global warming
tlambert | November 2, 2007Michael Dobbs continues to disappoint as the Washington Post's Fact Checker. In his new column he refuses to correct the mistake he made when he wrongly said that the judge had found "nine significant errors" in An Inconvenient Truth. Instead, Dobbs writes:
Contrary to Kreider's assertion, the judge did talk about "errors" in the Gore movie, and did not always put quotation marks around the word error, as some readers maintained. See points 18 and 19 in his judgment available in full here.
This is misleading. The judge put quotes around "error" 19 times. If he considered all nine of the…
cmooney | October 30, 2007The paper arrived for the first time at our place here in Silverlake today. Something about getting your local rag really makes you feel like you're rooted in a new location.
But though that observation might sound uplifting--and hey, this piece in the Times today was particularly great--it also inspires me to reflect critically upon my media consumption habits over the past several years.
I'm not of my parents' generation--reading the newspaper daily is not an ingrained routine for me. As a result, I stopped getting the Washington Post in, like, 2003. More generally, the diversity of my…
mikethemadbiologist | October 26, 2007I know: who could possibly think that the Bush administration would censor a report on the effects of global warming? From the Washington Post:
Testimony that the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention planned to give yesterday to a Senate committee about the impact of climate change on health was significantly edited by the White House, according to two sources familiar with the documents.
Specific scientific references to potential health risks were removed after Julie L. Gerberding submitted a draft of her prepared remarks to the White House Office of Management and…
tlambert | October 24, 2007John Stossel is his usual misleading self with a piece denying anthropogenic warming. Video here and summarized here. Tamino details the way Stossel deceives his viewers:
Probably the most irritating aspect of Stossel's "report" is a brief clip from An Inconvenient Truth of Al Gore saying, "... sea levels will rise 20 feet." What's irritating is that I've seen AIT often enough to know that this quote is taken out of context -- so much so that Stossel doesn't even have the honesty to play Al Gore's entire sentence. What Gore says is that IF the Greenland ice sheet, or the West Antarctic ice…
cmooney | October 24, 2007Well, the region in which I've made my new home is on fire...though I'm not there right now...and inevitably, global warming issues are starting to be raised. I myself haven't had time yet to dig into the science--which I know exists--on the relationship between global warming and an increased risk of wildfires. But assuming that others may have done so, here's an open question for you all to contemplate and, hopefully, answer:
Assuming you're an environmentalist who wants to be scientifically accurate, how would you couch your message right now about the climate-wildfire relationship?
Fire…
sheril | October 24, 2007Fossils always have interesting stories to tell, and two studies by prominent scientists in the field suggest this one may not have a happy ending...
Today's Seattle Times reports that in Earth's 520+ million year history, four of the five major extinctions are linked to warmer tropical seas. Warmer seas, by the way, are indicative of a warmer planet. Now the trouble is, research suggests our home terra may reach the same level of extinction-connected warming in about a century if we don't curb greenhouse gas emissions.
In the British study, Mayhew and his colleagues looked at temperatures…
sheril | October 22, 2007Their unusual style made an impression on me in Vegas. Readers can decide if the Blue fellas are as memorable here.
tlambert | October 19, 2007Correction: My post a few days ago implied implied that the Washington Post celebrated Gore's Nobel by publishing four items repeating the falsehood that a judge found nine errors in the movie. This was wrong. I missed their editorial on the Nobel Prize where they also took a swipe at Gore:
His movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," about the effects of climate change, was a box-office hit and an Oscar winner. That achievement is impressive and important, notwithstanding factual misstatements and exaggerations such as the "nine significant errors" in the film cited by a British judge Wednesday.
No…
nisbetmc | October 19, 2007Science magazine runs the following news report on Gore's Nobel prize and his impact on the policy debate and public opinion. The article quotes Steve Schneider, Michael Oppenheimer, Robert Watson, and other key scientists who note the immense importance of Gore's work on climate change over the years.
Climate researchers have known Gore as the rare policymaker who brings scientists in--and listens. When he visited Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York, as a senator, recalls geochemist Wallace Broecker, "he said, 'I don't want a tour. I just want to sit around a table with…
tlambert | October 18, 2007Several climate scientists have now examined the alleged errors in An Inconvenient Truth. At RealClimate Gavin Schmidt (NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies) and Michael Mann (director Penn State Earth System Science Center) write:
First of all, "An Inconvenient Truth" was a movie and people expecting the same depth from a movie as from a scientific paper are setting an impossible standard. Secondly, the judge's characterisation of the 9 points is substantially flawed. He appears to have put words in Gore's mouth that would indeed have been wrong had they been said (but they weren't).…
cmooney | October 18, 2007I've been running around crazy busy again, so I haven't had time until now to comment on Gore's Nobel, which I believe was richly deserved. However, there is what I would call a "paradox" about Gore and his recent achievements, the nature of which I try to outline in my latest DeSmogBlog weekly item:
Gore is our top mass media communicator on climate change, and yet Gore turns off many audiences that we definitely need to reach.
