“The Web's most influential climate-change blogger” — Time Magazine A Project of Center for American Progress Action Fund
File this under “Self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Below is an excerpt from the Friday Greenwire story (subs. req’d), “Treaty, regs won’t solve warming problems, former NYT reporter warns.”
If the quotes are inaccurate or incomplete, the former lead climate reporter for the paper of record can clarify and/or expand upon his remarks here or at DotEarth:
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NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) has released a draft paper “Current GISS Global Surface Temperature Analysis.” It is a must read for warming junkies, but, as James Hansen notes in an e-mail, “it is too long for popular use.” So Hansen offers “some of the main conclusions,” as well as a description of a rather shocking hack of the GISS website (all of which is reprinted below). The first conclusion is:
1) Contrary to popular belief, global warming has not stopped nor has the rate of warming even slowed down in the past decade (Figure 21).
The paper predicts a new record 12-month global temperature record, and says the calendar year (2010) is likely to set the global surface temperature unless “El Nino conditions deteriorate rapidly by mid 2010 into La Nina conditions” [as happened in 2007]. NASA notes:
This new record temperature will be particularly meaningful because it occurs when the recent minimum of solar irradiance (http://www.pmodwrc.ch/ pmod.php?topic=tsi/ composite/ SolarConstant) is having its maximum cooling effect.
Here are the rest of the summary conclusions of the paper, from Hansen’s email (I put in one relevant figure):
In the United States, designated bike lanes and a growing bike culture have started to garner mainstream attention. And bicyclists now have a giant ally—Google, as explained in this CAP repost.
Up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation; this means that the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state, not necessarily producing gradual changes between the current and the future situation.
This statement in the 2007 IPCC is “basically correct but poorly written, and bizarrely referenced,” as tropical forest researcher Simon Lewis told the BBC in January.
That didn’t stop the anti-science blogosphere from spinning this into another phony “gate,” as ClimateSafety explained in an excellent post, “AmazonGate: how the denial lobby and a dishonest journalist created a fake scandal.”
Recently, the anti-science crowd, from FoxNews to Anthony Watts, has been crowing about a new study that supposedly shows the IPCC paragraph was wrong. But a major statement by 19 top U.S., U.K., and Brazilian scientists who “conduct research on Amazon forests, climate, and/or fire,” thoroughly debunks that notion:
The details of the bipartisan climate and clean energy bill are starting to leak out (see here).
Twenty environmental, climate and progressive groups — including the one I work for — have issued a statement “in reaction to a late Thursday meeting with Senator John Kerry”:
Aluminum Maker Eyes Solar Industry
Alcoa, the aluminum giant, is testing a new type of solar technology that the company said it believed will lower the cost of renewable energy.
One of the best climate websites is SkepticalScience.com run by physicist John Cook.
The goal of SkepticalScience is to “explain what peer reviewed science has to say about global warming” and answer the most common questions and objections raised both by the well-meaning doubters and the not-well-meaning disinformers.
Fortunately for us, Cook is blogging more now, which means I’ll be quoting him more (see “How we know global warming is happening — Skeptical Science explains: It’s the oceans!“). Cook has a good discussion of a recent paper, “Denialism: what is it and how should scientists respond?” that I excerpt below:
A new report finds that comprehensive climate and clean energy legislation is needed to protect Americans from oil shock. Brad Johnson has the details in this repost.
A large majority of Americans continue to understand that global warming is real. In fact, warming of the climate system in recent decades is “unequivocal,” according to comprehensive analysis of observations around the globe by the world’s leading climate scientists.
Most of the decline in understanding seen in recent polls comes from conservatives and conservative-leaning independents, who are incessantly hammered with the myth of “global cooling” in the conservative and mainstream media.
And, in a rather unfortunate coincidence, we’ve seen below average temperatures in parts of the United States over the last two years. That’s particularly true during this uber-warm winter.
Accuweather’s Joe Bastardi admitted earlier this month: “Earth continues warmest winter since satellite measurements started.” NASA’s recently released data confirms that December through February was the second warmest globally (after winter 2006/2007) since records began in 1880. NASA also released a figure showing where it was warm and where it was cold around the globe. Guess where it was cold:
There is one question that no one who denies manmade climate change wants to answer: what would it take to persuade you? In most cases the answer seems to be nothing. No level of evidence can shake the growing belief that climate science is a giant conspiracy codded up by boffins and governments to tax and control us.
