“The Web's most influential climate-change blogger” — Time Magazine A Project of Center for American Progress Action Fund
Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson has the story:
Four climate activists are being held in a West Virginia jail for protesting how coal mining is killing the people and land of their state. On Tuesday, December 29, four activists with Climate Ground Zero — a grassroots campaign of non-violent civil disobedience in southern West Virginia to address mountaintop removal coal mining — were arrested for trespass at their homes in Rock Creek, West Virginia:
The figure is from Spaceweather.com, in its “Sunspot Surge” post.
The 2000s were the hottest decade in recorded history by far — even though we’re at “the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century.” The 2000s were a full 0.2°C warmer than the 1990s, which of course had been the hottest decade on record, 0.14°C warmer than 1980s (according to the dataset that best tracks planetary warming). Hmm. It’s almost like the warming is accelerating.
There’s little doubt the 2010s will be the hottest decade on record, barring multiple supervolcanoes. Yet when the anti-science crowd isn’t perversely spending their time trying to stop all efforts to cut global warming pollution that might slow warming, they are perversely trying to convince the public and policymakers we’re not warming at all. That’s why many of them have been rooting for this deep solar minimum to become a Maunder Minimum, to mute the warming signal and hence the motivation for action for a few more years. Yes, they have a self-destructive streak.
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Hint: This person was forced out of political office in the shadow of disgrace and failure. [Note to self: Maybe that doesn't winnow down the field much here in Washington, DC.]
Hint: This person has such staggering political independence and acumen that he said in July that Sarah “Four Pinocchios” Palin is a conservative leader on energy issues.
Hint: In June, this person summed up the conservative ethos, saying “I am not a citizen of the world! I think the entire concept is intellectual nonsense and stunningly dangerous.”
Hint: This person is an eco-fraud, who flip-flopped on the central policy issue of our time — reducing CO2 emissions.
And yes, this person tweeted of the recent East Coast snow storm:
It’s official. The state that stands to suffer the most from human-caused global warming has elected leaders who want to stop efforts to avoid its inundation (see “Sea levels may rise 3 times faster than IPCC estimated, could hit 6 feet by 2100“). That’s true of both Senators — see Senator Vitter of Katrina-ravaged Louisiana tries to block climate change response centers and Sen. Vitter opposes Lieberman-Warner and Landrieu wants to jettison cap-and-trade. And it’s true of the Governor (and presidential hopeful), as Think Progress explains:
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is finally moving to regulate global warming pollution. One of the leading opponents to the EPA’s proposed regulations, slated to go into effect in March, 2010, is Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal (R-LA). On Monday, Jindal “and the secretaries of the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources and Louisiana Economic Development filed objections with EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson,” claiming the Supreme-Court-mandated standards “will certainly have profound negative economic impacts“:
Yes, the news on climate science, solutions, and politics is already coming faster than I can keep up with. And yes, 2010 is probably going to the the busiest year to date in terms of climate action — domestic and international.
But still, in the coming weeks and months I do want to be as responsive as possible to reader interest and not let key topics fall off the radar screen as the Senate debate ramps up. So give me one or more ideas — and feel free to endorse other people’s ideas.
The web site Twentynot2000.com notes:
Say the year “1810″ out loud. Now say the year “1999″ out loud. See a pattern? It’s been easier, faster, and shorter to say years this way for every decade (except for the one that just ended) instead of saying the number the long way. However, many people are carrying the way they said years from last decade over to this decade as a bad habit. If we don’t fix this now, we’ll be stuck saying years the long way for the next 89 years. Don’t let that happen!
Please use the time you’ll save by not saying “two-thousand-and-ten” to fight AGW. That is all.
Below are all the posts written this year that were viewed by 12,000 or more people. These numbers don’t count views by my subscribers, who don’t show up in any of my stats unless they click on link and visit Climate Progress.
