Seasons Greetings

It has been a busy month, with for example organizing the 12 hour fundraiser show for the Secular Students Alliance. And now handling all the traffic I got from the shout-out from TheLivingDinosaur. Not to mention a very busy month at work.

It was fun, but a bit draining. So I’m going to celebrate the holidays with my family and friends for some needed rest. But I’ll leave you with a nice seasonal greeting from Fox news:

As winter descends, Fox is keeping with its annual tradition of using snowstorms and cold temperatures to mock global warming. But scientists say climate change could make winter storms stronger and more frequent.

12 Hours Of SkepticTV For Charity

This saturday, starting at 19:00 GMT, SkepticTV will be doing a special 12 hour show to raise funds for the Secular Students Alliance (SSA):

The mission of the Secular Student Alliance is to organize, unite, educate, and serve students and student communities that promote the ideals of scientific and critical inquiry, democracy, secularism, and human-based ethics. We envision a future in which nontheistic students are respected voices in public discourse and vital partners in the secular movement’s charge against irrationality and dogma.

Stephen Schneider: Science and Distortion

Stephen Schneider was a professor of Environmental Biology, a great scientist and one incredible science communicator.

The short below was made by Stephen Thomson, a  year in the making, and pays tribute to this scientific and academic important figure.

Professor Schneider will be missed.

A year in the making, this video pays tribute to a critical scientific and academic figure in postmodern history: the late Climatologist and Stanford Professor Stephen Schneider (1945-2010)

This video was screened before a live audience by Climate One of the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco on Dec 6, 2011 as the introduction to an event honoring Stephen Schneider and presenting an award in his name to Richard Alley, Professor of Geosciences and Associate of the EMS Environment Institute.

This video will be presented again tomorrow at the AGU (American Geophysicists Union) Conference currently being held in San Francisco.

No, It’s Not About The Hockey Stick

Peter Sinclair has released another excellent video about climate change science, this time about the simplistic view some have that all global warming science has its foundation on the hockey stick.

There’s a persistent delusion out there, that you hear a lot from people who should know better – that global warming boils down to a simple minded correlation between temperature graphs and CO2 rise.  Climate deniers are sure this is true, and that if they just attack the most famous temperature graph, Mike Mann’s “Hockey Stick”, they can knock down the whole thing.

But our understanding of climate is, of course, based not on a graph, but on the radiative properties of greenhouse gases – which have been well known for 150 years, and got seriously nailed during the 1950s when the US government was working on building heat-seeking missiles that had to pick out long wave radiation at all altitudes in the atmosphere.  We realized that CO2 was blocking heat – and as Richard Alley points out here, that means something.

A Look Into Our Climate: Past To Present To Future

Almost everyone who follows the climate change ‘debate’ has heard of Michael Mann, and if not would have in the very least heard about the “hockey stick graph” he produced.

This graph is the result of extensive research about temperature trends over the last thousand years, and shows that the current warming is unprecedented for at least the past thousand years. It was, and still is, heavily criticized by opponents. Although over the years other teams have confirmed that this graph is correct and have even extended our knowledge about how unprecedented current temperature trends are.