Cross Indexing Brainstorm

Development of the How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic guide is about to resume. I think I have so far covered most of the low hanging fruit that is out there, but there are clearly alot of arguments still to make against the swarm of objections still swirling, some silly but necessary, some a bit more sophisticated and indeed some with merit.

One thing stopping me at the moment is a concern that it is already a bit cumbersome to quickly find the needed rebuttal of the moment.

I like the "Guides by Category" well enough, but it is divided up too coarsely. There are also perhaps better ways to categorize things. But rather than trying to find the "best" way to subdivide topics I want to present as many different ways as feasible to chop it all up and let people chose their preference, perhaps using a different one depending on the target argument.

So this is a call for help. What works for you? How would you divide things up? Below are the categories and subcategories I have come up with so far so you can see what I mean.

Stages of Denial

• We Don't Understand Climate
  
  • Prediction is Impossible
  • Climate is Chaotic
  • We Lack Certainty
  • There is no Consensus
• The Climate Isn't Changing
  
  • There is Contradictory Evidence
  • There is Insufficient Evidence
• Climate Change is Not Our Fault
  
  • CO2 is Not the Cause
  • It Has Happened Before
  • It's a Natural Change
• Climate Change is Not Harmful
  
  • The Effects are Minor
  • The Effects Are Good
  • Change is Natural
• Climate Change Can't Be Stopped
  
  • It's Too Late Now
  • It's Someone Else's Problem
  • It is Economically Infeasible

Scientific Topics

• Atmosphere
• Oceans
• Temperature Change
• Modeling
  • Uncertainties
  • Scenarios
• Extreme Events
  • Hurricanes
  • Temperature Records
  • Droughts
• Climate Forcings
  • Solar Influences
  • Greehouse Gases
  • Aerosols
• Paleoclimate
  
  • Holocene
  • Ice Ages
  • Geologic History
• Cryosphere
  
  • Ice Sheets
  • Sea Ice
  • Glaciers
  • Permafrost

Argument Types

• Uniformed
• Misinformed
• Political
• Economic
• FUD
• Dodges
• Underdog Theories
• Crackpottery
• Strawmen
• Cherry Picking

Levels of Sophistication

• Silly
• Naive
• Specious
• Technical

Argument Users

• CO2 Science
• Junk Science
• John-Daly
• Warwick Hughes
• Bob Carter
• Patrick Michaels
• Michael Crichton
• Richard Lindzen
• Steve Milloy

What is missing?

New Global Change Discussion Group

As I mention in the introduction to the How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic guide, I cut my teeth in the climate change debate on sci.environment and alt.global-warming. Sadly, since I arrived there in around 11/04 the signal to noise ration has dropped dramatically and the cross posting to political groups and groups with rush limbaugh in their names are a constant stream. Consequently, the number of well informed active participants has dropped.

Michael Tobis has taken some initiative in creating an alternate venue to save the baby while still chucking the bathwater. Here is the announcement in full, I hope it becomes a very active discussion venue.

ANNOUNCING MODERATED GLOBAL CHANGE DISCUSSION FORUM

• globalchange.googlegroups.com

We are creating a moderated newsgroup/mailing list for the discussionof environmental science, economics, policy and politics, especially as related to global change issues such as climate change, biodiversity,and sustainability.

The signal to noise ratio on sci.environment and similar unmoderated discussion lists has dropped to the point where it can no longer sustain interesting or informative exchanges of information and ideas.

The success of the lightly moderated discussions on the realclimate.org blog has revealed that the hunger for serious and informed discussion remains. However, blogs do not fully replicate the broad-ranging conversational style that usenet once supported even in controversy-prone areas of interest.

Fortunately, new tools allow us to recapture most of the usenet experience without going through the tedious and archaic process of setting up a "big-eight" newsgroup.

It is difficult to specify what "fair" or "unfair" moderation meanswithout getting tediously legalistic. To avoid endless haggling aboutthis, we formulate our policy thus:

• Posts will be admitted to the list if and only if ANY moderator finds the submission to be constructive and/or interesting, on topic, and not gratuitously rude.

We are not unanimous in our opinions, and are open to submissions from people outside the spectrum of opinion represented by the moderators.

We will endeavor to remove obvious provocations ("trolls"). We also discourage postings that are redundant, in the sense that the poster has already made their points and does not seem to take account of the responses but is merely insistently reasserting points previously made.

Whether, as a consequence of this policy, you find the list useful and interesting or otherwise is left to yourself. If you don't like our list, by all means make your own.

==== HOW TO PARTICIPATE ====

I. WEB INTERFACE

Probably the easiest way to participate is to point your browser to

• http://groups.google.com/group/globalchange/

and you can read the messages immediately. You may send submissions through the web interface, or by email to

• globalchange@googlegroups.com

Using the interface in this way does not require you to get a Google login.