This list is perhaps a better introduction to Climate Progress than the most-discussed posts of 2008, since it is basically driven by what the rest of the blogosphere thinks are the best and most timely CP posts.
Regular readers can probably figure out what post written this year was (easily) my most widely read — viewed by over 63,000 people! Hint: It was certainly the most linked to and talked about post I did this year — particularly since the subjects of the post came after me. But I was quickly vindicated by independent analysis and reporting — and leading writers and bloggers picked up and expanded on my key points — so it became the most influential post I did this year.
“I think it [climate legislation] is important. I think we ought to take it up,” Specter said in a brief interview last week. He’s also said any final bill must protect manufacturers and provide a major boost for low-emissions coal.
Today, The Hill has an antidote to the flawed, unbalanced reporting in the Politico that I discussed yesterday. The Hill is not wrapped up in pushing a center-right narrative, like the Politico, but just focuses on getting the story right.
This is a superior piece of reporting from the start, with its headline, “Senate climate change fight looks as tough as healthcare reform bill.” Assembling 60 votes for comprehensive climate and clean energy jobs legislation was never going to be easy in this political climate, but any story has to begin with the White House commitment to climate action and the bipartisan team working with the administration:
Energy consultant Michael Lynch and I do not agree on oil, especially peak oil (see Open challenge to long-wrong Michael Lynch, who predicted back in 1996 “real oil prices FLAT for the next two decades”: I’ll take your bet on $30 oil). So I offered him a wager:
Here’s my bet to Lynch. Let’s take the average price of oil from 2010 to 2015. For every $1 a barrel it is below $40, I’ll pay you $200, if you pay me a mere $100 for every $1 a barrel it is above $40.
He didn’t like my terms and counter-offered (here) “say $65? per barrel adjusted for inflation.” I don’t actually read that website, since it’s run by the anti-science disinformers, and he didn’t post the terms in the comments here, which is the main reason I’ve been slow to reply but in any case, the bet is one no believer in peak oil could refuse, and I did want to accept it before the year ended.
It isn’t entirely clear from his post whether he is taking the other terms of my wager or offering a straight bet on the average price, which would also be fine by me. So we’ll have to work that out along with which oil price we’re going to use.
I do take Lynch’s point that the oil price is not definitive proof one way or another of the peak oil theory:
The Politico wasn’t a finalist for the 2009 “Citizen Kane” award for non-excellence in climate journalism solely because it is (supposedly) a new media outlet. But while the Politico offers itself as an antidote to the old media, this collection of political journalists has quickly established itself as more of the same. Squared.
Indeed, because they focus on the political ping pong game, with little or no substantive analysis of the issues they write about in a large fraction of their pieces, they are in danger of becoming a poor man’s David Broder, the sultan of the status quo, stenographer of those centrists who are fatally uninformed about global warming.
For instance, in “Republicans push on ‘Climategate’,” the Politico focused strictly on how the right-wing anti-science crowd were using the purloined emails and didn’t even have a single comment from an actual scientist until the second page of the story — and that was science advisor Holdren from his (terrific) House testimony. And they buried the most important line:
Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) dismissed the controversy as more of a public relations problem than a serious scientific meltdown.
An equally bad piece this month, “Have the greens failed?” sought to pass a negative judgment on the entire clean energy effort of the Obama administration and environmental advocates who support its goals — before Obama’s first year was up (!) and with no mention of many of the president’s remarkable achievements (!!), including for instance, Obama will raise new car fuel efficiency standards to 35.5 mpg by 2015, which is the biggest step the U.S. government has ever taken to cut CO2.
This is standard old-media stuff — when the President’s poll numberes are in a down cycle, declare defeat and failure. Since nobody would read the Politico for substantive analysis, which is done infinitely better at a number of major media outlets and blogs, the only possible reason to read the Politico is for the political analysis. But why bother when that analysis is both so predictable and so influenced by the Politico’s center-right, status quo spin on everything?
