Unfortunately, he still doesn’t understand the gist of our complaint, but he does clarify a few issues.

I do not, and did not, deny the established fact — arrived at by extensive scientific research — that average global temperatures have increased by a bit less than one Celsius degree. My commentary was concerned with my amateur confusion about the myriad of natural phenomena that obviously bring about worldwide climate changes and whether we can properly assign the cause to anthropogenic influences. Yes, I’m aware of the massive release of energy — mostly heat — that we’ve produced by exhuming and burning oil, natural gas, and coal. We’ve also attacked forests and turned them into fuel by converting them into paper at further energy expense, paper that is also burned, in turn. My remarks, again, are directed at the complexity of determining whether this GW is anthropogenic or not. I do not deny that possibility. In fact, I accept it as quite probable.

One of the more pernicious tactics of denialists is not to outright take a stand and reject an established point, but to instead raise unfounded doubts where there are none of any significance — to falsely state that there is a respectable middle ground of “the scientists aren’t sure” when the science hammers home over and over again that they are pretty damned sure.

Yes, it is quite probable that global warming has a significant anthropogenic component. About as probable as the idea that HIV causes AIDS, species diversity is driven by evolutionary processes, and that the world is round. Sure, someone could reasonably suggest that there are other agents that cause AIDS (so find them already and show us the evidence), or that there are new mechanisms that drive biological change (yes, please, show us some evidence), or that…OK, no one is going to contradict the fact that the world is an oblate spheroid. What we know is that humans are pumping out greenhouse gases released from sequestered carbon sources and gently tipping the balance of solar heat retention towards more warming. No, Randi, we aren’t burning fuel and heating the world directly. That’s a red herring.

I’m a bit disappointed. This was a case where Randi ought to have either a) admitted simple error, or b) recused himself from the argument, citing a lack of information. Either would have been the responsible thing to do.

Or he could have taken Phil Plait’s approach, and simply linked to a site that beautifully refutes the AGW deniers chief claims. Randi chastises me for not consulting him before posting his criticisms, but I wonder if Randi ran his not-pology by Phil before posting it?

The one thing he shouldn’t have done is reaffirm doubt where it is undeserved. It reminds me of all the apologists for Uri Geller, who like to say that although he sometimes does a few tricks when he’s nervous, his powers are real whenever Randi isn’t around to intimidate him. Of course it’s possible — it’s just that the case has been made so strongly that Geller is a phony and that human CO₂ emissions contribute to global warming that it’s disingenuous to argue for the exceedingly unlikely…especially when there are special interests out there eager to grab onto that glimmer of false doubt to continue to promote more self-destructive behavior.

I stand by my earlier objection. Randi has made a mistake that will make denialists gleeful, and his current denial of denial doesn’t change a thing.

But here, on a lighter note:

I should add that conditions that make the frigid north a bit more tropical do not bode well for Randi’s home in Florida.

This is so disappointing: James Randi joins the ranks of the climate change denialists, and he does so on the basis of an extremely poor argument. I know, he’s a professional skeptic about everything, but skeptics must have some standard for evidence … a standard which the climatologists have reached, while the denialists have not. Here’s the core of Randi’s dissent from the scientific consensus.

I strongly suspect that The Petition Project may be valid. I base this on my admittedly rudimentary knowledge of the facts about planet Earth. This ball of hot rock and salt water spins on its axis and rotates about the Sun with the expected regularity, though we’re aware that lunar tides, solar wind, galactic space dust and geomagnetic storms have cooled the planet by about one centigrade degree in the past 150 years. The myriad of influences that act upon Earth are so many and so variable — though not capricious — that I believe we simply cannot formulate an equation into which we enter variables and come up with an answer. A living planet will continually belch, vibrate, fracture, and crumble a bit, and thus defeat an accurate equation. Please note that this my amateur opinion, based on probably insufficient data.

At least he’s self-aware enoughto realize that he has come to this conclusion on the basis of his personal ignorance. He has two main reasons otherwise to disagree with the idea of anthropogenic global warming.

One is the idea that climate is such a complex product of multiple phenomena that we should expect significant variation, and that no one could possibly have a single equation that describes it all. This is entirely true, but irrelevant. Climate scientists have collected a huge amount of data, and the confounding fact that none of them would ever deny is that it’s variable, messy, noisy stuff, with loads of daily/monthly/yearly variation, and it has to be analyzed to find long term trends. The consensus was not reached because somebody had a magic formula that predicts a result. It was reached because a body of observation has shown long term change is going on. They are aware of possible causes, and they know that phenomena like volcanic eruptions and cyclic changes in solar activity effect climate…and our situation is not sufficiently explained by those kinds of natural events. One consistent change is a rise in CO₂ levels, and we know that we are digging up huge reservoirs of sequestered carbon and dumping it into the atmosphere.

The other source of his skepticism is one that Randi should have been more skeptical about: the Petition Project. This is a project by the denialists to gather enough signatures to show a strong pattern of dissent in the scientific community (Sound familiar? The Discovery Institute has done exactly the same thing with their “Dissent from Darwin” list). They’ve got over 30,000 signatures so far! However, as with the Discovery Institute’s list, only a tiny proportion of the signatories are actually qualified, and their procedure for gathering signatures is incredibly sloppy and prone to accumulate fake names. This is what you’d expect: they don’t want quality control, for the propaganda purposes of this list, all you need is quantity.

The source for this list is also rather dubious. It comes from a tiny team of crank scientists operating out of a ‘think tank’ in a small town in Oregon.

I would expect Randi to have given his denialist sources the same degree of critical analysis that he gave to the conclusions of the IPCC. Maybe he did, since he has shown no understanding of the IPCC determinations at all, but I think it was a gross mistake on his part to therefore charge in and decide on the basis of his rudimentary knowledge that maybe the fringe cranks were right.

This is the debate on climate change: scientist with the evidence vs. shouting loonie with wild accusations of conspiracy. Listen to the very end when Watson sums up the other guy perfectly.

This is an excellent response to the furious and unfounded assertions of the right-wing denialists that have followed from the release of private email by climate change scientists.

I’m on a couple of private mailing lists where we exchange views on evolution, and <shock horror> we actually argue it times, and sometimes even disagree heatedly with one another. That climate scientists hash out disagreements in vigorous private debate is no surprise, and no sign of either a conspiracy or intent to mislead the public.

There is a gigantic pile of plastic garbage accumulating in the Pacific. It’s concentrate by currents into one floating mass of bottle caps and detergent bottles and nylon debris, all slowly breaking apart into broken bits of polymer bobbing in the waves. It’s not good for marine life.

One of the most vivid demonstrations of the effects is this series of photos of dead sea birds on remote Midway Island — all completely undisturbed and photographed as found. Finding decayed bird corpses reduced to bones and feathers isn’t at all surprising, but some of these remains look more like the remains of some colorful cyborg, half biological and half industrial byproduct.

Recycle, and buy food that doesn’t use plastic packaging. That stuff is a poison pill for the environment.