Monday, September 23, 2013

Links

Global Warming Slowdown Hinders Climate Treaty Effort - Bloomberg
Skeptics have succeeded in “confusing the public,” said Michael Jacobs, who advised the U.K. government on climate policy until 2010.

“It’s been a very organized campaign by climate skeptics, using the very, very tiny number of scientists who don’t agree with the almost unanimous view of everybody else and inflating small uncertainties into apparently major challenges to the scientific consensus,” Jacobs said. “One of the challenges of the panel this year is to convince the media, politicians and the public that there is this extraordinarily widespread consensus on the major facts about climate change.”
...
“We don’t really know yet what the explanation is for the slowdown,” said Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. “The most favored explanation at the moment is that more of the heat absorbed by the oceans is being sucked down into deeper waters than before.”
...the scientists took a battering over inaccuracies in their work and the content of leaked e-mails between climate researchers.

“The credibility and the reputation of the IPCC definitely suffered,” Professor Robert Stavins, director of Harvard University’s Environmental Economics Program said by phone from Cambridge, Massachusetts.
UN climate panel: Hmm, how can we selectively edit these inconvenient truths to outwit those anti-science denialists? « Hot Air
Never mind that there are a million and one factors that go into the causes and effects of the planet’s climate (as the UN acknowledges with excuses factors like volcanic ash, solar activity, and oceanic heat-trapping after the utter failure of their own climate models), and that some more rationally-interested parties might advocate for less poverty-inducing and more free-market solutions — there is clearly no room for nuance here. It eludes me, however, as to why these extremists are surprised that anyone is suspicious of their motivations, when they spent decades doubling down on cataclysmic doomsday predictions that never came true whilst engaging in academic and political hostage-taking.

No comments: