Oh man, I put my boiler room question to vote by mistake, reply here.?

Question

Comments welcome.

Bob gets best answer.

Answer 1

I've noticed the same thing. One day there will be a half dozen questions about warming on Mars, the next day it will be the '800 year lag', the next day it will be solar warming.

I think the right wing blogosphere is mostly to blame. For example, the infamous DailyTech article which tried to argue that global warming had been 'wiped out' because of a cold January. Suddenly every global warming denier was linking this article and/or making this argument. Many continue to make this argument even though global temperatures have returned to their pre-La Nina levels.

The crux of it is that there aren't very many arguments the deniers can make. It's either 'it's all a conspiracy', 'the data is wrong', 'the sun is to blame', or 'consensus has been wrong before'. They pretty much just cycle between these lame arguments, and every so often a bunch of them make the same argument on the same day, usually because they saw it in some right-wing blog.

At least they've managed to come up with a new one now, claiming that we're incapable of reducing our emissions sufficiently. This is another ridiculous argument (for example, in the 2nd link you provide, the asker claims that "You could cover the whole southwest of the US with solar panels and still not have enough production to replace 3 percent let alone 15 pecent", which is patently absurd, as the link below illustrates), but at least it's a new one.

Answer 2

He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: "The horror! The horror!"

We'll all try to cope.