Naturally, the Politico’s pundits have turned their substance-free, horserace-heavy attention to the bipartisan climate and clean energy bill, in an article titled “Senate Democrats to W.H.: Drop cap-and-trade.” The piece is a perfect example of journalistic malpractice, intentionally misleading from the very start — the headline and lede:
The next round of the battle over climate change policy on Capitol Hill will involve more than the usual suspects. Way more. Watch soup makers face off against steel companies. Witness the folks who pump gas from the ground fight back against those who dig up rock. And watch the venture capitalists who have money riding on new technology try to gain advantage in a game that so far has been deftly controlled by the old machine.
The Center for Public Integrity has the most comprehensive analysis of the lobby to influence both domestic and global climate action. They’ve just published their latest analysis of the U.S. climate lobby, by Marianne Lavelle and M.B. Pell, which I excerpt below:
“China is going to eat our lunch and take our jobs on clean energy — an industry that we largely invented — and they are going to do it with a managed economy we don’t have and don’t want,” as I’ve said. Our only chance of matching them is to pass the bipartisan climate and clean energy bill.
Two new articles underscore America’s challenge. The first is a short Reuters piece on China’s new renewables law, and the second is a long New Yorker piece. Reuters reported Sunday:
A new Chinese law requires power grid operators to buy all the electricity produced by renewable energy generators, in a move that will increase the proportion of energy that comes from renewable sources in coal-dependent China.
The amendment to the 2006 renewable energy law was adopted on Saturday by the standing committee of the National People’s Congress, China’s legislature, the Xinhua news agency said.
The amendment also gives authority to the State Council energy department, together with the State Council finance department and the state power authority, to “determine the proportion of renewable energy power generation to the overall generating capacity for a certain period.”
Such legislation is not how we do business, which is why, I repeat, “The only way to win the clean energy race is to pass the clean energy bill.”
The New Yorker piece is great news from the perspective of those who want to see widespread dissemination of low-cost low-carbon technology, but alarming to any American who understands that such technology will be the among the biggest source of high-wage jobs and economic power this century (see “Invented here, sold there”). I recommend reading the whole piece, but I’ll single out two must-read extended excerpts. First, the overview:
This guest post by David Doniger, the policy director of NRDC, was first published here. I know Doniger from our days in the Clinton administration, where he was director of climate change policy at the Environmental Protection Agency and, before that, counsel to the head of the EPA’s clean air program. He is one of the country’s savviest thinkers on climate policy and emissions regulations.
The Copenhagen climate deal that President Obama hammered out Friday night with the leaders of China, India, Brazil and South Africa broke through years of negotiating gridlock to achieve three critical goals. First, it provides for real cuts in heat-trapping carbon pollution by all of the world’s big emitters. Second, it establishes a transparent framework for evaluating countries’ performance against their commitments. And third, it will start an unprecedented flow of resources to help poor and vulnerable nations cope with climate impacts, protect their forests, and adopt clean energy technologies.
Who the heck knows what the best posts are? But I do have two quantitative measures of the hottest posts — most comments and most views (Part II).
The most-discussed post this year received 390 comments, which doesn’t beat my record of 525 (see “Most discussed posts of 2008“), a figure I may never match again because of my comments policy, which is best described as anti anti-science. The disinformers and the quacks make their living by repeating false statements that have long been debunked in the scientific literature. In the real scientific community, anyone who did that would quickly be seen as a quack or a charlatan.
Those who have been duped by the disinformers endeavor to take over the comments section of every major climate website. Where they are allowed to do so, like Dot Earth, they ruin it for everyone else. Climate Progress has a long-standing policy of (generally) not allowing people to repeat long-debunked disinformation, since it requires me or my tireless readers to waste valuable time debunking it. The other choice, ignoring it, is not really an option because on any given day, a large number of people are visiting for the first time and if there is disinformation that is not debunked, they might assume the author and readers are accepting it as true. But sometimes I think it worthwhile to let the anti-science crowd have at it, just so everyone else can see what we are up against — and that leads to posts with lots of comments.