That’s UK Guardian columnist George Monbiot. I don’t agree with everything he says — and I don’t think the primary goal should be to persuade the unpersuadable.
But I am trying to bring you a variety of views on this central problem of climate science messaging, and this is a pretty good piece, which I excerpt below:
[UPDATE: Sometimes blog posts have pretty immediate impacts -- see here.]
I am not comfortable with the the idea that a meeting set up to create guidelines governing geoengineering field tests might be used to help raise funds for geoengineering field tests, without the informed consent of meeting participants. I am also concerned with possible conflicts of interest related to the profit motive.
That’s from an e-mail that climatologist and geo-engineering expert Ken Caldeira sent me this week.
I had heard last week that Caldeira was not going to the star-studded “Asilomar International Conference on Climate Intervention Technologies” — the “Woodstock” of geo-engineering. I asked him why. I reprint his full email below, along with concerns raised to me by geo-engineering expert David Keith.
Frankly, I think all of the conference attendees (and they include some of the biggest names in climate, full list here) need to ask themselves whether they are helping to legitimize — and thereby ultimately helping to raise funds for — a nonprofit that will not unequivocally forswear funding geo-engineering experiments, a nonprofit that is closely tied to the financing efforts of a for-profit company that has already started pursuing dubious geo-engineering schemes.
Report says China is squeezing U.S. firms out of its massive wind-power market
U.S. companies are getting squeezed out of the big Chinese wind-power market even as Dallas investors are bringing Chinese firms here via a big wind farm in Texas, according to a new industry report.
“They’ve used every measure you could possibly think of to enhance production of renewable energy equipment in China,” said report author Alan Wolff of the trade law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf LLP.
Conservatives have been doing their best to torpedo the movement toward clean energy by hyping controversies about the science behind global warming. But whatever effect these controversies have had on the public they do not appear to have undermined support for action on the clean energy front, as polling expert and CAP Senior Fellow Ruy Teixeira explains.
The natural gas lobby is fighting coal, whose lobbyists “continue to stress the economic advantages of the fossil fuel.” And the coal companies are trashing natural gas in advertisements as having “higher and more volatile prices” (click here).
But even as they lobby hard to prevent passage of comprehensive clean energy jobs and climate legislation, some oil and coal companies are making investments to prepare themselves for a coming clean energy, low carbon future. Purchasing natural gas, they think, may be the way out. Guest blogger, Sarah Collins, an intern with CAP’s Energy Opportunity team, has the story:
Last month, NOAA reported the world experienced the warmest January in both satellite records. And NOAA just reported (here) that it was the second warmest February on record in both satellite records. Now the UAH satellite data shows record-smashing temperatures in the first half of March:
The yellow line is the 20-year average temperature, the purple line is of the 20-year “record highs,” and the green line is the 2010 temperature [make your own chart here -- I have a more complete, though messier, graph at the end].
Other temperature datasets show slightly different results. For NASA, January and February were tied for the second hottest on record.
Of course, there never was any global cooling — see Must-read AP story: Statisticians reject global cooling; Caldeira — “To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous.” The vast majority of the warming went right where scientists had predicted — into the oceans (see “How we know global warming is happening” and below).
In fact, 2005 was the hottest year on record in both NOAA’s and NASA’s dataset — and in every dataset, the 200os were the hottest decade on record. But the anti-science crowd loves their much-vaunted satellite data. Why?
UPDATE: More details at the end.
Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), John Kerry (D-MA), and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) “shared an eight-page outline of their draft legislation that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions over the next four decades, including provisions to limit business costs while ramping up domestic production of oil, gas and nuclear power.”
E&E News PM (subs. req’d) reported the following details of the bill, which leaked out from the Senators “closed-door meeting with major industry groups they are courting”:
“The Government of Canada has cut virtually all programs aimed at funding climate science. I get the sense that they feel that science is a nuisance. They ignore science in their decision making; they muzzle their federal scientists by imposing impossible media-contact regulations; they cut programs designed to allow scientists to develop knowledge.” — Andrew Weaver, professor at the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, University of Victoria, and Canada Research Chair
That’s from “Troubling Evidence,” a startling new report from the Climate Action Network Canada. It was “released just days after a federal budget that effectively slashed funding for university-based climate science.”
