global warming
sheril | October 12, 2007Congratulations to Al Gore and the IPCC! Evidence it's not only the climate that's a changin... Hold on tight for November 2008!
The Nobel committee said that Mr Gore and the IPCC should be honoured "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".
The committee praised the IPCC for creating an "ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming", by involving thousands of scientists and officials from over 100…
nisbetmc | October 12, 2007
A busy day but a quick analysis of breaking news:
Gore's Inconvenient Truth has been a stunning success in generating news coverage to his preferred "pandora's box" framing of the "climate crisis" and in mobilizing a latent base of concerned citizens. His perspective is likely to only be amplified after winning the Nobel prize.
But as we describe in our framing article at Science and as I explain at NPR's On the Media, there still remains a Two Americas of climate change perceptions. Over the past year Democrats have grown even more concerned about the issue while Republicans remain…
retrospectacle | October 12, 2007Looks like speculations turned out to be true, and Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize early this morning, "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."
The IPCC and Al Gore will split the $1.5 million prize, which will be awarded Dec 10 in Oslo.
I personally couldn't be more thrilled for him, and believe it was the obvious choice. I am glad to see political + scientific activism be justly rewarded.
Got some criticisms of "An Inconvenient Truth" to…
scientificactivist | October 12, 2007The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was announced this morning, and it will be shared equally between Al Gore and the IPCC. It was widely anticipated that Al Gore would be this year's honoree. The IPCC was less expected, although it is certainly at least as--if not more--deserving of the honor. Here's what the Nobel Committee has to say about the award:
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 is to be shared, in two equal parts, between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr. for their efforts to build up and…
tlambert | October 11, 2007Joint winners of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize:
The Norwegian Nobel Committee has decided that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 is to be shared, in two equal parts, between the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr. 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.
Indications of changes in the earth's future climate must be treated with the utmost seriousness, and with the precautionary principle uppermost in our minds.…
tlambert | October 11, 2007A UK High Court judge has rejected a lawsuit by political activist Stuart Dimmock to stop the distribution of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth to British schools. Justice Burton agreed that
"Al Gore's presentation of the causes and likely effects of climate change in the film was broadly accurate."
There were nine points where Burton decided that AIT differed from the IPCC and that this should be addressed in the Guidance Notes for teachers to be sent out with the movie.
Unfortunately a gaggle of useless journalists have misreported this decision as one that AIT contained nine scientific…
cmooney | October 10, 2007My latest DeSmogBlog piece is now up--as I say, I'm surprisingly optimistic that a lot of the GOP candidates actually seem to take global warming at least somewhat seriously. Except for the real right wingers. Anyway, can you believe Mike Huckabee said the following?
"We ought to be moving rapidly towards energy sources that don't have a greenhouse gas effect. Aggressively set the goal that within a ten year period, we should move a way from a fossil fuel culture to one that has alternative energy resources."
You can read the entire piece here.
tlambert | October 10, 2007RealClimate reports that the notorious Oregon Petition is back. This time the mailings are using the new JPANDS version of the Robinson's dodgy paper. RealClimate are doing an open source debunking, so head over there and join in the fun.
cmooney | October 10, 2007
I was just surfing the great science blog of Eric Berger, who writes for the Houston Chronicle, when I found a post with this title: "The forecast for Houston, a century hence."
You see, Berger has gone and done a big story about how global warming will affect Houston--and what Houstonians can expect from the future. It's responsibly reported, and necessarily tentative in some of its predictions--but also troubling. An excerpt:
Scientists differ on whether hurricanes would become stronger and if the exceptionally active 2005 Atlantic hurricane season would become the norm.
However, with at…
sheril | October 10, 2007
Another global warming PSA produced by Environmental Defense in conjunction with the Ad Council. Is this a message that resonates with the readers? I expect what's alarmist to some will be poignant to others. But what I can say with certainty is that climate change will be a paramount issue in the 2008 presidential election. Consider The New York Times special politics section that highlights candidates' positions as the coming attractions of what we'll be hearing, reading, debating, and pondering over the next twelve months...
