For the first time since the yellow journalism of a century ago, the United States has a major news organization devoted to the promotion of one political party….  In a bygone era of fact-based commentary typified, left to right, by my late colleagues Scotty Reston and Bill Safire, these deceptions would have been given their proper label: disinformation….

[Ailes] and his video ferrets have intimidated center-right and center-left journalists into suppressing conclusions — whether on health-care reform or other issues — they once would have stated as demonstrably proven by their reporting.

As for Fox News, lots of people who know better are keeping quiet about what to call it. Its news operation can, in fact, be called many things, but reporters of my generation, with memories and keyboards, dare not call it journalism.

Sunday, the Washington Post published a must-read piece by Howell Raines, “Why don’t honest journalists take on Roger Ailes and Fox News?“  Raines, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former NY Times executive editor, focuses on Fox’s disinformation on health care, but it is equally true of their disinformation on climate change (see here), which is why I’m writing about it.

Ironically, WP media critic Howard Kurtz blows the opportunity to call out FoxNews in his story today, “The Beck Factor at Fox: Staffers say comments taint their work“:

Beck is drawing big ratings. But there is a deep split within Fox between those — led by Chairman Roger Ailes — who are supportive, and many journalists who are worried about the prospect that Beck is becoming the face of the network.

By calling President Obama a racist and branding progressivism a “cancer,” Beck has achieved a lightning-rod status that is unusual even for the network owned by Rupert Murdoch. And that, in turn, has complicated the channel’s efforts to neutralize White House criticism that Fox is not really a news organization. Beck has become a constant topic of conversation among Fox journalists, some of whom say they believe he uses distorted or inflammatory rhetoric that undermines their credibility.

Memo to Kurtz:  Do you think Fox is really a news organization, do you think they had any credibility, even in their non-Beck time slots?

Raines doesn’t:

Why haven’t America’s old-school news organizations blown the whistle on Roger Ailes, chief of Fox News, for using the network to conduct a propaganda campaign against the Obama administration — a campaign without precedent in our modern political history?

Through clever use of the Fox News Channel and its cadre of raucous commentators, Ailes has overturned standards of fairness and objectivity that have guided American print and broadcast journalists since World War II. Yet, many members of my profession seem to stand by in silence as Ailes tears up the rulebook that served this country well as we covered the major stories of the past three generations, from the civil rights revolution to Watergate to the Wall Street scandals. This is not a liberal-versus-conservative issue. It is a matter of Fox turning reality on its head with, among other tactics, its endless repetition of its uber-lie: “The American people do not want health-care reform.”

Fox repeats this as gospel. But as a matter of historical context, usually in short supply on Fox News, this assertion ranks somewhere between debatable and untrue….

Whatever its shortcomings, journalism under those standards aspired to produce an honest account of social, economic and political events. It bore witness to a world of dynamic change, as opposed to the world of Foxian reality, whose actors are brought on camera to illustrate a preconceived universe as rigid as that of medieval morality. Now, it is precisely our long-held norms that cripple our ability to confront Fox’s journalism of perpetual assault. I’m confident that many old-schoolers are too principled to appear on the network, choosing silence over being used; when Fox does trot out a house liberal as a punching bag, the result is a parody of reasoned news formats….

My great fear, however, is that some journalists of my generation who once prided themselves on blowing whistles and afflicting the comfortable have also been intimidated by Fox’s financial power and expanding audience, as well as Ailes’s proven willingness to dismantle the reputation of anyone who crosses him. (Remember his ridiculing of one early anchor, Paula Zahn, as inferior to a “dead raccoon” in ratings potential when she dared defect to CNN?) It’s as if we have surrendered the sword of verifiable reportage and bought the idea that only “elites” are interested in information free of partisan poppycock.

Why has our profession, through its general silence — or only spasmodic protest — helped Fox legitimize a style of journalism that is dishonest in its intellectual process, untrustworthy in its conclusions and biased in its gestalt? The standard answer is economics, as represented by the collapse of print newspapers and of audience share at CBS, NBC and ABC. Some prominent print journalists are now cheering Rupert Murdoch, the head of News Corp. (which owns the Fox network) for his alleged commitment to print, as evidenced by his willingness to lose money on the New York Post and gamble the overall profitability of his company on the survival of the Wall Street Journal. This is like congratulating museums for preserving antique masterpieces while ignoring their predatory methods of collecting….

