astroengine.com — As old media struggles to keep up with the tide of free and fast online media, cutbacks are inevitable. Cutting back on science journalists can widen the disconnect between scientists and the public, allowing pseudo-science room to manoeuvre. Bloggers have become an invaluable online tool to root out bad science and highlight crackpot theories.
Jul 14, 2009 View in Crawl 4
pacerxJul 15, 2009
You know, I don't know why people even say there's 'another side' to the climate change debate as though Pumping a large amount of CO2 into the atmosphere WILL affect the climate of the earth. One of the physical properties of CO2 is that it absorbs IR radiation at certain wavelengths and holds this energy in the atmosphere. If there is more CO2, it will absorb more energy. There is no debate about whether CO2 absorbs portions of the spectrum. There is no debate about whether more CO2 absorbs more energy.The 'other side' of the debate is obfuscation of these facts.There may be other factors that temporarily lower the temperatures, but more CO2 will ALWAYS absorb more energy*. It's just physics.There has also been comparisons of the amount of energy that gets radiated back to space from the Earth since the late 70s over the spectrum of wavelengths. There is noticeably less energy getting radiated back. This means that more energy is being absorbed in the atmosphere.Quite frankly, it's not the job of science journals to report junk science.*the only case is if CO2 reaches the saturation point where the entire range of wavelengths that CO2 can absorb is already fully absorbed, which is not already the case.
pacerxJul 15, 2009
Unfortuantely Carl Sagan is dead. He was one bad dude.
4antistupidJul 15, 2009
For many things, you simply can't make something understandable to someone that doesn't have the background. There's just too many things you have to understand first to even start.
sihayakaraJul 15, 2009
if you are a science blogger and you actually give a s**t about the misinformation spread everywhere, you wouldn't get your panties in a knot over the title of this article.you sound like a /b/tard :P
brianhatchJul 15, 2009
That's exactly what I was thinking when I wrote that.