Cheers to New Scientist for their set of interrelated stories addressing myths and misconceptions about climate change science. They start by acknowledging how hard it is to keep straight the complex actions, interactions and feedbacks that shape Earth’s climate, even without some “other side of the debate” throwing up roadblocks.
Contorted evidence and factoids can at times arrive in flurries, making them difficult to refute: the sun’s output is changing; cosmic rays are to blame; we can solve it by fertilizing the ocean; etc.
So New Scientist compiled a list of 26 of the most commonly heard objections, then assigned reporters to each one and produced short, specific refutations. A few of my favorites: We Can’t Do Anything About Climate Change; Mars and Pluto Are Warming Too; It’s Too Cold Where I Live – Warming Will Be Great; and even It’s All a Conspiracy.
The pieces are short, but that’s a bonus. If you’ve got time on your hands, you can read exquisitely detailed discussions, buttressed by long-term data sets, on any one of these topics at places like RealClimate.org. But those discussions run to the thousands of words – and dozens of graph traces – before you even get to the comments section.
What New Scientist has done is distill what’s wrong with each of these 26 common misconceptions, then collect them all in a single place. Put it in your back pocket this summer, for when you head off to neighborhood barbecues and the like.
Image: NASA. Thanks to the Tracker for his post.
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