global warming
nisbetmc | December 6, 2009A week from today, at their annual meetings in San Francisco, the American Geophysical Union will be sponsoring a workshop I co-organized on research related to climate change communication and public engagement. In the context of debates over Copenhagen and the stolen climate change emails, the session is particularly timely and relevant. Details are below and advance registration is at this page. So far, roughly 100 attendees have registered.
Re-Starting the Conversation on Climate Change:
The Media, Dialogue, and Public Engagement Workshop
Sunday, 13 December (1:00 PM -5:00 PM)
Inter…
nisbetmc | December 6, 2009If you are trying to make sense of the surge of news coverage and commentary surrounding the stolen e-mails from the East Anglia University Climatic Research Center, the place to start is Curtis Brainard's outstanding overview and critique of coverage last week at the Columbia Journalism Review.
gregladen | December 5, 2009Subtitled "The truth about the coming climate catastrophe and our last chance to save humanity," this might be a book you should read.
James Hansen is probably the world's best known climate scientist, partly because of his own work and his testimony before Congress, and partly because he has become a target of Global Warming denialists who seem to revel in every opportunity to accuse him of fraud, deceit, or incompetence.
In Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity, Hansen provides a message that is much more severe…
nisbetmc | December 3, 2009I've been busy the past week with wrapping up the semester. As a consequence, I have not had the chance to post about continuing developments related to the stolen emails from servers at University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU).
However, today is a convenient time to weigh in, since I share many of the same conclusions offered by Mike Hulme in recent op-eds at the BBC and Wall Street Journal.
Before discussing the Hulme articles, let me relay a few observations. Since the stolen email story broke, my concern has been that many bloggers and commentators are overlooking the…
tlambert | December 1, 2009David Kane asks me to look at two of the strongest arguments made by the "other side" following the break in and theft of data from CRU. OK, once he sees how weak the strongest arguments are, we can all agree that the affair is a beat up.
Today I'll look at Eric Raymond's alleged "siege cannon with the barrel still hot":
From the CRU code file osborn-tree6/briffa_sep98_d.pro , used to prepare a graph purported to be of Northern Hemisphere temperatures and reconstructions.
;
; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
;
yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25…
tlambert | November 27, 2009Yesterday, I wrote:
I wonder how many of the folks accusing NIWA of cooking their data will correct their posts?
Of course, the answer was none of them. Instead, Drudge decided that my post was supporting the trumped out charges against NIWA and linked it. As a result, the comments were overrun by nutty denialists. I added a link to the Copenhagen Diagnosis to the top of my post and it would seem that this to Drudge what sunlight is to vampires, because he deleted the link. In the meantime someone blindly following Drudge put a link on Digg that presented my post as saying the opposite…
tlambert | November 26, 2009Update: A special message to visitors from Drudge: you are being lied to. Global warming is happening and we're causing it, but to avoid dealing with the problem folks are shooting the messenger, attacking the scientists who discovered and reported on the problem. The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition isn't made up of climate scientists, but is just a group of global warming skeptics who gave themselves a fancy title. And they just got caught combining temperature data from different places to get rid of the inconvenient warming trend in New Zealand. If you want to know what the…
tlambert | November 25, 2009The latest story exciting the denialosphere is this one by Carol Driver in the Daily Mail. Driver claims:
Climate change scandal deepens as BBC expert claims he was sent 'cover-up' emails a month before they went public
The controversy surrounding the global warming scandal today deepened after a BBC correspondent admitted he was sent the leaked emails more than a month before they were made public.
No, he didn't.
In his BBC blog two days ago, Hudson said: 'I was forwarded the chain of emails on the 12th October, which are comments from some of the world's leading climate scientists written…
tlambert | November 25, 2009The Copenhagen Diagnosis is an update to the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report to cover research published since then.
This is the science that the cracker who stole the emails from CRU wants to distract you from.
Via RealClimate.
tlambert | November 23, 2009Andrew Freedman interviewed Spencer Weart about the stolen emails:
SW: Back around 2000 leading climate scientists talked to each other mostly about their science--debating one another's data and analysis and negotiating travel, collaboration and other administration--and a little bit about policy. As time passed they have had to spend more and more of their time answering criticism of the scientific results already established, criticism mostly based on ignorance, fallacious reasoning, and even deliberately deceptive claims. Still more recently they have had to spend far too much of their…
tlambert | November 22, 2009The global warming denialists have predictably gotten very excited about the emails that were stolen from CRU, declaring that they prove that there's a big climate scientist conspiracy (presumably to install a COMMUNIST WORLD GOVERNMENT). We don't know whether or not the thief altered the emails, but since there isn't really anything incriminating it's likely that they are all genuine.
