Climate Progress: An insider's view of climate science, politics, and solutions

Okay, the Examiner.com calls it their “First Annual Survey on Global Warming.“  But I think you’ll agree with our friendly neighborhood Rabett that it’s more like a “push poll.”

What has gotten Eli hopping mad?  This remarkable “you-are-a-pigeon question”:

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Roger Pielke Jr. has written the most Titanic whine in the history of the climate blogosphere, “Giant Fish, Big Fish and Minnows of the Liberal Blogosphere.”  And I do mean Titanic with a capital T. 

Tim Lambert (aka Deltoid) calls it the “Pielke Pity Party.”  Eli Rabett calls it “The great Pielke meltdown.”

The woe-is-me post is a substance-free ad hominem attack on Berkeley economist Brad Delong and some of the leading science bloggers, including me.  What is so fishy about the whole thing is that it tries to paint Pielke as some sort of innocent victim whose only sin is to have — cue violins — “patiently and persistently built upon an academic record of peer-reviewed research on aspects of the climate that they disagree with.”

In the real world, of course, Pielke routinely tries to drown the reputation of top scientists — including all three thousand attendees of an Al Gore talk at the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a coauthor of the recent NOAA-led climate impacts report — with no justification whatsoever (click here or see below).

In this piteous post, Pielke announces, “I have a major book on climate coming out next year that will be in bookstores everywhere.”  How disappointing for those of us who thought he was “voluntarily” going into semi-exile when he shut down his popular Prometheus blog and started his obscure but cleverly named “Roger Pielke Jr.’s Blog.”

So let’s set the record straight.  Roger Pielke Jr. is the most debunked person in the science blogosphere, possibly the entire Web.  Heck, computer scientist Tim Lambert (aka Deltoid) has a whole category just for Roger, which I commend to anyone who still takes the man seriously.  Lambert’s latest withering must-read takedown is “Another Pielke train wreck” (reposted by DeLong):

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Okay, the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act ain’t Shakespeare — and it ain’t perfect.

Still, there is much confusion about its name.   I heard it straight from the primary sponsors themselves that it is “Kerry-Boxer” and not the other way around.  The House bill is Waxman-Markey, and it would be inappropriate (and confusing) to call it Markey-Waxman.

It may not seem like a big deal, but this minor brouhaha actually made it into E&E News PM (subs. req’d) last night with a Shakespearean sub-head:

What’s in a name?

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A repost from Wonk Room.

This Tuesday, as President Barack Obama and other world leaders addressed the United Nations on the need to tackle global warming, some entrepreneurs hoped to demonstrate their own solution. Notably, this solution allows humanity — at least those who are sufficiently wealthy — to completely ignore climate change. The Yes Men displayed SurvivaBalls, self-contained survival suits impervious to the ravages of global warming, on the banks of the East River:

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ZACKENBERG RESEARCH STATION, GREENLAND—Claiming it to be one of the most dramatic and visible signs of climate change to date, researchers said Monday that receding polar ice caps have revealed nearly 200 clandestine lairs once buried deep beneath hundreds of feet of Arctic ice.

An ice shelf off the coast of Greenland in 2006 (above) and last week (below)

“We always assumed there would be some secret lairs here and there, but the sheer number now being exposed is indeed troubling,” said noted climatologist Anders Lorenzen, who claimed that the Arctic ice caps have shrunk at the alarming rate of 41,000 square miles per year. “In August alone we discovered 44 mad scientist laboratories, three highly classified military compounds, and seven reanimated and very confused cavemen. That’s more than twice the number we had found in the previous three decades combined.”

“This is no longer conjecture,” Lorenzen added. “This is a full-blown crisis.”

According to oceanographers, the Arctic Circle has been devastated by the effects of global warming in recent years, threatening hundreds of men and women who use the frozen tundra as a place to conduct bizarre experiments in human-animal grafting, carry out massive government cover-ups, or simply as a hidden headquarters from which to battle the forces of evil and fight crime.

“Last week a giant ice sheet broke off and split my prized underground complex nearly in half,” said Dr. Raygun, a self-described psychotic mastermind best known for his diabolical thought-control experiments. “Now millions of dollars in state-of-the-art doomsday devices are gone—all because of the environmental carnage wrought by the human race.”

“You spend your whole career concocting a brilliant scheme to wipe out all of mankind, and what happens?” Dr. Raygun continued. “They bring about a major global catastrophe completely on their own, those fools!”

