Global Warming

There is a good blog over at Tuibguy on the problem with all of the global warming deniers (especially after the whole email-gate) and how they screw up the math. This classic Abbott and Costello video is very similar.... and I like Abbott and Costello anyway...

For example, The Island of Doubt has a great little edit to a paragraph Sarah Palin's latest speech on the issue and "corrected" it, which is educational in itself for those of you not up to date. I liked it and figured you wold too so here is the main part from it:

"I will begin with this paragraph:

The e-mails reveal that leading climate "experts" deliberately destroyed [deleted copies of] records, manipulated adjusted data to "hide the decline" in global select North American temperatures [tree-ring proxy data that conflicted with observational records], and tried to silence [challenge] their [non-expert] critics' by preventing them from publishing [competency and the wisdom of allowing flawed papers to appear] in peer-reviewed journals. What's more, [T]he documents show that there was no a real consensus even within the CRU crowd. [While s]ome scientists hadstrong doubts about the accuracy of estimates reliability of temperatures [proxy data] from centuries ago [the last three decades, estimates used to back claims that more recent temperatures are rising at an alarming rate, [the observational data since 1850 only confirms the science behind anthropogenic climate change].

Hmm. On second thought, that took too much work for a single paragraph, and now it says nothing very interesting. In any case, I don't have the time to conduct a similarly rigorous edit of the rest of the essay. Sorry to get your hopes up. Recommend you start over from square one. An introductory course in climatology would be a good idea before tackling this issue again."

So I have to clarify, Palin wrote an article for the Washington Post (why they would publish and op-ed piece by probably the least qualified person to write about scientific issues in general, I have no idea) but several people have critiqued - see this piece in the Washington Post by lan I. Leshner, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and executive publisher of the journal Science.