global warming
cmooney | June 29, 2006I have a guest posting up on the Clark Community Network about the Supreme Court deciding to hear a global warming case. You can read my take here. I'll be answering comments over on that site....but you can leave them here as well.
nisbetmc | June 29, 2006There are two generalizable findings on influencing behavior change. First, citizens are more likely to get involved politically if they see members of their peer group or social group getting involved. In other words, the choice to participate may be as simple as doing something that everyone else is doing. In this case, there is an element of social pressure exerted, but also witnessing like-minded others "getting active" is a heuristic that the issue merits attention and personal resources. When these peers also start making personal requests to participate, it can be a powerful…
scientificactivist | June 28, 2006Yesterday, the AP released a story describing the general approval within the scientific community of the science behind Al Gore's new documentary An Inconvenient Truth
The AP contacted more than 100 top climate researchers by e-mail and phone for their opinion. Among those contacted were vocal skeptics of climate change theory. Most scientists had not seen the movie, which is in limited release, or read the book.
But those who have seen it had the same general impression: Gore conveyed the science correctly; the world is getting hotter and it is a manmade catastrophe-in-the-making caused by…
tlambert | June 28, 2006Senator Inhofe (R, Exxon) has responded to the AP story on how top climate researchers say Gore got it right. Drudge pimped the response, so it's all over the place now.
Inhofe's press release starts with a straight lie:
AP INCORRECTLY CLAIMS SCIENTISTS PRAISE GORE'S MOVIE
Top climate researchers did in fact praise the movie and the story quoted them.
Inhofe claims that "scores of scientists" have criticized the movie and demands that the AP release the names of the 19 scientists who praised the accuracy of the movie. Fair enough. Maybe he could tell us the names of the scores of critics.…
nisbetmc | June 28, 2006One of the critiques of Inconvenient Truth that has emerged is that Gore spends a lot of time warning viewers about global warming, but strays from actually providing concrete suggestions for policy action. Some have argued that this reflects his eye on the Presidential race in 2008, and that candidate Gore wants to avoid locking himself into costly policy proposals that might lose certain key constituencies or that might be used as fodder by opponents.
But in an extensive interview, Inconvenient Truth director Davis Guggenheim tells a different side.
The main goal of the movie was to…
tlambert | June 28, 2006How is An Inconvenient Truth doing at the box office? Pretty well. The gross takings have increased every weekend and have almost reached $10,000,000. It's already the number 7 on the all time box office list for documentaries.
How does John Hinderaker and UPI report this? (My emphasis.)
UPI reports that Al Gore's movie, An Inconvenient Truth, hasn't done so well after a promising start:
Former U.S. vice-President Al Gore's documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" has seen its ticket sales plummet after a promising start.
After Gore's global warming documentary garnered the highest average per…
nisbetmc | June 27, 2006
I was lucky enough to snag a ticket to see Superman Returns tonight at the Uptown Theater in Cleveland Park. Here is the scoop, without spoiling the movie: Superman foils a plot by Luthor to create a new Fortress of Solitude-like continent in the middle of the North Atlantic. As Luthor explains with the aid of maps and visuals, the emergence of a new landmass in the middle of the ocean would displace enough water to flood most of the coastline of N. America, Europe, Africa, and S. America, and in the words of Luthor, "killing billions."
Though climate change is not mentioned in the film,…
cmooney | June 27, 2006For reasons that will remain obscure, I was recently reading a 1978 volume of the journal Oceanus, published by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. And in light of the tripe we often hear about how in the 1970s scientists were worried about a New Ice Age, one passage in particular stuck out to me. It's from a paper by one John Imbrie, a Brown University oceanographer, entitled "Global Perspectives on our Changing Climate" (p. 65-70, Number 4, Fall Issue 1978, "Oceans and Climate"). Here's what it had to say about this subject:
...there is no doubt that the 40 year cooling trend…
nisbetmc | June 27, 2006In the recent issue of The NY Review of Books, James Hansen pens a must-read review of several recent books on climate change, and includes a review of Gore's Inconvenient Truth.
Hansen on the film:
The movie seems to me powerful and the book complements it, adding useful explanations. It is hard to predict how this unusual presentation will be received by the public; but Gore has put together a coherent account of a complex topic that Americans desperately need to understand. The story is scientifically accurate and yet should be understandable to the public, a public that is less and less…
nisbetmc | June 27, 2006Frank Luntz, GOP pollster and architect of the Republican message strategy on global warming, said last night in a documentary on CBC that he has changed his position on global warming, and now accepts the scientific evidence. Go here for more and to see archived video. Below is a transcript from the show.
NARRATOR: Today, Frank Luntz says the advice he offered the administration on global warming was fair when he gave it. But, he's distanced himself from their policies since.
LUNTZ: It's now 2006. Now I think most people would conclude that there is global warming taking place,…
tlambert | June 27, 2006Seth Borenstein, AP Science Writer
The AP contacted more than 100 top climate researchers by e-mail and phone for their opinion. Among those contacted were vocal skeptics of climate change theory. Most scientists had not seen the movie, which is in limited release, or read the book.
