Debra Saunders is a conservative columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle who has a history of writing misleading contrarian pieces on climate change. She contacted NASA Public Affairs recently for a comment on the initial glitch on the October GHCN numbers (see this earlier post for discussions of that). They forwarded the query to me and since her questions were straightforward, I answered them as best I could. Indeed in her subsequent column, she quotes me accurately and in context. However, the rest of her column shows none of the same appreciation for basic journalistic standards.
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Search Results for: consensus
Friday round-up
Blogging has been a little light recently (apologies!), but here are a few pieces that have caught our eye this week.
First up, the Columbia Journalism Review has a two–parter on journalistic coverage of climate change inspired by comments from Jeff Huggins on the Andy Revkin’s Dot Earth blog. The key issues CJR addresses are familiar ones to readers here: how to communicate mainstream science in a way that doesn’t distort the reality of the consensus on many issues in favour of controversy on more cutting-edge topics. Definitely worth a read, and proof (if such were needed) that commenting on blogs can make a difference to coverage.
Next, the role of CO2 as a long-term climate forcing. The old CO2 lead/lag issue keeps making the rounds as a contrarian talking point (and made a brief resurgence here in comments this week) despite the fact that the existence of impact of climate on the carbon cycle in no way invalidates the impact of CO2 (as a greenhouse gas) on climate. However, there is a nice paper in Nature this week (Lunt et al, 2008) which looks at the various proposed triggers for the onset of the quaternary glaciations at the end of the Pliocene (~3 million years ago). These triggers involve, permanent El Nino events, the closing of the Isthmus of Panama, changes in orbital forcing, tectonic uplift of the Rocky mountains – and long-term decreases in CO2 as a function of very slow variations in sea floor spreading and chemical weathering. Lunt et al find that only the change in CO2 (400 ppm to 280 ppm) can explain the changes in the ice sheet. None of the other ideas come even close.
Thus, it looks very much like the climate changed radically due to this externally forced drift in CO2 (and tectonic is external for climate purposes on this timescale). As a corollary, this is an expansion of the idea we discussed a few months back, that the long term changes in the Earth system due to external forcings might be well be larger than the classical (Charney) sensitivity we often talk about.
Third. There has been a lot of discussion on energy futures in the comments – Nature had a good rundown of the scientific constraints on the different prospects. But this video is a quite entertaining discussion of why we just can’t get our heads around the issue from Dan Gilbert (h/t GH).
Finally, a commentary on the prospects for continued employment as an Arctic ice expert (h/t Climate Feedback).
Climate Change and Tropical Cyclones (Yet Again)
By Rasmus Benestad & Michael Mann
Just as Typhoon Nargis has reminded us of the destructive power of tropical cyclones (with its horrible death toll in Burma–around 100,000 according to the UN), a new paper by Knutson et al in the latest issue of the journal Nature Geosciences purports to project a reduction in Atlantic hurricane activity (principally the ‘frequency’ but also integrated measures of powerfulness).
The close timing of the Knutson et al and Typhoon Nargis is of course coincidental. But the study has been accorded the unprecedented privilege (that is, for a climate change article published during the past 7 years) of a NOAA press conference. What’s the difference this time? Well, for one thing, the title of the paper: “Simulated reduction in Atlantic hurricane frequency under twenty-first-century warming conditions” (emphasis added).
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The Global Cooling Bet – Part 2
Last week we proposed a bet against the “pause in global warming” forecast in Nature by Keenlyside et al. and we promised to present our scientific case later – so here it is.
Venus Unveiled
Something over a week ago I had the pleasure of making my way up to the little ski resort of La Thuile in the Val D’Aosta to learn about the latest results from the Venus Express mission. (You can imagine it was a tough decision to go to La Thuile and hear real scientists talking about Venus when I could have instead been listening to luminaries such as Mark Morano drone on at the Heartland Institute pseudoscience bash. ) My own connection with the Venus Express meeting came about through some work I’ve been doing on habitability of the newly discovered "Super Earth" extrasolar planets like Gliese 581c. Many of us think these may be "super-Venuses" rather than "Super-Earths," so it seemed like time to touch base with the people working on our own Venus. The fact that we can put together the same bits of physics we use to understand global warming on Earth in order to understand the interplay of the carbon dioxide greenhouse with sulfuric acid clouds on Venus is a testament to the fundamental power of climate science, and gives the lie to Claude Allègre’s oft stated claim that there is no such thing as a science of climate. Altogether, it was a thrilling meeting.
