global warming
scientificactivist | June 4, 2007A piece of global warming denialism was published today in the conservative Financial Post. Normally it wouldn't be that noteworthy, except that it was oddly included in Sigma Xi's daily "Science in the News" digest. The article attacks the idea that there is a scientific consensus (embodied by the IPCC) regarding global warming. In a sense, the author is correct. The science regarding global warming is ongoing, and there are myriad subtleties to work out. Of course, this is not what the author is referring to. Although the scientific community as a whole agrees that the earth is…
nisbetmc | June 4, 2007
Imagine for the moment a classic work of modern art as pictured above. When a curator takes a heavy and bulky wooden frame, places it around the complex and uncertain image, a viewers' eyes are drawn to certain dimensions of that painting over others, perhaps leading to a specific interpretation of the artist's intent or even a specific emotional reaction.
If a second curator replaces that bulky wooden frame with a much lighter metallic one, a viewer's gaze might be drawn immediately to other aspects of the painting, potentially altering the interpretation of the artist's intended meaning…
scientificactivist | June 3, 2007Last Thursday, President George Bush unveiled a new climate change initiative, and this was further elaborated upon in a press conference by Jim Connaughton, Chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality (all of this, interestingly enough, as NASA Administrator Michael Griffin bizarrely proclaims that global warming isn't really a big deal after all). Although the Bush plan was given quite a bit of attention in the media, it's not a major departure from administration policy, as it continues to flout the tried and true international process led by the UN and does not insist on mandatory…
tlambert | June 2, 2007MarkH has made a case study of Alexander Cockburn's crankish nonsense on global warming, but there is a bit left over for me to comment on. Cockburn's main scientific authority is some guy he met on a cruise who worked as a meteorologist for a whole three years, but he does quote on other person on the science. Look:
As Richard Kerr, Science magazine's man on global warming remarked, "Climate modelers have been 'cheating' for so long it's become almost respectable."
It takes a few seconds to find the source of the quote. You need a subscription to read the whole article, but the bit you…
mikethemadbiologist | June 2, 2007Our Benevolent Seed Overlords have published an article by ScienceBlogling Chris Mooney about the need to reframe the global warming debate in language that non-scientists are more likely to respond to positively. While I don't disagree (who would argue that scientists should intentionally alienate people?), I wonder if that's the real problem. I would argue the problem is that the solution to the problem hasn't been clearly defined.
I've learned from my work on antibiotic resistance that if you simply state a problem and don't provide an answer to the problem, people get frustrated. After…
ddobbs | June 1, 2007
Don't count on the tropical forest gobbling up our excess carbon. Such is the warning from a recent study by Harvard's Kenneth Feeley and others in Ecology Letters, which suggests that we may not be able to count on surging tropical forest growth to slow global warming by consuming some of the excess carbon (via carbon dioxide intake). Why not? Because warming temperatures, contrary to previous thought and hope, were found to actually slow tropical forest growth in this 25-year study in Panama and Malaysia. As Feeley notes in the article's abstract, "these patterns strongly contradict the…
cmooney | May 31, 2007After thinking about NASA administrator Michael Griffin's ridiculous recent statement--he's not sure global warming is a "problem"--I decided to do a full entry at HuffingtonPost about it.
That entry, entitled "Of Idiocy and Optimal Climates," is readable here.
purepedantry | May 29, 2007The NYTimes has an excellent article about the controversy concerning hurricanes and global warming:
Perhaps the best known proponent of the idea that warming and hurricanes may be connected is Kerry A. Emanuel, an atmospheric scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His conclusion that the total power released in Atlantic and western Pacific hurricanes had increased perhaps by half in recent decades, reported in 2005 in the journal Nature, is one of the most discussed ideas in the debate.
He is not alone. Last year, researchers led by Carlos D. Hoyos of the Georgia Institute…
tlambert | May 29, 2007Remember how Christopher Monckton claimed that Gavin Menzies' fantasies about the Chinese navy sailing around the Arctic in 1421 proved it was warmer then?
EG Beck (of CO2 graph nonsense fame) makes the same argument and has a map to prove it:
Hey, who can argue if he has a map? By the way, all the dotted lines are journeys the fleet took. Really.
