26 Common Climate Myths Debunked

holy_calamity writes to mention that New Scientist is revealing the truth behind the '26 most common climate myths' used to muddy the waters in this ongoing heated debate. "Our planet's climate is anything but simple. All kinds of factors influence it, from massive events on the Sun to the growth of microscopic creatures in the oceans, and there are subtle interactions between many of these factors. Yet despite all the complexities, a firm and ever-growing body of evidence points to a clear picture: the world is warming, this warming is due to human activity increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and if emissions continue unabated the warming will too, with increasingly serious consequences."

thickest strongest ice in 30 years

[boxlight]

Eastern Canada is currently experiencing its thickest strongest ice in 30 years [www.ctv.ca]. Coast Guard officials I've spoken with say the ice severity follows a 30 year cycle and current conditions are the same as in the 1970s.

WTF

[ArcherB]

Funny. I see this in TFA

Myth: Many leading scientists question climate change

.Then I find this [senate.gov] article.

Also, in TFA, I see this:

Myth: Polar bear numbers are increasing

Then I see this. [csmonitor.com]

So, other than the standard response of "Global warming deniers are liars", can anyone tell me, why the discrepancy? It seems to me that TFA is as much a myth as the 26 myths it points to.

Shaking My Head

[moehoward]

That was sure a balanced report. Pfffffft.

It was nothing more than talking points. Crap like this is just plain dangerous. These "How to Respond to Your Critics" pieces just show how frickin' politicized this issue has become. It is more important to win the argument than to be right.

There are so many holes in just the five that I read. Incomplete. Knee-jerk. Very frustrating to say the least.

I see a strong bias here

[Sciros]

Having looked at the Firehose for some time now, I find it amusing that same-old, same-old (read: non-newsworthy) articles like this appear on the main page so quickly, whereas all articles that present a dissenting conclusion never get here in the first place. I doubt the "votes" have much of anything to do with that.

Slashdot editors please give both sides a fair chance here; this isn't science vs. religion; it's [supposedly] science vs. science and people should be promoting that.

Re:Scores high on the FUD-o-meter

[spun]

You just don't want to believe in global warming because you want to think of yourself as a good, responsible person, but you don't want to change your lifestyle. You were already convinced of your point before you started to read the article, and as soon as you found one point that you could attempt to refute, you stopped reading.

The fact is that they are saying that the Earth's weather, as opposed to climate, is a chaotic system. It's like boiling water, which is a chaotic system. When it comes to predicting where a bubble will form or burst, it's impossible. But predicting that adding more heat will make bubbles form more quickly is simple.

Re:Vote with your money

[gEvil (beta)]

So what do we buy if we want to kill babies?

I saw a hot deal on the Bay-B Shred-O-Matic the other day...

Troubling lack of snow

[Scrameustache]

Eastern Canada is currently experiencing its thickest strongest ice in 30 years [www.ctv.ca]. Coast Guard officials I've spoken with say the ice severity follows a 30 year cycle and current conditions are the same as in the 1970s.

The former capital of Canada, Québec city, experienced its first non-white xmas, ever, in 2006.

Re:WTF

[radtea]

It seems to me that TFA is as much a myth as the 26 myths it points to.

Whether or not it is a myth, it is extremely curious. The first "myth" is that "human CO2 emissions are too small to matter", and the text goes on to talk about the amount of CO2 being put into the atmosphere, not its effect on the heat budget of the Earth. This is odd, because the effect on the heat budget of the Earth (independent of any feedbacks) must be well-known, and that is the only figure that is relevant.

It is always bad engineering and bad policy-making practice to drive action based on INPUTs rather than OUTPUTs. The idiots ultimately responsible for Three Mile Island were the engineers who decided that the current running to a valve actuator could be used to measure the state of the actuator, forgetting that sometimes valves jam and so the inputs have nothing to do with the outputs.

In the present case, I don't care how many tonnes of CO2 humans are putting into the atmosphere, and neither does anyone else. I care how many W/m**2 they are adding to the Earth's energy budget. Until we start discussing that figure, we are not talking about climate change at all.

Part of the problem with this issue is that neither side is very honest. Climate change deniers start by denying the brutally obvious fact that the level of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased dramatically in the past century. This is an empirical measurement that only a lunatic would dispute. Having thus destroyed their credibility, they go on to make some interesting and valid points. On the other side of the issue, climate change proponents spend an awful lot of time focusing on INPUT measurements, which doesn't do their credibility any good either, while at the same time doing all kinds of excellent science.

