Real Climate

Real Climate is the real deal, the bona fide no-spin zone on climate change. It never ceases to amaze me just how sophisticated the mass media have become at propaganda. As a result, the populace as a whole have a distorted view of what is really happening when it comes to climate change. Perceptions are slowly changing as reality has a way of getting peoples’ attention, eventually. One of the favorite ploys of the media is to position a credible climate scientist against one of the quickly dwindling group of contrarian climate scientists and stage a kind of faux debate for the ‘benefit’ of the viewing public. The effect is to introduce far more confusion and uncertainty that actually exists-to mischaracterize and forestall a call to action on the part of the general public. Guess what-it’s all over except the tears.

If I hadn’t seen so many times how the mass media get it wrong I wouldn’t believe it either. At some point, one is faced with the realization that the media have an agenda and the agenda doesn’t have much to do with facilitating public debate on critical public policy issues...kind of makes you wonder what is really going on.

Remember the ozone depletion debate, how it raged in the media for a few years and then just...disappeared. Media coverage and the debate surrounding the issue disappeared due to the results of experiments based on the Rowland-Molina (both won the Nobel Prize for their work) model of ozone depletion in the upper atmosphere, an event the media covered poorly or not at all. Unfortunately, such decisive evidence is not available for an issue as complex as climate change. However, climate models are continually being refined and circumstantial evidence continues to accumulate. So much so that only a very few credible climate scientists are in the ‘change is not happening--or--there is nothing we can do about it anyway, so why bother’ camp. These are the folks you see on television.

So, if you’re interested in what mainstream climate scientists think about climate change, got to Real Climate. Then, go buy yourself a bicycle and get used to it.