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This article in The New York Times serves as a primer by briefly answering seventeen basic questions about the cause and consequences of—and possible solutions to—climate change. Ten scientists reviewed the article, and generally found the answers to be highly accurate distillations of the research on that topic.
“The article selectively quotes from interviews and scientific papers to create the false perception that climate models significantly overestimate the rate of warming. The article also falsely implies that the cited paper is about the so called “hiatus” while the paper is actually about the carbon budget for the 1.5 ºC target.”
“This whole post is based on semantics and basically one big strawman fallacy. The author is deliberately confusing air pollution from suspended particulate matter (as discussed in the WHO report) with pollution from carbon dioxide emissions (as discussed in the Reuters link and the Paris Agreement). Even though CO2 does not impact our health through “disease-causing pollutants that get into people’s lungs”, it does change our environment and the Earth’s climate, and in that sense does classify as a pollutant.”
Sen. Cruz’s article cites a single report that assessed only the costs of climate actions, relying on a series of assumptions that maximized those estimated costs, and that excluded the benefits of avoided climate change and of renewable sources of energy.
“Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, and Lovelock has not even come up to the standards of providing what the scientific community would consider to be ordinary evidence. The journalist did not balance Lovelock’s statements with a set of clear statements saying that the vast majority of informed climate scientists (as, for example, represented by the IPCC reports) have reached consensus on conclusions that are diametrically opposed to what Lovelock is saying, and that the IPCC scientists have backed up their statements with a wealth of empirical data, whereas Lovelock is largely opining without providing any substantive evidence to support his rather extraordinary claims.”
“The article reports about recent evidence that terrestrial ecosystems are ‘greening’ in response to human activities, principally the increasing atmospheric CO2 concentration. The author presents this ‘greening’ as a new finding while annual global carbon budgets have reported that about 25% of the fossil-fuel emissions have been taken up by the biosphere since the 1960s. Nothing is fundamentally wrong in the article but it is organized in a somewhat misleading way”
“It sadly implies that even the PETM, a massive warm climatic excursion, might not be harsh enough to represent an analogue for future climate change, as the Washington Post rightfully points out.”
