global warming
nisbetmc | June 3, 2008At Knight Science Journalism Tracker, Charlie Petit has a pretty comprehensive round-up and commentary on news coverage of this week's (failed) climate change legislation.
tlambert | May 30, 2008Sideshow Roy Spencer writes:
Our environmental protection practices have already caused the deaths of millions of people, mainly in poor African countries. By far the most humans -- mostly women and children -- have been sacrificed in the mistaken belief that the use of any amount of the pesticide DDT would harm the environment. As a result, the preventable disease malaria has continued to decimate Africa.
Only recently has this genocide disguised as environmentalism been partly reversed through the reinstituted practice of twice-yearly DDT treatments of the entryways to homes. While most…
cmooney | May 28, 2008Next week, our leaders will begin to debate legislation that would significantly curb U.S. greenhouse gas emissions--the Lieberman-Warner bill. This legislation is nothing if not moderate--not strong enough for many environmentalists, but way too strong for the likes of George W. Bush.
I've done my latest Center for American Progress column predicting how the debate is going to go, and focusing on one point in particular: Detractors of the bill are assured to cite its economic cost. But of course, those who argue in this manner all too frequently downplay the very real--and probably massive--…
tlambert | May 28, 2008In 2006 Exxon said that they would no longer fund organizations like the Competitive Enterprise Institute that misrepresent the science of global warming?
Last year we found out that they were still funding the George Marshall Institute and others.
Now Cindy Baxter reports that Exxon's latest Corporate Citizenship report says:
"in 2008 we will discontinue contributions to several public policy interest groups whose position on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally…
tlambert | May 22, 2008Oh look, it's Glenn Reynolds:
Cracks in the Consensus? Hey, science advances by changing its mind in response to new data. The worrisome thing would be if people didn't.
And from his link:
Professor Oleg Sorokhtin of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences is advising people "to stock up on fur coats" because he expects an extended period of global cooling, an assessment that is echoed by Kenneth Tapping of the U.S. National Academy of Science's National Research Council. Both scientists contend solar activity explains most of the temperature variation in the Earth's atmosphere.
We know…
tlambert | May 20, 2008Last year RealClimate reported that there had been another mass mailing to get more signatures on the notorious Oregon Petition. They are now announcing that they've increased the number of signatures from 19,000 to 31,000. The original objections to the Oregon Petition still apply -- most of the signers do not have PhDs and are not practising scientists. Just 40 of the signers claim to be climatologists, and since they don't tell you their names, it's impossible to check whether they are, in fact, climatologists.
Bigcitylib decided to test their quality control by signing using a fake…
nisbetmc | May 20, 2008
When Inconvenient Truth was released in 2006, Gallup polling showed that less than a majority of Americans had a favorable view of Al Gore. Yet just following his Nobel Prize win at the end of 2007, Gallup polling showed that this favorability rating had jumped to 58%. Call it the "Nobel bounce."
A recently released Pew survey shows that Gore's approval rating continues to hover just over the majority mark at 53%. Notably, in Pew tracking, as shown above, Gore has gained 11% in the "very favorable" category among Dems and 19% in the "very favorable" category among the college educated.…
nisbetmc | May 19, 2008As I wrote last week, in John McCain's recent television ad focusing on global warming, he frames his position as a pragmatic "middle way" approach between the two extremes of denying there is a problem and resorting to heavy taxation and regulation. The ad even ends by offering up the complementary frames that global warming is in fact a national security problem and involves a moral duty to future generations. Perhaps most notably, the ad opens by using imagery of more intense hurricanes, a "pandora's box" framing that has led to claims of alarmism directed at advocates such as Al Gore.
So…
tlambert | May 19, 2008More carriages have come off the rails in the Roger Pielke Jr train wreck. Pielke finally does a hypothesis test. Trouble is, it's an unpaired t-test, which would only make sense if GISS and HADCRU were independent of each other, i.e. temperature measurements of different planets. Which, uh, they're not.
James Annan explains it here.
