Climate Progress

The NY Times takes cash from ExxonMobil to publish its lies on the front page.  The Washington Post was on the verge of offering lobbyists off-the-record access to the “powerful few” for $250,000 (!) — until the Politico (and others) called them out.  But there still are a few media outlets that won’t sell their integrity for a few pieces of silver, as this Think Progress post explains.

Yesterday afternoon, Roanoke television station WDBJ-TV, announced they will be refusing to air a National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) ad attacking freshman Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA), citing factual inaccuracies. The NRCC had been planning to run television ads against Democratic members of Congress, like Perriello, who voted for the Waxman-Markey clean energy economy legislation that passed last week. After receiving information about the factual inaccuracies in the ad, the station pulled it from rotation.

For any objective observer, the the ad is pulled out of thin air. The ads erroneously state that the bill will “destroy jobs” and “cost middle-class families $1,800 a year.” According to a study by the Center for American Progress, clean energy economy legislation will create 1.7 million American jobs while simultaneously addressing climate change by capping carbon dioxide emissions. The $1,800 figure used by NRCC is also made of whole cloth. The Congressional Budget Office has scored the bill and found that by 2020, the annual cost would be about $175 per household — about a postage stamp a day. An EPA estimate of the bill found similar results, projecting the cost to be about $80 to $111 per a year.

Still refusing to accept reality, the Republican leadership is instructing its members to lie about the clean energy economy bill:

(more…)

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:

(more…)

Many of the top climate scientists in the world issued a major synthesis report reviewing the scientific literature since the 2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4).  They found “greenhouse gas emissions and many aspects of the climate are changing near the upper boundary of the IPCC range of projections.”  In short, actual observations show things are much worse than the IPPC found.  Duh! and Duh! and Duh! Media coverage level — bupkis!  Technorati links to report released June 18 — 6.

One EPA economist,  Alan Carlin, cuts and pastes some disinformation from a denier blog post in order to (falsely) assert that the EPA’s endangerment finding is flawed because

• “In the rapidly evolving field of climate change, by grounding its TSD Technical Support Documents in the IPCC AR4 the EPA is largely relying on scientific findings that are, by early 2009, largely 3 years or more out of date.”
• “Important developments” since the IPCC cast doubt on its conclusions.

Media coverage level of this crap, whose entire conclusion was vitiated by the earlier synthesis by real scientists — Michael Jackson [adjusted for subject area]!  Technorati links to “report” posted by deniers on June 25 — 61.

THE MEDIA PREFERS FABRICATED DRAMA TO GENUINE FACTS

When a government agency doesn’t incorporate plagiarized disinformation into their work product, is that suppression — or your tax dollars working the way they’re supposed to, with decisions based on sound science?   Deniers like the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Roger Pielke, Jr. say it’s the former, and they have spun some of the more gullible members of the status quo media, like CBS, who reported Friday:

Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty “decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.”

Well, this “report” was actually first just “proposed comments” and then actual “Comments on the Draft Technical Support Documents for Endangerment Analysis for Greenhouse Gas Emissions under the Clean Air.”

I worked in a federal agency for five years.  Lots of internal people provide comments on draft documents.  Some of it’s good, some of it’s irrelevant, and some is outright disinformation — typically the latter is from holdovers from a previous administration.  In this case, it actually looks like the comments were

1. Unadulterated and long-debunked disinformation
2. From someone unqualified on the subject they are writing
3. Cut and paste from a blog without attribution
4. Delivered too late and not actually germane

Such comments should not be incorporated into an official government document — certainly not without a serious inquiry first.  They might, however, be the basis of an advserse employment action, as the euphemism goes.

You can read a thorough debunking of these “comments” at the RealClimate Post, “Bubkes.”  A brilliant piece by Deep Climate showed that this so-called “suppressed report” is

largely lifted from an attack on the EPA published last November in climate science disinformation specialist Pat Michaels’ World Climate Report [WCR]. And all this came without any attribution of the large swathes of copied material to WCR or the original author (presumably either Michaels or sidekick Chip Knappenberger).

I won’t repeat the entire Deep Climate analysis, but let me quote from the central thesis of the WCR November 19, 2008 post:  Why the EPA should find against “Endangerment”:

(more…)

The U.S. House of representatives is debating landmark climate and clean energy legislation now — starting with the debate on the rule which limits total debate on Waxman-Markey bill to 3 hours, which means we should get a final vote by the end of the day.

The Waxman-Markey bill would dramatically shift the direction of US energy policy and put the nation on a path to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the coming decades, ultimately removing the overwhelming majority CO2 emissions from the nation’s economy by mid-century, while generating millions of clean energy jobs and restoring US leadership in the key industries of the future.

