global warming
nisbetmc | December 29, 2009Slides and synchronized video of the presentations from the AGU panel "Re-Starting the Conversation on Climate Change: The Media, Dialogue, and Public Engagement Workshop" are now online. Below I link to each of the presentations highlighting key themes or conclusions and the minute mark in the video.
Mass Media and the Cultural Politics of Climate Change
Max Boykoff, Ph.D.
University of Colorado-Boulder
Mass media serve vital roles in the communication processes between science, policy-makers and the public. This presentation reviews contextual factors as well as journalistic pressures…
grrlscientist | December 25, 2009tags: Polar Bear Versus Walrus Colony, nature, global warming, climate change, BBC, Planet Earth, documentary, streaming video
This video documents an awesome fight for survival as a grown male polar bear takes on a walrus colony at the edge of the Arctic circle. This was a truly epic battle, phenomenally captured in high quality, from the BBC natural history masterpiece, Planet Earth.
What surprised you most about this footage? I was surprised that the walruses did not work together to defeat/get rid of the polar bear.
nisbetmc | December 21, 2009
Overlooked in the coverage and discussion of Copenhagen are the remarks of Calif. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger who in his speech at the summit emphasized that the real future of policy innovation and action rests at the local level. Watch in the clip above as Schwarzenegger calls for a follow-up summit of cities, states, provinces, and regional/municipal governments on climate change, volunteering the state of California as the host.
Of course, if cities and regions are going to be the engines for change and innovation on climate policy, they need the communication infrastructure to fuel…
tlambert | December 18, 2009Eric Raymond (the one responsible for the botched analysis of the stolen CRU code) responds to my post on Essex and McKitrick's error in treating missing values as zeroes in a spreadsheet:
The error described is so stupid that I have trouble believing a statistician actually made it. Whether McKittrick understood thermodynamics or not is red herring; even somebody with my non-specialist knowledge of statistics alone would have known better, let alone a pro like him. The most plausible theory I can think of is that the spreadsheet was expressing temperatures as deviation from mean, that the "…
nisbetmc | December 17, 2009Roughly 90 scientists, journalists, educators, PIOs, and policy staffers turned out to Sunday afternoon's AGU workshop on climate change communication. I will have more to say about the panel in forthcoming posts, but for now, Steve Easterbrook provides an amazingly thorough, transcript-like overview of the panel and session. Slides and video of the presentations will eventually be posted at the AGU site.
tlambert | December 17, 2009The latest story exciting the denialosphere is being put about by novelist James Delingpole and is based on an analysis (translated here) by a right-wing Russian think tank. Delingpole quotes from a news story:
On Tuesday, the Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.
The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming…
nisbetmc | December 14, 2009
From the Associated Press to the Guardian to Reuters to Agence France Presse,protesters and journalists create a confusing storyline focused on chaos, conflict, and law and order
It's too early to say what impact the protests in Copenhagen will have on the negotiating process or on world public opinion. However, when it comes to social protest generally, past research suggests several common and powerful barriers to communication success. There are a few rare exceptions, such as the Civil Rights marches of the 1960s, but on issues such as world trade, food biotechnology, or the war in Iraq…
illconsidered | December 14, 2009 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 Disruption News December 13, 2009 Chuckles, COP15, COP15 Dailies, COP15 Tools, COP15 Alternate Forums, COP15 The Editorial, COP15 Demonstrators GermanWatch, Mediterranean Flood, CRU, Bottom Line, Carbon Tariffs, In the Balance Melting Arctic, Arctic Mode Switch, Methane, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food Production Hurricanes, GHGs, Pledges, Baseline…
nisbetmc | December 11, 2009One of the arguments I have been making in talking to journalists is to beware the hype over the relative impact of the climate skeptics movement in contributing to societal inaction on climate change. As many studies, articles, and experts have documented and described, the impact of the skeptic movement is only one of several significant contributors to political gridlock and perceptual differences on climate change.
In a recent blog post on Copenhagen, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus adeptly argue this point. I don't agree with all of their post and I don't share the same…
nisbetmc | December 10, 2009Audio of yesterday's discussion at WAMU's Kojo Nnamdi Show on science, religion, and the climate debate is now available online. I wish we had more time to focus in depth on several of the themes raised in the program. In particular I think there is much more to explore relative to my concluding comments on how scientists and environmentalists need to find more communication partners on climate change, ranging from religious leaders and public health professionals to national security experts and business CEOs.
illconsidered | December 9, 2009The Guardian has run a front page editorial on the Copenhagen summit along with 56 papers in 20 languages.
