global warming
nisbetmc | November 11, 2006
An unlikely coalition of environmental groups and Evangelical associations are promoting the new documentary "The Great Warming," which defines the issue in terms of a moral duty to future generations and the developing world. Narrated by Alanis Morissette and Keanu Reeves, the film is being shown in theaters, but also along the "Passion of the Christ" model, is being promoted for special church screenings.
The possible appeal of the documentary plays on a major challenge in engaging the public on global warming. How do you tell the "old" story of global warming in new ways that engage…
tlambert | November 10, 2006John Quiggin catches Andrew Bolt pointing to stratospheric cooling as evidence against global warming. Stratospheric cooling is one of the pieces of evidence that suggest that the warming at the Earth's surface (where people other than Andrew Bolt live) is caused by greenhouse gasses rather than the sun (which would warm the stratosphere as well). Eli Rabett has a post on the attribution of stratospheric cooling.
Also, Rabett finds another Monckton blunder and comes up with Needy Rapacious Scientists and Publicists for our favourite Canadian astroturfers.
tlambert | November 7, 2006Kevin Grandia writes:
Canada's latest and greatest climate change denial group, the Natural Resource Stewardship Project, has come up with a laughable reason for hiding it's funding sources. According to a recent CanWest News Service article, the NRSP's executive director, Tom Harris, states that "a confidentiality agreement doesn't allow him to say whether energy companies are funding his group."
But if energy companies are not funding his group, what sort of confidentiality agreement would stop him from saying so?
In other Tom Harris news, he's been editing the Wikipedia page on the…
purepedantry | November 7, 2006I know this is kind of old news, but some people have taken issue with the Stern Report -- a report about the economic consequences of global warming.
Some of the people taking issue are those who are still skeptical that global warming is real. But some who are taking issue question the validity of Mr. Stern's numbers -- that they may be overestimating the economic impact.
One of the second group is economist Richard Tol who issued a critique of the report (available via Prometheus):
The Stern Review does not, in fact, present a formal cost-benefit analysis. Instead, it compares the…
nisbetmc | November 6, 2006
Overlooked in the Ted Haggard scandal is that the former head of the National Association of Evangelicals was also one of the leaders of the "creation stewardship" movement, framing the issue of global warming in terms of moral duty.
Polls show that Republicans are far less concerned with global warming than their Democratic counterparts, and framing the "old" issue of global warming in a new way around moral duty is a very viable strategy for engaging the Republican base, showing Evangelicals why the complex and "uncertain" topic was personally relevant. (See this post from Spring 2006.)…
grrlscientist | November 3, 2006tags: global warming, Permian-Triassic boundary, mass extinction, weather
Computer simulation of the Earth's annual average surface temperatures in degrees Celsius 251 million years ago, at the Permo-Triassic (PT) boundary. Approximately 96% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species became extinct at the PT boundary, creating niches that the dinosaurs then occupied as the dominant animal group during the next geological age.
Image: National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado.
A computer simulation of the Earth's climate 250 million years ago…
tlambert | October 31, 2006
Tim Blair writes:
Consider the tragic environmental cost:
I had a strange experience on Monday. I went to see Al Gore's slide show, as he affectionately refers to An Inconvenient Truth, his exposé on global warming.
For the first time in my life, I was the only person in the cinema. I sat there for two hours, watching the advertisements, the promos and the feature itself. There was air conditioning, lighting and a projectionist, possibly, and an usher who opened the doors when the session was over, and asked me if I enjoyed the movie.
Given how wrong Blair was with his repeated…
tlambert | October 30, 2006In 2004, Naomi Oreskes looked at a sample of 928
papers in
refereed scientific journals and found that not one disagreed with the
scientific consensus: that humans are responsible for most of the
warming in the last few decades. Benny Peiser disputed this, claiming that 34 of them rejected or doubted the consensus. I asked him for his list of 34 and posted it. It was obvious that there was only paper in his list that rejected the consensus and not only was that paper not peer-reviewed it was from the AAPG (American Association of Petroleum Geologists).
Despite this, Peiser insisted that…
nisbetmc | October 30, 2006
Over the weekend, I appeared on a stellar panel at the National Association of Science Writer's meetings in Baltimore that featured Ralph Cicerone, President of the National Academy of Sciences, Dan Vergano from the USA Today, and Juliet Eilperin from the Washington Post. I will have more to say about this panel later, but apparently, while few fireworks flared in Baltimore, smoked filled the room at the Society of Environmental Journalists meetings in Burlington, VT. (Excuse the strategy/conflict frame.)
The panel featured Andrew Revkin of The New York Times, Bill Blakemore of ABC News;…
grrlscientist | October 27, 2006
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Climate change could cause the world's economy to fall into the worst global recession in recent history, according to a report that will be published next week.
