It’s been a bad Summer for Climate Change deniers.
Hot July
First off, July turned out to be the hottest month in the continental U.S. in the 118 years that records have been kept, averaging 77.6 degrees, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (http://www.noaa.gov/). Based on the extremely warm winter, 2012 is likely to be the warmest year in U.S. history.
According to NOAA, “the globally-averaged temperature for July 2012 marked the fourth warmest July since record keeping began in 1880. It also marked the 36th consecutive July and 329th consecutive month with a global temperature above the 20th century average.”
Hot History
Then, at the end of July, former Climate Change skeptic, Richard Muller, Founder and Scientific Director of Berkeley Earth (http://berkeleyearth.org/), released a set of studies funded by the Charles Koch Foundation that found that:
“The average temperature of the Earth’s land has risen by 1.5°C over the past 250 years. The good match between the new temperature record and historical carbon dioxide records (measured from polar ice samples) suggests that the most straight forward explanation for this warming is human greenhouse gas emissions.
The Berkeley Earth team values the simplicity of its analysis, which does not depend on the large complex global climate models that have been criticized by climate skeptics for their hidden assumptions and adjustable parameters.
The conclusion that the warming is due to humans is based simply on the close agreement between the shape of the observed temperature rise and the known greenhouse gas increase.”
Hot Governor
And now, California Governor Jerry Brown’s Governor’s Office of Planning and Research has put up a Climate Change Just the Facts website (http://www.opr.ca.gov/s_denier.php) to take on Climate Change deniers. The site presents the scientific consensus in simple straight forward terms.
And then the site goes on to take on the deniers head on.
“A small but vocal group has aggressively spread misinformation about the science, aiming to cast doubt on well-established findings and conclusions. Their goal is to create confusion and uncertainty, thereby preventing meaningful action to remedy the problem. The same strategy was used cynically for decades by the tobacco industry after research showed that cigarettes caused cancer. In fact, some of the same individuals who have spoken out against climate science also claimed that cigarettes were safe.
A famous tobacco industry document from the late 1960s said, ‘Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public.’ It is a strategy that has worked, at least for awhile, in the past, and it is being repeated today. Because of the serious impacts of climate change, the delay and obfuscation tactics of the deniers are particularly concerning, which is why we present some responses to the denier arguments on this website.”
Maybe the debate is shifting back toward reality.