New Tool Allows Scientists To Annotate Media Coverage of Climate Change 185
Layzej writes: Have you ever been skeptical of a climate change story presented by a major media outlet? A new tool holds journalists to account for the veracity of their stories. "Using the Climate Feedback tool, scientists have started to diligently add detailed annotations to online content and have those notes appear alongside the story as it originally appeared. If you're the writer, then it's a bit like getting your homework handed back to you with the margins littered with corrections and red pen. Or smiley faces and gold stars if you've been good." The project has already prompted The Telegraph to publish major corrections to their story that suggested the Earth is headed for a "'mini ice age' within 15 years." The article has been modified in such a way that there is no more statement supporting the original message of an "imminent mini ice age."
A mini ice age? Really? (Score:3, Insightful)
This is why no-one trusts the media. I doubt even the most fervent anti-CC campaigner believes this to be true. And while I don't think climate change itself is a hoax, I'm far less convinced that it's a death sentence (e.g. as far as I know we've had higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere in the past without all life dying).
Re:A mini ice age? Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
there is no climate change ? who said that? (Score:3, Interesting)
"there is no climate change" - I wonder how many deniers or skeptics argue that?- only a tiny %age at a guess. I'd say the evidence for climate change since the last Ice Age indicates that non-anthropogenic GW one of the stronger puzzles that needs to be worked on, even if Mann and Smith are trying to downplay the variability seen.
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Well, that's just equivocation; the poster isn't talking about people who deny that the climate in the Holocene is different than the climate in the Pleistocene. He's talking about people who deny climate changed in the past twenty years, or even in the past 100. That's still very much a live issue for deniers.
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That applies to both sides. When people point to a 15 year stabilization of temperatures [noaa.gov] as evidence in the climate change debate, the frequent response is "that's not climate, that's weather" or "that's normal variation." Or when they point out evidence that it was just as warm 1000 years ago as today [clim-past.net], it will be derisively dismissed.
But then there are those on the same side who will mention a 20-100
I clicked on that link to NOAA (Score:2, Informative)
And your claim that it shows stabilisation of temperatures is false. The temperatures are going up and down every year different from the one before. Not stable at all.
Since climate is 30 years average, a 15 year period cannot make any claim on the climate. It might not be weather, but it isn't climate.
As to "normal variation", well yes, look at other 15 year periods. Despite a definite upward trend there, there are 15 year periods with no difference from the start to the end or even dropping over that peri
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That applies to both sides.
Potentially, but not as much as you seem to think
When people point to a 15 year stabilization of temperatures [noaa.gov] as evidence in the climate change debate, the frequent response is "that's not climate, that's weather" or "that's normal variation."
The problem is those responses are actually reasonably true. In a noisy data set like yearly temperatures, we expect there to be periods of slow temperature growth [skepticalscience.com] and periods of fast temperature growth due to short term variability so "that's not climate, that's weather" is true, 30 year averages are generally used to minimize year-to-year variability that can drown out the long term trend. We have had a confluence of natural factors working together to sl
Re:there is no climate change ? who said that? (Score:5, Insightful)
That applies to both sides.
Potentially, but not as much as you seem to think
When people point to a 15 year stabilization of temperatures [noaa.gov] as evidence in the climate change debate, the frequent response is "that's not climate, that's weather" or "that's normal variation."
The problem is those responses are actually reasonably true. In a noisy data set like yearly temperatures, we expect there to be periods of slow temperature growth [skepticalscience.com] and periods of fast temperature growth due to short term variability so "that's not climate, that's weather" is true, 30 year averages are generally used to minimize year-to-year variability that can drown out the long term trend. We have had a confluence of natural factors working together to slow the surface air temperature growth over that period. Perhaps more importantly it's important to look at more than just the air temperature since the atmosphere only contains a small fraction of the heat content the earth can store [skepticalscience.com].
Or when they point out evidence that it was just as warm 1000 years ago as today [clim-past.net], it will be derisively dismissed.
That's a northern hemisphere temperature reconstruction, so it only covers half the world, and one of the authors of that paper, F. C. Ljungqvist, doesn't agree with your analysis [skepticalscience.com]:
But then there are those on the same side who will mention a 20-100 year period because it suits their argument.
Potentially, but those are periods that are long enough to cancel out year-to-year variability, though, I can't actually remember seeing anyone use a period that was longer than 30 years. Maybe it's not that the period suits the argument but that when you look at periods longer than 20 years, the evidence strongly supports one side in this debate? If that's the case, then the people who look at and accept the evidence have little choice but to end up on the same side of this debate?
Oh how I wish people would stop quoting skepticalscience as if a blog is a scientific resource.
Skeptical science says exactly would you did, and most of what they say is sourced against another blog(RealClimate.org) which was at least started by a pair of actual scientists, but is still itself not subject to peer review either and really does not belong in your exhibit of evidences. This is is what is WRONG with the whole 'debate'. Way too many folks believe themselves to be protecting and promoting the science while waving their hands at blogs and re-hashing the summaries from them. :(
One of the scientists that started RealClimate is Michael Mann, here is his latest article [pnas.org] on historic temperatures. Mann is (in)famous for the hockey stick graph. In his latest work here he's gone a long ways to trying to improve upon his original paper and although he only graphs the NA trend(citing that the SA data is of much lower quality), it very clearly shows temperatures as measured by proxy records matched or exceeded todays temperatures on multiple occasions in the last 2k years. He tries to down play this, but the data speaks for itself. Mann even notes himself that However, in the case of the early calibration/late validation CP
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That's why I think the actual science must trump blogging by scientists. The final response [cusersklas...r1a0205pdf]
This link is very broken. Do you have a better link?
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That's why I think the actual science must trump blogging by scientists. The final response [cusersklas...r1a0205pdf]
This link is very broken. Do you have a better link?
