From my perspective, a climate change news aggregator that has permanent links to Sen. Inhofe’s office and Anthony Watts and others is akin in my mind to the Jewish Anti-Defamation League home page containing prominent links to neo-Nazi websites. Yes, from a purely academic point of view, it may be necessary to reference such a site on occasion, but to have prominent permanent links to these sites implies that they have legitimate contributions to make to the debate. These two people certainly do not. I know Professor Dutton and his colleagues are thoughtful people; maybe they are unaware of how poor quality some of their blogroll links are? (Dutton teaches in New Zealand). I’ve seen serious charges of misrepresentation of evidence about both those people, in addition to probably several others on the blogroll. Several of these sites linked to have zero credibility in the debate in the United States.

If you want to expose people to policy questions about time tables or solutions or economic impact, fine… CCD can serve that worthy purpose. As mentioned, many of Climate Change Daily’s links are simply about economic policy issues, not basic science).

As I said, it’s really easy for a denialist to throw all sorts of random links to cast doubt on established science. It’s far harder for a denialist to show that there is no risk of global warming or that the harmful effects are unlikely. Again, I’ll refer you to my previous link about whether there is a consensus, especially the the Naomi Oreskes survey . Outside the arena of peer-reviewed journals, mainstream media frequently gives the impression that AGW is “controversial” or “unproven.”

Although consensus exists for the basic science, climate change solutions are highly controversial, and climate change predictive models are still highly controversial. But a good third of CCD’s blogroll links (in my rough estimate) are misinformation factories instead of being focused on legitimate areas of debate. Climateprogress.org and realclimate.org spend a lot of time pointing out the inaccuracies in many of these sources listed on their blogroll.

I think we are disagreeing here on what is ’signal’ and what is ‘noise’. I believe the ‘pro AGW’ contributors for Climate Change Daily are sincerely doing their best; it’s not their fault that they can find so little credible material. What they tend to find in its place is – ironically – denial: ‘Take those nasty facts away! We don’t want to hear any more of them!’

It’s sad, though, that you have to resort to the familiar and false ad hominem claims that AGW sceptics are all ‘corporate lobbyists’ rather than attempting to deal with the facts they present. ‘Guilt by association’ is hardly an objective judgement. And when did ‘famous’ become a perjorative?

For the record, I AM a scientist — at least, I have two degrees with ’science’ in their titles — which has no bearing whatever on my ability to evaluate good and bad arguments. The facts are reasonably clear, and any bright person should be able to make up their minds on the issue with no more than a little research and a modicum of common sense.

But this is getting off topic.

I am vaguely familiar with Climate Change Daily, another site by Denis Dutton (of A&L Daily fame). It’s a strange aggregator site; its blogroll mixes legitimate news sources with lots of unreliable sources. It attempts to “teach the controversy” by presenting two equal columns of pro and con. This is a false equivalency. I am no scientist but have a good idea of what kinds of sites are producing what kinds of information. The fact that CCD presents Realclimate.org (a prestigious science blog) in the same blogroll with Anthony Watts, Roger Pielke Jr., Heartland Institute and famous denialist Sen Inhofe suggests an inability to understand the scientific reliability of these sources. Instead of going to sites with a high signal to noise ratio, I would recommend choosing a site that vets its content more carefully. CCD is not such a site. It’s one thing to link to economists who disagree about the best mechanism to reduce GHG. It’s another thing to give credibility to “balanced approaches” that are repeated ad nauseum by corporate lobbyists.

By ‘bogged down’ do you mean refuted?

For a balanced approach to the AGW controversy see

http://climatedebatedaily.com/

See if you can spot which side is using the ad hominem arguments…

I just now did go back and get their complete scorecard and a company report (again, it appears that you have to download a separate pdf for each and every company – blech!!).

I agree that all this info would/should be more readily available via html pages and ONE pdf that has all the detailed company reports.

Accountability is a real problem with these green measures. Right now, standards about what constitutes a “carbon offset” for example are still nebulous and undefined. To my knowledge, there are not laws mandating this kind of eco-reporting.

A consumer group like climate counts doesn’t have the ability to demand documentation or accountability. All they can really do is to set uniform standards and use this as a basis to judge a company’s performance and hope that the companies involved make it easy to find this information.

BTW, there is a 22 point Climate Change PDF that is downloadable from each company’s profile. It goes into much greater detail that the summary you read.

With regard to your specific example about Amazon and DPWN, the text you read is from the HTML, not from the PDF. In the case of DPWN, on question 19 on the scorecard PDF, Climate counts says DPWN “Yes, supports non-voluntary federal- or international-level initiatives. Points awarded within each specified range for demonstrated depth of support in company materials (website, publications), via a public forum (press, speeches, advertising), and active lobbying”. On that same question #19, the Amazon position is marked as “No”. Really, the PDF scorecard explains things more thoroughly.

Let me say that when I first looked at the site, I made the same mistake of assuming that the brief remarks on the company profile page was the extent of Climate Counts’ analysis. This PDF scorecard is extremely easy to miss and requires that you fill out a captcha to download. Once again, the evil PDF strikes again!

Down with PDF! Long live the almighty HTML!

Seriously I don’t mean to beat up on PDF, but it’s interesting how often important information is hidden away on the PDF page. The best way to ensure some information won’t be read is to stick it on page 18 of some PDF page. (I know google indexes PDFs, but that doesn’t address the larger problem of browsability).

I have edited the original article to emphasize how to view the full report (and not just the abbreviated summary).

Not to start an anti climate change diatribe here (and I am not a climate change denialist) but I must say that the Climate Counts methodology is one of the silliest I have seen in some time.

Since you mentioned Amazons ranking I thought I would see why they ranked so low. Here is one item that cracked me up:

Policy Stance: 0/10 points. Climate Counts found no public information to suggest that Amazon.com supports public policy that addresses climate change.

Looking at a different category I see that the top ranked company (Deutsche Post World Net/DHL) had this as its score in the same element:

Policy Stance: 7/10 points. Climate Counts has found no public information to suggest that DPWN/DHL supports public policy consistent with climate protection.

So two companies with the exact same “policy stance” can be given such divergent scores as 0% and 70%. WTF?!?!?!?

Apart from the above mentioned inconsistency Climate Counts methodology is really only their judgement of public statements by all the companies it reviewed – it really does nothing to actually measure the actual footprint of a companies operations.