For the first time since the yellow journalism of a century ago, the United States has a major news organization devoted to the promotion of one political party. And let no one be misled by occasional spurts of criticism of the GOP on Fox. In a bygone era of fact-based commentary typified, left to right, by my late colleagues Scotty Reston and Bill Safire, these deceptions would have been given their proper label: disinformation.

Under the pretense of correcting a Democratic bias in news reporting, Fox has accomplished something that seemed impossible before Ailes imported to the news studio the tricks he learned in Richard Nixon’s campaign think tank: He and his video ferrets have intimidated center-right and center-left journalists into suppressing conclusions — whether on health-care reform or other issues — they once would have stated as demonstrably proven by their reporting. I try not to believe that this kid-gloves handling amounts to self-censorship, but it’s hard to ignore the evidence. News Corp., with 64,000 employees worldwide, receives the tender treatment accorded a future employer….

As for Fox News, lots of people who know better are keeping quiet about what to call it. Its news operation can, in fact, be called many things, but reporters of my generation, with memories and keyboards, dare not call it journalism.

Hear!  Hear!

Kudos to Raines for saying the Emperor has no clothes.  Will anyone else in the status quo media have the guts to do the same?

Related Posts:

• Fox’s “Fair and Balanced” debate: “Does climate change exist?’
• Limbaugh, Fox News suckered by Bin Laden into repeating his disinformation and message of hatred
• Palin: ‘I joined Fox’ because there’s too much ‘opinion interjected in hard news’ in the mainstream media
• Top GOP investigator Rep. Issa open to probing Saudi ownership of Fox News
• FoxNews’ Neil Cavuto still thinks winter chill disproves global warming; actual scientists disagree
• FoxNews, WattsUpWithThat push falsehood-filled Daily Mail article on global cooling that utterly misquotes, misrepresents work of Mojib Latif and NSIDC

Go to Source

Source: BBC News - The UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband is in China to hold discussions with the country’s political leaders. The two countries have disagreed over issues including climate change, Iran’s nuclear programme and executed British citizen Akmal Shaikh.
Go to Source

Another op-ed by Bjorn Lomborg, another Gish Gallup of non-stop disinformation.  The good news is that the task of debunking the Septical Environmentalist (sic), has been made easier by the publication of whole book dedicated to that tedious task, The Lomborg Deception.

And yes, “Septical Environmentalist” is not a typo.  Sure, it may seem like a mistake to use the word “environmentalist” to describe Lomborg.  But it’s the very fact that he calls himself an environmentalist while dedicating his life to spreading disinformation and delaying serious action on the seminal environmental issue of our time that makes him septical.  What else would you call the Typhoid Mary of anti-science syndrome (ASS)?

Lomborg’s op-ed,”Cars, bombs and climate change” repeats many of his favorite howlers, and adds some new ones.  Let’s start with one of his favorite targets, one I’ve covered many times (see “Debunking Bjørn Lomborg — Part II, Misrepresenting Sea Level Rise“), but here with a new bizarre twist:

If we actually face, as Al Gore recently put it, “an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventative measures to protect human civilization as we know it,” then no price would be too high to pay to stop global warming in its tracks. But are the stakes really that high?

The answer is no. Even the worst-case scenarios proposed by mainstream climate scientists — scenarios that go far beyond what the consensus climate models predict — are not as bad as Gore would have us believe.

For example, a sea-level rise of five meters — more than eight times what the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change expects, and more than twice what is probably physically possible – would not deluge all or even most of mankind. Of course, such a rise would not be a trivial problem.

It would affect about 400 million people, force the relocation of 15 million, and imply costly protection of the rest. But it would certainly not mean the end of the world. Estimates show that the cost in terms of adaptation would be less than 1% of global GDP. In other words, the price of unchecked global warming may be high, but it is not infinite

Maybe this version of the Gish Gallup — “drowning the opponent in half-truths, lies, straw men, and bullshit to such a degree that the opponent cannot possibly answer every falsehood that has been raised” — should be called the Lomborg leap.

Lomborg knows that entire argument is crap best flushed down a septic system.  Why?

First, he never puts a date on when the 5 meters would occur.  You won’t find any serious climate scientist who says that five meters is not physically possible.  The IPCC’s 2007 Synthesis Report says on this subject (click here), “Partial loss of ice sheets on polar land and/or the thermal expansion of seawater over very long time scales could imply metres of sea level rise” and “Rapid sea level rise on century time scales cannot be excluded.”

