OW. Journalist (politely) tears climate-skeptic bloggers a new one.

I did not read your link. But in general, there is nothing wrong with being a "climate skeptic". Very little science has been done to see if humans are responsible for climate change and/or how much is attributable to humans.

No, a consensus does not make something true. No, there is not even a consensus despite what some people keep saying. There are allegedly like 30,000 scientists that have said they are skeptical of the situation and think conclusions are premature.

I can't speak for everyone, but watching a journo who makes vids doesn't seem the optimal way to convey information. At the very least, is there a transcript somewhere so I don't have to put up with listening, and can read at my own pace?

Not me either wrote:

I can't speak for everyone, but watching a journo who makes vids doesn't seem the optimal way to convey information. At the very least, is there a transcript somewhere so I don't have to put up with listening, and can read at my own pace?

It's (not a) new tactic of the regressive Left to have snazzily produced videos with talking heads spewing out information to produce a simulacrum of reasoning that easily sways the viewer, and even gives them the impression that they now "know" something by the end of it. Of course, all the while seeming to be quasi-neutral, setting up opponent's strawmans that require a bit of work to knock over (don't want to make it too easy) but never addressing opponent's actual arguments, etc.

Sure. PH provides links (in the video descriptions) for all his sources. In fact it could be really useful, I think, to look at the links first before ever watching a given video--you might catch him in an error/misinterpretation of the data.

I did love the comment of an earlier poster, which I can paraphrase: "My mind is made up, do not confuse me with facts. I have no need to look at actual scientific sources because they will either confirm my preset opinion [hence being a waste of time] or they will contradict it [and hence be erroneous]."

I only trust REALIABLE sources like UK Lord Monckton

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/11/monckton-responds-to-potholer54/

Sarcasm me wrote:

I only trust REALIABLE sources like UK Lord Monckton

You're right, he's definitely spouting real lies!

hohoho wrote:

I did love the comment of an earlier poster, which I can paraphrase: "My mind is made up, do not confuse me with facts. I have no need to look at actual scientific sources because they will either confirm my preset opinion [hence being a waste of time] or they will contradict it [and hence be erroneous]."

"Controversy is the mother of truth." (Some dead Greek/Roman guy whose name I don't remember.)

Read R. Pielke Jr. Op Ed in Dec. 2 Wall Street Journal. That's what happens to heretics. And he's not even really a heretic.

Long story short, John Podesta, Hillary's boy Friday, pressured fivethirtyeight.com to stop publishing Pielke's pieces on climate science. He went from staff writer, to freelancer, to never being published. It's laid out in the wikilieaks emails. He's a college professor-so it's not like he was starving-but the silencing of someone with a nuanced opinion-that is not even in opposition to the "prevailing wisdom"-is chilling.

Thank god that woman was not elected.

Did the weather change today?

Yes!!!!!!!!!

MS Hydrology wrote:

Read R. Pielke Jr. Op Ed in Dec. 2 Wall Street Journal. That's what happens to heretics. And he's not even really a heretic.

Long story short, John Podesta, Hillary's boy Friday, pressured fivethirtyeight.com to stop publishing Pielke's pieces on climate science. He went from staff writer, to freelancer, to never being published. It's laid out in the wikilieaks emails. He's a college professor-so it's not like he was starving-but the silencing of someone with a nuanced opinion-that is not even in opposition to the "prevailing wisdom"-is chilling.

Thank god that woman was not elected.

Jill Stein still hasn't conceded.

MS Hydrology wrote:

Long story short, John Podesta, Hillary's boy Friday, pressured fivethirtyeight.com to stop publishing Pielke's pieces on climate science. He went from staff writer, to freelancer, to never being published. It's laid out in the wikilieaks emails. He's a college professor-so it's not like he was starving-but the silencing of someone with a nuanced opinion-that is not even in opposition to the "prevailing wisdom"-is chilling.

How can Podesta pressure 538? What power does Podesta have over them? Shouldn't there be some outrage against 538 if they caved into this pressure?

Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth had a bunch of evidence and reasoning, but when you looked closer at the "evidence," you found numerous inaccuracies and errors. So, you can take the video and all of its "evidence" and "reasoning" and go .....

