global warming
nisbetmc | February 1, 2008
I am in Italy until Wednesday of next week participating in an expert workshop on the scientific and societal dimensions of climate change. Organized by the Earth Institute's Urban Design Lab at Columbia University and the Adriano Olivetti Foundation, the workshop will turn into an edited volume released as part of the Ecopolis conference to be held in Rome in April, 2009.
The workshop features experts analyzing almost every major dimension of climate change. I am on a panel that kicks the workshop off by focusing on "Politics, Public Opinion, and Communication." Here are the questions that…
sheril | February 1, 2008
From TreeHugger:
For anyone who doesn't have Superman vision, the text from this striking image says: "Don't let this be our future. Save our rainforest, stop global warming".
Sure it's creative and interesting. Alarmist to some and frightening to others. As for me, I'm reminded of Charles Dickens 'A Christmas Carol'--An artistic foreboding image of a potential 'Earth Yet to Come.' Our future's uncertain and depends on whether we act to change the way we live. I for one have great expectations that we'll curb our pesky carbon emissions, calm this planetary fever, and Tiny Tim lives.
cmooney | January 18, 2008So...there is talk that Lieberman-Warner will be coming up again soon in the Senate, which kinda baffles me.
There are a whole host of reasons why it would be far better to have a climate change bill pass Congress in 2009, rather than during this election year. In my latest Daily Green column, I rattle off a few of them:
The politics of this issue are changing rapidly and dramatically, expanding the sphere of what's possible - and you can bet that by 2009, an even stronger bill will be able to pass. Between now and then, after all, we are probably going to just get worse and worse news from…
cmooney | January 16, 2008Well, so Romney won Michigan. Sigh.
I was a McCainiac in 2000, and I was just starting to feel a little bit of the buzz again.
But that's not what I wanted to say.
What's fascinating about Michigan, to me, is that the particular nature of the race in this state led to a focus on climate and energy policy--subjects that, until now, have gone largely neglected by the mass media on the campaign trail.
Indeed, even science came up some in relation to battle in Michigan between Romney and McCain. Hard to believe, I know, but it did.
But in my latest DeSmogBlog item, I argue that we science and…
nisbetmc | January 15, 2008
Conventional wisdom pegs 2007 as the long awaited tipping point in waking the American public up to the urgency of global warming. Yet as I review in my latest "Science and the Media" column at Skeptical Inquirer Online, such optimism runs up against the reality of public opinion.
Despite Gore's breakthrough success with Inconvenient Truth, American opinion today is little different from when the film premiered in May 2006. Gore has done a very good job of intensifying the beliefs of audiences who were already concerned about climate change, but a deep perceptual divide between partisans…
cmooney | January 14, 2008Watch this (unfortunately, not embeddable). The equation seems hard to refute:
Worse and worse news from climate system + ongoing political inertia = more and more serious consideration of geoengineering schemes
I don't think there's anything wrong with my math here--unfortunately.
P.S.: Speaking of bad news from the climate system...um, here comes the Antarctic ice sheet bearing the latest tidings of woe.
cmooney | January 10, 2008In my latest DeSmogBlog item, I try to explain the gap between what science says we need to do to stabilize the climate system, and what U.S. politics is currently capable of:
On the one hand, we've now got people like Bill McKibben and James Hansen talking as if 350 parts per million of atmospheric CO2 was the actual tipping climatic point. Which means we've already passed it, and completely radical changes will be necessary if we're to save the planet.
But over in the U.S. Congress, right now we can't even pass Lieberman-Warner, a cap-and-trade bill that would reduce atmospheric carbon…
cmooney | January 8, 2008In the latest issue of New Scientist, I've got a review of climate change journo Mark Bowen's new book, Censoring Science: Inside the Political Attack on Dr. James Hansen and the Truth of Global Warming. I have to say, this book is right up my presumed alley, and yet I had a hard time getting through it. You can't read the entire New Scientist review online, but here are a few parts:
Unfortunately, while Bowen gives play-by-play details - who emailed whom, who sat in on what meeting - Hansen remains curiously distant, or just plain absent, from much of the narrative. The story of his past is…
nisbetmc | December 31, 2007
Excerpt from coal and utility advertisement run in Kansas
Back in November, by framing their advertising appeals in terms of economic competitiveness and patriotism, a coal company and utility effectively promoted it attacks on the governor of Kansas. Their claim, conveyed powerfully in ads as shown above, argued that the governor's rejection of two power plant applications on the basis of greenhouse emissions would force the state to rely on natural gas from an Axis of near-Evil that included Venezuela, Iran, and Russia.
The Wichita Eagle newspaper responded with both a print editorial and…
nisbetmc | December 21, 2007
A X-Mas Goracle
In an editorial in the latest issue of the journal Climatic Change, Simon Donner argues that scientists need to join with religious leaders in communicating the urgency of climate change. Donner is an assistant professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on climate change, coral reefs, and nutrient cycling.
