Twitter bot battles climate skeptics

I think a lot us could use more of these Twitter bots:

Tired of arguing with climate change deniers in 140 character quips, the programmer wrote a script to do it for him. Chatbot @AI_AGW scans Twitter every five minutes searching for hundreds of phrases that fit the usual denier argument paradigm. Then it serves them up some science . Those responses are pulled from a database of hundreds of responses that the software matches up to the argument made by the original tweeter. Those who claim the entire solar system is warming are met with something like: “Sun’s output has barely changed since 1970 & is irrelevant to recent global warming” followed by a link to corresponding climate research .

Can the auto-responding Twitter bots change hearts and minds? We’ll see. Still, I’m glad this function is able to provide an alternative viewpoint to these ill-founded arguments. After the jump is one example with the skeptic Q and A regarding the sun causing global warming.

Skeptic argument: “Over the past few hundred years, there has been a steady increase in the numbers of sunspots, at the time when the Earth has been getting warmer. The data suggests solar activity is influencing the global climate causing the world to get warmer.” ( BBC )

What the science says…

Select a level…	Basic		Intermediate		Advanced
The sun’s output has barely changed since 1970 and is irrelevant to recent global warming.

Until about 1960,  measurements by scientists showed that the brightness and warmth of the sun, as seen from the Earth, was increasing. Over the same period temperature measurements of the air and sea showed that the Earth was gradually warming. It was not surprising therefore for most scientists to put two and two together and assume that it was the warming sun that was increasing the temperature of our planet.

However, between the 1960s and the present day the same solar measurements have shown that the energy from the sun is now decreasing. At the same time temperature measurements of the air and sea have shown that the Earth has continued to become warmer and warmer.  This proves that it cannot be the sun; something else must be causing the Earth’s temperature to rise.

So, while there is no credible science indicating that the sun is causing the observed increase in global temperature, it’s the known physical properties of greenhouse gasses that provide us with the only real and measurable explanation of global warming.