"Membership" is encouraged, as it permits us to give individual participants an overall approval, reducing propagation delays and the workload of the moderators. Membership does not automatically implye mail delivery of messages. Non-members may also post but all their messages require moderation.

II. RSS FEED

It is also possible to subscribe to the newsgroup as an RSS feed. See

• http://groups.google.com/group/globalchange/feeds

for more information

III. NNTP FEED

We are in the process of setting up an NNTP feed through gmane. When it is available we will offer futher information.

IV. MAILING LIST

You can subscribe to globalchange as a mailing list, but you have to use the web to sign up. Go to

• http://groups.google.com/group/globalchange/

and click "join this group" and follow instructions. To use this approach you will need to have or set up a free google login.

If you subscribe to the email, you need not ever use the web interface or your google account again. You may send submissions by email to globalchange@googlegroups.com

PLEASE PARTICIPATE!

Looking forward to reviving the historically interesting and productive usenet-style conversations on environmental matters, we are, sincerely, your globalchange moderators:

• James Annan
• Raymond Arritt
• Coby Beck
• William Connolley
• Michael Tobis

A Good Sea Level Rise Mapping Tool

(Be sure to check out the How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic guide)

Thanks to a commenter here, Sam on this thread, I had a look at another one of those google map-sea level rise tools. This one seems quite straightforward to use and can show you anything from 0 to 14 metres.

The executive summary of the chapter on sea level in the last IPCC report had this to say:

For the 35 SRES scenarios, we project a sea level rise of 0.09 to 0.88 m for 1990 to 2100, with a central value of 0.48 m.

There have been a number of recent findings about Greenland melt and Antarctic mass balance changes, so these figures may well be revised upwards.

It is very worth remembering that the year 2100 is not the end of time and ice sheets are one of the slower components of the climate system to respond to warming. We may be soon reaching a warming point that commits the world to many metres of rise. During the Eemian interglacial some 125K years ago, temperatures were 2 or 3 degrees higher and sea levels were 4 to 7 metres higher. There has been talk of irreversible desintegration beginning in the Greenland Icesheet and this mass alone represents 6 or 7 metres of sea level equivalent, but how long that will take is not clear (likely measured in centuries).

All that to say that 14m is not the map to generate if you are trying to guess beachfront property to leave your grandchildren, but it may be a plausible science fiction scenario for AD 2400+.

Guides, by Category

Active Threads

I have not yet found a way to get a real listing of recent comments, so thought I would ust post this because there are a couple of active threads from old posts.

http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/02/kyoto-is-ineffective.html
http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/02/action-on-global-warming-is-suicide.html

The economic ones are my least competent subects, maybe others can contribute better material...

[Update]
see here
http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/02/whats-wrong-with-warm-weather.html
and here as well
http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/01/climate-is-always-changing.html

Consensus or Collusion?

(Part of the How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic guide)

This article has moved to ScienceBlogs

It has also been updated and this page is still here only to preserve the original comment thread. Please visit A Few Things Ill Considered there. You may also like to view Painting With Water, Coby Beck's original fine art photography.

Finally, Proof Positive!

(Part of the How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic guide)

Objection:
There is no proof of global warming.

There are other takes to this objection, but this seems worth its own post!

Answer:
Climate Science has thus far proved unable to pull the woolies over the eyes of the public. Time after time, the meager offerings of globally averaged temperature trends, vanishing arctic sea ice, shrinking glaciers, melting ice sheets, earlier springs, satellite analyses of upper tropospheric temperatures and a comprehensive theory supported by the massive computational power of sophisticated computer models have been dismissed, denied and rebutted one by one.

But no more! At last the real smoking gun has been found, the definitive trend has, er.. revealed itself. Was it NASA that found the proof? Or NOAA? Will you see it in the IPCC AR4? No. From the Climate Research Institute of Victoria's Secret (hey, why shouldn't they get in on all that grant money?) comes proof positive of a sustained and rapid Global Warming trend:

ExxonMobil, eat my shorts!

Other Guides, by Category

Antarctic Sea Ice Is Increasing

(Part of the How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic guide)

This article has moved to ScienceBlogs

It has also been updated and this page is still here only to preserve the original comment thread. Please visit A Few Things Ill Considered there. You may also like to view Painting With Water, Coby Beck's original fine art photography.

There is No Evidence

(Part of the How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic guide)

This article has moved to ScienceBlogs

It has also been updated and this page is still here only to preserve the original comment thread. Please visit A Few Things Ill Considered there. You may also like to view Painting With Water, Coby Beck's original fine art photography.

Aerosols Should Mean More Warming in the South

(Part of the How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic guide)

This article has moved to ScienceBlogs

It has also been updated and this page is still here only to preserve the original comment thread. Please visit A Few Things Ill Considered there. You may also like to view Painting With Water, Coby Beck's original fine art photography.