Cool January sets rightwingers to lying
- From: "Kickin' Ass and Takin' Names" <PopUlist349@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2008 12:30:02 -0800 (PST)
A cool January has elicited gleeful celebration among conservatives
still caught in the grip of climate change denial. A good illustration
can be found in the blog section of a site called Daily Tech:
Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of
warming
.... All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA's
GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the
past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.
But the NASA GISS site referenced above says nothing of the sort about
2007:
The year 2007 tied for second warmest in the period of instrumental
data, behind the record warmth of 2005, in the Goddard Institute for
Space Studies (GISS) analysis.
A near record warm year and a dramatically colder one, what the heck?
Well, January '08 was cooler than average, that much is true. But
somewhere along the way in the D-tech diary, 'one month' was replaced
with 'twelve month long drop' and 'past year.' That screw up was then
compounded by the diarist erroneously proclaiming it 'erases a century
of global warming.'
A popular refrain in the mostly glowing comment section that follows
is 'it's the sun!' I doubt many of those pointing to the sun bothered
to ask an astronomer; but I asked a Bad Astronomer who said:
Over the whole sunspot cycle, at most, this would raise the
temperature of the Earth on average by 0.2 degrees Celsius, and we are
measuring increases much larger than that (not to mention the trend
just keeps going up, and doesn't rise and fall with the sunspot
cycle). People who try to tie global warming to the Sun have very
little evidence, and what they do have does not come close to
explaining the rise in temperature we see on Earth.
There are dozens of observatories on earth and in space scrutinizing
solar output at every wavelength. There are thousands of scientists
all over the world who spend their entire professional lives examining
that data. When someone comes along and asks "How come you smart
scientists never thought of the sun?" as if they've hit on a novel
explanation for climate change, the response from the scientific
community is little more than laughter.
This may be old hat for regulars, but we have a lot of new eyeballs
around, so it's useful to review the point I brought up yesterday:
This stuff gets pinged around the Internet gaining a life of its own
until it gets mainstreamed. That D-tech post has already been linked
by loads of wingnut sites including Drudge. From there it quickly
found its way into my email box along with indignant demands from
conservatives that I post The Truth. Which incidentally, I just did,
even though it's probably not The Truth they wanted to hear.
Odds are it's only a matter of time before we hear a talking head
solemnly asking how 'climate change alarmists explain the record drop
in global temperatures over the past year.' Apply that same procedure
to any right-wing zombie lie you choose, and you get a feel for why
they're so hard to kill
.
- Prev by Date: Re: A merciful society
- Next by Date: Re: This is the kind of speech we need to stir the political pot.
- Previous by thread: HEAVY early voting in Texas
- Next by thread: Re: This is the kind of speech we need to stir the political pot.
- Index(es):
Relevant Pages
|
Loading
