate change skepticism, climate science, How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic (all these topics)

The CO2-temperature correlation It's more complicated than you might think	Andrew Dessler	21 Nov 2006	Gristmill
Most people interested in climate change have seen the plots showing strong correlations between CO2 and temperature going back several hundred thousand years: FIGURE: Data from the Vostok ice core in Antarctica, from 410,000 years ago to the present. The top curve shows abundance of CO2 (in parts per million) from air bubbles in the ice core. The bottom curve shows the temperature anomaly in the Antarctic region, relative to the present, from isotopic measur ...
Topics: climate, climate science, greenhouse-gas emissions (all these topics)

'We can't even predict the weather next week' But weather is not climate -- that's why we have two distinct words	Coby Beck	21 Nov 2006	Gristmill
(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide) Objection: Scientists can't even predict the weather next week, so why should we believe what some climate model tells us about 100 years from now? Answer: Climate and weather are very different things, and the level of predictability is comparably different. Climate is defined as weather averaged over a period of time -- generally around 30 years. This averaging smooths out the random and unpredic ...
Topics: climate, climate change skepticism, climate science, How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic (all these topics)

'Aerosols should mean more warming in the south' Greater Northern Hemisphere warming is well-understood	Coby Beck	20 Nov 2006	Gristmill
(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide) Objection: Scientists claim that global warming from greenhouse gases is being countered somewhat by global dimming from aerosol pollution. They even claim that aerosol pollution caused the cooling in the mid-century. But GHGs are evenly mixed around the globe, while aerosols are disproportionately concentrated in the Northern Hemisphere. It follows that warming should be greater in the Southern Hemisp ...
Topics: climate, climate change skepticism, climate science, How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic (all these topics)

'Climate models are unproven' Actually, GCM's have many confirmed successes under their belts	Coby Beck	19 Nov 2006	Gristmill
(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide) Objection: Why should we trust a bunch of contrived computer models that have never had a prediction confirmed? Talk to me in 100 years. Answer: Given the absence of a few duplicate planets and some large time machines, we can't test a 100-year temperature projection. Does that mean the models can't be validated without waiting 100 years? No. The climate is an extremely complex system. Our observations of ...
Topics: climate, climate change skepticism, climate science, How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic (all these topics)

'Models don't take clouds into account' Clouds are complex and uncertain, but are not likely to save us from warming	Coby Beck	18 Nov 2006	Gristmill
(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide) Objection: Clouds are a large negative feedback that will stop any drastic warming. The climate models don't even take cloud effects into account. Answer: All of the atmospheric global climate models used for the kind of climate projections synthesized by the IPCC take the effects of clouds into account. You can read a discussion about cloud processes and feedbacks in the IPCC TAR. It is true, however, th ...
Topics: climate, climate change skepticism, climate science, How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic (all these topics)

The price of a climatologist's soul Oceanographer Tim Barnet reveals the dollar amount, and other fascinating points	Kit Stolz	17 Nov 2006	Gristmill
Tim Barnett, a leading oceanographer who just retired from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, this Monday gave a talk called Future Climate of Earth: A Sneak Preview [PDF] to a convention of fire ecologists in San Diego. Barnett began by saying that he had seven grandkids, and he didn't like to think about the world they were going to inherit from us. He then went on to succinctly explain why we know global warming is human-caused.Most of the warming in the earth is sto ...
Topics: climate science, greenhouse-gas emissions, James Hansen (all these topics)

'Peiser refuted Oreskes' In a poor piece of work that has been retracted by its author	Coby Beck	17 Nov 2006	Gristmill
(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide) Objection: Sure, Oreskes found no one bucking the consensus, but her paper was refuted by Benny Peiser, who did the exact same survey and found very different results. Answer: True, Benny Peiser did attempt a similar study and submitted it as a letter to Science responding to the Oreskes study. But for very good reasons, it was not published. Peiser claimed to find 34 articles in his 'reject or doubt t ...
Topics: climate, climate change skepticism, climate science, How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic (all these topics)

'Consensus is collusion' Is climate science maturing, or should we reach for our tinfoil hats?	Coby Beck	16 Nov 2006	Gristmill
(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide) Objection: More and more, climate models share all the same assumptions -- so of course they all agree! And every year, fewer scientists dare speak out against the findings of the IPCC, thanks to the pressure to conform. Answer: The growing confluence of model results and the increasingly similar physical representations of the climate system from model to model may well look like sharing code or tweaking ' ...
Topics: climate, climate change skepticism, climate science, How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic (all these topics)

Is today's warming man-made? Here's why the scientific community thinks so	Andrew Dessler	15 Nov 2006	Gristmill
This is a 'greatest hit' from my previous blog. It's a topic that comes up all the time, so I think it's worth a reprise. ----- As George Bush said at a recent press conference: 'the globe is warming. The fundamental debate: Is it manmade or natural?' Why does the scientific community think humans are significantly contributing to today's warming? To understand why, first recognize that whenever the climate shifts, there's a reason for it. It does not wande ...
Topics: climate, climate change adaptation, climate change skepticism, climate science (all these topics)

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