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Explaining climate change science & rebutting global warming misinformation

Scientific skepticism is healthy. Scientists should always challenge themselves to improve their understanding. Yet this isn’t what happens with climate change denial. Skeptics vigorously criticise any evidence that supports man-made global warming and yet embrace any argument, op-ed, blog or study that purports to refute global warming. This website gets skeptical about global warming skepticism. Do their arguments have any scientific basis? What does the peer reviewed scientific literature say?

http://skepticalscience.com/images/button_newcomers.gif http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/History_of_Climate_Science.jpg http://skepticalscience.com/images/button_big_picture.gif



The Economist Screws Up on the Draft IPCC AR5 Report and Climate Sensitivity

Posted on 19 July 2013 by dana1981

Earlier today, The Economist published a piece of irresponsible journalism regarding information in the draft Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report (IPCC AR5).  The Economist saved us some effort by explaining the problems with their own article:

“There are several caveats. The table comes from a draft version of the report, and could thus change. It was put together by the IPCC working group on mitigating climate change, rather than the group looking at physical sciences. It derives from a relatively simple model of the climate, rather than the big complex ones usually used by the IPCC. And the literature to back it up has not yet been published.”

So folks at The Economist, please explain to us, why are you reporting on climate sensitivity information in this draft report about climate mitigation that uses a simple climate model and is based on unpublished literature?

Readers may recall that climate contrarian blogs behaved in a similar fashion when the IPCC AR5 draft report on the physical science was “leaked” last December.  The contrarians made a huge to-do about a figure that seemed to show global surface temperature measurements at the very low end of the IPCC model projections.  As we discussed at the time, in reality the IPCC temperature projections have been very accurate.  As Tamino noted, the draft IPCC graph itself was flawed, using a single year as the baseline (1990) rather than aligning the data and models based on the existing trend in 1990.  Fast forward a few months later, and we hear from IPCC reviewers that this graph has been revised accordingly, now correctly reflecting the accuracy of the IPCC surface temperature projections.  The lesson to be learned is that you shouldn’t report on draft documents that are subject to change!

Thus problem #1 is that this article never should have been written, and doing so was a great example of irresponsible journalism, as climate scientist Kevin Trenberth told Climate Progress.  Problem #2 is that The Economist’s interpretation of the information from the draft IPCC report is wrong.  A similar table is shown in the 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) (Table SPM.5):

Table SPM.5

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6 comments



Science does inform policy making … sometimes

Posted on 18 July 2013 by gws

When I was a graduate student in the 1990s I attended many scientific seminars. I recall very few of them. One, however, stuck with me because it was revealing about the attitudes of some business people towards important scientific findings. In this case, it was about the infrared (IR) absorption properties of fluorinated hydrocarbons. The Montreal protocol was just a few years old at the time and scientists were looking into the future, investigating the possible effects of replacing those ozone depleting substances (ODSs) with new refrigerants, blowing agents, aerosol sprays, etc. At the end of her talk about those fluorocarbons and their future effects on climate the speaker was asked what the industry thought about her results. She shrugged, then indicated that they knew but did not care.

The science was clear at the time. As early as the 1970s, scientists showed that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were not only a problem for the ozone layer, but that they possessed a property that made them powerful greenhouse gases: the chemical bond between carbon and fluorine is absorbing infrared radiation at wavelengths in a region called the atmospheric window (Figure 1). In this wavelength region, most infrared radiation from Earth’s surface escapes into space. In other words, from space Earth appears very bright at these wavelengths to someone with infrared vision, and darker the more IR radiation is absorbed in the atmosphere. As a result, an atmospheric gas able to absorb anywhere in that “window” has plenty of energy available.

AtmoTransWavelength

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2013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #29A

Posted on 17 July 2013 by John Hartz

· Australian leader scraps tax on carbon emissions

· Caribbean launches new tool to deal with climate change

· CIA backs study on controlling global climate

· Climate change outpaces evolution

· Investors should strike while the planet is not too hot

· Models point to rapid sea-level rise from climate change

· Obama climate change plan faces long road ahead

· The costs of climate change and extreme weather in the U.S

· The forecast for 2018 is cloudy with record heat

· Tony Abbott caught dog-whistling to climate change denialists

· We are all climate change deniers

· Why don’t U.S. farmers believe in climate change?