It wasn't Podesta, but a staffer (Legum) at CAP. And the reason given was that the CAP-affiliated ClimateProgress pointed out numerous errors in Pielke's work, forcing Silver to apologize (to HuffPo) and reduce Pielke's 538 status.

A favorite game of the climate alarmist movement is predicting that we are on the verge of the climate "tipping point," that is, the moment at which human carbon emissions push the planet over the brink and climate armageddon becomes unstoppable.

But when will that "tipping point" be reached? Or have we already passed it? Many in the alarmism movement are clever enough to avoid ever putting out a specific date that can then be falsified. For example, former NASA chief catastrophist James Hansen is famous for serial declarations of "tipping points," and has announced their imminence on multiple occasions, but always with a cover of vagueness as to the precise timing. It's always just around the corner! Here is his 2008 screed titled "Tipping Point: Perspective of a Climatologist." Excerpt:

The warming that has already occurred, the positive feedbacks that have been set in motion, and the additional warming in the pipeline together have brought us to the precipice of a planetary tipping point. We are at the tipping point because the climate state includes large, ready positive feedbacks provided by the Arctic sea ice, the West Antarctic ice sheet, and much of Greenland’s ice. Little additional forcing is needed to trigger these feedbacks and magnify global warming. If we go over the edge, we will transition to an environment far outside the range that has been experienced by humanity, and there will be no return within any foreseeable future generation. Casualties would include more than the loss of indigenous ways of life in the Arctic and swamping of coastal cities.

But does being on the "precipice" of a "planetary tipping point" mean that we will go over the brink tomorrow, a year from now, ten years from now, or a hundred years from now? Note that Hansen is way too clever to get pinned down on this one. And when nothing much had happened on his 2008 "tipping point" prediction, nonetheless he was back in 2013 with new and even more catastrophic predictions of a precipice, still at some seemingly imminent but unspecified time in the near future. As the Guardian reported on July 10 of that year:

[A] new paper by James Hansen is just the latest confirming that we are on the verge of crossing a tipping point into catastrophic climate change.

But of course no specifics on when the infamous moment would occur. However, not all in the alarmism movement are quite so careful to keep their bets hedged. Take, for example, Al Gore. It seems that at the screening of his movie "An Inconvenient Truth" at the Sundance Film Festival back on January 25, 2006 (was it really that long ago???) Gore made the huge mistake of putting a precise 10-year time clock on the dreaded tipping point. Gore was quoted by CBS News as follows:

nless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return, Gore said. He sees the situation as “a true planetary emergency.” “If you accept the truth of that, then nothing else really matters that much,” Gore said in an interview with The Associated Press. “We have to organize quickly to come up with a coherent and really strong response, and that’s what I’m devoting myself to.”

And now here we are, just about three weeks away from the horrific deadline. How have things gone? Well, one thing we know is that there have been none of the "drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases" that Gore said were so absolutely essential. Here is a summary chart put out by Europe's Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research ("EDGAR"):

Yes, emissions in the U.S. and the EU have declined marginally in the intervening ten years. In the case of the U.S., that has not at all been because of "drastic measures" taken by the government (cap-and-trade, for example, went down to defeat in Congress), but rather because the "fracking" revolution has caused the substitution of now-cheaper natural gas for some coal. In Europe, comparable marginal declines in emissions have been achieved by governments' artificially driving up the cost of energy and impoverishing their people. And meanwhile, emissions in China have exploded, while those in India have also dramatically increased, together swamping the marginal reductions in the U.S. and the EU. Overall emissions are up, and by a lot.

So Al, is armageddon upon us? Funny, but the guy seems to be strangely quiet these days. One thing we know for sure is that global lower troposphere temperatures have been basically flat not just for the ten years since Gore's prediction, but going all the way back to 1997. Here is the latest UAH satellite temperature record:

Now Hansen says "the clock has moved back a bit" presumably because of 8 years of stewardship from Obama.

1. 2015 is the ‘last effective opportunity’ to stop catastrophic warming

World leaders meeting at the Vatican last week issued a statement saying that 2015 was the “last effective opportunity to negotiate arrangements that keep human-induced warming below 2-degrees [Celsius].”

