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

Our view on climate change: Imperfect ‘cap-and-trade’ is best option to fight warming

It’s complex, costly — and as good as the political system can produce.

Reasonable people can disagree about how bad global warming will eventually be if nothing is done, and some of the doomsday scenarios might well be overblown. But virtually all climate scientists concur that it’s a dire enough threat that the wise course of action is to sharply curb use of carbon-based fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas.

Since CP has a daily news roundup, I thought I’d add an editorial feature, too, maybe not every day, but occasionally, especially when I’m on travel, as today.

This is from USA Today editorial board, which is I think is fairly mainstream.  Here’s the rest:

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It is not really news that former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is not an animal lover — or, I should say, is not a live-animal lover.  That’s especially true for animals that happen to stand in the way of producing more fossil fuels:

• Protecting polar bears gets in way of drilling for oil, says governor Palin
• Palin’s axis of evil animals: Beluga whales join polar bears and wolf cubs
• And who really cares about wolves or their cubs anyway?

But if the Washington Post, which has four stories on Palin and her new book, Going Rogue, today, can take the headline quote above and put it on their front page in big type, well, then it must be news:

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When we last left David Broder back in April, the dean of the DC press corp and the sultan of the status quo centrists, he was criticizing Obama for “launching highly controversial efforts in health care, energy and education.”  What was his argument?  “Each of those issues has a history in Washington — a history marked by congressional gridlock and legislative frustration.”

Never mind the fact that inaction on energy would destroy a livable climate for billions.  No, Obama was rocking the establishment boat by trying to do too much too fast, taking on problems that were mired in decades of inside-the-beltway inaction because they were too difficult.

But now, in a stunning piece titled, “Enough Afghan debate,” Broder flips his criticism entirely.  Obama simply can’t act fast enough on perhaps the most complex issue of his presidency — even if it means getting this vital and dangerous issue completely wrong:

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Our guest blogger is supermodel Cameron Russell, a junior at Columbia University and the organizer of the “Supermodels Take It Off For Climate Change” video for the 350.org movement.  This is a Wonk Room repost.

Right now, preventing catastrophic climate change is just about the most important thing any one of us should be working on right now. 350.org organized a worldwide day of action which took place on October 24. The goal of their effort was to educate and generate attention around the setting of a 350 parts per million CO2 target goal for the meeting to be held in Copenhagen in December. I know something about getting attention and decided to contribute to their effort.

In the history of the world, all five mass extinctions have been accompanied by massive climate change, so we are facing an incredibly serious threat. In fact, we are technically in the sixth mass extinction right now, and it is the first mass extinction being attributed to humans.

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So I’m watching an otherwise interesting story on “efforts to convert algae into clean fuel,” by the otherwise very solid Tom Bearden of PBS’s NewsHour.  Then, boom, he drops the media’s favorite wishy-washy hedge:

Wells also produce carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas thought to contribute to global climate change.

C’mon.  I think we are at least one decade, if not two decades or more, passed a time when the words “thought to” are justified.

Note to Beardon:  Why exactly do you think it is called a greenhouse gas?

This hedge remains all too common in the media — see Memo to Wall Street Journal: You can do better than “greenhouse gases, which are believed to contribute to climate change.”

As I wrote in that earlier post, this hedge is especially pointless and misinforming because of the second hedge — “contribute to.”  All but the most extremist deniers of the basic climate science accept that carbon dioxide contributes to global climate change.

So perhaps the NewsHour might catch up with the scientific understanding and write some variation of:

… carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas that causes the global climate to change.

And people wonder why the public is still underinformed on this subject.

Related Posts:

• Note to media: Enough with the multiple hedges on climate science!

In September, I wrote a post “Newsweek gets duped by Big Oil — for real — in worst Big Media story of the year.”   The Newsweek piece by Rana Foroohar was titled “Big Oil Goes Green for Real” with greenwashing lines like “So how should we take the spate of new green announcements from the world’s major oil firms?”  Not.

What I didn’t realize is that Newsweek was not getting duped by Big Oil — it was getting cash from the American Petroleum Institute in return for “access,” as journalism and ethics experts told E&E News (subs. req’d).

Newsweek since 2007 has sold advertising packages to the oil industry’s biggest influence group that included the right to co-host forums on energy issues, including two where members of Congress sat side-by-side on panels with the association’s president.

American Petroleum Institute ranks among advertisers that have reached a spending threshold that allows them to attach their name to a Newsweek event and have their top executive as a panel speaker. API President and Chief Executive Jack Gerard was the sole industry speaker joining Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and Reps. Nick Rahall (D-W.Va.) and Doc Hastings (R-Wash.) at an “executive forum” the magazine and API held at the U.S. Capitol in March.

Newsweek and API have teamed on four forums so far and are planning another — “Climate and Energy Policy: Moving?” — for Dec. 1, when the Senate could be holding a floor debate on climate legislation. An invitation sent yesterday to lawmakers’ offices said Gerard again would be a panelist and that requests to speak were “currently pending confirmation with notable members of the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate.” Lawmakers receiving invitations included Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) and Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

I urge all lawmakers to shun this event.

TPM Muckraker also has a good story on part of this, “Newsweek And Oil Lobby Team Up To Host Climate Change Event With Lawmakers,” which noted:

In February 2008, the news weekly and the oil lobby held a panel discussion on “Globalization Trends and Energy and the Growing Competition for Resources.” That event featured Foroohar, the author of the recent Newsweek story lauding big oil, as well as Tony Emerson, the managing editor of Newsweek International, API’s then-CEO Red Cavaney, and an energy specialist for the Chamber of Commerce. Emerson, moderating, described API as “an advertising partner.”

Remember, the API is spending millions to spread disinformation about the climate bill (see here) and create fake grassroots campaigns against it (see “Leaked memo: Big Oil manufacturing ‘Energy Citizen’ rallies to oppose clean energy reform“).

The E&E story, “API’s partnership with Newsweek raises ad cash and ethics questions,” is so shocking that I will excerpt the rest of it at length below:

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Al Gore is in the spotlight again with his must-read solutions book — “Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis.” And that means the daggers are out.  But who would have imagined that one of the first pieces would be by the NYT’s John Broder, who repeats the false claims by “Critics, mostly on the political right and among global warming skeptics,” that “Mr. Gore is poised to become the world’s first ‘carbon billionaire,’ profiteering from government policies he supports that would direct billions of dollars to the business ventures he has invested in.”  I’m going to repost a piece by Media Matters from May that looks at one of the despicable origins of this smear, “O’Reilly Factor guest host Laura Ingraham presented clips of Al Gore’s recent congressional testimony that had been edited to remove his statements that he donates the money he makes from his climate-related work to a non-profit organization.”

But first I’m going to repost a response to the NYT piece by Grist’s Dave Roberts:

UPDATE 1:  Besides smearing my parents on his blog, besides questioning both my honesty and sanity on the same blog, Keith Kloor tried to smear me at Nature blogs, as one of my commenters notes below.  In the original version of that Nature blog post, Kloor wrote that Pielke said “Dubner and his co-author Steven Levitt have indeed been slandered” by me.  I asked Nature to take down that statement.  I pointed out that not only did subsequent reporting by Pooley and others show that my original piece was accurate, Kloor knew the charge against me was false when he wrote it (!) — since later in the same piece he quotes from the Bloomberg piece by Pooley that backed up my account (see “Bloomberg interview of Dubner and Caldeira backs up my reporting on error-riddled Superfreakonomics“).  Nature changed what Kloor wrote, not surprisingly, which is why the current (corrected) version of Kloor’s piece no longer makes much sense:

Roger Pielke Jr., never one to shy away from a battle, believes that Dubner and his co-author Steven Levitt have indeed been criticized by Joe Romm over at Climate Progress.

Yeah, I “criticized” them.  Can’t argue with that.  As the commenter below notes of Kloor’s false charge against me in Nature:

Why else is that Nature would have had to doctor up your first post at their climate blog? Do you think that they were worried about any legal problems you may have brought to their publication by defaming Romm? Or do you think they were simply embarrassed that they had hired someone who doesn’t know the difference between slander and libel?

So yes Kloor has been trying to spread false charges about me — again and again for months, as you will see. But at least Nature intervened to stop him in this case.

So after months and months of Kloor smearing me, misrepresenting what I wrote, and attacking other climate science advocates, I finally decided to do one post to set the record straight.

Some might have you believe that journalists (even those who are really mainly bloggers) should not be the subject of hard-hitting critiques by bloggers (though apparently bloggers can be).  I think even bloggers have the right to set the record straight.

UPDATE 2:   As one of the commenters at Nature blogs wrote in response to the original smear by Kloor:

What a nonsense disclosure, Keith. You haven’t just “weighed in on the matter on my own blog.” There’s almost not a week that goes by in which you don’t have something derisive to say about Joe Romm, often times in concert with Roger Pielke Jr.

So there’s no surprise that when there’s a controversy over a book replete with climate change errors that have been discussed at length across the internet, that you should focus on charges of “slander” by Roger Pielke Jr. against Romm. Are either you or Pielke Jr. lawyers who can speak competently about “slander”? Are you aware that unfairly raising charges of slander is also a form of slander?

This is extremely unprofessional. But par for the course for a blog that got off to an extremely rocky start by having Roger Pielke Jr. as one of its original authors.

Kloor often flaks for Pielke, who just happens to be a Senior Fellow at The Breakthrough Institute (TBI).  As I discuss in “A Breakthrough Institute primer,” TBI has dedicated the resources of their organization to trying to kill prospects for climate and clean energy action in this Congress and to spreading disinformation about Obama, Gore, Congressional leaders, Waxman and Markey, leading climate scientists, Al Gore again, the entire environmental community and anyone else trying to end our status quo energy policies, including me

Finally, for a complete debunking of the underlying charge that my critique of Superfreakonomics was in any way a smear of the authors, read “One error retracted, 99 to go. Superfreaknomics authors will, in future editions, correct their claim that Caldeira believes “carbon dioxide is not the right villain.” What follows is an updated version of the original post.

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The Atlantic Monthly named Freeman Dyson a “Brave Thinker” for the “contrarian view” he’s taken on climate change.  They tout his quote, “I like to express heretical opinions. They might even happen to be true.”

Like the authors of the error-riddled Superfreakonomics, Dyson is contrarian for the sake of contrarianism — the truth is secondary.  Coincidentally, the same is true of the reporter who profiled him for the NY Times magazine — see Media stunner: When asked “Does it matter, from a journalistic point of view, whether [Freeman Dyson is] right or whether he’s wrong?” his NYT profiler replies “Oh, absolutely not.”

In fact, the media’s adoration of contrarians means it is a lot less brave to be a contrarian these days than it used to be in, say, Galileo’s day.   Dave Roberts at Grist makes that point in a terrific piece (reposted below):

Willing to risk a fawning NYT profile … freeeeeedooooom!
Is Freeman Dyson really “brave”?

… What leads people to think that entire areas of climate science and policy, the subject of close study by thousands of very smart people all over the globe every day, can be overturned with facile points of logic and Silver Bullets Nobody’s Thought Of?

Well, it ain’t bravery….

On the other hand, simply repeat the broad global consensus— climate change is an urgent problem that warrants coordinated action to reduce GHG emissions—and you get nowhere. Boooring.

(I can’t tell you how many back-and-forths I’ve had with media outlets where I try to explain that the thing most people think is right actually is right, and they say, maybe so, but that’s not going to titillate our readers.)

Ditto!  Scientific wisdom was, like, so last year.

Krugman had it right in his first take on the Superfreaks:  “If you’re going to get into issues that are both important and the subject of serious study, like the fate of the planet, you’d better be very careful not to stray over the line between being counterintuitive and being just plain, unforgivably wrong.”  Last week, in “Contrarianism without consequences,” the Nobel laureate added:

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UPDATE:  Yes, bad coverage by big media, including the NYT’s Revkin, is one reason there has been a modest decline since April 2008 in the number of Americans who know that there is solid (in fact, overwhelming) evidence the Earth is warming and humans are the primary cause (see here).  Big media “did” the global warming story in 2006 and 2007 when Gore’s movie came out and then throughout 2007 when the IPCC released its four major summary reports.  Looking for a new angle, the NY Times and others played up the global cooling myth.  Now couple that with a ramped up disinformation campaign from the deniers who keep repeating the global cooling myth and continued lame messaging from the scientific community (see “Why scientists aren’t more persuasive, Part 1“) and a progressive community filled with people who have been persuaded by bad analysis that they shouldn’t even talk about “global warming” (see Messaging 101b: EcoAmerica’s phrase ‘our deteriorating atmosphere’ isn’t going to replace ‘global warming’ — and that’s a good thing).  That’s a recipe for an underinformed public.

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From today’s The Rush Limbaugh Show (via Media Matters):

LIMBAUGH: I think these militant environmentalists, these wackos, have so much in common with the jihad guys. Let me explain this. What do the jihad guys do? The jihad guys go to families under their control and they convince these families to strap explosives on who? Not them. On their kids. Grab your 3-year-old, grab your 4-year-old, grab your 6-year-old, and we’re gonna strap explosives on there, and then we’re going to send you on a bus, or we’re going to send you to a shopping center, and we’re gonna tell you when to pull the trigger, and you’re gonna blow up, and you’re gonna blow up everybody around you, and you’re gonna head up to wherever you’re going, 73 virgins are gonna be there. The little 3- or 4-year-old doesn’t have the presence of mind, so what about you? If it’s so great up there, why don’t you go? Why don’t you strap explosives on you — and their parents don’t have the guts to tell the jihad guys, “You do it! Why do you want my kid to go blow himself up?” The jihad guys will just shoot ‘em, ’cause the jihad guys have to maintain control.

The environmentalist wackos are the same way. This guy from The New York Times, if he really thinks that humanity is destroying the planet, humanity is destroying the climate, that human beings in their natural existence are going to cause the extinction of life on Earth — Andrew Revkin. Mr. Revkin, why don’t you just go kill yourself and help the planet by dying?

Yes, one of the few remaining intellectual leaders in the conservative movement — whose views dominate conservative discourse because few if any conservative politicians will publicly disagree with him — has just told the lead climate reporter for the New York Times to commit suicide.  Who among the deniers and delayers will have the courage to denounce Limbaugh here?

What incited Limbaugh?  Here is Revkin’s NYT blog today (emphasis added by MM):

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Columbia Journalism Review itself reports the startling and depressing news:

For the first time since it was created fourteen years ago, Columbia University’s highly regarded dual-degree graduate program in environmental journalism will not be accepting applications for next academic year.

In a letter to faculty at the Graduate School of Journalism, the Department of Environmental Sciences, and the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, the program directors cited falling employment in the field, the rising costs of education, and a lack of financial aid for students as the reasons for their decision:

“As you know, media organizations across the county are in dire financial straits and thousands of journalists’ jobs have been eliminated. Science and environment beats have been particularly vulnerable. Although our graduates have done well in their careers, even those still employed are finding few opportunities to do the kind of substantive reporting for which the dual degree program has trained them, as they scramble to do their own work plus that of laid-off colleagues.”

Maybe not a total surprise to readers of this blog and Chris Mooney’s book, Unscientific America,” but very untimely decision for two reasons.  First,”The scientific community is failing miserably in communicating the potential catastrophe of climate change.”  And second, the issue of global warming has already emerged as a top tier issue — and it’s increasingly obvious that it will become “the Story of the Century,” as I called it in my book.  Indeed CJR quotes one of the graduates pointing this very fact out:

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Okay, this isn’t news to CP readers:

• WashPost recycles another denier WSJ op-ed, this time from coal apologist Bjorn Lomborg. Funny how two new senior Post editors came from the WSJ
• WashPost, Fred Hiatt turn op-ed page into a “joke” with yet another falsehood-filled piece attacking climate action and clean energy — by GOP quitter-in-chief Sarah “Four Pinocchios” Palin!
• WashPost op-ed page remains the home of un-fact-checked disinformation about clean energy and global warming
• The Washington Post, abandoning any journalistic standards, lets George Will publish a third time global warming lies debunked on its own pages

But for the wider world, it’s nice that the uber-popular website Gawker has weighed in with, “The Washington Post Has the Worst Opinion Section in America,” which I reprint below:

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Planetary warming continues unabated (see “It’s the oceans, stupid!“), so the deniers are shouting even louder in their efforts to stifle genuine discussion.

The latest disinformer raising his voice and making headlines on Drudge is Phelim McAleer.  We’ve all been at major speaking events where some jerk tries to hog the microphone, asking a series of questions that seem pointed — but are in fact just rude and nonsensical.  In this case, however, the forum Gore was speaking at was a major gathering of journalists, so the refusal to give up the microphone was the equivalent of blocking other (i.e. real) journalists from asking Gore questions:

Former Vice President Al Gore shared his optimism about the “shifting momentum” of the climate change debate with about 500 environmental journalists Friday in Madison.

“We’re very close to that political tipping point,” Gore said at the Society of Environmental Journalists annual conference at the Madison Concourse Hotel. “Never before in human history has a single generation been asked to make such difficult and consequential decisions.”

You can watch McAleer’s version of events here in what the NYT’s Andy Revkin (who was there) describes as a “whiny video.”  But while McAleer’s a clever filmaker, he’s a bad liar.  He asserts of Gore, “He never takes questions.”  Not.

Take a look at this press conference in New York City on September 24 with Mayor Bloomberg, with extended Q&A:

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George Will and the editorial page editors at the Washington Post proved a long time ago they don’t know science (see “The Post, abandoning any journalistic standards, lets George Will publish a third time global warming lies debunked on its own pages“).  And they don’t do any fact-checking (see WashPost op-ed page remains the home of un-fact-checked disinformation about clean energy and global warming).

But as a letter to the editor pointed out, they don’t know mythology either.  I was so focused on critiquing the substance of the original post (here and here), I missed the unintentional inanity of the headline, “Cooling Down the Cassandras,” and Will’s final line:

Environmental Cassandras must be careful with their predictions lest they commit what climate alarmists consider the unpardonable faux pas of denying that the world is coming to an end.

Other than not knowing the science or doing basic fact-checking, the faux pas is pretending to be an intellectual while not even knowing you’ve used a mythological metaphor containing a hidden army that destroys your whole damn message.   Cassandra famously had the gift of prophecy but the curse of not being believed, with archetypally tragic results:

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