Latest Posts
- Vote for SkS in the physics.org web awards
- The 2nd law of thermodynamics and the greenhouse effect
- Climate cherry pickers: Falling humidity
- Increasing southern sea ice: a basic rebuttal
- Do critics of the hockey stick realise what they're arguing for?
- Throwing Stones at the Greenhouse Effect
- Danish translation of the Scientific Guide to 'Skeptics Handbook'
- Despite uncertainty, CO2 drives the climate
- DMI and GISS Arctic Temperatures: Hide the Increase?
- Climate Change Impacts on California Water Resources
- Skeptical Logic Can't Save Greenland Ice - for that you need to stop climate change
- Do the IPCC use alarmist language?
- Explaining Arctic sea ice loss
- The sun upside down
- The human fingerprint in coral
- SkS Housekeeping: right margin
- The first global warming skeptic
- Global warming impact on tropical species greater than expected
- Global warming is accelerating the global water cycle
- Skeptical Science housekeeping: Comments Gluttony
- The value of coherence in science
- Carbon Dioxide - Everyone's Favorite Pollutant
- What constitutes 'safe' global warming?
- Climate Cherry Pickers: Falling sea levels in 2010
- Irregular Climate podcast 11
- Uncertain Times at the Royal Society?
- An underwater hockey stick
- IPCC Reports: Science or Spin?
- Dutch translation of the Scientific Guide to 'Skeptics Handbook'
- How does global warming affect polar bears?
Scientific skepticism is healthy. Scientists should always challenge themselves to expand their knowledge and improve their understanding. Yet this isn't what happens in global warming skepticism. Skeptics vigorously criticise any evidence that supports man-made global warming and yet uncritically embrace any argument, op-ed piece, blog or study that refutes global warming.
So this website gets skeptical about global warming skepticism. Do their arguments have any scientific basis? What does the peer reviewed scientific literature say?
Saturday, 23 October, 2010
Vote for SkS in the physics.org web awards
Skeptical Science is honoured to be included in the short list of the Institute of Physics Web Awards 2010. Each year, the Institute of Physics select 35 websites in 7 different categories, including Best Blog, Best News Site, Best Podcast, etc. Skeptical Science is listed in the President's Prize category (which seems to be the miscellaneous websites that can't be categorised elsewhere).
Voting ends November 7 and on November 15, they announce a People's Choice plus the judge's choice. So be sure to register with physics.org (as only registered users can take part) and vote for Skeptical Science. Actually, you can vote/rate all the websites so have a look at some of the other websites - Sixty Symbols is pretty cool (what's that, I'm not supposed to mention the competition?)
Posted by John Cook at 8:04 AM | 12 comments
Friday, 22 October, 2010
The 2nd law of thermodynamics and the greenhouse effect
Skeptics sometimes claim that the explanation for global warming contradicts the second law of thermodynamics. But does it? To answer that, first, we need to know how global warming works. Then, we need to know what the second law of thermodynamics is, and how it applies to global warming. Global warming, in a nutshell, works like this:
Posted by TonyWildish at 9:37 PM | 25 comments
Thursday, 21 October, 2010
Climate cherry pickers: Falling humidity
Scientific skepticism requires we consider the full body of evidence before coming to conclusions. The antithesis of genuine skepticism is ignoring all the evidence that contradicts a desired conclusion. I witnessed such cherry picking on Australian television this week (the ABC's Q&A; program) when Jennifer Marohasy emphatically stated that humidity was falling. To come to such a conclusion, one needs to rely on a single outlier paper where its own author cautions about the uncertainty in their result. On top of that, you need to disregard other independent lines of evidence, the theoretical understanding of positive feedback and a number of other reanalyses of humidity.
Posted by John Cook at 10:00 AM | 24 comments
Wednesday, 20 October, 2010
Increasing southern sea ice: a basic rebuttal
Sea ice around Antarctica has been increasing over the last few decades that satellites have been measuring sea ice extent. Consequently, you often hear the refrain "Antarctica is gaining ice". First of all, it’s worth remembering that sea ice is not to be confused with land ice. This distinction might seem obvious, but the two are often confused in media reports. Sea ice is frozen seawater floating on the surface, whereas land ice is a layer of snow that has accumulated over time on a landmass. Antarctica is losing land ice at an accelerating rate.
Posted by James Wight at 10:40 AM | 21 comments
Tuesday, 19 October, 2010
Do critics of the hockey stick realise what they're arguing for?
The hockey stick, a reconstruction of temperature over the last 1000 or so years, is a much maligned graph. Critics of the hockey stick insist it underestimates past climate change. In particular, many insist that temperatures during the Medieval Warm Period were warmer than now. The next logical leap is that if past natural climate change is comparable to today, then current climate change must also also natural. The irony of this line of thinking is that if the Medieval Warm Period did turn out to be much warmer than currently thought, this doesn't prove that humans aren't causing global warming. On the contrary, it would mean the danger from man-made global warming is greater than expected.
Posted by John Cook at 6:07 PM | 112 comments
Monday, 18 October, 2010
Throwing Stones at the Greenhouse Effect
Some climate change skeptics dispute the so-called ‘greenhouse effect’, which keeps the surface temperature of the Earth approximately 30 degrees C warmer than it would be if there were no greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In other words, without the greenhouse effect, the Earth would be largely uninhabitable.
Posted by gpwayne at 8:53 PM | 97 comments
Monday, 18 October, 2010
Danish translation of the Scientific Guide to 'Skeptics Handbook'
A Scientific Guide to the 'Skeptics Handbook' is now available in Danish. Many thanks to Klaus Flemløse who did the translation.
Note - the Scientific Guide has also been translated into a few other languages, shown below. If you're interested in helping translate the Guide into another language, you can download the Word document, translate it and email me the translation. I'll then insert the translated text into the existing design and email back a PDF to check that it all came out right. But best first to contact me to ensure noone else is already working on your language (versions in Portuguese and Japanese are close to completion).
Posted by John Cook at 7:40 PM | 0 comments
Monday, 18 October, 2010
Despite uncertainty, CO2 drives the climate
In August 2010, Nature published a commentary by Penner et al. which mainly focused on the uncertainty regarding the effect short-lived pollutants (such as aerosols and black carbon) have on the climate. As is often the case, many in the blogosphere misinterpreted and misunderstood the statements and conclusions in the commentary. Not surprisingly, the biggest misinterpretation related to the contribution of anthropogenic greenhouse gases to global warming. Below is the most misunderstood quote, in which I've emphasized the key word.
Posted by dana1981 at 8:42 AM | 30 comments
Sunday, 17 October, 2010
DMI and GISS Arctic Temperatures: Hide the Increase?
A recent WUWT article by Frank Lansner, August 5th 2010 has the heading “DMI polar data shows cooler Arctic temperature since 1958”. Peter Berenyi also posted a similar chart here on SkS (which sparked my interest). Frank Lansnser goes on to show data from Goddard Institute of Space Science (GISS) July polar views and compares this with graphics of Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) data for July 2010 to cast doubt on the validity of the GISS gridded values in the Arctic region. This follows on from similar points made by Steve Goddard, and another article by Harold Ambler which tries to show how DMI is based on more data measurements than GISS, again providing a setting to raise questions about the reliability of GISS gridded values in the Arctic.
Posted by Peter Hogarth at 11:49 AM | 131 comments
Saturday, 16 October, 2010
Climate Change Impacts on California Water Resources
California's water resources face significant strain on two fronts - a state population which is expected to grow from 35 to 55 million over the next 40 years, and a declining Sierra snowpack as a result of rising temperatures.
Posted by dana1981 at 8:43 PM | 8 comments
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