global warming
tlambert | April 26, 2007The Financial Times reports:
One of Paul Wolfowitz's two handpicked deputies, Juan José Daboub, tried to water down references to climate change in one of the World Bank's main environmental strategy papers, the bank's chief scientist has told the Financial Times.
Mr Daboub, a conservative former finance minister from El Salvador, was brought into the bank by Mr Wolfowitz. He is already under fire for allegedly trying to take out references to family planning in the bank's Madagascar country assistance strategy and reduce its prominence in its new health sector strategy.
Robert Watson, the…
tlambert | April 25, 2007John Wilkins has already told the story with pictures, but I had to post this picture I took at Watson's Bay:
What's that on the ground?
Have a closer look:
It's a paper published by the Australian division of the Larouchites declaring that Global Warming is a fraud. Mooney already had a copy because one had been slipped under his door at his hotel in Melbourne where the science writers conference was.
It's hard to make out in the picture, but the graph under the headline is Beck's nonsensical claims that CO2 fluctuated wildly before we started taking the most accurate measurements. And…
nisbetmc | April 17, 2007NPR's Richard Harris reports on the UN National Security Council's attempt to recast global warming as really a matter of national and global security.
Trinifar has all the details and analysis. The mysterious one also has a related post up on yesterday's announcement by U.S. military brass that climate change is indeed a national security threat.
grrlscientist | April 17, 2007
The strawberry poison frog, Oophaga pumilio, is one of the species of amphibians and reptiles declining in the lowland forests of Costa Rica.
Image source: BBC News.
The recent decline in frogs and other amphibians has been blamed on a deadly fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis. However, a paper was published this week that proposes another reason for the decline of frogs: there is less leaf litter on the forest floor than in years past.
This study, carried out in a Costa Rican rainforest, found that lizards, which are not susceptible to this fungus, are also decreasing by a similar…
tlambert | April 13, 2007BetUS.com has set up a bunch of bets for suckers on global warming. Ker Than at LiveScience has the story:
BetUS.com spokesman Reed Richards said the company will personally back numerous bets, or "propositions," posted on the website related to global warming. "It's part of a campaign we've been doing for the past two and a half years called 'pop culture gaming,'" Richards said. "You can wager on things in the headlines."
One bet gives members 1-to-5 odds that scientists will prove global warming exists beyond any scientific doubt by the end of this year. Another gives 100-to-1 odds that…
tlambert | April 12, 2007The IPA is the Australian version of the CEI, so you don't have to read an article they publish on global warming to know what the conclusions will be. But you do have to read it to find out what pretext will be used to dismiss concerns about warming. In the latest issue of IPA review we find an article by two economists (Sinclair Davidson and Alex Robson) that attempts to spread confusion about the IPCC fourth assessment report.
The article is not online, but most of it is available here.
They start off by taking a leaf from Michael Crichton's book -- they change the vertical scale on the…
nisbetmc | April 11, 2007
How difficult is it for a well known political figure to break through the perceptual screens of partisanship, along with the ingrained frames of reference that citizens have developed over years, and boost their standing in the polls?
Consider Al Gore. Despite winning an Academy Award, receiving tons of free (and often glamorous) publicity in news coverage and on entertainment TV, Gore's favorability rating has only nudged up slightly in the latest Gallup polling.
According to the Gallup survey, only slightly more than half of Dems and only slightly more than a third of Independents would…
nisbetmc | April 10, 2007
Back in February, I chronicled the problems that the year's first IPCC report had in achieving wider media and public attention. In response, I argued that in today's fragmented media system, relying on traditional news coverage to attract the attention of the wider public just wasn't good enough.
As alternatives, I suggested recruiting and training a national system of opinion-leaders or "science navigators" to connect to fellow citizens on the topic, while also harnessing the power of entertainment media and celebrity culture to reach the massive audience of Americans who pay little or…
tlambert | April 9, 2007I can't help but be amazed at the bloody-minded denial in Holman Jenkins' WSJ op-ed:
It would surprise the public, and even the Supreme Court, to know how utterly the science of global warming offers no evidence whatsoever on the central proposition. What fills Mr. Gore's film, books, speeches and congressional testimony are scientific observations and quasi-scientific observations, all right. They concern polar bears, mosquitoes, hurricanes, ice packs and everything but whether humans cause global warming.
Some of this evidence may suggest, weakly or strongly, the existence of warming…
tlambert | April 8, 2007The Editors comes up with the best description of one my posts ever:
Finally, an all-star panel of warbloggers attempt to relieve the glory days of the Summer of War by holding an authentic olde-timey "Fisking" of an essay about global warming. Written in crayon. By a six-year-old. They fail. I wish I was exaggerating.