Ugh, sorry for that. Try here instead [e-publications.org] for the full McShane team rebuttal.
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Oh how I wish people would stop quoting skepticalscience as if a blog is a scientific resource.
It's kind of sad that you can make so many errors in one sentence. I referenced Skeptical Science because they have articles explaining in more detail exactly what I was explaining. I quoted one of the authors of the paper used by the parent to that post explicitly contradicting the view presented based on that's author's paper. How I wish you wouldn't ignore things that were inconvenient to you.
Skeptical science says exactly would you did, and most of what they say is sourced against another blog(RealClimate.org) which was at least started by a pair of actual scientists, but is still itself not subject to peer review either and really does not belong in your exhibit of evidences.
Isn't this just an ad hominem attack?
This is is what is WRONG with the whole 'debate'.
I would agree that your behaviour is exactly what is "WRONG" with this wh
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Oh how I wish people would stop quoting skepticalscience as if a blog is a scientific resource.
It's kind of sad that you can make so many errors in one sentence. I referenced Skeptical Science because they have articles explaining in more detail exactly what I was explaining. I quoted one of the authors of the paper used by the parent to that post explicitly contradicting the view presented based on that's author's paper. How I wish you wouldn't ignore things that were inconvenient to you.
You only ever linked to Skeptical Science. Your italicized quote of Ljungqvist has no reference to anywhere to prove he stated, or more importantly backed it up with anything. In Ljungqvist's peer reviewed published article that your opponent linked [clim-past.net] the article declares:
Our two-millennia long reconstruction has a well defined peak in the period 950–1050 AD with a maximum temperature anomaly of 0.6 C.
The level of warmth during the peak of the MWP in the second half of the 10th century, equalling or sli
Mid 20th century != 1990 and beyond (Score:2)
I hope you realize that this:
Our two-millennia long reconstruction has a well defined peak in the period 950–1050 AD with a maximum temperature anomaly of 0.6 C. The level of warmth during the peak of the MWP in the second half of the 10th century, equaling or slightly exceeding the mid-20th century warming, is in agreement with the results from other more recent large-scale multi-proxy temperature reconstructions
does not in any way contradict this:
Since AD 1990, though, average temperatures in t
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You only ever linked to Skeptical Science. Your italicized quote of Ljungqvist has no reference to anywhere to prove he stated, or more importantly backed it up with anything.
The quote appears in the linked blog post and a simple Google search would have shown you that it comes from "A NEW RECONSTRUCTION OF TEMPERATURE VARIABILITY IN THE EXTRA-TROPICAL NORTHERN HEMISPHERE" published by the Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography.
Our two-millennia long reconstruction has a well defined peak in the period 950–1050 AD with a maximum temperature anomaly of 0.6 C. The level of warmth during the peak of the MWP in the second half of the 10th century, equalling or slightly exceeding the mid-20th century warming, is in agreement with the results from other more recent large-scale multi-proxy temperature reconstructions
Sorry, I must forgive the person you responded to for thinking the science suggested that the MWP warming in 950-1050AD equalled or exceeded mid-20th century warming, seeing as it says exactly that in the scientific journal article he linked to!
That would have been a great argument 55 years ago. In case you haven't noticed we no longer live in the 1950s, so if you want a valid understanding of climate change, you need to compare historical temperatures to temperatures from this century.
Last decades exceed those of any other warm decade (Score:2)
Skeptical science says exactly would you did, and most of what they say is sourced against another blog(RealClimate.org) which was at least started by a pair of actual scientists, but is still itself not subject to peer review either ... That's why I think the actual science must trump blogging by scientists.
You will be happy to note that the skeptical science articles in question reference Murphy 2009 Domingues et al 2008. Nuccitelli et al. (2012), Cowtan & Way (2013), Moberg et al. 2005, Mann et al. 2008, and Ljungqvist 2010 as well as NOAA and the AGU, but do not reference realclimate. Not bad if you think the actual science is important.
Also of note, the author of the very paper that you give as proof that temps 1000 years ago were warmer than today says their paper shows: "Since AD 1990, though, av
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Skeptical science says exactly would you did, and most of what they say is sourced against another blog(RealClimate.org) which was at least started by a pair of actual scientists, but is still itself not subject to peer review either ... That's why I think the actual science must trump blogging by scientists.
You will be happy to note that the skeptical science articles in question reference Murphy 2009 Domingues et al 2008. Nuccitelli et al. (2012), Cowtan & Way (2013), Moberg et al. 2005, Mann et al. 2008, and Ljungqvist 2010 as well as NOAA and the AGU, but do not reference realclimate. Not bad if you think the actual science is important.
And wouldn't you agree that referencing those articles themselves would be a whole lot more valuable than instead referencing a blogger's interpretation?
Also of note, the author of the very paper that you give as proof that temps 1000 years ago were warmer than today says their paper shows: "Since AD 1990, though, average temperatures in the extra-tropical Northern Hemisphere exceed those of any other warm decades the last two millennia, even the peak of the Medieval Warm Period." Do you think that the analysis of your blogger is more accurate than the authors own?
I dunno who my 'blogger' is seeing as I've never referenced one?
As for the 1990 comparison, it's the same stunt Michael Mann has pulled time and again. Moreover, as I noted in my post Mann's latest paper observes that the proxy reconstructions systematically underestimate recent warming. That is to say, the 1990 temperatures that exceed even the MWP are NOT
Re:there is no climate change ? who said that? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Basically, they are arguing that the "pause" in global warming centered around the early 2000s can't be explained by models and is not a statistical noise. I'm not convinced-- they have selected out just a small period of the full record-- but that's their opinion. Even so, in their analysis the "pause" was a slow-down, not a stop of global warming.
