Skeptical Science explains: It’s the oceans!

Memo to climate scientists, environmentalists, and others:  If you’re going to give an interview or speak in public, you need to know the FULL scientific literature.  If you just stick to reading up on your area of expertise, you won’t have the sharpest answers for reporters or for a tough questioner in the audience.

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The Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review and the Annual Threat Assessment just given to the Senate by the Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair highlighted climate change’s impact on military operations and security.  The Pentagon and the intelligence community are finally recognizing climate change’s threat to global security, as discussed in this repost by CAP’s Michael Werz and Kari Manlove.

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For more on the brilliant strategy of the right wing, see The Audacity of Nope: The GOP channels Groucho Marx, “Whatever it is, I’m against it.”

Two top climate scientists and the NSIDC accuse Daily Mail of misquoting and misrepresenting them or their work.

Readers should assume that everything they see in the Daily Mail is untrue and unverified.   Scientists should refuse to grant interviews to the paper without a third-party present or an agreement to allow a review of any quotes used.

One of the British newspapers leading the charge to undermine the credibility of climate science has had its own credibility rocked.   Two leading scientists, Murari Lal and Mojib Latif, have accused the Daily Mail of misquoting and misrepresenting them.  And the National Snow and Ice Data Center has accused the paper of printing “nonsense” and of “very lazy journalism.”

Lending further credibility to the scientists’ charges are a pattern of false and misleading statements in the paper (and by DM reporter David Rose in comments on this very blog).

The latest self-inflicted body blow to the Daily Mail is this outrageously false headline (and subhed) echoing through the right-wing blogosphere:

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Now another swing Democrat has no reason to vote against the bipartisan climate and clean energy bill

Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh will not seek re-election this year, a decision that hands Republicans a prime pickup opportunity in the middle of the country.

“After all these years, my passion for service to my fellow citizens is undiminished, but my desire to do so by serving in Congress has waned,” Bayh will say.

As I said when Sen. Dorgan (D-ND) announced in January he would retire, what’s bad news for the Dems in the longer term could be good news for the climate bill in the short term.

Nate Silver had given Bayh a “Probability of Yes” vote of 46%, but recently, Bayh has been sounding much more squeamish, as in this E&E Daily interview (subs. req’d) a few weeks ago:

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Everybody talks about the weather, but few read the scientific literature about it.

The anti-science crowd has been doing a killer job pushing the myth that the big recent snowstorms somehow undercut our understanding of human-caused global warming.  But aside from the fact the precipitation isn’t temperature, it turns out that the “common wisdom” the disinformers are preying on — lots of snow means we must be in a cold winter — isn’t even true.

Let ‘s look at the results of an actual, detailed study of “the relationships of the storm frequencies to seasonal temperature and precipitation conditions” for the years “1901-2000 using data from 1222 stations across the United States.”  The 2006 study, Temporal and Spatial Characteristics of Snowstorms in the Contiguous United States (Chagnon et al., 2006) found we get more snow storms in warmer years:

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