Second, if he means 2100, then he knows the the IPCC clearly states “models [of sea level rise] used to date do not include uncertainties in climate-carbon cycle feedbacks nor do they include the full effect of changes in ice sheet flow.”  He knows there have been about a half-dozen major studies that “expect” much higher levels of sea level — see Sea levels may rise 3 times faster than IPCC estimated, could hit 6 feet by 2100 and this excellent new RealClimate post “Sealevelgate.”

Third, 5 meter of sea level rise would “force” the relocation of many more than 15 million.  Absent uber-costly adaptation, it would force the relocation of 300 to 400 million.  Now Lomborg can assert that people would spend hundreds of billions of dollars so people wouldn’t be forced to move, but that isn’t what the literature says.

Even in the Netherlands, a rich country with extensive experience in flood protection, where much of the country is already below sea level, a study interviewing Dutch experts about two different scenarios of 5 meter sea level rise over 100 years concluded:

Both scenarios indicate that the Southwest and Northwest of the Netherlands would be abandoned after the sea level rise.  Although most experts believe it is geo-morphologically and engineering-wise possible to largely maintain the territorial integrity of the Netherlands, there are some reasons to think that such is not likely to happen. The costs of such works would be enormous, annually a few percents of GDP.

Another 16-coauthor study led by Richard Tol (!) “Adaptation to 5 m of sea level rise” (again with expert interviews) concluded:

The face of London would change dramatically, while the Rhine and Rhone deltas would be largely abandoned. In the case of Rhine, this would imply a major relocation of population and industry for one of the world’s bigger economies. Compared to other climate change impacts, this is a very large impact. Note that France, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands are not particularly vulnerable to sea-level rise. Large impacts in these countries, imply much larger effects elsewhere. Although we do not know the probability of a WAIS collapse, let alone how this probability responds to greenhouse gas emission reduction, this does present itself as a clear case for precautionary emission abatement.

Duh.

So the Rhine and Rhone deltas would be largely abandoned.  What do you think is gonna happen to Bangladesh and poor countries?

Here’s 5 meters SLR on Florida (and New Orleans) and Southeast Asia:

It is conceivable that you could put a 10 meter levee system around Miami to deal with SLR and storm surge, but let’s remember two crucial things.  First, this is hurricane alley and everybody knows what happened to another major city that was under sea level and hit by a massive storm surge from a major hurricane.  In the 5 m SLR scenario, the planet is probably 5°C warmer and that means more Category 4 and 5 hurricanes (see “Nature: Hurricanes ARE getting fiercer — and it’s going to get much worse“).   And remember, the land currently surrounding Miami protects it from hurricanes coming from other directions.  Ff you turn Miami into Singapore, aren’t an island (or a city behind a moat), then any approaching hurricane, even those from the south and west, won’t weaken before landfall.

But hurricanes are NOT the reason why cities will be abandoned under a multi-meter SLR scenario — and I don’t think the threshold is 5 m SLR over a century, it is probably under half that.

There are basically two scenarios for multi-meter SLR.  Expected (i.e. fast) and unexpected (i.e. “slow”).  In the unexpected  scenario, very rapid SLR over a short period of time, say a couple of decades, obviously people haven’t had time to prepare, so abandonment and “forced” relocation is almost a given.

In the “expected” scenario, abandonment is probably more likely.  That’s because this whole notion of 5 m of sea level rise is misleading.  There aren’t any plausible scenarios where sea levels rise of 5 meters over a century simply stops.  Indeed, I don’t think there plausible scenarios where sea level rise of 2 m over a century simply stops:

• Science: CO2 levels haven’t been this high for 15 million years, when it was 5° to 10°F warmer and seas were 75 to 120 feet higher — “We have shown that this dramatic rise in sea level is associated with an increase in CO2 levels of about 100 ppm.”

In just the 1.4 meter case, sea levels are probably rising 1 inch a year or more by 2100.

Note:  We are currently on the A1F1 emissions trajectory (see “U.S. media largely ignores latest warning from climate scientists: “Recent observations confirm … the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised” — 1000 ppm“).  And if we listen to Lomborg, we’ll pretty much stay on track for 800 to 1000 ppm this century.

In the 5 meter (16-foot) SLR case, sea levels probably reach a rise of more than 2 inches a year — maybe 2 feet a decade for a long, long time (see NOAA stunner: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years”).

And don’t think this can’t happen:

• Nature sea level rise shocker: Coral fossils suggest “catastrophic increase of more than 5 centimetres per year over a 50-year stretch is possible.” Lead author warns, “This could happen again.”