If we could focus on the EFFECT of increased CO2 on the Earth's energy budget we might learn something important because CO2 forcing is global and well-mixed in the atmosphere, and so can be compared to other global forcings like insolation varation.

It's a curious thing that a simple figure like W/m**2/ppm is not universally available and serving as the basis for all these discussions, because if it was, at least both sides would be talking about the same thing, and it would be the thing that matters.
 

Re:FUD

[Rei]

Quite to the contrary of the GP's assertion, climate has caused catastrophically large extinction events [wikipedia.org] in the past. Thankfully, climate doesn't swing wildly very often on it's own.

Also, notice that it's not, say, a high temperature or high CO2 levels that are bad. It's the *rapid change* that is bad, and as far as rate of change, this current one is only really bested by asteroid/comet impacts and supervolcanism. A disturbing example of this is the "Great Dying" (the Permian-Triassic event), largely brought about by Earth's largest known volcanic event (the eruption of the "Siberian Traps"), which doubled Earth's CO2 levels, created acid rain, and all sorts of other effects that mimic Man's impact on the modern world (the other major theory also involves global warming, but from methane unleashed by the traps instead of CO2; either way, the warming aspect is generally uncontested, as the evidence is so strong). Over a million or so years (most concentrated in a few hundred thousand), the vast majority of multicellular life died as ecosystems were thrown out of balance, and hundreds of millions of years of evolution were undone. For a while after this eruption, the dominant species on the planet were fungi -- decomposers. Slowly eating all of the dead.

wikipedia is the same

[Shivetya]

try and post facts other than those supported by group think in relation to global warming and it will get editted out.

Example, the section about glaciers retreating has its own page, go make one showing all the growing glaciers and watch it vanish. I seriously do not believe them anymore when the say pages don't vanish. Its even more fun when your id goes missing too.

There is no place for intelligent discussion on global warming anymore. Too many of the people running sites have already decided and its evident in the stories that get posted and the comments that get nuked, stripped, or otherwise put into oblivion.

any scientist who supports something other than man made global warming gets labeled as an industry lackey whereas the obvious government we need continued funding lackeys get respect second to God.

The only science I trust now is that dealing with space. Too much of science about earth and mans effect is polluted by political ideaology.

Re:FUD

[Burnhard]

This argument is insane. I live in East Anglia (United Kingdom). 10,000 years ago it stretched right across to Europe. The north sea didn't exist. Mammoth roamed where the channel is today. Sea level has risen 300 feet since then and you are concerned about a rise of 1 or 2 meters over 100 years? Let me ask you a question: would you prefer global temperatures increased or decreased? They sure as hell aren't going to remain the same and you have no idea whether or not the current climate and temperatures are optimal for supporting anything, from Orange tree frogs to Mum and Dad. Your whole argument is predicated on the fact that we can actually keep global climate as it is today. I'm in dispair at the irrationality of the whole ridiculous argument.

Re:Vote with your money

[Anonymous Coward]

Good one. It's funny to listen to a hundred scientists argue about this issue with so much more certainty and passion than scientists like me have. I'm not going to touch the issue, other than to lament the way that it has become politicized to the extent that random people buy ridiculous individual arguments and defend a position that has no scientific support.

What I really wanted to point out, though, was that "organic" products are actually a major problem to the "let's emit less CO2 and remove more" strategy. "Organic" crops take up more that twice as much land area per unit output, which has led to huge sections of rainforest cleared out to allow for more land-hungry organic food production. Organic food was never meant to be a pro-environmental movement. When the labeling was first conceived, the idea was to imply that the food was healthier because it contained bugs instead of poisons. The idea that pesticides would then be less prevalent in water supplies became tied to it, with good reason. But then from that pro-environmental argument, people got the idea that organic food must be good for the environment in every way. It's certainly not. Organic food is an important cause of deforestation in Central America, both directly (organic food grown there) and indirectly (increased organic production in the United States means lower overall agricultural output, which then increases the demand for agriculture in Central America). Organic food in some cases may be better for your health. In some ways, it's better for the environment. However, it's a big problem for the environment in other ways, so you'll have to make an educated choice.

Okay, one more thing. "Does 1 person make a real difference? Hell no" is one of the stupidest things I've ever seen posted on /.

Re:I wish there was another point...

[duranaki]

Just a side note... CO2 isn't dirty, and is typically named public enemy #1 of "greenhouse gases". If all our cars and combustion based power planets burned friendly carbs at 100% efficiency they'd still spit out lots of H2O and CO2. We'd have no smog, you'd breathe freely even on hot days, and the world would still get warmer (or at least the majority of scientist would predict it).

