RealClimate

Hello boona, thanks for the lies in the links you provided, it is always entertaining to read bullshit rethoric. Also the appeal to a strawman like (quote) "evangelical progressivism" is a nice touch. On a serious note, none of the people behind the links you provide have done any serious research or climate modelling, have they? So, if you are legitimately deluded and ready to change your mind, then I recommend http://www.realclimate.org If you are a shill, let me ask you to consider that you may be exposed one day.

If you are interested in current climate science and commentary on the science "Real Climate" is worth reading http://www.realclimate.org/

Some of Professor Plimer's arguments have been countered elsewhere previously. Please see http://bravenewclimate.com/2008/09/01/spot-the-recycled-denial-iii-%E2… More generally, I would offer http://www.realclimate.org as a blog which offers excellent scientific discussion of climate change.

The IPCC is supposed to summarize the state of the existing literature, but it was born political, tends to attracts eco-activists of all sorts and relies more than it should on "grey literature" - unrefereed "reports" written by ecological organizations. The IPCC also to some degree generates the consensus it is supposed to be merely reporting on, in that the lead authors have been known to push specific articles into print supporting "their side" of things and delay articles supporting "the other side" with IPCC deadlines in mind so that their side gets the last word. That's one part of the process where excess alarmism gets to creep in. On the other side, your sources are correct that the result then gets massaged into acceptability. The "summary for policymakers" in particular is the result of political compromises - various country's representatives argue about it and then the rest of the document in some cases gets rewritten to reflect what the summary says, leaving nobody happy. Nonetheless, the IPCC documents aren't terrible and do tend to be worth reading if you really want to know what's going on. On being "past skepticism": The most credible skeptics tend to be "lukewarmers". They believe reality is a bit more complicated and uncertain than has been portrayed, they tend to suspect climate sensitivity is a lot lower than the models predict and they tend to be suspicious of doomsday claims generally. But almost nobody at this point doubts "CO2 is a greenhouse gas"…

Shutdown of northern Atlantic overturning after 2100 following deep mixing collapse in CMIP6 projections - 28 August 2025 - https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/adfa3b High-resolution ‘fingerprint’ images reveal a weakening Atlantic Ocean circulation (AMOC) - 12 Oct 2025 - https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2025/10/high-resolution… Physics-Based Indicators for the Onset of an AMOC Collapse Under Climate Change - 24 August 2025 -https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2025JC022651

> The models climate scientists currently have don't make accurate predictions. [citation needed] https://cbhighcharts2019.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/CMIP6/historical_t… are they perfect? of course not. are they useful? yes, the climate science community, the general science community things that yes they are. https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/WG1AR5_Chapter09_FINAL… "There is very high confidence that models reproduce the general features of the global-scale annual mean surface temperature increase over the historical period, including the more rapid warming in the second half of the 20th century, and the cooling immediately following large volcanic eruptions." https://www.carbonbrief.org/cmip6-the-next-generation-of-climate-model… https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/climate-model-projections-compar…

Absolutely agree with that, but the problem might be people not having the time to follow up on long discussions, and source information to disprove climate denier arguments. In fact my experience is that many climate activists are not that familiar with the science & economics themselves: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qaJKM77j00 (she should have quoted Martin Weitzman's work on the fat tails of the climate sensitivity distribution). I would suggest having a repository of clear arguments and counter arguments with links to reputable scientific sources, that we can refer any climate deniers to. For example: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2018/06/will-climate-cha…

Not that I know of, unfortunately--most of what I know I've gleaned from conversations with a brother who works in the field, and from http://realclimate.org/ , which has some decent technical information for a blog (but unfortunately has declined a bit IMO).

> is the antarctic icecap not rapidly getting larger? To the best of our knowledge the East Antarctic Ice Sheet is gaining mass[1] due to increased precipitation and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is losing mass[2] due to acceleration of glaciers. I believe there is also an increase in Antarctic sea ice extent [3]. As far as I know these increases are not enough to offset the reduction in mass in the Arctic but I don't have a comparison to hand. Wait a few days and the IPCC report will probably have a decent summary. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Antarctic_Ice_Sheet#Ice_mass_change… [2] http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/12/the-heat-is-on-i… [3] http://tamino.wordpress.com/2013/03/16/antarctic-sea-ice-gain/

The content doesn't say what the headline does. No surprise -- the Telegraph is really bad on climate issues. Check out http://realclimate.org/ if you want to get a real view of what's happening.

