global warming
cmooney | February 12, 2007Last week I got pretty exercised about how the White House was trying to rewrite history to pretend that Bush had always endorsed the scientific consensus on human-caused global warming. Well, now an L.A. Times news analysis piece by Maura Reynolds and James Gerstenzang goes over Bush's record, albeit incompletely, and comes to a similar conclusion. Check this out:
The letter cites a June 2001 speech by Bush, quoting him as saying that "we know the surface temperature of the Earth is warming.... There is a natural greenhouse effect that contributes to warming.... And the National Academy of…
nisbetmc | February 10, 2007
A series of concerts "bigger than Live Aid" are being planned for July, in a bid to put the subject of climate change before a global audience of two billion, reports the Financial Times. The event, scheduled for July 7, will feature co-ordinated film, music and television events in seven cities including London, Washington DC, Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town and Kyoto, with major broadcasters and media owners aiming to magnify public concern over global warming. Al Gore is reported to be a chief organizer.
Given the major challenges that even major moments like the release of the IPCC…
cmooney | February 9, 2007Is someone in the White House Press Corps reading this blog, and in particular, did someone in the press corps read this entry? If you read the following exchange from the gaggle yesterday, you have to wonder...
Q And also, the White House yesterday issued an open letter on climate change --
MR. SNOW: Yes.
Q -- and in it there is cited a National Academy of Science study, but it doesn't include in it part of the National Academy of Science conclusion that the verdict is still out to the extent that natural greenhouse cycle contributes to climate change, versus the human generation --
MR. SNOW…
nisbetmc | February 9, 2007Declaring that framing should be a central strategy, Ellen Goodman in today's syndicated Boston Globe column issues a call to arms on climate change: "Can we change from debating global warming to preparing? Can we define the issue in ways that turn denial into action? In America what matters now isn't environmental science, but political science." Her piece is one of the best summaries I've seen on just how central public communication is to this issue.
In mentioning some of my work in the area, Goodman hits on many of the themes I've featured here at Framing Science or that I have…
cmooney | February 8, 2007
Why do House global warming hearings draw so many more people than Senate hearings? I don't know, but I arrived late today to Capitol Hill and so spent half of my time listening to the House Science and Technology Committee hearing on the new IPCC report in an overflow room. (I didn't try at first to invoke "journalist's privilege" to get in the main room, although later, Seed's Washington correspondent was ushered in.)
The opening of the hearing was in some ways the most interesting part. In an historic moment, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (left) gave testimony on her global warming…
tlambert | February 8, 2007Writing about the new IPCC report, Andrew Bolt said
The scientists of even the fiercely pro-warming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict seas will rise (as they have for centuries) not by Gore's 600cm by 2100, but by between 14 and 43cm.
While Ron Bailey wrote:
By 2100 sea level is expected to rise between 28 to 43 centimeters
Both were wrong. The IPCC report says that the range is 18 to 59 cm if you ignore ice flow changes, and 28 to 79 cm if you include an estimate for ice flow changes. I let both Bailey and Bolt know of the problem. Bailey thanked me and corrected his…
cmooney | February 8, 2007There was an absolutely incredible letter from the White House yesterday concerning Bush's record on climate change. It is signed by Office of Science and Technology Policy director John Marburger and Council on Environmental Quality chair James Connaugton, both of whom, with this letter, are guilty of deceiving the public.
The letter says: "Beginning in June 2001, President Bush has consistently acknowledged climate change is occurring and humans are contributing to the problem." False. I need only point out, yet again, that just last year, Bush claimed there was a debate over whether…
cmooney | February 7, 2007Click here, and go to around minute 2:14:45. Then watch for about 15 minutes. I think it's quite a display, and a strong suggestion that the new Congress is really going to get serious on the climate issue, as well as the science integrity issue.
P.S.: Make sure to watch also the bit around minute 2:27:00 where it's observed that OSTP didn't show up for the hearing....
tlambert | February 7, 2007Bjorn Lomborg makes the (by now traditional) claim that the new IPCC report has significantly reduced the estimates of projected sea level rises.
Six years ago, it anticipated ocean levels would be 48.5 centimeters higher than they are currently. In this year's report, the estimated rise is 38.5 centimeters on average.
But the 38.5 number Lomborg presents does not include increases from accelerating ice flows. About these, the report says:
For example, if this contribution were to grow linearly with global average temperature change, the upper ranges of sea level rise for SRES scenarios…
tlambert | February 6, 2007There's pathological denial and there's super-duper-pathological denial.
In comments to my post at On Line Opinion OLO editor Graham Young has now written 20 comments denying that Peiser admitted to making multiple errors.
This Media Watch report?
"And when we pressed him to provide the names of the articles, he eventually conceded - there was only one."
