Wall Street Journal Wolf to its Little Piggies: Trust Me

Sigh. Once again, the Wall Street Journal has published a nonsense op-ed that has the climate denialosphere all in a tizzy. The author of the op-ed, Matt Ridley, tries to convince us that global warming won’t be so bad. The track record of correct climate science in WSJ op-eds leaves much to be desired. In Wall Street Journal: Selectively Pro-Science, I showed that WSJ op-eds fail to properly inform 93% of the time. In another study, The Union of Concerned Scientists found that WSJ op-eds mislead 81% of the time.

Matt Ridley bases his left field claim on the “expertise” of Nicholas Lewis who Ridley claims is “A semiretired successful financier from Bath, England, with a strong mathematics and physics background, Mr. Lewis has made significant contributions to the subject of climate change.”  Using two journal database search tools, I could only locate one paper from Lewis. Just one. I guess WSJ and Ridley think Lewis’ one peer-reviewed science paper qualifies as “significant contributions to the subject of climate change” and he is qualified to overturn the many thousands of experts (including health officials, military officials, and insurers) who are very concerned about the expected planetary warming.

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Global Warming isn’t Tomorrow – It is Now

“Extreme summer climate anomalies in Texas in 2011, in Moscow in 2010, and in France in 2003 almost certainly would not have occurred in the absence of global warming with its resulting shift of the anomaly distribution. In other words, we can say with high confidence that such extreme anomalies would not have occurred in the absence of global warming.”

This quote is from a new scientific paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper will be freely available online Monday August 6 as article #12-05276: Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., “Perception of climate change”, Hansen, J., Mki. Sato, and R. Ruedy. A draft copy can be downloaded here.

I often hear people state that we need to reduce our emissions of heat trapping carbon dioxide for our children and grandchildren’s sake. Unfortunately, human-caused global warming has already caused large increases in extreme heat waves. Global warming-caused extremes are happening now.

Tom Harris Teaches Heartland Institute Fake Science to Students

A science watchdog has released a report slamming a course taught at Carleton University (Canada) over what they call “biased and inaccurate” claims concerning climate change.

The course “Climate Change: An Earth Sciences Perspective”, taught by Tom Harris for two years, is the subject of a 98-page report written by the Committee for the Advancement of Scientific Skepticism (CASS). The report constitutes a blow-by-blow response citing extensively from the scientific literature to rebut 142 erroneous and fully-quoted claims.

On auditing the course, CASS discovered that key messages for students contradict accepted scientific opinion. These messages include: denying that current climate change has an anthropogenic cause; dismissing the problems that carbon dioxide emissions cause because CO2 is plant food; denying the existence of the scientific consensus on the causes of climate change; and claiming that we should prepare instead for global cooling.

In this blog post I will just focus on one ridiculous notion that Harris and his good friends at Heartland Institute keep pushing: CO2 is plant food.