But those who have seen it had the same general impression: Gore conveyed the science correctly; the world is getting hotter and it is a manmade catastrophe-in-the-making caused by the burning of fossil fuels.
Robert Corell, chairman of the worldwide Arctic Climate Impact Assessment group of scientists, read the…
nisbetmc | June 27, 2006With the Supreme Court deciding yesterday to hear a case challenging the Bush administration's enforcement of the Clean Air Act (Times coverage here, Post here), the Center for American Progress has issued the following Talking Points memo framing the issue of climate change around PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY. At issue, argues the Center, is that the Bush administration is formulating policy based on industry manipulated science. Efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions have been stalled, despite the fact that, according to the Center's interpretation, polls show that the public wants action.…
cmooney | June 27, 2006Well, here's what he said yesterday:
In the White House, only hours after that old elm had fallen, Bush was addressed by a reporter, thus: "I know that you are not planning to see Al Gore's new movie, but do you agree with the premise that global warming is a real and significant threat to the planet?"
"I have said consistently," answered Bush, "that global warming is a serious problem. There's a debate over whether it's manmade or naturally caused. We ought to get beyond that debate and start implementing the technologies necessary ... to be good stewards of the environment, become less…
purepedantry | June 26, 2006This could be very interesting:
The Supreme Court agreed Monday to consider whether the Bush administration must regulate carbon dioxide to combat global warming, setting up what could be one of the court's most important decisions on the environment.
The decision means the court will address whether the administration's decision to rely on voluntary measures to combat climate change are legal under federal clean air laws.
...
The administration maintains that carbon dioxide -- unlike other chemicals that must be controlled to assure healthy air -- is not a pollutant under the federal clean…
tlambert | June 26, 2006Judd Legum has already debunked Richard Lindzen's repetition of Benny Peiser's discredited study, but I want to add one point. Lindzen wrote:
More recently, a study in the journal Science by the social scientist Nancy Oreskes claimed that a search of the ISI Web of Knowledge Database for the years 1993 to 2003 under the key words "global climate change" produced 928 articles, all of whose abstracts supported what she referred to as the consensus view. A British social scientist, Benny Peiser, checked her procedure and found that only 913 of the 928 articles had abstracts at all, and that…
nisbetmc | June 26, 2006On June 15, the day I moved from Columbus to DC, I listened during my drive out here to a few hours of Rush Limbaugh. On his program he discussed a story in the Boston Globe that outlined the major points of the election platform for Congressional democrats, dubbed a "New Direction for America." I was suprised to hear that a novel part of the platform emphasized investment in stem cell research and the defense of evolution in schools.
So I finally got around to looking up the Boston Globe article, based on a press release from Nancy Pelosi's office. Below is the text, what is interesting is…
nisbetmc | June 26, 2006The real test as to whether Gore's Inconvenient Truth can capture a mass audience takes place over the next two weeks. The film opened in a 100 new theaters this past weekend, bringing its total to 514 theaters across 40 cities. (By comparison, the comedy Nacho Libre played in over 3,000 theaters.)
With the greater number of venues, Truth averaged $3,700 per screen, down from $4,700 the weekend before, and down from the stunning $70,000 average when it opened in just four theaters on May 24. According to BoxOffice Mojo, Truth earned $1.9 milion over the weekend, ranking it 14th among…
scientificactivist | June 22, 2006The National Academies today released their report on Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years. The verdict? "High confidence that planet is warmest in 400 years; less confidence in temperature reconstructions prior to 1600." The reviews from around the web are equally mixed, although generally agreeing that the report vindicates Mann's hockey stick model. Tim Lambert offers a round-up of them over at Deltoid.
I also noticed one familiar name in the list of the report's authors: Gerald North (the committee's chair), who's a meteorology professor at my alma mater,…
tlambert | June 22, 2006The NAS NRC panel on temperature reconstructions has released its report.
The press release states
There is sufficient evidence from tree rings, boreholes, retreating glaciers, and other "proxies" of past surface temperatures to say with a high level of confidence that the last few decades of the 20th century were warmer than any comparable period in the last 400 years, according to a new report from the National Research Council. Less confidence can be placed in proxy-based reconstructions of surface temperatures for A.D. 900 to 1600, said the committee that wrote the report, although the…
grrlscientist | June 20, 2006I want to share this amusing video with all of you, particularly with one very special reader, Joe [surname elided to protect him from his stupidity], who was so moved by this piece that I wrote that he has been emailing repeatedly to let me know that I am a poorly-educated liar. In fact, Joe was so inspired by my writing that he ignored my request to stop filling my email box with his offensive, narrow-minded tripe by responding with this erudite and truly revealing message;
You are presumptuous. Stop trying to enlighten the world with your parroting of evolutionary dogma. I am not going to…