Climate Progress

Who do you think will be the GOP’s presidential nominee in 2012?

“If I had to guess, we just saw the opening statement of the 2012 campaign.”

That’s conservative pundit Bill Kristol, calling into Fox News after the only governor who can see Russia when she stands on a really, really tall building announced she is quitting her job in a few weeks.

And why not?  Top GOP contenders for 2012 are dropping like adulterous, love-sick flies — and let’s not forget “Eruptions of know-nothingism from conservative savior Bobby Jindal.”

And let’s certainly not forget this post-election Rassmussen poll about the woman who wears a polar bear pin even though she is working overtime to wipe the species out:  “64% of GOP voters say Palin is their top choice for 2012, 69% say Palin helped McCain.”

So here’s a little Palin primer on energy and climate:

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The debate over Waxman-Markey reminds me of what I love most about blogging.

No, it’s not what you think, it’s not the chance to be snarky.  I don’t need the blogosphere for that.

No, what I like about the blogosphere is that it ultimately drives a precision in language and a clarity of thought because it is filled with people like The Talented Mr. Pielke, people who are too clever by half [or is that half clever?], people who are ready at a moment’s notice to spin some slightly ambiguous molehill of phrase into a mountainous assault on you, people whose primary blog, the ironically-named “Prometheus,” just died – let us pause for a moment of silence … and weekend of celebration, barbecue, and fireworks.

The problem arises for many reasons, such as malicious mischief, but here I’m going to focus on just one — the generally humorless nature of the global warming deniers and delayers.

My father, a lifelong newspaper editor known for his sense of humor, always said that no matter how blatant the humor he might use, some reader would inevitably take it literally and write him an angry letter.  I have endeavored to address that problem here with the “Humor” category — but that doesn’t work for small bits of humor in an otherwise serious post.

So for the first time ever — and I hope the last — I’m going to explain two jokes for the sake of those cheerless cheerleaders for climate chaos, and their head cheerleader [jeerleader?], The Talented Mr. Pielke (Jr).

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RealClimate has just eviscerated Roger Pielke, Sr. in an important post, “More bubkes.”  I am going to excerpt it at length because:

1. It thoroughly debunks some now-standard denier talking points on sea level rise, ocean heat content, and Arctic sea ice that the Pielkes, WattsUpWithThat, Inhofe, George Will and others have been pushing.
2. It has some excellent figures, including ones from the recent major peer-reviewed synthesis report of climate science since the 2007 IPCC report (which I wrote about here).
3. Pielke Sr. accused me of “a failure to understand the physics of global warming and cooling” in a post (here) about ocean heat content (which was gleefully reprinted by the anti-scientific website WattsUpWithThat), even though, as RealClimate definitively shows, it is Pielke who either fails to understand the science or chooses to willfully misrepresent it.

In my post “Breaking: NOAA puts out ‘El Niño Watch,’ so record temperatures are coming and this will be the hottest decade on record,” I had noted that Pielke Sr. loves to cherry-pick climate data over short time spans to make misleading scientific claims about climate.  Climate, of course, is about long-term trends.

The basis for Pielke’s claim I don’t understand the science of climate:  “There are peer reviewed analyses that document that upper ocean warming has halted since 2003….  Even the last few years of the Levitus et al 2009 paper shows this lack of warming (see).”  And then he links to his discussion of that paper and puts up this figure:

What serious climate scientist would look at that data and have the nerve to tell the public it documents that upper ocean warming has halted since 2003.  If you wanted to play this game — and game is a kind word for this willful attempt to mislead the public — you could much more truthfully say “upper ocean warming has soared since 2002.”  But both statements are beside the point.

How could any serious climate scientist possibly look at such noisy data, which is full of short-term gyrations and brief, multi-year periods of little obvious warming — but an unmistakable upward trend for decades — and have the audacity to pick the year right after a staggeringly rapid increase in upper ocean warming as the basis of his public pronouncements on this issue?  And Pielke Sr. has the chutzpah to say my writing exhibits “a failure to understand the physics of global warming and cooling.”  Doctor — heal thyself.  It’s sad, really, since, unlike his son, he is actually a “climatologist.”

Pielke Sr. tries the same crap on the climate scientists of RealClimate — and their devastating must-read response should end forever any notion that Roger Pielke, Sr. is a credible source on climate science:

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In its May 2008 Corporate Citizenship Report, ExxonMobil promised:

In 2008, we will discontinue contributions to several public policy research groups whose positions on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner.

Bullshit.

