global warming
tlambert | January 3, 2007Following up on my previous post on claiming the middle ground, we have:
David Roberts didn't like Revkin's article. Revkin replies in the comments. I do think that the media has focused too much on he extremes (Pat Michaels and we're all going to die stuff), but the middle they should be paying more attention to is the IPCC reports and not Pielke Jr.
Matthew Nisbet writes about the "Pandora's Box" frame of pending catastrophe. He thinks that it opens scientists up to charges of alarmism from the likes of Inhofe. I think that Inhofe is going to make such charges no matter what.
jsk argues…
nisbetmc | January 3, 2007
In case you were wondering, why in an era of extreme media fragmentation, polls show that Republicans rank global warming as less of a priority than flag burning or the estate tax (Pew 2006, slide #22), the following comes my way via the email updates from the Center for American Progress and Think Progress:
This past month, Denver, CO, was blanketed by two snowstorms, dumping approximately two feet of snow on the city during the holiday season. The right wing is now using these blizzards as evidence against climate change. Yesterday, climate skeptics Pat Michaels and Dan Gainor appeared on…
cmooney | January 2, 2007Gosh, I have so much work to do, I feel like blogging.....
A dialogue/debate is starting up over this whole concept of a "middle ground" on global warming, or the idea that one can be a "non-skeptic heretic." See here and here and just generally all over the place.
Labels are dangerous, so let me just tell you briefly how I think about all this. I am a "non-skeptic heretic" if it means the following:
1. The kind of person who thinks global warming is real and human-caused, but gets really uneasy when environmental groups and their ilk oversell the science, whether it's by blaming global…
nisbetmc | January 2, 2007
Over at Nanopublic, Dietram Scheufele reminds me of something I overlooked last week when I spotlighted Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's framing of environmental issues as a public health matter. According to the Humvee Governor, not only is California's leadership on global warming similar to the state's trendsetting on bodybuilding back in the 1970s, but being a leader on the environment is also important for the US in terms of public diplomacy. Here are the full quotes from the Washington Post article as only Schwarzenegger can phrase it:
"You go back to bodybuilding," he added, musing…
tlambert | January 2, 2007Roger Pielke Jr writes:
Andy Revkin has a well-done article on the "middle ground" in the climate change debate. I fully expect that many of the usual suspects on the extremes of the debate (both sides) will respond to this story by saying that they've been in the middle all along.
The most prominent of the usual suspects saying that they've been in the middle all along is, of course, Roger Pielke Jr. Since he was in the middle, in the Hansen/Michaels dispute, Pielke Jr was critical of both sides. Oops, no. Sorry, that was wrong. Pielke Jr just made some specious criticisms of Hansen's…
nisbetmc | January 2, 2007
Citizens are cognitive misers, meaning they rely on images and short cuts rather than knowledge to make up their minds about issues. It might run counter to democratic ideals and what scientists might prefer, but it's reality. One of the dominant heuristics is humor, as evidenced by the popularity of The Daily Show, and the impact of late night comedy on political campaigns.
So on the issue of climate change, how do you take into account this human tendency while also maximizing use of viral marketing techniques and new media platforms like YouTube? Well the Save Santa campaign is one…
nisbetmc | January 2, 2007
Over the weekend, Andrew Revkin at the NY Times wrote a very timely and important peice detailing the growing unease among many scientists and policy experts with the new "normal' in the framing of global warming by environmental advocates, journalists, and even some scientists. This new frame I label the "Pandora's box" interpretation, and it's something I've detailed in recent months here at Framing Science, and in several talks here in DC.
Advocates use this interpretation to define global warming as a looming catastrophe of unknown and devastating consequences that requires immediate…
cmooney | January 1, 2007Some stuff I've noticed today:
1. Andrew Revkin had a recent New York Times piece about a "middle way" in the global warming debate--i.e., admit it's happening and we're causing it, but don't go overboard and be open minded about a wide range of solutions. Roger Pielke, Jr., calls those espousing such a view "nonskeptical heretics." After writing Storm World, I think I've also become one of them. When it comes to hurricanes and global warming, it's clear the science has been abused on both sides.
2. Think the Democrats are automatically going to be proactive on global warming once they take…
grrlscientist | January 1, 2007Scientists are predicting that 2007 will be the hottest year ever recorded, due to the combined effects of El Niño and global warming. As a result, they predict that Indonesia will probably experience drought while California will receive excessive rain;
The warning, from Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, [UK] was one of four sobering predictions from senior scientists and forecasters that 2007 will be a crucial year for determining the response to global warming and its effect on humanity.
Professor Jones said the long-term trend…
tlambert | December 31, 2006Geoffrey Lean in The Independent claims:
Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India's part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true. ..
Two-thirds of nearby populated island Ghoramara has also been permanently inundated. Dr Sugata Hazra, director of the university's School of Oceanographic…
mikethemadbiologist | December 29, 2006A recent report by the National Arbor Day Foundation vividly describes the dramatic increase in average annual winter temperature throughout the U.S. They compared average annual winter temperatures in 1990 over a fifteen year period with those in 2006.