Over the next of several hours, you can watch this debate on C-SPAN (with various interruptions).  But one can hardly find any discussion of this most consequential legislation in the status quo media.  Even before the death of two pop icons, the coverage was very sparse.

Reuters worries “Michael Jackson overshadows Farrah Fawcett on a sad day.”  That’s the extent of the media’s introspection on its priorities!

Consider the paper of record today, whose front page (here) pretty much tells the rest of the media what the big stories of the day are.  We’ve got Michael Jackson on the cover.  Even Farrah makes the bottom of the front page where the short version of key stories inside are listed.  But no mention at all of the historic debate.  Indeed, there is no news coverage of this at all in the NYT (or much of the major media).

Now the NYT does have an excellent editorial on the bill, which I will reprint below.  But even there, the front page merely mentions that Paul Krugman has an op-ed.  So you’ll have to watch C-SPAN — and the blogosphere — for the real news of the day.  Here is the editorial, “The House and Global Warming“:

(more…)

If I may paraphrase Sir Thomas More in the masterful A Man for All Seasons:

It profits a man nothing to give his soul for the world.  But for ExxonMobil?

The NYT apparently thinks that the way to preserve its declining fortunes is by selling (what’s left of) its soul to ExxonMobil.  As you can see here (clearer picture here, at least through today), the NYT is once again running an ad that its senior staff must know is false and misleading.

I debunked the ad here:  The New York Times sells its integrity to ExxonMobil with front-page ad that falsely asserts “Today’s car has 95% fewer emissions than a car from 1970.” I know some at the NYT read CP and that emails have been sent to top reporters.

Also, the story has since been picked up by Media Matters (”ExxonMobil Exaggerates Emissions Reductions In NYT Ad“) and Fast Company (”Exxon’s Brazen Greenwashing, on the Front Page of The New York Times“), among others.

Ironically — or perhaps intentionally — ExxonMobil seems to be running this ad on Tuesdays, which is when the NYT runs “Science Times.”

Paper of Record, R.I.P.

Maybe it’s a waste of time, but please email the public editor at public@nytimes.com to explain you are “concerned about the paper’s journalistic integrity.”

When we last left the New York Times, they were burying the exclusive they got on climate science impacts report that NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco called a “game changer” (see Memo to White House: The NYT buried the “exclusive” you gave them on the landmark U.S. climate impacts report).

[It was, of course, purely a coincidence that, the very same day, they ran a deceptive front-page ad by the company most responsible for pushing disinformation on climate science (see The New York Times sells its integrity to ExxonMobil with front-page ad that falsely asserts “Today’s car has 95% fewer emissions than a car from 1970″).]

One of the ways that the NYT intellectualized burying this landmark report is that they found a serious scientist who appeared to downplay the report’s importance:

Michael C. MacCracken, a leader of the 2000 study and a principal outside reviewer of the current one, said in an e-mail message that the new report was a useful overview of the state of current climate science in the United States, but “there is not much that is new.”

I said I would email Mike, a friend, to explain this absurd quote.  I’ve certainly been misquoted by reporters and bloggers many times, so it’s only fair to allow Mike his full response.

Also, I think this episode provides a very good lesson to anyone who talks to the media on how NOT to get your message out. One of my readers, Anna Haynes, got an even more thorough reply than I did, which she posted here and I’m reprinting below:

(more…)

Please email the NYT at nytnews@nytimes.com about this egregious ad and/or email its public editor at public@nytimes.com to explain you are “concerned about the paper’s journalistic integrity.”  Click image for full pic of the NYT’s June 16, 2009 front page.

These are hard times for the newspaper business.  The paper of record has taken to running ads on the front page.  But if they’re going to give up that precious real estate, home to many Pulitzer-Prize-winning stories, they simply can’t do it for this kind of disinformation, which is utterly misleading to the public.

Fuel for thought

Today’s car has 95% fewer emissions than a car from 1970.

Needless to say — or, rather, in this case, needful to say — while today’s car has lower emissions of urban air pollutants thanks to government regulation, today’s car has, if anything, higher emissions of greenhouse gases, which threaten the health and well-being of the next 50 generations.  And needful to say, ExxonMobil has done more than just about any other company to undermine efforts to achieve the greenhouse gas regulations that could lower those emissions.

(more…)

The big story featured on the NYT website at 11 am Tuesday ain’t about climate:  “With consumers in revolt, it was almost a relief that Tracey Ullman did not shy away from a bit of a roast at American fashion industry’s annual awards night” (see photo below).  This is the NYT as People magazine, except today they are focusing on the wrong set of “hot” people.  Can you find their “exclusive” climate science story on the front page of nytimes.com?  It’s harder than Where’s Waldo?  It only made page A13 of the print edition.