Okay, you’re not shocked.  Still, it is worth publicizing their deceipt, as the UK’s Guardian did:

ExxonMobil continuing to fund climate denial groups, records show

The world’s largest oil company is continuing to fund lobby groups that question the reality of global warming, despite a public pledge to cut support for such climate change denial, a new analysis shows.

Company records show that ExxonMobil handed over hundreds of thousands of pounds to such lobby groups in 2008. These include the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) in Dallas, Texas, which received $75,000 (£45,500), and the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC, which received $50,000.

According to Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, at the London School of Economics, both the NCPA and the Heritage Foundation have published “misleading and inaccurate information about climate change.”

…  Ward said: “ExxonMobil has been briefing journalists for three years that they were going to stop funding these groups. The reality is that they are still doing it. If the world’s largest oil company wants to fund climate change denial then it should be upfront about it, and not tell people it has stopped.“

The oil giant’s full list of 2008 grantees is here.  They also gave money to such purveyors of misinformation on climate change policy as American Council for Capital Formation Center for Policy Research and American Council on Science and Health and Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies and Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and National Black Chamber of Commerce, which recently released this doozy:

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“… If he is not ready to risk failure by going all out, failure will be the most likely result.“

If Obama wants the Senate to pass Waxman-Markey — preferably strengthened — then he needs to put the same effort into it that he has begun for health care.  And you, the informed public, must get more involved.

The NYT reported lasted month, “Obama to Forge a Greater Role on Health Care“:

After months of insisting he would leave the details to Congress, President Obama has concluded that he must exert greater control over the health care debate and is preparing an intense push for legislation that will include speeches, town-hall-style meetings and much deeper engagement with lawmakers, senior White House officials say.

Terrific.  Awesome.  About time.  That, however, is also what passing strong climate and clean energy legislation will take, as I’ve said many times.  Tom Friedman argues in “Just Do It,” his recent column on House passing Waxman-Markey (despite its many flaws):

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Mary Bono Mack Should Be Burned in Effigy and Voted Out of Office

That’s the screaming headline at screaming right-wing blog Red State.  The article asserts, “she should now be targeted”:

… we beat her and her husband at the polls.

Yes, you heard me. We can get at Mary Bono Mack in two ways — her district and that of her husband. He should feel the heat just as much as her.

“Feel the heat” for voting to support efforts to stop global warming — yes, irony can be so ironic. Greenwire via the NYT explains the source of the latest ideological purity test of the ever shrinking GOP, “Conservative Ire Rains on 8 Republicans Who Voted for House Climate Bill.”  For CP readers, these folks are heroes:

The eight Republicans are Mark Kirk of Illinois; Mike Castle of Delaware; Mary Bono Mack of California; Dave Reichert of Washington; John McHugh of New York; and Frank LoBiondo, Leonard Lance and Chris Smith of New Jersey.

But not to the defacto leader of the GOP, Rush Limbaugh:

“This is an outrage. This is something that everybody who voted for this thing needs to be sent packing….”

I always thought “small is beautiful,” was a motto of the environmental movement but apparently it’s the new motto of the Republican Party, along with Gingrich’s “I am not a citizen of the world!” and, of course, “Drill baby, drill.”

And then we have top conservative blogger Michele Maglalang aka Michele Malkin, once called by a newspaper “an Asian Ann Coulter,” to which she responded “I’m not Asian, I’m American, for goodness’ sake. I would take the comparison to Ann Coulter as somewhat of a compliment.”  She put this poster on her website:

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The signs of global warming are everywhere.  Coming back from my Vail conference to Denver, the driver pointed out to me the shocking devastation the state is now experiencing from the pine beetle, devastation anyone who lives in the West can see.

The so-called paper of record ran its second major story in less than a year on the country’s most infamous climate-driven pest, “Beetles Add New Dynamic to Forest Fire Control Efforts” by Kirk Johnson.  And like the early piece, “Bark Beetles Kill Millions of Acres of Trees in West,” by Jim Robbins, it’s a great story, other than neglecting to mention climate change. It’d be like an article on an outbreak of avian flu that left out any discussion of birds.

So we have the national “liberal” media, like the NYT and NBC, blowing this story, while the local, conservative media get it right, see “Conservative San Diego Union knows climate change is killing Western forests” and “Oldest Utah newspaper: Bark-beetle driven wildfires are a vicious climate cycle.”

Of course, the journal Nature understands the science, as an April 2008 article made clear: “Mountain pine beetle and forest carbon feedback to climate change.” So does the Canadian media: “Climate-Driven Pest Devours Canada’s Forests.”

No wonder the public is not terribly concerned about global warming and fails to understand that humans are changing the climate now. The only surprising thing is that the NYT itself is surprised that the public is underinformed (see “NYT’s Revkin seems shocked by media’s own failure to explain climate threat“).