I read it at Real Climate who "takes no formal position" on its statements. I suppose it is to avoid the acusation of being political...
Well, I have rarely read an editorial I agree with more. And I say that with the utmost formality!
It was released under Creative Commons license, so I will reproduce it here in its entirety:
Copenhagen climate change conference: Fourteen days to seal history's judgment on this generation
Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step…
tlambert | December 9, 2009Remember how the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition made the warming trend in New Zealand go away by treating measurements from different sites as if they came from the same site? Well, Willis Eschenbach has followed in their foot steps by using the same scam on Australian data. He claims that for Darwin "the trend has been artificially increased to give a false warming where the raw data shows cooling". Here's his graph:
That blue line for raw temperature in his graph combines different records without any adjustment, even though Eschenbach could see that there was a step change…
mikethemadbiologist | December 9, 2009Both Digby and Amanda Marcotte have been asking why global warming seems to be driving much of the right wing berserk. While I agree that part of the reason is the ever-present desire to punch a hippie in the face, I think Fred Clark at the Slacktivist hits on a key point in these two posts: "It isn't intended to deceive others. It's intended to invite others to participate with you in deception."
In the two posts, Clark describes the fervent belief by a considerable number of evangelicals in the belief that the Proctor and Gamble corporation (P&G) was involved in satanic cults, which…
tlambert | December 8, 2009Not content with publishing George Will's fabrications about the stolen emails (for which, see Carl Zimmer), they now have a piece by climate expert Sarah Palin. The Washington Post simply does not care about the accuracy of the columns it publishes. Let's look at just one paragraph:
The e-mails reveal that leading climate "experts" deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals. What's more, the documents show that there was no real consensus even…
nisbetmc | December 8, 2009Tomorrow at 130pm, I will be a guest on WAMU's Kojo Nnamdi Show to discuss the communication challenge on climate change and strategies for overcoming political polarization.
Also as guests from Copenhagen will be Richard Cizik, formerly VP of the National Association of Evangelicals and Eric Chivian, director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard University. In 2008, Cizik and Chivian were named among Time magazine's 100 most influential people.
Earlier this year in a paper published at the journal Environment, I discussed the efforts by Cizik and Chivian in…
nisbetmc | December 8, 2009
On Copenhagen, not surprisingly, ideologically driven media outlets are working overtime to brand themselves and appeal to their respective audiences. Not only do we have the expected conservative commentary and reporting from brands such as Fox News and National Review archived daily at hubs such as the Drudge Report but there is also an initiative called the Copenhagen News Collaborative that brands together in one place commentary and reporting from reliably liberal news organizations and blogs such as Mother Jones, Huffington Post, TreeHugger.com, and Grist.
Conservative and liberal…
nisbetmc | December 8, 2009Over at the Columbia Journalism Review, Curtis Brainard and Cristine Russell file their first overview and analysis of Copenhagen coverage. Their daily round up of mostly mainstream news reporting promises to be a must read for the coming weeks.
illconsidered | December 8, 2009greenman has done a fine job of debunking the various exagerations, misrepresentations and lies circulating about the recent Swiftwacking of CRU (aka Climategate).
I recommend having a look, below:
tlambert | December 7, 2009Josh Nelson has set up Swifthack.com as a clearing house to correct disinformation about those emails stolen from CRU.
Peter Sinclair's Climate Denial Crock of the Week is on the stolen emails.
It certainly seems true that the quote miners almost always misrepresent what "hide the decline" refers to be explicitly or implicitly saying that it refers to temperature.
nisbetmc | December 6, 2009
ClimateGate: A now ubiquitous tagline that conveys a preferred storyline.
In a paper published earlier this year at the journal Environment, I explained how claims and arguments relative to the climate change debate can be classified and tracked using a typology of frames that are common to science-related issues.
With the recent controversy over the East Anglia stolen emails, one of these common frames has come to dominate discussion leading up to Copenhagen. What's different this time around is that climate skeptics and conservatives are applying the frame, rather than liberals and…