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Who can you trust, if not your own advisers? That is the inconvenient question raised by NYT reporter Andrew C. Revkin in a newly published article that reveals the extent to which the coal and oil industries ignored the advice of their own scientists on the question of climate change.

The Global Climate Coalition (how’s that for an Orwellian name?), an industry-funded group that spent years vehemently contesting any evidence linking anthropogenic activity to climate change, found itself in the uncomfortable position of rejecting its own experts’ recommendations when they reached the inevitable conclusion that the contribution of manmade greenhouse gas emissions to climate change “could not be refuted.”

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Not to let himself be outdone by his skeptic colleague in good standing, George Will, The Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby has penned an equally vacuous and misinformed column posing the thought-provoking question: “Where’s global warming?”

It’s hard to know where to start. From the outset, I was tempted to just rehash my previous post about “global cooling” and climate variability or to mine Mitchell’s George Will debunking posts for some good material. (This line, in particular, answers his question rather well: “In other words: if you want to see climate change, look out the window.”) In light of some of his other claims about global temperatures and Arctic sea ice, however, I thought I’d do some of my own snooping.

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To say that climate know-nothings like to pick and choose when it comes to interpreting the science is something of an understatement.

“Prominent” – and I use the term loosely here – deniers like Dennis Avery, S. Fred Singer and Michael Asher have made a cottage industry of playing loose with the numbers and extrapolating short-term trends to make sweeping statements about global warming (see: one unusually cold month means global warming is over).

Which is why I have a feeling this study (sub. required), entitled “Has the climate recently shifted?” (which will be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Geophysical Research Letters), will catch many a denier’s eye. The main takeaway from this study is that there is a significant degree of variability in our climate system, and that, even though we may be entering a period of warming “stasis,” long-term trends still point to significant warming due to anthropogenic forcing.

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The new face of the European Union also happens to be the old face of global warming skepticism. Vaclav Klaus, the president of the Czech Republic and, since January 1, the rotating president of the European Union, will give a keynote speech at the second annual International Conference on Climate Change in New York.

The widely ridiculed skeptic gathering, which last year drew only a few hundred attendees (and no actual climate scientists), will address the “question” of whether global warming “was ever really a crisis,” according to its lead sponsor, The Heartland Institute.

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Our 2008 analysis of global warming misinformation finds that there was a very significant upswing in online activity.

This trend should be troubling to US policymakers and campaigners wanting to implement new greenhouse gas reduction strategies.

Here’s the stats we’ve generated as evidence of our conclusions (click any of the images to enlarge):

“Global Warming” + hoax

A Google blog search for the term “global warming” + hoax between January 1, 2008 and January 1, 2009 reports 49,719 page results. The same search for the previous year reports only 22,077 page results.

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Today we’ll look at two more of the (supposedly) bullet-proof points in Joanne Nova’s “The Skeptics Handbook.”

“Professional Speaker” turned climate expert Nova rehashes two of the more common skeptic talking points, that: the world is no longer warming and the Vostok ice core record proves that rising CO2 emissions are not the cause of warmer temperatures.

As skeptics love to point out, the planet has not appreciably warmed over the last decade even though carbon dioxide levels have greatly increased. While it’s true that surface temperatures have remained essentially flat over the last 10 years, taking such a myopic view of the temperature record obscures the much more meaningful long-term trends.

Indeed, if you look at the temperature record of the last 150 years or so, you’ll find it extremely hard not to notice the obvious upward trend (there’s a reason why the nine warmest years on record have all occurred between 1998 and 2008).