The reason they chose that period is because they were evaluating global climate models. To evaluate a model, you need to look at what it predicts. There weren't many of those before that time period (and before 1988, only one that I know of working on AGW).
Here's the data from 1950 to 2012
Once again, you don't understand that this study is discussing the quality of climate models. If you understand that, you'll understand why they chose the time period they did.
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here's the subseta of that data that they chose to analyze, 1993-2012:
That is very curious. Why start at 1993 which is a local minimum and compare to data starting at 1998 which is a local maximum? The effect would be to exaggerate the trend in the first and minimize the trend in the second. Here are all three of your graphs combined: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/g... [woodfortrees.org] Curiously, the trend starting at 1998 is very close to the actual long term trend - even though it starts at a (then) extraordinarily warm year due to an unprecedented El Nino event.
We can quantify the variation (Score:2)
When people point to a 15 year stabilization of temperatures [noaa.gov] as evidence in the climate change debate, the frequent response is "that's not climate, that's weather" or "that's normal variation."
That is because we can quantify the variation. If you subtract ENSO and PDO (which are largely responsible for the variation) from the temperature trend you get a fairly monotonous rise in temperatures.
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1. We know arsenic kills people, it's been experimentally proven repeatedly
2. We saw you give the victim arsenic
3. The victim had arsenic in his system, the same arsenic can be forensically proven to come from the bottle you have in your hand
4. Whilst you were giving him arsenic we were shouting "don't let him drink that! It's arsenic! It will kill him!"
And yet you claim the victim died of natural causes based on the fact that 1000 years ago a man d
Re:there is no climate change ? who said that? (Score:4, Insightful)
When people point to a 15 year stabilization of temperatures as evidence in the climate change debate
An oldy but moldy, taken straight from the "How to Lie with Statistic" playbook: cherry pick your baseline to produce the trend (or lack of trend) you want.
Climate deniers like to say "there has been no significant warming since 1998", although strictly what they mean is "there has been no significant warming *compared to* 1998." Why 1998? BECAUSE 1998 WAS BY FAR THE HOTTEST YEAR EVER ON THE INSTRUMENTAL RECORD. It's like saying, "My income hasn't gone up significantly since 1998," when 1998 was the year your hit the PowerBall. If you use five year moving averages the "stabilization" effect disappears.
Or when they point out evidence that it was just as warm 1000 years ago as today [clim-past.net],
FTW: two other forms of cherry picking in one assertion. First, there's the kind of geographic cherrypicking that says "If Europe was warm in the middle ages it was warm everywhere," or "if there's snow in Washington DC it's cold everywhere", or "If there is unseasonal summer pack ice in western Hudson Bay then there must be unseasonable ice everywhere in the Arctic," all of which are trivial to refute but rely on the fact that most people won't bother to look up what's happening elsewhere.
Second form is cherry picking papers that sound like theysay what you want to hear. It's not that papers aren't important but science isn't like theology; it deals in contradictory evidence, which is abundant if you're trying to extrapolate global climate from local climate. That means you can prove anything by picking the right paper; you need to read the literature in a field as a whole. Since most of us don't have time to do that, let me suggest a more convenient way to get yourself up to speed on a topic: find a review paper in a journal that is (a) relevant to the question and (b) in the top quartile of journals in that field by impact factor.
What a review paper does is summarize all the significant and contradictory evidence that has been published on a question. It's a convenient and highly efficient way to go straight to the horse's mouth on a question, rather than relying on scientifically illiterate reporters. Choosing a top journal by impact factor eliminates what are essentially vanity press publications where authors can pay to get whatever they want into a "scientific journal". When some anti-vaxxer crackpot cites "their science" it's always in one of these pay-for-play "predatory journals".
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You missed the forest for the trees. "Cherry picking" occurs on both sides of the debate, which is political, not scientific.
Well, we have a different view on what the forest is. Mine is that when you remove the cherry picking, the notion that climate has stabilized is clearly false. All people make mistakes, but that doesn't make everyone equally right.
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"He's talking about people who deny climate changed in the past twenty years, or even in the past 100." That applies to both sides. When people point to a 15 year stabilization of temperatures [noaa.gov] as evidence in the climate change debate
Is there a reason why you use outdated evidence - apart from the obvious? Just one year later [noaa.gov] and the "stabilization" isn't quite that obvious.
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"there is no climate change" - I wonder how many deniers or skeptics argue that?- only a tiny %age at a guess. I'd say the evidence for climate change since the last Ice Age indicates that non-anthropogenic GW one of the stronger puzzles that needs to be worked on, even if Mann and Smith are trying to downplay the variability seen.
If you ignore the past 120+ years or so of climate research, then yes it is a puzzle. However, since Arrhenius first proposed his global climate model in the late 1800's science has come quite a long way in this matter. There are many research papers on this very topic, and even whole textbooks.
But if you don't want to bother with dedicated research on the topic (or if you doubt it), brush up on some physics, chemistry, and math and rediscover what all these scientist have researched over the past century.
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Quite a few still, but I suppose you can't call them skeptics because that assumes putting some value in truth and not just hoping reality will go away.
It's really just a symptom of a deeper illness of wishing for a perfect 1950s that never happened, and no change since then.
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> Oh, the answer to your "non anthropogenic GW" is CO2 still.
Actually it's water vapor, that 'other' greenhouse gas, that is doing most of the warming on Earth. Yes, CO2 is also a greenhouse gas, but its contribution to GW has been greatly exaggerated.
To see this consider the planet Mars, where the concentration of CO2 is 950,000 parts per million! Of course you can't compare that number to Earths 400 ppm because the Martian atmosphere is very, very thin. Yet, if you do the math to compute the actual wei
Re:there is no climate change ? who said that? (Score:5, Informative)
This argument of yours have been completely debunked by science over and over. The main thing you're ignoring is how long things stay in the atmosphere. If your reasoning was correct we would already be boiling because water vapor leads to greenhouse, leads to more evaporation leads to more greenhouse etc. etc.
