global warming
nisbetmc | July 16, 2007The Sunday Washington Post leads with a story that greenhouse gas mitigation proposals in Congress are likely to stall, in part because several key lawmakers believe (or at least claim) that the public will not support the economic impacts associated with the proposals.
Michigan Democrat John Dingell is the leading skeptic when it comes to public support and his selective framing of where the public stands on the matter is in line with his close auto industry ties. As the Post reports:
"I sincerely doubt that the American people are willing to pay what this is really going to cost them,"…
grrlscientist | July 15, 2007tags: global warming, human warfare, politics
Did you know that there is a positive correlation between cold temperatures and warfare? According to a study recently carried out by David Zhang of the University of Hong Kong and colleagues, human warfare increases as temperatures plunge.
Zhang's team looked at the frequency of warfare in eastern China during the previous thousand years and compared it with paleoclimate data. They found that there were 899 wars in eastern China between the years 1000 and 1911 and that nearly all peaks in warfare and dynastic changes coincided with cold phases…
tlambert | July 13, 2007Eli Rabett has a post where he corrects Lubos Motl's blunders about the greenhouse effect, but he left a few crumbs for me. Motl writes (warning, link goes to Motl's blog, which has a design so ugly it makes most MySpace pages look pretty):
The Gentlemen at RealClimate.ORG have decided that my article about climate sensitivity and similar articles by others are too dangerous because they show that every new molecule of CO2 causes smaller greenhouse effect than the previous molecule: the absorption rate gradually approaches saturation. ...
So what do these eleven climate scientists think…
tlambert | July 8, 2007The Lavoisier group has published the presentations from their 'Rehabilitating Carbon Dioxide' workshop. Allow me to shorten them for you.
David Archibald: I predict imminent global cooling based on the record from five US weather stations.
Tim Curtin: Nicholas Stern is in league with the Prophet Mohammed.
David Evans: In 1999, we didn't know that the world had cooled from 1940 to 1975. The recent discovery of this fact has changed my mind about AGW.
Michael Hammer: According to my calculations, the IPCC has got the climate sensitivity too high by a factor of 20.
Bob Carter: E-G Beck shows…
cmooney | July 6, 2007My second post on this subject is now up at Huffington Post. Check it out.
The first post, published yesterday, is here. Read together, in order, I think they make for a pretty comprehensive essay on the subject at around 2,000 words in length.
I want to emphasize that I couldn't have written any of this without Nisbet's research, and want to give credit where it is way due.
cmooney | July 6, 2007Soon I'll be putting up my second HuffingtonPost entry on "Why Global Warming Tipped." (For the first entry, which has gotten 50 comments at last glance, see here.) In the meantime, though, I'd like to republish the fascinating figures that I used at HuffingtonPost, both of which arise from Nisbet's research and are part of the Speaking Science 2.0 talk. Here's the first (for a high resolution version see here):
This depicts the volume of attention to global warming over time at two agenda-setting newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post (presumed to be broad indicators of…
tlambert | July 4, 2007At Wired Science Fraser Cain reports on the latest research on global warming and cosmic rays. There is no link:
But T. Sloan from the University of Lancaster and A.W. Wolfendale from Durham University have looked carefully at the evidence and found it unconvincing. They published their results in a new paper called Cosmic Rays and Global Warming. Their research will be presented at the 30th International Cosmic Ray Conference, held in Merida Mexico from July 3 - July 11, 2007.
According to Sloan and Wolfendale, the 2000 paper highlighting the connection between cosmic rays and low-level…
cmooney | July 4, 2007The Bush administration climate "policy" is a sham and an embarrassment. The number of abuses against science--and of power--that we've seen on this topic over the past six years is overwhelming.
Sometimes, though, one choice quote can capture it all far better than a laundry list of well-documented misbehaviors. A choice quote like, say, this one from a recent Rolling Stone expose on Bush and climate:
One e-mail exchange about the study underscores just how many industry foxes were guarding the climate henhouse. When Matthew Koch (a White House energy adviser who today lobbies for API) saw…
tlambert | July 1, 2007Law professor Glenn Reynolds calls Al Gore a fuddy-duddy:
How to be a 21st century fuddy-duddy.
Reynolds' source is novelist Roger L Simon, who writes:
What fascinates about Al Gore is not - as this article from the Chicago Sun-Times shows so clearly - that he is full of hooey when it comes to his global warming "scientific" pronouncements. It is that so many people believe him and that he is more popular than ever.