A CAN Canada spokesman says of the Harper government, “they’re putting climate deniers in key oversight positions over research, and they’re reducing funding in key areas.… It’s almost as though they’re making a conscious attempt to bury the truth.”
The muzzling is quite extensive, as the Montreal Gazette reported Monday:
After analyzing all of the data from 2009 survey, Krosnick and his Stanford colleagues concluded that the 5-point drop in the percentage of Americans who believe in the global warming was largely made up of people who both mistrust scientists and think that the Earth is cooling down naturally.
We’re subjected to many dubious claims about science messaging — stuff like, “the world’s scientists are struggling with the unsettling feeling that the more they talk about climate change, the less progress they make.”
Scientists may have that feeling, but it has little basis in fact. You can’t discuss this subject in a serious fashion without looking at key factors like the anti-science disinformation campaign, the he-said/she-said coverage by the media, the decision by many enviros to downplay talk of global warming, and, in the U.S., the relatively coolish temperatures of the past two years (see “The disinformers are winning, but mostly with the GOP“).
So I wanted to bring you further analysis by someone who has done actual detailed polling and research on the subject, Stanford communications expert Jon Krosnick. He has released an analysis of his latest survey of U.S. public opinion on global warming. Below is a synopsis, plus a video interview of Krosnick (with links to the analysis and working papers). His results indicate:
“I actually think the science around climate change is real. It is potentially devastating,” Obama told reporters Monday [March 24, 2009]. “If you look at the flooding that’s going on right now in North Dakota and you say to yourself, ‘If you see an increase of two degrees, what does that do, in terms of the situation there?’ That indicates the degree to which we have to take this seriously.“
The media love to focus on the few extreme weather events that they (mistakenly) believe are inconsistent with human-caused climate change [see "Was the 'Blizzard of 2009' a 'global warming type' of record snowfall — or an opportunity for the media to blow the extreme weather story (again)?"]. But will they keep ignoring all the extreme weather that scientists have been predicting for years would become more common as we pour more heat trapping gases into the atmosphere?
This post will serve as an introduction to climate solutions as well as a gateway to my ongoing series on the core solutions.
In this post I will lay out “the solution” to global warming.
In this post, I will summarize what the recent scientific literature says are the key impacts we face in the second half of the century if we stay anywhere near our current emissions path. I will focus primarily on:
I’m very interested in your thoughts on Avatar.
Here are mine on the must-see movie — but flawed eco-pic — and the controversies surrounding it:
[Mild spoiler alert, I suppose, but then if you can't figure out how this movie is going to end, well, you have led a very sheltered life.]
French energy giant Areva has bought U.S.-based Ausra in order “to become a world leader in concentrated solar thermal” power (CSP). And so the race is on for market share in “The Technology that will Save Humanity.”
CSP is the most scalable and affordable baseload (or, even better, load-following) low-carbon supply technology — when used with low-cost, high-efficiency thermal storage. CSP can also share its steam turbine with biomass, a strategy the Chinese are pursuing, or with natural gas (see “Hybrid solar/gas plants provide low-cost, low-carbon power when needed“).
We expect some of the most significant impacts of climate change to occur when natural variability is exacerbated by long-term global warming, so that even small changes in global temperatures can produce damaging local and regional effects. Year on year the evidence is growing that damaging climate and weather events — potentially intensified by global warming — are already happening and beginning to affect society and ecosystems. This includes:
Memo to climate scientists, environmentalists, and others: If you’re going to give an interview or speak in public, you need to know the FULL scientific literature. If you just stick to reading up on your area of expertise, you won’t have the sharpest answers for reporters or for a tough questioner in the audience.
Reading the BBC’s interview of Dr. Phil Jones, the climate scientist at the center of the hacked e-mail scandal, makes clear that even an experienced and widely published researcher like Jones doesn’t appear to know the full climate literature or the clearest answers to basic questions. The interviewer, the BBC’s environment analyst Roger Harrabin, also doesn’t, or he probably wouldn’t have asked “Do you agree that from January 2002 to the present there has been statistically significant global cooling?”
Now the snappiest answer to such a question comes from Ken Caldeira to the AP in October: “To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous.” You could also quote NOAA climate monitoring chief Deke Arndt from that same story, “The last 10 years are the warmest 10-year period of the modern record. Even if you analyze the trend during that 10 years, the trend is actually positive, which means warming.”
