global warming
tlambert | September 16, 2007Earlier I suggested that surfacestations.org was cherry picking by showing a station with warming as an example of a "bad" station, and a station with no warming as an example of a "good" station. Of course, it could have turned out that I was wrong, and those were the temperature trends of typical "bad" and "good" stations. But now they've classified one third of the stations and you can see that the cherry picking has been confirmed -- the trends are the same for "good" stations (in red) and "bad" stations (in green).
BigCityLib has more.
sheril | September 14, 2007It's a light day at The Intersection with Chris in New Orleans and me in Massachusetts. So while we're both on the road, here's a Larry King clip from earlier this year that takes on global warming. And added bonus -- it features Bill Nye the Science Guy.
sheril | September 12, 2007In 2006, the Ad Council brought this public service announcement to the basement of the Capitol to show policymakers and staff:
Global Warming. It may seem like an impossible problem: The Arctic ice is melting, storms are becoming fiercer, the resulting climate change is upsetting invaluable ecosystems, and the pollution is damaging our health.
But there is still time. Reversing the trend of global warming trend is possible and depends not only on the efforts of environmental scientists and researchers, governments of all nations, and leaders of business and industry, but just as…
cmooney | September 11, 2007My weekly post at DeSmogBlog is now up. It's about the latest Naomi Oreskes brouhaha, which I've been trying not to watch too closely. That's what the piece is about. And if that's too mysterious--well, read it.
cmooney | September 9, 2007There were a lot of comments to Friday's post, in which I shared U. Penn risk assessment specialist Adam Finkel's critique of a particularly bad Robert Samuelson column in Newsweek. Now, Finkel has come back and responded in detail to all of your comments. Check it out. A very brief excerpt:
Unfortunately, economists have a HUGE problem thinking adequately about uncertainty in cost, and they tend to "solve" it by ignoring it. On a good day, they can tell us something about how much money is needed to drive the "partial equilibrium" phase of a regulatory program--the one in which some people…
tlambert | September 8, 2007One of Climate Care's carbon offset schemes involves replacing diesel pumps for irrigation with treadle pumps. They say that the benefits include:
Allows 2 or 3 harvests a year, instead of 1
Prevents farmers having to leave their families to work in the city during 'off season'
Farmers' income increases, often between two and five-fold
So as a result of trade both parties are better off. Someone in a rich country gets to offset their CO2 emissions, while poor farmers save the money they would have had to have spent hiring diesel pumps and increase their income.
Sounds good, who could…
cmooney | September 7, 2007 Several weeks ago, Newsweek ran a much-discussed cover story by Sharon Begley "revealing" the story that many of us have been writing for years: There has been a campaign, supported by many fossil fuel interests, to sow doubt about mainstream climate science. Duh. The main newsworthy thing about this effort, to my mind, is that it now appears in decline. But it was a naughty, naughty thing to do, and it certainly ought to be exposed and re-exposed.
So far, so good.
But then comes Newsweek's own Robert Samuelson with a chowder-headed takedown of his own magazine's "Truth About Denial" cover…
tlambert | September 5, 2007John Lynch has posted Naomi Oreskes response to Schulte and the claims that there is no consensus:
3) The piece misrepresents the results we obtained. In the original AAAS talk on which the paper was based, and in various interviews and conversations after, I repeated pointed out that very few papers analyzed said anything explicit at all about the consensus position.This was actually a very important result, for the following reason. Biologists today never write papers in which they explicitly say "we endorse evolution". Earth scientists never say "we explicitly endorse plate tectonics."…
sb admin | September 3, 2007Read this book.
First and formost for a book review: Storm World is a good
read. You will not find yourself bogged down or forcing yourself to
push through a book that's "good for you." You will keep reading
because you will want to know more.
As for the book itself: Mooney clearly has a point of view in the
book, and does not hide it. However, that point of view is considered
based on the evidence, and he also admits that it is not exactly the
same as the point of view he expected to have when starting research for
the book. This is not a polemic, it is not a "the sky is falling, we're…
tlambert | August 30, 2007Via William Connolley I find another attempt to claim that there is no consensus in the scientific literature:
In 2004, history professor Naomi Oreskes performed a survey of research papers on climate change. Examining peer-reviewed papers published on the ISI Web of Science database from 1993 to 2003, she found a majority supported the "consensus view," defined as humans were having at least some effect on global climate change. Oreskes' work has been repeatedly cited, but as some of its data is now nearly 15 years old, its conclusions are becoming somewhat dated.
