Category: Global Warming
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Why do Republicans Hate Market-Incentive Based Solutions?
Contrary to what you might think, this new survey says that 69% of Republicans think that climate change is a “somewhat” or “very” serious threat. Table 3. Perception that climate change is a threat among Democrats (N=377), Republicans (N=306), Independents (N=389), and overall U.S. population (N=1089) in January 2013. Columns may not add to 100…
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Jim Manzi Disappoints on the Devastation of Lead and Crime
And Kevin Drum disappoints in his own defense. Regular readers will know that (at least sometimes) I like to seek out and highlight the very best, most cogent and convincing arguments countering my beliefs, trying to figure out what might be wrong with those beliefs, and hoping to understand what’s really going with the subject…
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Did Global Warming “Stop” Sixteen Years Ago?
An acquaintance of mine who’s very statistically savvy (and quite conservative) posted the following link on Facebook today. I replied as follows (I’ve replaced a link here with a clickable image): As a statistics guy, you know way better than most how important sample size is. There was a 30-year plateau in the HADCRUT data, mid-40s…
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Republicans: More Education, Less Reality
Via Chris Mooney to Digby to Krugman then me — this remarkable item from a Pew report: College-educated Republicans are more likely to deny scientific reality. They don’t spend their time in college (or life) trying to learn how the world works; they spend it learning how to mine, harvest, cherry-pick, and twist any “facts”…
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The Best Argument Against Climate Legislation — And the Best Answers
I’ve long lauded Jim Manzi for his cogent and convincing arguments against carbon taxes. He’s the antithesis of the “1998 was really hot! Look: it’s cooler now!” school of head-in-in-the-sand self-delusionists. Rather, he takes the 2007 IPCC report as the best available consensus scientific knowledge we have, and uses it to think through a clear-eyed,…
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One Completely False Statement in Superfreakonomics
Then there’s this little-discussed fact about global warming: While the drumbeat of doom has grown louder over the past several years, the average global temperature during that time has in fact decreased. This “fact” is true…but only if you calculate forward from 1998–one of the two hottest years in history (2005 was hotter). It’s not…
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Global Warming Caused by Sex!
More sex, more people. More people, more global warming. Pretty simple. If people would just stop having sex, we could solve the global warming problem! (Envision: Just-Say-No types happily twirling their fingers in their cheeks.) Right. But my tongue-in-cheek wise-guyism is spurred by something quite real: reducing unprotected sex worldwide could be the most cost-effective…
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NoNoNoNoNoNoNo! There Is No Global Warming!
The Cato Gang really went off the edge recently with their ad (pdf) in the New York Times, claiming that: temperature changes over the past century have been episodic and modest and there has been no net global warming for over a decade now.1,2 … The computer models forecasting rapid temperature change abjectly fail to…