Monday, February 25, 2008

Climate Debate Daily

I'm not very impressed by the new Climate Debate Daily site that purports to offer both consensus and dissenting views on global warming. The former consists of reports on peer-reviewed papers in the scientific literature, and the latter seems to consist of items like an experiment by some kid and his dad (who admits he has the attention span of an 8-year old).

(The dad, that is. Not the kid.)

I've been thinking that there ought to be a 24-hour cable channel called "Climate Daily" or something. It would be staffed by climatologists who would work in one- or two-hour shifts, and take phone calls from anywhere in the country. Let all the skeptics and yahoos call in with their disproved ideas and wacked-out theories, and the scientists could patiently give them an explanation of why they are wrong. The show would never end, of course, as the skeptics rehashed the same old points over and over again, but it might demonstrate a little about the scientific method and add something to the debate. And the climatologists could make some extra walking-around money.

2 comments:

John Mashey said...

I've long liked Denis Dutton's website Arts and Letters Daily. It's too bad to see him go of the deep end into turf he clearly doesn't understand very well.

Physics & math tend tobe more useful in this discussion than philosophy.

It does have a good list of URLs, though.

Sigh.

j.gabel said...

the way the site is described suggests it's set up to embarrass skeptics - if the goal is to be current on the debate, the editor may be hard-pressed to find enough peer-reviewed material by AGW skeptics to keep pace with AGW proponents, since their research is currently favored by the foundations, probably at a ratio of 10 to 1 - saddest of all is that too much research is conducted to prove a prescribed agenda rather than challenge the null hypothesis - nevertheless, when it does come out it makes its case - e.g., http://notrickszone.com/2013/03/25/flagship-daily-die-welt-stuns-germany-scientists-warn-of-ice-age-cites-new-peer-reviewed-russian-study/