We aren't because there is a massive negative feedback system that counter-acts the effect of water vapor as a greenhouse gas almost entirely. That system is called "rain". Water has a relatively high boiling point and returns to liquid form fairly easily, so water doesn't stay in the atmosphere for very long before it rains (or snows) down again. The average time a water molecule spends in the atmosphere is only about 11 days.
On the other hand CO2 has a much lower boiling point - it does not return to liquid form in the atmosphere, it doesn't rain down - and the average lifetime of a CO2 particle in the atmosphere is decades - but centuries are not at all unknown.
A small effect over a very long time will always have a bigger total impact than a large effect over a very short time.
Of course, just to throw your argument into even further debunked teritory - CO2 warming increases evaporation as well as increasing the lifetime of water in the atmosphere (hotter air means it takes longer before it rains down again) - so the impact of water vapor on temperature is aggravated by CO2 - not independent there-off.
Source:
http://scholarsandrogues.com/2... [scholarsandrogues.com]
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Sorry, one statement in particular just bugs me:
A small effect over a very long time will always have a bigger total impact than a large effect over a very short time.
Sooo...once it rains there's no more vapor being generated? I'm not sure how you define water vapor in the atmosphere as short term. Luckily, water vapor also provides it's own negative feedback effect in the form of clouds, increasing the earth's albedo and thereby reducing incident energy at the source.
In my view, the comparison is more akin to tidal vs wave action in respect to ocean levels. Water vapor's broader range of wavelength absorption [iastate.edu] plus it's
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The point about water vapor in the atmosphere is that it's limited by temperatures. It the atmosphere becomes saturated with water vapor then some of it will rain out. Water vapor can't drive climate change because it's a strictly reactive gas at the temperatures found in the atmosphere.
Also, clouds can be both a negative and a positive feedback depending on where and when they're found. They may block and reflect incoming sunlight but they also block radiation coming from ground level. Ever notice how
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This argument of yours have been completely debunked by science over and over. The main thing you're ignoring is how long things stay in the atmosphere. If your reasoning was correct we would already be boiling because water vapor leads to greenhouse, leads to more evaporation leads to more greenhouse etc. etc.
We aren't because there is a massive negative feedback system that counter-acts the effect of water vapor as a greenhouse gas almost entirely. That system is called "rain" ...
so the impact of water vapor on temperature is aggravated by CO2 - not independent there-off.
Source:
http://scholarsandrogues.com/2... [scholarsandrogues.com]
Except we don't know that interaction with near the confidence you claim. The prevailing theory is that Water Vapor, which accounts for ~80% of the greenhouse effect, is short lived and there for NOT an important long term feedback mechanism.Observation however shows that after volcanic eruptions shift the global energy balance abruptly, the decreasing temperature leads to rapid feedbacks bringing the global energy balance back to 'normal'. The predominant mechanism being water vapor. So at a minimum we hav
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Except we don't know that interaction with near the confidence you claim. The prevailing theory is that Water Vapor, which accounts for ~80% of the greenhouse effect, is short lived and there for NOT an important long term feedback mechanism.Observation however shows that after volcanic eruptions shift the global energy balance abruptly, the decreasing temperature leads to rapid feedbacks bringing the global energy balance back to 'normal'. The predominant mechanism being water vapor. So at a minimum we have witnessed repeatedly that in response to lowered temperature, water vapor acts as a negative feedback to warm things up. Luckier still for us, it doesn't continue on as a warming feedback as we approach the current global norms, it tapers off.
Large volcanic eruptions shift the global energy balance by injecting aerosols (primarily SO2) into the stratosphere where they reflect more sunlight increasing the albedo of the Earth. The reason the effect doesn't last long is that the aerosols are short lived and come back out of the atmosphere in 2 or 3 years. It has nothing to do with water vapor feedback. By cooling the atmosphere large volcanic eruptions reduce the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere.
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Except we don't know that interaction with near the confidence you claim. The prevailing theory is that Water Vapor, which accounts for ~80% of the greenhouse effect, is short lived and there for NOT an important long term feedback mechanism.Observation however shows that after volcanic eruptions shift the global energy balance abruptly, the decreasing temperature leads to rapid feedbacks bringing the global energy balance back to 'normal'. The predominant mechanism being water vapor. So at a minimum we have witnessed repeatedly that in response to lowered temperature, water vapor acts as a negative feedback to warm things up. Luckier still for us, it doesn't continue on as a warming feedback as we approach the current global norms, it tapers off.
Large volcanic eruptions shift the global energy balance by injecting aerosols (primarily SO2) into the stratosphere where they reflect more sunlight increasing the albedo of the Earth. The reason the effect doesn't last long is that the aerosols are short lived and come back out of the atmosphere in 2 or 3 years. It has nothing to do with water vapor feedback. By cooling the atmosphere large volcanic eruptions reduce the amount of water vapor in the atmosphere.
sigh, let's start with the things I think we agree on.
Agreed:
Volcanic aerosols are a negative feedback and cool the earth.
Those aerosols are short lived.
Uncertain:
Water vapor dominates the greenhouse effect, trapping upwards of 50% of energy by it's lonesome. I am going to presume you agree with the climate scientists on this point with me, but correct me if I'm wrong.
Now for the disagree:
You claim that cooling reduces the water vapor in the atmosphere:By cooling the atmosphere large volcanic eruptions redu
Re: there is no climate change ? who said that? (Score:2)
It has, numerous times. On one occasion the evidence suggests the polar ice caps actually met at the equator. A snowball earth. And what ends these glacial periods is probably mostly co2.
