Real Sceptic

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. Read more

The Effectiveness Of Prayer

AP Photo/Erich Schlegel

Remember the call for prayer from Rick Perry? The one where Texans should, among other things, pray for rain?

More than a month later the heat is still on in Texas and there hasn’t been any significant amount of rain that would have brought some relief from the drought. In fact, the drought has actually intensified. And to add insult to injure massive wild fires have raged in texas, leaving thousands of people homeless.

Shows how effective this day of prayer has been. And It isn’t strange that someone who denies the existence of climate change and thinks creationism is teached in Texas classrooms calls for something this ineffective.

Climate Change Deniers, The Merchants Of Doubt

Denial of the scientific evidence for Anthropogenic Global Warming was the running theme during the 24 hour broadcast of the Climate Reality Project.

And one of the shorts that was broadcast, called “Doubt,” is wel worth a watch. It’s about how the fossil fuel industry took the tobacco industry’s playbook to confuse the public on the science of climate change. Not by disproving the facts, but just by creating enough doubt to make the public dismiss it.

The following quote from the short sums it up quite nicely:

How did the tobacco companies manage to lie to the public in face of all the scientific evidence?

They realized that the science didn’t need to be disproven. It was enough to create doubt in the minds of the public to keep them from recognizing the truth.

This misinformation and doubt peddling is something I often talk about. Like for example when Chris Horner from the Competitive Enterprise Institute said a potential new maunder minimum would cause a new little ice age, so we don’t need to do anything. Or the confusion Watts Up With That tries to create every time there is some sort of cold spell.

And the short DOUBT shows how eerily similar the tactics of the tobacco industry are to what we are seeing with climate change:

Watts Says Cold Weather Disproves Global Warming

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t hold the blog WattsUpWithThat in high regard with how they build their case against Global Warming.

And today they posted a perfect example of why you shouldn’t listen to anything they have to say. As they posted the following canard:

Apparently, Gore has never noted that climate scientists once thought snowfall would disappear. But wait, there’s more.

According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.

“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.

Potholer54 on YouTube already made an excellent video explaining why this is an utter fabrication as scientists never said that (it starts around 2:40):

And that’s not all, Watts had actually the gall to write the following:

Apparently, Mr. Gore is unable to track the global monthly temperature either. There is no “global warming” this month.

No global warming this month? Are you kidding me… We measure climate trends over periods of decades to cancel out the noise of natural variability. And a cold winter cannot disprove Global Warming as it says nothing about any underlying climate trend: