Could the scientists at Nasa, the National academy of science, the American Meteorological Society, and every professional scientific organization on the planet really have been so silly as to miss something this obvious?
Although its been 20 years since NASA climate scientists first announced they had picked up the signal of global warming, some deniers still insist its not happening.
In many cases, its because of long out of date notions of what the science is really saying. Its amazing how durable some of these myths, most debunked a decade ago, seem to be.
one of the most popular, that I heard from a high school student not too long ago, is illustrated in this clip from a bogus climate denial film that gets a lot of circulation on the internet.
It goes like this:
===(CBC climate denial video explaining "heat island effect")===
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is that true? Could the scientists at Nasa, the National academy of science, the American Meteorological Society, and every professional scientific organization on the planet really have been so silly as to miss something this obvious?
Of course not. They've compensated for that factor.
But take a look at some more graphic evidence.
Many of you have seen this picture. Its a satellite image of the earth at night, with all the lights of all the cities showing up like twinkling campfires against the dark. We're going to use this to show something, but first I have to do a little photoshop transformation.
Lets make the light dots into dark spots.
Are you with me? Same map, just inverted it to make something easier to see.
All those dots represent city lights. This map would be a pretty good indicator of where we'd expect the "urban heat island" effect to show up, don't you think?
Now look at another map. This is the global temperature anomalies map from NASA for 2008. It shows which parts of the globe are warming the fastest.
The darker the red, the more that area has shown warming in the last several decades. Do you see where I'm going to go with this?
Of course you do.
Let's put the temperature map over my map of city lights.
Notice anything?
The urban areas don't really correspond with the red, warming zones. Doesn't that seem strange, if these urban areas are supposed to be the places where thermometers are showing warming?
why do denialists persist in repeating something that is so easily proven wrong?
In some cases ignorance. In some cases laziness. In some cases, they simply don't care if they're right or wrong, as long as they create confusion and paralysis. Remember, for the fossil fuels companies, every delay in action is money in the bank.
But some denialists persist in the notion that evil scientists all over the world are deliberately distorting temperature data, to fool you about global climate. They think the temperature data is all wrong. Its all part of a sinister plot.
I have an idea. Instead of arguing about whose temperature data is right, Lets just throw it all out. That's right. Throw out all the temperature data.
Let's look at the world with fresh eyes. As if we're aborigines with technological tools.
No thermometers to tell us what's going on. Just the real responses of the real planet.
Turns out someone' s done this. In a paper by NASA scientists, published in the journal NATURE, observations were made of the timing of nature's most basic processes.
The migration of birds, the blooming of flowers.the spawning of fish, the peak flows of glacial streams in spring time.
flowers, streams, and birds don't have an agenda. They don't know about politics.
They just respond.
And they tell us about what their environment is doing. Because this study, of 29,500 sets of physical and biological data, found that at the global scale, about 90 percent of observed changes in diverse physical and biological systems are consistent with warming.