Someone by the name “Danny” tried to post a couple of responses to the Desperate Denial post. Having posted Neil deGrasse Tyson’s eloquence about the value of science literacy, I thought I might share the comments and let readers form their own opinions about where they fall on the “science literacy” scale.
Posted in Global Warming
You have not fully expressed your power as a voter until you have a scientific literacy in topics that matter for future political issues.
— Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Posted in Global Warming
WUWT has a post in which Neil Frank proclaims that Hillary Clinton is no hurricane expert but he is. (Frank’s post was originally published on The Daily Caller, but was reprinted on WUWT with permission.) He objects to Clinton having recently said that “Hurricane Matthew was likely more destructive because of climate change.”
Some make light of the fact that the Japanese have announced the CO2 level at their Antarctic station (Syowa) exceeded 400 ppmv (part per million by volume) this year.
Climate deniers hate the surface temperature data sets, but they love to insult ’em. That’s because they show how much the globe has warmed … and that’s something deniers don’t want to admit, not even to themselves. They live in denial of it. They’ll do almost anything to minimize and/or discredit it.
Their favorite argument is to say that all adjustments made to surface temperatures from land-based thermometers are bad and wrong, and they usually throw in a thinly-veiled implication or outright accusation that the scientists who do that are perpetrating a fraud. Never mind that the whole purpose of adjustments is to improve things, that it’s a time-tested and proven procedure in many sciences, or that for most organizations the entire process is transparent (NASA, e.g., makes all the original data, the methodology, even the computer programs they use to do so available online for all to see).
The climate denial machine has gotten desperate. Among the many signs is that the British newspaper Sunday Telegraph still publishes the work of Christopher Booker. And Booker is still making arguments like this one (referring to the U.K. met office, scroll down to find it):
This year witnessed a September minimum of Arctic sea ice which was only the 2nd-lowest on record. But the year’s minimum isn’t the surprising thing about this year’s sea ice. That would be the surprising lows observed during May and part of June, and now, it seems, during the most recent few days of October. Here’s the data, with 2016 in red:
Not long ago I posted about how multiple factors, including in particular the use of “broken trends,” can lead us astray about what the trend really is by allowing distinctly non-physical changes. It also amounts to ignoring evidence about the trend, namely all the data that comes before a chosen start time. Let me illustrate.
Over at WUWT someone posted a comment on Bob Tisdale’s post (see my post about that) drawing attention to my removal of the influences of el Niño, volcanic aerosols, and solar fluctuations from the temperature record. This didn’t sit well with some of their readers, particularly someone using the moniker “Javier,” who had this to say:
Open Mind 