Comments on: James Fallows, Physics for Future Presidents, Al Gore, blogging journalists, and what will become of hockey sticks on an ice-free planet?

By: Susan Anderson

Susan Anderson — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 20:13:02 +0000

I am soooooo grateful for all this information. Yesterday I was looking for something about Greenland and google pointed me to icecap.us – sigh – its perversions are getting top usage. As an interested layperson with some scientific training, I am unable to contribute to the real work, but do spend a good bit of time trying to find ways to out the pseudo-skeptics who are extremely busy (after all, they have plenty of money). The Mann proven to be discredited meme is pervasive and has not gone away.

Lou Grinzo, that is just hysterical (in every sense of the word). Would you mind if I quoted it the next time Hansen is insulted?

yes, wildfires, Europe and Canada now …

I’m going to try to get past the censor with my full name again (I think I was discouraged for no good reason the last two times).

By: Chris Winter

Chris Winter — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 06:03:38 +0000

Fallows endorsed Richard Muller’s book. Earl Killian long ago doubly debunked that book here.

Yes, I was surprised when browsing Muller’s book in a bookstore to find he thinks (or thought) Mann’s work has been discredited. Let’s hope the past tense is now operative in that last statement.

By: Lou Grinzo

Lou Grinzo — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 23:47:13 +0000

Francis: You’ve figured it out! James Hansen, who lives in a mountain top secret lair, sits on a throne made from a T-Rex skull, and eats babies for breakfast, has single-handedly fudged the climate numbers you refer to. It’s All A Plot, and you uncovered the truth!

If only we had a champion, some courageous blogger who could rise from the pile of empty Doritoes bags and Dr. Pepper cans that surround his or her computer, shake one orange-stained fist at the sky, shout, “Damn you to hell, James Hansen!”, and then smite him with the sheer force of blog posts.

It would be so much simpler to make all that nasty, you know, reality, just go away instead of having to deal with it and all that icky science stuff.

By: john

john — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 19:09:07 +0000

Paul:

I’m not sure what you mean by “relatively cooler” — the first 6 months of 2009 rank as the 5th hottest in NASA’s records: see
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/

The FAO keeps statistics on global wildfires, although there is a lag time so they haven’t got anything I could find on 2009, yet. But the decade trend is sort of like a hockey-stick.

By: paulm

paulm — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 15:59:07 +0000

BTW, it seems like we have hit some kind of threshold here with all the wildfires going down globally. They are everywhere even with the relatively cooler global temperature.

Is there any comment on wild fires and threshold levels floating around?

By: Gail

Gail — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 15:58:22 +0000

Coincidentally, I found this 2005 interview while searching the ‘tubes this morning, with Raymond Bradley, one of the originators of the hockey stick theory. He had quite a bit to say, even then, about the paid denial machine.

“What he didn’t bargain for when he and his colleagues published those papers, but what he realizes in retrospect he should have anticipated, was the fury with which those having a vested interest in what he calls “the carbon economy” would attack not only his work but also him personally. The hockey stick “became the focal point of the venom and diatribe of the so-called climate skeptics,” said Bradley. ‘You publish a paper and you expect people to challenge it and ask questions, but you don’t expect to be personally attacked for what you are doing, your motives questioned and your competence questioned. That’s not the normal way of science.’”

http://umassmag.com/ Fall_2005/ Never_Mind_the_Weather__934.html