Pope Francis wants to weigh in on global warming, and is expected to issue an encyclical saying basically the same thing. Francis will likely reiterate that 2015 is the last chance to stop massive warming.

But what he should really say is that the U.N. conference this year is the “last” chance to cut a deal to stem global warming… since last year when the U.N. said basically the same thing about 2014’s climate summit.

2. France’s foreign minister said we only have “500 days” to stop “climate chaos”

When Laurent Fabius met with Secretary of State John Kerry on May 13, 2014 to talk about world issues he said “we have 500 days to avoid climate chaos.”

Ironically at the time of Fabius’ comments, the U.N. had scheduled a climate summit to meet in Paris in December 2015 — some 565 days after his remarks. Looks like the U.N. is 65 days too late to save the world.

3. President Barack Obama is the last chance to stop global warming

When Obama made the campaign promise to “slow the rise of the oceans” some environmentalists may have taken him quite literally.

In 2012, the United Nations Foundation President Tim Wirth told Climatewire that Obama’s second term was “the last window of opportunity” to impose policies to restrict fossil fuel use. Wirth said it’s “the last chance we have to get anything approaching 2 degrees Centigrade,” adding that if “we don’t do it now, we are committing the world to a drastically different place.”

Even before that, then-National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Space Flight Center head James Hansen warned in 2009 that Obama only “has four years to save Earth.” I wonder what they now think about their predictions?

4. Remember when we had “hours” to stop global warming?

In 2009, world leaders met in Copenhagen, Denmark to potentially hash out another climate treaty. That same year, the head of Canada’s Green Party wrote that there was only “hours” left to stop global warming.

“We have hours to act to avert a slow-motion tsunami that could destroy civilization as we know it,” Elizabeth May, leader of the Greens in Canada, wrote in 2009. “Earth has a long time. Humanity does not. We need to act urgently. We no longer have decades; we have hours. We mark that in Earth Hour on Saturday.”

5. United Kingdom Prime Minister Gordon Brown said there was only 50 days left to save Earth

2009 was a bad year for global warming predictions. That year Brown warned there was only “50 days to save the world from global warming,” the BBC reported. According to Brown there was “no plan B.”

Brown has been booted out of office since then. I wonder what he’d say about global warming today?

6. Let’s not forget Prince Charles’s warning we only had 96 months to save the planet

It’s only been about 70 months since Charles said in July 2009 that there would be “irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse, and all that goes with it.” So the world apparently only has 26 months left to stave off an utter catastrophe.

7. The U.N.’s top climate scientist said in 2007 we only had four years to save the world

Rajendra Pachauri, the former head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in 2007 that if “there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late.”

“What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment,” he said.

Well, it’s 2015 and no new U.N. climate treaty has been presented. The only thing that’s changed since then is that Pachauri was forced to resign earlier this year amid accusations he sexually harassed multiple female coworkers.

8. Environmentalists warned in 2002 the world had a decade to go green

Environmentalist write George Monbiot wrote in the UK Guardian that within “as little as 10 years, the world will be faced with a choice: arable farming either continues to feed the world’s animals or it continues to feed the world’s people. It cannot do both.”

In 2002, about 930 million people around the world were undernourished, according to U.N. data. by 2014, that number shrank to 805 million. Sorry, Monbiot.

9. The “tipping point” warning first started in 1989

In the late 1980s the U.N. was already claiming the world had only a decade to solve global warming or face the consequences.

The San Jose Mercury News reported on June 30, 1989 that a “senior environmental official at the United Nations, Noel Brown, says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000.”

That prediction didn’t come true 15 years ago, and the U.N. is sounding the same alarm today.

Chin up and Pull up champ wrote:

Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth had a bunch of evidence and reasoning, but when you looked closer at the "evidence," you found numerous inaccuracies and errors. So, you can take the video and all of its "evidence" and "reasoning" and go .....

right but the video(s) the op linked to specifically disavow al gore and some of the other "religious" alarmists precisely because they're not scientists. i looked at some of those vids and found them interesting because a) they don't take an all or none approach to various questions and b) they're backed up with original sources not the blogs of non-scientists.

And let's not forget "The Population Bomb", in which Paul Ehrlich predicted mass starvation in the 1970-80s.

"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.."