I would suggest it's the medium in which you choose to question it. People "questioning" global warming on Facebook are making a statement and appending the ?. There is any number of outlets or resources where they could've sought to become informed on the science, the consensus and the weakness or blindspots of current research. Instead they decided to "just ask questions" in a forum which cannot possibly support complex explanations. http://www.realclimate.org/ is a good place to start if you actually have questions about what is, inherently, a very complicated topic (that is also very interesting when people don't have an agenda with it).

I certainly didn't mean to write off climate science or scientists. My point was that I don't know how to distinguish the science from the propaganda, except in obvious cases. I find it hard to believe that other armchair scientists can be so sure of themselves. They could be right, but to me its mostly a sign of propaganda. So I don't know who the climate scientists are. Lots of parties are making wild claims and saying science is on their side. Take http://realclimate.org/ for instance. Is this real climate science? I mean, anyone could put up a website with the words "climate science from climate scientists". How does one tell? Though I think you're right that peer-reviewed literature gives an indication.

> reducing carbon seems like it should be a much lower priority compared to how hard its pushed I'm not sure what you mean. The last 50 years (and even 5) have been far more bark than bite. > incoming nuclear fusion would alleviate a ton of our carbon issues A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. I worked on nuclear in a previous career and still have friends there, including fusion (including the big labs). Being bullish, fusion net gain is still 10 years away. It'll take decades to add to the energy portfolio after that. The case for fusion is worse than the case for fission. We should work on both, but we can't hold out for future technologies (we can say the same about storage). We needed to act decades ago, pushing it off by a few more decades is not going to solve the issue, it is repeating the same mistakes. > fleshed out cost-benefit analysis I wouldn't trust any of these. Zero of them. You need to have a pretty good understanding of these systems (highly complex) to even understand if the analyses are good. Every single one has a bias and is highly politicized. The more politicized a topic is, the higher level of expertise you need to understand who is telling the truth (politicization adds large amounts of noise). > Bjorn Lomborg Who is a political scientist. He isn't a climate scientist, nor even a scientist. Here's a rather well known scientist, Stefan Rahmstorf (studies physics of oceans) discussing Bjorn[0]. You can check Bjorn's scholar page[1] to…

From my perspective, trying multiple things, testing them, and picking the ones which had the best predictive values seems exactly like the scientific process working as intended. ¾ of the models did not have this problem, after all. Remember, science isn’t the process of assuming you’re right but rather testing your ideas harshly and learning from the faults you discover. Given half a century of reliable predictions, I again argue that they have sufficient predictive value even if it makes science deniers uncomfortable to acknowledge their personal contributions have only been towards making the world worst. Global cooling was never a mainstream position and the people hyping it since the mid-1970s have intentionally been lying to you. https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/that-70s-myth-did-climate-scie… Similarly, there was not a reversal of warming. Weather data and sources are noisy, and changing sensor artifacts introduce sampling biases, but the trend is clear and numerous follow up papers found that claim to be wishful thinking: https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2017/01/there-was-no-pa…

FYI, there's a school of thought which has concluded that global warming will lead to another glacial period within the current ice age, because higher temperatures disrupt ocean currents -- particularly the Gulf Stream, which redistributes warm water from the Gulf of Mexico to northern Europe. As the Gulf Stream makes its deposits of warm water along the coasts of Great Britain and northwest Europe, it keeps the temperatures in northwest Europe warmer than in eastern Canada, even though they both are roughly the same distance from the equator. The hypothesis is that, if Arctic ice melts as a result of global warming, huge amounts of fresh water will pour into the North Atlantic and slow down the Gulf Stream, cooling Europe, and triggering a feedback loop with colder and longer European winters, and more and more ice building up on the planet's surface.[a][b] [a] The book "Ice Age" by Cambridge-trained astrophysicist John Gribbin and his wife Mary has a good high-level overview of this school of thought: https://reanimus.com/store/?item=1420 [b] Recent studies of circulation in the North Atlantic already show a significant reduction in currents flowing north from the Gulf Stream: https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2020/09/new-studies-con…

Realclimate is usually good (http://realclimate.org)

>This stuff has been debunked over and over. Debunked? I linked the science around the subject. I have never seen anyone debunk these scientific theories. >. Just one example showing increasing temperatures with low solar activity http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2016/11/record... Your link is looking at 1960s and closer. My links are looking at the last 20,000 years. Solar activity dips are not measured in such a short period of time. The solar activity is in the 'modern maximum' for the entire graph from 1960s on. You are not debunking anything with that link. It is of no surprise to me that during a 'modern maximum' solar cycle that temperatures are going up. >Also arguments about temperature millions of years ago are not really meaningful, humans (and most other of the current species) did not live on earth at the time. The 6 celcius increase in the last 20,000 to 10,000 years ago was something humans greatly benefitted from. The IPCC says that we are going to warm 1.4celcius by 2100. I'm 100% certain that humans can survive and very likely thrive because of this warming. >But at least the deniers have now as predicted progressed from "it's not happening", to "it's happening but it's not that bad", soon we will be at "it is definitely happening but it's to late now to do anything so might as well do nothing" Are you asserting that I am a denier? I have never been a denier. No, my links literally prove climate change is real. My problem is that people…