Australian leader scraps tax on carbon emissions

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of Australia announced a plan Tuesday to replace a deeply unpopular tax on carbon emissions with a market-based trading system a full year ahead of schedule.

The decision to scrap the politically toxic tax, which narrowly passed into law with the support of the minority Greens Party, is the most significant policy change unveiled by Mr. Rudd since he regained the leadership of the nation from Julia Gillard in a party coup last month. The announcement comes as a raft of new polls show his Labor Party running neck and neck with the opposition for elections scheduled for Sept. 14.

Australian Leader Scraps Tax on Carbon Emissions by Matt Siegel, New York Times, July 16, 2013

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5 comments



Debunking New Myths about the 97% Expert Consensus on Human-Caused Global Warming

Posted on 17 July 2013 by dana1981

A survey of over 12,000 peer-reviewed climate science papers by our citizen science team at Skeptical Science found a 97% consensus among papers taking a position on the cause of global warming in the peer-reviewed literature that humans are responsible.  Not surprisingly, our results have been subject to attacks from those who would prefer to continue to deny the reality of the expert consensus on human-caused global warming.

For example, on Sunday July 14th, 2013, Andrew Neil hosted UK Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Davey on the BBC show Sunday Politics.  Rather than discussing politics, Neil began the show by misrepresenting our consensus paper, making several false statements about it within the first 2 minutes of the show.

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Carbon Dioxide’s invisibility is what causes global warming

Posted on 16 July 2013 by John Cook

Australia’s leader of the opposition Tony Abbott recently derided an emission trading scheme as “so-called market in the non-delivery of an invisible substance to no one”. This echoes an earlier statement where Abbott dismissed carbon dioxide as an “invisible, odourless, weightless, tasteless substance”. In this modern age, most people are aware of how something that is invisible to the eye can nevertheless have a significant impact. Examples include radiation from radioactive material, germs and well, gravity. In the case of carbon dioxide, it is actually its invisibility that is the key factor in how it causes global warming.

When sunlight reaches the Earth, it passes through our atmosphere. Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide are invisible to sunlight, also known as shortwave radiation because of its short wavelength. This allows the sunlight to pass through the atmosphere unhindered by greenhouse gases, and warm the Earth’s surface.

The warm surface of the Earth radiates infrared heat, also known as longwave radiation because of its long wavelength. Greenhouse gases absorb longwave radiation. This results in the atmosphere trapping some of the Earth’s heat as it tries to escape out to space. Heat-trapping gases such as carbon dioxide make the atmosphere warmer than it would be without any greenhouse gases.

Currently, we are adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels. As more greenhouse gases accumulate in the atmosphere, more heat is being trapped. This causes global warming. Consequently, the fact that carbon dioxide lets sunlight pass freely through the atmosphere is an integral aspect of the greenhouse effect. Carbon dioxide’s invisibility is a key part of what causes global warming.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics/CO2_invisibility_med.jpg

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They didn’t change the name from ‘global warming’ to ‘climate change’

Posted on 16 July 2013 by gpwayne

This post is a new ‘basic’ level rebuttal of the skeptical argument: “They changed the name from ‘global warming’ to ‘climate change’

What The Science Says: The terms ‘global warming’ and ‘climate change’ have been used interchangeably for several decades.

What do these terms really mean?

Before we talk about the ‘name-change’ myth, it is worth considering what the terms actually mean.

‘Global warming’ is the temperature increase produced by adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Energy arrives from the sun in the form of visible light and ultraviolet radiation.  The Earth then emits some of this energy as infrared radiation, which is prevented from radiating into space by greenhouse gases (GHGs). Just a tiny amount of GHGs – less than 1% of the atmosphere – keep the Earth around 33°C (59.4°F) warmer than it would be without them.

Greenhouse gases act like a blanket, keeping in some of the sun’s warmth. Increasing the amount of GHGs through burning fossil fuels is like wrapping the Earth in a thicker blanket. This increase is ‘global warming’:

http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics/Temperature_Composite_500.jpg

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Global warming games – playing the man not the ball

Posted on 15 July 2013 by John Abraham

I hate to talk about myself, so this first part will be short. A little biography is necessary to set the stage for this post. A few years ago, I heard well-known climate contrarian Christopher Monckton speak on human-caused climate change. Monckton has been a favorite hero of the anti-science movement and, for the rest of us, a source of amusement as he travels the world reciting basic scientific errors and misrepresenting his own credentials.