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If a volcano erupts, we agree it emits aerosols into the atmosphere. We agree that these aerosols contribute to cooling. We disagree on what water vapor does. If water vapor does as you say, and contributes to cooling, how does the atmosphere recover?
We agree in the short term the aerosols will go away. In that time though, you claim water vapor will have been contributing to more cooling. By this point the planet is considerably cooler than the few years ago the eruption occurred. That means that water vapor will be contributing to more continued cooling and a runaway cycle.
When the aerosols drop out of the atmosphere the insolation reaching the surface is what recovers. Water vapor is strictly reactive to the conditions in the atmosphere so when more insolation reaches the surface of water bodies there is more evaporation and water vapor increases. Because water vapor is strictly reactive to the conditions of the atmosphere there is no way it can drive climate change. It merely reaches an equilibrium dictated by the current conditions.
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It has, numerous times. On one occasion the evidence suggests the polar ice caps actually met at the equator. A snowball earth. And what ends these glacial periods is probably mostly co2.
So, you are going to straight faced posit that positive feedback from water vapor was the cause of the ice ages? That's a new one.
With water vapor being as potent and short lived as it is, and with the suggestion that even a small cooling from volcanic aerosol is enough to cause it to respond, our planetary ice-age cycles look NOTHING like what should be happening. The ice ages should be abrupt and permanent, or alternatively, the boiling of the oceans should have been abrupt and permanent. As it has stood,
Re: there is no climate change ? who said that? (Score:2)
I did not posit anything of the kind. I merely pointed out that your impossible consequence has happened a bunch of times. I didn't say it happened because of what you described... but when your argument for something being wrong is that it would lead to x that argument only works if x is impossible or at least highly unlikely. It doesn't work when x is common.
It's as if I claimed "blah blah can't be true because if it was lots of people would die in car crashes all the time"
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I did not posit anything of the kind. I merely pointed out that your impossible consequence has happened a bunch of times. I didn't say it happened because of what you described... but when your argument for something being wrong is that it would lead to x that argument only works if x is impossible or at least highly unlikely. It doesn't work when x is common.
It's as if I claimed "blah blah can't be true because if it was lots of people would die in car crashes all the time"
And if you read anything I've said, the example of our ice ages is NOTHING like the consequence of a strong positive feedback from water vapor. It would not lead to millenial ice age cycles, it would be hitting and permanently remaining in one within a century. But I'm sure you won't read that the third time if you didn't the first or second already.
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It looks like you still don't get it that water vapor levels are strictly reactive to conditions in the atmosphere subject to the availability of water to be evaporated. Water vapor cannot drive climate change and so cannot drive runaway warming on its own.
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it's water vapor, that 'other' greenhouse gas
You can't just add water to the atmosphere. Cold air will not hold much water. The water vapour capacity of air increases as the temperature increases. Warmer air means more humidity means warmer air. It's a feedback.
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You can't just add water to the atmosphere. Cold air will not hold much water. The water vapour capacity of air increases as the temperature increases. Warmer air means more humidity means warmer air. It's a feedback.
True but what people often don't realise is CO2 has a molecular weight of about 44, Air is about 21 and water vapor is about 18; so CO2 is heavier than air whereas water vapor is lighter than air. This means it is more plausible that water vapor will carry heat and kinetic energy high above the IR scattering of CO2 where the energy is more easily radiated to space as the vapor condenses into clouds and rain and be a net negative feedback. Where or not this is the case in reality is a matter of emerging scie
Lapse rate - settled within uncertainty boundaries (Score:2)
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From the Wikipedia page for Black Body [wikipedia.org]:
"In astronomy, the radiation from stars and planets is sometimes characterized in terms of an effective temperature, the temperature of a black body that would emit the same total flux of electromagnetic energy."
A black
Water vapor [Re:there is no climate change ?] (Score:2)
"Actually it's water vapor, that 'other' greenhouse gas, that is doing most of the warming on Earth."
Water vapor does not stay in the atmosphere, but goes in and out of the atmosphere in the form of evaporation and rain. There is a reservoir of liquid water that is, from the standpoint of the atmosphere, effectively infinite. So, the water vapor responds to changes in temperature.
It is, of course, well understood that water vapor is a greenhouse gas-- this accounted for in all the models. The amount of water vapor in the atmosphere depends on the temperature. This is a feedback cycle. One of several f
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And the CO2/H2O vapor feedback coefficient is the single number they use to 'tune' the climate models to get the amount of warming they want.
Humidity feedback [Re:Water vapor] (Score:2)
And the CO2/H2O vapor feedback coefficient is the single number they use to 'tune' the climate models to get the amount of warming they want.
In the original Manabe and Wetherald model, the "tuning" was simply an input assumption that the relative humidity remains constant.
If you think that this results in too high feedback, you are essentially stating a hypothesis that humidity goes down as temperature rises. Would you like to come up with a physical reason for that assumption?
The models fit the observed data pretty well-- not just in overall temperature, but in parameters like day/night temperature variation (which is a more sensitive probe of
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You can't just post one datasets assumptions and use that to defend the entire field.
The fact is they use this feedback parameter to make the predictions worse or better. They have been caught setting it so high that the first exhale turned Earth into Venus. Because it produced better grants, at least until they started getting laughed at.
All competent computer modelers can get the model to tell them anything they want. I'd go so far as to use that as the definition of 'competent modeler'.
Models [Re:Humidity feedback] (Score:3)
All competent computer modelers can get the model to tell them anything they want. I'd go so far as to use that as the definition of 'competent modeler'.
You might think so. It's harder than you'd expect. The models have to match day-night temperature variation, variation with altitude, latitude and season, and-- these days-- they have to get not only the average cloud coverage, but the patterns of clouds right. The models have to be pretty darn close to correct to get all that right, and that hasn't even started looking at historical climate.
