global warming
illconsidered | March 30, 2010 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Climate Instability News Sipping from the internet firehose...March 28, 2010 Chuckles, COP15, COP16, WWD, Upcoming Meetings, Oh Oh, Anthropocene, Mitloehner, Mclean, Earth Hour Bottom Line, Carbon Tariffs, Risk, UN CFG, The Race, Lewis, Pro IPCC, CRU SAP, Samanta Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes,…
nisbetmc | March 24, 2010Not unexpectedly, the Slate article last week generated a range of reactions at blogs, on twitter, and in personal emails that I received. This topic is not going away and as I have more time over the coming weeks I will be returning to it.
Below is a brief run down of reactions.
Michael Zimmerman, Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center on Humanities and the Arts at the University of Colorado, in an email posted with his permission:
The sharp Republican-Democrat polarization in climate and in much of the country in general demands efforts to "transcend the ideological divide,"…
nisbetmc | March 22, 2010
Last week I did an extended Q & A interview with Grist magazine about strategies for connecting climate change to the ongoing health care debate. Below is just one of several exchanges likely of interest to readers. My views are informed in part by research I am currently doing in collaboration with Edward Maibach at George Mason University and funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Health Policy Investigators' program.
The one thing that I would add to the transcript featured is that any communication about the health impacts of climate change needs to be consistent with the…
tlambert | March 21, 2010There have been lots of new developments in the scandal surrounding the paper by Samanta et al misrepresented by a Boston University press release.
Simon Lewis, in a guest post at RealClimate, explains how the paper strengthens the IPCC conclusions about the Amazon, rather than weakening them as the press release claims.
Scott Saleska, in a guest post at RealClimate, argues that the Samanta paper is wrong as well -- Samanta's own data shows just as much greening in 2005 as the Saleska paper that Samanta claims to be disproving.
Michael Tobis finds Richard Taffe, who wrote the misleading…
tlambert | March 18, 2010Maurice Newman, the chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation has come out as a global warming denier in a speech to the ABC.
Michael Ashley replies here:
Scientists are fairly measured in their public statements. Years of training instils a care with words, and avoidance of value judgements. Well, sod that, I'm angry.
What has me fuming is your speech last week to ABC staff in which you accuse your senior journalists of "group-think" in favouring the scientific consensus on climate change. You refer to "a growing number of distinguished scientists [that are] challenging the…
nisbetmc | March 18, 2010
I have an article at Slate magazine today that ties together and elaborates on some of the themes explored at this blog over the past several weeks. Below is the lede to the full article. No doubt, the article will generate a good amount of discussion which I will highlight in follow up posts. I will also highlight specific comments made over at Slate.
Chill Out: Climate scientists are getting a little too angry for their own good.
By Matthew C. Nisbet
As Congress continues to struggle its way toward new energy legislation, climate scientists are getting a little hot. A series of major…
tlambert | March 17, 2010Peter Sinclair's latest video, debunking the "no global warming for 15 years" and "sea levels are not rising" memes:
sastyk | March 16, 2010A new Gallup poll suggests that Americans are less worried about most environmental issues than they have been since Gallup began polling 20 years ago.
"Americans are less worried about each of eight specific environmental problems than they were a year ago, and on all but global warming and maintenance of the nation's fresh water supply, concern is the lowest Gallup has measured. Americans worry most about drinking-water pollution and least about global warming."
People grasp what their drinking water has to do with them. Overwhelmingly, I think they do not fully grasp what global warming…
illconsidered | March 16, 2010 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Information overload is pattern recognition March 14, 2010 Chuckles, COP15, COP16 and Beyond, Paris, Wrong Green, CERA, Outsourcing CO2, World Bank, UN CFG IPCC Review, IPCC Support, CRU Theft, UK Wind, Samanta, Anthony's Question, NASgate Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics Food Crisis, Svalbard, Land Grabs, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Temperatures, Aerosols, Paleoclimate…
tlambert | March 13, 2010Back in 2007 a paper, Amazon Forests Green-Up During 2005 Drought, was published in Science:
Coupled climate-carbon cycle models suggest that Amazon forests are vulnerable to both long- and short-term droughts, but satellite observations showed a large-scale photosynthetic green-up in intact evergreen forests of the Amazon in response to a short, intense drought in 2005. These findings suggest that Amazon forests, although threatened by human-caused deforestation and fire and possibly by more severe long-term droughts, may be more resilient to climate changes than ecosystem models assume.…
nisbetmc | March 13, 2010
At a briefing on Capitol Hill yesterday, Stanford University communication professor Jon Krosnick presented the best analysis to date estimating the impact of "ClimateGate" on public perceptions of climate change and of climate scientists. Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment, where Krosnick is a faculty fellow, has put together a detailed news release on Krosnick's survey analysis. Also above is a YouTube clip of Krosnick explaining the research.
