climatespin

Another Year

2011-11-26T10:56:00.001-06:00

I'm glad the traffic for this page hasn't died down completely. Many things to post about, just no time. My twitter account is more active. Besides the ClimateSpin daily, I will sometimes livetweet a conference. Still hope to provide some content here in the future. Thanks for looking.

One year later...

2010-11-04T17:09:00.002-05:00

One year and a few days since my last post. My how things have changed.

A decent climate-energy bill passed the house but never got a vote in the Senate.

I believe a new Congress means all un-acted on bills have to be re-passed. No way a good climate bill gets passed in the House now. That means 2013 before there's any significant action in Congress. Of course, there's that new EPA authority to regulate CO2 that could be used by the Obama administration. But will they?

Recent global cooling isn't in the statistics

2009-10-26T18:11:00.003-05:00

A nice article from Seth Borenstein, one of the better climate science reporters, tries to explain how, statistically, there is no such thing as recent global cooling.

The case that the Earth might be cooling partly stems from recent weather. Last year was cooler than previous years. It's been a while since the super-hot years of 1998 and 2005. So is this a longer climate trend or just weather's normal ups and downs?

In a blind test, the AP gave temperature data to four independent statisticians and asked them to look for trends, without telling them what the numbers represented. The experts found no true temperature declines over time.

"If you look at the data and sort of cherry-pick a micro-trend within a bigger trend, that technique is particularly suspect," said John Grego, a professor of statistics at the University of South Carolina.

I love the idea of the AP asking 4 statisticians to just analyze a time series without giving the source of the numbers.

I don't know why the satellite data is labeled by Borenstein as "preferred by skeptics". They used to like it when an incorrect analysis suggested it contradicted model predictions. Not so much after the mistake was corrected.

The gist of this article is that, in statistics, you can't just throw out the data you don't like. That's what deniers are doing when they choose to only look at the last few years or so and say: "the data says the globe is cooling". But they have no way of knowing if that is temporary or permanent. The honest thing to do is to look at all the data and that data says its warming.

Now on twitter

2009-09-30T14:56:00.001-05:00

I'm joining the twitterati. Hopefully micro-blogging will be easier then actual blogging.

http://twitter.com/climatespin

Apollo or Manhattan project for energy won't work.

2009-07-20T22:54:00.003-05:00

On the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the first men landing on the moon, there's more talk about establishing an Apollo-scale project for solving the energy/climate crisis.
Lloyd Alter at Treehugger throws some cold water on that idea:

And [the Apollo project] was a marvelous accomplishment. But as a model of design and engineering, it was a one hit wonder, an extravagant waste of materials, and not a model for anything we should be doing today.

He links to an older article by Dan Greenberg at The Chronicle Review who sums it up nicely:

As handy metaphors for all-out government concentration on a clearly identified technological goal, Manhattan and Apollo are winners. But care should be taken in extrapolating their success to today’s energy problems. The big difference is that Manhattan had one customer, the U.S. Army, and Apollo also had only one, NASA (with a pork-happy Congress cheering it on). The goals were clear: Beat the Nazis to the bomb and the Soviets to the moon. Financed with blank checks, run by chiefs appropriately referred to as “czars,” and unimpeded by diverse political and economic interests, the two projects decisively proceeded to their successful conclusions.

In contrast, our energy and climate-change problems originate more in political, economic, and cultural entanglements than in technological deficiencies.
Sure, laboratory wizardry is needed to make do with less and cleaner energy sources, but the reality is that superior technologies remain undeployed because of the aforementioned impediments.

I would add that its more than just one customer that made those projects successful. Its that they were focused on building one physical thing: an atom bomb and a rocket to the moon. They had a much more well defined problem then "solve the energy crisis." As has been pointed out multiple times, there is no "silver bullet", no one machine to build, that can solve the climate/energy crisis. You have to do a lot of things: efficiency, transportation infrastructure, renewable energy production. There's some well-defined engineering problems to work on but those will do fine within the current research structure, provided they are adequately funded. The political and cultural work to be done is greater.

Waxman-Markey an ok bill

2009-07-11T10:38:00.003-05:00

I have mixed feelings about the Waxman-Markey bill. On the one hand, its a solid cap-and-trade program with a good target: emissions should be 83% below 2005 levels by 2050. That's basically a carbon-free economy. But there's an offset provision which could make the law useless. (Which makes we want to call it Waxman-Malarkey) A good summary of the pros and cons of the bill is here.

Also its not law yet. It still has to go through the Senate where I expect a weaker bill to emerge, if any. But its important to note, as others have, that this is the first time the House voted on any climate legislation and they did well.

Suppressed EPA report suppressed for a good reason.

2009-06-27T10:23:00.003-05:00

(I'm going to stop making grand claims about restarting this blog. Posting will continue to be irregular. That's life.)

I saw an interesting story on Huffington Post about an EPA report skeptical of global warming that has been "suppressed".

Realclimate has the rundown on this report. A sample:

So in summary, what we have is a ragbag collection of un-peer reviewed web pages, an unhealthy dose of sunstroke, a dash of astrology and more cherries than you can poke a cocktail stick at. Seriously, if that's the best they can do, the EPA's ruling is on pretty safe ground.

What's missing is a timeline. I wonder if this report was commissioned by the previous administration?

Obama's Science Team

2009-01-16T22:31:00.003-06:00

(Happy New Year everyone! Let me clear out the cobwebs on this blog once again.)

I'm pretty happy with the appointments Obama has made to the the various science agencies. It will be very interesting to see how climate science is changed over the next few months and few years.

One agency with no official appointment yet is NASA. Here's was Robert Park has to say about that and the other appointments:

OBAMA’S SCIENCE TEAM: AIR FORCE GENERAL TO HEAD NASA.
After eight years of continental drift in science policy the science community urged president-elect Barack Obama to act swiftly to fill science positions. But who expected a much admired professor of physics to be nominated as science advisor before Christmas? Or a Nobel laureate to be Secretary of Energy? No scientist could refuse the President’s call to serve their country and the world. Do we only now have a leader who understands this? The members of the Obama team are linked by their commitment to the environment. Only the position of NASA Administrator remains to be filled. It was no secret that Michael Griffin wanted to keep the job, but as NASA head he consistently ignored environmental concerns to push a hopelessly outdated space-cadet program of manned rockets and islands in space. The great environmental observatory DSCOVR was left locked in solitary confinement. Obama will name USAF Maj. Gen. Scott Gration, Ret. to head NASA, possibly today. We know virtually nothing about Gration’s position on the issues, but Obama presumably knows; he spent a lot of time with Gration on a trip to Africa, where Gration was born to missionary parents. This is the sort of person you put in charge when you want to sever the shackles of outdated tradition and totally reexamine its reason for existing.

Emphasis added on that last sentence. We live in interesting times....

President-Elect Obama to speak on Climate Change

2008-11-18T12:24:00.003-06:00

I was at the election night rally for Obama in Grant Park. As I listened to his speech, which was more somber then celebratory, I thought "Great, the adults are in charge again!".

As evidence of that, Obama is making a surprise video appearance at a Governors Global Climate Summit in Los Angeles today.

The video is here.

Must see TV: Frontline on fossil fuel addiction

2008-10-21T10:51:00.002-05:00

Check your local listings for this Frontline documentary airing this week on PBS. More info here.

There's no such thing as a Nobel Prize in Economics

2008-10-14T18:02:00.003-05:00

I'm a fan of Paul Krugman and don't want to rain on his parade but I can't wait another year to post this rant.

There is no such thing as a "Nobel Prize in Economics". What Krugman and the ones before him won was "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel." It's the highest achievement in Economics but it isn't a Nobel Prize. You see, Alfred Nobel set up exactly five prizes: physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and for peace, and didn't leave any means to extend or shorten the list. They've been awarded since 1901.

The Riksbank Prize, on the other hand, was started in 1968. How did it begin? From the Nobel Foundation website:

On the occasion of its 300th anniversary in 1968, the Sveriges Riksbank (Sweden's central bank) made a large donation to the Nobel Foundation. A Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has been awarded since 1969. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences is entrusted with the role of Prize Awarding-Institution, in accordance with Nobel Prize rules. The Board of the Nobel Foundation has subsequently decided that it will allow no further new prizes.

The Nobel Foundation official website makes a mess of this distinction. On the one hand, the site always calls it the "Economics Prize". You won't find the phrase "Nobel Prize in Economics" anywhere. On the other hand, you see economics prize winners included in the list of Nobel Laureates.

Why do I care? Well a blog concerned with climate science reporting in the press really values accuracy and hates the kind of sloppiness that allows the media to go on reporting lies like "Al Gore said he invented the internet". Its not correct to call it the Nobel Prize in Economics. Call it what it is: the Riksbank Prize or the Economics Prize.

I'm not the only one with a beef about this either. From the Riksbank Prize wikipedia entry:

Some critics argue that the prestige of the Prize in Economics derives in part from its association with the Nobel Prizes, an association that has often been a source of controversy. Among the most vocal critics of the Prize in Economics is the Swedish human rights lawyer Peter Nobel, a great-grandnephew of Alfred Nobel. Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal and former Swedish minister of finance Kjell-Olof Feldt have also advocated that the Prize in Economics should be abolished. Myrdal's objections were based on his view that the 1976 Prize in Economics to Milton Friedman and the 1974 Prize in Economics shared by Friedrich Hayek (both classical liberal economists) were undeserved, on the argument that Economics did not qualify as a science. If he had been asked about the establishment of the Prize before receiving it, Hayek stated that he would "have decidedly advised against it.

The bigger picture here is that economics, or at least the branch that promoted and apologized for the free-market liberalism that has led to our current mess (which does not include Krugman), has had an outsized influence on our decision makers and opinion leaders and the prestige of a "Nobel Prize in Economics" helps keep that influence alive. Calling the prize for what it can help take them down a few pegs.

Putin is watching

2008-09-29T12:32:00.004-05:00

(picture taken from DailyKos)

Does anyone have a pointer to Sarah Palin's views on climate disruption? She's a creationist so they are probably the least coherent of the 4 people at the top of the ticket.

McCain answers science debate questions

2008-09-28T20:04:00.003-05:00

It's only fair to note that McCain's campaign has answered the science debate questions. You can view Obama's and McCain's answers side-by-side here.

I'll just echo what Bob Parks said:

Unable to arrange a face-to-face debate between Obama and McCain on science issues, the dedicated team at Science Debate 2008 asked for written responses to 14 questions. The 35 pages of staff-written responses they got back served only to make it clear why a face-to-face debate was needed – it would have had a time limit. I would wager the candidates didn’t even have time to read their responses. Maybe it should have been multiple-choice questions, or even true-false. We thank the organizers for seeing it through, but the answers didn’t "restore science and innovation to America’s political dialogue" as we all had hoped.

Obama answers Science Debate questions

2008-09-05T21:23:00.004-05:00

Late last year, an online movement called Science Debate 2008 was started to try and get all the presidential candidates to have a debate focused on science. I threw my tiny support behind it.

The debate never happened but the organizers did get a list of 14 questions together and the Obama team has been the first to answer them.

On the climate and earth science front, the highlights are:

80% reduction in CO2 emissions below 1990 levels by 2050

cap-and-trade with all credits auctioned

restoring U.S. leadership in tackling climate disruption

Double basic science research budgets in 10 years

Increase reasearch and observations on the oceans

ratify the Law of the Sea Convention

A lot of this we already knew from his energy plan. Overall, I'm happy with the effort to get the candidates to focus on science and Obama's answers. We're still waiting for McCain's.

Known unknowns on ice

2008-08-25T23:35:00.005-05:00

This time last week I was at Los Alamos National Laboratory for a meeting that discussed building a Community Ice Sheet Model, inspired by the success of the Community Climate System Model. (Eventually CISM will be part of CCSM).

Ice sheets are getting a lot of attention because that's where one of the biggest potential impacts of climate disruption, sea level rise, comes from. The mechanics of ice sheets have some big known unknowns. The biggest is what is happening at the bottom of the ice sheet--at the ice-land interface. Is it sticky or slippery? What can change it? We only have a few observations and some guesses at theory. Another group of "known unknowns" are the processes that control ice sheet calving. Calving is when chunks of the ice sheet edge break off and form icebergs, a very photogenic process whose exact physics are poorly understood. There's lots of theories, but only trial and error in simulations and more observations will help weed out the good from the bad. Both of these processes affect how fast ice sheets can shed mass to the ocean. Its these mechanical processes, rather then simple melting alone, that has the potential to lead to rapid sea level rise. As you might guess from the immaturity of the field, none of this was considered in the last IPCC report. With efforts like CISM, we will hopefully be able to say a little more in the next report, due out in 2013.

Words Matter: call it "climate disruption" says John P. Holdren

2008-08-12T15:16:00.004-05:00

(mt started the John P. Holdren bandwagon before I could write this post but I'm going to pile on..)

I first saw John P. Holdren speak at the Chicago Humanities Festival last year. I was very impressed by his savvy, big-picture take on the whole climate-energy problem. In particular, I like the phrase he is advocating: "climate disruption".

I'm not sure of the origins of "Global Warming" but it was in common usage among scientists when I entered the field in the early 90's. As Holdren said, "warming" sounds almost benign; like a balmy day on the beach. The big problem with this phrase is that it implies that it's all about temperature. Precipitation is actually a bigger thing to worry about. It also implies that its uniform ("global") when there will be large regional differences in response and only a warming in the global-average sense. The global average temperature is a good index for scientists to talk about with each other but not much good for policy planning.

(this paragraph corrected as suggested by the comments.)
"Climate change" is a phrase popularized by Republican pollster Frank Luntz who advised the Bush administration and Republicans everywhere to use it instead of "global warming". This phrase is incredibly wishy-washy: Its "change": Maybe up, maybe down, maybe no big deal! Personally, I've managed to make it an exact simile for "global warming" and so will sometimes use it but it should really be avoided by scientists when talking to the public.

Now "climate disruption" is much better. The general pattern of climate where you live, the extremes and patterns of precipitation, clouds, snowfall, storms and temperature, are going to be disrupted from their normal patterns. "Disruption" is an edgy, angry word that gets your attention. Its probably not benign. Let's all try to use it.

Another good phrasing that Holdren uses is our three options for dealing with climate disruption: adaptation, mitigation and suffering. We are already doing some of each and what's up for grabs is the future mix.

You can find video of Holdren's talk at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum and a pdf of his slides here.

Krugman: GOP is "Party of Stupid"

2008-08-08T23:58:00.002-05:00

I don't mean to turn this in to a Paul Krugman fanboy site but in today's column he both writes about energy and uses stupid as a noun!

...the debate on energy policy has helped me find the words for something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Republicans, once hailed as the “party of ideas,” have become the party of stupid.

What does he mean by this?

What I mean, instead, is that know-nothingism — the insistence that there are simple, brute-force, instant-gratification answers to every problem, and that there’s something effeminate and weak about anyone who suggests otherwise — has become the core of Republican policy and political strategy. The party’s de facto slogan has become: “Real men don’t think things through.”

The effect on the energy "debate" is sobering:

Sad to say, the current drill-and-burn campaign is getting some political traction. According to one recent poll, 69 percent of Americans now favor expanded offshore drilling — and 51 percent of them believe that removing restrictions on drilling would reduce gas prices within a year.

More on recent polls and a call to arms for Progressives on this issue from WattHead.

Krugman concludes:

...remember this the next time someone calls for an end to partisanship, for working together to solve the country’s problems. It’s not going to happen — not as long as one of America’s two great parties believes that when it comes to politics, stupidity is the best policy.

This is obviously directed at Obama and his "rise above partisanship" rhetoric. Indeed, can you really negotiate with a party that stands against reason? Should you?

Tank full of Stupid

2008-08-07T12:47:00.006-05:00

I don't know who started this trend of using "stupid" as a noun but it cracks me up almost every time. Consider this recent Tom Toles cartoon (above). My absolute favorite joke is from Atrios who said of the internet in general, paraphrasing a line from "2001: A Space Odyssey": "My God, Its full of stupid..."

Speaking of full of stupid, consider the call for off-shore drilling as a way to lower gas prices. There are a couple of ways this is dumb. First, its not like there's a switch ready to be thrown and the gas starts flowing. Those off-shore sites need to be developed which means someone needs to build a rig, start drilling, etc. It will take years for that oil to reach the market. Second, our current U.S. oil producing fields are continuing to decline. By the time those off-shore sites come online, they won't even make up the lost production between then and now. Finally, the total amount available is just a blip on the world production and world production is what sets the price. You need to discover a Saudi Arabia-size oil reserve to lower prices and there aren't any of those left.

In his column last week, Paul Krugman made this observation about off-shore drilling boosterism from John McCain and the lies around it:

Mr. McCain’s claim that opponents of offshore drilling are responsible for high gas prices is ridiculous — and to their credit, major news organizations have pointed this out. Yet Mr. McCain’s gambit seems nonetheless to be working: public support for ending restrictions on drilling has risen sharply, with roughly half of voters saying that increased offshore drilling would reduce gas prices within a year.

Hence my concern: if a completely bogus claim that environmental protection is raising energy prices can get this much political traction, what are the chances of getting serious action against global warming? After all, a cap-and-trade system would in effect be a tax on carbon (though Mr. McCain apparently doesn’t know that), and really would raise energy prices.

I offer this anecdote to corroborate Krugman's observation: a co-worker of mine who has a somewhat conservative family told me some of them believe the recent fall in gas prices is because Bush signed an executive order lifting the ban on offshore-drilling. Sigh. That EO just reversed a previous EO and did nothing. Congress has to authorize the drilling for it to happen. Gas prices have declined because demand has declined. It turns out Americans will indeed drive less if gas gets too high.