Here's an interesting thing, though. There are about twenty different groups, on four continents, running differen
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Again you guys are making some mythical denialists up. Straw men as I believe they are known.
All figures from memory:
Burning fossil fuels adds CO2 to the atmosphere. For some reason the natural feedback in the carbon cycle responds with a time constant longer than 150 years, which is quite odd in itself. As a result 60% of CO2 from FF burned in the last 150 years is still in the atmosphere.
Adding CO2 to Earth's atmosphere will, on balance, increase the global surface average temperature.
So, so far I'm a luk
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I've been plotting the Manabe and Weatherald 1967 model-- the one in which the only feedback was an assumption of constant humidity-- and also the predictions of the 1979 National Academy of Sciences report against the actual measurements using the actual carbon dioxide numbers for several years now, and the data is so far matching predictions. Predictions do not require "200% calibration factors". All the model assumes is constant humidity.
It's possible that this assumption needs to be tweaked. But this
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It is, of course, well understood that water vapor is a greenhouse gas-- this accounted for in all the models. The amount of water vapor in the atmosphere depends on the temperature. This is a feedback cycle. One of several feedback cycles.
Well it seems the the humidity:
Check your sources [Re:Water vapor] (Score:2)
Sorry, but here's an important lesson for you. Memorize this simple rule:
Never get your science information from the opinion/editorial pages of Forbes magazine.
Forbes is a business magazine. It's not a science magazine. It doesn't even pretend to be a science magazine. It's a bad source for science information, because they are editorializing to make a point, not to understand how climate works.
Track down original sources. Don't rely on editorials in Forbes.
Since you get your data from business magazine
The sun varies... but not very much (Score:2)
And don't mention that big ball of burning stuff in space. Its output is constant. Not like a star has a climate or anything silly like that.
We measure the output of the sun. We've been measuring it for most of a century, and measuring it very very accurately from satellites for many decades. We can compare the variations of solar output (which are very small variations) against climate on Earth. Variability in solar output does not account for the changes seen in the climate.
We also know a lot about the brightness of sunlike stars. Stars like the sun turn out to be pretty boring. There are some stars with a lot of variability... but not th
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Variability in solar output does not account for the changes seen in the climate.
Right. On top of that, solar output has been dropping since the 80's. To the extent that it does have an effect, it has been a cooling effect for the last 4 decades. - http://woodfortrees.org/plot/p... [woodfortrees.org]
Great graphing site! [Re:The sun varies... but...] (Score:2)
Variability in solar output does not account for the changes seen in the climate.
Right. On top of that, solar output has been dropping since the 80's. To the extent that it does have an effect, it has been a cooling effect for the last 4 decades. - http://woodfortrees.org/plot/p... [woodfortrees.org]
Wow, that's a great graphing tool.
I would like to kvetch that by picking a 120 month average for a data set that only spans 420 months, you give a distorted view of the solar data (and you also make a graph that stops 5 years before the end of the data set, since a 120-month average requires data for ± five years).
Here is the same graph, but I removed the averaging of the solar irradiance, so you can see more clearly that the effect is primarily the solar cycle:
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/p... [woodfortrees.org]
You can
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I would like to kvetch that by picking a 120 month average for a data set that only spans 420 months
Yeah. There is an 11 year cycle. A 120 year moving average smooths this out so you can see the long term trend. The data only goes back to the late 70's since it is derived from satellites. You can use sunspot count as a pretty good proxy and get something quite a bit longer: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/s... [woodfortrees.org]
This 120 year moving average is the method that was used to promote the solar/temperature link in the 80's. You can get a pretty good match for much of the last century, but it falls apart in re
careful on averaging.. [Re:Great graphing site!] (Score:2)
I would like to kvetch that by picking a 120 month average for a data set that only spans 420 months
Yeah. There is an 11 year cycle. A 120
[month]
moving average smooths this out so you can see the long term trend.
You could... except that when you take a 120-month average on a data set that only spans 420 months, what you just did is compress the data down to a curve that is effectively only 2 and 2/3 points (keeping in mind that the first 60 months and the last 60 months are now truncated from the graph).
You've removed the noise... but there's not much information left, either.
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You've removed the noise... but there's not much information left, either.
Fair enough. You are right. This one goes back to 1750 and removes the noise. Best of both worlds: http://woodfortrees.org/plot/s... [woodfortrees.org]
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I'd like to see it used on claims made in religious articles.
I'm confused. Are you saying you want scientists to comment on religious dogma, or are you saying you want theologians commenting on science articles?
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Re:A mini ice age? Really? (Score:5, Informative)
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But if no reputable scientists are saying that climate change is a death sentence, why do articles like the one below keep appearing? It's about Christiana Figueres, leader of the Framework Convention on Climate Change. It's titled, "The Woman Who Could Save Humanity".
http://www.realclearpolitics.c... [realclearpolitics.com]
Sounds like what we really need is a tool to annotate extremists on both sides. Why does this tool do that?
Climate change is not a death sentence. There aren't any reputable scientists saying it is. I think you may have been listening to some sensationalist media stories, and possibly embellishing what they state. If you like, you can read some of the published effects of climate change [epa.gov], and "all life dying" is not one of them.
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if no reputable scientists are saying that climate change is a death sentence, why do articles like the one below keep appearing?
Probably because they are written by the media, not by scientists. That is why this new initiative is so great. Scientists can weigh in on the claims of an article and give you a clearer picture of where there is hyperbole and where there is a real concern.
Catastrophe [Re:A mini ice age? Really?] (Score:5, Interesting)
Climate change is not a death sentence. There aren't any reputable scientists saying it is. I think you may have been listening to some sensationalist media stories, and possibly embellishing what they state. If you like, you can read some of the published effects of climate change [epa.gov], and "all life dying" is not one of them.
