Rachel’s Musings

During my exchange with Pat Frank in the comments to my post on the climate crisis, he raised a question about CO₂’s pollutant status. When I researched the question, I found a write up by Weather Underground that recounted the history of that question: It stems from a campaign founded by Exxon. An article on the Doubt Makers by Michelle Nijhuis describes how industries, starting with tobacco, use a similar tactic to create doubt: The climate science models are just too unreliable, therefore we don’t really have to do anything.

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Ken over at Open Parachute wrote a very good post about the climate changes we are facing. His summary does an excellent job of countering the arguments of climate change deniers.

Of course I had to add my 3 cents mentioning a couple of articles from the current issue of Skeptic Magazine.

There are a couple of interesting articles in the Skeptic magazine. One of them is arguing that

The claim that anthropogenic CO2 is responsible for the current warming of Earth climate is scientifically insupportable because climate models are unreliable.

IF I understand the article correctly (and that is a big if - I got somewhat lost), the author claims because climate models don’t predict well (your point 4), humans are not causing climate change. Obviously, this would confuse prediction with explanation: Even though we might not predict future climate well, as the other article points out, the models of historical climate change are pretty darn good but only if they take human generated pollution into account, which echoes what you wrote again in point 4.

I’d love to see other people’s interpretation of these articles, especially the first one. I am still hoping that I misunderstood something… Somehow, an article by a climate change denier in a skeptical magazine doesn’t seem too appealing…

There is also an interesting older episode of Point of Inquiry with Bill Nye in which he takes issue with climate change deniers.

Totally off topic, much more mundane is a discovery I just made in the real world: a website by Consumer Reports on Green Choices. Just like their main site, it contains ratings of green products, something that is especially helpful for green products since, unfortunately, there’s a lot of snake oil out there…