global warming
cmooney | January 18, 2007The HuffPost has an amusingly written blog entry by David Roberts, of Grist, over all the new-middle-in-the-climate-debate stuff. Roberts thinks I have allowed myself to be co-opted/duped by those wanting to construct a false equivalence between science abusers on different sides of the issue:
Science journalist Chris Mooney has been researching a book on the connection between hurricanes and climate change. In the course of his research, he's come across a lot of people in the public press mischaracterizing the science, stating categorically that there is or isn't such a connection, when the…
grrlscientist | January 17, 2007
This graphic shows how close to the midnight of humanity's annihilation that the minute hand approached in the 60 years since the "Doomsday Clock" has been kept. Individual minutes until midnight are depicted as squares on the y-axis, while each year is on the x-axis. The closest the minute hand ever approached midnight was 1953, when it was 2 minutes until midnight, and 1984, when it was three minutes to midnight. The BAS began keeping this clock in 1947.
Image source: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Experts who assess the dangers posed to civilization added climate change to the…
nisbetmc | January 17, 2007
Tony Snow denies reports from sources close to UK prime minister Tony Blair that Bush will use next week's State of the Union address to announce plans for the US to adopt a "Kyoto-like" mandatory cap on emissions, part of the administration's move towards "more radical measures" on climate change.
For Bush to flip-flop his position on climate change might seem highly unlikely, but there is at least one interesting indicator in these reports. They are consistent with how the administration has cultivated journalists, pundits, and the public in advance of other major (and at one time…
scientificactivist | January 17, 2007Some of the more insidious factors enabling the constant and dangerous advance of global warming are a lack of public awareness or acceptance and the feeling that it's not a problem relevant to my everyday life. One potentially effective way of tackling these particular issues, then, could be through art: specifically through large in-your-face, impossible-to-ignore, publicly-visible art projects designed to bring the issue to the forefront of the mind of the incidental viewer.
This is precisely the aim of the debut project of the Precipice Alliance, a non-profit organization dedicated to…
retrospectacle | January 16, 2007There are two discussions which are going on in the ScienceBlog-osphere about Al Gore, brought to the table by my esteemed co-bloggers Framing Science and Stoat. The first is whether or not Gore's opus "An Inconvenient Truth" belongs in a science class (Framing Science argues compellingly that it doesn't). The second is whether, as Stoat argues, Al Gore is a hypocrite for 'jet-setting' across the world to preach his message of global warming, thereby increasing the pollution through air-travel which, in turn, actually exacerbates the causes of global warming. While both bloggers have made…
nisbetmc | January 16, 2007
In case you missed it, ScienceBlogs lit up last week with news that Federal Way school district in Seattle has banned Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth, in part because the presentation conflicts with creationist views and does not depict a fiery End Times for the earth. (Go here, here, here, and here, to name just a few posts.)
The deeply distressing news from Federal Way is yet another sign that at the local level, elements of the conservative movement are broadening their attacks on the cultural authority of science by challenging not only the consensus on evolutionary science, but also in…
purepedantry | January 16, 2007The global warming debate has been going for a long time, and both sides have become deeply entrenched. Unfortunately, this polarization is beginning to impede the achievement of any reasonable solution. Further, the proponents of steps to fight global warming deride the other side's motives while denying that theirs are in any way tainted. This is not a fair or acceptable behavior, particularly when it is behavior by scientists.
Cathy Young -- a contributing editor at Reason -- had this to say about it:
There is a growing number of voices in the scientific community that reject both…
grrlscientist | January 16, 2007
A peninsula long thought to be part of Greenland's mainland turned out to be an island when a glacier retreated.
Increasing global temperatures are not simply melting glaciers; they are changing the very geography of coastlines of Greenland and the Arctic. Nunataks -- "lonely mountains" in Inuit -- that were encased in Greenland's ice sheet are being freed of their age-old bonds, exposing a new chain of islands, and a new opportunity for Arctic explorers to write their names on the landscape. But the sudden appearance of islands is a symptom of an ice sheet going into retreat, scientists…
cmooney | January 15, 2007I am quoted at length in this recent Boston Globe op-ed column by Cathy Young, entitled "Common sense in the warming debate." (Via Prometheus.) I really appreciate the attention from Young, but without necessarily intending to do so, she appears to have put me in a box that I don't wish to occupy. So allow me to clarify.
Young starts off like this:
Global warming is the subject of intense debate. But if ideology is getting in the way of science, maybe both sides of the debate are letting that happen.
While the evidence of global climate change is overwhelming, there are skeptics who challenge…
purepedantry | January 15, 2007The Economist has an interesting article on ideas for cooling the planet directly -- in manners other than CO2 emissions reductions -- and how they are being received:
This gloomy outlook has encouraged new interest in a technological fix. A scientific journal, Climatic Change, published a series of papers on the subject in August, including one by Paul Crutzen, a Nobel-prize-winning atmospheric chemist. Other journals followed up. In November the Carnegie Institution and NASA held a conference.