After hearing Monckton’s lecture, I posted a detailed rebuttal online showcasing his mischaracterization of the science and his obvious and elementary errors. In response, my university and I received a 99-page complaint letter, which ended with a request to pay $110,000 to the United States Association of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta. This was followed by attacks against me by Marc Morano, who was kind enough to publicly post my contact information on his website. Monckton went on to encourage listeners of the radical Alex Jones show to write to my university administration to “investigate” me.

What ever happened to that whole episode? Not much. A few hate messages that appear in my mailbox from time to time. They are easy to spot because they never have a return address and their speeling and punctuation,,, is just terrble! And has Monckton ever followed through with his promised? Nope… I am still waiting. This whole event, as a colleague told me, was the bite of a toothless Chihuahua. It helped that my University stood beside me and was not bullied by this sideshow.

My colleagues, however, have endured far worse attacks by the anti-science crowd. Take, for instance, Dr. Ben Santer and the attacks leveled against him in The Wall Street Journal. Or how about the numerous attacks against Dr. Michael Mann? He has been viciously attacked on blogs and in far right-wing media as his work on paleoclimate has been held up as the face of climate change.

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14 comments



2013 SkS Weekly Digest #28

Posted on 14 July 2013 by John Hartz

SkS Highlights

Empirical evidence that humans are causing global warming, a new basic level rebuttal by gpwayne, generated the loudest comment thread buzz of the articles posted this past week. Given how loudly the deniers beat the drum of the myth, “There is no actual empirical evidence that carbon dioxide emissions are causing global warming,” the interest in this post is not surprising.

Toon of the Week

2013 Toon 28

H/T to I Heart Climate Scientists Facebook page.

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2013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #28B

Posted on 13 July 2013 by John Hartz

· Acidic oceans of the future show extinction

· Dangerous global warming could be reversed

· Fossil fuel addiction could trigger runaway global warming

· How water scarcity could jack up Europe’s power prices

· Insect discovery sheds light on climate change

· Japan braces for exceptionally hot summer

· Pumping water underground could trigger major earthquake

· Recessions make climate change costlier

· The global outlook for renewable power in one graph

· Wildfires may have bigger role in global warming

Acidic oceans of the future show extinction

Ocean acidification may create an impact similar to extinction on marine ecosystems, according to a study published Monday

The study, exploring naturally acidic waters near volcanic vents in the Mediterranean Ocean off Italy, suggests that ocean acidification as a result of human emissions can degrade entire ecosystems – not just individual species, as past studies have shown.

The result, scientists say, is a homogenized marine community dominated by fewer plants and animals.

Acidic oceans of the future show extinction, The Daily Climate, July 9, 2013

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Patrick Michaels: Cato’s Climate Expert Has History Of Getting It Wrong

Posted on 13 July 2013 by dana1981

This is a re-post of a devastating debunking of Patrick Michaels‘ history of wrong climate predictions by Shauna Theel at Media Matters.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/Predictions_150.jpgA review of claims made by the Cato Institute’s Patrick Michaels over the last quarter century shows that he has repeatedly been proven wrong over time. Michaels is one of a few contrarian climate scientists who is often featured in the media without disclosure of his funding from the fossil fuel industry.

Patrick Michaels’ Losing Bets

On Temperature Trends

Michaels “Bet” In 1999 There Would Be A “Statistically Significant Cooling Trend” From 1998 To 2008. In a Cato post that was later published as a Washington Times op-ed, according to Nexis, Patrick J. Michaels wrote that he would place a “bet” that “the 10 years ending on December 31, 2007, will show a statistically significant global cooling trend in temperatures measured by satellite”:

I’m willing to wager two things. First, I’ll bet that anyone who said global warming is an overblown bunch of hooey had a terrible time at this year’s holiday cocktail parties. Second, I’ll take even money that the 10 years ending on December 31, 2007, will show a statistically significant global cooling trend in temperatures measured by satellite.