Following the lead of older avant-garde communicators such as Carl Sagan, Neil deGrasse Tyson and EO Wilson, Donner is one of many among a new generation of scientists who recognize that a paradigm shift is needed for engaging the…
tlambert | December 20, 2007Hey, remember John McLean? The guy who kept steering Andrew Bolt into brick walls? Well he's teamed up with Tom Harris of the NRSP to accuse the IPCC of lying about the scientific support for its reports:
In total, only 62 scientists reviewed the chapter in which this statement appears, the critical chapter 9, "Understanding and Attributing Climate Change". Of the comments received from the 62 reviewers of this critical chapter, almost 60% of them were rejected by IPCC editors. And of the 62 expert reviewers of this chapter, 55 had serious vested interest, leaving only seven expert…
nisbetmc | December 19, 2007
Pew has released its annual analysis of the top 20 most followed news stories of the year by the public. Pew pairs the survey data with a summary of their weekly news agenda tracking. For regular readers of this blog, you should not be surprised that climate change fails to crack the top 20 most followed issues or the top 20 most covered topics of 2007. (See previous posts here, and here.)
Several issues appear in the top 20 agenda items that are incidental to climate change including gas prices, periodic heat or cold waves, wild fires, and even the economy. In terms of effective public…
tlambert | December 18, 2007Andrew Dessler tried again to get a debate. He was going to debate Tim Ball on BlogTakRadio, but alas, Ball couldn't get through.
He did get to talk to various callers. My favourite was one Robert Colmes who ordered Dessler to stop saying that there was a consensus because he (Colmes) didn't agree. Oh and Colmes denied that there was such a thing as global climate.
Update: Dessler posts on it.
cmooney | December 17, 2007I'm preparing for a KPFA radio interview this morning, and so have had to brush up on precisely what went down in Bali over the past week. In essence: Everything, and nothing.
Global delegates agreed to a plan that (we hope) will eventually lead to a successor to the weak tea and expiring Kyoto Protocol. That successor treaty will be negotiated in late 2009 in Copenhagen--two years from now.
In Bali the U.S. was essentially browbeaten by the rest of the world--global moral suasion proved powerful enough to get State Department negotiator Paula Dobriansky to stop blocking the development of…
loom | December 16, 2007I've got a new conversation up at bloggingheads.tv. This time around I talk to University of Washington paleontologist Peter Ward about the mass extinctions that wiped out millions of species in the past, and how disturbingly difficult it is to rule out the possibility that we're sending ourselves into another great die-off.
cmooney | December 13, 2007As many of you know already, this week Rep. Henry Waxman's House Oversight Committee came out with a major report on the Bush administration's interference with climate science. Not exactly a new subject, but the Waxman report (PDF) is definitive in the way journalistic accounts often cannot be, simply because congressional investigators have many more tools at their disposal.
I wrote my latest DeSmogBlog item about the new Waxman report. "The end of an era," I called it--by which I mean, the end of the Bush vs. science era. And what an era it has been. I end the piece this way:
All in all,…
tlambert | December 12, 2007I don't think I've ever seen a more dishonest piece of reporting than this whoppper from Simon Caldwell at the Daily Mail:
Pope Benedict XVI has launched a surprise attack on climate change prophets of doom, warning them that any solutions to global warming must be based on firm evidence and not on dubious ideology.
The leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics suggested that fears over man-made emissions melting the ice caps and causing a wave of unprecedented disasters were nothing more than scare-mongering.
Needless to say, this story was linked by Drudge and all the other denialists…
tlambert | December 10, 2007In the olden days to become a distinguished climate scientist you had to work hard, do lots of research and publish it in good journals. Now there's a quicker method. Put out a press release.
The International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC) has been denied the opportunity to present at panel discussions, side events, and exhibits; its members were denied press credentials. The group consists of distinguished scientists from Africa, Australia, India, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
The scientists, citing pivotal evidence on climate change published in peer-reviewed…
cmooney | December 4, 2007I am quite confident that most readers of this blog would agree that NASA's James Hansen is a pretty big hero. Nevertheless, he shouldn't be saying stuff like this:
Recently, after giving a high school commencement talk in my hometown, Denison, Iowa, I drove from Denison to Dunlap, where my parents are buried. For most of 20 miles there were trains parked, engine to caboose, half of the cars being filled with coal. If we cannot stop the building of more coal-fired power plants, those coal trains will be death trains - no less gruesome than if they were boxcars headed to crematoria, loaded…
sheril | November 29, 2007Research... okay, but geoengineering continues to raise a heck of a lot of red flags for me.
By no means do I deny what we're up against or disagree with my favorite blogger, but I'd like to emphasize that priorities must focus on changing our collective mindset and behavior regarding carbon in this country and beyond. Yes, we're indeed mucking up this home planet we share, but I'm not sure I'll ever be comfortable tinkering with natural systems. That said, conducting research to understand complexities may be a good thing provided it's done responsibly.
What I know for sure is our trajectory…