SkepticalScience.com - Climate Myths Sorted by Taxonomy

Of course, it’s impossible to discuss climate science findings without also being confronted with the endless repetitive cross-fire from the bullhorns of naysayers and their bias driven unidirectional skepticism and disconnected-from-physical-reality lies.  

As a result the folks at SkepticalScience.com made a point of studying contrarian claims and then explaining the real science that climate science “skeptics” consistently choose to ignore.

Republicans have a hubristic confidence in their own self-interest, and because they’ve convinced themselves that they possess God in their back pockets, it’s okay for them to disregard fundamental geophysical evidence and facts.  It's lunatic thinking, still here we are.

The real tragedy is that nobody is interested in learning.  They only know their personal wants and by their actions and words, they appear to lack intellectual integrity, how else could they so easily refuse to listen, let alone learn lessons, all the while shamelessly repeating the same juvenile nonsense over and over and over again.  

What kind of nonsense you ask?  Well, take a look,

SkepticalScience.com, Climate Myths sorted by taxonomy

• It's not happening
• Temp record is unreliable
• Hockey stick is broken
• Tree-rings diverge from temperature after 1960
• Ljungqvist broke the hockey stick
• Dropped stations introduce warming bias
• It's Urban Heat Island effect
• 1934 - hottest year on record
• It's microsite influences
• Satellite error inflated Great Lakes temperatures
• Satellite record is more reliable than thermometers
• It's cooling
• We're heading into an ice age
• It's freaking cold!
• Record snowfall disproves global warming
• Record high snow cover was set in winter 2008/2009
• 2009-2010 winter saw record cold spells
• Oceans are cooling
• It hasn't warmed since 1998
• Phil Jones says no global warming since 1995
• Global warming stopped in 1998, 1995, 2002, 2007, 2010, ????

Robert Hazen - Origins, mineral evolution - What a scientist sounds like.

In order to get a change of scenery I spent the summer of 2006 working north of Boulder and living in a Teepee.  My transportation was mainly my bike and Longmont was a better destination than crowded Boulder.  It also sported a very nice library with a big non-fiction audio book collection, which was very exciting considering I’d long run out of decent nonfictions at my home town fiction loving library.  Browsing through their rows of “The Great Courses” series, I spied something new "Origins of Life."

Origins of Life

Professor Robert M. Hazen, Ph.D.

George Mason University

The Great Courses.com - course 1515

https://www.thegreatcourses.com/professors/robert-m-hazen/

With a title like that, I couldn’t say no.  It turned out to deliver one astounding surprise after another, along with a few revelations to boot.  I needed to listened a second time before returning, despite its 12 hour length.  Since then I've made a point of listening to pretty near every YouTube lecture featuring him and there are many. 

I also liked that this new understanding also vindicates my own reflexive disgust at having read some serious scientists assume that for the first few billions of years nothing happened on Earth.  It seemed a ridiculous notion to me and so it was.  Just like junk DNA, or wasted brain matter, nonsense - it was simply that we hadn’t learned enough to know what it was doing yet.  Seems that conceit and short sightedness has been a predominate feature in human thinking going way back.

The beauty of science is that truth and honesty and evidence is valued - authoritative facts win in the end.  This is because scientists belong to a community of dedicated, competitive, informed, skeptical individuals who buy into the basic premise that: We Need Each Other To Keep Ourselves Honest.  

Also they work under a set of rules, that puts honest observation at the top of the list, because constructively learning about our planet, along with her ways and means, is the goal.  A place where geophysical facts rule over personal opinion and preferences. 

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According to Neal deGrasse Tyson this is how science operates:

(1) Question authority. No idea is true just because someone says so, including me. 

(2) Think for yourself. Question yourself. Don't believe anything just because you want to. Believing something doesn't make it so. 

(3) Test ideas by the evidence gained from observation and experiment. If a favorite idea fails a well-designed test, it's wrong. Get over it. 

(4) Follow the evidence wherever it leads. If you have no evidence, reserve judgment. 

And perhaps the most important rule of all...

(5) Remember: you could be wrong. Even the best scientists have been wrong about some things. Newton, Einstein, and every other great scientist in history -- they all made mistakes. Of course they did. They were human. 

Science is a way to keep from fooling ourselves, and each other.

{Mistakes are learning opportunities !}

Fundamentals - Earth's Carbon Cycle By The Numbers - R.Rohde

The single most important lesson to understanding the physical reality of manmade global warming: IT’S THE ATMOSPHERIC INSULATION SILLY!  

