New Zealand dismissed climate change sceptics - Telegraph

New Zealand's High Court on Friday dismissed a challenge launched by climate change sceptics against a government research agency's finding that the temperature had risen in the past century.

Owen Paterson's climate change problem: cock-up or conspiracy? | Damian Carrington | Environment | guardian.co.uk

The new environment secretary's first statement fails to rebut accusations that he is a climate change sceptic

What do you do when climate change drops out of politics? Whatever you can | Grist

Like Rachel Hope. Hope is a 41-year-old member of Pissed-Off Polar Bears, an organization you’ve never heard of as she appears to constitute about 33 percent of the membership. She flew from Los Angeles to Tampa, where she began a hunger strike to raise awareness around climate change. Now in Charlotte, she’s on her eighth day without eating. For the strike to end, Hope issued a bunch of … optimistic demands — TV networks have to report on methane release and phytoplankton die-off, the New York Times has to fire Andy Revkin, and Obama has to call for climate action in his big convention speech.

Do greenhouse gases warm the planet by 33°C? Jinan Cao checks the numbers. « JoNova: Science, carbon, climate and tax

Jinan Cao has been dissecting the nature of the greenhouse effect and a key calculation that I normally just accept without questioning. This will set a few pigeons loose, but it will be interesting to see where they land. The claims analyzed here are the oft repeated ones that the Earth’s greenhouse effect already warms us by 33°C and that a doubling of CO2 directly causes a 1.1°C rise (that’s with no feedbacks taken into account).

Jinan points out that these numbers, repeated as “fact”, are merely a result of misuse of the Stefan-Boltzmann equation. If Earth is not a perfect black body, but has an emissivity of 0.7 (as satellites suggest), then the temperature of the planet’s surface without any greenhouse effect would not be -18°C, but more like 5°C. That would mean the entire warming due to the greenhouse effect is only around 10°C, not the more impressive 33°C that is usually claimed. It means the greenhouse effect is probably less important than implied.