In terms of greenhouse gasses, the biggest polluter is probably the ocean pumping all the water vapor into the atmosphere. Water vapor has by far the greatest greenhouse effect, accounting for about 65-85% of the greenhouse effect vs human generated CO2 that directly contributes 0.12%. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/01/calculating-the-… If we really want to change things, we'll have to get rid of the ocean. Seriously, though, I'd like to see some real numbers that if we completely eliminated human CO2 emissions, what is the actual difference that would make? What does that say about the significance of practically achievable reduction in human CO2 emissions? What amount of CO2 would we have to recapture to make a difference? What amount can we practically capture? I am getting the impression that these numbers might paint the CO2 dilemma as completely unsolvable. Sure, maybe in some way every little bit helps, but maybe it helps like using a squirt gun to put out a volcano. It'd be nice to know just how relevant our efforts would actually be if everyone unified and did the absolute best we could do, even so far as drastic population reduction or even complete elimination of human beings. Would even such Thanos like measures do anything, or would that just be bringing a second squirt gun to the volcano?

Not mentioned yet is http://realclimate.org and its Wiki.

No, i'm with you. Falsification is a huge deal. As far as "complex" goes, i'm thinking of the old strange attractor. I don't know if it'll rain on sept 19 2016, but i think it's safe to say there will be 3 inches of rain next september. If we refine our understanding and language, there's a nice probability density function for quantity of rain over the month of sept 2016. Not much probability around 0, not much beyond 6, but a big lump right there at 3. I outright reject the "no model is possible" argument. If nothing else, it's that way because god wills it. Some folks argue weather is related to frequency of gay sex. I'm confident the above paper outperforms that model. The nice thing about the above model is it is testable. we know historical variation around the prediction. We can make a prediction based on increasing CO2, then increase it, and see how our prediction plays out. (edit and we did, and the model was pretty good, but earth actually got warmer faster than the paper predicted http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/04/evaluating-a-198… So, anyway, weather works "somehow" and we can make forecasts. Although it's never been tested, i'm pretty sure Pat Robertson is wrong and it's not gay sex driven. So, i still dont' get why it's not settled. The best models we have are refinements of the above paper. Is there some other model that gives better answerers?

> Why don't we start at the IPCC? Here are some analyses: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/hansens-1988-pro… http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/02/2012-updates-to-… http://www.skepticalscience.com/lindzen-illusion-2-lindzen-vs-hansen-1… Current climate models are pretty accurate in their predictions. > Which isn't surprising at all, given no one has been able to show a working model of Earth. I am not sure, at this point, if you are just trolling. Every model has a certain limits, but it doesn't mean it is "not working". If you actually knew history (I always recommend https://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.htm) it is a remarkable achievement that we can model climate at all. > There's no way you can know that. CO2 may be completely dominated by other factors. Sorry, this is just trolling. Of course, in the same sense, we cannot predict the path of the Earth around the Sun because what if an unknown dominating factor comes to its path? When creating a model, we simply try to account for every important factor we know of. And given that the predictions are quite accurate (look at Lindzen comparison!), we probably know of all the important ones.

I'm not a climate scientist, but something bothers me about this debate. Why is it that skeptics are dismissed at best as ignorant or stupid, as paid shills for big oil, or even terrorists. I'm skeptical of at least some climate change claims, but I don't feel like I'm stupid or ignorant or a terrorist. Instead, I constantly hear confused or misleading statements about the environment, often stated with a religious fervor that characterizes those who doubt as sinners. While at happy-hour, a friend's boyfriend started complaining about how much waste there was in some pizza box. So far, I'm at least partially on-board with what he's saying, but then it goes off into alarmist claims about landfills. Now, I'm starting to realize that he hasn't really read anything about the subject (I read a lot). So I say, "Well, it's probably not the world's biggest problem, there's not a shortage of holes in the ground." He end's up getting mad and casting aspersions. (The best being that he accuses me of being a "Capitalist"). At a party I'm talking to a self-identified "geologist". He's talking about global warming and loss of glaciers, etc. I say, "Isn't it weird that that's going on while central Antarctica is actually cooling?". His response was "Oh, well of course, warming can cause that too." He was a nice enough guy, but I notice that it didn't matter what direction the temperature of Antarctica was heading, to him, it confirmed his belief. I really like Phil Plat's Bad…