What I take away from this is in addition to trying to educate the public about the climate system, we also need to educate them about where all their energy currently comes from. High prices may help with that. Soon everyone will understand the difference between "light, sweet" and "heavy" crude oil.

Obama's Energy Plan: Really good

2008-08-06T20:03:00.001-05:00

Obama came out with his energy plan yesterday. I agree with Joe over at Climate Progress that its pretty darn good from a major-party candidate (I don't recall if its better then Gore's 2000 plan. Anyone?)

Here are some good points:

cap-and-trade program with all credits auctioned
Reduce emissions to 80% of 1990 levels by 2050.
Raise CAFE by 4% a year
Increase building, appliance and power generation efficiency (still the easiest "win")

And tucked way at the bottom was this nice part about building more sustainable and livable communities: "Obama is committed to reforming the federal transportation funding and leveling employer incentives for driving and public transit." Yeah!

I didn't like the mention of exploiting oil shales in Montana and clean coal but, overall, this is great. Too bad energy, except for gas prices, and climate has fallen off the radar in the campaign or this might get more attention.

Krugman points out the "fat tails"

2008-08-03T23:46:00.004-05:00

First in his blog and then a few days later in a column, NYT columnist Paul Krugman uses his influtential position to point out the interesting work being done by Harvard economist Martin Weitzman on the economics of climate change. Finally!

To much economic comment on climate change is focused on cost-benefit analysis, as if we can just count up the cost of losing ecosystems etc. Dr. Weitzman points out that the economic question isn't about accounting and discount rates, its about uncertainty. We don't know exactly what's going to happen and we need to mitigate that risk. If you consider a probability distribution of temperature increases, it looks like a typical "bell" curve, with 2-4 degrees being most probable and cases on either side being lower and lower the further you get away from that center. The problem is that the probabilities for the really bad cases don't fall off fast enough, the tails of the bell curve are "fat". From Krugman's column:

It’s true that scientists don’t know exactly how much world temperatures will rise if we persist with business as usual. But that uncertainty is actually what makes action so urgent. While there’s a chance that we’ll act against global warming only to find that the danger was overstated, there’s also a chance that we’ll fail to act only to find that the results of inaction were catastrophic. Which risk would you rather run?

Martin Weitzman, a Harvard economist who has been driving much of the recent high-level debate, offers some sobering numbers. Surveying a wide range of climate models, he argues that, over all, they suggest about a 5 percent chance that world temperatures will eventually rise by more than 10 degrees Celsius (that is, world temperatures will rise by 18 degrees Fahrenheit). As Mr. Weitzman points out, that’s enough to “effectively destroy planet Earth as we know it.” It’s sheer irresponsibility not to do whatever we can to eliminate that threat.

This mention was actually part of a larger, and good, point about the recent lying about off-shore drilling which is subject for another post.

Cheny's office wanted cuts in climate change testimony

2008-07-08T11:45:00.002-05:00

I said I wasn't necessarily going to do the media thing but this is to good. According to the AP's H. Josef Hebert in this story:

Vice President Dick Cheney's office pushed for major deletions in congressional testimony on the public health consequences of climate change, fearing the presentation by a leading health official might make it harder to avoid regulating greenhouse gases, a former EPA officials maintains....

"The Council on Environmental Quality and the office of the vice president were seeking deletions to the CDC testimony (concerning) ... any discussions of the human health consequences of climate change," Burnett has told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee....

Senate and House committees have been trying for months to get e-mail exchanges and other documents to determine the extent of political influence on government scientists, but have been rebuffed.

The letter by Burnett for the first time suggests that Cheney's office was deeply involved in downplaying the impacts of climate change as related to public health and welfare, Senate investigators believe.

A nice article except for this bit of background:

Scientists believe manmade pollution is warming the earth and if the process is not reversed it will cause significant climate changes that pose broad public health problems from increases in disease to more injuries from severe weather.

I hate the use of the word "believe" because its one of those words that makes global warming sound like an opinion instead of a measurement. Why not use "have determined that" instead of "believe"?

Not dead yet

2008-06-20T21:58:00.004-05:00

I stopped posting on this blog for typical blogging reasons: I was in a rut. I was determined to focus on traditional media coverage of global warming. But that meant I had homework: read traditional coverage of global warming. The emails from google news searches piled up as work took over, I got really far behind, missed some big news, and got discouraged.

The solution is easy: be more like a blog and talk about global warming, or other issues, whenever the mood hits me!

I have another week of travel and then I'll be back in Chicago for most of the summer. I hope to rejoin the conversation then. Look for my posting of my radio "debate" with the Heartland Institute's Joe Bast in early July!

Update: Make that August.

With Edwards withdrawal, more important for reporters to ask about global warming - Updated

2008-02-02T22:59:00.000-06:00

I was supporting John Edwards for the Democratic nomination for President. One big reason was he was the candidate who most frequently talked about global warming, often without any prompting from the audience. His website has the image on the right on his front page.

Now that he's suspended his campaign, its more important than ever for reporters to keep candidates feet to the fire and ask them what they're plans are to solve the climate/energy problem. The Sierra Club has joined the League of Conservation Voters in their petition drive to get reporters to pay attention to this issue. It's not just Sunday morning talk show hosts who need to be asking this question but also debate moderators and the reporters following each candidate.

Updated: Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection has a separate petition aimed more broadly at "members of the press".

More Tom Toles fandom

2008-01-03T23:19:00.001-06:00

I didn't post about this at the time but back on August 27th, 2006, over two months before the midterm elections that saw the Democrats take back Congress, Toles published this cartoon:

Wow. I was stunned. Can you imagine the uproar if a columnist wrote that? But its in a cartoon so, in the eyes of the Village Elders, its not really a threat. There wasn't even a Heartland Institute "How dare you!" comment in the archives.

And Tom couldn't help but gloat a little after the election:

Hmmm. This is dated Nov 21, 2006. How come I can't find it in the Post's archive?

Tom Toles says it all again

2008-01-02T21:10:00.000-06:00

Tom Toles of the Washington Post has consistently provided the best and most incisive commentary on the U.S. government's lousy record on global warming. He does it again today:

What does it mean that an editorial cartoonist at a major paper is better on an issue then the editors or columnists at that paper?

Congressmen join ScienceDebate2008 effort

2007-12-27T00:19:00.000-06:00

In part to make up for the situation described below, I'm supporting an effort to get the presidential candidates to debate science and technology issues: ScienceDebate2008.

Today, that effort got a boost when two congressmen, Vern Ehlers, R-MI, and Rush Holt, D-NJ agreed to co-chair the steering committee. From the press release:

"Advancing science and technology lie at the center of a very large number of the policy issues facing our nation and the world - issues that profoundly affect our national and economic security as science and technology continue to transform our lives,” the two said in a joint statement. “No matter one's political stripe, these issues pose some of the most important pragmatic policy challenges the next president will face."

“We believe a debate on these issues would be the ideal opportunity for America and the candidates to explore our national priorities for the twenty-first century, and we hope candidates will wish to be involved in such a discussion,” they said.

Ehlers is the Ranking Republican of the Subcommittee on Research & Science Education of the House Science and Technology Committee. Ehlers has Ph.D. in physics from U.C.-Berkeley and taught at Calvin College in Michigan for 16 years. Holt is Chairman of the Subcommittee on Intelligence Policy and also serves on House Committee on Natural Resources. He has a Ph.D. in Physics from New York University and was assistant director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab.

I'm still hopeful this debate will happen during the primaries were there's less control over the content and structure. But a debate between the two major party candidates would get more coverage. Either way, the voters win.

Why aren't Sunday morning news shows asking about Global Warming?

2007-12-20T20:23:00.001-06:00

(An intro for you international readers and those who avoid TV) All the major networks have a half-hour to one-hour show on Sunday morning where various pundits and news figures interview various White House and Congressional figures. I stopped watching these a while ago since they have an annoying conservative bias and only talk about what the Village Elders (pundits in the prestige press) think is important.

But because it is a reflection of what the Village Elders think is important, its telling that these talk shows, which frequently have presidential candidates or their spokesmen as guests, don't ask about global warming. We don't want them asking if its real. We want them to ask candidates what they're going to do about it.

The League of Conservation Voters have set up a website highlighting this issue and started a petition to hopefully get their attention. I encourage you to sign it.

Lets hear the candidates debate their solutions for global warming

2007-12-10T12:45:00.001-06:00

Nearly all of the major-party presidential candidates have some kind of plan for dealing with global warming. But which is better? Who really knows his/her stuff? What about their support of science and technology in general which has suffered greatly under the anti-science Bush administration?

This should not be a minor issue but one of the biggest issues in the campaign along with Iraq and health care.

I've joined a group of science bloggers calling for a presidential debate focused only on issues of the environment, health and medicine, and science and technology policy. Strong support for these areas used to be a given but after 8 years of Bush, we need to hear specifics from the candidates.

You can get involved by submitting a question.

I'll recommend that Tim Russert not be the moderator.

NBC's Green Week really Greenwash week

2007-11-28T23:00:00.000-06:00

From November 4 through 10, NBC, (for you non-U.S. readers, one of the big 4 broadcast networks here in the states) dedicated a week of programming to the theme "Green is Universal". Scripted dramas, news, sports, game shows, and reality shows were all supposed to be in on it.

You can see the archive of this event at NBC's website.

I was a little apprehensive that this would turn in to a series of quickly forgotten stunts and, for the most part, that's what happened. NBC pulled off a neat logistics trick by doing live simulcasts from the Arctic and Antarctic giving a vivid "the world is small" feeling. But the rest was pretty forgettable.

I knew it was going to be more style then substance when watching football on NBC on Sunday night and the studio which does commentary before the game dimmed their lights and used candles for their entire time on the air. They said it saved some tons of carbon and I'm sure it did but the lights were right back on full the next week. It was eye-catching at least; looked like they had a partial power outage.

Joe over at Climate Progress has more thorough review. He was also unimpressed.

The best part was Al Gore's cameo on "30 Rock" where he gave a nice speech about how networks could do more to promote solutions to global warming then stunts, all while appearing on an episode which skewered greenwashing stunts. I can't find the full clip online so you'll just have to see his exit:

You can see the whole episode for free for the next couple of weeks at NBC's website. Its episode 205. The funniest joke is when the large plastic Earth prop they're using catches fire right at the end of the episode. As the screen fades to black, you can hear lead character Liz Lemon say "Ok this Earth is ruined! We need a new one!" If only it was that simple.

Chicago Sun-Times business editor shills for denialists

2007-11-20T23:48:00.000-06:00

A minor journalism scandal is brewing here in Chicago over the decision by Chicago Sun-Times editor Dan Miller to write a cover letter urging an "open mind" over global warming. The cover letter is part of a package sent out by right-wing "think" tank The Heartland Institute. (Hat tip to Inel for alerting me to this.)

Phil Rosenthal over at the Chicago Tribune saw some of his fellow reporters get the package and wrote about it first:

Chicago Sun-Times Business Editor Dan Miller apparently believes this paper doesn't have enough editors to guide its staff. Two Chicago Tribune reporters received a letter under his name urging them to "keep an open mind" on global warming.

Heartland Institute spokesman Tom Swiss was maybe a little too honest in explaining The Plan: "If it came from just ourselves, it would look like an advertisement and just get lost." And its not just reporters who are getting this package:

The letters went to others in the media, Swiss said. Others whom Swiss declined to name signed cover letters that accompanied packages for those in other fields.

What is it about denialists and their packages? If you get one of these, let me know.

Who is Miller and why would he do this? Rosenthal tells us all we need to know:

Miller, who oversaw Heartland publications in 1998 and 1999 before joining the Sun-Times, is friends with Heartland President and Chief Executive Joseph Bast.

Is he in trouble? Maybe:

Efforts to reach Miller by phone and e-mail for comment Thursday and Friday were unsuccessful. Sun-Times Editor in Chief Michael Cooke indicated Thursday that he did not know about the Heartland packages and wanted to talk to Miller, a 2006 Chicago Journalism Hall of Fame inductee.

Rosenthal quotes Poynter Institute for media studies ethics scholar Bob Steele:

Most news organizations discourage staffers from being activists, particularly on issues that touch on what they cover or edit, Steele said. "It would be exceptionally hard to argue that global warming doesn't fall somewhere in the sphere of business," he said. "At least based on the cards I see on the table, it raises serious ethical concerns."

Jon Coifman over at the National Resource Defense Council doesn't think Rosenthal went far enough:

Still not convinced that this is a deep breach of journalistic ethics?

Try replaying the same scenario, but substitute “Hillary Clinton” or “Rudy Giuliani” for “global warming.” If the business editor for a leading metropolitan daily had sent a letter nakedly encouraging fellow reporters to take a second look at one of the presidential candidates, he would fast be looking for a new job.

Here, he has done essentially the same thing by throwing himself into one of the most important political debates today.

(For comparison's sake, note that *former* ABC News correspondent Carole Simpson yesterday had to offer up her resignation from the journalism program at Emerson College for publicly endorsing Hilary Clinton for President.)

To be clear: It would have been perfectly legitimate for Miller to raise this sort of question in a column, under the cold hard light of day. Or to assign a reporter to a news story examining the issue.

But it is *not* OK for him to be using his name and that of the paper as part of a one-sided, behind-the-scenes sales pitch from an organization with an expressly unbalanced view of a critical public issue. (It wouldn’t be any more appropriate for him to stick his name on something from us, for the same reason.)

Heartland President Joseph Bast apparently didn't like Rosenthal's piece calling it "libelous" in an email sent to his list which was reprinted in the blog of one of the package's recipients, Houston Chronicle reporter Eric Berger. In a typical bullying tactic of denialists, he included the emails of Rosenthal and his interviewee Steele in the letter and encouraged his minions to "let them know what you think". I hope Rosenthal publishes some of those thoughtful, intelligent letters!

Update: St. Petersburg Times got the package and are unimpressed.

Update 2: Former reporter Richard Littlemore weighs in over at desmogblog. Read all the way to the end for his spot-on put down of Miller and lawyer-baiting of Heartland.

Midwest climate pact generates little attention

2007-11-19T22:59:00.000-06:00

Midwest Governors (plus Canadian officials) signed a couple of climate agreements in Milwaukee last Thursday. Madison's liberal paper, The Capital Times, only ran a couple of AP articles by Emily Fredrix who explains:

The plan calls for laying out concrete goals within the next eight months and establishing the cap-and-trade system within a year, with the entire agreement implemented within 2 1/2 years.

Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Manitoba, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin agreed to that deal, according to an association ballot circulated among the states. Indiana, Ohio and South Dakota have agreed as observers.

Those states also agreed to the other part of this agreement:

Under the other pact, biofuels produced in the Midwest and other low-carbon fuels would make up at least half of all transportation energy consumed in the region by 2025. A third of retail gas stations in the region, or about 10,000 stations, would offer the ethanol-based gasoline E-85 by that year.

Thirty percent of electricity in the region would come from renewable sources by 2030. All new coal plants would capture and store carbon dioxide emissions by 2020, and a multi-jurisdiction pipeline would be permitted by 2012 to move carbon dioxide captured from new plants to a reservoir.

This was called a regional summit on energy and climate change but a lot of the above is about "energy independence": finding a replacement for middle-east oil which powers our transportation. Everyone reading about global warming should remember this fact: doing something for independence in our transportation fuels doesn't necessarily do anything to stop global warming. Burning ethanol still produces CO2, though not as much as gasoline. Most of our CO2 release is from electricity generation.
A Reuters article from John Rondy answers my question from two posts ago:

The third such pact between U.S. states means that nearly half of Americans will be living in areas covered by agreements designed to combat global warming, according to the Washington-based World Resources Institute.

The area involved in Thursday's agreement runs from Ohio west to Kansas. If the region were its own country, the World Resources group estimates, it would be the globe's fifth-biggest producer of greenhouse gas emissions behind the United States as a whole, Russia, China and India.

The midwest gets about 70% of its electricity from coal (Chicago, mostly nuclear, is an exception) so we've got a lot to do. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel endorsed the pact in an editorial.
The NYTimes covered it as part of story on other regional efforts. The WashPost didn't cover it at all.

IPCC prepares final synthesis report.

2007-11-16T09:59:00.001-06:00

If you only follow the IPCC reports casually, you probably wonder "What? Again?" every time you hear about one which you have a lot this year.

To review: there are 3 working groups -- basic science, impacts and mitigation -- and they each release a Summary for Policy makers (SPM) and a full report. This blog started around the time the SPM was released for the science working group (Working Group I)

All those pieces need to be summarized and the SPM for the "Synthesis Report" is due out tomorrow. Expect to see lots of stories about diplomats and scientists negotiating the text (which they do only for the SPMs). This will complete the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the IPCC.

U.S. Midwest governors to form climate pact

2007-11-13T22:22:00.000-06:00

Local papers again are the place to go for global warming coverage.

Tom Content reports for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Frustrated by inaction in Congress on global warming, Midwest governors will convene in Milwaukee next week to craft a regionwide strategy to curb greenhouse gas emissions and boost renewable energy.

Those dates are November 14th and 15th.
More from this just-the-facts article:

The summit agenda calls for the signing of a "Midwestern Energy Security and Climate Stewardship Platform." [Wisconsin Governor] Doyle currently serves as chairman of the 12-state governors association.
The plan is expected to follow regional plans created by six states on the West Coast and 10 northeastern and mid-Atlantic states to reduce emissions linked to global warming.
"These governors will be gathering in Milwaukee next week and will be getting together to sign historic agreements that will increase the production and use of renewable energy, promote energy efficiency and reduce greenhouse gases," [Doyle's spokesman Matt] Canter said.

