TalkClimateChange

Don’t change a thing, keep on with the same, it’s great and one of the few places where one can get the full picture.

The arrogance of some of the letters you received is exactly why it should remain as is. Being green is one thing; being a total a**hole is another.

I’d use all the energy and commitment you’re showing to the subject to move beyond red/green/blue debates and harness that energy for solutions. There’s a body of research showing how ‘balance’ now operates as ‘bias’; that is, when the journalistic norm of balanced reporting of two sides of a particular issue is problematic when one side is so overwhelmingly supported by the factual and scientific consensus, and the other side is hugely lacking in the same level of scientific fact and peer-reviewed, consensual agreement. I think you need to move beyond such balanced ‘friction’ as a means of finding solutions. If 90% certainty is your starting point, we’re well beyond that now, Mark. The peer-reviewed journal Global Environmental Change carries some great research in this area, including Boykoff & Boykoff’s 2004 article ‘balance as bias’… I write about it on my blog. As a professional journalist and academic, I’m building up a body of evidence, and in that sense, for me, your site is great. But I think you need to focus down your energies. I think the mix of your writers and interests (chemical, economic, social, cutlural) are the right mix for finding solutions. Rightly, UK journalism has left behind the ‘balanced debate’ debate, as noted by Andreadis and Smith in the British Journalism Review, 2007. Don’t get left behind.

As James Baker at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration famously said: “[t]here’s a better scientific consensus on this than on any issue I know - except maybe Newton’s second law of dynamics.”

“the journalistic norm of balanced reporting of two sides of a particular issue” Huh?

We must live on different planets. I can’t remember seeing that on any subject in my lifetime.

“Boykoff & Boykoff’s 2004 article ‘balance as bias’ would have made Goebells proud. When you start with 90% certainty, as determined by that great scientific body, the UN, that tells me you’re really starting at about 45%. They start their investigation by only looking at anthropogenic causes and you’re saying everyone else should continue doing the same and ignore all other peer reviewed science that has been published since. Again I say, the arrogance of this religion of yours is mind boggling.

Alex, you obviously have fallen into the trap of closed mindedness. Most “journalists” have this problem.

Here are the facts:

There are all most as many, if not more peer-reviewed scientific studies which question the theory of man made climate change. Unfortunately, the two major scientific journals have rejected them without review. You can find the studies that either question or flat out refute the theory in journals such as Geophysical Research Letter, Meteorology, Climate and Geology.

This supposed consensus is based on the lie that the IPCC speaks for all scientists whose disciplines are related to weather, climate and physics. The IPCC does not. They IPCC doesn’t even speak for the majority of scientists. It only speaks for the UN and the WMO.

Upon further inspection of the IPCC using their own data provided on their website, There are only 9 scientists that agreed to the section atributing causation of climate change. I am sure there are more then 9 scientists in the world.

Then you add in Dr. Kevin Trenberth’s admission that the models used did not include any known, natural variations, that it only included CO2 emmissions, the case is quite clear that the models are fataly flawed. He also admitted that the models were not meant to be scientific forecasts, but rather were designed to be “what-ifs” based solely on CO2 and no other forcings.

Next you add in the cooling trend over the past ten years and you can clearly see that global warming, as described by the media does not exsist. The models were completely wrong. CO2 levels have dramatically increased, yet temperatures have fallen. That is in direct contradiction to the theory.

Then there is the misinformation about what has happened in the Arctic. The media keeps presenting it as being caused by humans, yet there isn’t a study which proves this. In fact there are 3 studies that were peer reviewed and published late last year which say just the oposite is the case. That the changes were natural. The best of the three studies was conducted by NASA’s JPL. They concluded that the changes happened due to a naturally occuring shift in wind and non-linear wind patterns and not global warming. (note: all the ice has returned to the arctic and actually has increased by 1k sqKM setting a new record extent of the ice sheet.

There are plenty of quality peer reviewed studies that contradict what the media is force feeding the public on a daily basis. The science is not clear. It is not settled and there still is a debate raging as to what exactly caused a minor warming over a 150 year period. Yes .7 degrees is a minor warming and not a huge catastrophe as the media and the IPCC keeps saying.

Mark, I have read through all of the comments on the post titled Green Advocates Failing in Climate Debate on La Marguerite. I happen to agree with the notion that continuing to emit large quantities of CO2 and other air pollution from burning fossil fuels is a bad idea. (It also happens that I will benefit financially from a continued effort to slow down fossil fuel combustion.)

However, I cannot help getting angry at people who resort to name calling and calls for an end to debate when there is such a complex and important topic at hand.

I think I would cause most “Greens” to get spinning eyeballs if I introduced the notion of complex differential equations to the discussion, but I think it is an important aspect of understanding something like climate and weather.

There are many contributing influences on climate that all change at different rates and with different levels of importance. Not all emissions from power plants, for example, cause overall temperatures to increase. Soot and smog forming chemicals like SOx and NOx tend to push temperatures in the opposite direction by causing shading and reflection of solar energy back up into the sky. It is also important to understand the effect of solar incidence angle - a change in reflectivity index in low latitudes is far more important than one that occurs at high latitudes where the sun’s energy is already just a small fraction of what it is when coming in at a larger angle - (solar intensity at any location is a function of the sine of the incidence angle.) Many other commenters have introduced a number of other factors that all need to be included in any predictive model for it to be a valid way to understand future climate impacts.

People who have liberal arts or “political science” educations that include math at the checkbook balancing level have a very difficult time understanding that science is not a democracy and that it simply does not matter how many votes you tally. What matters is evidence and data. True scientists know that they must continue to gather both and to use hard mathematics to gain a true understanding of complex system behaviors. They also know that debate and discussion - using all available facts - is an important part of the process of decision making. (I have never claimed to be a scientist, but I have a reasonably complete technical education.)

Keep up your effort to provide a place where people can discuss climate and all of its complexities. We also need a place to talk about the all important question of the correct responses to the gathered evidence.

Ignore those people who call for an end to discussion.

Thanks! Heartening comments!!

Mr. Adams, there is one problem with something you said. CO2 is NOT a pollutant. It never has been. Without CO2 in the atmosphere all vegitation would die and you want to talk about climate change. Whew. Do you know how cold it would be on the dark side of the planet and how warm it would be on the side that is facing the Sun.