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To prove a point known only to him, Fox News commentator Glenn Beck throws a frog in boiling water (maybe).  It’s not entirely clear from the video that Beck actually did what he said he did:

“You know the old saying, if you put a frog into boiling water, he’s going to jump right out, because he’s scalding hot, but if you place the frog in lukewarm water and gradually raise the temperature, it won’t realize what’s happening and die?”

Once and for all people, this assertion is a myth.  As Wikipedia puts it, German physiologist Friedrich Goltz “demonstrated that frogs will indeed remain in slowly heated water, but only if their brain is removed” — see “Turns out humans are not like slowly boiling frogs … we are like slowly boiling brainless frogs.”

Now if anyone on the planet is proof that our species is like slowly boiling brainless frogs — that we should drop one of the sapiens, and, provisionally put the other one in quotes, so we are Homo “sapiens” sapiens — that would be Glenn “Almost everyone who does believe in global warming is a socialist” Beck.

But here’s the ironic thing about Beck’s rant — his big complaint against Obama here is that, yes, “he’s forced us to think”:

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Perhaps I should send Toles my earlier post, “Turns out humans are not like slowly boiling frogs … we are like slowly boiling brainless frogs.”

From the 9/14 New Yorker.

First the Luddite U.S. Chamber of Commerce said it seeks “the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century” on global warming.  Then the monkey-see, monkey do deniers at Planet Gore and the office of Sen. James Inhofe (R-OIL) joined in.

Finally, the Chamber realized it needs to pretend to not be the extremist, anti-science organization it is, so Bill Kovacs, Vice President for the Environment, Technology & Regulatory Affairs Division, walked back (swung back?) his remarks in a blog post on the National Journal Energy & Environment “Expert blogs” [talk about lowering the bar on the word "expert"]:

My “Scopes monkey” analogy was inappropriate and detracted from my ability to effectively convey the Chamber’s position on this important issue.

“A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth,” as the journalist Michael Kinsley said back in 1992.  The analogy may have been “inappropriate” — but it was all too truthful.  Little distinguishes the deniers from the creationists, as the Christian Science Monitor explained here.

Then Kovacs lets out the biggest whine I’ve heard since, well, my daughter refused to help clean up the mess she made last night:

The anti-business lobby quickly jumped on these news articles without actually reading the substance of the Chamber’s petition, casting us as climate “deniers.” That is certainly unfortunate, but not unexpected. For many of these special interest groups, dogma trumps facts, and they’ve been calling us deniers for years, even though the Chamber supports sensible and ambitious congressional and international action on global climate change.

“Yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt.”

The fact is, the Chamber simply refuses to clean up the mess they made, which is to say the ever increasing amount of heat-trapping greenhouse gases their members are pouring into the atmosphere.  They not only don’t support “ambitious congressional and international action on global climate change,” they actively oppose even the not-so-ambitious Congressional climate and clean energy bill passed by the House — although many of the major businesses on the Chamber’s board publicly support strong climate action (see here).

And speaking of “dogma trumps facts,” here is Kovacs pushing more denier dogma:

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Who would ape the Luddite U.S. Chamber of Commerce in their call for “the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century” on global warming?  Why the monkey-see, monkey do deniers at Planet Gore and the office of Sen. James Inhofe (R-OIL).

Inhofe’s office actually quoted me:

Joe Romm, of the Center for American Progress, asks the board members of the Chamber “to declare whether they are evolved members of humanity or dedicated to our self-destruction.” This scathing, ad hominem response brings to mind John Stuart Mill, who, in his renowned essay “On Liberty,” discussed the practical implications of stifling opinions thought to be incorrect or misguided.

Note:  If you aren’t evolved, then my attack wouldn’t be ad hominem.  Ad simian, maybe.

In any case, my fact-based critique quotes at length from the major court case already held on climate science (see here), in which the witness for the deniers, John Christy, essentially agreed with the witness for climate science, NASA’s James Hansen on the key points, and where he didn’t, the judge explained that “it appears that the bulk of scientific opinion opposes Christy’s position” and that Christy’s view “does not fall within the mainstream of climate scientists.”

What is truly bizarre is that Inhofe staffer David Lungren quotes Mill:

To refuse a hearing to an opinion, because they are sure that it is false, is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty.