[…]

Last year was so warm that it induces a statistically significant warming trend in the satellite data. Thus the second bet: Starting with 1998, there will almost certainly be a statistically significant cooling trend in the decade ending in 2007. [Cato, 1/18/99]

Satellite Records For That Decade Showed No Statistically Significant Trend. From 1998 to 2008, the University of Alabama in Huntsville satellite record shows a warming trend that is not statistically significant at the 95 percent level (a warming of 0.074°C per decade plus or minus 0.439°C). The Remote Sensing Systems satellite record shows a cooling trend that is not statistically significant at the 95 percent level (a change in temperature of -0.053°C per decade plus or minus 0.425 °C). The three surface temperature records showed a “warming trend” for that time period according to a Skeptical Science report on a 2008 paper by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology. [Calculated using Skeptical Science’s Temperature trend calculator, 7/1/13] [Skeptical Science, 1/10/13]

Michaels’ New Bet: “We Are Going To Go Nearly A Quarter Of A Century Without Warming.” In a Washington Times op-ed in January 2013, Michaels stated “it’s a pretty good bet that we are going to go nearly a quarter of a century without warming.” [The Washington Times, 1/17/13]

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Climate Change and the Nature of Science: The Carbon “Tipping Point” is Coming

Posted on 12 July 2013 by Micha Tomkiewicz

A guest post by Professor Micha Tomkiewicz, reposted with permission from Climate Change Fork.

http://climatechangefork.blog.brooklyn.edu/files/2012/06/graph-1-june-25-blog1.jpg

http://climatechangefork.blog.brooklyn.edu/files/2012/06/graph-2-june-25-blog1.jpg

The two attached pictures are schematic diagrams of the circulation of carbon on Earth (IPAA Report (2001) – the Carbon Cycle).  If I Google “Carbon Cycle Diagram” in the image mode, I get close to a million entries.  Most of these entries look like the second image – not the first.  What is the difference?  The second one doesn’t have numbers (photoshopping on my part).

The numbers in the arrows of the first image represent fluxes of carbon per year in units of billion tons of carbon.  The numbers outside the arrows represent quantities in the same units of billion tons of carbon. The man-made (anthropogenic) contributions are shown by the dashed red arrows.

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2013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #28A

Posted on 11 July 2013 by John Hartz

· American leadership on climate change

· Another Wall Street Journal article misses the target

· Climate change could make hurricanes stronger

· Climate change could spark small mammal invasion

· European capacity to grow food is plateauing

· Hurricanes are getting stronger in the Caribbean

· Krauthammer’s climate crack-up

· U.S., China unveil joint climate initiatives

· Use of coal to generate power rises in U.S.

· We are all aboard the Pequod

· Will more U.S. conservatives experience a ‘metamorphosis’?

· Yogi Berra and emerging ‘memes’ post-Obama climate speech

American leadership on climate change

Here’s a sure sign the U.S. is starting to get serious about climate change: some newspaper columnists are playing Chicken Little again. The latest case in point is Charles Krauthammer, who used his syndicated column last week to claim that the Obama Administration’s sensible plan to reduce carbon pollution amounts to “economic suicide.”

American Leadership on Climate Change by Fred Krupp, The Huffington Post, July 9, 2013

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129°F is Close But No Cigar

Posted on 11 July 2013 by Rob Honeycutt

Everyone’s been talking about the heat this past week.  In article after article in the MSM the statement has been made:  “According to the NWS the highest temperature ever recorded was 134°F on July 10,1913 at Greenland Ranch, CA.”  Greenland Ranch is now the more widely known Furnace Creek CA station at the Visitor Center for Death Valley.

There were also some random reports that Furnace Creek actually beat the previous 134°F with a new record of 135.5°F.  The official temperature on June 30, according to NWS, was 129.2°F.

Some alarm bells went off reading that the highest recorded temperature was in 1913.  Let’s be skeptical on all sides and see where this leads us.

On the Weather Underground website I looked up the 1913 record and found the following footnote:

“The temperature of 134°F reported from Greenland Ranch on July 10, 1913 is most surely unreliable as is most of the pre-1920 Greenland Ranch heat data. The instrument shelter was unusually low to the ground and many of the record forms are inconsistent with other relevant stations and existing weather conditions. The hottest reliable temperature measured in Death Valley is 129°F which has occurred on four occasions: at Greenland Ranch on Jul. 20, 1960 and at Furnace Creek on Jul. 18, 1998, Jul. 20, 2005, and Jul. 7, 2007.These are also the hottest temperatures ever reliably measured anywhere in the world. For further discussion of the Greenland Ranch heat data see XXXXX. Amos (Mammoth Tank) recorded 130°F in Aug. 1887 but is most likely not a reliable reading.”