An exercise for the reader: if enough U.S. regions get together and form cap-and-trade type systems, is this the same as if the U.S. had agreed to Kyoto as a nation? Better? Worse?

The Low Carbon Kid: That Geoclimatic Studies hoax - and what it was about

2007-11-11T22:32:00.000-06:00

Read all about this great hoax perpetrated on gullible global warming deniers. I don't think the hoax made it in to any traditional media outlets (unless you count Rush Limbaugh) but I want you all to know about it anyway.

The Low Carbon Kid: That Geoclimatic Studies hoax - and what it was about

Update: Reuters ran a short story about the hoax.

More on the WPost Democrats and climate change story

2007-11-11T19:50:00.000-06:00

I was going to make this an update to my previous post on this Washington Post article and its false choices but there's another angle to this.

First, Talking Points Memo noticed how awful this article was:

A few days ago, The Washington Post ran a long front-page story that carried this frightful headline:
Climate Is a Risky Issue for Democrats

There was zero polling data in the piece to support this claim. As Matthew Yglesias noted, the basis for it appeared to be little more than the "time honored principled Everything is Bad News for Democrats."

TPM links to a Politico story on a poll, conducted by a Republican pollster, which suggests the opposite, its bad for Republicans to ignore the issue and not propose solutions. Republicans need to do something. TPM concludes:

Yet despite the fact that lots of Republicans have reached this conclusion, somehow The Washington Post was only able to discover that this is a risky issue for Democrats. This illustrates once again that the default setting for many in the political media is still that Dems are always vulnerable; Dems are always at risk of getting too far ahead of public opinion; and Dems are always at risk of provoking a backlash from the same public that strongly agrees with them.

It'll be interesting to see if WaPo revisits this issue, now that we have some actual empirical evidence to shed light on the topic the paper reported so extensively on. Somehow one doubts that WaPo will call up Ayres and ask him what gives.

I'm not holding my breath.

The Columbia Journalism Review treated this article more seriously then it deserves. But I thought this passage said a lot:

Indeed, energy and the environment have been a source of strength for the Democrats in particular....The concern that the public may react unfavorably to a strong pro-environment platform in the general election is a fairly novel idea for news pages, and Post writer Juliet Eilperin makes the case that it’s legitimate.

"Makes the case". Think about that for a minute. Its not reporting that Eilperin is doing. She's trying to persuade her readers to believe something that simply isn't true. Making a case.

This is almost "swift boating". Here's the WPost taking a Democratic strength, the environment, and saying, with no support at all, just conjecture, that its a weakness for the candidates. I predict the next step in this will be a story which talks about how "reasonable" and "sensible" the Republican candidates plans are. Lets hope this particular brand of "kick the Democrats" that the beltway media loves to play stops here.

False choices: economy or environment?

2007-11-08T23:30:00.000-06:00

The Washington Post had a front page article on the presidential candidates' plans on global warming with the awful title: Climate Is a Risky Issue for Democrats and and even worse sub-title: Candidates Back Costly Proposals You almost don't have to read the article. The title asks the question "why is it risky?" and the subtitle has the answer: because its costly!

I've complained about Post headline writers before. If you read the article, you'll find what's becoming a....oh no I'm going to use that word..."frame" for solutions-focused articles: you get to choose between business-as-usual early 21st century prosperity or fix the environment and guess which one those no-fun liberals want you to choose?

Lets just pick apart the opening paragraph:

All of the leading Democratic contenders for the presidency are committed to a set of cuts in greenhouse gas emissions that would change the way Americans light their homes, fuel their automobiles and do their jobs, costing billions of dollars in the short term but potentially, the candidates say, saving even more in the decades to follow.

"would change" is followed with "costly" implying its not a change for the better. Also its stated as fact that it will definitely cost billions while it only "potentially" will save more. And the savings is "candidates say" implying its one of those lies they like to tell while the cost is just a God-given fact.

Quotes from Clinton's energy speech are for some reason countered with an MIT study about how much energy will cost in 2050 under an 80% reduction plan. Where's the quote about how unreliable economic forecast models are? Oh wait, they only do that for climate models.

A Siegel has more on how you can both protect the environment and be prosperous. A frequent subject on Michael Tobis's blog is how silly it is to discuss "cost-benefit" when we're talking about the one-and-only planet we live on.

I actually liked the second half of the article which goes into how global warming is figuring in to political strategy for the upcoming presidential election. This actually cheered me up:

"It's a huge issue. I've been stunned by this," said Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, who found in a May poll that energy independence and global warming were cited as America's most important domestic challenge by 29 percent of respondents, second only to health care. "I think this is a top-tier voting issue that has crossover appeal," Greenberg said.

Republicans will try to attack them on the cost. I hope some candidate points out that it's a false choice.

Update: another take on this article above.

Another underreported story on CO2 emissions: they're getting stronger faster then expected

2007-11-07T23:45:00.000-06:00

Back in June, I wondered why a report from the Global Carbon Project that emissions rose faster then expected got little coverage.

4 months later another Global Carbon Project study, this one also published (and available for free) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that asks why this is happening is also not getting much attention. Its a shame because it has some sobering news: global emissions are rising faster then the most pessimistic scenario used in the recent IPCC climate predictions. (hat tip to Michael Tobis for finding this.)

USAToday had some good matter-of-fact coverage on the "why" question:

The growing world economy is fueling the emissions. "Our ability to become more carbon-efficient is declining, especially since 2000," Field says. "We're no longer seeing progress in this area, which is probably a reflection of a large amount of coal coming into the power system."

The Associated Press had an article by Randolph Schmid but I haven't seen it picked up anywhere except the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Carbon dioxide emissions were 35 percent higher in 2006 than in 1990, a much faster growth rate than anticipated, researchers led by Josep G. Canadell, of Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, report in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Increased industrial use of fossil fuels coupled with a decline in the gas absorbed by the oceans and land were listed as causes of the increase.

Unfortunately, Mr. Schmid felt the need to include some "balance" and NCAR's Kevin Trenberth, surprisingly, supplied it:

Trenberth noted that carbon dioxide is not the whole story — methane emissions have declined, so total greenhouse gases are not increasing as much as carbon dioxide alone. Also, he added, other pollution plays a role by cooling.

There are changes from year to year in the fraction of the atmosphere made up of carbon dioxide and the question is whether this increase is transient or will be sustained, he said.

For the first point: the CO2 is the one that will stick around for thousands of years and he knows that. For the second: that might matter if it was a new trend but this is plainly a continuation of an existing trend.

A companion article (also free) goes in to the global and regional drivers of the rise. Its worth quoting at length despite the tiny bit of algebra:

The strong global fossil-fuel emissions growth since 2000 was
driven not only by long-term increases in population (P) and
per-capita global GDP (g) but also by a cessation or reversal of
earlier declining trends in the energy intensity of GDP (e) and
the carbon intensity of energy ( f ). In particular, steady or slightly
increasing recent trends in f occurred in both developed and
developing regions. In this sense, no region is decarbonizing its
energy supply.
Continuous decreases in both e and f (and therefore in carbon
intensity of GDP, h=e*f) are postulated in all IPCC emissions
scenarios to 2100, so that the predicted rate of global
emissions growth is less than the economic growth rate. Without
these postulated decreases, predicted emissions over the coming
century would be up to several times greater than those from
current emissions scenarios. In the unfolding reality since
2000, the global average f has actually increased, and there has
not been a compensating faster decrease in e. Consequently,
there has been a cessation of the earlier declining trend in h. This
has meant that even the more fossil-fuel-intensive IPCC scenarios
underestimated actual emissions growth during this period.

GCP also made available a PowerPoint presentation with some figures. Initforthegold explains the best ones. There's been plenty of blog coverage: ClimateProgress, Rabett Run, and Stoat but they all seem to focus on the one part of the increase: a slow down in the natural carbon sink. But Canadell et. al. say that's only 18% of the increase, the rest is the growing world economy and its increasing reliance on coal.

If you're feeling depressed just remember: we've just now started talking collectively about doing something. There's a lot of inertia in the system so the previous years of neglect will continue to generate bad stories like this while we work to prevent future worse stories.

StepItUp post script

2007-11-05T23:51:00.001-06:00

I went to check out the StepItUp2007 event near me which was over in the Lakeview neighborhood of Chicago at the High Risk Gallery on Belmont. Not a place associated with a historical leader like most StepItUp rally sites but a nice venue.

You can read reports from the organizers and others here.

The first part featured speakers talking about the problem. Tim Montague from Climate Justice Chicago seemed to be at the wrong venue. He gave a very doom-and-gloom talk about the urgent need for action which seemed more suited to a general audience. Isn't everyone at a StepItUp rally already aware of the need for action? Also he kept using the phrase "runaway global warming". I don't know what he meant by that but the old idea that we might develop a Venus-like climate was discredited years ago. Anthony Star from the Center for Neighborhood Technology went over Chicago's GHG emissions. He also mentioned there is a Chicago Climate Task Force which has been formulating a climate plan for the city. Its supposed to be released "soon" and will make Chicago a world leading Green City. I'm looking forward to seeing it. Jack Darin, Illinois Director of the Sierra Club, told me something I didn't know: that the Sierra Club made global warming its central issue for the next 10 years at a conference in 2005. He had some interesting facts like Illinois is about equal to the Netherlands in total emissions and that Detroit currently makes two versions of every car sold: a clean version for California and similar states with tough laws and a "dirty" version for Illinois (the 5th largest car market by state) and states without those laws. There's currently a bill in the Illinois legislature which would make us clean and maybe that would be the "tipping point" to convince Detroit to make only clean cars.

In the second part of the meeting, we heard from elected officials. I was most pleased to hear from Mike Quigley and learn about the great work he's doing in the Cook County Commissioners office. Cook County has a $3 billion annual budget and can do a lot to make Chicago green. Illinois State Rep. Greg Harris had a disappointing answer to my question about possibly banning coal-fired power plants in Illinois: "not likely". Illinois has 1/4 of the country's coal and mining counts for a lot of jobs in the southern part of the state. Debra Shore of the Metropolitan Water District talked about the changes there such as seeing rainwater as resource to preserved instead of waste to be rid of.

Although I know a lot about the science of global warming, I didn't know much about what's being done locally to address it. I learned a lot at this meeting. The most encouraging bit of news was a recent law which gave customers a rebate in electricity bills included a provision to make it easier for the local utility to buy wind power. A wind farm north of Bloomington, IL was announced almost immediately after the bill passed.

Step it Up tomorrow

2007-11-02T14:57:00.000-05:00

Back in April, author and environmentalist Bill McKibben "led the organization of the largest demonstrations against global warming in American history". Step It Up 2 is tomorrow, November 3rd, one year before the U.S. presidential election:

On November 3rd, Americans will demand real leadership on global warming. From coast to coast, we'll rally in our communities and invite our politicians to join us. We'll see who rises to the occasion and who has a real plan to tackle the defining challenge of our time. One year before the election, let's make sure the world witnesses our national call to action.

I've been disappointed that global warming doesn't seem to be on the top of any candidate's stump speech. This is not just a policy issue you need to have a position on. You need to lead. From the website:

...most of our elected officials and candidates for federal office think global warming is a “third-tier” issue for their constituents—they don’t know that this is the greatest challenge confronting our civilization. And so they’re likely to act too modestly if they act at all—passing some new law that calls for only small cuts in carbon emissions and takes too long to get started. If we allow that to happen, the pressure for change will fade away, and by the time it builds again the scientists tell us it may be too late.

And let's not forget, November 3 is one year before the next federal elections, and most campaigns will be eager to get out see their constituents. If we do our job right -- all of us -- at events all across the country on November 3 and find out who's a leader.

I encourage everyone reading this blog to find a location near you and go.

Climate change polls presidential candidates should look at

2007-11-01T23:30:00.000-05:00

A couple of climate change polls in the early primary stats of New Hampshire and Iowa show climate change is on voters minds.

Think Iowa hunters would be a conservative group with a typical denier attitude? Think again. According to this poll taken by the National Wildlife Federation and reported in the Des Moines Register:

--69 percent of Iowa hunters and anglers agree global warming is currently occurring.
--57 percent agreed with a statement that global warming is an urgent problem requiring immediate action
--57 percent believe global warming is a threat to fishing in Iowa.
----54 percent believe global warming is a threat to the future of hunting in Iowa.
--75 percent agree the U.S. should be a world leader in addressing global warming.

Party identification was split evenly.

On the other hand, a New Hampshire poll done by the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests found concern for climate change breaking along party lines:

the poll...found that 69 percent of Democrats said they were very concerned about climate change, while just 22 percent of Republicans had the same level of concern. Forty percent of independents said they are very concerned.

Education level is also a factor, with more educated respondents more likely to be concerned about climate change.

Both polls were conducted in September.

Chicago Humanities Festival takes on climate change

2007-10-22T23:43:00.000-05:00

The theme for this year's Chicago Humanities Festival is The Climate of Concern. An odd choice for a humanities festival? Artistic director Lawrence Weschler explains:

Concern about the changing climate, to be sure, but more generally and broadly about humankind’s place in nature, and the future of that relation. In those days, certainly here in America, the challenge still seemed to be one simply of rousing ourselves to the crisis at hand. We’ve watched in amazement as the discourse has since accelerated: suddenly the specter of global climate disruption and its many interrelated symptoms has become the media flavor of the year (all that noise, paradoxically, threatening to become simply another way in which we cocoon ourselves from the palpable reality of the situation at hand). Still, the challenge grows clearer and more urgent with each passing week: how do we, as a community of fellow humans, come to envision – with lucidity, vigor, and hope — our responsibilities toward each other, our progeny, and the planet?

Its certainly an interesting program. I'll be part of a panel on Sunday, October 29th, looking at climate change images. Stop by and say "hello".

Update: Some coverage of the panel from the Computation Institute Newsletter.

Al Gore to lauch $100 million climate change ad campaign

2007-10-19T19:56:00.000-05:00

Kudos to Steve Hargreaves over at CNN Money who seems to be the only traditional media reporter (and just barely that since he writes for CNN's web site) to catch this:

The former vice president, Oscar-winner and now Nobel Peace Prize recipient is embarking on a climate-change advertising campaign estimated to cost between $100 million and $200 million a year, one of the largest public service campaigns in history [emphasis added]. Expect to see television commercials, newspaper spreads and Internet ads popping up in a few months time.

Funded by donations and proceeds from Gore's 2006 "An Inconvenient Truth," the campaign will focus on convincing people that they can do something about global warming.

"It's about communicating the urgency and solvability of the climate crises," said Brian Hardwick, a spokesman for the Alliance for Climate Change, an environmental group founded and chaired by Gore. "So [people] will demand the kind of change we need."

The campaign is organized through the Alliance for Climate Protection, which is also the organization Al Gore donated his Nobel Peace Prize money too.

Looks like I won't have to worry about global warming falling off the radar between now and the next IPCC report (if there is one.)

Recent polls on global warming

2007-10-18T23:21:00.000-05:00

I last looked at polls of public opinion on global warming back in April here, here and here.

Those polls were taken during or soon after the media blitz which accompanied the release of the IPCC Working Group I Summary for Policy Makers, Al Gore's testimony to Congress and "An Inconvenient Truth" winning the Oscar.

Global warming couldn't keep up that kind of media saturation all summer. Nevertheless, a poll taken by Yale and Gallup in July showed a high level of awareness of the problem and what level of action might be needed. From Science Daily:

A growing number of Americans consider global warming an important threat that calls for drastic action, and 40% say that a presidential candidate's position on the issue will strongly influence how they vote....Sixty-two percent of respondents believe that life on earth will continue without major disruptions only if society takes immediate and drastic action to reduce global warming....A surprising 40 percent of respondents say a presidential candidate's position on global warming will be either extremely important (16 percent) or very important (24 percent) when casting their ballots.

Annoyingly, this is not the same group from Yale that did the poll back in March. They didn't ask exactly the same questions.

The same group that did the July survey also adid one in September about local responses to global warming. The NYTimes covered it...it their blog.

Have you heard?! Gore wins Nobel!

2007-10-15T22:01:00.000-05:00

This blog focuses on U.S. media coverage of global warming but even that restriction leaves to much to cover during the days following the announcement that Al Gore and the IPCC had won the Nobel Peace Prize...

for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change

In the deluge of coverage, it's nice to read the actual award. I especially like this passage from the press release on why Gore deserved the award:

He is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted.[Emphasis added]

However most of the U.S. coverage included one or more of the following items: Will Gore run for president? Bush is dumb. Which is better: Nobel Peace Prize or two U.S. presidential terms? Gore is famous. Nobody took Gore seriously. Gore is smart. Oh yeah, the IPCC also won.

You could write one of these yourself.

A French climate scientist visiting U. Chicago noted that in Europe at least, the coverage is all about the IPCC and Gore gets little mention.

I was pretty disappointed in the Washington Post but Deltoid has covered that well including links to Bob Somersby, the go-to source for dissecting the traditional media's horrible coverage of anything Gore-related.

Seth Borenstein, who usually writes great global warming coverage for the Associated Press, for some reason felt the need to quote a global warming denier in his article. The denier did his job and provided some juicy quotes, including that the Nobel Peace Prize had been "cheapened". But its not really news that he's going to say that so why report it?

