http://edro.wordpress.com/nuking-earth/

I think what you’re really asking above is not “are the mainstream media worthless,” but “Are words worthless in the climate fight?” This is a question I’ve explored for awhile now back at Dot Earth.

Presumably you’re really saying that the blogosphere is riding to the rescue because the MSM can’t. But what makes you think the intellectual silos in the blogosphere (Huffington over here, Drudge over there…) will somehow break through on this in a way other media can’t? I hope you’re right. But I have deep doubts.

The reason? The entwined climate/energy/development challenge is the world’s worst problem, with every single facet posing challenges to a species that is mainly “here and now” and with any generation only prodded to powerful action by powerful events. Even Paul Hawken, one of the most skillful green communicators, told me recently that he doesn’t foresee real progress on shifting from non-sustainable energy options etc without a potent jab from nature.

As for the science, you ask where the holes are. They’re just in every facet of the climate prognosis that relates most directly to people, unfortunately. Just a couple here:

1) The reality of centuries of eroding ice and rising seas in a warming world is powerfully established, but the rise in the next 100 years is highly uncertain. I personally think the first point is plenty powerful enough to get people’s attention, but unfortunately we care a lot more about the short term. And the Hansen-size projections are the least certain of all (with irreducible uncertainty on relevant time scales, given the complexities of ice-sheet dynamics.)

2) The IPCC impacts report speaks of rising precipitation in higher latitudes for at least half a century, while near-tropical areas grow dry. So the grain belt gets longer growing seasons and more water… Catastrophe? Depends on where you live, and how rich you are, as we’ve written in the Climate Divide series.

3) A much closer look at the extinction projections reveals layers of uncertainty on top of layers. I’ve been preparing to dive into this, but haven’t had time yet. And this section of the IPCC reports is constrained to species that have been studied for such risks, not for all the globe’s species. You seem to have a much better line-by-line familiarity with the report. Can you dig out just how many species have been studied, and where they are? (My guess is in places that are already vulnerable, like mountain slopes.) That’d help me get started.

On the energy/emissions trends, we’re about the only publication I know of that has given sustained, in-depth coverage to the glaring lack of energy research, the limits of current efforts (including the existing renewables markets), and the real-world choices that faces a species heading toward 9 billion people, all of whom would love the gifts that come with ample energy.

We’re all in this together — blogs, MSM, TV, teachers, poets, neighborhoods — and we’re all at a loss not just for words, but options, until we get busy.

I think we should have a bloggingheadsTV style conversation on this that we could post on both Dot Earth and here. Let’s chat.

Our global warming situation is growing worse by the day, and meaningful action is being stalled by sellouts and myopic ideologues.

What sickens me even more than the paid deniers is how many of my fellow US citizens look at the “controversy” and shrug and conclude that there’s nothing definitive enough to warrant action.

Again, if we don’t curb emissions sharply, these holes go away and the catastrophe is assured.

I’d love to have “a bloggingheadsTV style conversation,” though I confess I don’t know exactly what that entails.

There is a consequence to being so well informed on a topic. It becomes difficult and frustrating to repeatedly communicate the essence of the topic to the masses without seeing the desired outcome. Responses come back with all degree of agreement, corrections, additional information or nonsense, insults and hack opinions based on denier propaganda– believes vs. the trolls.

That makes the authors dig deeper for the more descriptive words and facts they sense were missing in the last blog, news article or commentary.

An issue as complex as AGW, (science, society, politics, economics) is constantly changing the impressions of readers who come to the article (your words) with all of their psychological strengths and baggage to sort out and comprehend what you are saying and what it means to them personally.

In a sense, true believers of AGW acting as communicators are like oncologists telling us mass of patients the bad news….it is life-threatening, you are unsure how much time we have, you offer us treatment with no guarantee of success, and, you need our full attention and commitment to cooperate.

The IPCC provides the lab results and you have to present them to a preoccupied and increasingly distracted and insecure public. How can there be the appropriate words and warnings to get the IPCC message across in this day and time?

I suggest you and Andy continue your words and style and not carry the burden of achieving the perfect message. There is none–right now.

Lou Grinzo said it best in his above comment:

[What sickens me even more than the paid deniers is how many of my fellow US citizens look at the “controversy” and shrug and conclude that there’s nothing definitive enough to warrant action.]

That is the plight of us AGW believers.

Blog entries survive for days; newspaper articles forever if they can be preserved and retrieved; radio and television pieces have nanosecond lives and the AGW story changes constantly. No perfect media there but it is all we have.

We will never have the Oracle of Delphi to rely upon for answers.

Dating back to 1400 BC, the Oracle of Delphi was the most important shrine in all Greece, and in theory all Greeks respected its independence. Built around a sacred spring, Delphi was considered to be the omphalos - the center (literally navel) of the world.

People came from all over Greece and beyond to have their questions about the future answered by the Pythia, the priestess of Apollo. And her answers, usually cryptic, could determine the course of everything from when a farmer planted his seedlings, to when an empire declared war.

We have only you and honest bloggers, reporters and scientists to go to.

Tainter’s hypothesis/observation is that collapse of complexity occurs when the marginal return on complexity declines to the point that complexity is no longer advantageous. In societies lacking a method to avoid Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons, simply reaching a level of technology where it is possible to destroy the Commons makes it inevitable that it will be. (The modern Commons are Earth’s atmosphere and oceans, and they are both being destroyed.) Does the modern world lack the ability to avoid the Hardin’s tragedy? The failure of Kyoto and Bali suggests it does, but Montreal suggests it does sometimes has the capability (but Montreal required only a technological substitute and so was undemanding).

Betting on humanity to save itself is, I’m afraid, a very long shot. I agree with Paul Hawken, but I’m not sure just what kind of natural disaster, at what scale, will change peoples’ thinking? It’s not the politicians who need to change, it’s the people who vote them in.

We can only hope that economic and national security concerns do not push climate change off the table in the 111th Congress and that the President will actually submit a bill to the Hill. Then, Committees will have that mandate to send a bill to the President for signature. That is both a real possibility and a longshot.

Having the next President take the lead will have required some agreement with India, China, Russia and other major emitters that it will be a cooperative effort because Congress will not accept a unilateral approach by the US. There will not be the votes in the Senate to have the US go it alone.

AGW will hit civilizations with an endless barrage of natural disasters and some will be unrecognizable (possible disease increase and change of plant phisiology as examples). There will not be a show-stopper event that triggers global or US or averay citizen response—even complete summer meltback of the Arctic sea ice in the next decade. But, Australian farmers see their future coming at them and drought around the planet will be the big canary for all to see.

John L. McCormick

o realization of problem,
o galvanization to change,
o motivation to move, and
o discussion/agreement for a direction.

Our complex societies are not good at any of the above bullets. It’s like herding cats. And my profession is directly related to enabling all four bullets (what’s the definition of insanity, you may ask).

Best,

D

Andy Revkin: you’re wrong. Your words make it clear you think you’re driving somewhere that you’re not. You’re on the wrong road. You’re statement about moving agricultural regions is just plain silly. That was the kicker. Take a drive up to northern Ontario. Oh, wait, can’t drive there. It’s all rock and lake with a thin veneer of forest. Take a float plane. Take half a day to scramble over rocks and climb up a nice tall hill. And then envision trying to drive a tractor anywhere within sight. You really need to do this. Maybe then a tiny little bit of information that many people other than yourself already know, will perhaps come to you.

To put cold Januarys in terms that Republicans can understand — the market rises and falls, but what counts is long-term trends.

I too fear that some very negative jolt will be needed to truly awaken people. Accepting that, I still see whatever near term abatement policies that can be enacted as being very crucial. At least it will get things rolling and put in place the mechanisms and manufacturing infrastructure that can then be ratcheted up as reality sinks in its teeth. Fortunately, the partially overlapping concern of peak oil makes near term partial action more likely.

Contrary to some environmentalists, I believe that this inherent inability for the public to accept the full scope of the problem until when nature forces it upon them will mean that otherwise undesirable “geoengineering” solutions might be a necessary part of the process of salvation. Even ones that merely cool temperature without addressing CO2 ocean acidification may need to be employed as stop gap measures after the wake up call.

Alternative energy sources are not a complete solution. A complete solution requires permanently sequestering about 500 GtC. I don’t see how to convince people to pay $$ to do so unless done through taxation.

How about a fossil carbon tax?

The words climate fight are at the root of the problem. Pursuasion is not a fight and those who think it is are the true delayers. The negative impact of the word fight is evident in this thread. There is the need to blame others in harsh tones…”meaningful action is being stalled by sellouts and myopic ideologues”….to find an enemy…”the journalists who are the modern villains, working as aides to the devils such as the George C. Marshall Institute”…to rage at that enemy…Andy’s incomprehensible screed.

Regarding Andrew Revkin’s DOT EARTH question “Do the media fail to give climate its due?” — all the above criticisms are valid, as are the CEO’s and managing editors’ rebuttals, from big papers to small papers, from huge TV networks to radio stations — but one thing a lot of us overlook is this:

newspapers are just another form of modern entertainment and information dispersal, they are in the business of trying to make a profit by selling advertising (subscription fees don’t amount to a thing in the total income package) to large stores and corporations, and readers, while important, are NOT part of the business model, other than to keep circulation figures up and therefore get high advertising fees from the advertisers.

Advocacy newspapers belonging to specific advocacy groups, rightwing or leftwing or green or whater, are a different animal altogether. They exist from funding from readers, sponsors and rich benefactors.

The Times, like the Springfield Union, my old hometown paper, or the Boulder Camera (gotta love that name for a newspaper) are not really “news” papers — they are for-profit business. And they exist to inform, entertain, editorialize, advertise escort services, plug a new TV show, make PR people happy and host of other reasons — none of which have much to do with mitigating global warming.

That’s our dilemma. We live in a business model world. What other world is there?

That said, we need better coverage of the climate change crisis. But we won’t get it until the “war” begins, and so far, nobody has shot the archduke on the steps of World War One or bombed “Pearl Harbor” as part of World War Two.

“World War Three” will not be televised.

I am writing to you because I ran into your environmental blog and was wondering if you would be interested in telling your readers about an upcoming youth action event called Massachusetts Power Shift (MAPS).

MAPS is a three-day global warming and climate change conference to be held at Boston University from April 11-14th. Saturday and Sunday will consist of discussion panels from a variety of topics ranging from alternative fuels to carbon caps. On that Monday, students will lobby their senators to pass the Massachusetts Global Warming Solutions Act.
Passing the GWSA, inclusive of a 20% cut in emissions by 2020, will be a milestone for Massachusetts environmental policy.

Please consider spreading the word! Just let me know if you will post an entry about it so I can send you more information and web banners/fliers. Our website is http://www.masspowershift.org/

Thank you for you time.

Cheers,
Vicky
Media & Marketing Volunteer
Massachusetts Power Shift Planning Committee

http://climatejokeawards.blogspot.com

They honor (sic) people who say stupid things about the climate crisis. The awards are satire. Then again, maybe they aren’t satire. The page is up now and running and we are accepting nominations via the comment section throught the year, anytime you spot a good quote, send it in. Cheers,

db

You wrote ‘How about a fossil carbon tax?’

I think that’s a great idea. That’s the best idea to get us out of the mess we are in. The only reasons against it is that it is hard to get people to agree to it.

I think it is better than the Cap and Trade that’s been pushed around. But the Cap and Trade gives politicians an out on increasing fossil fuel carbon costs, ‘Hey it’s not me raising your fossil carbon costs, it’s the science, telling us how much we have to reduce carbon emmisions.’

What I think would be the best system is for the world to agree on a carbon tax system. The first major part would be that the first consumption tax that governments impose on consumption are fossil carbon taxes, before any property, sales, value added or whatever other consumption taxes you could name. The second major part would be that we would have a world wide agreement on what the level of producer carbon taxes should be.

Even poorer countries could have a fossil fuel consumption tax before they have a consumption sales or property tax if they have any consumption taxes at all.

Some of the major points against a carbon tax in the United States is that it would increase our producers costs against other producers costs like China and India and we sure don’t need more problems there. But if we had only a carbon consumption tax like the sales tax, that tax wouldn’t affect our producers costs of out product to other countries. It would reduce arguments against acting alone. We could trade the taxes that states have for revenue with a fossil carbon fuel tax that wouldn’t affect our trade with other countries.

Then having a world wide agreement on what level of tax all the worlds producers should pay would be at the same level. ($ per ton of carbon) But all these taxes would go into each countries general fund. (or however each countries uses their taxes)

It would also then allow each country to act on global warming greater than the Cap and Trade agreements. The Cap and Trade agreements don’t go fast enough in taxing carbon to reduce it’s use and goes to far to pay people for other energy sources. To much chance for fraud, waste and abuse. Using carbon consumption taxes to pay for general government and then reducing other consumption taxes would allow each country to do more than Cap and Trade.

We could have both have a world wide Cap and Trade and a world wide Fossil Carbon Fuel Consumption /Production taxes at the same time. It might just require both to do the 80 to 90 reductions by 2050.

Some of this may be a personality issue - I know another science journalist who takes a similar tack. It’s an interest in science for science’s sake, not for informing-the-public-about-what’s-at-stake’s sake.

1. From the last large stade (massive ice sheets) to the Holocene, CO2 went from about 185ppm or so to about 260ppm. The global temperature increased about 6–8 K. There have been no major climate shifts during the remarkably climate-stable Holocene. Which we have just left for the Antropocene…

2. Hurricanes are weather and weather is not climate. Or rather climate is not weather, but a, say, 33 year global average of weather events.

Most people know something about baseball and Major League Baseball(MLB); I’ll use that as analogy. Do you know how many homeruns are going to be hit in a baseball game? Sometimes it’s 5 homeruns, sometimes there aren’t any. Does that mean that there is nothing that can be said about how many homeruns are hit in a game over time?

From this web page we get an average homeruns per game over a number of years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/ Image:MLB_HR_and_SB_rates.png

From the graph we can see some trends. From 1900-1920 we had homeruns per game of less than 0.5. From 1920 to mid 1940’s, there was about 1 homerun per game. World War II must have taken more homerun hitters into the military than pitchers who didn’t throw a homerun pitch. From 1950 to 1990, the homerun per game average was about 1.5. About 1994, the homerun per game average went up, maybe that was when there was a large increase in steroid use or something else.

I think it was in 1968 that MLB changed how high to make the pitchers mound (they lowered it) and the size of the strike zone (they decreased it) and we can somewhat see why from the graph. MLB had the feeling that pitchers got an advantage on hitters and changed it. That stuff is from my memory so don’t quote any of it, please.

But I can’t make comment on any year to year or smaller changes. Things just happen, little things vary and that’s makes small variations in homerun totals. The same with weather and monthly weather patterns.

The point of all that is that even though we can’t begin to guess on which day the homeruns are going to be hit, we can over time see a pattern or level of homeruns in a years time. The same with weather and climate, we can’t predict the weather more than a week to 10 days time and we have trouble with weather patterns of many months, we still can make climate judgments over years time.

I reiterate, there have been no major climate shifts throughout the Holocene. Only minor ones.

Regarding the climate models, yes they could predict global cooling, if any was going to occur. To illustrate, a Japanese group modeled the global climate from the Eem (125 kya) to the present, including the three stades (periods of massive ice sheets) inferred to occur during that interval from the proxy records in ice cores.