As so much has changed in our society, fuddy-duddy "liberalism" has become the most conventional or, dare I say it, conservative of belief systems. It's almost as if the novels…
tlambert | June 25, 2007Via Eli Rabett, Rolling Stone has the story of the Bush administration's war on global warming science:
But a new investigation by Rolling Stone reveals that those distortions were sanctioned at the highest levels of our government, in a policy formulated by the vice president, implemented by the White House Council on Environmental Quality and enforced by none other than Karl Rove. An examination of thousands of pages of internal documents that the White House has been forced to relinquish under the Freedom of Information Act - as well as interviews with more than a dozen current and former…
nisbetmc | June 25, 2007Something to think about...Kyoto was strategically framed by conservatives as an unfair economic burden on the U.S. , deflating public support across polls. Yet according to Gallup trends and other poll indicators, Americans have always supported international agreements on climate in general and mandatory caps on CO2 emissions specifically. It's a classic example of how framing can alter public preferences on a particular agreement or legislative bill that turns on a principle that the public would otherwise support.
Below the fold I detail what the available poll data suggests about how…
tlambert | June 16, 2007I've written before about the Australian's war on science (see Part I II III IV V VI VII VIII). According to the Australian global warming isn't happening and we're not causing it and stopping it would destroy the economy. Now, in a barking mad editorial (entitled, I kid you not, "Reality bites the psychotic Left") they offer us this:
Rather than objectively assess the realities of climate change and the practical task ahead they [the psychotic Left] advocate symbolic, but ultimately futile, penance. By persisting with a misguided campaign to turn back the clock and demonise the Howard…
tlambert | June 16, 2007Remember E-G Beck's dodgy CO2 graph? Well, at RealClimate Stefan Rahmstorf finds Beck presenting another dodgy graph. Look at the perfectly regular temperature cycles in Beck's graph:
But they are only regular cycles because Beck changed the horizontal scale in the middle of the graph. Here's what it looks like with a uniform scale:
No regular cycles in this graph.
grrlscientist | June 15, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, global warming, climate change, ornithology, birds, avian biodiversity, habitat destruction
White-crested hornbill, Tropicranus albocristatus, also confined to African rainforests, may see more than half of its geographic range lost by 2100.
Image: Walter Jetz, UCSD. [larger]
Thanks to the combined effects of global warming and habitat destruction, bird populations will experience significant declines and extinctions over the next century, according to a study conducted by ecologists at the University of California, San Diego and Princeton University. This…
grrlscientist | June 14, 2007tags: environment, humor, streaming video
Martin Short revisits his classic character Nathan Thurm, the nervous, sweating, chain smoking big business lawyer. In this skit, Robert F. Kennedy grills him on global warming and how his clients, the big oil companies, are contributing to it. [2:18]
cmooney | June 13, 2007posted by Sheril R. Kirshenbaum
Jerry Lewis is a Congressman representing the 41st District of California.
Jerry Lewis is also a comedian from Newark, New Jersey.
I imagine it's confusing to share a name with someone famous. Even more unusual is the case of the Jerry Lewises because both fellows have independently and collectively made names for themselves.
Well it turns out the Congressman has quite a sense of humor - arguably rivaling that of the comedian. As former chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, he had this to say regarding a substantial spending boost for NOAA's oceans…
nisbetmc | June 13, 2007Previously, I've noted the major hole that the IPCC digs itself by releasing its consensus reports on Fridays, only to be lost in the weekend news cycle. Back in February, the timing of the IPCC report helped contribute to what I described as a "massive communication failure" in generating wider attention among the U.S. media and public.
Now several leading climate scientists, led by James Hansen, are calling attention to a bigger problem. They argue that the IPCC's conclusions are scientifically "too reticent" (a great frame device).
According to these scientists, it's more than just a…
cmooney | June 11, 2007posted by Sheril R. Kirshenbaum
Since quoting Doug Adams, I've received some thoughtful emails from readers in northern and inland states asking whether they ought to be concerned about An Inconvenient Truth. Fair question. If sea level rise and warming temperatures appear to have little personal relevance, why worry? The series finale of The Sopranos is troublesome enough for the weekend.
This influx to my inbox got me thinking about social momentum..
The usual suspects (climate scientists) have been concerned for a long time as they've documented increasing levels of CO2 in the…
grrlscientist | June 8, 2007tags: global warming, LabLit, science fiction, book review
Fifty Degrees Below (Bantam Books, NYC: 2005) is the second novel in Kim Stanley Robinson's global warming trilogy (the first is Forty Signs of Rain). In this book, the novel shifts its attention from Anna and Charlie Quibler and their quirky sons onto NSF scientists/beaureaucrats Frank Vanderwal and Diane Chang.
The first book in this trilogy, Forty Signs of Rain, developed slowly, which seemed to reflect the author's perception of America's slow reaction to impending global climate change. However, that book ended with a stunning…
grrlscientist | June 7, 2007tags: global warming, LabLit, science fiction, book review
A friend of mine who is an editor at Random House Publishers sent me a fascinating book about global warming that I think qualifies as "LabLit." LabLit is short for "Laboratory Literature"; a new genre of fictional science literature that realistically portrays scientists working and living during contemporary times.
This book, Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson (NYC, Bantam Books: 2004), is a peek into the lives of scientist, Anna Quibler, who works for the National Science Foundation (NSF), and her stay-at-home husband,…