I’d also recommend mentioning two major scientific studies from last year, which demonstrate that when you look at where 90% of the human-caused warming was expected to go — the oceans — you find steady warming in recent years. I’d keep this figure handy [I use it in my talks]:
Time series of global mean heat storage (from 0 to 1.24 miles).
One reason I am launching the Climate Science Project is to connect people to the best scientific explanations and the best answers to commonly asked questions. Obviously, one of the first places you should start is SkepticalScience.com. That’s where I saw this figure — and an excellent explanation of what it means.
This repost comes from economists at E3 Network: Eban Goodstein, Kristen Sheeran, Director, Peter Dorman, Jonathan Isham, and John Laitner.
I. Addressing Climate Change Can Lead to Net Job Growth in the United States
Many economists believe that due to the global downturn, the US will experience high rates of unemployment (>6%) for a number of years to come. However, a steady shift toward climate protection will likely boost net job growth in the US:
In honor of the Vancouver Olympics, I am reposting this humorous video from 2008:
I’m featured in Tom Friedman’s column today, “Global Weirding is Here.” I’ll blog on that term and that column shortly.
Right now, though, I need to get up a quick post for those who’ve come here looking for that “listing of the best scientific papers on every aspect of climate change for anyone who wants a quick summary now” that Friedman wrote about Regular readers know I’ve just started that process, but for now let me update my review of the best papers in the past year. If you want a broader overview of the literature in the past few years, focusing specifically on how unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gas emissions are projected to impact the United States, try “An introduction to global warming impacts: Hell and High Water.”
Tom Friedman has a new column, “Global Weirding is Here.” He mentions my new effort to post summaries of “the best scientific papers on every aspect of climate change.” Readers interested in that project should click here.
If you want to know more about me or this website, start with “An Introduction to Climate Progress.” You can get daily email updates on climate science, solutions, and politics by clicking here.
Friedman spells out why he suspects “China is quietly laughing at us right now” and why “Iran, Russia, Venezuela and the whole OPEC gang are high-fiving each other”:
Marine life face some of the worst impacts. We now know that global warming is “capable of wrecking the marine ecosystem and depriving future generations of the harvest of the seas” (see 2009 Nature Geoscience study concludes ocean dead zones “devoid of fish and seafood” are poised to expand and “remain for thousands of years”).
The acidification of the ocean in particular is a grave threat — for links to primary sources and recent studies, see “Imagine a World without Fish: Deadly ocean acidification — hard to deny, harder to geo-engineer, but not hard to stop” (and below).
A new Nature Geoscience study, “Past constraints on the vulnerability of marine calcifiers to massive carbon dioxide release” (subs. req’d) provides a truly ominous warning. The release from the researchers at the University of Bristol is “Rate of ocean acidification the fastest in 65 million years.”
I am reprinting below a piece by award-winning science journalist Carl Zimmer published this week by Yale environment360, which explains ocean acidification and what this important study says:
Tom Tomorrow poses the question in this hilarious cartoon for Salon:
THE EARTH is warming. A chief cause is the increase in greenhouse gases accumulating in the atmosphere. Humans are at least in part responsible, because the oil, gas and coal that we burn releases these gases. If current trends persist, it’s likely that in coming decades the globe’s climate will change with potentially devastating effects for billions of people.
Contrary to what you may have read lately, there are few reputable scientists who would disagree with anything in that first paragraph.
That’s the opening of a pretty good editorial on climate from the paper that has all but destroyed the credibility of its opinion pages (see and the 2009 “Citizen Kane” award for non-excellence in climate journalism goes to …).
Every month brings more evidence the world’s greatest ice sheet is disintegrating much faster than the “consensus” forecast (see Satellite data stunner: “Our data suggest that EAST Antarctica is losing mass…. Antarctica may soon be contributing significantly more to global sea-level rise”). Guest blogger Nick Sundt has the latest news in a piece first published here.
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) reported Monday that “every ice front in the southern part of the Antarctic Peninsula has been retreating overall from 1947 to 2009, with the most dramatic changes occurring since 1990. “ The finding comes on the heels of the warmest January on record for the Southern Hemisphere.
