So, in honor of the worldwide marches yesterday, I give you a few of my weekend reading on Climate Change.
First, a WaPo editorial urging action:
A climate for change: America should not wait while the world warms
FOR MORE than a century, scientists have understood the basic physics of the greenhouse effect. For decades, they’ve realized humans can affect the climate by burning coal, oil and gas. But the country’s leaders remain divided on the need to curb greenhouse emissions, let alone how to do it.
Among mainstream scientists, this paralysis is mind-boggling.
Jump!
I mean, even the Pentagon recognizes the urgency:
Weather Warriors: Meet the Pentagon’s Combat Climatologists
“Is climate change accelerating? Absolutely,” said Ray Keiss, the lead scientist of the 14th Weather Squadron. “The extremes in this era are significantly being changed year in, year out.”
The 14th is the Pentagon’s oldest office of climatology, a go-to for all manner of atmospheric readings. It collects more than a million weather observations a day, the bulk of the planet’s most-downloaded set of surface data. Both the National Climate Assessment and the International Panel on Climate Change have used it in recent reports, noting the increasingly dire effects of global warming.
And lastly, the deniers can suck it:
Eight Pseudoscientific Climate Claims Debunked by Real Scientists
Most people who deny that human activity is warming the planet just dismiss a massive body of scientific evidence as a big hoax.
But there’s a more sophisticated set of climate “skeptics” who make arguments that, at least to the lay ear, sound like they’re grounded in scientific evidence. And because most of us lack the background to evaluate their claims, they can muddy the waters around an issue that’s been settled in the scientific community.
So, as a public service, we gathered eight of the most common of these pseudoscientific arguments and asked some serious climate scientists – all working climatologists who have been widely published – to help us understand what makes these claims so misleading.
So how you doin’? 😀