global warming
nisbetmc | May 17, 2007
In a segment from the recent Frontline special "Hot Politics," GOP pollster Frank Luntz explains his 1997/1998 memo that became the playbook for how conservatives like President Bush and Senator James Inhofe redefined climate change as really a matter of "scientific uncertainty" and "unfair economic burden." We detail the strategy and its impact on public opinion in our Framing Science thesis and in our talks as part of the Speaking Science 2.0 national tour.
Below you can watch a clip of Senator Inhofe's appearance on Fox & Friends the week of the release of this year's first IPCC…
tlambert | May 17, 2007John Quiggin:
Phillip Adams and Peter Dixon have prepared a reply (over the fold) to the opinion piece by Robson and Davidson in the Australian which offered a range of incoherent criticisms of proposals to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. Disgracefully, but not at all surprisingly, the Oz has declined to print it, marking yet another step in its decline.
Admittedly, the debate is so one-sided that printing the reply would have made it obvious how ill-advised it was to publish the Davidson-Robson piece in the first place. Dixon is Australia's pre-eminent economic modeller, and Adams is…
purepedantry | May 16, 2007You remember how in The Day After Tomorrow global warming leads to a shutdown of the Gulf Stream and catastrophic cooling of Europe. (This would be before the scene where the cold chases the kid down the hallway of the New York Public Library.) Well, just in case you didn't know, that isn't going to happen:
The idea, which held climate theorists in its icy grip for years, was that the North Atlantic Current, an extension of the Gulf Stream that cuts northeast across the Atlantic Ocean to bathe the high latitudes of Europe with warmish equatorial water, could shut down in a greenhouse world…
tlambert | May 13, 2007Rupert Murdoch might be concerned about the harm that threatens from global warming, but the Australian is still in denial, printing an opinion piece by Alex Robson and Sinclair Davidson, who continue to deny the existence of scientific evidence for man-made warming:
The petition also states "the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has determined that warming of the world's climate is 'unequivocal' and that it is almost certainly due to human activity".
We are invited to think that such a statement would be backed up by IPCC research that used easily accessible data, replicable…
mikethemadbiologist | May 9, 2007Tristero makes an excellent point about Republican rhetoric, and I think it partially explains why so many scientists are opposed to the Bush Administration. Tristero compares the Niger 'evidence' for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq with the rhetoric opposing the HPV vaccination (italics mine):
Why were we positive Bush was lying? Because no one who is telling the truth talks like this about such a serious subject. Notice the first five words. It's not that Saddam recently sought significant quantities yadda yadda, but only that "the Briitish government has learned." If there was any…
nisbetmc | May 9, 2007How do you activate an otherwise disinterested Republican base on the issue of global warming? As we argued in our Policy Forum article at Science, two possible frames are to recast the issue as really a matter of moral duty or alternatively as an issue that might promote increased profits from new technologies.
In recent weeks a new frame strategy has emerged and it involves re-focusing attention to the issue around dimensions of national security. Again, advocates need to be careful here. The national security frame borders on a lot of the interpretations that have previously been…
mikethemadbiologist | May 8, 2007Senator Obama earned a lot of points in my book today because he took the leadership of the U.S. auto companies to task for being such retrograde, anti-progress morons. From the NY Times (italics mine):
In a speech that hit hard at the failings of Detroit automakers, Mr. Obama, a Democratic presidential candidate, said Japanese companies had done far better than their Detroit counterparts to develop energy efficient vehicles....
"For years, while foreign competitors were investing in more fuel-efficient technology for their vehicles, American automakers were spending their time investing in…
nisbetmc | May 4, 2007
Posted from La Guardia airport in transit to a talk at Cornell University. Will have more comments this weekend.
tlambert | May 3, 2007Nature has started Climate Feedback, a blog on climate change. One of the first posts is by Roger Pielke Jr, who claims
Even the venerable New York Times is prone to completely botching a discussion of the science of climate change. In a front page article today, the NYT reports on how the National Arbor Day Foundation has updated plant hardiness maps to reflect recent changes in climate. (A plant hardiness map presents the lowest annual temperature as a guideline to what plants will thrive in what climate zones.) The NYT misrepresents understandings of variability and trend and in the…
cmooney | May 3, 2007Via Guns, Germs, & Steeled, I just noticed that Steven Hawyard of the American Enterprise Instiute and Pacific Research Institute has released a rather tacky parody movie of Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. I just watched it; you can do so here.
In general, Hayward is trying to position himself as a moderate, someone who accepts some human caused global warming but who isn't an alarmist like Al Gore and those wacky environmentalists. There's just one problem with this stance: Hayward was aiming straight at the scientific consensus as recently as two years ago:
What do we actually know? The…
tlambert | May 3, 2007In 2005 I wrote about a survey of "renowned scientists" conducted by spiked (if you've never heard of spiked, read this) that included 14 global warming skeptics and only three from the mainstream of climate science.