So, it seems there might be some question about the validity of that figure.  We’re not going to rule it out yet, just take it with a pinch of salt.

To get a general idea of the distribution of record high temps I pulled together a quick list of annual record high temps for the US since 1915 (because that’s what was most easily available on Weather Underground).  I converted the temps to Celsius to group them a little better, and this was the result.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/record-highs.png

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Charles Krauthammer’s flat-earther global warming folly

Posted on 10 July 2013 by dana1981

Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer recently wrote an opinion piece that was published by many media outlets including The Washington Post, claiming that President Obama’s Climate Action Plan is a “folly.” In fact, the real follies lie in Krauthammer’s arguments.

Krauthammer’s article begins in a schizophrenic manner, claiming that “Global temperatures have been flat for 16 years — a curious time to unveil” a climate action plan, but then admitting that this “doesn’t mean there is no global warming.” Indeed it does not. In fact, over the past 16 years, the planet has accumulated an amount of heat equivalent to about 2 billion Hiroshima atomic bomb detonations. Krauthammer objects to the President’s comment that “We don’t have time for a meeting of the Flat Earth Society,” because we don’t understand everything about the Earth’s climate, like exactly why surface temperatures have warmed relatively slowly over the past 16 years (though we do have a good idea).

Of course, the choice of the 16-year window is a juicy cherry pick. It puts the starting point right at the formation of the 1997–1998 El Niño, one of the strongest in the past century. During El Niño events, heat is transferred from the oceans to the air, causing abnormally hot surface temperatures. Focusing on the slow surface air warming over the past 16 years is like arguing that your car is broken because it slowed down as you approached a stop sign. Krauthammer is focusing on an unrepresentative period during which the overall warming of the planet continued, but less heat was used in warming the air, and more in warming the ocean. However, climate research suggests that this is just a temporary change, and surface air warming will soon accelerate again.

Krauthammer also complains that “flat-earthers like Obama” have blamed heat waves on human-caused global warming. Indeed, recent research has shown that Australian heat waves and record-breaking monthly temperature records in general are now five times more likely to occur due to global warming, with much more to come. Papers have concluded that several individual heat records, like those in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010, would not have been broken if not for human-caused global warming. The video below from NASA shows how the distribution of summer temperatures has shifted towards hotter values over the past 60 years, making these heat records more likely to occur.

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Empirical evidence that humans are causing global warming

Posted on 9 July 2013 by gpwayne

This post is a new ‘basic’ level rebuttal of the myth: “There is no actual empirical evidence that carbon dioxide emissions are causing global warming.”

What the Science Says: Less energy is escaping to space. Carbon dioxide (CO2) acts like a blanket; adding more CO2 makes the ‘blanket’ thicker

It is the Earth’s atmosphere that makes most life possible. To understand this, we can look at the moon. On the surface, the moon’s temperature during daytime can reach 100°C (212°F). At night, it can plunge to minus 173°C, or -279.4°F. In comparison, the coldest temperature on Earth was recorded in Antarctica: −89.2°C (−128.6°F). According to the WMO, the hottest was 56.7°C (134°F), measured on 10 July 1913 at Greenland Ranch (Death Valley).

Man could not survive in the temperatures on the moon, even if there was air to breathe. Humans, plants and animals can’t tolerate the extremes of temperature on Earth unless they evolve special ways to deal with the heat or the cold. Nearly all life on Earth lives in areas that are more hospitable, where temperatures are far less extreme.

Yet the Earth and the moon are virtually the same distance from the sun, so why do we experience much less heat and cold than the moon? The answer is because of our atmosphere. The moon doesn’t have one, so it is exposed to the full strength of energy coming from the sun. At night, temperatures plunge because there is no atmosphere to keep the heat in, as there is on Earth.

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The Consensus Project self-rating data now available

Posted on 8 July 2013 by John Cook

I’ve just uploaded the ratings provided by the scientists who rated their own climate papers, published in our peer-reviewed paper “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature“. This is an opportunity to highlight one of the most important aspects of our paper. Critics of our paper have pointed to a blog post that asked 7 scientists to rate their own papers. We’d already done that, except rather than cherry pick a handful of scientists known to hold contrarian views, we blanket emailed over 8,500 scientists. This resulted in 1,200 scientists rating the level of endorsement of their own climate papers, with 2,142 papers receiving a self-rating.

