Just the Facts of Climate Science

This site was initially motivated by the theft of climate scientists' data which was reported throughout the corporate media, without any fact-checking, as "climategate" but this should quickly become an accessible reference for clarifying all popular misconceptions about climate science, and eventually, about environment and energy policy, too. The organizing principle of this website is that any conversation, from the most basic coordination of plans among friends to a national debate about climate policy, must be based on a shared set of facts, and a shared understanding of how those facts interact to be worthwhile. While the vested financial interests of corporations and their "think" tanks are fair game, the focus will not be on various parties' bias, but on objective facts, how they are proved, and the magnitude of uncertainty of what cannot be absolutely proved, but can be estimated within a well-defined range. One thing we know with absolute certainty is that carbon dioxide causes warming. The best online resource to explain how this came to be known is the historical account by Spencer Weart & American Institute of Physics of the origin of the Greenhouse Gas Theory in the nineteenth century, when scientists found evidence of a past ice age in the fossil record, and began trying to understand what had caused it. It's fascinating, and everybody should read as much of it as you can, but even that resource is likely to be challenging for anybody who is not at least a college physics student. So the first steps are to understand the electromagnetic spectrum and how heat transfer causes weather and climate in enough detail to understand The Greenhouse Theory, without unnecessary jargon.

COMMENT POLICY is simple.

1. Make your grammar and spelling respectable.
2. If you're asking me a question, ask your questions the smart way.
3. If you're arguing, do so civilly, and support your argument with original, authoritative sources of fact -- meaning peer reviewed science and official records -- not with op-eds. When I want Anthony Watts' opinion, or Roger Pielke, Jr's or Steve McIntyre's, I'll give it to them!