Apparently Young reckons that's a fabrication, though for some reason Peiser hasn't called them on it.
Over at his own blog, Young seems to have perfected the art of denial. After he wrote this post insinuating that the IPCC was up to no…
nisbetmc | February 6, 2007
Last week, global warming cracked the top 5 news stories at Pew's media attention index, but only accounted for roughly 5% of the total news hole across outlets, dwarfed by the roughly 40% of news attention captured by the combined issues of Iraq, Iran, and the 2008 Presidential horserace.
nisbetmc | February 6, 2007
What accounts for the striking partisan differences in public perceptions of global warming? As I've detailed (here and here), it's a combined result of strong opinion-cues from party leaders and the ideological safe zones created by Fox News, political talk radio, the WSJ, conservative columnists, and other right-wing venues.
Now comes more data on global warming's "Two Americas," from a recent National Journal survey of Congressional members. There aren't many details given on the nature of the sampling or its representativeness, but the gulf in perceptions is gigantic enough to be…
cmooney | February 6, 2007Okay, explain to me again why there's no "Republican war on science" when 84 percent of a sample of congressional Republicans polled by National Journal questioned anthropogenic global warming, whereas 95 percent of congressional Democrats affirmed it....
Meanwhile, if you want to know how such a divide is possible, look no farther than the conservative media echo chamber that continues to feature James Inhofe and make his stance appear credible.
nisbetmc | February 6, 2007
With political leaders like Senator James Inhofe and ideological safe zones like Fox News and the Wall Street Journal editorial page, is it any wonder that only 23% of college-educated Republicans accept that human activities have contributed to global warming, or that among Republicans the issue polls dead last in importance behind the estate tax, gay marriage, and flag burning?
Take for example Inhofe's press release declaring that the IPCC report "is a political document, not a scientific report, and it is a shining example of the corruption of science for political gain." The Big Oil…
grrlscientist | February 5, 2007Perhaps not surprisingly, the USA isn't included in this number, nor is China and India -- the two most rapidly growing economies in the world at this point.
The the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report [PDF] was written and published by a collaboration of hundreds of scientists around the world, and was approved by 113 nations, including the United States.
The charge led by French President Jacques Chirac came a day after the release of an authoritative -- and disturbingly grim -- scientific report in Paris that said global warming is "very likely" caused by mankind and…
cmooney | February 5, 2007
Following the incredible recent destruction from tornadoes in Florida, it seems appropriate to do a brief post about whether there's any significant global warming-tornado relationship, or at least, any relationship that we can confidently discuss at this point in time. I particularly want to address this topic because it's one where, sadly, my own intellectual allies have left themselves vulnerable.
In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore threw in the 2004 U.S. tornado season in his laundry list of phenomena apparently related to climate change: "Also in 2004, the all-time record for tornadoes in…
cmooney | February 5, 2007From one of the press briefings:
But no administration in American history, and none on the face of the Earth, has been more aggressive in trying to do sound science on [global warming] than this administration.
Those of us who know what "sound science" actually means couldn't agree more.
P.S.: Matt Nisbet has a fascinating post about why the IPCC report has failed to gain significant mass media coverage.
tlambert | February 5, 2007Nexus 6 writes about critics of the IPCC
There has been a concerted attempt by a number of contrarians with media access to use the findings of the summary to discredit claims about the degree of climate change and its impacts.
A lot of these claims seem to revolve around the myth that the IPCC summary states that sea-levels will raise by a maximum of 59cm by 2099.
Nexus 6 gives us Jennifer Marohasy, who has an article in Courier Mail:
.....the IPCC summary indicates that sea levels have risen by just 17cm and may rise by no more than another 18cm, certainly no more than 59cm by 2099.
Nexus…
nisbetmc | February 5, 2007
Friday's IPCC report represents history's most definitive statement of scientific consensus on climate change, yet despite the best efforts of scientists, advocates, and several media organizations to magnify wider attention to the moment, the report still only scored a modest hit on the overall news agenda.
Generating major attention to the report's release stood as an almost impossible task. First, it's a technical backgrounder, a massive literature review of the state of climate science. As exciting as that might sound to the small number of Americans who closely track the issue, it's…
tlambert | February 4, 2007Ron Bailey makes a dreadful hash of things in this article on the IPCC 4AR. He tries to describe how projections of warming by 2100 have changed as each of the IPCC's four assessment reports has come out. Unfortunately, Bailey confuses warming projections with climate sensitivity (how much warming will eventually occur if CO2 doubles). For the First Assessment Report he gives us the climate sensitivity:
In 1990, the FAR found that computer climate models projected that global mean surface temperature as a result of doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide was unlikely to lie outside the range 1…