I'm not trying to agitate, just hear this "CO2 is pollution" argument too often. But whatever shuts your neighbor up... :)

Re:FUD

[Gerzel]

"Just believe in ID, it has more prove that the stuff you pull out."

Oh really? Care to site sources for this proof?

Most of the so-called "proof" for Intelligent Design rests on claims that the probability of life coming about as it did is so low that some mind has to be behind it. However, if the universe is one big roll of the dice than every possibility is equally likely, and thus while any one particular possibility can occur by chance w/o the help of God.

Furthermore, the ID supporters assume that there was only a single chance for life to occur in the universe. From what we have seen from studying the universe and space exploration this is probably far from the case. Mars, Venus, and several moons in our solar system may all have at one time or in some cases may still support microbial life. A single chance in a million will probably not yield much, but a billion runs at a one in a million shot should give several successes. There are billions upon billions of stars. We have already seen several with planets.

All that said. I do believe that there is a higher order to the universe, but simply putting things as "God did it" is both a disservice to mankind and a thoughtless disrespect for any such God who I am pretty well sure put us on this earth for more than just kissing up to him.

Re:FUD

[Holmwood]

And rising CO2 levels means higher plant growth. Yes, TFA notes concerns with water supply and ground level air pollution, but the former is partly independent, and the latter is independent of global warming (i.e. one can have cleaner air and rising (or falling) CO2.

As for the posts below which respond with "yes, warmer in the age of the dinosaurs", well, there's a reason why Greenland was named Greenland. It was green, merely a few centuries ago.

On the whole, that set of articles actually makes a decent case (for me) that global warming will be beneficial for wealthy northern regions with plenty of fresh water and limited exposure to rising water levels. (Canada, Greenland, Scandinavia in particular. Russia ... maybe, with oil money to adapt crops). The US South, including Texas (irony of ironies) maybe not so much.

No, even assuming their arguments and that conclusion (above) is correct, I don't suggest that we therefore ignore global warming if we live in one such region. We're one world after all. But I do find it ironic that the countries that may actually benefit from such changes are amongst the most concerned about the problem, while regions that could suffer serious harm seem to be far less concerned.

Watch 'An Incovenient Truth'. Seriously.

[joggle]

There are several predictions by the global warming theory that would have a very severe, immediate impact on humans as well as other species. Even if they are wrong on most things, if they are correct on any one of these items the consequences would be very serious and irreversible (at least not reversible in any short amount of time).

Several key, non-controversial observations of the world we are living in:

• The glaciers of the world are disappearing. Based on photographic evidence from 100 years ago or less the world's glaciers were much larger than they are now.
• The level of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased rapidly over the last several decades (really longer than this but the amount of CO2 prior to this may be disputed by a few people).
• The tundra is thawing in Alaska as well as other locations.
• The ice sheet over Greenland and Antarctica is melting.
• Several large lakes in Africa and Asia have disappeared over the last few decades. Some were directly related to over irrigation but not all of them.

The list could go on. Now for the potential consequences:

• Severe local climate changes. This is already happening in several places, such as the Alps where they had one of the warmest winters ever recorded. Other areas are getting worse floods than they have ever experienced while very sever droughts occur elsewhere (such as in Africa).
• If the thawing of the tundra continues a large amount of methane frozen in the soil in Russia could be released very quickly, doubling the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
• A large amount of Greenland's or Antarctica's ice sheet could be released into the ocean. Just recently a very large amount of ice (larger than Rode Island) fell into the sea from Antarctica in less than 6 weeks. Ocean levels would rise (but what amount is debated but they will definitely rise). It's possible that the Gulf Stream would stop due to a sudden decrease in salinity if Greenland's ice were to quickly dip into the ocean.

So, why should we risk these severe consequences? We have the technology and resources to significantly dampen the rate at which greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere. Oil companies certainly have the resources to help out in this regard (considering they made billions in pure profit last year alone). Frankly, I think it is the height of irresponsibility to just keep going along and doing nothing until some catastrophic event occurs.

The motivation for most, if not all, of the prominent critics is quite clear. They are almost always funded directly or indirectly by oil companies. Some executives go so far as to describe the benefits of global warming while simultaneously claiming humans aren't the primary cause of the current trend.