This list of most-commented-on posts is, I think, an okay introduction to Climate Progress (though I’d still recommend starting with the articles on the right hand column) — but it’s an even better introduction to the terrific set of readers that make CP’s comments section so lively and informative:
UPDATE: Gelbspan is responding to comments, so please keep them coming! And enjoy this rare dialogue with a true legend of climate reporting.
Investigative journalist Ross Gelbspan has a new video out — and is very much interested in your feedback on it.
While I’ve been writing about climate and clean energy for two decades, Gelbspan is one of the main reasons I’ve focused so much attention on both the anti-science disinformation campaign and the flawed media coverage of global warming — two areas he has done pioneering work for more than a decade (see his website, The Heat is Online).
But what I didn’t realize until a recent e-mail is that I met him more than three decades ago.
Two butterfly species, the small heath (left) and common blue (right), have become more likely since 1980 to have multiple generations in Central Europe in the same year, as a long-term warming trend has picked up pace:
Ecologist Florian Altermatt of the University of California, Davis has studied 44 species of moths and butterflies in Central Europe. He published the results December 22 in the science journal, Proceedings of the Royal Society B article, “Climatic warming increases voltinism in European butterflies and moths” (which is available online for free for a few more days). “Voltinism” refers to the number of breeding cycles in a year.
As the region has warmed since the 1980s, some of these species have added an extra generation during the summer for the first time on record in that location. Among the 263 species already known to have a second or third generation there during toasty times, 190 have grown more likely to do so since 1980.
Since the journal article is a tough read, I’m excerpting the Science News story (which is also the source of the pictures):
Please post your choices in the comments. Here are my 10 favorite:
And yes, I’m well aware that the best scientific evidence says humans are not like slowly boiling frogs … we are in fact much more like slowly boiling brainless frogs.
The anti-science crowd is all for “teaching” our kids about dirty energy (see “Let’s Learn About Coal”: Industry front group distributes coloring book on the “advantages” of coal). But when it comes to climate science, their motto seems to be “We don’t need no education,” as Think Progress reports.
Until recently, the Build-A-Bearville website (part of the Build-A-Bear Workshop) featured online videos telling children about manmade global warming and the dangers it holds for the North Pole. In the videos, little animals learn about the problem and teach Santa Claus about it. The right wing has been outraged over the antics of these bears and penguins. One conservative called for a boycott of Build-A-Bear, and another said the the videos amount to “indoctrination.” In response to this right-wing pressure, Build-A-Bear has taken down the educational videos. A statement from “Founder and Chief Executive Bear” Maxine Clark:
That’s the the 7-day (12/14-12/20) sea surface temperature (SST) anomaly map from Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology (ABM). Their El Niño-Southern Oscillation report finds:
Pacific Ocean temperatures remain at levels typical of a mature El Niño…. As a result, central Pacific Ocean surface temperatures are now at their warmest level since the El Niño of 1997-98, exceeding temperatures observed in both the 2002-03 and 2006-07 events. During the past week, small regions which are more than 3°C above their average temperature have emerged along the equator.
Leading climate models continue to suggest tropical ocean temperatures are approaching their peak, and will remain above El Niño thresholds through the southern summer before starting to cool.
The longer and stronger the El Niño, the more likely 2010 is the hottest year on record (see “Hansen predicts better than 50% chance 2010 will set new record” and UK Met Office: Global warming plus El Niño means it’s “more likely than not that 2010 will be the warmest year in the instrumental record”).
The warming in the Nino 3.4 region of the Pacific is typically used to define an El Niño — sustained postive sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies of greater than 0.5°C across the central tropical Pacific Ocean. Here’s the Nino 3.4 data for the last 5 years from ABM:
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