The Venus Express mission was described in this earlier RealClimate article, and you can read more about the mission at the VEX home page. Venus Express was done on the cheap, mostly using instruments cobbled together from leftover hardware from Mars Express and the Rosetta comet mission. The results have been nonetheless spectacular, and La Thuile provided a suitably spectacular venue in which to discuss them. This meeting was one in the series of Rencontres de Moriond in which scientists get together for a week of intensive discussion of leading-edge topics in physics — plus equally intensive skiing, climbing, hiking and enjoyment of good Northern Italian cooking. If you’ve ever read any of Jeremy Bernstein’s accounts of how he got involved in mountaineering through his attendence at particle physics meetings conducted in similar circumstances, you’ll know the general idea about how such things work. It’s a great way to shake loose creative thinking. And it’s one of those things that makes real science so much fun. Perfectly aside from the setting, it was a thrill to see the vigor of this field, and the influx of talented new young postdocs and graduates students, with all their fresh ideas and enthusiasm. I hope to give just a bit of the flavor of what went on during that eventful week.
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Our Books
This post is a list of books since 2005 (in reverse chronological order) that we have been involved in, accompanied by the publisher’s official description, and some comments of independent reviewers of the work. We will try and keep this list up to date as and when new books appear. We have also added links to the sidebar with the latest offerings.
Available now:
- The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines, Michael Mann, Columbia University Press.
- Global warming: Understanding the Forecast, Second Edition, David Archer, Wiley (2011).
- Global Warming and Political Intimidation, by Raymond Bradley, University of Massachusetts Press (2011).
- The Warming Papers: The Scientific Foundation for the Climate Change Forecast, by David Archer and Ray Pierrehumbert, Blackwell / Wiley (2010).
- The Global Carbon Cycle: Princeton Primers in Climate, by David Archer, Princeton University Press (2010).
- Principles of Planetary Climate by Ray Pierrehumbert. (Cambridge University Press, 2010)
- The Climate Crisis: An Introductory Guide to Climate Change. David Archer and Stefan Rahmstorf, Cambridge University Press (2010). An unofficial guidebook to the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report.
- Our Threatened Oceans Stefan Rahmstorf and K. Richardson (2008)
- Climate Change: Picturing the Science. Gavin Schmidt and Joshua Wolfe, W.W. Norton (2009)
- The Long Thaw: How Humans are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate. David Archer, Princeton University Press (2009)
- Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming Michael Mann and Lee Kump, DK/Pearson (2008)
- Wie bedroht sind die Ozeane? Stefan Rahmstorf and K. Richardson (2007, in German)
- Global warming: Understanding the Forecast, David Archer (2006)
- Der Klimawandel Diagnose, Prognose, Therapie, Stefan Rahmstorf and H. J. Schellnhuber (2006, in German, Korean, Vietnamese; Arabic version forthcoming)
- Solar Activity and Earth’s Climate, Rasmus Benestad (2006, 2nd Edition)
- Paleoclimatology: Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary, Ray Bradley (2005, 2nd Edition)
Happy Reading!
The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines, Michael E. Mann (Columbia University Press).
Publisher’s description:
In its 2001 report on global climate, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations prominently featured the “Hockey Stick,” a chart showing global temperature data over the past one thousand years. The Hockey Stick demonstrated that temperature had risen with the increase in industrialization and use of fossil fuels. The inescapable conclusion was that worldwide human activity since the industrial age had raised CO2 levels, trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and warming the planet.
The Hockey Stick became a central icon in the “climate wars,” and well-funded science deniers immediately attacked the chart and the scientists responsible for it. Yet the controversy has had little to do with the depicted temperature rise and much more with the perceived threat the graph posed to those who oppose governmental regulation and other restraints to protect our environment and planet. Michael E. Mann, lead author of the original paper in which the Hockey Stick first appeared, shares the real story of the science and politics behind this controversy. He introduces key figures in the oil and energy industries, and the media front groups who do their bidding in sometimes slick, bare-knuckled ways to cast doubt on the science. Mann concludes with an account of the “Climategate” scandal, the 2009 hacking of climate scientists’ emails. Throughout, Mann reveals the role of science deniers, abetted by an uninformed media, in once again diverting attention away from one of the central scientific and policy issues of our time.