So the notion that a 16-foot SLR would only force the relocation of 15 million is absurd.  Indeed, if the analysis by Rahmstorf in other leading peer-reviewed studies is correct, we’re looking at 100 million “forced” relocation by centuries end just from SLR.  [That doesn't count the relocation from the loss freshwater supplies from inland glaciers and Dust-Bowlification.]

And if you think the West Antarctic ice sheet is stable, well, I’ve been meaning to blog on a recent study that suggests otherwise, but for now, let me just quote the New Scientist magazine from January:

A major Antarctic glacier has passed its tipping point, according to a new modelling study. After losing increasing amounts of ice over the past decades, it is poised to collapse in a catastrophe that could raise global sea levels by 24 centimetres.

Pine Island glacier (PIG) is one of many at the fringes of the West Antarctic ice sheet. In 2004, satellite observations showed that it had started to thin, and that ice was flowing into the Amundsen Sea 25 per cent faster than it had 30 years before.

Now, the first study to model changes in an ice sheet in three dimensions shows that PIG has probably passed a critical “tipping point” and is irreversibly on track to lose 50 per cent of its ice in as little as 100 years, significantly raising global sea levels.

The team that carried out the study admits their model can represent only a simplified version of the physics that govern changes in glaciers, but say that if anything, the model is optimistic and PIG will disappear faster than it projects.

The time to ignore Lomborg is now!

Go to Source

Another vote, another win for the conservative majority on Texas’ State Board of Education.

Science is in a street fight with anti-science, as Nature has argued.  Now the forces of the dark ages are taking on the Enlightenment itself.

As the NYT reported, “Last year, the Texas Board of Education adopted language requiring that teachers present all sides of the evidence on evolution and global warming” (see How ultraconservative Texans are rewriting your kids’ textbooks and bringing global-warming denial into science class).

The Texas Board of Education wants dumber kids.

Thursday, the Dallas Star-Telegram reported:

Ken Mercer, a member of the State Board of Education, wants Texas students to know about both the good and the bad that government can offer, he said Thursday.

So, he introduced an amendment to state social studies curriculum standards that said: “understand how government taxation and regulations can serve as restriction to private enterprise.”

He said the students need to know that over-regulation and over-taxation can inhibit innovation and stifle industry.

His fellow member, Terri Leo, agreed. She said it’s especially important today, with issues like cap-and-trade and “policies that are based on supposed global warming theories.”

Kids don’t need to know the harm pollution can cause, of course, just the “harm” from  efforts to stop pollution.  No need to point out, say, that a U.S. study found, “Closing coal-fired power plants can have a direct, positive impact on children’s cognitive development and health” (See “If you want smarter kids, shut coal plants“).

And then Friday, the Texas Freedom Network reported:

… the board stripped Thomas Jefferson from a world history standard about the influence of Enlightenment thinkers on political revolutions from the 1700s to today. In Jefferson’s place, the board’s religious conservatives succeeded in inserting Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin. They also removed the reference to ‘Enlightenment ideas’ in the standard, requiring that students should simply learn about the influence of the ‘writings’ of various thinkers (including Calvin and Aquinas).”

Hey, let’s just stop teaching “reason” and “thinking” entirely.  It  really just leads to our kids asking annoying questions and learning stuff.  Very dangerous.

Go to Source

You can’t save daylight by moving around the hands on your clock, of course. So daylight saving time remains as absurdly named as it ever was.

The general pointlessness of DST was the subject of a Rachel Maddow interview Friday (video below) with the author of a whole book (!) on the subject.

What’s germane here is that DST saves about as much energy as light, according to most studies.  In fact, a 2008 study found DST “may actually waste energy“:

Up until two years ago, only 15 of Indiana’s 92 counties set their clocks an hour ahead in the spring and an hour back in the fall. The rest stayed on standard time all year, in part because farmers resisted the prospect of having to work an extra hour in the morning dark. But many residents came to hate falling in and out of sync with businesses and residents in neighboring states and prevailed upon the Indiana Legislature to put the entire state on daylight-saving time beginning in the spring of 2006.

Indiana’s change of heart gave University of California-Santa Barbara economics professor Matthew Kotchen and Ph.D. student Laura Grant a unique way to see how the time shift affects energy use. Using more than seven million monthly meter readings from Duke Energy Corp., covering nearly all the households in southern Indiana for three years, they were able to compare energy consumption before and after counties began observing daylight-saving time. Readings from counties that had already adopted daylight-saving time provided a control group that helped them to adjust for changes in weather from one year to the next.

