global warming
Naadir has posted a couple of videos from BBC Newsnight on global warming denialists. Melanie Philips is revealed to be just as clueless as I suspected.
As Inhofe attacks the media for exaggerating the threat of global warming, the GOP continues to pursue its election strategy of making terrorism and the memory of 9/11 the defining criteria for voters come November. John Mueller, political scientist at The Ohio State University, makes a strong case in the latest issue of the journal Foreign Affairs that the terrorism threat has been overblown and exaggerated by the government and the media. Comparing terrorism to global warming makes for an interesting risk assessment exercise.
Just to show you how out of touch Inhofe and his staff are in their attack on the media, they even label as alarmist Andrew Revkin of the NY Times. I've read through literally dozens of Revkin's articles, I have seen him speak on several occasions, and interviewed him for this article on hurricane coverage. Of all the journalists out there, he is probably the most sophisticated and nuanced when it comes to understanding and accurately communicating scientific uncertainty. (And don't take my word for it, ask climate scientists what they think.) In fact, Revkin himself has been critical of…
I'm sure you can guess what the suppressed report says about the link between hurricanes and global warming.
Jim Giles at Nature reports (subscription only):
A statement on the science behind the politically sensitive issue of hurricane activity and climate change has been blocked by officials at the US Department of Commerce, Nature has learned.
Work on the statement began this February after complaints about the actions of political appointees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), an agency that falls under commerce-department control. NOAA researchers accused the…
Yesterday, Senator James Inhofe, Chair of the Committee on Public Works & the Environment, issued a challenge to journalists to stop what he called the "media hype" over global warming. Inhofe compiles a list of what he considers exaggerated distortions of global warming from recent and past news coverage. Of course, Inhofe's tactic is all too familiar. Conservatives have long complained about a "liberal media bias" generally, relying heavily on anecdotal evidence to back up their claims. When news reports don't favor preferred policy positions, whether it is election politics or…
I always like to consider questions of the day from the perspective of deep time. How hot is it these days? Look back 1.35 million years, and you can see it's pretty hot. Here's a chart, published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (free paper here). It combines historical records with geological evidence from the West Pacific to reach back 1.35 million years (kyr= thousands of years ago). The scale is telescoped near the right end, since recent warming has been so fast that it would be hard to make out its details otherwise. Two lines mark some average recent…
It's almost cheating to play Global Warming Sceptic Bingo on an Inhofe speech. David Roberts takes it apart.
In June, the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine retracted a fraudulent paper because:
"financial and intellectual input to the paper by outside parties was not disclosed."
Paul Thacker has an interesting article on financial-disclosure policies in scientific journals. Most journals do not require authors to make financial disclosure statements:
The editors of several environmental journals recently discovered that they had published papers by industry-funded researchers, yet had not disclosed the authors' financial backers. Officers of the American Geophysical Union (AGU)…
Paul Thacker has the story in Salon:
In February, there were several press reports about the Bush administration exercising message control on the subject of climate change. The New Republic cited numerous instances in which top officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and scientists at the National Hurricane Center sought to downplay links between more-intense hurricanes and global warming. NOAA scientist Thomas Knutson told the Wall Street Journal he'd been barred from speaking to CNBC because his research suggested just such a link.
At the time, Bush administration…
The Guardian reports
In a letter earlier this month to Esso, the UK arm of ExxonMobil, the Royal Society cites its own survey which found that ExxonMobil last year distributed $2.9m to 39 groups that the society says misrepresent the science of climate change.
These include the International Policy Network, a thinktank with its HQ in London, and the George C Marshall Institute, which is based in Washington DC. In 2004, the institute jointly published a report with the UK group the Scientific Alliance which claimed that global temperature rises were not related to rising carbon dioxide levels…
Jeffrey Sachs writes in the Scientific American about the Wall Street Journal's editorial page:
Another summer of record-breaking temperatures brought power failures, heat waves, droughts and tropical storms throughout the U.S., Europe and Asia. Only one place seemed to remain cool: the air-conditioned offices of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. As New York City wilted beneath them, they sat insouciant and comfortable, hurling editorials of stunning misdirection at their readers, continuing their irresponsible drumbeat that global warming is junk science.
