You could still use a second best science blog on the web blurb on the book jacket.

As they say here in Louisiana, vote early, vote often.

Next time I want to make ice cubes in my freezer, rather than adding water to the ice cube tray, I’ll just turn the temperature down. Sounds like a far more effective mechanism. I’m so glad I’ve got TheBlackCat to save me from “denialist silly claims”.

Of course, I’m only yanking your chain here. I think Bad Astronomy seems a pretty good blog, and I personally think the standards of the comments here are far, far higher than those at Pharyngula. ClimateAudit is still going to get my vote though; it is less accessible, but is engaged in front-line science. And Steve Mc is highly objective in how he goes about things. Bad Astronomy takes a close second in my view.

Good luck to all in the closing hours of the contest, and if nothing else, the opportunity to visit some other interesting sites is perhaps the most important thing to come from the awards.

Denialism describes the position of governments, business groups, interest groups, or individuals who reject propositions that are strongly supported by scientific or historical evidence and seek to influence policy processes and outcomes accordingly.

Note that the term would not properly apply to a genuine skeptic.

For someone who doesn’t know anything about the blog, you sure have a lot to say about it through innuendo. Your point was that mission statements don’t necessarily reflect a blog’s quality. You should have left it at that. You need to go to CA and spend a few months getting up to speed. If you are a fair-minded person who is genuinely interested in getting to the truth of AGW, you will be rewarded.

You write: “a denialist is someone who reject scientific evidence because it disagrees with ideas they have for non-scientific reasons.” Steve McIntyre is not denying science; he is, like Darwin, Newton and Galileo pointing out flaws in its methods and conclusions. And he’s finding lots to point out, enough, in fact, to cast grave doubts about those who claim certitude and consensus about these often complex issues.

Go to CA and read the recent installment about Mann et al, Wegman and the NAS Report. It is posted for the benefit of newbies. It should open your eyes. If it doesn’t, perhaps you are a cat calling the panther black.

As for your “evidence”, short-term local temperature fluctuations and long-term global climate changes are two entirely different things. Trying to use one as evidence against the other is, quite frankly, one of the silliest climate change denialist claims (and they get pretty silly). Short-term local temperature fluctuations are just that, local (they only affect a small area) and fluctuations (they go down and up) and short term (any change is soon reversed). Long-term global climate changes are just that as well. What happens is that the fluctuations go about and down around a certain mean level, and the mean of all areas around the world give a picture of the global mean temperature. With global climate change the global mean temperature changes, so the temperature continues to fluctuate but the low end and high end of the fluctuations change. For instance glaciers melt during the summer and grow during the winter (a grossly oversimplified view, I admit). If the average temperature increases, however, they will grow less in the winter and shrink more in the summer, causing (if the change is big enough) the glacier to shrink and then disappear entirely if the change continues over a long enough period.

But, seriously – why use such an emotive word, with respect to someone who doesn’t agree with your intepretation of a very hazy concept, like global mean temperature? (Hell, we’re talking about 0.5 degrees celsius: it goes from about 14 to 28 each day, where I live. How about you?)

Was Galileo an Earth-centric denialist? Was Darwin a creationism-denialist? How about Barry Marshall – the ulcer denialist? Einstein, the aether denialist? John Snow, the “smelly air” denialist?

Should I go on? Or, do you get the idea that scientific theory and disagreement go hand in hand?

Do you know that it’s just possible that you might be wrong and the “denialists” might be right, from time to time. Were that not the case, we’d still be sacrificing virgins to the Sun god.

That you call them “denialists”, rather than, “people who don’t agree with me”, connotes a desire to tar them with an unsavoury and negative brush. To lower them, almost to a criminal status.

If one can win their arguments with science and logic, they need not have any resort to name-calling and derogation. Calling someone a “denialist”, because they don’t agree with you, is no crime. In fact, it’s at the very foundation of scientific enquire.

Grow up!