And another Pielke carriage comes off the rails here.
grrlscientist | May 19, 2008tags: surface temperature, global warming, climate change, weather, environment, streaming video
This streaming video reveals the temperatures of the Earth's surface since 1884. The video released by NASA and GISS. The only problem with this video is that I think it should run a little more slowly so it's easier to see the details. Note: Yellow = warmer than usual, Blue = cooler than usual, White = usual [0:32].
tlambert | May 17, 2008In the second part of his Ockham's razor talk Aitkin said:
I gave a public address on this subject a few weeks ago, which was picked up in the daily newspapers, the text of the address was put on one newspaper's website, and a vigorous correspondence developed. In all, I received, well, 150 or so communications. The majority of them were positive. The negative ones fell mostly into one or other of two groups: either I was trespassing on someone else's patch, that is, only scientists are allowed to talk about these issues, and I am not a scientist; or I was a 'denier', someone who, in spite of…
tlambert | May 16, 2008If you haven't been watching the Roger Pielke Jr train come off the rails and the carriages smashing into each other and exploding, I suggest you look at this post from James Annan:
Roger Pielke has been saying some truly bizarre and nonsensical things recently. The pick of the bunch IMO is this post. The underlying question is: Are the models consistent with the observations over the last 8 years?
Hey, hypothesis testing. First year stats stuff. So Annan carefully explains how it's done.
Marvel at Pielke Jr's response:
All he does is draw some graphs and wave his hands around. Does he…
tlambert | May 13, 2008What Mark Kleiman says
John Tierney, demoted from the NYT op-ed page and now continuing his libertarian propagandizing in the guise of "science writing," points out that flying around to climate-change conferences creates a large carbon footprint for high-profile environmental activists. That allows Tierney to claim the sort of faux-populist gotcha! so beloved among glibertarians and greedhead conservatives. (The theocrat, nativist, and imperialist wings of conservatism prefer their faux-populist gotcha!s on different topics.)
If you travel frequently by air, even on commercial flights, you…
nisbetmc | May 12, 2008
In a new campaign advertisement (above), Senator John McCain focuses on global warming, framing his position as a pragmatic "middle way" approach between the two extremes of denying there is a problem and resorting to heavy taxation and regulation. The ad even ends by offering up the complementary frame that global warming is in fact a national security problem. (Also notably, the ad refers to and uses imagery of more intense hurricanes, a "pandora's box" framing that has led to claims of alarmism directed at advocates such as Al Gore.)
While McCain's commitment to climate change policy is…
tlambert | May 12, 2008Jeff Poor of Business & Media Institute spliced the audio of an Al Gore interview to turn a statement that Arctic melting was a consequence of global warming:
And we're seeing consequences that scientists have long predicted might be associated with continued global warming. The entire north polar ice cap, normally the size the lower 48 states, give or take an Arizona, is melting before our eyes. 40 percent melted in the last twenty years. And in the summer months, it could be completely gone, in one scientific estimate, in as little as five years.
into a claim that Gore never made,…
nisbetmc | May 12, 2008
Since Earth Day, a number of polls have been released confirming that public opinion on climate change has changed very little over the past two years or since the premiere of Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Conventional wisdom pegged Gore's film and media campaign as changing the nature of the debate in the public's mind, but unfortunately this interpretation doesn't hold up to the data. Americans already concerned about the issue have grown more intense in their feelings, while many others continue to disregard the problem.
The latest evidence is this Pew survey, that details the lingering…
tlambert | May 10, 2008
Tim Blair declares:
Global cooling is now a flight-safety hazard.
The post he links speculates on a cause of the crash of BA flight 38:
But it would appear that the major contributory factor could have been the extreme cold. In other words, global cooling can kill.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Al!
and
After the aircraft crossed the Ural mountain range in Russia it climbed further to 38,000 where the ambient temperature dropped to as low as minus 76°C.
But 38,000 feet is in the stratosphere. And while greenhouse gases warm the surface of the Earth, they cool the stratosphere.
In…
tlambert | May 8, 2008Via Gareth Renowden:
Q: How many climate sceptics does it take to change a light bulb? A: None. It's too early to say if the light bulb needs changing.
Though I think the answer should be: None. The light bulb isn't broken and it will recover by itself and sitting in the dark is better than in the light.
nisbetmc | May 7, 2008Bill McKibben's latest grassroots project is the launch of www.350.org, a Web portal and blog designed to focus world attention on cutting the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million.
From the Web site:
Dear friends,
350 is the red line for human beings, the most important number on the planet. The most recent science tells us that unless we can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, we will cause huge and irreversible damage to the earth.
We're planning an international campaign to unite the world around the number 350, and we need…
grrlscientist | May 7, 2008tags: five easy ways to save the planet, environment, global warming, climate change, carbon footprint, streaming video
An amusing but instructive streaming video describing five easy ways that you can contribute to saving the planet. [3:42].