A growing environmental awareness among Americans has…
cmooney | October 2, 2007So: If there's one thing I never tire of doing....it's beating up on George W. Bush's record on global warming--which usually involves exposing the ridiculous lies and deceptions the administration has cooked up over the past six years so as to misrepresent either a) the science; or b) what the president/administration has said about the science.
And here comes my latest thrashing: Entitled "Beating Around the Bush," it's now up at DeSmogBlog. Money quote:
Many others will tell you that even if Bush now accepts the science, he isn't contributing helpfully to the policy mess anyway with his…
cmooney | October 2, 2007
...either that, or Greenpeace is much more clever than M. Night Shyamalan.
Hmm...given these two possibilities, I think the choice is an obvious one.
P.S.: Michael Crichton would have had us believe that aliens cause global warming. Nonsense. Don't listen to him. The aliens were always on our side.
tlambert | September 28, 2007James Hansen replies to the deceitful IBD editorial:
The latest swift-boating (unless there is a new one among seven
unanswered calls on my cell) is the whacko claim that I received
$720,000.00 from George Soros. Here is the real deal, with the order
of things as well as I can remember without wasting even more time
digging into papers and records.
Sometime after giving a potentially provocative interview to Sixty
Minutes, but before it aired, I tried to get legal advice on my rights
of free speech. I made two or three attempts to contact people at
Freedom Forum, who I had given permission to…
cmooney | September 28, 2007
My latest DeSmogBlog entry is up--it's a reaction to the recent Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger piece in the New Republic, which in turn is an excerpt/adaptation from their new book Break Through. You'll recall that these guys are the stylish authors of the famed "Death of Environmentalism" essay (PDF). Anyways, I think Nordhaus and Shellenberger are largely right, but also not really as revolutionary as you (or they) might think. As I put it:
Not only do Nordhaus and Shellenberger get the central global warming message right--they go farther with detailed policy prescriptions. The…
tlambert | September 27, 2007Via RealClimate, James Hansen refutes the Investor's Business Daily's claim that he endorsed global cooling in 1971:
Mr. McCaslin reported that Rasool and Hansen were colleagues at NASA
and "Mr. Rasool came to his chilling conclusions by resorting in
part to a new computer program developed by Mr. Hansen that studied
clouds above Venus."
What was that program? It was a 'Mie scattering' code I had written
to calculate light scattering by spherical particles. Indeed, it was
useful for Venus studies, as it helped determine the size and
refractive index of the particles in the clouds that veil…
scientificactivist | September 25, 2007Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming
by Chris Mooney
Harcourt: 2007, 400 pages.
Buy now! (Amazon)
At 2:09 am on September 13, 2007, Hurricane Humberto made landfall just east of Galveston, Texas--still the site of the deadliest natural disaster in US history, the Galveston Hurricane of 1900. With maximum sustained winds of 85 mph, though, Hurricane Humberto was just a Category 1 storm (the weakest category on the Saffir-Simpson Scale). While it was the first hurricane to make landfall in the US since the record-breaking and devastating 2005 hurricane…
nisbetmc | September 24, 2007
From the UK's Independent:
The Pope is expected to use his first address to the United Nations to deliver a powerful warning over climate change in a move to adopt protection of the environment as a "moral" cause for the Catholic Church and its billion-strong following. The New York speech is likely to contain an appeal for sustainable development, and it will follow an unprecedented Encyclical (a message to the wider church) on the subject, senior diplomatic sources have told The Independent. It will act as the centrepiece of a US visit scheduled for next April - the first by Benedict XVI,…
tlambert | September 23, 2007Eli Rabbett coined the usage "to Rasool", to refer to the practice of attributing papers to just one of the authors in order to target the only author mentioned:
A very famous paper by S. Ichtiaque Rasool and Steven Schneider in the early 70s modeled the effects of aerosols on global temperature. For years it has been used by denialists to attack Schneider and by claiming that global cooling was predicted in the 70s to attack the fact that global temperatures are warming rapidly. As part of their strategy, Rasool often disappears, much as has happened with Michael Mann, whose first papers on…
tlambert | September 20, 2007
Study this cartoon by Nexus 6.
Read this post by Richard Littlemore.
Update: Nexus 6 rubs it in.