* supports research by scientists and other scholars challenging various aspects of neo-Darwinian theory;
* supports research by scientists and other scholars developing the scientific theory known as intelligent design;
* supports research by scientists and scholars in the social sciences and humanities exploring the impact of scientific materialism on culture.
* encourages schools to improve science education by teaching students more fully about the theory of evolution, including the theory’s scientific weaknesses as well is its strengths.

Nothing there looks particularly anti-science to someone not familiar with the conflicts between science and creationism, but the organization uses pretty much every anti-science and denialist technique under the sun (often involving outright lies) to further their religious agenda.

Now let me emphasize this: I am not saying ClimateAudit is at all like the Discovery Institute. I don’t know anything about the blog. My point is that just quoting a mission statement is far from a convincing argument regarding how anyone actually behaves in practice. What is worse, in this case you just quote a part of the mission statement, which is a key warning sign of cherry-picking to people familiar with anti-science tactics. I suggest you not do that in the future if you expect people to take you at all seriously. I personally cannot find those objectives myself to verify the rest of the objectives, but it is still looks very fishy.

So, I’d encourage CA readers to read the BA’s blog. It’s mostly good stuff that I can enjoy and agree with.

“battle for the reality of science are consolidating”

Two of the explicitly stated objectives of Climate Audit:

- Promote the full, open and timely disclosure of all data and information for published research.

- Promote more complete, indpendent and replicaton of published claims and research.

Can you exmplain how these do anything but advance the reality of science”?

But that vid of the moon was awesome and that’s why I’ll be back here.

I have seen your blog, thanks to the Best Science Blog Awards, and the comments at Climate Audit (where I am an irregular contributor, as I was on RealClimate, if not censored).
As good as Bad Astronomy is aimed to debunk non-scientific “common knowledge”, CA is aimed to look at what is said to be “scientific” knowledge, which is not always what it looks like.
Steve McIntyre is not a climate change denier (neither am I), he is sure that more CO2 causes some warming, but what he wants is that the science about how much warming that will cause is funded on the underlying data, not the more political promotion around the data.

What he discovered, is that a lot of the “science” proving that there was no MWP is based on cherry picking the right series of proxies which “proves” their point, and using bad statistics which mines for “hockeysticks”. The same for e.g. number of hurricanes and sea surface temperatures, etc… It is extremely important to know the cause and influence of natural variability, before one can say anything about the impact of the increase of greenhouse gases.

I have done myself some digging in the reality of the “projections” of GCM’s in forecasting future temperatures. Some simple EBM (energy balance) model (taking temperature as result of energy changes of the different independent variables as simply linearly related), obtained at a one-day course at Oxford does a better job in following the temperature of the past century than the very sophisticated GCMs of today. See: http://www.bu.edu/cees/people/faculty/kaufmann/documents/Model-temporal-relation.pdf where the performance of simple climate models outperforms the best GCM’s of today.

Important is that with the simple model, one can change all parameters and constraints within what is physically meaningful, that is beyond the 3°C for 2xCO2 which is more or less fixed in current models. One can reduce the impact of (sulfate) aerosols (very unsure, and probably highly overestimated) and consequently one need to reduce the impact of 2xCO2 to get the 1945-1975 cooling period straight. See the results at: http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/oxford.html

There seems to be rather many misconceptions about McIntyres blog at Bad Astronomy, why not give a guest comment by McIntyre on your blog and a guest comment of yours at CA (after the contest)?

Meanwhile, the popularity contest of Best Science Blog is going on, it seems that BA will be the winner of this year, with CA second… Nevertheless I think that CA goes much deeper into science, with a lot of very valuable contributions (and of course a lot of good, bad and ugly commenters, as on any blog)…

Sincerely,

Ferdinand Engelbeen

Mike,
The wheels come off our wagons when we leave. Life is a sweet gift, a gift with an expiration date.

Last time I checked, science wasn’t about winning, nor is it particularly about being “right” in the ideological sense…

And Eric, I would take offense at the ‘duck’ comments but I understand your meaning.

And as regards the “auditor”: if he looks like a duck impersonator, and walks like a duck impersonator, and quacks like a duck impersonator, he needn’t get all huffy when people feed him soggy bread.