Overall, my view is that its always good for the global warming problem to get another boost in coverage. Here in the U.S., the serious national stories are still dominated by the Iraq war or health care. This is also what the presidential candidates are mostly talking about. Keeping it on the front pages is a good thing.

First detection of global warming in water vapor goes underreported

2007-10-09T23:47:00.000-05:00

A significant paper was published online on September 19th in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences titled "Identification of human-induced changes in atmospheric moisture content."

Why is this a big deal? Lets let the lead author, Ben Santer, explain the key findings (from new media Science Daily):

Our key findings were as follows:

1. Despite the relatively short length (19 years) of the observed water vapor data, we were able to identify a "fingerprint" of human activities in this observational record.
2. Unlike most previous "fingerprint" work, our study used results from virtually all of the world's major climate models. We showed that our identification of a human "fingerprint" in satellite-based water vapor records was robust to current uncertainties in climate models.
3. The model results enabled us to "disentangle" the contributions of different factors to the overall increase in water vapor. We found that in climate models, this increase in water vapor was primarily due to human-caused increases in greenhouse gases.
4. Bottom line: our results suggest that there is an emerging signal of human activities in the moisture content of Earth's atmosphere. The climate system is telling us a consistent story. The observed changes in temperature, moisture, and atmospheric circulation fit together in an internally- and physically consistent way.

And the reason this is important from Dr. Santer:

One persistent criticism of the "discernible human influence" findings of previous IPCC assessments is that such conclusions were largely based on "fingerprint" studies which relied heavily on surface temperature changes.

The thrust of the criticism was this:

"If there really is a signal of human activities lurking in the climate system, it should be manifest in many different climate variables, and not in surface temperature alone."

Our study helps to refute this criticism, and shows that we have now moved well beyond "temperature only" fingerprint studies.

Here's the press release from Lawrence Livermore National Lab.

About all I can find is coverage in the San Jose Mercury News and brief mention in United Press International. This would have been great to mention during the Bush and U.N. meeting's coverage the following week.

U.N. and Bush meetings coverage

2007-10-08T23:55:00.000-05:00

(My apologies for the lack of posts. Work/life got in the way again.)

The Bush meeting was somewhat successful in its main goal: compete with the U.N. meeting on the same week. It did it by forcing almost every story on the U.N. to mention the Bush meeting, although not in a very good light.

Take this AP preview story which gave the background to the U.N. meeting but also was compelled to mention:

On Thursday and Friday, Bush will host his own two-day climate meeting in Washington, limited to 16 "major emitter" countries, first in a series of such U.S.-sponsored climate gatherings.

Many environmentalists fear this separate U.S. "track," which will involve China and India, may undercut the global U.N. negotiating process. But some hope it eventually helps draw those two big developing nations and others into a new, U.N.-negotiated emissions regime.

This Reuters story also mentions the Bush meeting but does not have quotes about what it really is. Shame on you, Deborah Zabarenko.

The NY Times U.N. preview story also mentions the Bush meeting and includes a few quotes on what a crock it is but is not as dismissive as the AP story. USA Today strikes a similar "balance".

The Washington Post had probably the worst article title, playing in to the Bush cult-of-personality with an article titled "Bust Steps Out in Front on Climate Issue". This absurd title seems to come from this quote:

"It's a great initiative that [Bush] has taken," said Lars G. Josefsson, chief executive of the European utility Vattenfall AB and an adviser to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. "But of course with that initiative, he also takes on a responsibility, which means he has to deliver."

Hey, W. Post, you're quoting an energy company executive. Bush is only taking an initiative to deliver a process:

But [United Nations Foundation President Timothy E. Wirth] faulted the Bush administration for promoting dialogue without pressing for concrete commitments. "When you don't want to do anything, talk process. Nowhere in this process is this administration talking about a concrete commitment," he said. "Is this administration going to be the one to break the logjam? I haven't seen any evidence of that."

The AP continued its tone with its preview of the Bush climate meeting titled "Bush Climate Goals Marked by Bureaucracy".

The post-meetings coverage for the U.N. emphasized the star power of Schwarzenegger and Gore: Reuters, Wash Post, Reuters again. U.N. Secretary Ban's call for a "real breakthrough" at least made it in to the Washington Post's coverage.

Business Week, of all places, had a good summary of the Bush meeting. Title: "Bush's Climate Meeting: Talk, But no Action." But U.S. outlets missed just how badly Bush's party was perceived from U.K's The Guardian:

George Bush was castigated by European diplomats and found himself isolated yesterday after a special conference on climate change ended without any progress.

European ministers, diplomats and officials attending the Washington conference were scathing, particularly in private, over Mr Bush's failure once again to commit to binding action on climate change.

For me, the most promising meeting that week was one between some U.S. Congressmen and officials from China discussing what do do post-Bush. Hat tip to H.E. Taylor's GW News who spotted this story in Der Spiegel.

Corporate Climate Response

2007-09-25T00:33:00.000-05:00

Another event this week, one unlikely to get much national coverage, is a "Green Power" conference on "Corporate Climate Response" here in Chicago. I would go but the fee is over $1K.

I'm a little jealous that Prof. Ricky Rood got a free press pass based on his new blog at Weather Underground.

However I will be going to similar themed conference in Maryland next month. I keep hearing that business is taking climate change seriously and want to see it for myself and also learn about what climate modelers can be doing better for these communities.

Big week for climate news in U.S.

2007-09-24T09:45:00.000-05:00

This should be a week where global warming is a big story in the traditional media. The U.N. starts a meeting on climate change today and Bush's climate party is at the end of this week. The traditional media in the U.S. typically ignores the U.N. and the meeting later this week is mostly a way for the administration to whitewash its lousy record. We'll see how they do.

Hope and despair in AP wire stories on global warming

2007-09-23T23:14:00.000-05:00

My thanks to Climate Progress for pointing out a recent AP wire story by Seth Borenstein, who's work has been followed here before.

This story concerns new maps that the AP has seen of what coastlines will look like with a meter of sea level rise. The depressing part is that a meter of sea level may already be inevitable, its just a question of when. I think this is the kind of journalism Steve Outing had in mind: passionate and truthful.

The downside of these kind of stories is it might make people despair: what's the point of working to de-carbonize our economy if so much damage is already done?

Well the reason is in the hopeful counterpoint to this article, also written by Mr. Borenstein:

"It's hard at times," said University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver. "You can't give up hope because what else is there in life if you give up hope? When you give up hope, that's quitting and scientists don't like to quit."

That optimism is based on science and faith.

The science, [Penn State Professor Michael] Mann said, is because climate researchers are sure of one thing that the public isn't: The numbers show that there is still time to avert the worst.

NASA's James Hansen, who forecasts some of the bleakest outlooks on global warming, said in an e-mail: "I am always surprised when people get depressed rather than energized to do something. It's not too late to stabilize climate."

Here's the best anecdote from this article:

Stanford University climate scientist Stephen Schneider has battled cancer and it has colored his outlook. He said the key is not to get overwhelmed by the belief that something is too tough. Sure a 2-degree rise in temperatures is bad. But 4 or 5 degrees would be even worse [emphasis added].

Schneider's wife, Stanford University biologist Terry Root, recalled how in 2002 she was sitting at the hospital as Schneider slept after cancer treatment. The oncology nurse came in, chatted and asked her what she did for a living.

Root said she studied how animals are being hurt by global warming. "That is such a depressing job," replied the nurse who daily deals with cancer patients.

Then they both laughed.

It will be interesting to see which papers pick up one or both articles.

The message that "bad things will happen but we need to prevent worse ones" is a tough one for a political leader to say. But then, saying the tough things is what makes someone a leader. I wonder if any of the current U.S. presidential candidates can convey this particular message about global warming? I know the current office holder can't.

IPCC Working Group II full report released to silence.

2007-09-22T23:50:00.000-05:00

The IPCC process can be confusing. In a nutshell, there are three working groups looking at science of, impacts from and response to climate change, respectively. Each group releases a "Summary for Policymakers" and then a full report.

Working Group II, which looks at impacts, released its summary back in April and the full report earlier this week (Sept 18). While the summary was noticed, did anyone notice the full report? Not that I can tell.

Adam Siegel pointed out the lack of coverage and also noticed this depressing quote from an article in the U.K.'s The Independent:

"If warming is not kept below two degrees centigrade, which will require the strongest mitigation efforts, and currently looks very unlikely to be achieved, the substantial global impacts will occur, such as species extinctions, and millions of people at risk from drought, hunger, flooding."

If preventing a two degree warming is now "very unlikely" and the IPCC says so, that's news. But I can't find that phrase in the report itself. The source of the quote is referred to as "the body" by The Independent. A google search turned up an article on the same subject and with the same quote in Marie Claire U.K. (!?) But here the quote is "A spokesman said". Maybe a reporter can fill me in on the distinction.

The source of this quote must have been from the press conference. In a way, its good that this wasn't in the full report because its supposed to not contain any surprises: all the main conclusions are supposed to be in the Summary for Policymakers. That may also be why the full report isn't getting much coverage. Still, that's a newsworthy quote whatever the source.

(I'm back home for a week. But now each evening I have a choice: unpack or blog?)

Another delay in posting

2007-09-17T23:42:00.001-05:00

I'm currently at a meeting of the Climate Change Prediction Program in Indianapolis. Probably won't be able to post until I'm back on Thursday.

Latest blogstorm (Oreskes) fails to impress traditional media

2007-09-14T10:31:00.000-05:00

Soon after the NASA GISTEMP non-story died away in the blogosphere, a new one started up concerning a yet-to-be-published paper in denier "journal" Energy and Environment that supposedly refutes the notion that there is a scientific consensus on global warming by counting publications. You can get some background at Stranger Fruit here and here, at DeSmogBlog here and here and at Deltoid.

But this blog is about traditional media coverage of which there's been none so far for this story. The NASA GISTEMP story took about 3 weeks between its first appearance on blogs and mention in the New York Times, although not how the deniers would want it. This one started around late August so time is running out. It might get another push when the paper is actually published.

Update: The best summary of this story is at the Stranger Fruit blog here and here.

No posts, moving.

2007-09-13T00:28:00.000-05:00

I just finished moving within Chicago and will resume posting when things are somewhat back to normal.

Hansen releases GISTEMP source code

2007-09-07T23:07:00.000-05:00

Jim Hansen and colleagues have made available the source code that generates their global temperature plots. From Hansen's latest email:

Because the programs include a variety of languages and computer unique functions, [my colleague] Reto [Reudy] would have preferred to have a week or two to combine these into a simpler more transparent structure, but because of a recent flood of demands for the programs, they are being made available as is.

The data which this source code uses was corrected slightly and this was the subject of a lot of hot air from the denier crowd who tried to take an insignificant data correction, blow it up and then sow doubt about the whole process. Gavin Schmidt maintained that the references for the algorithms were enough (see comment #44 and #67). I think open source is always better. Not publishing the source just gives deniers more mud to throw in people's eyes. Cheers to Hansen and his colleagues (especially Reto Reudy).

Editor and Publisher columnist: "Climate Change: Get Over Objectivity"

2007-09-06T22:42:00.000-05:00

I've argued on this blog that the denialists haven't been getting nearly as much of their material in to the traditional media since the IPCC report came out in February (when I started this blog). They're mostly heard in the right wing outlets and in editorial and columnist pages (and in the non-traditional media.)

But other's are still concerned. The excellent column by Mark Lynas (below) started out haranguing the false balance in global warming stories. Now Steve Outing, a columnist for the newspaper trade magazine Editor and Publisher, has published a strong argument for abandoning "objectivity" about climate change.

He starts out thinking about what he can do do make his kid's world better:

I've also been thinking about the newspaper industry and global warming. And frankly, I don't think newspapers are doing enough. Indeed, newspapers' fabled commitment to "objectivity" has been a detriment to efforts to combat global warming.

The industry still has a lot of power to influence people. How about if newspapers abandon their old way of doing things when it comes to the issue of global warming, and turn their influence to good? It just might be that through this issue alone, newspapers revive themselves to some extent. Editors are shirking their responsibility to improve our world, in my view, so let's change that.

This echo's Mark Lynas' call for a "more rigorous and honest approach".

He then goes on the say where objectivity is meant to be used:

I have no quibble with the status quo when it comes to controversial issues where there is a significant split of opinion. Outside of the opinion section, most newspapers are not going to allow writers and editors to express an opinion on hot debates like the right to abortion, or public funding for stem cell research. There are sizable groups of people lining up on both sides of those issues (not to mention those who fall in between). It would be journalistic suicide to take a mainstream paper and go on an advocacy tear about abortion, for example.

But advocacy in terms of encouraging people to act to alleviate climate change is really a wholly different issue. There's clearly scientific consensus that humans are altering the planet's climate, and that the effect is accelerating. Stronger hurricanes, melting glaciers and sea ice, worse wildfires and longer fire seasons, more severe droughts and flooding, and more frequent bizarre weather events overall.

Wow. I'm glad that message has gotten through to this non-scientist professional newspaperman.

For me the most interesting part was this mini-history of "objectivity":

The problem with that kind of coverage is that it doesn't permit journalists to find the truth in an issue, like global warming. Jay Rosen, associate professor of journalism at New York University and a respected new media observer, points out that journalistic objectivity first arose in the 1920s and '30s -- following a period of sensational, "muckraking" reporting by newspapers.

"Part of the problem is that journalists don't realize what objectivity was in the first place," says Rosen. "From the beginning it was a way of limiting liability, and allowing journalists to take a pass when it's hard to figure out who's right and what's really going on. From the beginning it was meant to dull the knife edge of the press. It was meant to 'de-voice' or defang the individual journalist, so that more people would be comfortable with the product. But the costs of that system have built up over time.

"One of the most insidious and deceptive things about the system of objectivity is how it persuades journalists that the alternative to it is 'subjectivity.' From this angle, to relinquish objectivity means to surrender to partisanship, opinion, bias. Not very attractive, that. But what if the real alternative is truthtelling itself?" Rosen adds.

That's a powerful observation that should be repeated often to anyone trying browbeat the media into downplaying or denying global warming. The alternative to false-balance "objectivity" in global warming reporting is not advocacy or subjectivity but truthtelling.

He concludes the philosophical discussion:

The good professor would seem to support my idea that newspapers' sacred commitment to journalistic objectivity perhaps is hindering the power of the press to impact humans' behavior, because in the name of objectivity, reporters must give equal time to the tiny minority of skeptics and not go too far out on a limb to declare that climate change indeed is caused by humankind. (Perhaps that's why during recent news coverage of severe summer flooding in the Midwest US and historic wildfires in Greece, seldom is mentioned the possible -- I'd suggest, likely -- link between those events and human-caused climate change.)

As long as news organizations keep alive the idea that there's still a "debate" about whether human-induced climate change is real or not, people have an excuse for not changing their behavior.

What I take away from this is that editors need to go beyond making sure their reporters don't fall for the denialist spin, they need to also clean up their editorial pages.

Mr. Outing's inbox was apparently filled with flames from a few newspaper people and some denier usual suspects. Lets let him know his views are appreciated.

The morality of global warming and its reporting

2007-09-05T18:09:00.000-05:00

I've been aware of the movement to describe global warming as a moral issue but mostly saw it as a way to bring more people, such as religious leaders, in to the effort to stop it.

However this excellent column by British reporter and activist Mark Lynas, called "Neutrality is cowardice", has made a connection between this moral side and reporting which I had not appreciated.

The BBC was planning an "Earth Relief" day of climate-change related programming. A little complaining from some anti-environmentalists and the BBC executives couldn't disown it fast enough:

The spat at last weekend's Edinburgh International Television Festival was a classic example of this impulse to timidity. When the anti-environmentalist film-maker Martin Durkin and his Channel 4 commissioning editor Hamish Mykura attacked the BBC's upcoming Planet Relief project - a proposed day of climate change-related programming and entertainment modelled on Comic Relief - corporation executives present rushed to disown it. "It is absolutely not the BBC's job to save the planet," insisted Newsnight editor Peter Barron. "I think there are a lot of people who think that it must be stopped."

Yes its not the BBC's job but if you could help save the planet, wouldn't you? Here's the passage that really struck me:

If Barron is really suggesting that the BBC should be "neutral" on the question of planetary survival, his absurd stance surely sets a new low for political cowardice in the media. It is also completely inconsistent. On easy moral questions, such as poverty in Africa, the BBC is quite happy to campaign explicitly (as with Comic Relief or Live Aid), despite the claim by the corporation's head of television news, Peter Horrocks, that its role is "giving people information, not leading them or prophesying". By analogy, the BBC would have been neutral on the question of slavery in the mid-19th century, and should be giving full voice today to the likes of the British National Party - all in the interests of balance and fairness. Likewise, it should not cover the plight of Aids orphans in South Africa without constantly acknowledging the views of the tiny minority who still dispute the link between HIV and Aids.

Another example that immediately came to mind was Apartheid in South Africa which the press here easily condemned in the eighties. More from Mr. Lynas:

It is worth re-stating again what a more rigorous and honest approach to climate change might look like. First, it would recognise that, despite small uncertainties regarding the specifics, the larger scientific question regarding causality has been settled for a decade at least. Second, it would acknowledge the moral repercussions of our failure to act so far: on people who are already suffering and dying in more frequent and extreme weather events, on future generations of human beings who will suffer a far worse fate, and on other species that will be driven to extinction as a result.

Mr Lynas has a lower opinion of reporters, editors and producers then I do (some of them know what to do). But this does put the onus on the traditional media: its not enough to not give deniers space in your pages or patiently explain the latest scientific findings. They need to talk about how this is ruining lives now and in the future and why action is necessary now. More on this in a future post.

