Wood Romances

Stossel's second video about climate myths has been published, continuing the shoddy journalism from Stossel and fake research from Lueken. Like my last post , I'll first show the flaws in their rhetorical strategy and then look at the individual myths. I'll then provide a bibliography of the research on each of these subjects so you can check up on me and see for yourself that the actual research does not support Stossel's claims. Rhetorical Strategy The same tactics of taking soundbites out of context continues here. In fact, Stossel reuses the "We don't have decades; we hardly have years" clip in this video. He also shows a soundbite from news story reporting that extreme drought conditions exist in the northeastern US, but he doesn't show that the story attributes that to climate change (as his "myth" 5 claims). And he's still enlisting the help of Linnea Lueken to give scientific credibility to his shoddy journalism. But he adds an ...

Nikolov and Zeller (NZ) published a "paper" ( this link downloads a pdf) in 2011 that claims to be a "unified theory of climate" (UTC). In it they offer the nuts and bolts of what they think is an alternative explanation for the greenhouse effect (GHE). Instead of greenhouse gases (GHGs), they argue that long-term climate changes are caused by changes in atmospheric mass that change atmospheric pressure. The change in pressure changes global temperature via the ideal gas law (IGL). This concept has already been debunked ; there's nothing resembling a working theory here. They seem very confused about the fact that it's work applied to compressing a gas that increases its temperature (and pressure); at hydrostatic equilibrium, pressure doesn't do work, and so pressure doesn't cause temperature to increase. If pressure could perform work to increase temperature, it would violate conservation of energy. Pressure changes as a result of the work that inc...

The Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) was a period of time beginning about  56 million years ago. Temperatures increased by 5–8°C[2][4] due to a large excursion of biogenic carbon. Temperatures increased extremely rapidly, and the perturbation of the carbon cycle led to ocean acidification and a mass extinction of benthic foraminifera. The warming event occurred suddenly, geologically speaking, perhaps in as little as 10,000 years[12], making it one the most rapid warming events detected in the Phanerozoic. The extreme warmth of the PETM lasted less than 220,000 years before returning to "normal" Eocene levels. The rapid warming warming associated with the PETM makes it a good analogue to current warming, so I think it would be helpful to cover this event as well as provide a bibliography for further reading on the subject. The PETM is also one among many examples in geologic history where it is clear that GHGs were driving global warming. CO2 led (and drove) the warmin...

This is part 1. My response to part 2 is here . John Stossel is at it again. He has released a new video of shoddy journalism catering to the partisan rhetoric of the Heartland Institute. In this video, Stossel claims that scientists don't actually agree about the risks climate change poses to humanity, and he promises to correct claims made by "activists and the media" by identifying seven of their myths and showing why they are wrong. He promises that that this will come in two parts, correcting three of these "myths" in this video, and presumably four in the next. In this post, I'd like to see how he did. I'll begin with looking at his rhetorical strategy, and then look at each of the three myths he covers in this video. Rhetorical Strategy: Dishonest Soundbites + Partisan "Experts" Stossel's strategy here is to show soundbites from people sharing on news stories, documentaries, comedy routines, adds, and YouTube videos that he wants us...