– There are certain arguments I get from climate crisis doubters that on first blush, I have trouble refuting. “There!“, they say, “That proves all this global climate crisis stuff is bogus.”
– “The Great Global Warming Swindle” video shown first on British TV back on March 8th of this year was one such. Just packed full of scientists testifying and with flashy charts and data, it seemed to show that global warming was just a contrived crisis. But, as the days and weeks followed showed, the only thing that was ‘full of it’ was the show itself. See: ➡ & ➡ & ➡ & ➡.
– Another theory the climate deniers have grabbed onto and pointed at as having ‘disproved’ the idea that global climate change is being caused by mankind it the ‘Sun did it theory‘. They ran with that one for awhile but recently articles have come out from the scientific community putting the lie to that refuge as well. See: ➡ & ➡ & ➡
– Then there’s the ‘Cosmic Rays are doing it theory‘. A sample proponent of the theory: ➡ and a sample rebuttal: ➡.
– Sometimes the climate change deniers go back in time to find their material. One issue I’ve had tossed at me more than once involves research done in the 70’s that suggested that the world was on the brink of an ice-age. Some high-profile people like Carl Sagan pushed this idea and that gave the public the impression that it was the consensus opinion of the climate science community in general, which wasn’t true. Reasic has taken the time to publish a nice piece, called Green Myth-Busting 70’s Ice Age Predictions, placing this fiasco in perspective here: ➡.
– Now, let’s turn our attentions towards the future of climate denial as in, ‘What’s next’?
– Well, the other day I saw several interesting stories about an ice core that they drilled in Greenland some five hundred miles north of the island’s southern tip. The expectation was, that when they got to the bottom of the ice and found the materials and DNA there from whatever lived there the last time the ice had melted, they would be looking at stuff from the last big melt which was about 125,000 years ago. But, in fact, the materials they found there were from about 450,000 years ago which strongly implies that during the big melt 125,000 years ago, this part of Greenland remained covered with ice. Here are links to some of the articles: ➡ & ➡
– So, what might all of this mean to the climate deniers? Well, the fact that the scientists didn’t find what they expected at the bottom of the hole means that their theories are obviously wrong. You can probably expect to see a series of such claims soon. But, in fact, it means that the existing theories need to be adjusted and that is the normal and reasonable course that science aways follows. Skeptics expect science to be 100% accurate or they say it is all wrong. Scientists know that science is a self-correcting entity and they welcome new data and the changes those data cause. Each change means the picture has grown a bit clearer.
Another line of attack which has been recently renewed are some of the recent meteorological station data used to estimate the recent trends. See
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/07/no-man-is-an-urban-heat-island/
for more details…The deniers are quite conspiracy minded about the whole thing, and there were some tetchy responses to this post on some other climate sites, particularly Roger Pielke, Sr blog.