After a few years hanging around on these climate-related blogs, you know that the *AGW* deniers (being specific, just so the denialati out there can't opt for the sympathy vote by accusing us of conflating you with Holocaust deniers) never, ever read whatever is on the end of a science-based link that you send them to. I find this behaviour to be perplexing, if not understandable with regards to human nature. I mean, honestly, who really wants to read stuff that runs contra to your carefully constructed world-view, built up over oh so many years? However, I regularly read wattsupwiththat, clinmateaudit, climateetc, et. al. (mostly out of a morbid curiousity, and I must admit to silently cussing a lot of the commenters for how selfish and clueless they are). So why won't these people read anything at all that you point them at? Stangely, when it comes to climate contrarianism, the intellectual traffic all seems to be one-way.
Sites like Skeptical Science do a great job of shooting down the common AGW denier canards, but the fake skeptics (synonymous with AGW denier, just so you know) don't frequent it all that much because, you know, Anthony tells them not to. For one thing, people don't always use their real names, and that's a Bad Thing
TM according to Willard, because... just where is the accountability then?111!111
But I digress. Call it a form of 'warmist' dissembling, or what have you. Instead of pointing Malcom or Westwall here at that boring Skeptical Science place, I've decided to provide my own compendium of climate-related links that, over the past 3 years or so, have turned me into a person who was wondering what 'Climategate' was all about into someone who is deeply concerned about the profound negative effect mankind is having on our climate. In no particular order, first up is an eye-opening presentation concerning the favourite AGW denier talking points about sea-level rise by Jerry Mitrovica of Harvard:
The Fingerprints of Sea Level Change
Then, a concise explanation of how we know that mankind is causing the recent unprecedented rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration:
Are the Increases in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Other Greenhouse Gases During the Industrial Era Caused by Human Activities?
Personally, though, I'm the most concerned with the effects that CO2 is going to wreak on rainfall and drought patterns, given that we are going to have about 9 billion mouths to feed come 2050 or so. As one of my favourite climate blog commenters Barton Paul Levenson so succinctly puts it (quoting from memory now): "100 years ago there was a column of 4kg of CO2 above every square meter of the Earth's surface. Now there is 6kg". Also from Real Climate, a fantastic guest post by Spencer Weart, in collaboration with Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, that explains why the greenhouse effect can never be saturated, as the AGW deniers are frequently wont to claim:
A Saturated Gassy Argument
To summarise: as the atmospheric CO2 concentration rises, long-wave IR radiation into space occurs from ever-inceasingly higher and colder altitudes, thus Earth cannot shed as much heat into space, and must warm as a result. Furthermore, two nail-it-to-the-mast articles that put to rest the misguided notion among AGW deniers that Steve McIntyre has 'debunked' the Mann/Bradley/Hughes 'hockey stick' of 1998:
Replication and due diligence, Wegman style
How Red are my Proxies?
And finally, one of my favourite climate-related articles of all time, by the distinguished statistician tamino:
Not Computer Models
A bit of historical data coupled with a simple two-box model tells it all.