I'll also track down and comment on an interesting reference Mr. Lynas found comparing denier-speak with pro-slavery arguments from 19th century America!

Update: BBC canceled the Planet Relief special. Cowards.

More on religion and climate change

2007-09-04T23:39:00.000-05:00

I continue to be fascinated by the growing involvement of religious leaders of many different faiths in stopping global warming. Here's a few recent articles on the topic:

A small gathering of church leaders was held in Charleston:

It is an issue of stewardship, Rose Edington, co-minister of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship, said.

“Regardless if the science on global warming is true, half true or not true, we have to be stewards of our planet for the next generation,” he said.

A group of scientists and Evangelicals took a trip to Alaska together to discuss climate change:

The historic collaboration between leading scientists and Evangelicals to protect the environment, spearheaded by the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) continues this week with a trip to Alaska.

"The goal of our trip is to witness together what human-caused climate change is doing to our world," said co-leader of the trip Eric Chivian, who shared the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize and is Director of the HMS Center. "While this collaboration may come as a surprise to some, it makes perfect sense. Both scientists and Evangelicals see life on earth as sacred and share the same deep sense of responsibility about protecting it."

"The idea is for all of us to experience what human activity is doing to God's Creation so that we can understand the urgent importance of caring for it," added expedition co- leader Rev. Richard Cizik, Vice President for Governmental Affairs of the NAE. "We dare to imagine a world in which science and religion cooperate, minimizing our differences about how Creation got started, to work together to reverse its degradation."

Counterpoint: On the other hand, some Evangelicals are not yet convinced.

Update: The Pope is also saying climate change is a serious issue.

Did anyone in U.S. cover U.K. climate protests?

2007-09-03T23:45:00.000-05:00

This is now old news but I want to write about it before its really old.

On Saturday, August 18th, and the week prior, groups of protesters conducted a coordinated protest of global warming over multiple sites in England including Heathrow airport where early rumors the protests would shut the airport down didn't pan out. It all went peacefully.

Despite getting lots of coverage in the U.K., I didn't see anything in the traditional U.S. media except for this story in the L.A. Times.

The traditional media missed a great story. From the L.A. Times article:

The greatest show of force was a midday parade through this village's streets -- shadowed by Heathrow's lumbering jets overhead -- as demonstrators carried placards reading, "No Third Runway," "Altitude Sickness" and one of the catchier slogans of modern protest, "We Are Armed Only With Peer-Reviewed Science."

Heh, heh. I love British humor.
From the same article:

Over the last week, an estimated 1,200 activists set up makeshift tents, a fleet of bicycles on loan and a sophisticated recycling center in the Camp for Climate Change near the site of the proposed runway. In addition to preparing for Sunday's showdown, camp leaders conducted workshops on civic activism and environmental science and oversaw a series of earlier protests leading up to Sunday's clashes.

This was a large, well coordinated protest. Besides Heathrow, there was action at other places. From The Guardian:

Demonstrators from the Heathrow Camp for Climate Action today glued themselves to the Department of Transport in the latest action to highlight their protest against the airport.

Around 11 protesters arrived at the building in Horseferry Road, central London, at around 8.15am.

Six superglued their hands to its rotating doors, police said, while another two climbed on top of them with a banner protesting against airport expansion. A further three chained themselves to the doors

. Clever. Also from The Guardian:

Climate change activists who set up a camp at Heathrow airport nine days ago yesterday began to wind down their protests after a second day of civil disobedience which saw financiers, oil and nuclear power companies and even carbon offset firms targeted. In the past week there have been 12 separate actions and 71 arrests.

The climate camp's promised 24 hours of direct action, which began with protests at Heathrow against the aviation industry on Friday evening, spread to protests in Oxford, the City of London and Essex. Targets included organisations which campaigners said were contributing to climate change through their emissions at Heathrow or which they judged were not offering solutions

Here's my favorite story:

Two carbon offset firms staffed by committed environmentalists also found themselves targeted. Climate Care in Oxford was invaded by people dressed as red herrings and the CarbonNeutral Company in London was leafleted. Both offer to "neutralise" the emissions of consumers and companies by investing in projects which lower emissions elsewhere.

"Carbon offsets are ineffective, based on dubious science and lead people to believe they are helping when they are not," said Sophie Nathan, who took part in the CarbonNeutral Company action.

Now I realize that U.S. newspapers usually ignore domestic events in other countries but this particular domestic event involves an issue that affects all of us so maybe that should change.

You can catch up with this story at Google News and YouTube.

Update: H. E. Taylor of GW News has provided a collection of links to coverage, mostly on non-traditional media. I've put the summary here.

Who killed the DSCOVR climate satellite? An experiment in blog-to-traditional media crossover

2007-09-01T23:30:00.000-05:00

DeSmogBlog is launching an investigative series into how a NASA satellite called the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) was killed before launch even after 90% of it was done. The DSCOVR satellite is designed to sit at an L1 point, very far from the earth, and measure its energy budget. This can provide a very simple and direct measurement of global warming and also help bound a few important parameters in climate models.

Despite being ready for launch for about 5 years, the satellite has sat in storage. I've always heard this was because it was 1) a climate thing and 2) championed by Al Gore and the Bush administration is just that petty.

DeSmogBlog investigative reporter Mitchell Anderson hints that the oil lobby may have requested that it be killed. In an odd move, DeSmogBlog is asking for donations to support the ongoing (?) investigation in to this story. Don't you want to keep the investigation a secret until the story is done so you don't spook sources? And what if there's no story there? Unlikely, but still....

Anyway, good for DeSmogBlog and I wish them luck. It will be interesting to watch and see if this story makes it in to the traditional media. Blogs are often criticized (unfairly (by the traditional media)) for only feeding off the original reporting of the big papers and news networks. But lefty blog Talking Points Memo is credited with pushing the fired U.S. attorney scandal back in to the traditional media, thus making it a scandal, by a combination of linking and original reporting. It will be interesting to see if DeSmogBlog can accomplish something similar.

There are models and then there are models

2007-08-31T15:01:00.001-05:00

Some NASA scientists recently published an article in Journal of Geophysical Research Letters which shows that severe thunderstorms may be more intense in a warmer world.

There's nothing wrong with the article or the science, but I have a quibble with the press release NASA put out about it. It seems to imply that NASA built an entirely new climate model. Consider the opening paragraph:

NASA scientists have developed a new climate model that indicates that the most violent severe storms and tornadoes may become more common as Earth’s climate warms.

Wow! A whole new climate model? NASA sure has been busy! There's more:

Previous climate model studies have shown that heavy rainstorms will be more common in a warmer climate, but few global models have attempted to simulate the strength of updrafts in these storms. The model developed at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies by researchers Tony Del Genio, Mao-Sung Yao, and Jeff Jonas is the first to successfully simulate the observed difference in strength between land and ocean storms and is the first to estimate how the strength will change in a warming climate, including “severe thunderstorms” that also occur with significant wind shear and produce damaging winds at the ground.

I know how hard it is to make a climate model so I didn't think it was really a new model. Indeed the article said that Dr. Genio et al. had simply altered one small part, the convection parameterization, of the NASA GISS Model E which is probably 3-4 years old. Its more accurate to say that Dr. Genio et al. have developed a new model of convection and placed this in the larger model of the global atmosphere. Those two uses of the word "model" are very different. I would expect this distinction to be lost somewhere but not in the NASA press release.

The press release, or slightly re-written versions of it, have shown up in a couple of places so far: ScienceDaily and even Fox News.

U.S. states continue to lead on global warming

2007-08-28T22:39:00.000-05:00

Global warming is expected to be a big topic when Congress returns in September. I continue to believe that Bush won't even sign a bill with weak restrictions on CO2 emissions and lots of loopholes. His position is still "no mandatory cuts".

So leadership will have to continue to come from the states. Some recent coverage:

In Oregon:

Gov. Ted Kulongoski signed the state's first climate change legislation Tuesday, capping what he called the "most momentous legislative session for energy and the environment in more than 30 years in Oregon."

The bill sets ambitious standards for greenhouse gas reduction in Oregon, including reducing greenhouse gas levels by 75 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.

In Maryland:

[Governor] O'Malley signed a bill earlier this year on tightening car emissions and created the Commission on Climate Change. And Mr. Aburn [top air quality official at the Maryland Department of the Environment] also said he expects his boss to continue to take action on global warming.

Standing in front of a bright yellow banner advertising the goals of "at least 20 percent by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050," Mr. Aburn said: "I think the time has come and you're going to see action this year."

Mr. Aburn hinted that even stricter emissions are possible, pointing to the banner and saying, "I'm glad you put the words 'at least' in there.

In California, Attorney General Jerry Brown was suing cities who weren't abiding the state's environmental laws in its development planning:

San Bernardino now sets the pace for how local government can adopt powerful measures to combat oil dependency and climate disruption," Brown said. "This landmark agreement establishes one of the first greenhouse gas reduction plans in California. It is a model that I encourage other cities and counties to adopt."

Approved today by the County Board of Supervisors, today's settlement resolves a lawsuit, filed by the attorney general in April, contesting the adequacy of San Bernardino's general plan under the California Environmental Quality Act.

Bush Administration ordered to produce climate report

2007-08-25T23:30:00.000-05:00

A federal judge has ordered the Bush administration to finally produce the two reports about climate change that its required to make under the Global Change Research Act of 1990.

Part of this report was leaked to a couple of reporters in March.

This press release from the Center for Biological Diversity has the details:

The Research Plan and National Assessment required by the Global Change Research Act are intended to be the preeminent documents guiding federal research and policy-making on issues related to global warming. The Research Plan guides all federal climate research, while the National Assessment serves to provide an understandable summary of global warming impacts on the environment, economy, human health and human safety of the United States and is to by used by Congress and federal agencies in setting policy and responding to global warming. The last National Assessment was issued in late 2000 under the Clinton administration. Its use and dissemination was suppressed by the Bush administration, and the required update in 2004 was never produced. The Research Plan was required by law to be updated in 2006 but also has never been produced.

The Court ordered the Bush administration to issue the draft overdue Research Plan by March 1, 2008, with a final 90 days thereafter, and the National Assessment by May 31, 2008.

Coverage by Bloomberg, ABC News, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Associated Press.

The administration claimed the law gave it lots of discretion on deadlines and the judge flatly rejected that. The administration also said it didn't need to do 2 reports and is instead planning to do 21 little reports over 2 years. Thus minimizing the impact and press coverage, of course. You can see the planned reports and schedule here.

The news articles are all appropriately harsh to the administration. This is mentioned as their second legal setback along with the Supreme Court decision on CO2.

Newsweek editor's pre-apology.

2007-08-22T10:25:00.000-05:00

I read Newsweek editor Jon Meacham's "Editor's Desk" note in the issue of Newsweek with the great story on global warming deniers. I found this anecdote interesting:

In the issue of NEWSWEEK dated April 28, 1975—the cover that week, about the pending fall of Saigon, was called "The Last Battle" —the magazine ran what is probably the most-cited single-page story in our history. Headlined the cooling world, it explored worries about a new ice age. Global warming soon led scientists to put such concerns aside, but those who doubt that greenhouse gases are causing significant climate change have long pointed to the 1975 NEWSWEEK piece as an example of how wrong journalists and researchers can be. (If you type NEWSWEEK and global cooling into Google, you get 262,000 hits—not bad for a 33-year-old article.)

Meacham continues to misinterpret this history by saying scientists "put aside" cooling like it was some fad and now the same scientists are talking about warming. This was never more than a handful of scientists' speculations being blown up by the press, e.g. Newsweek. See realclimate for the definitive debunking of this media myth.

But I missed the significance of this odd paragraph in the same note:

We are not saying that it is time for all Americans to give up their cars and bike to work, or that Gore should be canonized or that the board of the Sierra Club should be given emergency powers to run the country.

Well of course you're not. Does a story about the denial industry really need this qualifier?

Luckily, the Daily Howler is long skilled at spotting this kind of journalistic weasel-ness:

But the real must-read in the current Newsweek is Jon Meacham’s weak-kneed “Editor’s Desk,” in which The Parson finds three hundred ways to apologize for running such a piece. Meacham is a genial person, but we’ve long been struck by his lack of spine, a problem which was always clear when he was doing more TV punditry. But this “Editor’s Desk” is an Instant Classic—a portrait of a multimillionaire press corps’ pusillanimity in the face of conservative power.

Sigh. Between the Democratic leadership and traditional media editors, I hope there's enough spines to go around.

The deniers screamed and nobody listened

2007-08-20T22:56:00.000-05:00

For the last couple of weeks, the climate blogosphere has been a-buzz with the story of how a small error was spotted, and corrected, in the NASA GISS global temperature record. The correction was very minor and did not alter the global trend (up) at all. See coverage at realclimate, ClimateProgress (reprinting much of an email from James Hansen), and the August 19th edition of GW news.

Here's what's really interesting about this event: despite the coordinated effort from the deniers and their supporters in Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and the Washington Times, this "story" was completely ignored by the traditional media. About all I could find was a mention in the Washington Post, where it was portrayed as a "look at what those bloggers are in a tizzy over now" story. The LA Times also had a brief mention where the change in the data is appropriately described as "negligible" and the blog reaction is a big part of the story.

This non-reaction underscores a point I've been making a lot on this blog: the traditional media have shut the door on the climate deniers. When they're mentioned at all, they are always qualified with their conservative and other agendas. They aren't portrayed as scientists engaged in a legitimate debate.

So what should climate bloggers do? Take a cue from the traditional media reporters: when climate deniers say they have "proof" that GW isn't happening or is a hoax, ignore them. No matter how much they post in your comment section, ignore them. They will only sap your strength and time for the real fight that will begin when Congress returns in the fall: the debate about what to do about global warming.

Update: The paper of record, the New York Times, has weighed in with a story by their main climate reporter, Andrew Revkin. Again the emphasis is on the over-reaction in the blogosphere. There's some interesting words on what James Hansen and Stephen McIntyre agree on (a surprisingly large amount). This passage was interesting in what it didn't say:

Everyone appears also to agree that too much attention is paid to records, particularly given that the difference between 1934, 1998, and several other sets of years in the top 10 warmest list for the United States are so small as to be statistically meaningless.

And who is it that pays all this misleading attention to records? The media, Mr. Revkin.

Speed Matters

2007-08-16T09:53:00.001-05:00

Let me take a timeout from climate coverage to address an issue that concerns everyone who uses the internet. Did you know the U.S. is currently ranked 16th in the world in average internet bandwidth to the home? I can remember when the U.S. led the world in internet bandwidth but that was apparently back in the dial-up days.

If we want to grow the online community, one straightforward way to do that is to improve the infrastructure.

A group called speedmatters.org is advocating that Congress address the problem of both speed and access. The results from their test on my AT&T DSL line are on the right. Try it yourself at their website and see what you can do to help.

How to report on science: "Its not that hard".

2007-08-13T23:40:00.000-05:00

Sharon Begley, the lead reporter on the mostly excellent Newsweek article on the global warming denial industry had an online chat last Wednesday. In it she not only showed a good grasp of the issues but had a good answer for the question of how reporters report on global warming:

White Stone, Va.: How can the responsible media best meet their "fairness/accuracy/'balance'" responsibilities in dealing with climate change deniers?

Sharon Begley: We haven't figured that out, have we? In my case, whether it's climate change or the latest fossil find, I believe that only those who do research in the given field are qualified to comment. Further, I don't think science is like political or social issues, where all views are of equal weight. To the contrary: in science, there really is a 'right' answer, tho it may take time to emerge, and journalists have a duty to tell readers what that answer is likely to be. Me, I don't do he said/she said, but delve into the arguments and see which has empirical merit. It's not that hard.

The question was an odd one, how to fairly deal with deniers (?), but the answer was a very good one on how to report science. Indeed it is not that hard. The deniers, even the few legitimate scientists like Lindzen, don't have the facts on their side. So you don't have to give equal column inches to their "view". I'm not familiar with Ms. Begley's work so I don't know if she's always been this good in reporting on global warming. But why did her fellow reporters do so badly until recently?

The best example of how to deal with deniers is the Newsweek article itself. Ignore them on stories about global warming, since they only lie about it, and instead write articles on their motives for and history of lying. I'm sure there's more great stories there. As Gavin Schmidt recently speculated in a post on Realclimate:

However, there is clearly a latent and deeply felt wish in some sectors for the whole problem of global warming to be reduced to a statistical quirk or a mistake.

Yeah. Why is that? C'mon reporters! Dig!

Newsweek's history of "The Denial Machine"

2007-08-11T23:31:00.000-05:00

The August 13th edition of Newsweek has an eye-catching cover with a picture of the sun and the headline "Global Warming is a Hoax*". The asterisk goes on to say "Or so claim well-funded naysayers who still reject the overwhelming evidence of climate change. Inside the denial machine". This excellent article by Sharon Begley (with help from 4 others) gives a history of the denial efforts which started as a response to Jim Hanson's 1988 testimony to Congress and continue through today.

If you are new to this topic and think there's any doubt about global warming, please read this article and see how you've been manipulated. Even if this is all old news, its a good summary.

The article is mostly history but here's a quote about where things stand today:

To some extent, greenhouse denial is now running on automatic pilot. "Some members of Congress have completely internalized this," says Pew [Center for Climate Change]'s [Manik] Roy, and therefore need no coaching from the think tanks and contrarian scientists who for 20 years kept them stoked with arguments

.
Fortunately, they can still be voted out of office.