The full report should be read, but below I feature several key conclusions. Despite alarm over the presumed impact of ClimateGate,…
nisbetmc | March 11, 2010Daniel Sarewitz, professor of science policy at Arizona State University, has an important op-ed at Slate today explaining why if we continue to frame the climate change debate in terms of science, we may never achieve meaningful policy action. Drawing on the conclusions of much of the scholarship in the area of science studies, Sarewitz writes:
When people hold strongly conflicting values, interests, and beliefs, there is not much that science can do to compel action. Indeed, more research and more facts often make a conflict worse by providing support to competing sides in the debate, and…
nisbetmc | March 9, 2010
American Today, the weekly newspaper for American University, ran this feature on last week's AU Forum and public radio broadcast of "The Climate Change Generation: Youth, Media, and Politics in an Unsustainable World." My graduate assistant Brandee Reed has also produced a transcript of the panel which I have pasted below the fold.
I was joined on the panel by AU journalism professor Jane Hall who served as moderator, and fellow panelists Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post and Kate Sheppard of Mother Jones magazine. The transcript is not quite professional quality, but it does provide…
illconsidered | March 8, 2010 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Sipping from the internet firehose... March 7, 2010 Chuckle, Copenhagen, Yvo de Boer, COP-16, UN-CFG, Anthony's Question, Precautionary Principle, Greenhouse Effect Bottom Line, Carbon Tariffs, World Bank, AAAS, IPCC Review, Interpreting Polls, Pushback, CRU Inquiry Melting Arctic, Polar Bears, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Land Grabs, Food…
nisbetmc | March 8, 2010At NewYorkTimes.com, Alex Kaplun of Greenwire reports on emails exchanged among several prominent climate scientists regarding possible plans to fight back against the "neo-McCarthyism" of political leaders such as James Inhofe.
The anger on the part of several scientists that is revealed in the emails is understandable. These scientists, members of the National Academies, have been personally attacked by commentators and threatened with legal action by Inhofe.
I have a great deal of respect for many of the scientists mentioned in the article. However, I side with the warnings offered by…
tlambert | March 7, 2010Randy Olson (maker of Sizzle) has an interview with Mark Morano.
RO: Are you an anti-evolutionist?
MM: Haha, not at all. In fact, you know it's not an issue. The implication of your question is that somehow the skeptics are aligned with creationists. In all my years of dealing with Senator Inhofe the subject of creationism and evolution never even came up. Someone even did an analysis of it in our scientists report, and I think they may have only found one or two creationists out of 700-some names.
Wait, that was my analysis. I looked at the people who were on the Discovery Institute's…
tlambert | March 5, 2010Tamino writes
It has now been independently confirmed, by multiple persons, that my results regarding the impact of station dropout on global temperature are correct. Your claims, in your document with Joe D'Aleo for the SPPI, are just plain wrong. ...
If you have any honor at all, you'll set the record straight. You owe it to everyone, and especially to NOAA, to admit that you were wrong. And you certainly owe it to NOAA to apologize. You need to make a highly visible, highly public admission of error, and apology, for using falsehoods to accuse others of fraud.
My post from way back in…
tlambert | March 5, 2010BigCityLib catches the IOP using the memory hole.
William Connolley is not impressed:
What a bunch of slimy little toads: they pretend to believe in openness, they won't tell us who wrote their statements, then they silently airbrush out embarassing words afterwards.
nisbetmc | March 5, 2010Dan Vergano of USA Today has an important column out this weekend. Vergano, I believe, is the first major journalist to call into question the now dominant narrative that "ClimateGate" has powerfully damaged public trust in scientists.
In the column, he quotes Stanford professor Jon Krosnick with the following apt observation. As Vergano writes:
What's really happening, suggests polling expert Jon Krosnick of Stanford University, is "scientists are over-reacting. It's another funny instance of scientists ignoring science."
The science that Krosnick is referring to are the multiple polling…
illconsidered | March 5, 2010From up north, we have some more troubling news. Actually very troubling. Catastophic release of methane hydrates is a prime suspect in a few events dramatic enough to show in the earth's geological records, coarse and obscured as that record may be. (Our actions today will be featured prominently in that record for anyone looking back a million years from now.) It has been a worry for many years that humanity is running the risk of triggering such a release again, which would truly pile disaster on top of calamity.
New research coming out in Science today indicates that this most dire of…