The 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) report ignored dynamic ice-sheet disintegration, which was already happening (see Nature: “Dynamic thinning of Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheet ocean margins is more sensitive, pervasive, enduring and important than previously realized”). The IPCC therefore low-balled sea level rise estimates, suggesting seas might rise “only” a foot or two this century, greatly delighting the anti-science crowd (see “Debunking Bjørn Lomborg: Misrepresenting Sea Level Rise“).
The need is urgent for climate scientists to communicate more effectively to policymakers and the public. This article details some of the problems with how climate scientists communicate and offers practical suggestions for improvement. For example, scientists can improve their effectiveness by avoiding jargon as well as words that mean different things to scientists than to non-scientists. They can use appropriate metaphors and re-frame poorly framed questions. As policymakers grapple with the climate challenge, scientists should take the opportunity and responsibility of clearly communicating what the wider world needs to know about this issue.
Saying scientists are not doing a terribly good job communicating climate science is like saying the status quo media are not doing a terribly good job communicating climate science. But then the media doesn’t suffer the consequences of that failure. At least not more than, say, the American pika….
Our guest blogger is Susan Joy Hassol, an expert in climate communication. She was lead author of “Impacts of A Warming Arctic,” the synthesis report of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, and helped author or edit many major climate reports in the past decade. In 2008, she wrote “Improving How Scientists Communicate About Climate Change,” which is reprinted below with her permission:
Warning: Please put your head in a vise before reading further.
Andy Revkin has just written the most illogical climate post on Earth. Or maybe he’s written the most logical climate post on the Bizarro World Htrae.
Senator James Inhofe, ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, has gone a step beyond promoting his long-notorious global warming denialist propaganda. He is now using the resources of the Senate committee to seek opportunities to criminalize the actions of 17 leading scientists who have been associated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment reports. A report released by Inhofe’s staff on February 23 outlines this classic Joe McCarthyite witch-hunt: page after page of incorrect and misleading statements, a list of federal laws that allegedly may make scientists subject to prosecution by the U.S. Justice Department, and a list of names and affiliations of 17 “key players” in the “CRU Controversy” over stolen e-mails and their connections with IPCC reports.
That’s from Rick Piltz, the guy who blew the whistle on the Bush Administration’s censorship of federal climate science. This is a repost from his website, Climatesciencewatch.org:
Mass media have been a key vehicle by which climate change contrarianism has traveled, according to Maxwell Boykoff, a University of Colorado at Boulder professor and fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, or CIRES.
UPDATE: Joe Bastardi replies to this post in the comments here.
Ah, the anti-science crowd. Their much-vaunted satellite data shows record smashing temperatures (make your own chart here). So what’s a disinformer to do? You either have to tie yourself in knots to explain how a rather moderate El Niño could be to blame — or go after the satellite data. And the latter is coming, I’m sure.
But Accuweather’s meteorologist Joe Bastardi is a satellite-data-ophile, so he chooses the knot-twisting approach in his must-read stream of consciousness “European Blog,” which certainly wins the gold medal for self-contradiction. What is so incredible about this blog is that it resides on one long page, so you’d think Bastardi might occasionally go back and look and see if what he just wrote doesn’t contradict something he wrote a little earlier.
Look at Saturday’s post:
Our favorite climate de-crocker, Peter Sinclair has a terrific new video on the basic facts of climate science (with links to the literature):
Researchers must purge e-mail in-boxes daily of threatening correspondence, simply part of the job of being a climate scientist
That’s the subhed for a new Scientific American piece on cyber bullying. It comes fast on the heels of “Bullying, lies and the rise of right-wing climate denial,” the first part of the terrific series by Clive Hamilton, reprinted below (followed by an excerpt of the SciAm piece):
This is a Wonkroom repost.
According to the mainstream media, there is a controversy over the validity of climate science, in particular the conclusion that the warming of the planet by greenhouse gas emissions poses a risk to the public:
You can get daily email updates on climate science, solutions, and politics by clicking here. If you want to know more about this website, start with “An Introduction to Climate Progress.” This is a Think Progress repost.
Last week, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) spoke with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman to discuss clean energy legislation. During the interview, Graham warned his party that it will fall into irrelevancy if it continues to embrace climate change disinformers:
The Chicago Tribune Online has a helpful Q&A that summarizes where climate science stands today. It also addresses the IPCC, emails, and temperature stations issues.