The Climate Crisis: An Introductory Guide to Climate Change. David Archer and Stefan Rahmstorf, Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Publisher’s description:
This book provides a concise and accessible overview of what we know about ongoing climate change and its impacts, and what we can do to confront the climate crisis. Highly illustrated in full colour, it lucidly presents information contained in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, making essential scientific information on this critical topic available to a broad audience.
David Archer and Stefan Rahmstorf – two outstanding scientists – bring us up-to-date on climate science in this remarkable and very readable book. This book deserves to be read by anyone interested in climate change.
–Paul Crutzen, Max Plank Institute for Chemistry, winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for explaining the ozone hole
The key findings of the IPCC, written in plain and simple terms. Great value in informing the public at large about the science underlying the growing challenge of climate change.
-Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the IPCC and Director-General of The Energy Resources Institute
They are excellent communicators of the science to the general reader… One hopes for a wide readership for this measured book which clearly and thoughtfully sets out the results of the work of a great many scientists.
– Bryan Walker, Hot Topic, 19 January 2010
Climate Change: Picturing the science. Gavin Schmidt and Joshua Wolfe, W. W. Norton, April 2009
“Climate Change: Picturing the Science is a tour de force of public education. It is simply the best available collection of essays by climate scientists on the nature of human-induced climate change, the ways scientists have come to understand and measure the risks that it poses, and the options that we face….The editors, climatologist Gavin Schmidt and photographer Joshua Wolfe, have produced a collection of essays of uniformly outstanding quality, supported by photographs of beauty and insight.”
-Jeffrey D. Sachs
Director, Earth Institute at
Columbia University
Publisher’s description:
An unprecedented union of scientific analysis and stunning photography illustrating the effects of climate change on the global ecosystem.
In this groundbreaking book, published by W.W. Norton & Company in April 2009 NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt and photographer Joshua Wolfe illustrate as never before the ramifications of shifting weather patterns for human society. Photographic spreads show us retreating glaciers, sinking villages in Alaska’s tundra, drying lakes. The text follows adventurous scientists through the ice caps at the poles to the coral reefs of the tropical seas. Marshalling data spanning centuries and continents, the book affirms the headlines with cutting-edge research and visual records, including contributions from experts on atmospheric science, oceanography, paleoclimatology, technology, politics, and the polar regions.
The Long Thaw: How Humans are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate, David Archer (Princeton University Press, 2009).
Publisher’s description:
Global warming is usually represented as a hundred-year problem, say to the year 2100. In The Long Thaw, David Archer, one of the world’s leading climatologists, shows how a few centuries of fossil-fuel use will change the climate of the Earth dramatically for hundreds of thousands of years into the future. The great ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland will take more than a century to melt, we think, but the climate impact from fossil fuel CO2 will last long enough for the ice sheets to respond fully to the warmer climate, changing sea level one hundred times more than the forecast for the year 2100. A planet-wide thaw driven by humans has already begun, but Archer argues that it is still not too late to avert dangerous climate change—if humans can find a way to cooperate as never before.
Reviews:
In this short book, David Archer gives us the latest on climate change research, and skillfully tells the climate story that he helped to discover: generations beyond our grandchildren’s grandchildren will inherit atmospheric changes and an altered climate as a result of our current decisions about fossil-fuel burning. Not only are massive climate changes coming if we humans continue on our current path, but many of these changes will last for millennia. To make predictions about the future, we rely on research into the deep past, and Archer is at the forefront of this field: paleoclimatology. This is the book for anyone who wishes to really understand what cutting-edge science tells us about the effects we are having, and will have, on our future climate.
Richard B. Alley, Penn State University
This is the best book about carbon dioxide and climate change that I have read. David Archer knows what he is talking about
James Hansen, NASA
Books on climate change tend to focus on what is expected to happen this century, which will certainly be large, but they often neglect the even larger changes expected to take place over many centuries. The Long Thaw looks at climate effects beyond the twenty-first century, and its focus on the long-term carbon cycle, rather than just climate change, is unique.