The biggest U.S. climate science story in a long time is the US Global Change Research Program releasing its long-awaited analysis of Global Climate Change Impacts in United States.

After all, the Bush administration spent eight years muzzling US climate scientists, stopping them from talking to anybody about U.S. climate impacts, and blocking and burying mandated studies of U.S. impacts (see “The four global warming impact studies Bush tried to bury in his final days“).  No surprise, then, that many Americans don’t worry very much about global warming, particularly those who get the news from right wing media (see the deniers are winning, especially with GOP voters or rather only with GOP voters).

Based on media coverage and my conversations with people, I can safely say that it is news to 99.9% of Americans that if we don’t do anything to restrict greenhouse gas emissions we’ll see scorching 9 to 11°F warming over most of inland U.S. by 2090 with Kansas above 90°F some 120 days a year.

The report is embargoed until 1:30 today, but the paper of record was given an exclusive yesterday.  Well, you can look very hard to try to find that story on their website.  Their piece, “Government Study Warns of Climate Change Effects,” is buried, and the reporter actually managed to find a serious scientist to downplay the report’s importance:

(more…)

Big media struggles with how — or even whether — to explain to the public that the increase in extreme weather we are seeing is precisely what scientists have been predicting would occur because of human-caused climate change (see, for instance, “CNN, ABC, WashPost, AP, blow Australian wildfire, drought, heatwave “Hell (and High Water) on Earth” story — never mention climate change“).

But the AP and the Washington Times has explained quite well (here) the likely source of Brazil’s double punch — brutal drought followed by brutal flooding, Hell and High Water:

Across the Amazon basin, river dwellers are adding new floors to their stilt houses, trying to stay above rising floodwaters that have killed 48 people and left 405,000 homeless.

Flooding is common in the world’s largest remaining tropical wilderness, but this year the waters rose higher and stayed longer than they have in decades, leaving some fruit trees entirely submerged.

The surprise isn’t just the record flooding, it’s that the flooding followed record droughts:

Only four years ago, the same communities suffered an unprecedented drought that ruined crops and left mounds of river fish flapping and rotting in the mud.

Experts suspect global warming may be driving wild climate swings that appear to be punishing the Amazon with increasing frequency.

The BBC also got the story right last month, “Experts say global warming may be behind the wild climate swings that have brought periods of unprecedented droughts and flooding to the Amazon in recent years.”

Interestingly, the same exact swings in extreme weather hit Louisiana in 2005, as I wrote in my book Hell and High Water:

(more…)

Memo to Washington Post:  Please, please trade editor Fred Hiatt to the Wall Street Journal editorial page where his penchant for allowing unfact-checked crap into the paper — and for writing it himself — would no longer hurt the reputation of a (once) great newspaper.

There are lots of reasons for progressives and the progressive media to criticize the “B-” grade Waxman-Markey bill.  Most notably, the 2020 target is too weak, too easy to meet with the over abundance of low-cost clean energy strategies available in this country.  There are lots of reasons for status quo centrists to criticize the bill.  Most notably, they don’t get that global warming is a big deal (see “David Broder is the stenographer of those centrists who are fatally uninformed about global warming“).

But what kind of newspaper would attack the bill because it sets a standard that requires new buildings to become more energy efficient?  That is a hard-core conservative critique.  Pretty much everybody else understands the multiple market barriers that work against energy-efficient design — including the fact that the overwhelming majority of buildings are not built by the people who occupy them.  Construction and management companies emphasize minimizing first cost, spending the least amount of money upfront, which has the effect of maximizing lifecycle cost, leading to much higher energy bills that otherwise rational decision-making would lead to.

And so most reasonable, non-conservative observers understand and support national standards for energy-efficient appliances and buildings, such as you find in the Waxman-Markey bill (see “Better buildings soon? Energy and climate bill would set national energy codes“).  But not if you work for the editorial page of the Washington Post, which is usually derided as leftist by the right-wing and derided as centrist by progressives, but is now just plain derided by everybody.

Let’s go through the critique in Sunday’s unsigned Washington Post editorial, a piece that is both naïve and paranoid at the same time (which one can safely assume ed page editor Fred Hiatt had a big hand in) and Hiatt’s signed column today (which he apparently wrote because Krauthammer, Will, Samuelson, and the occasional Schlesinger column don’t satisfy his need for pushing right wing disinformation).

First we have the conspiracy-theory pushing Sunday editorial:

(more…)