Update: Joe over at Climate Progress thinks Newsweek wasn't hard enough. He also think the cover is a little to clever and I agree with that. A lot of people will just read the cover headline and not see the asterisk.

Update II: more on this article from me here and here.

Open source energy policy development

2007-08-06T23:21:00.000-05:00

Over 10 years ago, a programmer named Eric S. Raymond presented an essay called "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" which explained why he thought the software development model that produced Linux was so successful. (Also around that time anyone reading a web page was also probably a programmer so I wouldn't need this background. How times have changed.)

Basically the action of many loosely connected individuals (the bazaar) looking at and working on source code made bugs more likely to be found and created good, reliable software in a fraction of the time of the traditional model. This was only possible if the source code was available for anyone to look at and the whole process was open. This was, and still is, a dangerous notion to companies like Microsoft that view source code as valuable intellectual property for which access is to be strictly controlled and monitored.

Well now the same open source philosophy has been applied to the arcane world of energy policy making. The result is Energize America, "a comprehensive and compelling 20-point plan developed by informed citizen activists to wean the U.S. from its fossil fuel addiction and provide the U.S. with Energy Security by 2020, and Energy Freedom by 2040." It also will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2020.

I learned about this plan at a panel at YearlyKos. Some of their ideas already have the support of members of Congress. A related panel, which I missed, talked about "Using the Blogosphere to develop Policy". There's obviously a lot in common with the ideals behind the open source movement: take creation of a valuable public good (An operating system, a sustainable energy policy) and take it out of the hands of the few (for-profit software companies, lobbyists) and give it to the many (volunteer programmers,concerned citizens). Congrats to the Energize America team (whose work has really just begun).

With Murdoch, will Wall Street Journal come around on global warming?

2007-08-04T23:26:00.001-05:00

The Wall Street Journal editorial pages are one of the more notable MSM holdouts on climate change (see this post on realclimate for an example)

The great Bob Parks wonders in his "What's New" newsletter if Murdoch's takeover of the WSJ will change that:

Last week, WN predicted that if news mogul Richard Murdoch was successful in acquiring the WSJ, its editorial policy on climate would not get greener. Several readers, however, pointed out that Murdoch may have had a recent epiphany on climate. Indeed, Monday's New York Times quoted a May 8 Murdoch speech, "Climate change poses clear, catastrophic threats." To demonstrate his conversion, he went out and bought a Prius for a lot less than it cost him to buy Dow Jones. "The debate is shifting," he said, "from whether climate change is really happening to how to solve it." Is that enough to change the WSJ? I don't know.

Murdoch explains his green turn in an interview at Grist.

I'm with Bob's initial reaction. Fox news hasn't changed their denial-tinged coverage so I doubt the WSJ editorial pages will change anything.

For you young blog readers out there: Bob Parks has been sending out his newsletter by email since before blogs and even before the world wide web. He has been debunking junk science and calling out climate denial flim-flam for a long time. Prof. Parks is a national treasure.

Will anyone come to Bush's climate party?

2007-08-03T22:24:00.000-05:00

I blogged about the run up to the G8 summit, where a big story was the pressure being put on Bush to do something about global warming. Blair tried his best to prod his ally. Bush made a big phony speech the week before and announced he would call his own summit of the world's CO2 emitters. Nothing came out of the G8 meeting itself.

Well he's now made the formal invitations to this conference as reported in a Washington Post story by Michael Fletcher:

President Bush yesterday formally invited top officials from the world's leading economic powers to take part in a climate change summit aimed at establishing voluntary goals for lowering greenhouse gas emissions while sustaining growth.
....
Long wary of the effectiveness of global environmental agreements, Bush tried to seize the initiative on global warming with his pledge to initiate a series of meetings to set flexible, long-term goals for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. He said his approach would allow countries to find their own best paths to reducing pollution.

In other words, Bush wants to spread internationally the "voluntary" program he advocates for U.S. businesses. This will accomplish nothing. Actually it might give the illusion something is being done and hold off real solutions which is worse then just continuing to be quiet.

Mr. Fletcher was sure fooled:

The proposal marked a clear shift for Bush, who had come under international criticism for his opposition to participating in the Kyoto Protocol, a United Nations-led environmental agreement that expires in 2012.

.
Uh....no. This is not a Kyoto-level of commitment to change so his opposition to that approach is intact.

China and India are invited and Secretary of State Rice will host.

Reuters has a longer article by Matt Spetalnik where Greenpeace also worries about the effect of the smoke and mirrors being set up:

John Coequyt, a policy analyst with Greenpeace, expressed concern the Washington conference would be used to "erode support for the process that's strengthening at the U.N."

.
Note the timing...

The talks, where the Bush administration will control the agenda, will take place three days after a U.N. summit on climate change in New York in which U.S. policy on global warming may come under sharp criticism.

And this just starts a process which is scheduled to finish after Bush leaves office.

The White House said the U.S. meeting was meant to supplement, not upstage, ongoing international initiatives.

.
Yes I'm sure thats the only intent.

Its simple: any effort which doesn't start with binding, mandatory cuts in emissions is not a serious attempt to address this problem.

Joe Romm at Climate Progress also thinks there's not much here.

What Adam said

2007-08-02T23:30:00.000-05:00

Adam Siegel has a nice diary up at Daily Kos about how to view upcoming global warming legislation.

He brings up a point that I hadn't really considered before about legislative inertia and the importance of getting it right the first time.

When it comes to "Global Warming" legislation, who seriously believes that we will be able to drink at the trough multiple times. That if a GW titled piece of legislation is passed by Congress and signed by George the W, that it will be possible to invest the effort and convince 'moderates' to pass another Global Warming act just a few years later?

As per Stoller

only the Sanders-Boxer bill does what is needed. The rest of them are worse than nothing. If you pass a big piece of legislation, we'll have to wait at least five years before understanding it hasn't worked, which is five years we don't have.

This is a one-shot opportunity.

We get it wrong, the consequences will last generations.

We must get it right.

He's right that we must get it right. However I had previously been thinking that a series of laws, each tougher then the last, might be the way to go just to show the economic doomsayers that you won't wreck the economy, or even dampen it, by cutting carbon emissions. But, as Seigel points out, the legislative process doesn't work that way.

I continue to maintain that George the W isn't signing anything. The first chance for global warming legislation to become law will be late January of 2009.

Looking forward to YearlyKos

2007-07-31T11:52:00.000-05:00

(Below I promised more posts in July. Obviously that didn't happen. Hopefully August will be better.)

The YearlyKos convention is in Chicago this weekend and I'll be attending and also volunteering a bit. I'll definitely be at the following panels:

Science Bloggers Caucus: Thursday, Aug 2, 4:30pm - 6:00pm
Science, Politics and Activism: Friday, Aug 3, 2:30pm-3:45pm. Chris Mooney will be at this one.
Smoking Politics: Saturday, Aug 4, 9:15am-10:15am. This is about how the tobacco company playbook is being used in global warming.
Global Warming Politics: Saturday, Aug 4, 10:30am - 11:30am.

I'd be interested in meeting any readers of this blog who might be attending. Send me an email. rljacob at gmail

Update: Saturday morning I'm going to attend the "Energize America" panel instead of "Smoking Politics".

Apollo program for climate change?

2007-06-22T21:08:00.001-05:00

An Apollo Program for Climate Change. That's the provocative title in an op-ed in the Washington Post. It was written by David Sokol, who happens to be CEO of a large energy holding company owned by Berkeshire Hathaway.

The content wasn't quite what I was expecting from the title. It wasn't asking for a coordinated program toward one thing, which is the wrong approach since it will take many different technologies to stop global warming. Sokol explains:

Besides finding new ways to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, we need to do research to achieve breakthroughs in renewable energy, nuclear technologies and reductions in demand, as well as improvements in high-voltage transmission systems and the retrofitting of existing fossil-fuel plants. Achieving a future of low carbon emissions is not a matter of choosing one technology over another. All must play a role.

Sokol is instead asking for an Apollo-program level of funding which would be about $46 to $60 billion in todays dollars. That's a good start.

You almost couldn't tell this was written by an energy company CEO except for this dismissal of carbon caps:

Placing caps on carbon emissions before the technology is available to actually reduce those emissions will simply impose a tax on the American people without any positive environmental benefits. There has to be a better way.

Sokol goes on the say we need more than just cap-and-trade which is true but putting a price on carbon at least puts market forces at work for the climate instead of against it. How can a good capitalist like Sokol's boss Warren Buffet object to that?

P.S. Sorry for the long absence. June has been a busy month and I have another week of job-related travel ahead of me. I promise more posts in July.

George W. Bush: "I'm the denier"

2007-06-04T22:44:00.000-05:00

As the IPCC reports were released, I expected there to be a lot of the typical "false balance" reporting from the mainstream media. But that didn't happen. The stories about the IPCC reports were straightforward, maybe even a little gloomy, and contained no equivalent amounts of text from the climate change denier crowd. It seems the main media outlets of the U.S. instantly decided Singer and Lindzen et al. were no longer worth quoting. With a few notable exceptions.

But there's one climate change personality the press still treats with unwarranted credibility: George W. Bush.

Now Bush isn't really a denier. He's careful not to say climate change isn't happening or that mankind isn't responsible. He just says we there can't be any forced emission reductions. To me, that makes him a "denier in spirit" because the result is the same as if the denier crowd was controlling the debate: nothing should be done to stop global warming.

In advance of the G8 summit, it looked like some serious pressure was getting put on Bush to do something. First there were all kinds of unflattering leaks about how the U.S. was resisting the text in a statement on climate change. Then direct political pressure was applied from people such as Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who, while in Berlin, said Bush should make a major deal, as quoted in this Reuters story by Erik Kirschbaum:

"The science is clear, the challenge is undeniable," Pelosi said. "We have to work together, though, to reach a solution."

Pelosi met with German Prime Minster Merkel, a meeting which signaled Germany was willing to put up a fight, according to this International Herald Tribune story.

In typical Bush administration fashion, a big speech was rolled out that sounded good but had no substance at all. And, as illustrated by the Washington Post's Dan Froomkin, the mainstream media bought it and sold it back to the public.

The White House yesterday showed that it still knows how to play the American press like a harp.
President Bush yesterday put forth a new proposal on climate change that is most newsworthy for its attempt to muddy the debate about the issue and derail European and U.N. plans for strict caps on emissions.....But a change in rhetoric was enough to generate some headlines about the administration's attention to the issue: Bush Proposes Goals on Greenhouse Gas Emissions, reads the New York Times headline. Bush Proposes Talks on Warming, says The Washington Post's front page. Bush offers to take climate lead, proclaims the Los Angeles Times.

Please read the whole piece by Froomkin to see just how cynical this Bush speech was.

David Roberts over at grist.org comes to a similar conclusion.

As you can see -- and as you would expect -- this announcement from Bush is not a genuine change of heart on climate change. The U.S. still will not agree to any emission reduction targets. It will not agree that the developed countries bear primary responsibility for climate change. It will not sign on to the growing consensus among developed nations about how to tackle the problem

Joe Brewer of the Rockridge Institute dissects the framing of Bush's speech.

Underreported story on CO2 emissions?

2007-06-03T22:17:00.000-05:00

My good friend Michael Tobis is wondering why the main stream media didn't make a big deal out of a joint statement by multiple national scientific academies that we should move to a more sustainable energy system. This statement was targeted at the upcoming G8 summit which otherwise has gotten a lot of press in relation to the climate change topic.

I have an underreported story too: this article by Peter Spotts in the Christian Science Monitor covers a report by the Global Carbon Project, which was coincidentally published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that CO2 emissions rose dramatically in the first part of the 21st century:

CO2 emissions from cars, factories, and power plants grew at an annual rate of 1.1 percent during the 1990s, according to the Global Carbon Project, which is a data clearinghouse set up in 2001 as a cooperative effort among UN-related groups and other scientific organizations. But from 2000 to 2004, CO2 emissions rates almost tripled to 3 percent a year – higher than any rate used in emissions scenarios for the reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

There's some discussion that maybe its a temporary effect created by leaving the 2000 recession and a spike in natural gas prices leading to more coal burning. On the other hand, maybe this is China showing up. I'm surprised this didn't get more press just for supporting the "blame China" people.

Another quote from this excellent article:

The Global Carbon Project study held two surprises for everyone involved, [Christopher] Field says. "The first was how big the change in emissions rates is between the 1990s and after 2000." The other: "The number on carbon intensity of the world economy is going up."

In other words, the warnings from the IPCC AR4, which were so powerful that cut off access to the main stream media by the denier camp, may now be both out of date and underestimating the problem.

I haven't seen original reporting anywhere else besides CSM.

State and local action to reduce CO2

2007-06-02T18:07:00.000-05:00

Since the U.S. government will most like do nothing substantive between now and January, 2009, several states and municipalities are taking action to reduce CO2 emissions and some of this is getting covered.

The San Francisco Chronicle (Carolyn Jones) covers Berkeley's substantial efforts to reduce its carbon footprint:

Six months after Berkeley voters overwhelmingly passed Measure G, a mandate to reduce the city's greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050, the city is laying out a long-term road map for residents, business and industry. It includes everything from solar panels at the Pacific Steel foundry to composted table scraps.

The article in places uses what I think is some poorly chosen language about how hard this is going to be. There's the title "IT WON'T BE EASY BEING GREEN: Berkeley sets tough course for its residents to follow to help reduce emissions of greenhouse gases in city". First of all, the residents voted to do this themselves. It was not "set" on residents by some outside authority. And again there's this assumed hardship of de-carbonizing compared to burning CO2 without a care in the world. Has anyone speculated on daily life in an all-carbon-all-the-time future? I bet its no picnic.

The Washington Post covers attempts by the states to set their own vehicle emissions standards. This is fallout from the recent Supreme Court decision that the EPA can regulate CO2. Further fallout is in this article from Joel Havemann and Johanna Neuman at the Los Angeles Times about California's request to set tougher emissions standards. Look at this bizzare comment from an auto industry lobbyist:

Steven Douglas, a representative of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, said California cannot prove a link between global warming and carbon dioxide emissions by motor vehicles in the state. Global warming is a global problem, he said, and California could not prove that the state could solve it because there are so many other sources of greenhouse gases.

"prove a link?". These guys are definitely cribing from the tobacco industry playbook. But then Mr. Douglas undercuts his denialism with a small-scale version of the "we shouldn't do anything until the Chinese do something" game.

All CO2 emissions count towards the problem and any reduction is a good thing, including California's cars. No one act will solve the global warming problem. Its going to take many things and this is one of them.

More on G8 summit and climate

2007-05-28T11:00:00.000-05:00

The Associated Press has an article by David Stringer about the U.S. obstructing a climate deal from the summit. The article is based on leaked documents from the summit obtained by Greenpeace.

What are the responsible leaders trying to do?

[German Chancellor] Merkel is seeking to win agreements for a global reduction in emissions of 50 percent below 1990 levels by 2050 and bold commitments to energy efficiency strategies at the summit in Heiligendamm, on Germany's Baltic Sea coast, June 6-8.

They are also talking about a maximum temperature increase:

The draft communique also included a commitment to curb the rise in average temperatures this century to 3.6 degrees, said the environmental group Greenpeace - which has published two leaked versions of the document. Without significant efforts, the rise is estimated to rise as much as 11 degrees, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

I'm glad this article mentioned the IPCC upper bound but I wish it also mentioned some of the other suggested emission targets. There's no way to judge if "50 precent below 1990 levels by 2050" is considered middle-of-the-road or conservative.

The U.S. government wants no part of this:

"The U.S. still has serious, fundamental concerns about this draft statement," the notes on the document read. "The treatment of climate change runs counter to our overall position and crosses multiple 'red lines' in terms of what we simply cannot agree to."

Still (as of now) 603 days left.....

Update: Reuters covers the same story but focuses on how dumb Tony Blair looks:

Greenpeace said the U.S. stance gave the lie to confident statements by Blair that Washington's position was moderating as the summit approached.

"This shows more clearly than ever that despite his protestations to the contrary Tony Blair's efforts to persuade George Bush of the importance of tackling climate change have singularly failed," said Greenpeace director John Sauven.

Five new posts

2007-05-20T22:49:00.001-05:00

Its been about two weeks since my last post and I had a bunch of media coverage to go through. It was too cold to sail today (please, no "where's the global warming" cracks) so I had some time to catch up on recent media coverage of a few issues. Enjoy!

20 more months of no U.S. action?

2007-05-20T21:53:00.000-05:00

Despite the promising talk from the presidential candidates (see below) and the current Congress, there's still the matter of the current President when considering what might get done about global warming in the 20 months his administration has left.

If this article in the Washington Post (by Juliet Eilperin) is any indication: not much. The Bush administration is trying to weaken some mild language in a climate statement that is supposed to come out of a June G8 summit:

Negotiators from the United States are trying to weaken the language of a climate change declaration set to be unveiled at next month's G-8 summit of the world's leading industrial powers, according to documents obtained yesterday by The Washington Post.

A draft proposal dated April 2007 that is being debated in Bonn, Germany, this weekend by senior officials of the Group of Eight includes a pledge to limit the global temperature rise this century to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, as well as an agreement to reduce worldwide greenhouse gas emissions to 50 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.

The United States is seeking to strike that section, the documents show.

First, reducing emissions to 50% below 1990 by 2050 (still emitting in 2050, mind you, but only at half of 1990 levels) isn't enough to limit the rise to 3.6 degrees. But hey, you gotta crawl before you can walk so I'm willing to start there. But the Bush administration isn't.

