Rearranging the Deckchairs

From climateprediction.net:

Climateprediction.net is the largest experiment to try and produce a forecast of the climate in the 21st century. To do this, we need people around the world to give us time on their computers – time when they have their computers switched on, but are not using them to their full capacity.

Whatever about globalwarming, this is certainly making my Macbook get hotter and louder:

Before:

After:

(more…)

This is a great lively presentation from Naomi Oreskes on global warming denialism in America (not that it’s restricted to America). It’s also a good backgrounder on the science.

(And if the name seems familiar, she’s the author of this paper on the scientific consensus on global warming – and yes, Virginia, there is one)

HT Deltoid

Technorati Tags: globalwarming consensus denialism science

DK: close-minded, pusillanimous, ill-informed moron. demonstrably incorrect about global warming

Over at Devil’s Kitchen, DK demonstrates projection, and gets every point of substance wrong while calling someone else an ill-informed idiot. First we have:

The entirety of the global warming theory is predicated on (fudged) computer modelling and inaccurate data.

Well, for the sake of argument let’s suppose for the moment that there really is a global conspiracy among climate scientists to fudge computer models and to fake data. As conspiracy theories go this is slightly, but only slightly, more plausible than the notions that hollywood faked the moon landings, Israel brought down the WTC, and space aliens stole New York City overnight and replaced it with an exact replica. But let’s go with it. Even then DK appears to be skipping lightly over a number of items such as the observed warming, the many independent lines of evidence for it (including not only melting icecaps and glaciers, but the valiant attempts of denialists including DK himself to explain it without invoking CO2). Then there are the observations of elevated CO2 in the atmosphere, the isotope evidence that it is man-made, the observations of CO2 infrared absorption in the lab and from space, and the droughts which are explained only by warming. Oh, and  the little matter of the physics of greenhouse gases which has been known and uncontroversial for over 100 years – that is, until it all added up to a problem that wingnuts couldn’t solve by cutting taxes, raising prison sentences, prayer, or bombing the middle east. And boy, all those birds and butterflies are going to be mad as hell when they realise they left their previous habitats all because they were fooled by fudged computer models and inaccurate data! Given all that, the only explanation for DK’s strange outburst is that he is exceptionally ill-informed or lying.

Next up is a graph of CO2 over the past 500 million years:

It’s worth reading the whole of that post in order to understand how those warm periods relate to CO2 (or, rather, don’t particularly).

Actually it’s worth reading the cited paper so that you realise that it is about long term climate change, i.e. change on tectonic timescales and thus has sweet FA to do with global warming on shorter timescales…such as for example the last century or the last 30 years. To put that in perspective, if you were to plot the emergence of modern man (homo sapiens, c. 130,000 years ago) on the graph DK cites, it would look a little like this:

But it gets worse. No fact-free denialist rant would be complete without at least one canard that has been rebutted countless times already, so DK doesn’t disappoint and takes “global warming stopped in 1998″ for yet another whirl around the dancefloor. In fact, global warming did not stop in 1998. Even leaving aside the blatant cherry picking of 1998 (a record year) as starting point, that claim is garbage. However as Tamino points out: garbage is forever.

Technorati Tags: globalwarming projection climate

What is it about the global warming topic that makes otherwise sensible people lose all semblance of reason?

For example, according to Bishop Hill oil might not be a fossil fuel after all, and there is…

an article in Science which seems to support the theory. Our findings illustrate that the abiotic synthesis of hydrocarbons in nature may occur in the presence of ultramafic rocks, water, and moderate amounts of heat.

…so far, so good. But then he goes on to say that:

If this is right, then oil is not a fossil fuel at all, and another prop has been kicked out from under the global warmers’ feet.

Huh? While it is true that ‘global warmers’ (like most everyone else) tend to refer to oil as a fossil fuel, AGW theory doesn’t depend at all on whether oil is a fossil fuel or not. The issue is whether combustion of, among other things, oil, leads to increased GHGs which in turn leads to increased T. Why do denialists pretend that every silly quibble somehow spells doom for the AGW theory?

Elsewhere the good bishop thinks that invoking the magical concept of ‘the price‘ will somehow make a market take into account costs that people can simply externalise. This is a case of believing in the free market fairy.

According to New Scientist:

The water shortages gripping the western US are the result of global warming, not natural variations in climate, according to a bleak study by hydrologists. The results suggest that water disputes will plague the region in the future and damage economic growth unless action is taken now, warn researchers. About 60% of the changes seen in river flow in the western US are due to warming caused by humans, their study suggests.