What motivation would all of these scientists have to deceive everyone? You could say they wouldn't get research grants if they were to try to publish reports that countered the global-warming theory. But how did it get to this point? Global warming wasn't commonly believed until relatively recently (only the last couple of decades). Meaning that scientists changed their minds. In whose interests would it have been to change these scientists' minds? How could they have convinced them without sound scientific data? The great majority of climate scientists are payed by public funds and aren't easily fired so there really is not an incentive for them to knowingly lie to or deceive their peers.

So I repeat: watch 'An Inconvenient Truth'. Just because you don't like the messenger doesn't mean he's wrong. And if you doubt Al Gore's intentions consider that his professor in college was one of the original proponents of global warming and Gore has been pressing this issue for decades. What would motivate him to do this if he didn't honestly believe in it?

Re:FUD

[h2_plus_O]

Who are the scientists that say we need more study before taking action?

Who said anything about needing more study before taking action? The parent simply disagrees with the assertion that the case is closed, which is not the same thing as saying action should be postponed.

This is a reasonable position to take, given the ongoing inquiry nature of science itself. Sure, there's a consensus, but it's all still theory and there's still a lot of good science to be done on this one. ...and oh yeah, you don't have to believe the consensus to align on the notion that we should do something about that polluting we've been up to, which seems to be the whole reason everybody's up in arms trying to convince us that we are the primary cause of global warming.

We should take action *and* do more study- and we should do our best to make irrelevant the folks who want to dogmatize science.

Re:FUD

[baboo_jackal]

This is exactly what I don't like about this debate:

The evidence becomes sparser the further back we look, and its interpretation often involves a set of assumptions. In other words, a fair amount of guesswork... The point is that historical anecdotes about the past climate, such as the claim that Greenland used to be green, or that Newfoundland (Vinland) was full of grapes, have to be treated with caution.

So, claims that the planet has been warmer in the past can't be justified using temperature reconstructions or local phenomena.

What is clear, both from the temperature reconstructions and from independent evidence - such as the extent of the recent melting of mountain glaciers - is that the planet has been warmer in the past few decades than at any time during the medieval period.

Yet, somehow the same "guesswork"-ey temperature reconstructions and local phenomena *can* be used as evidence to support claims that the planet *hasn't* been warmer in the past.

Here's my issue: I'm not sure of the extent of our part in that warming, but I think we ought to minimize our negative impact as much as possible. But the polarized rhetoric about all of this is obfuscating the real, candid debate we ought to be having. You can't claim that it's a fact that we are causing a catastrophic warming trend that will kill billions based on what we know now. But you also can't claim that there's nothing to worry about, either!

The only way we're going to ever have a productive conversation about this is if we can get past the politics and posturing and admit the shortcomings of our knowledge, but at the same time, acknowledge that we can't ignore the issue.

Re:Yes, temperatures have changed and will change

[Burnhard]

So what if it is faster today than it was 1,000 years ago? Is it caused by Carbon? Road building? Agriculture? Deforestation? Cows farting? The Sun? Cloud Formation? Microbes? Natural Cycles? All of the above? None of the above? Some of the above? What? Its all guesswork based on inaccurate models that have no verifiable predictive power. How can you justify spending 1/4 trillion dollars per year fiddling with a variable when you have no idea if it's the right one or how it interacts with the other variables? And what about Global Cooling, the Ozone Layer, Asteroid Impact, Y2K, Avian Flu - too many media scares crying wolf and demanding action when the reality as we all know is probably completely benign.

Re:thickest strongest ice in 30 years

[jfengel]

I find that there are at least two different things driving doubters. One is, fundamentally, money. Fixing global warming is going to cost somebody a lot of money. I know that there are various claims that it can be done on the cheap or even have an economic advantage, but it seems pretty simple on the surface that if you hold yourself to rules and somebody else doesn't, they're going to beat you economically, at least in the short term. If there's any doubt that humans cause global warming, or that humans could fix global warming, or that things would get better if we did fix global warming, then it's very much in their best interest to make sure those doubts are heard.

But a lot of people haven't analyzed it out that far. For them, it's reason #2, a kind of herd instinct. I don't single out global-warming doubters for that. Quite the contrary: very few global-warming believers are actually in a position to make the claim directly. There are a few thousand scientists with direct knowledge of the problem; everybody else is just taking their word for it. Instead, they believe because it sounds reasonable to them, and they believe it because it reinforces their ideology.