As I then elaborate at DeSmogBlog:
This fact puts anyone who cares about the climate issue in an awkward position: On the one hand, we must applaud Gore for drawing…
loom | October 17, 2007[Update 10/18 8:30 am: Honestly, when I wrote this post last night, I could only access the first couple paragraphs of the op-ed in question. But now the link takes you to the full text. Could it be that my cries were heard?? Doubt it, but open access is always nice.]
In today's Wall Street Journal there was a very provocative op-ed by ecologist Daniel Botkin. He argues that the evidence of potential harm from global warming is overblown. Here is what you can see for free...
Global warming doesn't matter except to the extent that it will affect life -- ours and that of all living things on…
nisbetmc | October 17, 2007In a new regular column over at DesmogBlog, Chris Mooney elaborates on the arguments first offered here. We should applaud Gore, writes Chris, but we also need to draw on data and evidence in order to accurately evaluate his impact and consider what else needs to be done:
However, there's one arena in which we seriously ought to criticize the Gore communications juggernaut--it just isn't the realm of scientific accuracy. Rather, the true issue is the one that Matthew Nisbet has been highlighting, and what I might term the "Gore paradox": Gore is our top mass media communicator on climate…
nisbetmc | October 17, 2007
In the United States, when it comes to public perceptions of Gore's climate message and Nobel award, partisanship is serving as the strongest of perceptual screens, triggered in part by the chorus of conservative media attacking Gore's accomplishments and challenging the science behind his claims.
Consider the clip above from Fox News Sunday. In the roundtable discussion, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol leads by deriding Gore for "bloviating" about climate change while people die in Iraq and Burma. Conservative columnist Charles Krauthamer adopts the now familiar talking points,…
loom | October 16, 2007If you live anywhere near my home town of Guilford, Connecticut, I'd be delighted if you could join me Thursday at 7:30 at the Guilford Free Library for a talk, "Will Global Warming Redraw the Map of Life?" (flyer pdf) I'll be discussing extinction projections, assisted migration, and more.
cmooney | October 16, 2007From a Fox News online report:
LOS ANGELES -- Jimmy Kimmel is going bicoastal as a TV talk show host.
The host of ABC's "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" will fill in for a vacationing Regis Philbin on "Live with Regis and Kelly" in New York while still hosting his namesake show from Los Angeles.
During the week of Oct. 22, Kimmel will fly back and forth across the country daily, co-hosting with Kelly Ripa in New York each morning and taping his own show in Los Angeles each night. That's two cross-country flights a day for five days.
"I am a little bit insane," Kimmel told The Associated Press. "It will…
tlambert | October 15, 2007Paul Krugman offers an explanation of Gore Derangement Syndrome
So if science says that we have a big problem that can't be solved with tax cuts or bombs -- well, the science must be rejected, and the scientists must be slimed. For example, Investor's Business Daily recently declared that the prominence of James Hansen, the NASA researcher who first made climate change a national issue two decades ago, is actually due to the nefarious schemes of -- who else? -- George Soros.
Which brings us to the biggest reason the right hates Mr. Gore: in his case the smear campaign has failed. He's taken…
nisbetmc | October 13, 2007
One of the reasons why Al Gore's communication campaign has had limited success in activating the American public on climate change is that only half of adults have a favorable opinion of the former Vice President. Not only do pre-conceived notions about Gore serve as a perceptual screen in interpreting his climate crisis message, such hardened opinions don't augur well for the many of us who have been hoping that Gore would run for president. Indeed, as a recent Gallup analysis reviews, polls from Marist and Pew indicate that half of Americans would never consider voting for Gore as…
tlambert | October 13, 2007In my post on the decision by Justice Burton to allow the showing of An Inconvenient Truth because it was "broadly accurate" I listed some of the reporters who wrongly claimed that the judge decided that AIT had nine errors. Mary Jordan's story was particularly bad. Most of the reporters eventually got around to telling their readers that the judge found AIT "broadly accurate", but Jordan only mentioned the negative parts of the decision. And Bob Somerby has more:
"Al Gore's Film Has 9 Errors, British Judge Rules in Suit." That's the headline on page one, promoting this news report, filed…
tlambert | October 12, 2007For this post I didn't go trawling through freeper or blog comments or look at obscure blogs. I just went to memeorandum.
William Teach
The Nobel Prize committee has basically surrendered to hysterics, mass exaggerators, and liars, most of who are not even climatologists or even any type of scientist.
Scott Johnson:
Today's award to Al Gore and the IPCC "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change" fits in with a subset of cosmopolitan frauds, fakers,…