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23 Mar, 43 tweets, 14 min read
In 2019, @sarahknapton wrote quite a bad climate denial piece for @Telegraph. I identified 30 climate myths in the thread below.

She's got another one there today. Let's see if it's any better this time, 1.5 years later. Debunking thread! 🧵
1) "The planet's average ground temperature has risen by around 1.62F (0.9C) during that period [since 1850]"

It's more like 1.2°C now.
telegraph.co.uk/environment/0/…
2) "Globally, the five warmest years on record have all occurred since 2010"

This is true, but a big understatement. The last 7 years were the 7 hottest on record, and the 8–9 hottest have happened since 2010.
data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabled…
3) "In 1990 the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted that temperatures would rise by 0.54F (0.3C) per decade."

Totally false, as I noted in 2019:
4) "Skeptics argue that the forecasts were too high because they relied too heavily on the impact of carbon dioxide (CO2)."

Yes, well skeptics are full of shit, aren't they?
5) "Yet, some scientists argue that the gas is not capable of producing the extreme temperature rises seen in recent decades."

Again, "some scientists" are full of shit.
6) "the IPCC estimated that human emissions are probably responsible for more than half of the observed increase in global average temperature from 1951 to 2010.

But it means a chunk of the rise is coming from elsewhere."

NO!! Another 2019 myth repeated:
7) "some experts argue that carbon dioxide is only a minor player in this atmospheric hothouse effect."

Every case of "some experts say [bullshit]" gets dinged.
8) "Ice cores from Antarctica show that at the end of recent ice ages, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere started to rise only after temperatures began to climb."

Another exact, word-for-word repeat from 2019:
9) "Scientists such as Dr Willie Soon, a solar astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, have shown that as water vapour rises, so does temperature."

How are you still citing Willie Soon?!? Another cut & paste from 2019:
10) A second myth from that sentence:
11) "CO2 is not powerful in that sense, the only thing it does in the system is make the planet greener. Carbon Dioxide is playing a minor role in the total greenhouse effect."

Double myth. On the 'greening':
skepticalscience.com/co2-plant-food…
12) On the 'minor role in the greenhouse effect':
science.sciencemag.org/content/330/60…
To be fair, the article then quotes @piersforster debunking this dumb myth, but why even raise it in the first place?
13) "academics claim it’s virtually impossible to get funded for work that disputes climate change through other channels."

Well that's a load of horseshit. It's true that it's difficult to get funding for bad science, but plenty of 'skeptics' have gotten bad papers published.
14) "BBC has admitted to Ofcom that the corporation is now biased on the matter because it no longer thinks there is a counter-argument."

WTF? No! BBC's correction was to stop including denier misinformation! That's not bias, that's journalistic accuracy!
theguardian.com/environment/20…
Which, by the way, is clearly a practice @sarahknapton should try to emulate. Bothsiderism ≠ unbiased. Or do you balance your stories about NASA by interviewing flat earthers because otherwise you're being biased?
15) "The MWP lasted from about 950 to 1250AD, and temperature records appear to show it was even hotter than today"

Nope! Another 2019 word-for-word repeat:
16) "But the period has caused a headache for climate scientists because clearly there was no upswell in carbon dioxide that could account for such swift warming."

17) "Likewise temperatures suddenly plummeted after the MWP, bringing a period of cooling known as the Little Ice Age"

18) "Skeptics claim such anomalies prove that Earth can quickly warm and cool even in the absence of carbon dioxide, and any warming today may be caused by similar natural events."
19) "one scientist at the IPCC - Jonathan Overpeck - wrote an email to a colleague claiming ‘we have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.’"

20) "Four years later a paper appeared in the journal Nature showing the famous ‘Hockey stick’ graph of temperature data for 1,000 years, in which both the MWP and the Little Ice Age had been smoothed away."

"Smoothed away" is ... I keep having to use this word, but:
21) "its creator Dr Michael Mann had spliced two datasets together"

Nope, another repeat:
22) "much of the data had been based American bristlecone pines ... The IPCC no longer includes the ‘Hockey stick’ chart in its reports."

23) "Some scientists believe that solar activity is more likely to influence today’s climate than carbon dioxide, and Dr Soon has compiled data..."

24) "“The Sun in my opinion is the primary driver of climate change,” he said. “The Sun is the big giant gorilla in the climate system.”"

Do you know what the opinion of a fossil-fuel funded climate denier is worth?
25) "The melting ice has led to global sea level rise of around eight inches since reliable record keeping began in 1880. It is projected to rise another one to four by 2100."

Inches?? Perhaps you mean feet?
26) "During the slight cooling period between 1943–1976, there were slightly more La Niña events than El Niño events, while the frequency is roughly equalised during the warming pause from 1998."

There was no warming pause, and the slowdown was due to a preponderance of La Niñas
Clarification - the first "inches" is correct, I was referring to the projection of "one to four," which would be defensible with a unit of feet, not inches.
27) "The linear relationship between rising carbon dioxide levels and global warming appeared undeniable, until temperature increases began to slow down after 1998 and remained relatively stable for a period of 15 years"

Inaccurate.
skepticalscience.com/trend.php
28) "Today, the hiatus is still disputed as it is picked up in the Met Office’s compilation of global temperatures but not in the records compiled by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Nasa."

No, this is just wrong.
metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcrut…
29) "Contents of the [Climategate] emails suggested scientists had been hiding or manipulating data"

Oh for fuck's sake.
30) "In one particularly damning email, CRU director Phil Jones said he had used ‘Mike’s Nature trick’ to ‘hide the decline’ in temperatures in the second half of the 20th century."

