global warming
tlambert | April 15, 2008NPR has run a puff piece on Kristen Byrnes. Byrnes stuff is full of errors, but the reporter seems uninterested in whether Byrnes' science is accurate or not.
James Hrynyshyn notes that Byrnes has libelled James Hansen, while Janet Stemwedel is doesn't like the lack of analysis in the NPR story.
Update: More comments from PZ Myers and Orac.
sheril | April 14, 2008According to the BBC News, China has already overtaken the US as the world's 'biggest polluter.'
Dr. Max Auffhammer, lead researcher on an upcoming report in next month's Journal of Environment Economics and Management, explained his projections assume that the Chinese government's recent aggressive energy efficiency program would fail and called figures for emissions growth 'truly shocking.'
"But there is no sense pointing a finger at the Chinese. They are trying to pull people out of poverty and they clearly need help.
"The only solution is for a massive transfer of technology and wealth…
tlambert | April 14, 2008Instead of correcting his erroneous post Tim Worstall has put up another post coming out against corrections. This time it's about an inaccurate textbook. Can you pass the test at the book's online study centre? Question 16. True or False?
Worstall claims that book is accurate, offering this interesting argument:
But many other problems are much less clear-cut. Science doesn't know how bad the green-house effect is."
Indeed this is so. Climate sensitivity (how much warming from a doubling of atmospheric CO2) is the most important unknown at present. The IPCC thinks somewhere from 2…
tlambert | April 12, 2008About a week ago, the World Meteorological Organization put out a statement to correct the erroneous claims in the media that global warming had stopped (emphasis theirs):
GENEVA, 4 April 2008 (WMO) - The long-term upward trend of global warming, mostly driven by greenhouse gas emissions, is continuing. Global temperatures in 2008 are expected to be above the long-term average. The decade from 1998 to 2007 has been the warmest on record, and the global average surface temperature has risen by 0.74C since the beginning of the 20th Century.
The current La Niña event, characterized by a…
esiegel | April 10, 2008
In my mind, and in my car,
we can't rewind, we've gone too far,
pictures came and broke your heart,
put the blame on VTR.
And for those of you who are under the age of 25, VTR stands for Video Tape Recorder. This was the Buggles, who made the first music video that ever appeared on MTV, back when MTV played music videos. (I wonder what the last music video on MTV was? My guess is California Love by Tupac and Dre back in 1996. At least, that's probably the last music video that I've ever seen on MTV.)
But why all this? Because I wanted to tell you about my appearance on The Space Show this…
cmooney | April 9, 2008My latest Science Progress piece is up: It's about what we would actually have to do to prepare just one sector (transportation) and one region (the Gulf Coast) for climate change. If you then extrapolate that to all sectors and all regions, well....we are so unready it is ridiculous, and the Bush administration has done virtually nothing to change that.
Climate change adaptation, therefore, will be a massive project for the next administration.
tlambert | April 9, 2008The Australian front pages an article on "eminent historian" Don Aitkin who attacks the "quasi-religious" scientists of the IPCC for advocating that some action to combat global arming should be taken. Aitkin deploys the argument from incredulity
He says an increase in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide over the past century is agreed, some of it due to fossil fuels, cement-making and agriculture. However, normal production of CO2 is not known, and it makes up only a tiny part of the atmosphere. "How does a small increase in a very small component have such a large apparent effect? The…
tlambert | April 7, 2008John Mashey on the global warming deniers who reckon that AGW is a plot against capitalism:
What's really weird about this is that many of the people who do this (claim that AGW believers are attacking capitalism)
a) Have rarely, or never worked for an actual profit-making company that builds useful products or provides useful services.
b)A few work for PR/lobbying organizations that claim to speak for free-market capitalism. But, actually they generally lobby for that tiny subset of companies (of rich family foundations that own them) that make more money by imposing costs (negative…
tlambert | April 6, 2008Terence offers a definition of Gore's Law:
Gore's Law: As an online climate change debate grows longer, the probability that denier arguments will descend into attacks on Al Gore approaches one.
tlambert | April 2, 2008James has written an open letter to Kevin Rudd. Key paragraphs:
Global climate is near critical tipping points that could lead to loss of all summer sea ice in the Arctic with detrimental effects on wildlife, initiation of ice sheet disintegration in West Antarctica and Greenland with progressive, unstoppable global sea level rise, shifting of climatic zones with extermination of many animal and plant species, reduction of freshwater supplies for hundreds of millions of people, and a more intense hydrologic cycle with stronger droughts and forest fires, but also heavier rains and floods, and…
nisbetmc | April 2, 2008
Several news reports note that Gore's new climate communication initiative targets Americans not just through television ads, but also by way of interpersonal networks, specifically what campaign organizers call "influentials" (roundup of coverage).
