Thw W is now in question

Deleterious Anthropogenic Warming of the Globe (DAWG).

When I tell people about, I say that as we move right to left down this tendentious acronym, things get a bit harder to prove.

G - I like to concede that the Earth is round; this gives me a lot of cred around lefties.
W - I usually concede that most data show warming. But that some question the methods and accuracy.
A - I claim this is the stinker. Mars seems to be warming, pari passu, with Earth -- with no SUVs.
D - Here I quote Bjorn Lomborg who believes 100% in A, W, and G. Yet he thinks there are far more pressing needs and that a longer growing season might be beneficial to humankind.

This is to avoid the dreaded "denier" label that Newsweek has now picked up (raise your hand if you're surprised). I'm a skeptic, says I. Then I bring up the epistemology of Karl Popper and their eyes glaze over and they ask "do you have any more beer?"

Of late, there have been two stunning hits at the W. The first is the superb original blog reporting from surfacestations.org who had visited the collection sites in California and found egregious contraventions of standards: some comical like an asphalt parking lot under the sensor or a barbecue pit 10 ft away. (DoS attack on link at present. No comment.)

Yesterday, I read about the Y2K bug (I think off Insty) and I looked forward (lazy blogger, no link, no biscuit!) to somebody else fleshing it out. Not to be overly literal, but how did the Y2K bug affect the 1998 readings?

Bill Hobbes does not answer that penetrating question. But he does catalog some of the issues, challenge the media to report on them, and call for new demands for accuracy.

The private sector ought to demand the government revamp the temperature sensor network, with input from private-sector scientists and academia, to ensure that the data being collected is accurate from each sensor, and broadly accurate as well. The problem is that even if such a network of sensors was installed today, its data would still be compared to historical data from the current problematic network. Still, is it too much to ask that global warming policy be based on facts that we can trust?

If you see some good links on flat earth, let me know. We can kill this Global Warming thing where it lives.

UPDATE: Don Luskin is on it,.

UPDATE II: I have always hoped this acronym would be picked up by a bigger blog. Last night I thought a catchy jingle might help. To the tune of Nat King Cole's "L-O-V-E:"

D, is Dallas under rising seas,
A, And it's caused by S-U-Vs,
W is Well determined
G, Grossly endothermic.
It's here. It's bad, It's caused by we.

Deleterious Anthropogenic Warming of the Globe Posted by jk at August 10, 2007 4:48 PM