One simply can not comprehend anything else about current climate changes without first achieving that bedrock understanding.

Today’s science-contrarian industry has made it their goal-one to muddle and hide away that fundamental physical certainty from public view - and frankly, rationalists at all levels have been compliant suckers in going along with the bully con job and turning a blind eye on the obvious.  Rather than focusing on and explaining what is known for certain.

Okay, so how to explain Earth’s Carbon Cycle to people?  
As it happens Robert Rohde has managed to put together an amazing data visualization that drives home Earth’s carbon cycle like nothing I’ve seen before.  

What's natural about Steele's scary stories? Why Pacifica Tribune? (3/6/2019)

My previous post gave a summary of March 6th’s What’s Natural? column in the ‘libertarian’ Pacifica Tribune.   So I’ll dive straight into this, the “too long, didn’t read” part 2 intended for the student of libertarian deception.  Here I dissect the words and offer links to serious sources for the other side of Steele assertions. 

Glib misrepresentations, insulting experts and weaving transparently deceptive tales is easy - learning the facts and understanding our biosphere and climate engine that’s what requires some serious self-starter effort.  Like the difference between a vandal and a builder. 

Jim Steele’s, What’s Natural? Pacifica Tribune | March 6, 2019

(click on the image for better reading)

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{Since this is a Virtual Debate I drift back and forth between addressing Steele and addressing my readers}

First paragraph,  Steele gets into the Heaven’s Gate Suicide Cult.  Guess, to fluff up his audience.   When Steele tossed in:

Steele:  “the Heaven's Gate Cult. Highlv educated members …” 

I though I’d investigate, turns out People magazine printed a little bio of the unfortunates.  Not to disparage, but educationally they were actually a decidedly middling crowd: https://people.com/archive/cover-story-who-they-were-vol-47-no-14/.  Reading it, lonely people looking for simple answers is what came to my mind.

Odious sensationalistic smoke and mirrors, reckon it’s all one's left with when one doesn’t have any facts on their side?

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Second paragraph,  launches into some heavy handed self promotion.  

Steele:  “I’ve pointed out how over-hunting and invasive organisms endanger species.  I’ve noted island extinctions occurred when humans imported rats, cats and mosquitos that attacked ill-prepared native species.”

Come on Jim, who’s kidding whom, that’s been text book stuff since I was in school, why do you spin it into sounding like original work or something? 

Steele:  “My research in the Sierra Nevada restored a watershed …”

I think the Sierra Valley Resource Conservation District (sierravalleyrcd.com) might not agree with Jim’s self-serving assessment.

Editor Frederick, Regarding Steele's Scary Campfire Stories. March 6, 2019

Letter to Editor Frederick, 

Regarding Jim Steele’s "What’s Natural?" Scary Campfire Stories.

March 6, 2019 - Pacifica Tribune - sent March 11, 2019

Dear Editor Fredrick,

What’s Natural? Indeed, that is the question.  It took a couple days to steel myself to tackle the Scary Campfire Stories column but I’ve been working on it much of the day and hopefully it’ll be posted soon.  I’m pretty sure my point by point review wouldn’t be of much interest around here, so I’m posting it at my ConfrontingScienceContrarians.blogspot.com - I’d much appreciate it if you could share that with your readers. Instead of details I’d like to share general impressions. 

Lets start with a summary of the column’s ten paragraphs: introduces topic with the Heaven’s Gate Suicide Cult (no crass politicization happening here); dismisses the seriousness of a 1°Centigrade rise within our global climate engine; misrepresents the facts in order to disparage a respected butterfly expert; quibbles about Polar Bear counts, while ignoring that the Arctic Ice Cap is melting away; ridicules penguin researchers for revolutionizing census gathering abilities and keeping up to date with their available data; heaps scorn on the entire climate science community because some scientist at some low point once said snow was going to disappear from England in the next decades; oh and we're to forget about “atmospheric insulation” because CO₂ is plant food; he tells us there’s far more important problems to address than our planet’s atmospheric insulation regulator going from 280 ppm when the steam engine was invented to over 410 ppm and rising fast today.

Then Steele’s coup de grâce: ”For several decades, bogus catastrophic climate-change claims have come and gone.” -“If we truly care about nature … the real problem is overhunting, invasive species and loss of habitat.”

So this is libertarian entertainment?  Is that it?  It sure isn’t serious education!  What’s natural about this contemptuous disregard for our physical Earth and it’s biosphere?  How on Earth can one hold the notion that raising the temperature of our global biosphere won’t profoundly alter its components?