Many big ideas for global cooling have been suggested over the years. They include seeding the…
tlambert | January 14, 2007Please welcome new blogger tamino at Open Mind. He writes about global warming. CO2 science are notorious for cherry picking -- tamino shows how they cook up their misleading temperature of the week posts. Also, if you don't know what red noise is, he has a clear explanation.
mikethemadbiologist | January 14, 2007So those who oppose global warming are using the same strategy as the creationists: teach the 'controversy.'
This week in Federal Way schools, it got a lot more inconvenient to show one of the top-grossing documentaries in U.S. history, the global-warming alert "An Inconvenient Truth."
After a parent who supports the teaching of creationism and opposes sex education complained about the film, the Federal Way School Board on Tuesday placed what it labeled a moratorium on showing the film. The movie consists largely of a computer presentation by former Vice President Al Gore recounting…
grrlscientist | January 13, 2007
Image: NOAA
Between the effects of El Niño and global warming, 2006 was the warmest year on record since records were first kept in 1895. According to the preliminary data, 2006 averaged 55 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 2.2 degrees F (1.2 degrees Celsius) above the 20th Century average and 0.07 degrees F (0.04 degrees C) warmer than the previous record-setting warm year, 1998 (see figure, below). These temperatures were collected using a network of more than 1,200 U.S. Historical Climatology Network stations. The resulting data, primarily from rural stations, were adjusted to remove…
grrlscientist | January 12, 2007In a Federal Way school district near Seattle, a parent objected to the showing of Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, in his daughter's classroom. Perhaps not surprisingly, this same parent opposes sex education in the classroom;
"Condoms don't belong in school, and neither does Al Gore. He's not a schoolteacher," said Frosty Hardison, a parent of seven who also said that he believes the Earth is 14,000 years old. "The information that's being presented is a very cockeyed view of what the truth is. ... The Bible says that in the end times everything will burn up, but that perspective isn'…
tlambert | January 11, 2007One of factoids Alistair McFarquhar offered up trying to support his post that vanished down the memory hole was this:
Among Economists almost twice as many believe that rising greenhouse gas levels will cause the economy to grow. Most think rising greenhouse gas levels will have virtually no impact on income per person. The vast majority (73.2%) predicts that the impact will be less than 5 percent one way or the other.
His source was this article by Robert Whaples in Tech Central Station. When newspapers report survey results they give the sample size and confidence interval, but Whaples…
nisbetmc | January 10, 2007
Over at the Huffington Post, David Roberts concedes my point about why the Pandora's Box frame of looming catastrophe may not be the best way to communicate the urgency of climate change. Yet he disagrees that environmental advocates should be concerned about opening themselves up to claims of "alarmism" from climate skeptics.
This is a classic earnest progressive concern, as though if we just keep all our p's and q's in order, we'll render ourselves immune to criticism. Guess what? There's a whole class of people with careers and reputations built around criticizing greens and casting…
tlambert | January 10, 2007At the grandly named Adam Smith Institute blog, Alister McFarquhar (an economist who was one of the sixty scientists denying that climate change was real) asserted:
Surveys show two-thirds of scientists either don't know or don't believe man can influence climate
Jim from Our Word is our Weapon left a comment asking McFarquhar:
Which surveys are those? Can you give a reference?
McFarquhar cited Benny Peiser and a survey of economists, neither of which supported his claim. When Jim explained this, McFarquhar asked for help from the ClimateSceptics mailing list and was given a reference to…
nisbetmc | January 7, 2007Think Progress has the video of Sunday's speculation at ABC News This Week that newly elected Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi may appoint a special committee on global warming. Watch it here.
tlambert | January 6, 2007Eli Rabett is calling for nominations for the S Fred award for spreading disinformation. He has started with:
Diplom Beck proving CO2 concentrations over smokestacks in the 1940s were higher than they are today globally.
Willis Eschenbach and the moving line
Monckton of Blenchley whose climate analysis has now found its home in a flying saucer mag.
I nominate Khilyuk and Chilingar for comparing natural C02 emissions over the entire history of the planet with anthropogenic emissions over the past two centuries.
tlambert | January 4, 2007James Annan summarizes the whole non-skeptic middle heresy thing with: "No, I'm in the middle".
The RealClimate team check the list Revkin gives and find that they also qualify as NSMHs. (See also Revkin's response.)
Andrew Dessler (who was one of the people Pielke Jr originally labeled as a NSH) writes that:
The problem I have with the article is that it confuses two separate debates, one scientific (is climate change real?) and one value-based (what should we do about it?). By putting these two issues into the blender, the article confuses rather than clarifies. ...
The Revkin article would…