This new piece made the crucial connection between the beetles and the record-breaking forest fires that the West have been experiencing — but missed the equally crucial connection to global warming.  On the one hand, that also isn’t surprising since three years ago, the NY Times blew the Wildfire Story.  On the other hand, had reporter Kirk Johnson bothered to spend even one minute on Google he would have uncovered the tragic feedback that would have made his story complete — global warming leads to more bark beetles, which kills more trees, which leads to more fires, which emit large amounts of carbon dioxide, which leads to more global warming!

The NYT did get the grim, superficial facts of the story right:

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In the first half of his Sunday interview after the passage of the Waxman-Markey bill, Obama said he was confident the Senate will pass the climate and clean energy bill.  He also asserted “My strong belief is that innovation and technology are going to accelerate our process beyond these targets, and that we’re going to look back and say we can do even more.”

Then Obama invited Energy Secretary Steven Chu and climate czar Steven Carol Browner to chime in (transcript here).  Here is the rest of the interview:

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Judging by emails and comments, many progressives and enviros seem to be under the misimpression that a much tougher climate bill was politically possible.  I myself was under that misimpression for a while.

Now, in fairness to myself (and others), one serious scenario does exist for a tougher climate bill being politically possible — but that involves a very hands-on Obama, which so far hasn’t been his style for passing legislation (see “Obama can get a better climate bill in 2010“).  Also, his advisors are almost certainly telling him to soft-pedal climate science — a serious mistake, since it essentially gives the deniers free reign to shape half of the debate.  I will blog on that shortly.

Outside the DC beltway, much of what goes on in this town is seen as some form of crass, enigmatic sausage making.  Well, as someone who has lived here for over 15 years, that’s precisely what it is.  And it always bears repeating that given modern conservative ideology, which is 100% anti-conservation, “the country can only contemplate serious environmental legislation when we have the unique constellation of a Democratic president and [large] Democratic majorities in both houses, an occurrence far rarer than a total eclipse of the sun.”

Even then, you must contend with the fact that a key part of this new Democratic majority is built upon votes from districts that are relatively moderate if not conservative, people who voted Democratic not so much because they endorse the progressive platform, but because they finally saw the ever-shrinking Republican Party for what it is — a rigidly-ideological movement hat has no solutions to offer for the many problems facing the country, problems that in fact stem from the few times the public mistakenly handed them the keys to the Hummer.

I would also add that in my one year as an American Physical Society Congressional science fellow advising a conservative Democrat from Florida in 1987-1988 — a pre-Gingrich time that was in theory much more conducive to bipartisanship — I never once saw a single member cast a vote purely for the national interest, except when that vote had no bearing whatsoever on their district.  And even then, every vote was still primarily a political calculation, and if their support wasn’t needed for passage, members almost automatically asked for a pass on any vote that could conceivably get them in any trouble in their district.

So how did we actually get a majority to vote for the first major environmental bill in two decades, a bill that is easily demagogued against politically — see this misleading but brutal GOP ad already whipped up against one Dem –  but whose major environmental benefit is decades in the future?

The Politico explains in “Chaos, arm-twisting gave Pelosi win,” excerpted below:

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Enhancing cooperation on climate change and energy efficiency should be a major plank of U.S. Russia policy and should be discussed at the highest levels when President Obama meets with President Medvedev next week.This Center for American Progress post, by Senior Fellow Andrew Light, Senior Policy Analyst Julian L. Wong, and Fellow Samuel Charap, was first published here.

The summit between President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev in Moscow on July 6-8 comes in the middle of a packed international schedule of bilateral and multilateral meetings for the United States. on climate change. In the run up to the critical U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen at the end of this year, when the extension or successor to the existing Kyoto Protocol must be agreed upon, it is crucial that the United States and Russia—both major emitters of greenhouse gases and potentially leaders on this crucial issue—explore ways of working together to ensure a positive outcome at these talks. Enhancing cooperation on climate change and energy efficiency should be a major plank of U.S. Russia policy and should be discussed at the highest levels when President Obama meets with President Medvedev next week.

Russia, like the United States, is a significant contributor to global warming. If the European Union is disaggregated Russia is the third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide behind the United States and China and still currently ahead of India. More importantly Russian per capita emissions are on the rise, and are projected at this point to approach America’s top rank as per capita emitter by 2030. Russia is also the third-largest consumer of energy and one of the world’s most energy-intensive economies. Making Russia a partner on these issues could be critical in order to advance a sound global climate change agenda.

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