Maybe not "daily", but very frequently: here is a small selection of some of the small sites on my newsblur newsfeed list: [0] http://www.jamesaltucher.com : Much self-pity, but also sometimes quite funny. http://www.astrobio.net/latestnews_rss/news.xml : Is there life on other planets? http://kaygun.tumblr.com/ http://www.friday.com/bbum : Coding, hardware projects, generally interesting. http://bestyoucanbe.blogspot.com/ : Insights into the education system in regard to the raising of his neurologically non-typical son. http://blog.lmorchard.com http://ex-muslim.org.uk : Oppression of atheists in the Muslim world. http://clojurefun.wordpress.com : Clojure! http://scientopia.org/blogs/goodmath : Bad science, denialism. http://blog.willbenton.com : Music, logic, programming, etc. http://www.groklaw.net : Maybe not "small"; detailed analysis of important legal cases. http://hicksdesign.co.uk/journal : Web design. http://www.holovaty.com/ : "I'm co-creator and co-Benevolent Dictator For Life of the open-source Django Web framework" http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones : Combines talented photography, photoessays, and study of the retina. http://lee-phillips.org : I regularly check my site to see if it's still working. http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca : Language issues; can be amusing or stupid. http://freethoughtblogs.com/maryamnamazie : Freedom for women in the Muslim world. http://math-blog.com : Infrequently updated, but often…

Thank you for citing your claims. Now I am not familiar with the particulars of the alleged manipulations by GISS in Australia, but I would note a few things. One, the analysis in your citation was missing any sort of error analysis, and so it is impossible to formulate a statistical hypothesis test of the claimed manipulations. Being a personal blog, I wouldn't expect more, but without that sort of detailed statistical analysis, the claims have very little weight to them. Second, climate change is not my area of scientific expertise, and so if there are errors in his analysis, I am not likely to notice them; thus, I refer you to a group of people who have expertise in this area: http://www.realclimate.org/. Third, even if the alleged claims are true, they are far from showing a systemic error in all climate data. Our understanding of climate change is far broader than GISS's efforts, even though they are important in that understanding. In any field of study, there will be errors and failures of the review process, and so to conclude anything about the validity of climate data as a whole would require some sort of evidence that the alleged manipulations are occurring on a large scale and across organizations. This has not been provided, and thus your earlier assertions are still not backed up by evidence. On the issues of the the Hockey Stick, the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, there is decidedly more to say that has been said by people much smarter than I.…

"This article was not particularly insightful - it contained lots of classic proof by assertion. It doesn't treat seriously any of the valid criticisms of the current thought and research processes on global warming. That said, I'm not going to flag it because I think it deserves some thought and rebutting." It's not really an article about climate change. Ben Goldacre's field is more to do with the public perception of science. In that light, making the assumption that the "scientists in charge" are correct isn't invalid, although he would have done well to point it out as an explicit assumption. However, I would note that your concerns have largely been addressed, both in his article and in the general field. "First, if it's really happening to an extent as to require severe urgency, you ought to be able to say things like this: The current average temperatures and standard deviations of temperatures in these 50 regions are X and Y. We expect the temperatures to rise by A over this period of time in at least 35 of these regions, and the standard deviation to increase by B. If this does not happen over the next five years, that creates serious doubt in our claims and methodologies." This has been done, in several ways. A prediction has been made that, if we limit our total CO2 emissions to (from memory) 650GT between now and 2050, the anthropogenic portion of global warming will be limited to 2 degrees. This is falsifiable. Predictions of sea-level rise over the shorter…

Some additional useful context from RealClimate: https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2023/07/what-is-happeni…

> Can you cite any accurate prediction about 2023 made by climate alarmists in the 1980s? https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1988/1988_Hansen_ha02700w.pdf Feel free to superimpose today's data[1] on Figure 3 from the above report. Link to the CSV file is here [2] to save you some time with the analysis. Some discussion here [3] (2007). Seems to me that if you compare against the most recent data, scenario B ("the most plausible" of 3 scenarios) is pretty close to dead-on. [1] https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v4/graph_data/Global_Mean_Es… [2] https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v4/ [3] https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/05/hansens-1988-pr…

The realclimate.org graph (https://www.realclimate.org/images/Hansen88_forc.jpg) shows B as off the chart by 2020, but 1988 is around .2 and 2015 is around 1.45. Extending another 5 years, should be about 1.45 deg C difference by 2020. The NASA chart shows a rise of about .7 during that time.