Jeffrey T. Kiehl, NCAR
A great book. What sets it apart is that it expands the discussion of the impacts of global warming beyond the next century and convincingly describes the effects that are projected for the next few thousand years. What also sets it apart is how deeply it takes general readers into the scientific issues of global warming by using straightforward explanations of often complex ideas.
Peter J. Fawcett, University of New MexicoArcher has perfectly pitched answers to the most basic questions about global warming while providing a sound basis for understanding the complex issues frequently misrepresented by global warming skeptics. With a breezy, conversational style, he . . . provides a complete picture of climate change.
—Publishers Weekly[An] enjoyable and fast-paced treatise. . . . Archer leads the reader to a simple yet accurate picture of climate changes, ranging from geological time scales to current warming, ice ages and prospects for the future.
—Susan Solomon, Nature
Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming Michael Mann and Lee Kump, (2008).
Publisher’s description:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been issuing the essential facts and figures on climate change for nearly two decades. But the hundreds of pages of scientific evidence quoted for accuracy by the media and scientists alike, remain inscrutable to the general public who may still question the validity of climate change.
Esteemed climate scientists Michael E. Mann and Lee R. Kump, have partnered with DK Publishing to present Dire Predictions–an important book in this time of global need. Dire Predictions presents the information documented by the IPCC in an illustrated, visually-stunning, and undeniably powerful way to the lay reader. The scientific findings that provide validity to the implications of climate change are presented in clear-cut graphic elements, striking images, and understandable analogies.
Readers will be able to understand the IPCC reports’ key concepts such as scientific uncertainty. They will also learn how to build a climate model and use it to predict future climates. Geoforensics is presented as a way to learn from the past by piecing together clues from prior climates.
Independent reviews:
Here’s a powerful, straight-forward guide to how scientists, economists, and engineers really understand the problem of global warming. It makes 20 years of research and consensus-building completely accessible to anyone who cares to know the truth–and to do something about it.
Bill McKibben, author of “The End of Nature”
With its eye-grabbing graphics and reader-friendly prose, “Dire Predictions” walks us through the findings of the world’s leading climate scientists – and places the ultimately responsibility for the human future directly at our feet.
Ross Gelbspan, author of “The Heat Is On” and “Boiling Point”
Dire Predictions is a must read for anyone who wants the straight facts on global warming. It cuts to the heart of the massive 2007 IPCC report, presenting major scientific findings in easy to understand language and graphics. Written by two of the scientific community’s most thoughtful researchers, Dire Predictions’ unbiased message about global warming arrives at a time when people need it most!
Dr. Heidi Cullen, Climate Expert at “The Weather Channel”
Wie bedroht sind die Ozeane?, Stefan Rahmstorf and K. Richardson, (Fischer 2007, in German, English version published 2008)
Publisher’s description:
Die Meere sind eine Grundlage unseres Lebens — sie regulieren unser Klima und sind ein wichtiger Nahrungslieferant. Doch wir zerstören sie durch globale Erwärmung, Überfischung und Verschmutzung. Das wird verheerende Folgen haben, wenn wir nicht rasch umdenken und handeln. Dieser Band zeigt Ansätze auf, wie wir unsere ozeanischen Ökosysteme wirkungsvoll schützen können.
Global warming: Understanding the Forecast, David Archer (Wiley-Blackwell, 2006).
Publisher’s description:
Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast is a comprehensive introduction to all aspects of global warming. Written in an accessible way, this important book examines the processes of climate change and climate stability, from the distant past to the distant future. Examining the greenhouse effect, the carbon cycle, and what the future may hold for global climate, this text draws from a wide range of disciplines, and not only summarizes scientific evidence, but also economic and policy issues, related to global warming. A companion website provides access to interactive computer models of the physics and chemistry behind the global warming forecast, which can be used to support suggested student projects included at the end of each chapter. Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast provides an essential introduction to this vital issue for both students and general readers, with or without a science background.
Independent reviews:
Rigorous but rewarding, David Archer’s book takes us through the science of global warming so that we can more effectively assess where the world may be heading.
