|  The Best Climate Change Websites
It's supposed to hit 96 degrees here in Seattle today, so (scientific certainty or no) climate is on our minds, and I thought this would be a good opportunity for an overview of climate resources online.
If you're looking for a chance to educate yourself on climate change, get started on greening your own life (with all the normal caveats that lifestyle changes are nowhere near enough) or have facts and figures at hand to win your next argument with a denialist, you've got some tricky choices ahead of you. After all, the web has never been more overrun with climate "resources" and "guides," and most of them are lame -- some are downright inaccurate or misleading.
Here is a quick survey of some that I've found interesting and useful:
The best on-going coverage of climate change and related issues can be found at Real Climate. They're scientists, and sometimes the issues they find important to discuss can be complex, but they do an astonishingly good job of making cutting-edge climate science accessible. If they aren't on your RSS feed, they ought to be.
The Sustainability Insitute's Climate Challenge simulator is a great place to start. Using the analogy of a bathtub (the atmosphere) and a faucet (emissions), it lets you test various strategies for keeping atmospheric CO2 under dangerous levels (or, in the analogy's terms, the water from overflowing the tub). I found it a simple, yet helpful tool for visualizing the reality of our climate troubles.
Smart people all know the debate is over, but some others still haven't caught on. Our friends at Grist have provided a new home for ally Coby Beck's classic resource How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic. If you have a denialist in the family -- don't be ashamed, in North America, even the best families often do -- How to Talk will give you more than enough ammunition to ruin the next family outing by proving him decisively wrong.
Of course, if you want to know how your relative became a denialist in the first place, two amazing resources are worth a look: ExxonSecrets will let you follow the money that funded climate deception back to it sources, while DeSmog Blog debunks prominent denialists with funny, hard-hitting posts.
If you're looking to take some first steps towards lifestyle change (or encourage someone you know in that direction) the Live Earth site isn't bad at all. Ally David de Rothschild's Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook is excerpted there. They also offer the now-obligatory climate footprint calculator.
Of the big enviro groups' climate sites, I most prefer NRDC's, though if you want the real deal, there's just no substitute for taking a deep breath and plowing through the original reports at the IPCC. Yes, the IPCC reports were watered down by politicians, and the reality is we probably need to move much farther, much faster than the reports suggest, but they are still the closest thing the world has to a scientific consensus on the issues.
But enough about me: what climate sites would you recommend?
The Best Climate Change Websites
It's supposed to hit 96 degrees here in Seattle today, so (scientific certainty or no) climate is on our minds, and I thought this would be a good opportunity for an overview of climate resources online.
If you're looking for a chance to educate yourself on climate change, get started on greening your own life (with all the normal caveats that lifestyle changes are nowhere near enough) or have facts and figures at hand to win your next argument with a denialist, you've got some tricky choices ahead of you. After all, the web has never been more overrun with climate "resources" and "guides," and most of them are lame -- some are downright inaccurate or misleading.
Here is a quick survey of some that I've found interesting and useful:
The best on-going coverage of climate change and related issues can be found at Real Climate. They're scientists, and sometimes the issues they find important to discuss can be complex, but they do an astonishingly good job of making cutting-edge climate science accessible. If they aren't on your RSS feed, they ought to be.
The Sustainability Insitute's Climate Challenge simulator is a great place to start. Using the analogy of a bathtub (the atmosphere) and a faucet (emissions), it lets you test various strategies for keeping atmospheric CO2 under dangerous levels (or, in the analogy's terms, the water from overflowing the tub). I found it a simple, yet helpful tool for visualizing the reality of our climate troubles.
Smart people all know the debate is over, but some others still haven't caught on. Our friends at Grist have provided a new home for ally Coby Beck's classic resource How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic. If you have a denialist in the family -- don't be ashamed, in North America, even the best families often do -- How to Talk will give you more than enough ammunition to ruin the next family outing by proving him decisively wrong.
Of course, if you want to know how your relative became a denialist in the first place, two amazing resources are worth a look: ExxonSecrets will let you follow the money that funded climate deception back to it sources, while DeSmog Blog debunks prominent denialists with funny, hard-hitting posts.
If you're looking to take some first steps towards lifestyle change (or encourage someone you know in that direction) the Live Earth site isn't bad at all. Ally David de Rothschild's Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook is excerpted there. They also offer the now-obligatory climate footprint calculator.
Of the big enviro groups' climate sites, I most prefer NRDC's, though if you want the real deal, there's just no substitute for taking a deep breath and plowing through the original reports at the IPCC. Yes, the IPCC reports were watered down by politicians, and the reality is we probably need to move much farther, much faster than the reports suggest, but they are still the closest thing the world has to a scientific consensus on the issues.
But enough about me: what climate sites would you recommend?
http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/007016.html
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