Its “just the facts” approach is superior to more than 90% of what has been written by the media these days (see Boykoff on “Exaggerating Denialism: Media Representations of Outlier Views on Climate Change” and here):
All major emitters of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases need to rapidly and cost-effectively transition to a low-carbon economy, in both the production and use of energy and the management of forests and agricultural lands. In order to ensure food, water, and human security, and to protect the world’s biodiversity, the goal should be to limit the global average temperature rise to 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) above pre-industrial levels…. Without concerted action now, the world will be faced with temperature increases far in excess of 2 degrees C, with unthinkable impacts.
Dr. Robert Watson was chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change from 1997 to 2002. He was opposed by fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil and the Bush administration waged a successful campaign to have him replaced with Rajendra Pachauri. Now Watson is Strategic Director for the Tyndall Center at the University of East Anglia and Chief Scientific Advisor for the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Yale’s Environment 360 online magazine has a piece by him they have given me permission to repost.
Methane release from the not-so-perma-frost is the most dangerous amplifying feedback in the entire carbon cycle. Research published in Friday’s journal Science finds a key “lid” on “the large sub-sea permafrost carbon reservoir” near Eastern Siberia “is clearly perforated, and sedimentary CH4 [methane] is escaping to the atmosphere.”
Scientists learned last year that the permafrost permamelt contains a staggering “1.5 trillion tons of frozen carbon, about twice as much carbon as contained in the atmosphere,” much of which would be released as methane. Methane is is 25 times as potent a heat-trapping gas as CO2 over a 100 year time horizon, but 72 times as potent over 20 years!
The carbon is locked in a freezer in the part of the planet warming up the fastest (see “Tundra 4: Permafrost loss linked to Arctic sea ice loss“). Half the land-based permafrost would vanish by mid-century on our current emissions path (see “Tundra, Part 2: The point of no return” and below). No climate model currently incorporates the amplifying feedback from methane released by a defrosting tundra.
The new Science study, led by University of Alaska’s International Arctic Research Centre and the Russian Academy of Sciences, is “Extensive Methane Venting to the Atmosphere from Sediments of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf” (subs. req’d). The must-read National Science Foundation press release (click here), warns “Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.” The NSF is normally a very staid organization. If they are worried, everybody should be.
It is increasingly clear that if the world strays significantly above 450 ppm atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide for any length of time, we will find it unimaginably difficult to stop short of 800 to 1000 ppm.
Note: As part of the Climate Science Project, I’m making this post as definitive as I can by including other recent scientific findings on the tundra. Please add other relevant links in the comments.
The lead author, Natalia Shakhova, explains the new findings in this video:
The Heritage Foundation, a once-influential conservative think tank, has long had extreme views (see “Heritage even opposes energy efficiency“). Now it has completely lost its grip on reality, comparing the IPCC’s scientific work to what a magician at a children’s party does (!), as explained in this Wonk Room repost.
The serial misinformers and misrepresenters demand equal time for their misinformation and misrepresentations. What should climate science defenders and the media do?
The leading anti-science blogger in the country, Anthony Watts, owes NOAA scientists an apology. So far, he’s passing the buck.
The former TV weatherman coauthored a “report” with Joe D’Aleo, “Surface Temperature Record: Policy Driven Deception?” accusing top U.S. scientists of various kinds of misfeasance and malfeasance in the global temperature record. I’m not linking to it because most of the report’s claims had already been long debunked (see Must-read NOAA paper smacks down Anthony Watts — Q: “Is there any question that surface temperatures in the United States have been rising rapidly during the last 50 years?” A: “None at all.”)
The blogger Tamino of “Open Mind,” has been dismantling one of Watts’ few new claims and wrote last week:
At a quiet lakeside retreat house in Potsdam, Germany, 35 people met this month to discuss the future of nuclear power.
Guest blogger and nuclear economics expert Craig Severance was one of the attendees. He discusses his presentation in this repost.
As long as we keep taking no serious action on climate and clean energy, there’s nothing to stop the energy bills of Americans from rising. Daniel J. Weiss, CAP’s Director of Climate Strategy, explains what’s in store this summer.
The mounds of snow blackened by auto exhaust have barely melted in Washington, D.C, yet the Energy Information Administration’s Short Term Energy Outlook already predicts that:
Why should you vote for ClimateProgress in TreeHugger’s Best of Green Awards 2010 Readers Choice in the category of Best Political Website (click here to vote)?
