Dive right in:
- Climate experts agree: Global warming caused unprecedented Russian heat wave – “I agree with Michael Tobis’s take at Only In It For the Gold that something systematic has changed to alter the global circulation and you’ll need a coupled atmosphere/ocean global model to understand what’s going on. My hunch is that a warming Arctic combined with sea-surface-temperature teleconnections altered the global circulation such that a blocking ridge formed over western Russia leading to the unprecedented drought/heat wave conditions. Without contributions from anthropogenic climate change, I don’t think this event would have reached such extremes or even happened at all.”
- Myth of the climate science gravy train: scientists studying Greenland forced to pay their own airfares – One of the more absurd claims made by the denialists is that climate science offers scientists a veritable “gravy train” of funding. I’ve always found it a curious argument: after all do biomedical researchers need to “make up cancer” in order to obtain funding? Do biologists make up evolution in order to get grants? How about those wacky physicists over at CERN who managed to scare up nine billion US dollars to build an atom smasher? That’s your tax money being scammed by leftist-pinko-scientists who believe in relativity! Did they fabricate quantum physics in order to get some hot grant money? I mean, who has actually seen a sub-atomic particle?
- Lords distance themselves from climate sceptic Christopher Monckton – Monckton argues his use of the portcullis emblem, which has appeared on his letterheads and lecture presentations, does not breach any rules: “My logo is not a registered badge of parliament, and is plainly distinct from parliament’s badge in numerous material respects. The Lords do not use the portcullis at all on their notepaper: they use the Royal Arms within an elliptical cartouche.” A House of Lords spokeswoman said: “The emblem is property of the Queen, and Parliament has a Royal Licence granted for its use.” … In June, following the death of Viscount Colville of Culross, Monckton, as a qualifying hereditary peer, put his name forward as a candidate at the resulting byelection to find the replacement elected peer. However, he failed to secure a single vote among the 29 crossbench hereditary peers eligible to vote.
- RealClimate: Expert Credibility in Climate Change – Having lived through the plate tectonics revolution, I can clearly see the differences between that scientific revolution and this one. In the case of plate tectonics, there were initially few convinced but they kept coming up with exciting new data. When others tried to falsify the idea, they found more interesting observations that got them excited. It really didn’t take long to convince almost everybody, except a few diehards, that the science was right. Meanwhile these diehards (e.g., the Meyerhoffs) continued to publish for decades about ‘problems with plate tectonics’.For all I know, they are still publishing. In the scientific (vs media) discussion of global warming, all the interesting new data points to warming changes in the system… It is no wonder why the Lindzen idea of strong negative feedback is not well regarded in the scientific community–it doesn’t lead anywhere and doesn’t match with the other data available. Nevertheless he will probably keep publishing.
- A dark ideology is driving those who deny climate change – In each case the tactics are identical: discredit the science, disseminate false information, spread confusion, and promote doubt. As the authors state: “Small numbers of people can have large, negative impacts, especially if they are organised, determined and have access to power.” In Britain, links between deniers and big business are less obvious. Yet it is clear lessons have been learned and tactics copied. Consider these examples: the leaking of the “climategate” emails and the wild over-reaction to the mistaken insertion of a paragraph in the IPCC’s last climate assessment, that suggested wrongly that Himalayan glaciers are melting rapidly. Both created a furore with the former revealing “a massive fraud” that represented “the final nail in the coffin” for the theory of global warming, deniers argued. This claim was later shown to be nonsense, though it took three inquiries to establish the point.