While our analysis of abstracts found 97.1% consensus among abstracts stating a position on anthropogenic global warming (AGW), the method of self-rating complete papers independently found 97.2% consensus among papers self-rated as stating a position on AGW. This independent confirmation demonstrates how robust the scientific consensus is. Whether it’s Naomi Oreskes‘ original analysis of climate research in 2004, Doran and Kendall-Zimmerman (2009) surveying the community of Earth scientists, Anderegg et al. (2010) analysing public declarations on climate change, or our own independent methods, the overwhelming consensus consistently appears.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics/Figure_3_col_med.jpg

Figure 1: Percentage of climate papers stating a position on AGW that endorse human-caused global warming. Year is the year of publication.

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13 comments



Climate Change Denial now available as Kindle ebook

Posted on 8 July 2013 by John Cook

Climate Change Denial by Haydn Washington and John CookSince April 2011 when Haydn Washington and I launched our book Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand, people have been asking me when the book will be available in ebook format. For two years, I’ve been answering “soon”. Finally, I can answer “now”! The Kindle Edition of Climate Change Denial is now available at the Amazon store.

Our book examines the phenomenon of climate change denial. It looks at the many techniques of literal denial, where ‘skeptics’ deny the evidence for man-made global warming. It exposes denial within governments, who make a lot of noise about climate change but fail to back it up with action. And it examines the denial within most of us, when we let denial prosper. This book explains the climate science and the social science behind denial.

Climate change can be solved – but only when we cease to deny that it exists. This book shows how we can break through denial, accept reality, and thus solve the climate crisis.

Our book was designed to engage scientists, university students, climate change activists as well as the general public seeking to roll back denial and act. It’s been pleasing to see that over the past few years, the book has been cited extensively in the peer-reviewed literature (30 times according to Google Scholar). To recap, here are reviews of our book:

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10 comments



2013 SkS Weekly Digest #27

Posted on 7 July 2013 by John Hartz

SkS Highlights

John Cook and Dana’s 4 Hiroshima bombs worth of heat per second metaphor has become a  “sticky image” worldwide. Needless to say, it garnered the highest number of comments of all the articles posted on SkS during the past week. If you have not yet read the article, you will want to do so. Toward the end of the article, John throws down the guantlet to all readers to come up with a stickier metaphor. To date, none of the commentors have done so.

Toon of the Week

2013 Toon 26

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2013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #27B

Posted on 7 July 2013 by John Hartz

· Climate change alters soil bacteria distribution

· Climate change planning, prevention needed

· Climate change will hurt GOP appeal to young voters

· Gasland‘ sequel accuses industry of corrupting government

· Global food supply under threat

· Has the Republican Party stopped denying climate science

· Summer bummer for your Fourth of July?

· The elements of destruction

· Trapping carbon dioxide underground: can we do it?

· World’s largest offshore windfarm opens in Thames estuary

Climate change alters soil bacteria distribution

A warmer planet means that heat-seeking microbes will elbow out those that prefer life a bit more chilly, with unknown effects on the planet’s ecology. Karen Hopkin reports.

Climate Change Alters Soil Bacteria Distribution by Karen Hopkin, Scientific American, July 7, 2013

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1 comments



2013 SkS Weekly News Roundup #27A

Posted on 6 July 2013 by John Hartz

· Antarctic flood produces ‘ice crater’

· Climate change, pipelines and Alberta floods

· El Nino was unusually active in possible link to climate change

· European Parliament acts to support emissions trading system

· Global warming trend and variations charted by cello

· Hotter, drier West (U.S) faces more huge fires

· Is environmental action impossible in corporate-dominated age?

· It’s climate change: I told you so

· Koch pledge tied to Congressional climate inaction in U.S.

· Obama seeks new U.S. role in climate debate

· UN charts “unprecedented” global warming since 2000

· UN Green Climate Fund ready by 2014

Antarctic flood produces ‘ice crater’

Scientists have seen evidence for a colossal flood under Antarctica that drained six billion tonnes of water, quite possibly straight to the ocean.

Antarctic flood produces ‘ice crater’ by Jonathan amos, BBC News, July 2, 2013

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