So many things are wrong with this argument.  We’re not talking about an “opinion.”  Climate science is … science.  There have been innumerable “hearings,” including the Vermont court case, but far more importantly, through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change process in which every single member government — including the Bush Administration, China, and Saudi Arabia — got to “hear” every single word of the scientific conclusions of the hundreds of scientists who have reviewed thousands of articles (articles which themselves were subject to a scientific “hearing” in the peer review process).  The IPCC summaries are agreed to word for word by every government (which is one reason they tend to be watered down).  The results of the hearings can be found here and are summarzied here, “Absolute MUST Read IPCC Report: Debate over, further delay fatal, action not costly.”

The deniers just don’t like the facts that they hear, so they stick their fingers in their ears and yell “La la la la la la la” over and over again or is that “ooh ooh, ee ee, ah ah” (see “Can you PROVE to me that global warming is being caused by mankind?”*).

I am filing this under humor in part because it is unintentionally hilarious that Inhofe’s staffer quotes Mill, a man who understood the difference between science and opinion — a man who was one of the early proponents of the argument that unlimited growth was unsustainable!  Indeed, on that final point, Wikipedia’s entry on Mill notes:

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Who ever could have imagined that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce would publicly — and proudly — equate climate science with evolution and their denial with a belief in creationism?  Time now for the the major businesses on the Chamber’s board to speak up since many of them publicly claim to support strong climate action (see here).  It might also be time for advocates to start boycotting those brand-name companies if they don’t act swiftly to stop

First, however, the mind-boggling L. A. Times story:

The nation’s largest business lobby wants to put the science of global warming on trial.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, trying to ward off potentially sweeping federal emissions regulations, is pushing the Environmental Protection Agency to hold a rare public hearing on the scientific evidence for man-made climate change.

Chamber officials say it would be “the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century” — complete with witnesses, cross-examinations and a judge who would rule, essentially, on whether humans are warming the planet to dangerous effect.

“It would be evolution versus creationism,” said William Kovacs, the chamber’s senior vice president for environment, technology and regulatory affairs. “It would be the science of climate change on trial.”

The goal of the chamber, which represents 3 million large and small businesses, is to fend off potential emissions regulations by undercutting the scientific consensus over climate change. If the EPA denies the request, as expected, the chamber plans to take the fight to federal court.

What’s the next step for the Chamber — calling for a law banning the teaching of climate science comparable to the 1925 Tennessee law banning the teaching of human evolution that was the basis for the Scopes trial?

You probably thought that the crafty global warming deniers — especially the corporate ones who represent businesses with lots of customers — had gotten together in a room and decided to focus on the economics of the bill or on China’s and India’s intransigence, while keeping their flat-earth views to themselves for fear of not being taken seriously, for fear of being seen as far outside the mainstream.

How wrong you were.  Apparently global warming denial is the new creationism.  The funny thing is, most creationists themselves realized a while back how transparently untenable their public arguments were, so even they have created the media- and moderate-friendly term “intelligent design.”  The Chamber’s head is so stuck in the ground that they actually think it makes sense to analogize their desire to put climate science on trial with the famous Scopes Monkey case, which ultimately “caused millions of Americans to ridicule religious-based opposition to the theory of evolution.”

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By Alex Hallatt From the Cartoonist Group.

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One of the revolving ads at the top of the homepage of one of the leading purveyors of disinformation on global warming, the Drudge Report:

Self-described conservative “humor” — with a lengthy definition of “humor” at the top of the t-shirt website just in case for some reason you didn’t get that this was humorous!

Seriously, torturing people is just so damn funny.   Stop it, you’re killing me.

UPDATE:  Roger Pielke, Jr. is a Senior Fellow for an organization that is dedicating all of its resources to killing any chance of either a national or international effort to avert catastrophic global warming and to spreading disinformation about Obama, Gore, Congressional Democrats, and the environmental movement.  My bad.  I keep forgetting how many people who come to CP on any given day aren’t regular readers and so don’t have the full context for some of my posts.  Back to the humor.

Now that they* have shut down his original popular blog Prometheus, I don’t read his new obscure blog, cleverly named “Roger Pielke Jr.’s Blog.”  As an aside, I’m guessing Pielke’s gonna follow up his book, The Honest Broker, with one titled Roger Pielke’s book.  But I digress.

So it wasn’t until googlealerts pinged me this morning that I learned about Pielke’s July 31 plea to his readers to “Please Read Climate Progress.”

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