The Editors also delivers a well deserved shellacking to:
Ron Bailey, who, while professing to accept the scientific consensus on global warming, reserves all his criticism on the topic for people like Al Gore who also accept the consensus and gives his buddies at he CEI a…
grrlscientist | April 7, 2007
Warmer conditions towards the end of the year allow the Fly Agaric to fruit as late as December.
Image source: BBC News.
A unique research project has revealed that rising temperatures are affecting fungi in southern England by allowing mushrooms to grow during the winter when they never did before, and to fruit earlier and later in the season, as well as more often.
This research, published in the top-tier journal, Science, is one of the first studies to show a biological impact of global warming in autumn as well as in spring.
Fungus enthusiast Edward Gange collected 52,000 sightings of…
grrlscientist | April 6, 2007Some of the world's greatest natural treasures are threatened with extinction due to global warming, said an international environmental group, the World Wide Fund for Nature. According the WWFN, These natural treasures include such wonders as the Great Barrier Reef, the Amazon rain forests and the unique ecosystem of the Mexican desert. The environmental group, which is observing the climate change conference in Brussels, issued a list of 10 regions suffering serious damage from global warming, and where it has projects to limit further damage or to help people adapt to new conditions.
"What…
tlambert | April 6, 2007Commentator 1: Hello, and welcome to a special Good Friday edition of INTELLECTUAL CAGE MATCH. Today we have a great match up for you. The topic is Global Warming and it's the collective wisdom of Tim Blair's commenters against Ryan Gwin, who is six.
Commentator 2: Ooh, that's not fair.
Commentator 1: I know, but we couldn't find any four year olds who wanted to take them on. But Team Blair has been training hard so we may have a contest here. Here's hollingshead on their training program:
Hence why I stock up on Tim Ball videos.
C2: Ooh, they might sue Ryan if they lose. I remember…
loom | April 6, 2007Check this out. An international team of climate experts has been looking into the impact of climate on ecosystems, food production, and other aspects of the natural and human-controlled world. They've just come out with the executive summary of their contribution to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's fourth assessment report. Heavy rains likely in some places, heat waves in others. Some parts of the world may enjoy a better climate for producing food, but for how long is unclear. Other places face serious threats to food.
They consider the threat of extinction (which I've…
nisbetmc | April 4, 2007
Everywhere you look, polarized views from the tail ends of the bell curve of opinion on climate change are being picked up by the media. Indeed, only at a few outlets like the NY Times, WPost, or NPR can Americans get that "invisible middle" of views on the issue. Unfortunately, these are not the outlets that reach the wider public.
Consider the stories linked to at the Drudge Report today, one of the major agenda-setters, especially for cable news and political talk radio.
From a Vanity Fair article excerpting the script of Leonardo DiCaprio's upcoming documentary The 11th Hour (see note…
nisbetmc | April 3, 2007 Back in February, I described how the first release of the IPCC was a massive communication failure, never really landing on the wider media or public agenda. In a column at Skeptical Inquirer Online, I described alternative strategies for reaching Americans.
As the next IPCC release arrives on Friday, the New York Times has marshaled its journalistic resources in its best attempt to make sure that global warming places third behind the war and the 2008 horse race in terms of media and public attention. For the second time in three days, the Times leads with news about the issue. On…
nisbetmc | April 3, 2007Despite the ever growing scientific consensus about the nature and urgency of global warming, Americans remain more divided politically on the matter than at anytime in history. The reason is that personal views on global warming have come to define what being a Democrat or Republican means. As GOP leaders continue to attack the science of global warming, and Democratic leaders like Al Gore continue to emphasize the urgency of the climate crisis, stances on global warming among the public have hardened into "political identity markers."
Thus, what it "means" to be Republican is to identify…
loom | April 2, 2007There's nothing more grating for a science writer than see your work get cut and pasted to give people precisely the wrong impression. My latest irritation: "Ten Questions For Al Gore and the Global Warming Crowd", which appeared Friday on the conservative web site Townhall.com.
The author is John Hawkins, who describes himself as a professional blogger who runs Right Wing News. Hawkins claims that he is skeptical that humans are causing global warming because, in his words, "'the Earth-is-going-to-burn-us-alive' crowd cannot answer the most basic questions about the theory that they…
grrlscientist | April 1, 2007According to a panel of UN scientists, postponed bird migrations and early flower blooms are not the only effects that will occur as the result of global climate change. Within the next 50 years, poverty will increase, combined with a lack of drinking water, an increased rate of glacial melting and an increasing number of vanishing species unless action is taken to tackle global warming.
The warning will be part of the latest report, to be released on Friday, from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body of more than 2,000 international scientists assessing global warming.
The…