31) "The IPCC was also not exempt from misleading the public. The panel was forced to retract a statement in its 2007 report saying all Himalayan glaciers could melt entirely by 2035."

Did the @Telegraph pay twice for this same article?
32) "The figure traditionally cited that suggests 97 per cent of climate scientists agree that global warming is man-made was also found to be flawed."

33) "A survey which claimed to have questioned 10,257 academics, was found to have winnowed down the sample to just 77."

34) "A poll of 1854 members of the American Meteorological Society found the number who believe climate change to be man-made to be 52 per cent."

35) "“The 97 per cent figure is derived from two pieces of pseudoscience that would have embarrassed a homeopath,” said Viscount Ridley in his climate blog."

36) "Climate skeptics argue temperature records have been adjusted in recent years to make the past appear cooler and the present warmer"

This was a glaring, embarrassing mistake that @sarahknapton made in 2019 and just copied and pasted again in 2021:

37) "that [RSS] data has since been adjusted to show a warming trend.

The difference between recorded temperatures and reported temperatures has been slowly rising in recent years."

I just love the ignorant implication of scientific fraud here.
skepticalscience.com/how-data-adjus…
38) "Confusion peaked in 2014 when surface temperature readings said the year was the hottest on record, while satellites maintained it was cooler than 1998."

There we go! Error #30 in 2019 was Error #38 in 2021. I guess that somehow despite copying and pasting most of the 2019 @Telegraph piece, @sarahknapton managed to cram in a bunch of new errors in 2021.

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Dana Nuccitelli Profile picture
11 Nov
The @WSJopinion page loves to publish junk from Bjorn Lomborg downplaying the risks posed by the climate crisis. Today he argues that potentially catastrophic 3.5°C global warming is 'economically optimal' based on Nordhaus' research. A thread 🧵 discussing the many errors here:
1) It's based on one paper (a.k.a. "single study syndrome", a.k.a. "cherrypicking"). Lomborg tries to bolster his case by noting the paper is by Nordhaus who won a Nobel Prize. But Nordhaus has said high-warming scenarios are uncertain and dangerous.
theguardian.com/environment/cl…
2) The referenced paper was published in 2016, meaning it's 5 years out of date. The field of climate-economics has advanced dramatically during that time, yet Lomborg totally ignores the past 5 years of research. That's called cherrypicking.
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Dana Nuccitelli Profile picture
11 Aug
Quick thread 🧵 debunking the misinformation in @GeorgeWill's latest ignorant climate musings in @washingtonpost @PostOpinions (1/14):
The quote below is utter nonsense. The referenced "exhortations to combat climate change" are based on the authoritative @IPCC_CH report, and there have been plenty of climate policies proposed that are congruent with 'conservative agendas' like carbon pollution pricing (2/14)
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Dana Nuccitelli Profile picture
17 Feb
Let's do a thread 🧵 of conservatives falsely blaming Texas' power outages on wind turbines. To start, @DanCrenshawTX (who purely coincidentally happens to be the 3rd-highest House recipient of oil & gas money):
Montana's @RepRosendale, h/t to @karinkirk_mt:
Gov @GregAbbott_TX on @seanhannity @FoxNews, just a day after admitting that fossil gas, coal, and nuclear failures were largely to blame:
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Dana Nuccitelli Profile picture
3 Feb
The @POTUS Climate Crisis Executive Order last week was a BFD! In @CC_Yale today, I discuss how it was basically a mini #GreenNewDeal. Here's the article, and thread 🧵:
yaleclimateconnections.org/2021/02/bidens…
The #GreenNewDeal framework is largely a deployment of federal investments in clean technologies for lots of sectors, creating millions of jobs while cleaning up fossil fuel pollution and correcting environmental injustices. That's exactly the framework of the climate crisis EO!
On emissions reductions, the EO targets net-zero carbon from US electricity by 2035 and zero-emissions vehicles for federal, state, local fleets, including @USPS trucks. Those two sectors account for close to 60% of US carbon pollution.
Read 13 tweets
Dana Nuccitelli Profile picture
30 Nov 20
It's conservatives' favorite argument against climate solutions: "it's too expensive!"

In @CC_Yale I tried to do a definitive debunking of this myth, also available @skepticscience short URL sks.to/costs. Please read it, then this thread (1/10)
yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/11/fighti…
First, HUGE CAVEAT: we can't put a $$$ value on many climate crisis consequences like suffering, trauma, extinctions, lost biodiversity, etc., as advocates like @GretaThunberg & @sunrisemvmt remind us. Nevertheless, the economic case for climate solutions is a no-brainer (2/10)
Opponents like Trump & @NikkiHaley argue against a #GreenNewDeal by inflating its cost and ignoring its benefits. They're only doing the first half of a cost-benefit analysis, and doing it in a bad faith, bullshit way (e.g. see the thread below) (3/10)
Read 10 tweets
Dana Nuccitelli Profile picture
28 Oct 20
So, what's happening in the Arctic now is kinda crazy, but also really important to extreme weather throughout the northern hemisphere. Read my piece today on the topic, but here's a Thread:
yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/10/warmer…
First, the basics: there's a "positive feedback" (positive in the negative sense, Trump would say), like a mutually destructive relationship. Warming melts ice & snow in the Arctic, making the surface less reflective -> absorb more sunlight -> warm more -> melt more -> etc. 1/n
As a result, the Arctic is warming 3x faster than the global avg, and sea ice is disappearing fast. Half Arctic sea ice surface area and 75% of its volume disappeared in summers between 1979 and 2012.

Then 2014–2020 were the 7 hottest years on record. Guess what happened? 2/n
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