The Eilperin piece had no counter-quotes from the administration, probably because they called on Saturday (good one!).

Compare that with this article two days later from the Washington Post by Steven Mufson and Michael Fletcher about fuel efficiency. The title sounds great: "Bush Calls For Cuts In Vehicle Emissions: Agencies Ordered To Draft New Rules". But the agency is the EPA which takes a long time to do anything. You have to read the article to find this fact:

"In effect, the president asked his agency heads to share ideas and come up with a plan that is due three weeks before he leaves office," said Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), chairman of the new House select committee on climate change. Markey said that "will leave motor vehicle fuel economy stuck in neutral until Bush's successor takes office.

The article is appropriately negative to the administration. So why the sweetheart headline? Reporters who write the articles don't pick the headlines. Someone else usually does.

More on the G8 statement stonewalling from the Financial Times.

Spin alert: intensity reduction

2007-05-20T17:13:00.000-05:00

This AP story about Al Gore's criticism of the Canadian government's climate plan includes this quote:

[Gore] said "intensity reduction" - which allows industries to increase their greenhouse gas outputs as they raise production - was a poll-tested phrase developed by think tanks financed by Exxon Mobil and other large polluters.

Gore also called the plan a "Fraud". But lets look at this phrase "intensity reduction". It has "reduction" in it. That sounds good. That's what we want, right?

But intensity reduction means that the rate of CO2 emitted per unit of stuff made by a factory goes down. In other words, the factory somehow becomes more efficient at emitting carbon as it does its thing (make energy or make a car). That doesn't actually reduce the amount of CO2 emitted. If the factory increases production, its emissions will go up and that's ok with this plan.

Note that intensity reduction is the only thing the Bush administration will commit to.

Cheers to the AP for not letting "intensity reduction" get in to the story without qualification.

Public and Republican presidential candidates think global warming is a problem

2007-05-20T15:36:00.001-05:00

Remember those polls on public attitudes toward global warming? Christian Science Monitor staff writer Brad Knickerbocker wrote about them for Earth Day:

"The last six months have been the most rapid period of change in public awareness and attitudes on climate change that I've ever seen," says William Moomaw, a Tufts University climate expert and coauthor of the recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a UN-sponsored group of scientists.

Demand for climate-change briefings he's delivered for the past five years have jumped in the past year, says Dr. Moomaw. Audiences who were once polite are now actively engaged.

Cool.

More evidence of a shift in acceptance of reality is that responding to climate change, and not denying it, is something even Republican presidential candidates are doing as mentioned in this Reuters story by Deborah Zabarenko:

[John] McCain is hardly alone in his party. Rudolph Giuliani and Mitt Romney have also staked out positions on this topic, generally pushing for alternative energy and more efficient technologies to stall the globe's warming trend.

One reason for this sea change is former Vice President Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" laying out the science behind global warming, said Eileen Claussen of the non-profit Pew Center on Global Climate Change.

This new Republican openness to discussing ways to tackle climate change may also be an indirect result of recent changes in how the White House has talked about the problem, said political scientist Cal Jillson of Southern Methodist University in Dallas said.

"Once President George W. Bush acknowledged that global warming was a problem, other Republicans were freer not to have to support the administration stance - that the science was incomplete - but now they could say on the campaign trail, 'Here's what I propose to do.'"

This shift has occurred in the last year or so, Jillson said.

More analysis along these lines appeared in MarketWatch, a business news outfit owned by Dow Jones (the same guys that own the Wall Street Journal:

Al Gore isn't running for president, but in some sense he's already won.
All the major Democratic candidates for president -- and a fair number of the Republicans, as well -- have embraced Gore's signature issue: global warming. In sharp contrast to the current occupant of the Oval Office, most of the candidates say climate change is a major challenge that the next president will have to address.

Most of the major candidates say the scientific debate is over. They agree that human activity is a major cause of the increased temperatures already seen around the globe and that immediate steps are needed to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
But the policy debate is just beginning. It's one thing to diagnose the illness; it's another to prescribe the right economic and political incentives to wean the global economy away from carbon.

The article has a summary of where the candidates are on things like fuel efficiency and future emission targets.

Climate change and the U.S.

2007-05-19T18:59:00.000-05:00

One of the conclusions of the WGII report was that poor nations of the world will suffer more from climate change because they don't have the infrastructure to deal with it. Lately, I've been hearing some smart people (at various meetings I've been to) say something that is quite different: that the U.S. and Europe will barely be affected. That appears to be a misinterpretation of the WGII report. I'm not sure how that has spread but I hope readers of this blog know better. Update: Quotes like this from the WGII panel chair Rajendra K. Pachauri in the NYTimes must be responsible:

“It’s the poorest of the poor in the world, and this includes poor people even in prosperous societies, who are going to be the worst hit"

Note: thats worst hit, not only hit.

To help set the record straight, here are some articles about how climate change will definitely affect the U.S. and not for the better:

Associated Press (Edith Lederer) article title "Panel Says U.S. Faces Change As Climate Warms"

Chicago and Los Angeles will likely to face increasing heat waves. Severe storm surges could hit New York and Boston. And cities that rely on melting snow for water may run into serious shortages.

This commentary by George Monibot in the Guardian talks about charges of censorship from the warming crowd but also mentions that during the wrangling over the WGII SPM, this sentence was taken out: "North America is expected to experience locally severe economic damage, plus substantial ecosystem, social and cultural disruption from climate change related events". And they don't mean only Mexico and Canada. Always remember that the IPCC process results in a very conservative, in terms of climate prediction, document.

This Associated Press article by Seth Borenstein combines the U.S. climate change and national security (see below) stories:

Roger Pulwarty, one of the federal government's top drought scientists, said states such as Arizona and Colorado, which already fight over the Colorado River basin water, will step up legal skirmishes. They may look to the Great Lakes, but water availability there will shrink, he said.

The occasion for this story was that the general's and admiral's report on climate change was issued the same day as a 67-page report on North American climate change (part of the IPCC WGII full report but I can't find it online).

The San Francisco Chronicle's Jane Kay covered the same report and reported:

Severe heat waves -- characterized by stagnant masses of warm air and consecutive nights with high minimum temperatures -- will intensify in the United States and Canada, according to the data on North America released Monday by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

More Climate Change and National Security

2007-05-19T17:54:00.000-05:00

When I first blogged about this about a month ago, it was just an article in Le Monde and a small AP story about the U.N. But now Congress is considering the national security issues of climate change and there's been a bunch of stories about it.

Boston Globe: Article by Bryan Bender gives an overview of a Senate bill requiring the National Intelligence director to create an NIE (National Intelligence Estimate) on global warming.

The effort would include pinpointing the regions at highest risk of humanitarian suffering and assessing the likelihood of wars erupting over diminishing water and other resources.

The measure also would order the Pentagon to undertake a series of war games to determine how global climate change could affect US security, including "direct physical threats to the United States posed by extreme weather events such as hurricanes."

I have no idea what war gaming against extreme weather looks like but the first part of that quote seems like a reasonable thing to do. The article finishes with:

"What makes this interesting is the clear effort to make the politics of global warming broader," said Hamre, who is now president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "There are legitimate security issues associated with this question."

This AP story covers a recent report written by retired generals and admirals which warns about how destabilizing climate change can be:

The report says that in the next 30 to 40 years there will be wars over water, increased hunger instability from worsening disease and rising sea levels and global warming-induced refugees. "The chaos that results can be an incubator of civil strife, genocide and the growth of terrorism," the 35-page report predicts.

More coverage of this report from The Financial Times.
Download the report here.

The spin on these seems to be mostly "wow! Even generals are worried about climate change." I think that's appropriate and underscores just how out-of-touch is the climate-denier crowd.

According to the Washington Post, the Director of National Intelligence agrees its a good thing to do.

Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell believes it is "appropriate" for global climate change to be considered in a future National Intelligence Estimate, according to a letter he sent Wednesday to Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-Calif.), a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Joe Brewer at the Rockridge Institute (the guys who know something about framing) has a long essay on security as a progressive issue and how great a match this is with fighting global warming. Funny how this "frame" seems to have come from general's first.

Glen Beck's piece on Headline News

2007-05-09T22:19:00.000-05:00

What's become of the Headline News Network, a CNN offshoot? When I was an undergrad, I really appreciated its format of a 30-minute newscast every half-hour, 24-hours a day. It was great for the undergrad's schedule. My roommates and I would some times leave it on for hours in the background and it was interesting to follow the ebb and flow of the top stories as they moved around within the 30-minutes.

I stopped watching HNN several years ago. Recently, they dropped the 24-hour newscast and started having prime-time shows. One of these was given to right-wing talk radio guy Glen Beck. Mr. Beck has an interesting shtick: he always mentions being a recovering alcoholic, thus separating himself from most holier-than-thou right wingers. But his "speech" is notable only for its "aren't-I-shocking" racism.

On May 2nd, Glen Beck devoted his show to global warming in an episode titled "Exposed: The Climate of Fear". Fortunately for me, MediaMatters watched it so I don't have to. Their line up of his "experts" is here and debunking of the usual mis-information is here

Should we worry about this ham-handed disinformation hour? I think not. According to the ratings, Mr. Beck had a grand total of 275,000 viewers of his show that night.

Update: Desmogblog has a take with video clips and agrees those ratings are a "crisis" for Mr. Beck....

Coverage of IPCC WGIII SPM release

2007-05-07T23:39:00.000-05:00

Wow that's a lot of acronyms in that title. But I'm sure the savvy readers of ClimateSpin know them all by now. The Summary for Policymakers of the IPCC Working Group III report was released on Friday, May 4th. Working Group III "assesses options for limiting greenhouse gas emissions and otherwise mitigating climate change." I'll look at the coverage here and update this post during the week.

Washington Post: article by Marc Kaufman. (What happened to Juliet Eilperin who was doing all the climate coverage at the Post?) The opening paragraph echo's a lot of the coverage I've seen:

An international scientific panel for the first time yesterday put a price tag on what it would take to avoid the worst effects of global warming, concluding that the effort would be affordable and would be partially offset by economic and other benefits.

The message that doing something is, well, doable got its first real airing with coverage of this report and this article is a good example. There's the usual Bush administration negative quote in this case that the aggressive $100/ton carbon tax examined in the report is out of the question. Kaufman seems to fault the report for looking at several options without recommending any of them. But the overall tone is that we must do something and it won't be calamitous.

NYTimes: coverage by Andrew Revkin and Seth Mydans. The opening paragraph here is not as hopeful as the Post:

The world’s established and emerging powers will need to divert substantially from today’s main energy sources within a few decades, to limit centuries of rising temperatures and seas driven by the buildup of heat-trapping emissions in the air, the top body studying climate change has concluded.

"divert substantially"? That sounds hard. But the article doesn't really get in to the details of that and gets much better in its tone. I really like this quote from one of the WGIII authors: “We can no longer make the excuse that we need to wait for more science, or the excuse that we need to wait for more technologies and policy knowledge,” said Adil Najam, an author of one chapter and an associate professor of international negotiation at Tufts University. “To me,” he said, “the big message is that we now have both, and we do not need to wait any longer.”
Another high point is this explanation of the cost of delay:

The report also made clear the risks of delay, noting that emissions of greenhouse gases have risen 70 percent just since 1970, and could rise another 90 percent by 2030 if nothing is done.

Carbon dioxide is particularly important, not only because so much is produced each year — about 25 billion tons — but because much of it persists in the atmosphere, building like unpaid credit-card debt.

"unpaid credit-card debt" is a great analogy. Much better then the alliterative "procrastination penalty".

Chicago Tribune: The most positive article yet comes from Tribune foreign correspondent Laurie Goering. Here is the opening paragraph:

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which up to now has laid out some doomsday global warming scenarios, had some good news Friday: Climate change can be limited, and at what scientists said would be a reasonable price.

The title was "UN climate panel: Fix is within reach" and the sub-title was:
"A new report says humans can easily limit global warming without cooling the economy." The article is upbeat throughout, save for the typical Bush adminstration skeptic quote about "global recession". Why don't those guys have to show their work?

WGIII SPM out Friday; Full WGI report online.

2007-04-30T23:55:00.000-05:00

All of you climate-media followers have probably already seen pre-coverage of the IPCC Working Group III Summary for Policymakers (SPM) which is due out this Friday. Recall that WGIII addresses mitigation: how to actually do something about greenhouse gas emissions.

The SPM's are just summaries. The full reports are starting to come on line. Thanks to RealClimate who pointed out that the full WGI report, about the science, is now online.

Thinking about Framing Science? Don't.

2007-04-30T22:40:00.000-05:00

A little late, but I thought I'd comment on the Nisbet and Mooney article called "Framing Science" which appeared in the April 6th edition of Science magazine. In case you missed it, this set off a minor storm in the science blogosphere. A long summary is here (see updates at the bottom)

After reading the article and some of the follow up discussion, I'd say I agree with the take at Mixing Memory and in particular the post by Greg Laden that this was a botched job.

I notice that there's been little crossover from the science blogs to the lefty blogs where frames were first discussed about three years ago. My first introduction was this post on DailyKos.

First, Nisbet and Mooney misunderstand the word "frame" which, in Lakoff's work, is more of a noun then a verb. Frames are something people have hard-wired in their brain and the politicians job is to invoke one or the other. Its a not a processor you run your presentation through.

Nisbet and Mooney seem inspired by a Pew center poll which showed lack of interest/understanding on global warming. However this poll was taken in January of 2007, before the 3 month long IPCC press barrage. As more recent polls discussed below show, the AR4 reports have had a major effect on the public understanding and acceptance of global warming, without any "framing".

The article is mostly about examples, some accurate, some not, of framing. They actually don't say much about how to do a better job of "framing science" or what that even means. Here's what comes closest to a proposal in their text:

Without misrepresenting scientific information on highly contested issues, scientists must learn to actively “frame” information to make it relevant to different audiences.

I disagree. The key phrase in the above is "frame information". Scientists deal in facts. Verifiable facts. And we should describe them using the words we know when asked. A Princeton professor had a recent book out called "On Bullshit" which talked about how pervasive it is on our culture. I think people are exhausted by this and would like a break. If a scientist finds him or herself in front of an audience, its probably because the audience wants to hear about some science, some facts. To "Frame information" sound like ~~"turn facts into bullshit"~~ "wrap facts in a layer of bullshit" to me. Scientists are one of the few groups who can be counted on to not bullshit, at least when asked about actual science. We give that up at our peril and the peril of the scientific enterprise itself.

There are two problems here: communicating science and communicating policy. Communicating science should follow the simple rules laid out by Mixing Memory: be nice, know your audience and realize that words have power (the take-home message from the theory of frames.) I would add never refuse to answer a science question. If it requires more detail, go in to the detail. Hide nothing. Let the audience tell you when to stop.

Now if you're a political leader trying to persuade the public to some action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and/or energy use, then you have to worry about the words you use and what frames they evoke.

But for scientists communicating the science of our climate system, just stick to the facts. Thats what people want from you. Reversing the global warming trend will require a level of world-wide cooperation unprecedented in human history. Its only fitting that people have an unprecedented understanding of the science behind it. There's no room for "framing" in that undertaking.

Update (5/2/07): I think this last paragraph is where I've been misunderstood. Although I said "just stick to the facts", note that its "when communicating science." And I didn't mean you had to do it in a monotone or that you should use the figures right out of your papers. If you have other things to communicate, like how to solve the problem, why its a problem worth solving, then you can and should use all the persuasive skills you can muster. And facts.

A closer look at recent polls

2007-04-28T12:05:00.000-05:00

The recent polls I've been talking about paint a pretty consistent picture that the public believes global warming is real and a problem. I've looked at the poll results themselves and have a few comments.

The original questions and answers:
Washington Post/ABC News
Yale Center
NYTimes/CBS News

With its 83% saying global warming is a serious problem, one might think the Yale Center poll is an outlier. But the poll also asked some general belief questions and found that 58% of those surveyed also thought the world was literally created in 6 days like the Bible says. So they probably weren't just polling the Yale student body. I don't find that 58% discouraging. It shows that people with conservative religious beliefs aren't necessarily in the global warming denier camp. That's a good thing.

One of the more dispiriting results from the Post/ABC poll was the finding that 41% think global warming is caused by people while 42% think its equally between people and natural causes.
First look at the question itself:
Do you think a rise in the world's temperatures is being caused mostly by things people do, mostly by natural causes, or about equally by things people do and by natural causes?

It uses "a rise in the world's temperatures" instead of "global warming". Why is that? The Post said this was an attribution of "global warming". I think this question is confusingly worded. "A rise" over what time period?

The NYTimes came closest to asking an attribution question in question 49 of its poll:
49. Greenhouse gases are released when coal, oil and gasoline are burned by cars, utilities and factories. Which comes closest to your opinion: 1. The release of greenhouse gases is the most important factor causing global warming, or 2. The release of greenhouse gases is one factor among many causes of global warming, OR 3. The release of greenhouse gases is NOT a factor causing global warming at all.

The result was 21% most important and 63% one among many. They didn't throw in "natural causes" so we have no idea what is the "many" people might be thinking of.

The Post also reported that only 4 in 10 are "extremely" or "very" sure global warming is happening. They must be referring to question 8:
How sure are you that the world's temperature (has/hasn't) been going up - extremely sure, very sure, somewhat sure, or not sure at all?
But the result was actually 49% extremely or very sure which I would round up to 5 in 10. Is this bad news for those of us concerned with communicating the science? Simply asking the question may cause a non-scientist to waiver. This question was only asked of the 84% who already agreed that the temperature has been going up over the last 100 years (question 7). Should we be concerned that half the 84% aren't extremely or very sure?

