I recently stumbled upon Coby Beck's How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic (not to be confused with World-Changing's in-progress Universal Climate Change Skeptic Response), and I was floored by the level of attention to detail and thoroughness of research that Beck has done to create his "Layman's Guide" to the anthopogenic global warming debate. Beck is upfront about the fact that, in his words, "INACS (I Am Not a Climate Scientist)," but that he's just a regular guy looking for concise and informed ways to respond to common misconceptions about climate change. Topics Beck addresses include Skeptic catchphrases that we've all heard before, and with the holidays approaching you can all arm yourselves with quick and solid responses to Aunt Sally and Uncle Jerry's more annoying "rebuttals":

"There is no evidence of warming, only model predictions."

"There is no proof that CO2 is what's causing the temperature to go up."

"It was as warm during the Medieval Warm Period as it is today."

"All in all, a warmer climate seems like a good thing."

"Global warming began about 20,000 years ago; humans have nothing to do with it."

and my personal favorite,

"This alleged consensus is just because the scientists are afraid to speak out."

He's got quite a list of  topics, some of which are still a work in progress, but what's important about this site is that Beck isn't a scientist, and his writing is clear, concise, and accessible. The responses are short, with links to sources of data and further information, and the comments section (it's posted on his Blogger blog) have some interesting debates going.

...Which brings me to theclimateblog . What kind of content would you like to see here? News? Explanations of climatic processes and phenomena? Historical climate events? Politics? Book reviews? Everything? I attended a recent lecture by Bill Cronon, author of Changes in the Land, Nature's Metropolis, and other works of environmental history, and he had some interesting things to say about climate change as a "narrative," a story that we tell as a culture and how certain ways of telling that story are more valuable and effective than others. He brought up some scary points about society's collective attention span, and how after a while we stop caring about a story because we know the ending, essentially, and we've heard it all before. I've been struggling with this lately, and trying to think of ways that climate scientists (and journalists, and activists, and everyone else involved in the Climate Change Story) can continute to revitalize the issue so that interest is kept long enough for lasting change to occur. It's incredibly frightening to me to think that it may be inevitable for interest to wane before climate change can become a permanant part of our collective consciousness.