global warming
tlambert | February 26, 2007John Quiggin suggests some terminology
The problem of terminology has always been difficult. It's obviously unreasonable to use terms like "skeptic" or "contrarian" to describe people who produce or swallow transparently fraudulent propaganda like that of Singer and Seitz because it happens to suit their preconceived ideological views or financial interest. On the other hand, there have been vigorous objections to "denialist". So, I'm switching to "delusionists", a term which covers:
(i) people who manufacture delusions for a living like those mentioned already and their local counterparts
(…
cmooney | February 26, 2007I have just contributed an item to the website Gather.com about Bush's (or to be more precise, his administration's) lying on the subject of global warming. Twenty comments have flown in so far. Feel free to head on over there and discuss...I may need backup. Heh.
cmooney | February 26, 2007On Friday I noted that Vice-President Cheney apparently still does not accept the scientific consensus on global warming. True, Cheney concedes that humans might be contributing to the problem. But that's not the mainstream scientific view at this point. Rather, the latest IPCC report expressed high confidence that humans are causing most of the current trend. It's a significant distinction.
It's important to note that Cheney's latest remarks contradict a prior statement from the White House itself. Right after the IPCC Summary for Policymakers came out in early February, the White House put…
tlambert | February 26, 2007Last year I wrote about the Australian's War on Science. It's continued this year, leading Ian Musgrave to write:
The Australian is Anti-Science, it's a conclusion I'm reluctant to draw, but the accumulated evidence drives me to it.
Read his post to find out why. He then has a post on the next anti-science piece published in the Australian (just two days later).
Nexus 6 piles on to the same dreadful Australian editorial here, while John S Wilkins concludes:
the paper is becoming firmly anti-science (as all good conservatives must be these days, it seems), especially with respect to climate…
grrlscientist | February 23, 2007Ecosystems along the continental shelf waters of the Northwest Atlantic Ocean, from the Labrador Sea south of Greenland all the way to North Carolina, are experiencing large, rapid changes. While some scientists have pointed to the decline of cod from overfishing as the main reason for the shifting ecosystems, a recent paper emphasizes that climate changes are also playing a big role.
"It is becoming increasingly clear that Northwest Atlantic shelf ecosystems are being tested by climate forcing from the bottom up and overfishing from the top down," said Charles Greene, director of the Ocean…
cmooney | February 23, 2007Recently the White House assured us that president Bush has "consistently acknowledged climate change is occurring and humans are contributing to the problem." But perhaps it all depends on what the meaning of "contributing" is. After all, here's Dick Cheney:
I think there's an emerging consensus that we do have global warming. You can look at the data on that, and I think clearly we're in a period of warming. Where there does not appear to be a consensus, where it begins to break down, is the extent to which that's part of a normal cycle versus the extent to which it's caused by man,…
tlambert | February 23, 2007CNSNews is a news analogue of Conservapedia. They have a story arguing that An Inconvenient Truth should be disqualified from the Oscar for best documentary because it's inaccurate. CNSNews tells us:
A new scientific study shows that for the first time they're finding polar bears that have actually drowned swimming long distances - up to sixty miles - to find the ice," Gore says in the movie.
John Berlau, author of a new book on the environmental movement entitled "Eco-Freaks," claims the polar bear scene alone should disqualify Gore's film from consideration for best documentary, because…
grrlscientist | February 22, 2007Scottish ministers have announced funding for what has been described as the world's biggest wave energy farm. The Pelamis device has been tested at the European Marine Energy Centre (Emec) on Orkney by Leith-based company Ocean Power Delivery. Scottish Power wants to commission four more at the same site.
The large, tubular segments were taken to a site off the northern coast of Portugal last year for a project which aimed to generate enough power for 1,500 households. Now Scottish Power is planning a venture which it believes could create enough power for 2,000 homes.
The biggest single…
tlambert | February 22, 2007The Wall Street Journal editorial board is infamous for their reckless disregard of the evidence for global warming. They've just published an op-ed by Pete Du Pont which manages to get pretty well every single factual claim wrong. As with most of these things, correcting every single false claim would result in a post about five times as long as the original piece, so I will just do some of the more egregious ones.
Solar radiation is reducing Mars's southern icecap, which has been shrinking for three summers despite the absence of SUVS and coal-fired electrical plants anywhere on the Red…
grrlscientist | February 21, 2007Rogelio Zacaula plucks an ear of corn from his field with the pride of a prospector unearthing the gold that legend says is buried in the slopes surrounding the nearby Orizaba volcano.
International corn prices driven by the burgeoning U.S. ethanol industry have soared to their highest in a decade, making farmers like Zacaula feel like they just won the jackpot.
''I have never seen prices like this,'' said Zacaula, 66, who has been growing corn since he was 10. "We suffered for so many years, years in which no one even wanted to buy our crop -- until now.''
Corn had languished around $2 a…
nisbetmc | February 20, 2007The major news organizations, especially the big three cable news networks, need a crash courses in ethics. Given all the major issues taking place in the world, how can they continue to pander to the American public's most base instincts with 24 hour coverage of Anna Nicole Smith?
Witness the analysis for the top most covered stories at the major news outlets over the last five weeks, as indexed by Pew.