But if no reputable scientists are saying that climate change is a death sentence, why do articles like the one below keep appearing? It's about Christiana Figueres, leader of the Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Figueres was trained as an anthropologist, but doesn't do anthropology professionally; she's a Costa Rican diplomat. (Being the daughter of the President of Costa Rica probably gave her a leg up here). I'm willing to add a stipulation that anthropologists who have never actually worked as scientists shouldn't be considered as "reputable scientists" on climate models.
It's titled, "The Woman Who Could Save Humanity". http://www.realclearpolitics.c... [realclearpolitics.com]
Well, if you actually read the article, it doesn't anywhere quote her as saying that climate change will be "a death sentence". In fact, it's primarily an article about how hard it is to get diplomats to agree. The closest it gets to any such statement is the title of the article (and article titles aren't written by the reporter), and a sentence in the article saying that on the well of her office is a picture of the Statue of Liberty waist-deep in water. I'm not sure if we should judge people by the satirical pictures on their walls.
Sounds like what we really need is a tool to annotate extremists on both sides. Why does this tool do that?
I absolutely agree. Accuracy is desired in both directions. We're in luck, though, the tool discussed here does annotate both sides! Here-- from the link in TFA-- is their tool applied to the Rolling Stone article "“The Point of No Return: Climate Change Nightmares Are Already Here”:
http://climatefeedback.org/eva... [climatefeedback.org]
--along with the reply by the author, the very first point of which was "I didn't get to write the headline; the headlines are written by the editor."
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--along with the reply by the author, the very first point of which was "I didn't get to write the headline; the headlines are written by the editor."
I like that he points out as well that the headline was written before the article. This just sounds terrible, but is very likely just how the media industry works.
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Climate change is not a death sentence. There aren't any reputable scientists saying it is. I think you may have been listening to some sensationalist media stories, and possibly embellishing what they state.
Yeah, and I bet these guys will "correct" stories like these as well <eyeroll>
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Yeah, and I bet these guys will "correct" stories like these as well
Click the link in the summary and find out (hint: yes)
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"All life dying" is never going to happen. Life has survived on this planet through far worse cataclysmic events. And humans aren't about to go extinct anytime soon.
However, climate change has consequences. When climate shifts, fertile land becomes less fertile. When food runs out, there's famine. When there's famine there's disease and war.
Let's say it's a relatively small disruption, then only 1% of population dies off. That's not too bad? That's 70 million people. If you kill 70 people, you're a serial k
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Let's say it's a relatively small disruption, then only 1% of population dies off. That's not too bad? That's 70 million people. If you kill 70 people, you're a serial killer. If you kill 70 million people, you're a climate change denier.
I would say more correctly, it makes you a human. It isn't only the deniers who use energy, everyone uses it. There is only so much that a single person can do, and no one is doing enough.
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Let's say it's a relatively small disruption, then only 1% of population dies off. That's not too bad? That's 70 million people. If you kill 70 people, you're a serial killer. If you kill 70 million people, you're a climate change denier.
And let's say 140 million people die because they were thrust into poverty by the supposed fix for global warming. I guess you're a climate change denier times two then.
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There's no evidence that any of the proposed efforts to mitigate global warming would increase poverty.
Like a doubling of the price of electricity in Germany and Denmark due to their subsidies for renewable energy? And what of the developing world and its tremendous need for electricity from any source? Taking down their fossil fuel infrastructure and replacing it with an expensive renewable infrastructure will drive more people to poverty just like making any other necessity of life more expensive would. Nor are they going to get wealthier when developed world economies are self-introducing massive ineffici
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The main problem the shrill Apocalyptic Global Warming Alarmists have is there are so many shrill alarmists pimping so many causes du jour, that their propaganda is getting lost in the cacophony. Add to that the current satellite data shows no statistically significant warming for 18 out of the 65 years that anthropogenic warming was even possible, it's no wonder that the "consensus" has fallen from 97% to the 50's range, and the popular opinion puts climate change near last.
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Add to that the current satellite data shows no statistically significant warming for 18 out of the 65 years that anthropogenic warming was even possible, it's no wonder that the "consensus" has fallen from 97% to the 50's range, and the popular opinion puts climate change near last.
I don't think that's possible since satellite temperature data is only about 36 years old at this point. Among climate scientists I doubt the consensus has changed much at all.
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CO2 has been theoretically able to overcome the effects of natural variability since about 1950, hence the 65 years; there has been a pause in warming for a little over 18 years or about half of the satellite record. The pause is going to end soon due to the current El Nino, I’m actually surprised it hasn't ended all ready, the next 5 or 6 years will be interesting.
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Changes in CO2 levels will always lead to changes in global temperature regardless of the source of the change in CO2. CO2 changes from human activity have been happening for a long time (thousands of years) but mostly until after WW II they were small enough to not be particularly noticeable.
As far as an 18 year pause any rigorous statistical analysis shows the warming trend for the past 18 years is indistinguishable from the warming trend since 1970. The pause is all in the eye of the deniers. Here's t [wordpress.com]
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Climate change is not a death sentence. There aren't any reputable scientists saying it is
Yes there are. James Hansen surely has as high a reputation as any scientist [youtube.com], plenty of papers, was the head of a national research center. He says: [nytimes.com] ".........it will be gameover for climate.......Civilization would be at risk........If this sounds apocalyptic, it is."
James Hansen has never been afraid to warn of the dangers of climate change.
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This is why no-one trusts the media. I doubt even the most fervent anti-CC campaigner believes this to be true. And while I don't think climate change itself is a hoax, I'm far less convinced that it's a death sentence (e.g. as far as I know we've had higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere in the past without all life dying).