Here's what they found:
That's right: it is getting warmer everywhere in the U.S. The annual average low in Boston increased between 115-29 degrees Fahrenheit (unfortunately, the map is only in gradations of ten degrees). But I guess global warming is just a 'theory'...
grrlscientist | December 29, 2006As was earlier noted, the bears in Spain are in on the global warming hoax, and now it appears that even inanimate objects, glaciers, are in on the hoax, too! I wonder what Michael Crichton has to say about this?
A giant ice shelf has snapped free from an island south of the North Pole, scientists said Thursday, citing climate change as a "major" reason for the event.
The Ayles Ice Shelf -- all 41 square miles of it -- broke clear 16 months ago from the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 500 miles south of the North Pole in the Canadian Arctic.
Cited story.
.
tags: global warming, glaciers,…
tlambert | December 28, 2006
Some readers think I should use the piñata whenever I write about something silly by Tim Blair, but the rules for piñata usage are stricter than that. The rules are that it is only to be used when Blair produces another nugget of stupid after being beaten with a clue stick. For example, this post. Rex Ringschott had already explained that Blair's claim:
A 40-year-old VW Beetle produces far more pollutants per kilometre than a modern Ferrari. Monbiot is an idiot.
was only true if you ignored CO2. But Monbiot was specifically talking about greenhouse gasses:
There is a direct…
tlambert | December 26, 2006Kevin Vranes wonders if scientists have oversold climate change:
We wonder if we've oversold the science. We're wondering what happened to our community, that individuals caveat even the most minor questionings of barely-proven climate change evidence, lest they be tagged as "skeptics." We're wondering if we've let our alarm at the problem trickle to the public sphere, missing all the caveats in translation that we have internalized. And we're wondering if we've let some of our scientists take the science too far, promise too much knowledge, and promote more certainty in ourselves than is…
nisbetmc | December 26, 2006
In one of the strongest declarations I've seen from a major newspaper editorial board, the San Jose Mercury News calls on Congress in 2007 to enact major legislation to deal with global warming:
Climate change at crisis level
EVERYONE -- PUBLIC AND PRIVATE -- MUST ACT TO AVOID CATASTROPHE
Mercury News Editorial
Global warming is the greatest environmental threat that humanity has ever faced....The United States produces about one-fourth of the world's carbon dioxide emissions, yet we're the only major nation that officially denies there's a problem. This is the year for all of us --…
nisbetmc | December 24, 2006
The Washington Post chronicles Arnold Schwarzenegger's efforts to frame his environmentalism in "public health" terms. The Governerator explains his position in ways only he can. For example, he compares California's lead on global warming to the state's pivotal role in popularizing bodybuilding back in the 1970s.
With Senators Boxer and Feinstein pitching Federal legislation modeled after California, Schwarzenegger says he is ready to travel to DC to testify in support of the bill, creating a possible major showdown with the Bush administration.
grrlscientist | December 23, 2006Bears have stopped hibernating in the Cantabrian Mountains of Spain, and instead, spend their winters wandering around, expending valuable energy by eating nuts, acorns, berries and chestnuts.
This is interesting because I thought that bear hibernation was a circadian (daylength) event rather than an environmentally-dependent event, but this shows that the trigger for hibernation is more complex that I supposed.
Bears have stopped hibernating in the mountains of northern Spain, scientists revealed yesterday, in what may be one of the strongest signals yet of how much climate change is…
tlambert | December 22, 2006Iain "CO2 is life" Murray complains about politicization of science. No, I'm not kidding.
More seriously, Andrew Dessler gives a definition I agree with:
In the end, claims repeatedly verified by the scientific community (e.g., the earth is warming, DNA is a double-helix, CFCs destroy ozone) come to be accepted as true.
Thus, someone is honestly using science if he or she articulates a position that is supported by the whole of the peer-reviewed literature (e.g., the earth is warming). Misrepresenting the peer-reviewed literature is my definition of politicizing science. That includes cherry…
grrlscientist | December 20, 2006Birds including robins, thrushes and ducks that would normally fly south from Scandinavia, for instance, have been seen in December -- long after snow usually drives them south. And Siberian swans have been late reaching western Europe.
"With increasing warmth in winter we suspect that some types of birds won't bother to migrate at all," said Grahame Madge, spokesman of the British Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).
Many individual birds were leaving later, and flying less far.
One Swiss study this month suggested that Europe has just had the warmest autumn in 500 years.…
tlambert | December 15, 2006
Tim Blair writes: Heat Down
Less heat is evidence of a continuing hotness trend:
2006 is set to be the sixth warmest year on record, continuing the trend of global warming and extreme weather conditions worldwide, the UN's weather agency said.
As Andrew Bolt observes: "Only the sixth ?"