1. Iraq Policy Debate - 12%
2. Events in Iraq - 10%
3. Anna Nicole Smith Dies - 9%
4. Campaign 2008 - 8%
5. Astronaut Scandal - 6%
6. Severe Weather - 3%
7. Super Bowl - 3%
8. Libby Trial -…
nisbetmc | February 20, 2007 Where have you heard this one before? Back in September, Canada's Environment Minister John Baird echoed the predictions of a university economist when he claimed that if Canada were to meet its's 2008-12 Kyoto targets, it would require "a rate of emissions decline unmatched by any modern nation in the history of the world except those who have suffered economic collapse, such as Russia. Canadians do not want empty promises on a plan that we cannot achieve and they do not want our country to face economic collapse."
This kind of "economic ruin" and "unfair burden" frame has long been used…
grrlscientist | February 19, 2007The oceans are filled with phytoplankton: microscopic plants that are vital to the marine ecosystem because they form the base of the marine food chain. Phytoplankton cannot be seen with the naked eye but from space, satellite images show phytoplankton forming enormous green swirls hundreds of kilometres long in coastal waters. Because phytoplankton consume CO2, increasing their numbers might be a good stratgey for combatting global warming.
"Just like trees, they can take carbon dioxide and give us back oxygen," says Professor Ian Jones, an ocean engineer from the University of Sydney,…
tlambert | February 18, 2007Queensland's Land and Resources Tribunal has rejected objections to a new coal mine by environmental groups who wanted offsets for the carbon emissions of the mine. Unfortunately, the Tribunal got the science badly wrong, understating the emissions by a factor of 15, making inappropriate comparisons for the emissions, and dismissing the scientific consensus on global warming based on their own erroneous understanding of the science.
The Presiding Member, Greg Koppenol writes:
Emeritus Professor Ian Lowe AO gave evidence that the proposed mine would contribute to the cumulative impacts of…
grrlscientist | February 17, 2007Located in the Andes Mountains of South America, the Quelccaya Ice Cap is the largest tropical body of ice in the world. According to recent research, one of the glaciers in this ice cap, the Peruvian Qori Kalis (pictured), is rapidly melting and could soon vanish completely, providing the clearest evidence yet for global warming.
"I would not be surprised to see half of it disappear in this coming year," said climatologist Lonnie Thompson, from Ohio State University, at the Advancement of Science's (AAAS) annual meeting in San Francisco.
Thompson has been studying the Qori Kalis glacier…
grrlscientist | February 17, 2007When Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991, 10 tons of sulfur were blasted into the stratosphere, which is 10-40 kilometers above the earth's surface. As a result of this eruption, earth's average surface temperature decreased by 0.6 degrees celsius (1 degree Fahrenheit) for two years afterwards.
The plan is to send rockets carrying sulfur up to the stratosphere, where they would explode.
"After the injection at high altitude, it started to move around the globe with the air motions; first in an east-west direction, but also with time in a north-south direction. After about a year, the initial…
nisbetmc | February 16, 2007
In the week following the Friday, Feb. 2 release of the Fourth IPCC report on global climate change, few if any Americans reported that global warming was the issue they were following most closely. Instead, the public turned its gaze back to the war in Iraq, while others, especially women ages 18 to 29, were distracted by the media frenzy over the death of Anna Nicole Smith. The trends are reported in the first release of Pew's media interest index, an innovative new project matching audience data to weekly content analyses of the top news stories.
Things were only marginally different…
tlambert | February 14, 2007Back in July I mentioned that the AEI was offering $10,000 to scientists for a "review and policy critique" of the new IPCC report. This month the Guardian caused all kinds of grief for the AEI when they described these payments as bribes. David Roberts and Andrew Dessler tell the story and what it means. They conclude that the payments weren't bribes, but:
What they do not acknowledge is that the conservative movement has squandered its credibility on the subject of climate change. After years of efforts to deny or obfuscate mainstream climate science -- driven by ideology, fossil-fuel…
nisbetmc | February 14, 2007
Irony can be an effective persuasion tool. As pictured on the Drudge Report this morning with the headline: HEARING ON 'WARMING OF PLANET' CANCELED BECAUSE OF ICE STORM. The headline links to a Drudge posted press release, likely sent his way by staffers in the James Inhofe "Big Oil" wing of the GOP.
HOUSE HEARING ON 'WARMING OF THE PLANET' CANCELED AFTER ICE STORM
HEARING NOTICE
Tue Feb 13 2007 19:31:25 ET
The Subcommittee on Energy and Air Quality hearing scheduled for Wednesday, February 14, 2007, at 10:00 a.m. in room 2123 Rayburn House Office Building has been postponed due to…
nisbetmc | February 13, 2007
Just how tough is it to sustain news and thereby public attention to the problem of global warming? Exhibit A: The week after the release of the IPCC report, the issue failed to even crack the top five news stories of the week, as tracked by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism. The death of Anna Nicole Smith and the murder plot involving a love triangle of astronauts bumped climate change from top five news agenda status.
Even this week, as shareholders organize to demand companies address the problem; British PM Tony Blair announces that he is focusing the remaining months of his…