Medical researcher Dr.…
nisbetmc | August 29, 2007Here are the major implications from our study analyzing twenty years of American public opinion data on global warming:
1. Global warming skeptics continue to make an impact on public opinion.
As we describe in the article, although a strong majority of Americans say that they believe that global warming is real, that temperatures are rising, and that the release of carbon dioxide is a cause, the public remains relatively uncertain about whether the majority of scientists agree on the matter. As long as the public remains confused about where the experts stand, public support for policy…
nisbetmc | August 27, 2007NOTE: Unfortunately, the article is only free access from most university IP addresses. Please email me at nisbetmc@gmail.com and I can send you a copy.
I have the following article forthcoming at the fall issue of the journal Public Opinion Quarterly that is now available as part of their free advanced access. Full text here and abstract below:
Nisbet, M.C. & Myers, T. (2007). Twenty years of public opinion about global warming. Public Opinion Quarterly, 71, 3, 1-27.
Over the past 20 years, there have been dozens of news organization, academic, and nonpartisan public opinion surveys on…
tlambert | August 26, 2007Last Tuesday Matthew Warren [reported] in the Australian:
Labor plans to rid Australian homes of off-peak electric hot water systems, in a move it claims will cut Australia's greenhouse gas emissions by 7.5million tonnes each year. ...
Labor will keep existing rebates to encourage take-up of alternatives and believes its plan can save households $300 a year.
Pretty straight forward reporting. But then on Saturday he wrote another story about the Labor plan. This one ended on the front page, under the headline "Garrett's $6.5bn hot water bill":
Households will have to pay up to $6.5…
tlambert | August 23, 2007Last month the Australian mounted an over-the-top defence of one of their pundits after blogs criticised him for spinning as favourable to the government an opinion poll that showed the opposition way ahead and no change in its lead. So how do you think they reacted to Media Watch's criticism?
With 4672 words blasting Media Watch, including the entire editorial, stories from Caroline Overington and Matthew Warren and an opinion piece from David Salter.
Check out the unbelievable arrogance of their editorial:
When Media Watch demanded we jump to an apology and correction, The Australian was…
nisbetmc | August 23, 2007
Congressman John Shadegg's re-election campaign issued a press release last week that cites Michael Fumento and Steve McIntyre to claim that the "facts" about climate change are wrong. If you missed the McIntyre controversy that ignited the conservative blogosphere and political talk radio, you can find the full context here.
In Shadegg's instance, he adds fuel to the fire by using Al Gore as a foil. It's another example of the "two Americas of climate change perceptions," a partisan divide that Gore has only amplified. Given competing cues from partisan leaders, over the past year, Dems…
loom | August 20, 2007I've got a story in the current issue of Science about the challenge of predicting how many species (and which) may become extinct due to global warming. You can read the article here on my web site. I blogged about some of the early material in the article back in 2004 here. For a good summary of the qualms many scientists have about the power of current models, check out this recent review in the journal Bioscience: pdf.
[Update: If for some reason you have trouble reading my article on my web site, the link to the story at Science is here.]
tlambert | August 19, 2007Four of the six government members on a committee examining geosequestration put out a dissent denying the existence of anthropogenic global warming. I was going to write a post on what they got wrong, but I realised that since they rely on Bob Carter so much, I'd already done it. John Quiggin comments on the affair:
But now that the disinformation machine has been created, it's proving impossible to shut it down. Too many commentators have locked themselves into entrenched positions, from which no dignified retreat is possible. The problem has been reinforced by developments in the media,…
tlambert | August 17, 2007If I summarized Glenn Reynold's response to my post on his hyping of a small correction to GISS data, you would not believe me, so I'm quoting the whole thing:
Lamberted! But no Instalanche.
Later: In an update: "Matthew Yglesias links to Tim Lambert, obviously deeming him a reputable source. Hey, this is about politics; not accuracy." Yglesias has been off his game lately.
More: Brad Plumer has been fooled, too.
Yes, Reynolds is enough of an egomaniac to think that I wrote my post because I was hoping to get an Instalanche. In fact, I wrote it to correct his hype. The change meant that…