Now they've conducted another survey, asking "key thinkers in science, technology and medicine ... what they see as the greatest innovation in their field". They do have responses from great scientists, but once again climate science is represented by global warming skeptics: Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, John Brignell, Kenneth Green, Nils-Axel Mörner, Todd Seavey, and S Fred…
tlambert | May 2, 2007Gareth Renowden has started a blog about climate change and New Zealand. He's going to use the term "climate cranks" for those people. Plus he has the latest from Ringworld.
zooillogix | May 2, 2007Polar bears in the southern Beaufort Sea have begun to cannibalize one another according to a recent study in the online publication Polar Biology. The polar bears' main food source in the area, ringed seals, are accessible only across ice shelves. Global climate change has melted these shelves, cutting off the bears from their food and forcing them to turn on one another.What would you do for a Klondike Bar?
Polar bears often kill their own kind as a form of population control, territorial dominance and reproductive advantages, but killing each other for food had rarely been witnessed…
tlambert | May 2, 2007Nexus 6 notes that Andrew Bolt has come another cropper after he posted a graph showing a cool April in Australia and implied that this was evidence against global warming. Unfortunately for Bolt, the cool April was in 2006.
Nexus 6 also reminds of an earlier episode where Bolt posted a graph showing that the stratosphere was cooling, clearly unaware that that was exactly the thing that climate models predicted.
For the April debacle Bolt credits:
(Thanks to reader John McLean.)
And for his stratospheric bungle Bolt credits:
(Thanks to reader John McLean.)
Good work, John McLean!
Update:…
loom | May 2, 2007A bit of journalistic irony. Last week I groused that a new paper on methane from plants was getting very little attention in the press, despite the fact that it refutes a 2006 paper published in Nature that got lots of press. I wished aloud that the situation would be set right. Well, five days later, a few more sites have published the press release, but I've only seen one new piece of original reporting.
It appears in the news section of today's issue of Nature. Hats off to Nature for making room for some uncomfortable news.
purepedantry | May 2, 2007The Great Global Warming Swindle was a documentary that aired in March on UK TV organized by Martin Durkin of Wag TV. The documentary purports to debunk several of the claims made by climate scientists on global warming. (Just to be clear I have not seen this documentary.)
Anyway, Roger Pielke notes that several scientists and activists have issued an open letter to the Martin Durkin protesting his distribution of the film over DVD:
We do not dispute your right to make a programme that includes different opinions about climate change. We are not seeking the censorship of differing…
tlambert | May 1, 2007The Nation Post's Lawrence Solomon has been writing a series of articles falsely casting scientists such as Nigel Weiss and Sami Solanki as deniers. His latest target: Roger Revelle:
Then in 1991, Dr. Revelle wrote an article for Cosmos, a scientific journal, with two illustrious colleagues, Chauncey Starr, founding director of the Electric Power Research Institute and Fred Singer, the first director of the U.S. Weather Satellite. Entitled "What to do about greenhouse warming: Look before you leap," the article argued that decades of research could be required for the consequences of…
tlambert | May 1, 2007Australian talkback radio host John "Cash for comment" Laws on global warming:
Yeah. It's interesting to note that in the last 17 years there has not been the slightest increase in temperatures in the world. Over 100 years there's been less than one degree of temperature rise. Over the last 17 years it hasn't risen at all. Where's the climate warming? ...
Prior to 1940 the world was warmer than it is now and there were certainly less CO2 emissions prior to 1940. We didn't have too many cars. We've got plenty of those now. So how could that happen? ...
Julia the scientists that Al Gore wants…
loom | April 27, 2007Here's a story that should be getting lots of press but apparently isn't: a new study indicates that plants don't release lots of methane gas.
You may perhaps recall a lot of attention paid to methane from plants back in January 2006. A team of scientists (mostly from the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics)reported in Nature that they had found evidence that plants release huge amounts of the gas--perhaps accounting for ten to thirty percent of all the methane found in the atmosphere.
The result was big news for several reasons. It was a surprise just in terms of basic biology--…
nisbetmc | April 26, 2007As we argue in our Framing Science thesis, in order to engage a religiously diverse public on pressing problems like climate change, it's important to offer positive and personally meaningful messages.
Our argument is cited and repeated today in a letter in the latest issue of Science written by Portland University biologist Steven A. Kolmes and theologian Russel A. Butkus. Here's a portion of the letter, my own emphasis included.
Science, Religion,
and Climate Change
A MOMENT OF AGREEMENT HAS ARRIVED FOR scientists to join forces with religious groups on issues of climate change. This is…