Amateur Climate Change

The Skeptics: Why I believe in Climate Change (V)

Image taken from http://www.desmogblog.com

Credibility is very important in any discussion. Sometimes, the different arguments may be convincing but the opinion about the discusser turns the balance. And credibility is not something static as politicians, journalists and many other people know so well. It can be gained slowly, or lost very fast. In my case, I have a lot of doubts about climate skeptics because of important contradictions or even cherry-picking cases I find in their webs. Just one example (maybe later I will show more):

In this post in climaterealists they mention one paper to reinforce their position about the sun’s driving force in climate opposed to CO2. The paper studies the relationship between sun and climate but as read in the abstract of the paper:

In this work the surface temperature anomaly (dTG) and sunspot number (R_z) time series in the period 1880–2000 are studied with wavelet multi-resolution analysis. We found a very low correlation of 0.11 between dTG and R_z in the 11-yr-solar cycle band. A higher correlation of 0.66 is found in the ∼22-yr-band with zero lag correlation coefficient between dTG and R_z. Furthermore, the long-term trend is markedly different between dTG and R_z. This might occurs because of the long-term warming on the last century, which is attributed mainly to anthropogenic effects.

The authors do not consider this relationship meaningful in last century due to anthropogenic effects, i.e., CO2 and other greenhouse gases.

The explanation given in the post and  the paper are clearly contradictory, this is quite embarrassing for that webs credibility. And it is not the only case.

Nevertheless, I believe in climate change mainly for other reasons explained here, here, here and here this is just a confirmation.