I was going to write a big post discussing why almost everything in this article is wrong. But now, I think that would be a waste of time. It rolls out the same old arguments: the Earth isn’t warming, it’s warming but it’s not us, it’s warming it’s us but it’s a good thing, etc. The article does have one amusing paragraph:

A cold spell soon to replace global warming

Carbon dioxide has quite a different pernicious influence—not on the climate but on synoptic activity. It absorbs infrared radiation. When tropospheric air is warm enough for complete absorption, radiation energy passes into gas fluctuations. Gas expands and dissolves to send warm air up to the stratosphere, where it clashes with cold currents coming down. With no noticeable temperature changes, synoptic activity skyrockets to whip up cyclones and anticyclones. Hence we get hurricanes, storms, tornados and other natural disasters, whose intensity largely depends on carbon dioxide concentration. In this sense, reducing its concentration in the air will have a positive effect.

I’d encourage you to read this multiple times since English is obviously not the authors native language. In a nutshell, increased CO2 will cause larger mid-lattitude stroms. I haven’t seen any claims like this in the peer-reviewed literature. However, I don’t really follow that type of paper so would definately not be up on the latest developments. Given the other claims in the article and the fact that it doesn’t make much sense, I’m going to assume he just made it up.

If you’re reading this and don’t know where you stand on the climate change “debate”, please leave a comment (or contact me via the contact page) with what you don’t understand. Please do your homework. Look at each paragraph in the article and then find the corrosponding “answer” on Coby Beck’s excellent page how to talk to a global warming skeptic.

This post is mostly intended as a question to others interested in communicating science to the public. Assume that Joe Public has a high school diploma and the science education that comes along with it. Further assume that Mr. Public is a Republican, and watches the likes of Glen Beck.

I claim that it is not possible to educate Mr. Public about the science of climate change. The argument is simple, and is not based on logic, but upon experience. Because Mr. Public has no experience dealing with complex issues, he expects problems to have a simple binary solution. In the case of climate change this is framed as:

Is [anthropogenic] climate change real?

The fact that the question has been framed this way leads directly to its failure. By allowing the possibility that climate change is not real allows Mr. Public to think that it is a viable answer. Instead of phrasing the question as above, I submit that it should always be framed as an “essay” question instead of a “true/false” question.

What influences do humans have upon their environment?

I’ve never liked true/false or multiple choice questions. In my opinion they don’t accurately test knowledge; they test memorization. By phrasing the climate change question in an “essay” type question, it makes the respondent think of ways that we do influence the environment. While there are many examples of how we influence the environment, my favorite example is “ship tracks”.

I actually presented this image (with credit to NASA) at a department seminar and was asked if this picture was “real” by a graduate student. It’s a “true color” image - meaning they used several wavelengths of light and combined them in a way that makes it look like the same colors that we see. But yes it is real. I like using ship tracks as an example because it’s something that we can see. Describing how a colorless gas (CO2) will affect our entire planet is difficult to grasp. But we can show other side effects of combustion that are visible to the eye, and maybe, just maybe, it will show that we can drastically change our environment.

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