Their finding: Having the entire state switch to daylight-saving time each year, rather than stay on standard time, costs Indiana households an additional $8.6 million in electricity bills. They conclude that the reduced cost of lighting in afternoons during daylight-saving time is more than offset by the higher air-conditioning costs on hot afternoons and increased heating costs on cool mornings.

“I’ve never had a paper with such a clear and unambiguous finding as this,” says Mr. Kotchen, who presented the paper at a National Bureau of Economic Research conference this month.

A 2007 study by economists Hendrik Wolff and Ryan Kellogg of the temporary extension of daylight-saving in two Australian territories for the 2000 Summer Olympics also suggested the clock change increases energy use.

The Kotchen and Grant NBER paper is here.  It concludes:

We also estimate social costs of increased pollution emissions that range from $1.7 to $5.5 million per year. Finally, we argue that the effect is likely to be even stronger in other regions of the United States….

There are nevertheless several reasons we might infer that DST increases electricity demand across a much broader area.  First, existing simulations suggest that DST increases electricity consumption on average over 224 different locations throughout the United States (Rock 1997). Our results also corroborate the results of such simulation exercises. Second, even when prior research finds little or no electricity savings from DST in the United States, the effect is smaller in more southern regions (DOE 2006). Finally, the fact that we identify the underlying tradeoff between artificial illumi- nation and primarily air-conditioning suggests that the DST effect that we estimate is likely to be even stronger in the more populated, southern regions of the Unites States. Further south, the days are shorter during the summer, meaning that decreases in electrical use from lighting are likely to be smaller, and air conditioning is more common and intensively used, meaning that increases in electricity for cooling are likely to be bigger.

In “13 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Daylight Saving Time,” U.S News notes:

Daylight saving time was first used during World War I, as part of an effort in the United States and other warring countries to conserve fuel. In theory, using daylight more efficiently saves fuel and energy because it reduces the nation’s need for artificial light.

An Australian study concluded “These results suggest that current plans and proposals to extend DST will fail to conserve energy.”

Probably the best recent case for DST is from a 2008 Department of Energy report for Congress, which found DST saved a whopping .02% of the country’s total use in 2007. But Wikipedia lists a bunch of other studies on DST, most of which (but not all) come to a similar conclusion as the Australia study.

DST’s general inanity is clear in this Rachel Maddow interview of Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time:

U.S. News concludes, “When clocks spring forward, people lose sleep, have more heart attacks, and might not even save energy.”

Enjoy!

Go to Source

In an editorial today (13 March 2010), the New York Times criticizes efforts by some U.S. Senators to undercut the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) authority to regulate greenhouse gases.  The Congress should "address the very real danger of climate change, not deny the government the tools it needs — and legally has — to fight it," said the editorial.

read more

Go to Source

Data released yesterday (12 March 2010) by NASA indicates that summer (December-January) surface temperatures in the Southern Hemisphere were the warmest on record.  The same period in the northern hemisphere (winter) was the fifth warmest on record and globally it was the second warmest November-January on record.  In North America there were sharp contrasts: while NOAA reports that the U.S. experienced the 18th coolest winter on record (out of 115 years), Environment Canada says it was the warmest and driest winter on record for Canada.

read more

Go to Source

You can’t save daylight by moving around the hands on your clock, of course. So daylight saving time remains as absurdly named as it ever was.

The general pointlessness of DST was the subject of a Rachel Maddow interview Friday (video below) with the author of a whole book (!) on the subject.

What’s germane here is that DST saves about as much energy as light, according to most studies.  In fact, a 2008 study found DST “may actually waste energy“:

Up until two years ago, only 15 of Indiana’s 92 counties set their clocks an hour ahead in the spring and an hour back in the fall. The rest stayed on standard time all year, in part because farmers resisted the prospect of having to work an extra hour in the morning dark. But many residents came to hate falling in and out of sync with businesses and residents in neighboring states and prevailed upon the Indiana Legislature to put the entire state on daylight-saving time beginning in the spring of 2006.

Indiana’s change of heart gave University of California-Santa Barbara economics professor Matthew Kotchen and Ph.D. student Laura Grant a unique way to see how the time shift affects energy use. Using more than seven million monthly meter readings from Duke Energy Corp., covering nearly all the households in southern Indiana for three years, they were able to compare energy consumption before and after counties began observing daylight-saving time. Readings from counties that had already adopted daylight-saving time provided a control group that helped them to adjust for changes in weather from one year to the next.

