Articles by Coby Beck
Former musician, turned tree planter, turned software engineer. Same old story... I have been blogging about climate change since 2006 at A Few Things Ill Considered.
All Articles
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‘But the glaciers are not melting’–Except … they are!
(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide)
Objection: Sure, some glaciers are melting. But if you look at the studies, most of those for which we have data are growing.
Answer: This is simply not true, rumors on "the internets" aside. The National Snow and Ice Data Centre and their State of the Cryosphere division, on their Glacial Balance page, report an overall accelerating rate of glacial mass loss. The World Glacier Monitoring Service has similar findings, the most recent data coming from 2004.
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‘Global warming stopped in 1998’–Only if you flagrantly cherry pick
(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide)
Objection: Global temperatures have been trending down since 1998. Global warming is over.
Answer: At the time, 1998 was a record high year in both the CRU and the NASA GISS analyses. In fact, it blew away the previous record by .2 degrees C. (That previous record went all the way back to 1997, by the way!)
According to NASA, it was elevated far above the trend line because 1998 was the year of the strongest El Nino of the century. Choosing that year as a starting point is a classic cherry pick and demonstrates why it is necessary to remove chaotic year-to year-variability (aka: weather) by smoothing out the data. Looking at CRU's graph below, you can see the result of that smoothing in black.
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‘Antarctic ice is growing’–Well, probably not, but even if it were, we are not off the hook
(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide)
Objection: The Antarctic ice sheets are actually growing, which wouldn't be happening if global warming were real.
Answer: There are two distinct problems with this argument.
First, any argument that tries to use a regional phenomenon to disprove a global trend is dead in the water. Anthropogenic global warming theory does not predict uniform warming throughout the globe. We need to assess the balance of the evidence.
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A month’s worth of beautiful and/or fascinating astronomy photos from NASA
For your Sunday time-wasting pleasure, last month's selections from Astronomy Picture of the Day:
