global warming
Last year Benny Peiser claimed that on a literature search he found 34 papers "reject or doubt" anthropgenic global warming. I posted the abstracts and it's very obvious that he misclassified most of the papers. Peiser left several comments on that post, but could not bring himself to admit that he had made mistakes. Now Sylvia S Tognetti has spotted that Peiser has finally admitted to making mistakes:
I accept that it was a mistake to include the abstract you mentioned (and some other rather ambiguous ones) in my critique of the Oreskes essay.
Better late than never, I guess.
The publishing industry is fairly well known for being afraid of nonfiction environmental books, especially on subjects like global warming. What a snooze, publishers often think. Moreover, they have data to show that a number of books on this subject have not sold particularly well in the past. (What data? Er, I don't know precisely, but trust me, they have it.)
Anyway, that's why I've been watching the fate of Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers and Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes From a Catastrophe quite closely. Neither has appeared on any bestseller lists yet, so far as I know. But…
The short story: it's melting!!
Meltwater stream flowing into a large moulin in the ablation zone
(area below the equilibrium line) of the Greenland ice sheet.
Photo by Roger J. Braithwaite, The University of Manchester, UK.
Well, despite the fact that the George Bush Gang has been shushing scientists who dare to disagree with his administration's fantastical world view, now an entire governmental agency has come out and stated that global warming is occurring.
Two studies were recently published, documenting changes in the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, confirming that climate warming…
For those of you who don't know of him already, Rick Piltz is one of the many science whistleblowers to run screaming from the Bush administration. I've written about him here. Formerly of the Climate Change Science Program, Piltz famously drew attention to the editing of government climate reports by White House official Philip Cooney, who subsequently resigned and, as pretty much everyone now knows, went to work for ExxonMobil.
Now Piltz has launched a website, entitled "Climate Science Watch," that's full of goodies like this. For one thing, he has exposed a troubling inquiry by Senator…
Carl Zimmer has reviewed two books on Global Warming: Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers (I dissected some criticism of Flannery's book here) and Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes From a Catastrophe.
Last week, in a post that got a fair amount of attention, I observed that we may well have a global warming case heading towards the Supreme Court. In the comments thread, the issue then quickly arose: Is that a good thing? Is it something that we ought to be drawing attention to? Could drawing attention actually have any impact on the court's decision about whether to take this case?
The first question is perhaps the easiest to tackle. This case (involving the Clean Air Act) has been appealed to the High Court by environmentalists and a collection of state attorneys general. If these…
In her latest rant, Miranda Devine warns about the imminent threat of a take over by scientists:
It used to be men in purple robes who controlled us. Soon it will be men in white lab coats. The geeks shall inherit the earth.
I suppose you are wondering how they are going to take over. Could it be giant robots? Or tiny tiny robots? Or genetically engineered cephalopods? Nope. Devine reckons they're going to use Kyoto to take over the world:
Environmentalism is the powerful new secular religion and politically correct scientists are its high priests, rescuing the planet from the…
Miranda Devine tells her readers what GIGO means:
The outputs are totally dependent on the quality and accuracy of the inputs. At university we had a name for what often happens: GIGO - garbage in garbage out.
And then perfectly illustrates it:
Yet a paper published last week by the Lavoisier Group, Nine Lies about Global Warming, says the real censorship is applied by the scientific establishment to those scientists who express scepticism about the global warming "consensus".
A retired climate expert and founder of the Antarctic Co-operative Research Centre, Garth Paltridge, says he…
Last summer, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected a lawsuit challenging the EPA's failure to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act, two judges on the court paraded their scientific ignorance. As I've previously shown at length, Judge A. Raymond Randolph as well as Judge David Sentelle displayed a considerable lack of understanding of climate science in their opinions (PDF), with Randolph abusing scientific uncertainty and Sentelle ridiculously suggesting, in order to deny standing, that global warming will affect the entire world in the same way.…
From today's Post piece on the melting of the Antarctic ice sheet:
But some scientists remain unconvinced. Oregon state climatologist George Taylor noted that sea ice in some areas of Antarctica is expanding and part of the region is getting colder, despite computer models that would predict otherwise.
"The Antarctic is really a puzzle," said Taylor, who writes for the Web site TSCDaily [sic], which is partly financed by fossil fuel companies that oppose curbs on greenhouse gases linked to climate change. "A lot more research is needed to understand the degree of climate and ice trends in and…
Tim Blair links to some interesting articles in this week's Bulletin. First up is a page on John Howard with the intriguing title "The hosue of Howard". It's a fearless, hard hitting complete suck up to Howard. Apparently, after a decade of power and privilege as prime minister, Howard hasn't lost touch with the common folk. Why not? Because he owns a regular, simple house. He doesn't live there or even in the Prime Minister's official residence -- he lives in a mansion with multi-million dollar harbour views, but just owning that house is enough to stay in touch with the little people…
Back when I was first on my learning curve about climate science, I remember always being confused about the date for each report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The official publication date would be in one year, but as soon as you did any background research, you would learn that everyone had been chit-chattering about the report in the media well before the year of official publication.
Now I understand why. Although the IPCC's fourth assessment report isn't supposed to be out until 2007, the British media are already waving around a draft version of it. IPCC drafts are…
Last week I wrote about how the Australian government was gagging scientists from expressing mainstream science views on global warming. Garth Paltridge has responded with a claim that global warming skeptics get gagged as well. From the Feb 22 Australian Financial Review:
Graeme Pearman (in his ABC Four Corners interview last Monday)
maintained that CSIRO is not backward in stifling comment from
scientists on matters that bear on its political aspirations. It was
ever thus. In the early nineties I was involved in setting up the
Antarctic Cooperative Research Centre, which was, and…
Brian Montopoli, of CBS's "Public Eye," talked with Scott Pelley recently about his "60 Minutes" global warming special. Pelley explains that he deliberately did not talk to those voices who remain skeptical of the science: "It would be irresponsible of us to go find some scientist somewhere who is not thought of as being eminent in the field and put him on television with these other guys to cast doubt on what they're saying." My own belief is that Pelley is being a tad too dismissive--a better approach might be to include the existence of the skeptics but also to contextualize their…
Last week I wrote about the greenhouse mafia in Australia. This week, Clive Hamilton has named the "dirty dozen", the twelve people who have worked together to mislead Australians about climate change. The Age reports:
Speaking at the Australia-New Zealand Climate Change and Business Conference yesterday, Dr Clive Hamilton dubbed the group - including Prime Minister John Howard, businessman Hugh Morgan and The Australian's editor-in-chief, Chris Mitchell - "the dirty dozen".
Dr Hamilton is the executive director of the Australia Institute and was invited to the conference in Adelaide to…
State of Fear is back in the top 100 books on Amazon.com, presumably thanks to the news that Bush read it. Meanwhile, Rush Limbaugh, who's probably driving plenty of those sales, has this to say about Crichton's book:
If you haven't read State of Fear you ought to get it and you ought to read it, because he puts it in novel form, but documents how many of these groups actually try to create accidents and disasters on the eve of big conventions where they're going to be trying to raise money, how it is all a fund-raising operation; it all has its own political agenda.
"...puts it in novel…
A week ago, I quipped that some reporter should ask Scott McClellan about Bush's reported meeting with Michael Crichton during the press gaggle. Well, it happened today. Here's the relevant exchange, which took place aboard Air Force One:
MR. McCLELLAN: The United States is leading the way in investing in the kind of technologies to help us address greenhouse gas emissions. That's something we -- remember, we're on track to meet the President's goal of reducing greenhouse gas intensity that he outlined. And we also have joined in partnerships around the world to invest in research and…
Finally, the major media pick up the story I've been flogging all week. The Times piece is relatively bare-bones, but it does contain something revealing. You see, the paper asked the White House to comment on the Bush-meets-Crichton story. And not only was the Crichton meeting confirmed; Bush was dug into a deeper hole by one of his spokespeople:
Not so, according to the White House, which said Mr. Barnes's book left a false impression of Mr. Bush's views on global warming.
Michele St. Martin, a spokeswoman for the Council on Environmental Quality, a White House advisory agency, pointed to…
My copy of Rebel-in-Chief just arrived, and I can now quote you exactly what the book says about Bush's views on global warming, and his meeting with Michael Crichton. From p. 22-23:
The president later provoked worldwide protests when he formally withdrew the United States from the Kyoto global warming treaty. The environmental lobby in this country fumed, but Bush didn't flinch. The treaty had never been ratified and stood little chance of winning Senate approval. Though he didn't say so publicly, Bush is a dissenter on the theory of global warming. To the extent it's a problem, Bush…
The Progress Report just picked up on the news that Bush may have met with Michael Crichton on global warming, but with that exception, this story doesn't seem to be getting nearly the traction that it ought to. I'm going to order Fred Barnes' book to get more details. Meanwhile, if this report is true, it's interesting to contemplate what that would say about the role of Bush science adviser John Marburger, who is supposed to be ensuring that the president is well informed about matters of science. Either way, the news doesn't look good for Marburger. On the one hand, if he arranged the…