As I have argued previously, the current communication challenge is to go beyond the liberal democratic base who were mobilized by Inconvenient Truth, and to reach a diversity of publics who currently tune out the urgency of climate change. Here's what Andrew Revkin at the NY Times reports about the Gore-led campaign strategy:
Pollsters and…
tlambert | March 31, 2008z, in comments:
"CO2 is not causing global warming, in fact, CO2 is lagging temperature change in all reliable datasets. "
See also my forthcoming paper: "Chickens do not lay eggs, because they have been observed to hatch from them".
nisbetmc | March 31, 2008I'm hitting the road for talks at Princeton, but a quick post on Gore's new ad campaign, launched officially with an appearance last night on 60 Minutes.
I haven't see the ads yet and I didn't see last night's program, but from news reports, the campaign appears to incorporate the types of necessary strategies that I've written about at this blog, in articles, or that I have highlighted in talks over the past year. Gore and his Climate Alliance specifically:
a) Attempt to reach non-news audiences, the type of people who have been tuning out the really good science coverage.
b) In commercials…
nisbetmc | March 30, 2008
I just drove round trip from the Minneapolis airport to Madison in a rented Toyota Prius. I have to say that the car is super fast and smooth and has amazing handling. Although the interior and accessories leave some things to desire, the handling compares with the best German cars. Highway mileage, however, is about what you get in a traditional compact or mid-size. The Prius is probably the only car I will rent from now on and I am hoping that other similar hybrid models will appear soon.
cmooney | March 27, 2008
I haven't blogged in the last few days--what happened here over Expelled has been quite a shock to my system, and I'm still trying to process it. I will have something to say about all that as soon as I'm ready, so prepare the expletives.
Meanwhile, though, I wanted to point out my latest Daily Green item, which is about two recent bits of climate change news--one, that we're losing another Antarctic ice shelf, and two, climate change may not be the cause of tropical frog declines. I find the juxtaposition more than interesting:
In one case the impact of climate change is both dramatic and…
tlambert | March 25, 2008Thanks to Drudge and Instapundit another round of "global warming stopped in 1998" is making the rounds of the blogs.
It's only been a few months since the last time and yet you only have to look at a graph of GISS temperatures to see that warming hasn't stopped:
Falsehoods like this are able to survive and spread due to the efficiency of the disinformation cycle shown below. Notice that there is little chance of actual facts about the world getting in.
What is particularly disappointing about this particular case was that one of the nodes in the cycle, Counterpoint was produced by…
nisbetmc | March 25, 2008
Speculation mounts as to whether Gore will endorse either Obama or Clinton in the Democratic Primary race. My suggestion would be that he stay out of election politics in 2008, except to try to raise the profile of climate change in a non-partisan way.
As I describe in this column and in several public radio interviews, public opinion is little changed today from the time of the release of Inconvenient Truth, despite the massive publicity success of the film and the sharp increase in news coverage of climate change. The reason is that Gore's success has been a double edged sword. Attention…
tlambert | March 22, 2008Remember EG Beck's dodgy CO2 graph?
You really didn't have to know anything at all about the history and practice of measuring CO2 to deduce that something was wrong with Beck's theory that there were wild fluctuations in CO2 concentration that suddenly ended when the most accurate measurements started. But Energy and Environment published his paper.
Eli Rabett has links to comments from experts Harro Meijer and Ralph Keeling (the son of Charles Keeling), who explain where Beck went wrong. Meijer concludes:
It is shocking that this paper has been able to pass the journal's referee system. "…
sheril | March 18, 2008I'm Just One Person. What Can I Do About Global Warming?
EARTH HOUR 2008
Created to take a stand against the greatest threat our planet has ever faced, Earth Hour uses the simple action of turning off the lights for one hour to deliver a powerful message about the need for action on global warming.
This simple act has captured the hearts and minds of people all over the world. As a result, at 8pm on the 29 March, 2008 millions of people in some of the world's major capital cities, including Copenhagen, Toronto, Chicago, Melbourne, Brisbane, Tel Aviv and Manila will unite and switch off for…
cmooney | March 17, 2008In its latest issue, Time magazine singles out "10 Ideas That Are Changing the World." One of those is very literal: geoengineering.
Time's piece on the subject is a bit muddled--it lists iron fertilization of the oceans as a way of reducing sunlight to the planet--but the bottom line is unfortunately very accurate: "Unless the geopolitics of global warming change soon, the Hail Mary pass of geoengineering might become our best shot."
If you wanted evidence of geoengineering entering mainstream social discourse, it's hard to think of something better than an article like this, in Time.