Andrew S. Goudie, University of Oxford
David Archer’s book is an accessible, entertaining, but detailed account of how scientists are trying to predict future climate change. It is an excellent book and should be the first port of call for anyone wanting to delve deeper into exactly what goes into those global warming forecasts.
Mark Maslin, University College London, author of Global Warming: A Very Short Introduction
This is a wonderful book. Between the covers of a surprisingly slim paperback, David Archer has distilled nearly everything a concerned undergraduate student could wish to know about the workings of the climate system…overall, this book perfectly hits its target audience.
Keith Alverson, Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO, Environmental Conservation
Solar Activity and Earth’s Climate, Rasmus Benestad, (Praxis-Springer, 2006, 2nd Edition, originally published 2002)
Publisher’s description:
The main purpose of this book is to introduce the reader to the subject of solar activity and the connection with Earth’s climate. It commences with a brief review of the historical progress on the understanding of the solar-terrestrial connection and moves on to an objective scrutiny of the various hypothesis. The text focuses on how knowledge about the solar cycle and Earth’s climate is obtained. It includes discussion of observations, methods and the physics involved, with the necessary statistics and analysis also provided, including an examination of empirical relations between sunspots and the Earth’s climate. The author reviews plausible physical mechanisms involved in any links between the solar cycle and the Earth’s climate, emphasizing the use of established scientific methods for testing hypothesized relationships.
Der Klimawandel Diagnose, Prognose, Therapie, S. Rahmstorf and H. J. Schellnhuber (2006) (in German, Korean, Vietnamese; Arabic version forthcoming)
Independent reviews:
“In dem Buch “Klimawandel” in der Reihe “Wissen” des C.H. Beck Verlages melden sich zwei ausgewiesene Fachleute zu Wort: Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber ist Gründer und Direktor des Potsdam-Instituts für Klimafolgenforschung und Professor für Theoretische Physik an der Universität Potsdam. Stefan Rahmstorf forscht am Potsdam-Institut für Klimafolgenforschung und ist Professor für Physik der Ozeane an der Universität Potsdam. Auf 144 Seiten geht es einmal quer durch das Fachgebiet, das die Autoren in fünf Abschnitte aufgeteilt haben: Die Klimageschichte der Erde; die derzeitige globale Erwärmung und ihre Ursachen, die Folgen des Klimawandels; die öffentliche Diskussion um den Klimawandel und schließlich die möglichen Lösungswege. Viele ihrer Aussagen und Analysen zum Klimawandel sind bekannt – doch man hat sie selten so kompakt, übersichtlich und kompetent auf so wenig Raum zusammengefasst gefunden.”
Susanne Billig, Deutschlandradio Kultur, 23. März 2006“Stefan Rahmstorf und Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber haben ein Buch geschrieben, das einen hervorragenden Überblick über Erforschung, Folgen und Lösungsmöglichkeiten des Klimaproblems gibt.”
RBB-Inforadio, 8. April 2006
Paleoclimatology: Reconstructing Climates of the Quaternary, Ray Bradley, (Academic Press, 2nd edition, 2005, originally published in 1999).
Publisher’s description:
Raymond S. Bradley provides his readers with a comprehensive and up-to-date review of all of the important methods used in paleoclimatic reconstruction, dating and paleoclimate modeling. Two comprehensive chapters on dating methods provide the foundation for all paleoclimatic studies and are followed by up-to-date coverage of ice core research, continental geological and biological records, pollen analysis, radiocarbon dating, tree rings and historical records. New methods using alkenones in marine sediments and coral studies are also described. Paleoclimatology, Second Edition, is an essential textbook for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students studying climatology, paleoclimatology and paleoceanography worldwide, as well as a valuable reference for lecturers and researchers, appealing to archaeologists and scientists interested in environmental change.
Independent Reviews:
Paleoclimatology is a definite “must-have” for anyone working in climate studies and highly recommended for anyone seriously interested in our climate.
William R. Green, The Leading Edge
This thorough, well referenced text will prove to be indispensable to anyone involved in the study of past and current climate change and modeling.
Southeastern Naturalist
Tropical tropospheric trends
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!