Apparently you've never seen the bags of crazy at WUWT and CA, or even read the comments on a climate science story here on Slashdot. Chemistry? Thermodynamics? Pssh. Much more plausible to believe a global conspiracy on the order of the Illuminati. :P
At any rate, no respectable climate scientist has said that climate change will end all life. Again, that's something the crazies (such as those at WUWT) fabricated out of nothing. There will be negative consequences to be sure. But I've never seen a single sa
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This is why no-one trusts the media. I doubt even the most fervent anti-CC campaigner believes this to be true. And while I don't think climate change itself is a hoax, I'm far less convinced that it's a death sentence (e.g. as far as I know we've had higher levels of CO2 in the atmosphere in the past without all life dying).
The issue isn't all life dying off. That's not going to happen. I don't even think homo sapiens will go extinct. We are a very adaptable species.
The issue is whether our modern high tech civilization can survive the changes that are coming and even if it can what the cost will be as opposed to the cost of doing something about it in the first place.
Re: A mini ice age? Really? (Score:2)
This is why no one trusts the media. They will actually let 'experts' rewrite their stories, without explanation.
One sure way to prove the dissenters wrong - silence them. At the source.
Bastards.
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If this were at all relevant, why is the CO2 increasing rather than plants doing more converting and keeping the number stable?
If you guys would stop eating them, we might find out!
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why is the CO2 increasing rather than plants doing more converting and keeping the number stable?
Increased plant growth is thought to be sinking about 20-25% of our carbon emissions. So it does have something of a dampening effect. - http://theconversation.com/pla... [theconversation.com]
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""Climate change" plants live off of converting CO2!"
If this were at all relevant, why is the CO2 increasing rather than plants doing more converting and keeping the number stable?
In case anyone wonders, it's not relevant because plants have to photosynthesize to consume CO2, and they can only do that so quickly. Add more sun and you don't get faster photosynthesis, you get a dead plant. (Within reason; some plants can take more than they normally get, some not so much.) Plants have adapted for the climate we've enjoyed here for the last bunch of millenia. CO2 enrichment is for use in spaces without adequate CO2.
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Because the fossil fuels we are burning are the result of thousands and millions of years of plant accumulation so it will take a similar amount of time for plants the reabsorb the CO2.
Nothing new here (Score:3)
a tool for tools (Score:2)
So they "invented a new tool"? Nope. (Score:2)
So they "invented a new tool"? Nope.
Sorry to tell you, but they are 13 years late to the party.
A Foresight.org project on 2002 was the release of Ka-Ping Yee's CritSuite.
It was also "invented" independently as "Third Voice" in 2004.
It's cute that they believe they've done something unique with the grant dollars (that they should probably be actually spending on dealing with climate change, rather than beating reporters over the head with foam "pool noodles"), but what they've done is far from new.
Hypthesis (Score:2)
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It goes both ways
Yes. That's the great thing about it and that is why I included the mark up on the Rolling Stone article in the summary.
Clarity or Information sabotage? (Score:2)
Fanatics gotta fanaticize. [kurzweilai.net]
The scientist feedback seems valid (Score:2)
The emerging meta statistics (Score:2)
Who Watches the Watchers? (Score:3)
Like any such 'auditing', this tool runs into a "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" problem.
1) granted, I didn't dig deeply into the site more than a skim of the 'about' information, but I'm not sure I understand what sort of credentials qualify someone to contribute?
2) this - and the meta-narrative - suggests that the commenters are somehow objective. Scientists (contrary to some anecdotal experience, for sure) are humans like the rest of us. They have motivations, biases, and varying levels of tendentiousness, *particularly* when it comes to a subject important to them.
3) I see that anonymous reviews are also allowed, which means that this tool is fundamentally no more credible than, say, any comment system that allows anonymous cowards. And we all know how those can suck.
To use what's probably a good example:
http://climatefeedback.org/eva... [climatefeedback.org]
Lomborg is a divisive figure among the Global Warming movement; a credible, well-informed, reasonably charismatic spokesman for "the enemy", his point in recent years has been consistent: YES, it appears that warming is happening; YES, it appears that humans are to blame, but NO, it's not worth addressing with limited funds and resources - not even in the top 10 'big' subjects we should try to attack.
For example, the criticisms of his article reflect this:
"The author tries to rebut the narrative âoethat the worldâ(TM)s climate is changing from bad to worseâ. In doing so, he erects a straw-man, cherry-picks studies and misrepresents current climate science. Furthermore, the logic that since things are not âworst-than-we-thoughtâ(TM), we shouldnâ(TM)t take action and do the things we would do if things were simply âbadâ(TM), is lost on meâ¦", "Tries and fails to make a convincing case for why humans need to worry about climate change less than they currently do." and "The author on multiple occasions presents blatantly inaccurate information and otherwise uses selective information to argue his point, which is highly misleading." is NOT 'scientific' criticism. That's just bitching.
Moreover, on a technical note, the shorthand 'rating' system of the tool seems to vary as well.
Other articles are rated from +2 (very high scientific credibility) to -2 (very low scientific credibility) while his strangely goes from 4 to 0 (excellent to very poor).
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Well, of course people will be "attacking you" since you perceive people showing you you are wrong or telling you you are wrong as "attacking you". But you're wrong.
Heck, you're wrong when you claim you believe CC is real since that comes from this "manufacture[d the] climate change story" you think is a pernicious conspiracy. You don't know climate has changed except by the testimony of those scientists and organisations you believe are conspiring to concoct a worldwide lie.
Why did climate change in the pa
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the people producing this tool are not scientists. So I am not attacking scientists, just people that continue the hype without substance.
The annotations are added by scientists. If you really are against hype and pro-science then you will be a fan of this site. You really should take a few minutes to check it out [climatefeedback.org]. Your preconceptions will be challenged.
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Can I come and visit you at the institution where you are housed?