Predicting something as minor and regional (only eastern North America, Greenland and Europe) as the so-called Little Ice Age appears to be beyond the current state of the art.

-CO2 levels of 1000 ppm will cause average global temperatures some 10° to 14° C higher - 18° to 25° F higher - and perhaps 50% higher than that on northern land masses like the continental U.S.

-CO2 levels will rise to more than 1000 ppm if we do not act and will rise to 1000 ppm even with some government action to limit emissions.

Regardless of the uncertainty about how much sea level rises in this century and how much of that that rise is deferred until the next century, this large a temperature increase would be a catastrophe.

Imagine summer temperatures in the United States routinely reaching 125 or 130 degrees - the effect on people, on biodiversity, and on crops!

“…a 3.5°C rise is a certainty…”? You’re joking, right?

That anyone finds the concept of a “secret IPCC computer math formula” credible is a pretty sad commentary on both the scientific community and the press.

“Multiply 10 assumptions ( variables-each with a 95 percent confidence level) times each other and the IPCC model will fall apart with respect to the final probability (of being accurate) .” as well, though there’s some underlying truth to it. There isn;t an IPCC formula (the IPCC is a literature review) but there are some cascading uncertainties. As Joe Romm has been saying (along with myself among others for some considerable time) this uncertainty at best cuts both ways.

The IPCC conclusions are in fact carefully stated in a context of uncertainties, as anyone taking the time to read the reports would plainly see. They do not, however, stress the enormous dangers associated with some of the underconstrained processes. Things could as easily be five times worse than the median prediction as five times better. While five times better amounts to something not out of range of normal natural variation, five times worse amounts to a threat of extinction for humanity itself as well as most other species.

People who think the science is uncertain should be the ones most eager to control this situation. If the science is solid, the risk is plenty large enough, but if the science is flawed, the risks become unfathomably huge.

Don36 should be aware that there is nothing secretive about the IPCC. It seems clear from his complaints that he hasn’t read their reports. I suggest he start there.

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/ 2008/ 03/ 05/ do-the-media-fail-to-give-climate-its-due/ #more-186

There’s some further discussion on my own blog here:

http://initforthegold.blogspot.com/ 2008/ 03/ times-gets-all-meta.html

In the end I’m a bit puzzled by Andy Revkin. While I’m grateful for him raising the issues, his response to them seems as uniformly disappointing as anyone’s. Revkin does seem to understand the scale of our problems, and surely he understands the media as well as anyone, yet he doesn’t seem willing or able to acknowledge the extent to which the media are failing to convey the proportions of the problem to the public, and especially to opinion leaders and policy makers.

Mr Seitz also cited NAS’ own study which states, “inter alia, the earth
has been subjected to impressive and abrupt swings in climate during recent
periods covering thousands of years and that mankind’s role cannot be
assessed without adequate …. baseline documentation of natural climate
variability”..

If as Mr. Tobis asserts”The IPCC conclusions are in fact carefully stated in a context of uncertainties, as anyone taking the time to read the reports would plainly see.” why is the IPCC summary report cited time and again by the UN, the EU, and governmental representatives as the ‘doom and gloom’ document which requires taking drastic actions, increased taxes and spending of billons of dollars, pound and euros which would not resolve and would put an end to the never ending, ever changing climate of planet earth

This also appears;
“Also, models do not predict; they project, a big difference”
predict -To state, tell about, or make known in advance, especially on the basis of special knowledge.
project- To calculate, estimate, or predict (something in the future), based on present data or trends.
What’s the big difference or any difference?

Wrong. Sudden ugly death for billions. Misery for hundreds of millions.

http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/ media/ images/ 42380000/ gif/ _42380678_america_wheat_416×350.gif

http://tinyurl.com/2xtncl

http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/ 2008/ 04/ 30/ a-look-at-hadcrut-global-temps-and-pdo-with-hodrick-prescott-filtering-applied/