Their finding: Having the entire state switch to daylight-saving time each year, rather than stay on standard time, costs Indiana households an additional $8.6 million in electricity bills. They conclude that the reduced cost of lighting in afternoons during daylight-saving time is more than offset by the higher air-conditioning costs on hot afternoons and increased heating costs on cool mornings.

“I’ve never had a paper with such a clear and unambiguous finding as this,” says Mr. Kotchen, who presented the paper at a National Bureau of Economic Research conference this month.

A 2007 study by economists Hendrik Wolff and Ryan Kellogg of the temporary extension of daylight-saving in two Australian territories for the 2000 Summer Olympics also suggested the clock change increases energy use.

The Kotchen and Grant NBER paper is here.  It concludes:

We also estimate social costs of increased pollution emissions that range from $1.7 to $5.5 million per year. Finally, we argue that the effect is likely to be even stronger in other regions of the United States….

There are nevertheless several reasons we might infer that DST increases electricity demand across a much broader area.  First, existing simulations suggest that DST increases electricity consumption on average over 224 different locations throughout the United States (Rock 1997). Our results also corroborate the results of such simulation exercises. Second, even when prior research finds little or no electricity savings from DST in the United States, the effect is smaller in more southern regions (DOE 2006). Finally, the fact that we identify the underlying tradeoff between artificial illumi- nation and primarily air-conditioning suggests that the DST effect that we estimate is likely to be even stronger in the more populated, southern regions of the Unites States. Further south, the days are shorter during the summer, meaning that decreases in electrical use from lighting are likely to be smaller, and air conditioning is more common and intensively used, meaning that increases in electricity for cooling are likely to be bigger.

In “13 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Daylight Saving Time,” U.S News notes:

Daylight saving time was first used during World War I, as part of an effort in the United States and other warring countries to conserve fuel. In theory, using daylight more efficiently saves fuel and energy because it reduces the nation’s need for artificial light.

An Australian study concluded “These results suggest that current plans and proposals to extend DST will fail to conserve energy.”

Probably the best recent case for DST is from a 2008 Department of Energy report for Congress, which found DST saved a whopping .02% of the country’s total use in 2007. But Wikipedia lists a bunch of other studies on DST, most of which (but not all) come to a similar conclusion as the Australia study.

DST’s general inanity is clear in this Rachel Maddow interview of Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time:

U.S. News concludes, “When clocks spring forward, people lose sleep, have more heart attacks, and might not even save energy.”

Enjoy!

Go to Source

A letter from a reader (reproduced with permission):

Dear RealClimate team:

I have a background in biology and studied at post-grad level in the area of philosophy of science. For the last few years, I have been working on a book about the logic of argument used in debates between creationists and evolutionists.

About a year ago I decided it was time to properly educate myself about climate science. Being perhaps a little too influenced by Harry M Collins’ “The Golem” (and probably too much modern French philosophy!), I was definitely predisposed to see group-think, political and cultural bias in the work of climatologists.

On the whole, though, I tried hard to follow the principles of genuine skepticism, as I understood them.

Obviously, there are plenty of ill-considered opinions to be found either side of any issue, but only the most ignorant person could fail to see the terrible intellectual gulf between the quality of so-called skeptic sites and those defending the science behind the AGW thesis.

What convinced me, though, is that the arguments made by a few sites like yours are explicit and testable. In particular, it is useful that RealClimate sticks to the science as much as possible. It has been a lot of hard work to get here, but I am now at a point where I understand the fundamentals of climate science well enough to articulate them to others.

For my part, I am grateful to you guys. I hope it gives you some small amount of satisfaction to know that your work can convert readers who really were skeptics in the beginning. I use the word ’skeptic’ carefully – the one thing most commonly absent from the so-called ’skeptics’ is authentic skepticism.

By the way, my book is an attempt to categorise the various logical errors people fall into when they search for arguments to support a conclusion to which they have arrived at a priori. It will now have a few chapters on global warming.

All the best,

Go to Source

Educational dialogue is taking place between Senate staffers and college campuses all over the U.S. The goal is to engage young people with federal decision-makers on important climate and energy policy changes shaping the future. Upcoming calls include New Mexico, North Carolina, Florida and Iowa.

read more

Go to Source