2024 SkS Weekly Climate Change & Global Warming News Roundup #48

Posted on 1 December 2024 by BaerbelW, Doug Bostrom, John Hartz

A listing of 26 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, November 24, 2024 thru Sat, November 30, 2024.

Story of the week

Before Skeptical Science and an entire fleet of other websites devoted to combating and correcting climate misinformation and disinformation, there was Real Climate (“RC” for short and familiar). For our part we’ve been slinging climate facts for 17 years, but Real Climate team members Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, Rasmus Benestad, Stefan Rahmstorf and Eric Steig are still plugging away after a full 20 years on this often (chronically!) frustrating but entirely necessary beat.

Real Climate’s archive begins in November of 2004 with a glossary entry covering Antarctic Oscillation. Within a month, RC’s articles evolved to include critiques of inadequate terminology for communication of science to the public, detailed corrections of climate bunk promoted by high-profile journalists, and corrective guidance on common (and carefully fostered) misunderstandings about our role in warming Earth’s climate. In the intervening period between way-back-then and now the RC team have devoted extraordinary energy, persistence and— above all— patience to helping us all better understand our climate predicament, and how to escape it. Today the archives span hundreds of entries, each an informative nugget.

Reader comments captured at Real Climate over the course of decades are a sort of zoological garden of climate-denying critters; every species of “I don’t want to know” is represented. RC comments are a longitudinal record of chumpish parroting of denier talking points, exciting contrarian fads that have come and gone, a whole bag of bent “final nails in the coffin” of climate science avidly sought by the deluded, like phlogiston by alchemists. We read this record and are prompted to both cry and laugh— progress is impaled on and arrested by the ridiculous, after all. 

Many of us found our entry into the world of climate science and fake climate skepticism via Real Climate, including your author writing this article today. RC was in 2004 and remains now an excellent onramp to this fraught subject, managed by experts in the field.

Two decades is likely longer than anybody imagined would be necessary to agree on reversing our climate mess. But as Real Climate’s commemorative post points out, the Keeling Curve is still droopy when by now it ought to be arched— and that droop means continued acceleration of CO2 being added to Earth’s atmosphere by our culture. Clearly the struggle to create sensible and crisply effective public policy to abate our emissions is not over. Successful public policy is an outcome of political processes guided by evidence and not wishful thinking or narrow self-interest; so long as the machinery of politics is operating in a hallucinatory fog of climate fiction serving various needs we won’t get this situation under control. 

Are we truly still stuck in climate murk? Here at Skeptical Science we maintain access statistics for our collection of climate myth debunkings. Overwhelimingly search-driven, use of our resources serves as a rough proxy of what sort of claptrap on climate is circulating in the public mind. Today’s stats show the top five confusions to be Models are Unreliable (they’re very reliable), CO2 Effect Is Saturated (it’s not), It’s the Sun (it isn’t), 2nd law of thermodynamics Contradicts Greenhouse Theory (it doesn’t), and There Is No Consensus (there most certainly is). These are all ancient myths predating the inception of Real Climate— 20 years ago. We are indeed still mired in climate garbage, and really no suprise as this rubbish is promoted at industrial scale. 

It’s unfortunately the case that Real Climate needs to continue. We’d all like to hang up our hats but we’re not there yet. We salute Real Climate and also hope for their and our end to come sooner than later. Perhaps never before has redundancy been such a fond wish for the potentially disemployed— especially when most of us (including the RC crew) are volunteers!

That’s our sad Story of the Week. 

Stories we promoted this week, by publication date:

Before November 24

• Book: Climate Obstruction Across Europe, Climate Social Science Network and published via Oxford University Press, Brulle et al., editors. From denial to delay, climate obstruction tactics appear to be thriving.
• Trump Energy Secretary Pick Chris Wright Calls Climate Crisis Denier Bjorn Lomborg a `Friend`, DeSmog, Geoff Dembicki. With fracking CEO Wright tapped to serve in Trump’s cabinet, Lomborg’s influence could extend into the highest levels of the U.S. government.
• Twenty years of blogging in hindsight, RealClimate, Rasmus Benestad.
• Huge election year worldwide sees weakening commitment to act on climate crisis, Environment, The Guardian, Oliver Milman. “Among sweeping rightwing electoral victories across the globe, the ‘big loser of the elections has been climate’ “
• 350 Chicago Hosts Climate Misinformation Seminar In Association With Loyola, The Loyola Phoenix, Jackson Steffens. The event aimed to combat the spread of false information surrounding the climate crisis.
• Misinformation & Artificial Intelligence – An interview with John Cook, “Science, Technology & the Future” on Youtube, Adam Ford.