Now I have nothing…
Andrew Bolt welcomes Al Gore to Australia with a column that accuses Gore of being "one of the worst of the fact-fiddling Green evangelicals". Bolt writes:
Well, here are just 10 of my own "minor quibbles" with Gore's film. These are my own "inconvenient truths", and judge from them the credibility of Gore's warnings of the end of all civilisation.
So let's assess Bolt's 10 "inconvenient truths". I'll classify them as either:
wrong, or
not wrong but misleading, Bolt having omitted other facts that undercut his position, or
a valid point about Gore's movie.
To get a passing grade Bolt…
Big Coal: The Dirty Secret Behind America's Energy Future
by Jeff Goodell
Houghton Mifflin: 2006. 352 pages.
Buy now! (Amazon)
Coal tends to inspire a few common images in our collective minds. Grizzled and hardened miners, working in deep, dark underground tunnels, piece by piece haul out the black feed needed to power the oversized, dirty, rumbling machines spewing out their noxious waste through tall smokestacks. In the process, these beasts power the rise of the world's up and coming superpower, the US.
Dirty. Dangerous. Imprecise. Big.... Old school.
In the Twenty-First Century…
Roger Pielke at Prometheus has some back of the envelope calcuations suggesting that the prospects for climate stabilization are rather bleak. His conclusions:
1. Serious thought and research needs to be given to the prospect of stabilization levels much higher that currently being discussed. What are their policy implications for mitigation and adaptation?
2. The EU, for instance, needs to move discussion beyond its fantasy of stabilization at 450 ppm (see Richard Tol on this here).
3. If stabilization at higher than 550 ppm is determined to be "dangerous interference" in the climate system…
Over at Climate Audit, Willis Eschenbach responded to my comment about CA's censorship of comments with this denial:
Tim, you're posting here, free to blather on about nothing scientific at all ... meanwhile I'm totally censored from asking scientific questions at RealClimate.
Unfortunately for Eschenbach, within a few minutes my comment about CA's censorship was censored -- everything except for four words was deleted and the link to my blog from my name was deleted. I posted a comment to draw their conduct to his attention and that was deleted as well. I wonder if this will be enough to…
According to Clive Hamilton, Alan Moran is one of Australia's greenhouse Dirty dozen:
As the head of the Regulatory Unit at the Institute for Public
Affairs, a right-wing think tank with close ties to greenhouse
sceptics, Moran's role has been to support the Government and the
fossil fuel corporations with anti-environmental opinions about
climate science, the costs of emission reductions and the pitfalls of
renewable energy. As a bureaucrat in the Kennett Government he played
a major role in stopping, for a time, the national adoption of energy
performance standards for home appliances that…
The Union of Concerned Scientists is running a cartoon contest for the best global warming related cartoon. Check them out here. See, humor is cathartic.
Here is my feeble attempt at a global warming cartoon. Certainly not as witty as theirs, but I also can't draw so bear with me.
Hat-tip: Nature.
[Blogged from Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport!]
Anyone concerned about how this administration has repeatedly distorted, undermined, and in some cases suppressed information about global warming should read this amicus brief (PDF). It was just filed by a distinguished group of climate scientists--including James Hansen and Nobel Laureates Sherwood Rowland and Mario Molina--in the upcoming Supreme Court case over whether the EPA should be compelled to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles.
I have already observed how Judge A. Raymond Randolph, in his majority opinion in this case…
William Connolley has a few comments on the Chronicle of Higher Education's article on the hockey stick wars.
There is also a question and answer session with Gerald North of the NRC panel. I liked this question, from one Patrick Frank:
The original hockey stick has been shown not just flawed but wrong. Why was the NAS committee unable to clearly state that?
You can just see Frank spluttering with indignation. Why didn't the NAS committee agree with me, why? As North puts it:
There is a long history of making an inference from data using pretty crude methods and coming up with the right…
I just received fellow Scienceblogger Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science. I've already read the first edition. The new edition has a new forward, updates at the end of many chapters, and a revamped conclusion. Hopefully, this weekend, I'll get a chance to read it. For more information about the book, you can go the website.