Via Stefan Rahmstorf, who has more on another dodgy Beck graph.
tlambert | May 27, 2007Martin Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" used fake graphs to try to make a case that global warming is a hoax. Compare their version of temperature change (on left) which they claimed came from NASA with what you actually get from NASA.
Now the Australian Broadcasting Corporation has decided to show Durkin's "Swindle". Durkin's version of the NASA graph and NASA's version are just two alternative opinions and people should see Durkin's version as well.
Don Arthur has written the definitive round up of the controversy.
Dave Tiley's take is also worth reading.
Tim Blair, meanwhile, is…
nisbetmc | May 25, 2007The NY Times' Andrew Revkin details a study at Nature that finds that in the Caribbean there have been centuries where strong hurricanes occurred frequently even though ocean temperatures were cooler than those measured today. Revkin reports that although the new study does not necessarily conflict with other recent research connecting global warming to more intense hurricanes, it does show that factors other than ocean temperatures can shape trends in the power of storms.
Revkin quotes climate scientist Judith Curry, ending the article with an important focus on the policy implications of…
cmooney | May 24, 2007Dr. Montgomery McFate, a noted anthropologist and Pentagon consultant currently based at the U.S. Institute for Peace, has pointed out an historical military role of her academic field in understanding the local populace during the Colonial period. Despite this intermingled history of anthropology and the military, however, modern-day defense policymakers and academic researchers rarely play well together in the proverbial sandbox. In general, a Cold War-era preoccupation with technological superiority, combined with the negative aftereffects of poor cultural understanding of opposing forces…
tlambert | May 23, 2007Via Gristmill, reasic's magisterial debunking of Michael Crichton's silly "Aliens Cause Global Warming" talk.
cmooney | May 22, 2007The International Energy Outlook 2007 (IEO2007) was released yesterday with an assessment by the Energy Information Administration (EIA) of the projection for international energy markets through 2030. This includes the details on everyone's favorite element with 6 protons - the very topic keeping many of us blogging as we debate its significance with regard to global warming. In this most recent report, we learn that atmospheric concentrations of C have been increasing at about 0.5 percent annually. What's more.. well, check out these figures:
World carbon dioxide emissions (let's just…
tlambert | May 21, 2007MarkH has written a guide to the global warming denialists. The Competive Enterprise Institute wins the "bottom of the barrel" rating.
cmooney | May 21, 2007posted by Sheril R. Kirshenbaum
In the first installment of Intersection-ing sans Chris, I've decided to address all this hullabaloo on Global Warming.. Is it real? More and more, scientists are criticized as alarmists jumping on the apocalyptic panic bandwagon while the rest of us have more important things to worry about. War, growing national debt, nuclear proliferation, and K-Fed's attempt at a hiphop career to name a few. So how dramatically has the state of the world shifted since humans came onto the scene? Can it be we just have an ego problem - bragging our species has had a…
grrlscientist | May 20, 2007tags: humor, satire, An Inconvenient Truth, streaming video
According to the latest streaming news on global warming, children are the greatest enemies of our environment [1:19]
tlambert | May 20, 2007I wrote earlier about William Broad's many misrepresentations in his story that criticised Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Now Kevin Libin has produced an article for the National Post that makes Broad look like a paragon of virtue. Look at this:
James E. Hansen, a NASA scientist and one of Mr. Gore's advisors, agreed the movie has "imperfections" and "technical flaws." About An Inconvenient Truth's connection of rising hurricane activity to global warming - something refuted by storm experts - Mr. Hansen said, "we need to be more careful in describing the hurricane story than he is."…
tlambert | May 18, 2007Roger Pielke Jr has stopped blogging. James Annan comments:
It had appeared for some time that RPJr's his blog was on the wane, attracting little more than a handful of denialist ditto-heads, and now he's decided to knock it on the head. Personally, I found much of Roger's blogging to be interesting and thought-provoking, although I'm a bit baffled by some of the clangers he dropped (eg his bizarre cheerleading of air capture of CO2, and his lame attempt to discredit Hansen's 1988 forecast). Many of his comments on the politicisation of climate science in general, and the hurricane wars in…
tlambert | May 17, 2007The New Scientist has published a handy guide, rounding up 26 of the most common myths and misperceptions in climate science.