Most of the fuss has been generated by taking emails out of context and bad faith interpretations of what was written. If you're interested in the gory details the RealClimate comment thread addresses most of…
nisbetmc | November 11, 2009Earlier this year, in an article at Nature Biotechnology, I joined with several colleagues in warning that the biggest risk to public trust in science is not the usual culprits of religious fundamentalism or "politicization" but rather the increasing tendency towards the stretching of scientific claims and predictions by scientists, university press offices, scientific journals, industry, and journalists. As I detail with Dietram Scheufele in a separate article at the America Journal of Botany,(PDF) each time a scientific prediction or claim goes beyond the available evidence and proves to…
tlambert | November 7, 2009Back in 2006 it was revealed that scientists at the CSIRO had been forbidden from commenting on some impacts of climate change:
JANINE COHEN: Kevin Hennessy is the coordinator of the CSIRO's Climate Impact Group. One of his jobs is to talk about the potential impacts of climate change. But there are some likely impacts of climate change that are clearly a no-go zone. Some scientists believe that there'll be more environmental refugees. Is that a possibility?
KEVIN HENNESSY, CSIRO IMPACT GROUP: I can't really comment on that.
JANINE COHEN: Why can't you comment on that?
KEVIN HENNESSY, CSIRO…
nisbetmc | November 4, 2009For their upcoming annual meetings in San Francisco, the American Geophysical Union is sponsoring a pre-conference workshop introducing scientists, public information officers, journalists, and other attendees to several areas of social science research that examine dimensions of climate change communication and public engagement.
Below the fold are the details and the conference page is here. You can sign up for the workshop by visiting this page. It promises to be a great event and I am looking forward to the ideas, connections, and discussion that it generates.
Re-Starting the…
nisbetmc | November 4, 2009Over at Dot Earth, the NY Times Andrew Revkin has a good round up and preview on Gore's new book Our Choice. His post also includes an embedded 30 minute interview between Katie Couric and Gore on his new book. Of interest, Couric asks Gore if he thinks the climate debate has been too technical and if there is a need to simplify and appeal to emotions. She also asks Gore about the recent Pew climate survey, which Gore describes as an outlier, asserting that public will and support for action are actually on the rise rather than in decline, as the Pew poll indicates.
I will be picking up my…
nisbetmc | November 4, 2009
The faculty here at American University's School of Communication include several of the country's leading environmental filmmakers with their work coordinated through the Center for Environmental Filmmaking. One of our faculty Larry Engel worked on the recent PBS NOW film "Waterworld" which documents how climate change is impacting Bangladesh. The film describes the human health effects that climate change is already causing in this developing country of more than 200 rivers and frequent storm surges. You can read a transcript and/or watch the film at the embed above.
You will also want to…
nisbetmc | November 3, 2009
Repower America's lastest advertising campaign to promote their new online feature "The Wall" is brilliant. The ads and the social media initiative vividly portray the diversity of support for serious climate action while also framing the relevance of the issue in ways that transcend the traditional ideological divide. As I wrote in a paper this spring at the journal Environment, the Repower campaign is a stark contrast to the dominant message of Inconvenient Truth which may have unintentionally reinforced the partisan divide on climate change.
Gore, however, also faces a major…
tlambert | November 1, 2009I recently left a comment on Tom Fuller's blog objecting to Fuller's claim to be on the middle ground.
If Fuller is in the middle ground, then so is Inhofe -- they both think that climate scientists are a bunch of frauds.
Fuller objected in a completely unrelated comment thread and derailed the discussion. I'm starting a new thread here for discussion with Fuller.
Here, in his own words, are Fuller's beliefs about climate scientists:
I believe that a generation of climate scientists have tried to make global warming a political football, and have exaggerated or distorted the truth to push…
grrlscientist | October 30, 2009tags: environment, forest ecology, trees, forestry, carbon sequestration, global warming, climate change, Nature Conservancy, streaming video
You know that trees store carbon, but what does that really mean? How much carbon does the tree outside your window store, and how does that compare to the carbon we emit when we travel or power our homes?
How many trees are in your yard? I don;t have a yard (I have a fire escape), but my neighborhood is being revitalized by BYC's "Million Trees" project, so roughly by the time that I leave for Germany, the city will be planting trees on the street in…
nisbetmc | October 29, 2009Last week's Pew survey on American views of climate change generated a sizable amount of speculation and debate from bloggers and other commentators. See for example this round up at the NY Times.
In comparison to some of this blog debate, readers will find very useful the discussion offered earlier this week at NPR's Talk of the Nation involving Pew director Andrew Kohut and Yale researcher Anthony Lieserowitz. [Transcript.]
For more background on how lingering public disengagement relates to the frames of reference provided by the media, climate skeptics, and climate advocates alike, see…