Good op-ed in the SJR today from Eric Grimm, about the perverse attempts to undermine the science of global warming. A lot of advocates of climate change (as opposed to myself, an opponent of climate change ;) ) claim to be speaking in favor of sound science. What I don't really hear, though, is any sense of what an unbiased test would look like (to their eyes). Instead, you get a lot of railing against the use of computer models, which strikes me as completely bizarre and about as anti-scientific as you can get. After all, a model is a tool--shaped by theory, tested against reality, and like anything else in science you get bonus points for being repeatable and consistent.
Anyway, I think at this point this is something of a futile effort. We're at the point where only a committed core of people don't think global warming is human caused* and requires action. Better to spend our time figuring out how to adapt and prevent.
With that in mind, here's a scary little nugget: Russia has long relied on its winters to repel all invaders. Turns out the warming world might be leaving Russia vulnerable, not just to the ghost of Napolean, but to the hantavirus, which survived this year's record setting warm winter, and thus got a boost in prevalence. It's still unclear whether the spread is due to the warm weather or cyclical mouse population dynamics, but it's certainly an example of the kinds of weird and unwanted results we expect to see as the world warms.
* One commenter at the SJR was in a huff over the use of "human caused." For the record, when I say "global warming is human caused," I mean "the unnatural part of global warming is human caused." No one's concerned about natural warming, because it happens on a timescale that's easy to adapt to.