Sure, you like the insider’s view of climate science, solution, and politics delivered every day to you for free. But the other nominees are pretty darn good, too.
Well, set aside all issues of merit, look at the competition, and vote strategically:
Nature, the highly respected British scientific journal, has an excellent editorial and news story tomorrow on the recent assault on climate science (excerpted below).
Taking Nature’s advice, I urge the administration to send science advisor Holdren and NOAA Administrator Lubchenco and Energy Secretary Chu on a media blitz and national tour to explain and emphasize the science.
The partisan divide on climate science has been growing for a while, as I discussed in a 2008 review of the Gallup polling. No surprise, really, since the anti-science disinformation campaign uses “experts” that are more credible to conservatives, and that disinformation is repeated to death on conservative media outlets.
Now Gallup has updated its polling and just now released its own analysis, “Conservatives’ Doubts About Global Warming Grow,” with this fascinating ideological breakdown that shows how the divide has grown in the past 2 years:
Dr. Peter Gleick is co-founder and president of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security in Oakland, California. He wrote a great op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle, with that terrific Matt Groening cartoon:
Another vote, another win for the conservative majority on Texas’ State Board of Education.
Science is in a street fight with anti-science, as Nature has argued. Now the forces of the dark ages are taking on the Enlightenment itself.
Another op-ed by Bjorn Lomborg, another Gish Gallup of non-stop disinformation. The good news is that the task of debunking the Septical Environmentalist (sic), has been made easier by the publication of whole book dedicated to that tedious task, The Lomborg Deception.
And yes, “Septical Environmentalist” is not a typo. Sure, it may seem like a mistake to use the word “environmentalist” to describe Lomborg. But it’s the very fact that he calls himself an environmentalist while dedicating his life to spreading disinformation and delaying serious action on the seminal environmental issue of our time that makes him septical. What else would you call the Typhoid Mary of anti-science syndrome (ASS)?
Lomborg’s op-ed,”Cars, bombs and climate change” repeats many of his favorite howlers, and adds some new ones. Let’s start with one of his favorite targets, one I’ve covered many times (see “Debunking Bjørn Lomborg — Part II, Misrepresenting Sea Level Rise“), but here with a new bizarre twist:
For the first time since the yellow journalism of a century ago, the United States has a major news organization devoted to the promotion of one political party…. In a bygone era of fact-based commentary typified, left to right, by my late colleagues Scotty Reston and Bill Safire, these deceptions would have been given their proper label: disinformation….
[Ailes] and his video ferrets have intimidated center-right and center-left journalists into suppressing conclusions — whether on health-care reform or other issues — they once would have stated as demonstrably proven by their reporting.
As for Fox News, lots of people who know better are keeping quiet about what to call it. Its news operation can, in fact, be called many things, but reporters of my generation, with memories and keyboards, dare not call it journalism.
Sunday, the Washington Post published a must-read piece by Howell Raines, “Why don’t honest journalists take on Roger Ailes and Fox News?“ Raines, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and former NY Times executive editor, focuses on Fox’s disinformation on health care, but it is equally true of their disinformation on climate change (see here), which is why I’m writing about it.
Ironically, WP media critic Howard Kurtz blows the opportunity to call out FoxNews in his story today, “The Beck Factor at Fox: Staffers say comments taint their work“:
Climate change inherently favors invasive pests. On the one hand, milder winters since 1994 have reduced the winter death rate of beetle larvae in places like Wyoming from 80% per year to under 10%. On the other hand, hot-weather uber-droughts — aka “global-change-type droughts” — have made trees weaker, less able to fight off beetles.
Forest Ecology and Management just published a major new study by 19 researchers around the word, “A global overview of drought and heat-induced tree mortality reveals emerging climate change risks for forests.” Its key conclusion — that human-caused climate change is already killing forests, releasing carbon, and amplifying warming — will be a shock only to the anti-science crowd:
Okay, it’s not a ’stunner’ for CP readers that the NY Times doesn’t get it. Still, it’s nice to see independent confirmation. What’s the point of having a blog if you can’t say, “I told you so”?
In an otherwise silly article criticizing efforts to improve climate science messaging, John Horgan, a former Scientific American staff writer who directs the Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology, reports:
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