Posts Tagged ‘Climate Denial’
Unlocking the Conspiracy Mind-Set
Friday, 22 February 2013 12:00
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Stephan Lewandowsky

Justin Gillis tries to unscramble the conspiracy culture surrounding climate change for the New York Times:

When I first met the NASA climate researcher Gavin Schmidt a few years ago, we discussed the proliferation of material on the Internet attacking mainstream climate science. I asked him whether he thought climate contrarians were flirting with conspiracy theory in their views.

(Read more…)

“Flirting?” he said. “No. They’ve already had conspiracy theory out on a hot date, and now it’s the morning after and they’re sitting up in bed, having coffee.”

I happened to recall that conversation the other day as I read the latest chapter of a remarkable back-and-forth between mainstream researchers and climate contrarians.

It all started last year, when a social scientist named Stephan Lewandowsky, of the University of Western Australia, and two colleagues published a rather provocative paper. It was based on an anonymous Internet survey of the readers of climate blogs.

The title alone will give you a sense of the findings: “NASA Faked the Moon Landings – Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax.” The subtitle was “An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science.”

The strongest finding in the survey was that ideological belief in an unregulated free market tended to be a predictor of someone’s willingness to reject the findings of mainstream climate research. No great surprise there. It was the secondary findings that set off a brouhaha…

[continues in the New York Times]

 
Climate Foes Dispute UN Report On Sun’s Role In Global Warming
Sunday, 03 February 2013 09:03
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The sun1Trust Fox News to be in the lead on showcasing climate skeptics delight at a leaked report from the United Nations suggesting that the Sun may be a larger factor in global warming than most scientists have admitted to date:

The Earth has been getting warmer — but how much of that heat is due to greenhouse gas emissions and how much is due to natural causes?

A leaked report by a United Nations’ group dedicated to climate studies says that heat from the sun may play a larger role than previously thought.

(Read more…)

“[Results] do suggest the possibility of a much larger impact of solar variations on the stratosphere than previously thought, and some studies have suggested that this may lead to significant regional impacts on climate,” reads a draft copy of a major, upcoming report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The man who leaked the report, StopGreenSuicide blogger Alec Rawls, told FoxNews.com that the U.N.’s statements on solar activity were his main motivation for leaking the document.

“The public needs to know now how the main premises and conclusions of the IPCC story line have been undercut by the IPCC itself,” Rawls wrote on his website in December, when he first leaked the report.

Rawls blames the U.N. for burying its point about the effect of the sun in Chapter 11 of the report.

“Even after the IPCC acknowledges extensive evidence for … solar forcing beyond what they included in their models, they still make no attempt to account for this omission in their predictions. … It’s insane,” he told FoxNews.com.

Some skeptical climatologists say that the statement in the U.N. draft report is important, but not game-changing.

“The solar component is real but not of sufficient magnitude to have driven most of the warming of the late 20th century,” Pat Michaels, the former president of the American Association of State Climatologists, and current director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute, told FoxNews.com…

[continues at Fox News]

 
The Climate Change Denier Who Became The Voice Of Hurricane Sandy On Wikipedia
Sunday, 04 November 2012 11:00
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We all rely far too much on Wikipedia without questioning the veracity of the source. As a reminder of the fallibility of the user-generated entries, Dan Nosowitz exposes the climate change denier Ken Mampel at PopSci:

“All I am is a contributor. I have no title, I’m just a Joe Blow,” says Ken Mampel, a currently unemployed 56-year-old living in Ormond Beach, Florida. He’s also largely responsible for the Wikipedia article about Hurricane Sandy. (Read more…) If it isn’t already, that article will eventually become the single most-viewed document about the hurricane. On the entire internet.

In an unpaid but frenzied fit of news consumption, editing, correction, aggregation, and citation, Mampel has established himself as by far the most active contributor to the Wikipedia page on Hurricane Sandy, with more than twice the number of edits as the next-most-active contributor at the time this article was written.

And Mampel made sure that the Hurricane Sandy article, for four days after the hurricane made landfall in New Jersey, had no mention of “global warming” or “climate change” whatsoever.

 * * *

Late in the evening of November 1st, a new section appeared at the bottom of the Wikipedia page, titled “Connection to global warming.” It was the first mention of climate change the article had had, and laid out the response from climate scientists, mostly stating that climate scientists don’t really know if the hurricane was caused in part or whole by climate change. I emailed Ken, who goes by the name Kennvido on Wikipedia, to get a response, and he wrote back: “thanks deleted again and told them to go discuss Sandy on the global warming page.” I reloaded the page and confirmed: Ken had eliminated any discussion of climate change. A few minutes later, I reloaded and the section was back, only with a big block warning, telling me that “The neutrality of this article is disputed.” By 10:23, that warning read: “An editor has expressed a concern that this Section lends undue weight to certain ideas, incidents, controversies or matters relative to the article subject as a whole. Please help to create a more balanced presentation.”

By the morning of November 2nd, the section was gone again. The revision history shows an argument: “the existence of other views is solved by referencing them in RS, not deleting views one disagrees with,” says one contributor. Mampel continues to fight, and he’s not the only one: another user chimed in that the Hurricane Sandy page is “Not the place to push global warming when no evidence exists that this was a cause.” But by early afternoon, the article had a small paragraph in the “Meteorological history” section linking to a few articles that suggest a connection to global warming. Ken had been overruled…

[continues at PopSci]