Speaking at a climate change conference in Birmingham, Sir David King, the government's chief scientific adviser, said that all of Sir Nicholas Stern's "detailed modelling out to the year 2100 is going to indicate first of all that if we don't take global action we are going to see a massive downturn in global economies." He added: "If no action is taken we will be faced with the kind of downturn that has not been seen since…
grrlscientist | October 18, 2006Failing to fight global warming now will cost trillions of dollars by the end of the century even without counting biodiversity loss or unpredictable events like the Gulf Stream shutting down, a study recently showed. But acting now will avoid some of the massive damage and cost relatively little, said the study commissioned by Friends of the Earth and the Global Development and Environment Institute of Tufts University in the United States.
Most scientists now agree average temperatures will rise by between two and six degrees Celsius by the end of the century, driven by so-called…
tlambert | October 16, 2006Radar has a list of America's Dumbest Congressmen. Number 3 is Inhofe:
Inhofe is best known for his categorical claim that global warming is "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people" -- a rhetorical flourish he recently refined by likening climate change theories to Nazi propaganda. And here's the scary part: Those are the sentiments of our chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee. It's a bit like making Lyndon LaRouche the American Ambassador to England.
But that's not the half of it. As far back as 1972, he called for Democratic presidential nominee George…
nisbetmc | October 13, 2006
As usual, global warming is no where close to being a major topic of debate in the upcoming election, despite the fact that 2006 will be a historic high in amount of coverage at the New York Times and Washington Post.
Global warming fails to receive more attention at election time, in part, because candidates look at the topics that poll as the "most important issues facing the country" and see that global warming places as low as 10 or 11 in the public's rankings. (As I detailed on my former blog site, even Al Gore in 2000 was snagged by this paradox , go here for more.)
There's also…
tlambert | October 13, 2006Jim Hoggan has the details on a brand new Canadian astroturf group, the Natural Resources Stewardship Project. The chairman is none another than Tim Ball, who is still puffing up his resume. The executive director is Tom Harris, whose other job is at a PR firm, High Park Group that works for the Kyoto-opposing Canadian Electricity Association.
The NSRP has a nicely done site -- looks like there's some money behind them.
nisbetmc | October 10, 2006For those in the DC area, tomorrow I will be giving the following presentation at AAAS HQ as part of the Science Policy Alliance speaker series. Breakfast is at 730 and the talk kick-offs at 815. I'm told about 180 people have RSVPed. I hope some readers can make it!
In the presentation, I explain why the dominant models of science communication--the science literacy and public engagement models--are incomplete, especially when thinking about how the public makes up its mind about contemporary controversies such as those over stem cell research or global warming.
In fact, when thinking…
tlambert | October 5, 2006One of the things that gave Andrew Bolt 0 out of 10 on global warming was his misleading account of Severinghaus' research. Crikey reports:
Severinghaus told Crikey that he doesn't make a habit of Googling his own research, but Bolt appeared on his radar when a librarian in Brisbane wrote to him asking if "I'd really meant what Bolt said I meant".
He didn't. "Many, many other studies have found that carbon dioxide causes the earth to warm. This is not controversial, and to continue to deny it is akin to denying that cigarette smoking causes cancer," Severinghaus told Crikey. "The evidence for…
tlambert | October 4, 2006Warwick Hughes has a post claiming that there were high CO2 levels in the atmosphere in the 1940s "contrary to IPCC science" pointing to a something by E-G Beck. Here's Beck's graph:
Now, a normal person looking at that would conclude that chemical measurement of CO2 concentrations was not particularly accurate, but Beck concludes that there were huge fluctations in CO2 that ended by some strange coincidence exactly when they started making more accurate measurements.
Eli Rabett explains what is wrong:
Here we will briefly summarize the paper and then point out why it is wrong, not only…
scientificactivist | October 3, 2006What they clearly lack in substance, they attempt to make up for in style, but global warming denialists certainly aren't winning any points for class. In a September 25th speech in the Senate, Crazy Ol' James Inhofe--who once called global warming "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people" and who ironically serves as the chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee--attacked The New York Times' esteemed environmental reporter Andrew Revkin for what else but his new children's book The North Pole Was Here. "So here we have a very prominent environmental…
nisbetmc | October 2, 2006Last week, the online news section of the Columbia Journalism Review ran this very useful reaction to Senator Inhofe's attack on journalists covering global warming, referencing the analysis posted here.
tlambert | October 1, 2006The examples of the Bush Administration muzzling scientists just keep coming.
The New Jersey Star-Ledger reports:
[Researchers Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory] say the press releases and the position paper detailed reports linking intensified hurricanes to global warming. The reports also predict spells of intense weather like droughts and floods, and paint some warming as irreversible, the scientists say.
"What can I tell you? I was telling them something they didn't want to hear," said Richard Wetherald, a career scientist at the federally funded center. "But the public is not being…