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New Tool Allows Scientists To Annotate Media Coverage of Climate Change
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."
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).
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 past? Well, Arrhenius showed that solar changes were not enough by a long shot. He showed that CO2 had to make up MOST OF THE WARMING otherwise the record of past climate change could not be reconciled. That was 220 years ago.
Chemists around the world will tell you that burning fossil fuels (hydrocarbons) will produce CO2.
We burn billions of tons of CO2 for years. Just read the marketing reports of the companies selling it, and the export sheet of fossil fuel exporting countries.
And that CO2 will do the same today as it did in all those changed climates of the past: cause a lot of warming.
But you cannot abide this for political and ideological reasons, so you attack the scientists instead. Then preempt the martyr position by knowing that you deserve to be "attacked" and pretending this is only because your talk is not wanted. Yet this is EXACTLY what you yourself do to the science. And you see no hypocrisy.
How?
> 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 weight of CO2 above each square meter of surface area, you'll find that Mars has about 28 times more CO2 per unit of surface area than Earth.
So how much warmer is Mars now, compared to its theoretical black-body temperature? Well, the black-body temp is 210K. The measured average temp is also 210K. So CO2 is not doing any warming of the Martian atmosphere, even though it is a greenhouse gas.
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/pla...
On Earth, the BB temp is 255K, but the average temp is 288K. So Earth's atmosphere raised the temp by 33K, almost entirely due to the ubiquitous water vapor which blankets the surface of our planet.
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/pla...
The main CO2 absorption band is 15microns, smack dab in the middle of Earths longwave radiation spectrum. So there will be some absorption and mechanical heating due to "Earthshine". But heated air at the surface most likely will rise due to convection which tends to have a cooling effect. That's why scientists have not actually measured the actual warming effect of CO2 in the atmosphere (note that I didn't say 'estimate' or 'model', they haven't measured the CO2 contribution to GW with a thermometer). It's like peeing in the ocean. You know it made the sealevels rise, but it can't actually be measured because of other climate 'noise'.
"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 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, it will be derisively dismissed.
But then there are those on the same side who will mention a 20-100 year period because it suits their argument.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
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 died natural causes.
Of course your argument is treated with derision. How can you possibly expect a different response?
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,
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".
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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 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 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.
Or when they point out evidence that it was just as warm 1000 years ago as today, 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:
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 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