Some old-timers will remember a series of ‘bombshell’ papers back in 2004 which were going to “knock the stuffing out” of the consensus position on climate change science (see here for example). Needless to say, nothing of the sort happened. The issue in two of those papers was whether satellite and radiosonde data were globally consistent with model simulations over the same time. Those papers claimed that they weren’t, but they did so based on a great deal of over-confidence in observational data accuracy (see here or here for how that turned out) and an insufficient appreciation of the statistics of trends over short time periods.
Well, the same authors (Douglass, Pearson and Singer, now joined by Christy) are back with a new (but necessarily more constrained) claim, but with the same over-confidence in observational accuracy and a similar lack of appreciation of short term statistics.
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Global dimming and global warming
Readers might remember a minor kerfuffle in EOS (the AGU house journal) in February this year in which Gerald Stanhill claimed to find a paradox in the contemporaneous effects of global warming and global dimming (a long term reduction of surface solar radiation, mainly due to aerosols and clouds). The article attracted attention mainly because the paradox was claimed to “pose [a challenge] to the consensus explanation of climate change”.
Rather than point out the subtle confusions (between surface and tropospheric forcing, and local and global signals) here, I and two co-authors wrote a comment to the journal. After a number of avoidable and unavoidable delays, this comment (along with another one and a reply) have all now appeared in EOS (Nov 6 edition). By now of course, the original piece has been long forgotten and so the point in having the correspondence printed is unclear, but still…
For those that care, I’ll link our comment once it’s been posted on the GISS website (now available here), but the bottom line is clearly seen in the following figure:
That is, if you take all of the IPCC AR4 models (now called the CMIP3 ensemble), then over the twentieth century all of them show varying degrees of global warming, while at the same time they show significant global dimming. An earlier paper of ours had pointed to the aerosols (unsurprisingly) being the dominant cause for long term changes in dimming, but that changes in clouds on a decadal basis were responsible for much of the shorter term variability. Thus there doesn’t appear to be much ‘paradox’ left to worry about – both dimming and warming are seen in models and in observations.
Apologies for appearing to push my own papers here (not something we like to do particularly), but the published comment would have been better done as a blog post in February. There may be a lesson there….
BBC contrarian top 10
There is an interesting, if predictable, piece up on the BBC website devoted to investigating whether there is any ‘consensus’ among the various contrarians on why climate change isn’t happening (or if it is, it isn’t caused by human activity or if it is why it won’t be important, or if it is important, why nothing can be done etc.). Bottom line? The only thing they appear to agree about is that nothing should be done, but they have a multitude of conflicting reasons why. Hmm…
The journalist, Richard Black, put together a top 10 list of sceptic arguments he gathered from emailing the 61 signers of a Canadian letter. While these aren’t any different in substance to the ones routinely debunked here (and here and here), this list comes with the imprimatur of Fred Singer – the godfather to the sceptic movement, and recent convert from the view that it’s been cooling since 1940 to the idea that global warming is now unstoppable. Thus these are the arguments (supposedly) that are the best that the contrarians have to put forward.
Alongside each of these talking points, is a counter-point from the mainstream (full disclosure, I helped Richard edit some of those). In truth though, I was a little disappointed at how lame their ‘top 10’ arguments were. In order, they are: false, a cherry pick, a red herring, false, false, false, a red herring, a red herring, false and a strawman. They even used the ‘grapes grew in medieval England’ meme that you’d think they’d have abandoned already given that more grapes are grown in England now than ever before (see here). Another commonplace untruth is the claim that water vapour is ‘98% of the greenhouse effect’ – it’s just not.
So why do the contrarians still use arguments that are blatantly false? I think the most obvious reason is that they are simply not interested (as a whole) in providing a coherent counter story. If science has one overriding principle, it is that you should adjust your thinking in the light of new information and discoveries – the contrarians continued use of old, tired and discredited arguments demonstrates their divorce from the scientific process more clearly than any densely argued rebuttal.
The “Have you stopped beating your wife yet (yes/no)” questionnaire
I got an email Climate Expert Survey today from DemandDebate.com, a creation of Steve Milloy. Milloy has practiced to deceive before in the climate arena, and his junkscience.com, claiming to debunk the junk science of others, is actually a terrific source of specious deception in its own right. This survey looks like another such initiative. (Note added later: If you get a copy of this, post a comment or send us an email. We’d like to keep track.)
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