That's what it all comes down to: a collection of liberal causes all back each other up and believe global warming. A collection of conservative causes all back each other up and doubt it. These causes are unrelated on the surface; there's no reason to find a correlation between global warming skepticism, opposition to gun control, demand for reduced government (and reduced taxes), more influence of religion, etc. except the underlying ideology.

That's where your "self-hood" comes to be at stake. If global warming is real, and human caused, etc. then an entire conservative philosophy is at risk. And the converse. If anything more so: a large class of global warming believer is only to happy to believe that this will force large corporations like car and oil companies to shut down, and it's just really really nice that the actual evidence happens to agree with them.

The lines of ideology aren't absolute. Some conservatives are starting to find that the evidence is too strong for global warming, and other aspects of their ideology start to kick in. For example, evangelicals believe that allowing the earth to warm is a failure of our custodianship of the planet.

Did you guys really read TFA?

[Radical Moderate]

Yes, some scientists in the 70s claimed that we were entering a cooling stage, but his point is that it was only a handful of scientists and the media took it and ran with it. Once the data was investigated further the scientists backed off. I was just a little shaver then and I remember the hype, but I can't say if the whole scientific community was behind it or if it was just a few mavericks. And judging from your posts, neither can you.

Re:FUD

[Draconix]

Overall global warming could disrupt the oceanic currents, and actually make it _colder_ in Iceland and Europe. The reason Europe is temperate is because of oceanic currents bringing warm water to its shores. If those were to change too much, the climate in Europe could become like the climate in northern Canada.

Re:Or...

[PigIronBob]

Rubbish, apply the inverse square law to the temperature increases for both Earth and Mars and it becomes obvious that the 2 are totally unrelated.

Re:How about some actual data?

[Ambitwistor]

What is sorely lacking from the global warming debate is actual complete numeric data specifically how much an increase in CO2 will affect the global temperature. I looked at the ICCC report and there are basically a whole bunch of wild assed guesses as to how much it will affect temperature based on simulated models of the climate. The values range all over the place.

Just because the values are not certain, or are based on climate models, does not mean they are "wild assed guesses".

The warming of CO2 is actually relatively well established; what is uncertain is how much it is amplified by feedbacks.

We're talking increasing the CO2 concentrations by a few hundredths of a percentage point as a percentage of the mass of the atmosphere over the next century.

What matters is the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations, as weighted by each gas's warming potential, not the total amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. CO2 is a major greenhouse gas (although not the strongest), and it may more than double over the next century.

I saw references to the simulations but could not find the methodology as to how they were conducted.

The full Working Group I report (not just the Summary for Policymakers) has references to the literature.

If they were based on the Vostok ice cores they are suspect

They're based on both instrumental and ice core data, among other sources. The ice core data is not the long-term Vostok data for ice ages you're referring to, but just over the last few centuries.

I would love to talk with someone about actual data and methodologies used to come to conclusions

Ok, what do you want to know?

90 years to walk from Sudan to Moscow

[symbolset]

You will note in your linked image that the biggest increase in precipitation is over that "arable land" I was talking about. For the most part they get big temp increases as well. Of course I care that people are going to starve. That's why I care about arable land. That much more water over such large areas suggests viable hydro power also. You're suggesting they stay where they are. Don't you care that they're going to starve?

Now if there was some way of getting the hungry people from where they are to where the food will grow... Some way that involved them applying some self help to earn their escape from darwin's cut... O, if people were only equipped with some method for moving themselves about lest they perish!

Seriously, I use these redundant articles to grind my favorite axe about this subject. Too many people are possessed of the notion that they're committed to live out their lives within 50 miles of where their mother first dropped them, and their children also, as if the world promised them it would be theirs and their progeny's forever. It doesn't work that way. Climate changes. Move or perish. Spread the word.

And by the way, the "more arable land" would be in areas that aren't currently farmed, so we'd be chopping down even more trees and compounding the problem by wrecking even more carbon sinks.

Trees do not sink more carbon than crops. Especially not the scruffy 4/acre trees that grow in permafrost vs modern managed crops.

Re:Welcome the warmth

[jc42]

I hate Massachusetts winters. And how cool would it be to pick coconuts in my back yard?

Hey, last Saturday I was at Russell's Garden Center (on Route 20 in Wayland), and noticed that they had potted palm trees for sale. They weren't coconut palms. It didn't look at the label, but they looked like baby cabbage palms.

Your wish may come true sooner than you think. Of course, by then most of the Massachusetts coast, including all the Cape, will be under water. I wonder if they'll be able to build levees around Boston that keep it dry? Considering how well this worked for New Orleans, I wouldn't bet on it.