Post by Smithee on May 25, 2012 20:16:26 GMT 10
"The Medieval Warm Period was just as warm" - NOT!
Read more at www.skepticblog.org/2012/05/16/the-medieval-warm-period-was-just-as-warm-not/#more-16747
As I discussed in a previous post (April 11), the people who deny anthropogenic global warming (AGW) have many similarities to creationists. Despite the fact that the reality of AGW is supported by a 95% or greater consensus of qualified climate scientists, the critics (mostly non-scientists, or scientists in fields that do not qualify them to assess climate science) keep on repeating the same false tropes over and over again, no matter how many times they are debunked. This is analogous to the shopworn old arguments of creationists, who invariably trot out fallacious arguments like ¡°evolution contradicts the Second Law of Thermodynamics¡± even though it has been corrected hundreds of times by scientists. The creationists have such a strong denial filter to resolve their cognitive dissonance that they either don¡¯t realize why their ¡°Second Law¡± argument is invalid, or they are deliberately and deceptively using it over and over again because it impresses their scientifically illiterate following.
The same is true of the long-debunked example of cherry picking, ¡°It hasn¡¯t warmed since 1998¡å (see my April 11 post). Another common false statement is ¡°The planet warmed just as much during the Medieval Warm Period, but eventually it cooled down again.¡± They argue that if this warming preceded our modern injection of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, then maybe our current global warming not caused by our burning of fossil fuels. Climate deniers repeat this old saw over and over again as if it¡¯s somehow a devastating blow to the huge body of data about our recent climate changes. They often illustrate it with the anecdotes about how the Vikings could colonize Greenland for a while, then as climate cooled in the late Middle Ages, these colonies failed when Greenland became too cold again. The story about the fate of Viking colonies in Greenland is true¡ªbut the rest is not.
The same is true of the long-debunked example of cherry picking, ¡°It hasn¡¯t warmed since 1998¡å (see my April 11 post). Another common false statement is ¡°The planet warmed just as much during the Medieval Warm Period, but eventually it cooled down again.¡± They argue that if this warming preceded our modern injection of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, then maybe our current global warming not caused by our burning of fossil fuels. Climate deniers repeat this old saw over and over again as if it¡¯s somehow a devastating blow to the huge body of data about our recent climate changes. They often illustrate it with the anecdotes about how the Vikings could colonize Greenland for a while, then as climate cooled in the late Middle Ages, these colonies failed when Greenland became too cold again. The story about the fate of Viking colonies in Greenland is true¡ªbut the rest is not.
Read more at www.skepticblog.org/2012/05/16/the-medieval-warm-period-was-just-as-warm-not/#more-16747