Global-Warming Skepticism Hits 6-Year High 846
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Chris Mooney writes at Mother Jones that a new study, from the Yale and George Mason University research teams on climate change communication, shows a 7-percentage-point increase in the proportion of Americans who say they do not believe that global warming is happening. And that's just since the spring of 2013. The number of deniers is now 23 percent; back at the start of last year, it was 16 percent (PDF). The obvious question is, what happened over the last year to produce more climate denial? The answer may lie in the so-called global warming "pause"—the misleading idea that global warming has slowed down or stopped over the the past 15 years or so. This claim was used by climate skeptics, to great effect, in their quest to undermine the release of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fifth Assessment Report in September 2013—precisely during the time period that is in question in the latest study. "The notion of a global warming "pause" is, at best, the result of statistical cherry-picking," writes Mooney. " It relies on starting with a very hot year (1998) and then examining a relatively short time period (say, 15 years), to suggest that global warming has slowed down or stopped during this particular stretch of time." Put these numbers back into a broader context and the overall warming trend remains clear. "If you shift just 2 years earlier, so use 1996-2010 instead of 1998-2012, the trend is 0.14 C per decade, so slightly greater than the long-term trend," explains Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at NASA who was heavily involved in producing the IPCC report. This is why climate scientists generally don't seize on 15 year periods and make a big thing about them. "Journalists take heed: Your coverage has consequences. All those media outlets who trumpeted the global warming "pause" may now be partly responsible for a documented decrease in Americans' scientific understanding.""
There can't be global warming (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Which shows that people don't understand (Score:2, Funny)
The rest of your comment aside, this is simply absurd. Aside from some blindly religious zealot goofballs who think the planet is 6,000 years old and that Jesus rode to school on a Velociraptor,
That's ridiculous. Everyone knows Jesus was home schooled like all real Americans.
Re:An ode to wankery (Score:4, Funny)
Could be when spell-checkers made us sloppy about proper usage. It's "Death throes" unless you're talking wrestling.
Wouldn't you use a spelling checker instead of a spell checker, unless your name is Harry Potter?
White Coats vs solar output (Score:3, Funny)
For all the "scientific" discussion about the topic in hand, few are still reminding the populace that no scientific theory has been able to predict the changes in total solar output & solar flares over any long period of time! This is an enormous hole in the knowledge needed to do predictions that mean anything.
Solar output conditions dramatically alter the surface temperatures surprise (this winter notice the current so-called "solar maximum" with a "solar flare minimum" and the medieval Maunder minimum).
Until you can accurately predict solar output over a century with some degree of proven accuracy, the climatologists are, well, just guessing.
We need a mathematical model of how the Sun's engine works, but we simply do NOT HAVE IT.
Re:Show me a climate model for the past 16 years (Score:3, Funny)