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Last updated: September 2014

Cartoon by xkcd – ‘Duty Calls’.

There are currently hundreds of blogs that discuss climate science, and in particular man-made global warming theory. Unfortunately, a side-effect of the nature of blogging is that many of the people who feel passionate enough to blog about a topic, happen to have very strong opinions on that topic. This means that reading blogs can lead you to very one-sided views on these topics.

This isn’t helped by the commenters on such blogs who often are quite aggressive and/or offensive in stating their opinions. Many bloggers use comment moderation on their blogs, deleting or editing to try and make the comments less offensive. However, this often leads to accusations of censorship, if the commenter believes their comment was valid.

All of this makes venturing into the “blogosphere” to learn about man-made global warming quite intimidating. It can be quite tempting to confine your reading to the bloggers who you agree with:

That was excellently observed, say I, when I read a passage in an author, where his opinion agrees with mine. When we differ, there I pronounce him to be mistaken. – Jonathan Swift, Volume 14, p174

This is a bad idea, as there is a lot of useful information and analysis available on the blogs that you will miss out on if you only read the blogs that you agree with. We recommend reading blogs from several different viewpoints, particularly those you might initially disagree with.

There seem to be two polar extremes to climate blogs:

  • Those who believe that global warming is a man-made crisis, and that anyone who disagrees is a “climate denier” or “climate contrarian”, and probably in the pay of the fossil fuel industry
  • Those who believe that global warming is a natural process, and that anyone who disagrees is a “climate alarmist” or “climate activist”, and probably in the pay of the green energy industry

However, we think most of the more interesting blogs lie on the scale of views in between those extremes.

We’ve loosely categorised some of the more popular climate blogs into five groups, depending on whereabouts on this scale their opinion seems to mainly lie. This list is in no way complete!

If you feel we have misrepresented the views of any of these bloggers, please let us know and we can modify the description accordingly.

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10 Thoughts on Links
    Lucky
    1 Mar 2014
    2:17pm

    Where are you placing -globalwarmingsolved?

    Reply
    Ronan Connolly
    3 Mar 2014
    10:39pm

    Hi Lucky,
    If you read the Start here page, you’ll probably find your answer.
    But, since you ask, before we started actively researching man-made global warming theory (early 2009), we would probably have been in the middle of the spectrum (i.e., 2-4).

    We always thought that the climate naturally changes from decade to decade and century to century, and that at least some of the reported “global warming” was probably just a natural phenomenon. But, a lot of scientists supported the man-made global warming theory, and we felt it was plausible that some of the “unusual global warming” could be due to the increasing CO2 concentrations as was claimed.

    However, when we started looking in detail at the science behind man-made global warming theory, the data wasn’t matching up with the theory. We are strong advocates of the “data is king” approach to science, i.e., if the data contradicts your theory then there is something wrong with your theory: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b240PGCMwV0

    Our results which we present in our eight papers tell us that:
    1) The “unusual global warming” since the Industrial Revolution has been substantially overestimated, and that the 1980s-2000s “global warming” was matched by the 1950s-1970s “global cooling”, i.e., it was just as warm in the 1940s as it was in the 2000s.
    2) Increasing the concentration of “greenhouse gases” in the atmosphere does not alter global temperatures, after all.

    So, we believe that the experimental data supports “5” on the scale above.

    Have a look at our Start here page for a more detailed explanation (you can also find links to our 8 papers there).

    Does that answer your question?

    Reply
      Lucky
      11 Mar 2014
      2:50pm

      Yes. Thank you.

      Reply
    Kevin Marshall
    20 Sep 2014
    6:29pm

    Ronan, I probably end up looking like I am a category 5, but I could as easily be in 4. It does not really bother me either way. As a non-scientist, I approach the topic from the aspect of finding good quality evidence for a non-trivial and adverse problem. Further, if there is a problem, is there a set of policies that will improve deliver a better state of affairs than doing nothing. I think the evidence is pretty shallow on the “science” side and from a policy point of view (where I would claim an understanding beyond any climatologist) it is even worse.

    Reply
      Ronan Connolly
      21 Sep 2014
      10:46am

      Thanks for your feedback, Kevin! I’ve moved your blog to category 4.

      Reply
    hunter
    13 Sep 2015
    1:23pm

    Great approach. I am probably in a 3 or 4 position on this:
    We are changing the climate by land use, CO2, particulates, etc.
    The climate is highly changeable without our contributions.
    The changes our forcings are causing are not dangerous, unusual or extreme.
    The data does not support the crisis culture.
    The data has been massaged heavily to support the consensus view.
    Predictions of apocalypse/global disaster have been universally wrong and wasteful.

    Reply
    Richard Mallett
    6 Oct 2015
    3:47pm

    Your scale is very helpful, thank you. Perhaps you could change HotWhopper to HotWhopper (Miriam O’Brien, a.k.a. “Sou”)

    Reply

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