Finally, there is the perception of scientific disagreement question:
Do you think most scientists agree with one another about whether or not global warming is happening, or do you think there is a lot of disagreement among scientists on this issue?
40% said most agree while 56% thought there was a lot of disagreement. I first thought that that was a bad result until I considered the rest of the poll and the other polls and came to this conclusion: Who cares what the public thinks of the scientific debate? They already think there's a problem and that something needs to be done. Isn't that what scientists who hope this problem gets solved want to see?

The last bit of depressing info from the Post/ABC poll is in question 3:
How much do you trust the things that scientists say about the environment - completely, a lot, a moderate amount, a little, or not at all?
The results are 5% completely, 27% a lot, 43% moderate amount, 19% little and 5% not at all. The Post reported this as "Americans' skeptical attitudes toward scientists". Well American's are skeptical on just about everything they see in the news so a lot depends on where/how they're hearing scientists "say" things. I wouldn't want scientists to be trusted completely. I agree that there is some work to be done to move people from the "moderate" to "a lot" column.

The blog Pro-Science also examines the Post poll in more detail.

NYTimes/CBS Poll: Warming is real, not sure what to do about it

2007-04-28T10:47:00.000-05:00

A new poll conducted by the New York Times and CBS News reaffirms what the three previous polls discussed here say: the public overwhelmingly thinks global warming is real and a problem. The confusion is over what to do about it. This is another phone poll of about 1000 adults but this one was conducted very recently- April 20-24. Among the findings:

84% of Americans see human activity as at least contributing to warming.
90% of Democrats, 80% of independents and 60% of Republicans said immediate action was required to curb the warming of the atmosphere and deal with its effects on the global climate. 19% said it was not necessary to act now, and 1% said no steps were needed.
52% said that generally speaking they would support protecting the environment over stimulating the economy.

Note that Democrats and Republicans were based on self-identification "do you consider yourself a...". They weren't asked if they were party members.

Its interesting to contrast this result with the National Journal poll of members of Congress which Jonathan Chait wrote about in the LA Times. It showed a deep divide among Congressmen by party with only 13% of Republicans agreeing that global warming is caused by humans and that gap grew in less than a year (original poll here). That poll and these other four show something that is obvious to anyone following politics: members of Congress aren't a good proxy for the general public. Can you say "sample bias"? Also the National Journal poll was taken before the IPCC press blitz.

Also consider this Pew center poll which inspired Nisbet and Mooney's framing article in Science (I'll have more on that later.) It was taken in January of 2007, before the AR4 Working Group I report was released.

We'll see what similar polls say in a year but it appears that the IPCC AR4 reports, and their publicity, have really changed the debate. The public is no longer listening to the deniers and contrarians about the reality of global warming. That doesn't mean we should relax. But scientists who are engaging the public should separate questions/confusion about the science vs. questions/confusion about the response.

Tom Toles says it all

2007-04-25T23:05:00.000-05:00

I hope this cartoon was syndicated widely.

Two spins on one poll

2007-04-21T11:06:00.000-05:00

One poll on climate change views was taken jointly by The Washington Post, ABC News and Stanford. The Post and ABC News then each did a story on it and comparing the two provides a good lesson on climate spin.

First look at the headline and sub-headline:
WPost: Growing Number of Americans see Warming as Leading Threat: Most Want U.S. to Act, But There Is No Consensus on How
ABCNews: Concern Soars About Global Warming as World's Top Environmental Threat: Increasing Numbers Believe Global Warming Is Caused by Humans and That Scientists Agree on It

In the Post it's a "growing number" while in ABCNews its "concern soars". The trends are up but did they grow or soar? I guess you need to look at a lot of these polls to tell. The rank of global warming in important environmental problems doubled in a year and is the clear number one. That sounds like "soaring" to me.

Consider the attribution question on what's causing the warming. 41% say the rise in temperatures is man made while 42% say its a mix of human and natural causes. The Post reported this as "Americans are also split on what causes global warming in the first place" while ABCNews "finds a 10-point increase in the belief that global warming is caused mostly by human activity (to 41 percent, up from 31 percent last year)". So is the trend more important or the current numbers? I'd say the trend considering the barrage of mis-information put out by the Right Wing Noise Machine.

The poll asked "Do you think most scientists agree with one another about whether or not global warming is happening, or do you think there is a lot of disagreement among scientists on this issue?". In the Post, this result was a downer: "56 percent continue to think there is "a lot" of disagreement among scientists about climate change." While ABCNews accentuates the positive: "This...poll...finds....a significant decline — the first in a decade — in the belief that many scientists disagree on whether global warming is happening." The decline was from 64% to 56% in a year. Again, considering how much disinformation is out there, I see the glass as half full.

What's the takeaway lesson here? The Post is a conservative paper but we already knew that. Coupled with the Yale poll, I think we can be optimistic that the public is hearing through the noise.

Public overwhelmingly thinks global warming is a problem.

2007-04-20T22:43:00.000-05:00

Three recent opinion polls suggest a large shift in public perceptions of climate change. We can probably credit the IPCC reports and AIT for that. First a roundup of the polls in the order they were taken. (Has anyone seen the first two covered in the press? Pointers are appreciated.)

The first poll was conducted by the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and released in March of 2007. The poll surveyed 1000 adults the week after the IPCC Working Group 1 report was released (Feb 5-11). Among the findings:

83% believe global warming is a serious problem (up from 70% in 2004) including 56% who think its "very serious"
More than two out of three (68%) Americans agree that global warming is something people can control. And fully 81% agree with the statement, “It is my responsibility to help reduce the impacts of global warming.”
Two of three Americans (67%) say that, if they had to, they could explain global warming or climate change “to someone I meet in passing.”
The most trusted source of information on environmental issues is scientists at major universities (76%) followed by the EPA (62%). George Bush and Republicans in Congress are the least trustworthy.

This last point is the most encouraging. The Inhofe's of the world may talk a lot from a place of prominence but people can mostly see through their bullshit.

I found out about this poll in a column by George Will (more on that later). I've seen no other coverage.

The second poll was conducted by USA Today and Gallup. This poll was published in USAToday's April 19th edition on page 7A. The byline with the poll is Marcy Mullins. In that issue, their were three stories on "going green" but no other reference to the poll. USA Today is part of the Rupert Murdoch empire so that isn't to surprising. Can anyone find this poll on the web?

The poll surveyed 1007 people from March 23-25 (after Al Gore's testimony to Congress).

60% believe the effects of global warming have already begun
38% say major and 28% say extreme changes will happen in the next 50 years if nothing is done about global warming
58% think it takes more drastic measures then recycling, etc. to reduce global warming.
46% think the government should require a surcharge on utility bills when energy-use limits are exceeded
44% think vehicles that do not get at least 30 miles per gallon should be banned.

Wow. No one, and I mean no one, in any political office is talking about banning vehicles with less then 30 mpg and yet it already has 44% support.

The final poll actually does have some coverage from the Washington Post because it was their poll. Actually they conducted it with ABC News and Stanford. The poll surveyed 1002 adults from April 5-10 which includes the release of WGII's report. The article is by Juliet Eilperin and Jon Cohen. Their poll finds:

A third of Americans say global warming ranks as the world's single largest environmental problem, double the number who gave it top ranking last year.
70% of Americans want more federal action on global warming, and about half of those surveyed think the government should do "much more" than it is doing now.
42% think the government should require greater fuel efficiency for vehicles.
Americans are split on what causes global warming in the first place: 41 percent say the temperature rise stems mainly from human activities -- a 10-percentage-point increase from last year -- and 42 percent attribute it about equally to human and natural causes.
84% think that average global temperatures have been rising over the past century, and more than half say weather has become more unstable where they live. Still, only four in 10 are "extremely" or "very" sure global warming is happening, and 56% continue to think there is "a lot" of disagreement among scientists about climate change.

Those last two points seem to contradict the other polls. I'll look more closely at the polls in another post. See also ABC News coverage of the same poll.

Overall, there is strong public belief that global warming is real and the government needs to do something. That's good news. The last two points of the Washington Post poll suggest sites like this one and RealClimate still have some work to do.

U.S. Supreme Court -- protector of the environment?

2007-04-07T12:16:00.000-05:00

This can't be what movement conservatives expected from a court filled with Reagan, Bush I and Bush II appointees.

In two separate rulings, the Supreme Court cleared legal roadblocks to addressing climate change and other environmental problems.

In the first case, covered in this AP story by Pete Yost, the Supreme Court, on a 9-0 vote, overturned a lower court ruling that allowed some old power plants to get out of regulations controlling emissions of sulfur and nitrates. What, you ask? This isn't about CO2? No. These are regulations for controlling acid rain. Yes thats right: some power companies are still fighting otherwise successful acid rain regulations. Duke Power is the culprit here. Keep this in mind when viewing calls from power companies to please regulate CO2 emissions. Those need to be examined very closely.

In the second case, a 5-4 vote said that the E.P.A. can indeed regulate CO2 emissions from car tailpipes. The NYTimes article by, and we're not kidding, Linda Greenhouse, spends a lot of time on the legal issue the minority was arguing: that the case didn't have standing.

This is being hailed as a major victory however don't expect an EPA staffed with Bush appointees to move quickly on their new authority. One immediate effect of this ruling, according to an AP story by Samantha Young, is that the EPA will go ahead and consider California's request to set its own tail pipe emission standards.

Actually the 4 in the 5-4 vote were Cheif Justice Roberts, Alito, Scalia and Thomas. Conservatives are close to getting the court they want.

Update: Sure enough, the EPA is dragging its heals in doing anything about CO2.

Working Group II report released

2007-04-07T10:47:00.000-05:00

If you're reading this site, you probably follow climate change somewhat and are very much aware that yesterday the IPCC released the summary for policy makers of the Working Group II report.

To recap: the IPCC divides its effort in to three working groups. Working Group I covers the science and released their summary back in February. Working Group II "assesses the vulnerability of socio-economic and natural systems to climate change, negative and positive consequences of climate change, and options for adapting to it."

You can download the Working Group II summary for policymakers here.

According to this schedule, the full report was also supposed to be released but I can't find it on the IPCC site.

Pre-release coverage: The first week of April had many stories previewing the report. One of the most interesting was this AP story by Seth Borenstein dated April 1st (but not a joke). A lot of coverage is given to a chart that shows the effects of each degree of global warming. Dr. Andrew Weaver gets the juicy quote calling it the "highway to extinction". Mr. Borenstein speculates its likely to be the subject of intense debate but it made it in to the final report as Table SPM-1.

The predictions for the upper end are pretty gloomy. Borenstein concludes with this hopeful quote:

“The worst stuff is not going to happen because we can't be that stupid,” said Harvard University oceanographer James McCarthy, who was a top author of the 2001 version of this report. “Not that I think the projections aren't that good, but because we can't be that stupid.”

Cynical response to Dr. McCarthy: Oh ye of little faith.

Seriously, lets hope we're indeed not that stupid.

The NY Times pre-release coverage, by Andrew Revkin and based on a preliminary copy they received, gives a bit to much space to the supposed "good side" of climate change: less deaths from cold and a greener world. As noted later, the bad ultimately overcomes the good. So why mention it? The "less deaths from cold" seems particularly weak but the details are in the full report which I haven't seen. Yes if there's less cold, there will be less deaths from cold but if the goal is "less deaths" then its not at all clear there will be any benefit.

Post release coverage: The NY times coverage is also by Andrew Revkin with James Kanter. The article correctly describes how the WGII report shows that climate change will affect the poor the most:
“It’s the poorest of the poor in the world, and this includes poor people even in prosperous societies, who are going to be the worst hit,” said Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman of the panel. “People who are poor are least-equipped to be able to adapt to the impacts of climate change, and therefore in some sense this does become a global responsibility in my view.”

I'm a little disturbed at this quote from co-chariman Martin Parry: “We’re no longer arm-waving with models,” he said. “This is empirical information on the ground.” Its good to have data from the ground but climate models are only arm-waving if you don't understand them. A better statement would be: "We now have data to confirm the theoretical calculations from the model". That's how science works, ya know.

The NY Times article also mentions some of the controversy that apparently began in the last meeting hours before release of the report when China and other countries' diplomats wanted some of the language watered down. AP's Seth Borenstein also writes about this. As Borenstein mentioned in his pre-release coverage Table SPM-1 was the subject and he reports it had parts removed and altered. They also argued about "confidence" vs. "high confidence" in some of the results. Why bother? Well they only make these reports once every 7 years and this one will guide policymakers for a while. The Times notes that the U.S. diplomats were *not* part of the dilution effort.

Global Warming and National Security

2007-04-07T10:11:00.000-05:00

Le Monde (english translation at truthout) has an article by Herve Kempf on a global warming angle I haven't seen covered much in the U.S. press: the effect on national security. Its been mentioned here or there but this article covers a conference in Chapel Hill, North Carolina called "Global Climate Change: National Security Implications".

This is not a difficult concept: climate changes, and the associated changes in water and food supply, could lead to armed conflict. It has in the past. From the article:

"We need to glide from the war against terrorism towards the new concept of sustainable security," summarizes John Ackerman of the US Air Force's Air Command and Staff College.

(I'm really really tired of "War on this" "War on that" language that permeates our public policy. I hope we can tackle this problem seriously without declaring a "War on Climate Change". That phrase thankfully isn't used by Mr. Ackerman but I expect to see it from an official sometime in the near future.)

The article ends with what I though was an encouraging, on more then one level, quote:

The stakes are so important that a new strategic framework must be imagined. That's what the Center for Naval Analysis, an independent institution created in 1942 in the margins of the Army and led by retired officers, will propose in the next few days: "Climate change is a reality, and the country, like the Army, must prepare itself for it," indicates one of the authors who wished to remain anonymous. Isn't that a contradiction with the Bush administration's present policy? "The Army is not in the service of any particular administration," he answers, "but in the service of the country."

Maybe the national security implications will finally get the attention of Conservatives who seem more and more dedicated to deny-and-do-nothing. I'm glad to see a small-c conservative institution like the U.S. Army taking climate change seriously.

Another interesting quote:

The American Army is the world's premier consumer of energy, which costs it close to eleven billion dollars a year. That handicaps its flexibility: "On the battleground, 70% of the carried tonnage is fuel."

Premier as in number 1 consumer? Compared even to U.S. industry? I'd like to see that explained better but the article doesn't go in to it. Maybe a translation problem.

Has anyone seen any coverage in the U.S. press about this conference?

Update: The U.N. is also considering the security implications according to this AP story.

Al Gore goes back to Congress

2007-03-25T19:21:00.000-05:00

I was going to do a big long post on how the media covered Al Gore's day of testimony to both the House and the Senate. But Media Matters did a great job covering the subtle and over-the-top smearing of Gore in various media outlets, including NPR, here and how coverage of his confrontation with Senator Inhofe was mis-handled here.

Basically the hate-hate relationship the media has with Al Gore continues more or less unabated and hopes for rational coverage of climate change issues may be a casualty.

(For a primer on the media's War on Gore, see this article at Consortium News)

Some comments on the NY Times main story on Gore's testimony by Felicity Barringer and Andrew Revkin. We first encountered Ms. Barringer in her condescending profile of Bill McKibben. In the opening sentence, Gore's appearance is described as "part politics and all theatre". We are told he arrived in a hybrid S.U.V. and was later "whisked" out. You know, like Elvis. Why do we need to know what he arrived in, hybrid or not? Is it because Gore is viewed as a hypocrite? The constant references to Gore's Oscar and description of him as film star are not complimentary. They serve to trivialize him: "How can this movie star tell us how to reconfigure our energy system?".

Update: Media Matters also flagged Ms. Barringer's uncritical citing of debunked global-warming denier Bjorn Lomborg.

March 07: more recent climate press

2007-03-25T09:37:00.001-05:00

Cost of doing nothing. If you think any steps to reduce emissions will cost our economy too much, what about the cost of doing nothing? This excellent article in TerraDaily tells the story of an economics professor at a small Canadian college who asked his class to calculate this cost:

The important question is the cost of these opinions [in favor of doing nothing] being wrong relative to the cost of the IPCC report being wrong in its assessment.

Indeed. Even if you hate statistics, read this article for a good introduction to some of the concepts and how they apply to this question of what to do?

Investors on board. This Reuters article by Timothy Garner tells us which investor groups are asking Congress for climate change legislation. According to John Donnelly of the Boston Globe, they've signed an agreement calling for legislation.

Food. Don't Panic but Steve Conner of The Independent has news that some crop yields are already feeling the effects of climate change.

Repression. The New York Times reviews material released by the congressional committee looking in to administration attempts to quiet government scientists on climate change:

The documents “appear to portray a systematic White House effort to minimize the significance of climate change,” said a memorandum circulated by the Democrats under the committee chairman, Representative Henry A. Waxman of California.

Big Enviro. Alternet has a post from Megan Tady with the provocative title "Are Big Enviro Groups "Holding Back" Anti-Warming Movement?". The holding back is relative: the complaint is that they aren't doing enough. Greenpeace in particular is taken to task for not pushing hard enough for renewable support and energy-use reduction.

...Greenpeace is not pushing for the government to get heavily involved in funding and distributing renewable energy, but instead promotes weaker reforms like removing subsidies for fossil-fuel industries and forcing prices to reflect the actual costs of environmental damage.

Scaling back. GW-activist Bill McKibben has an editorial in the L.A. Times that begins to question if "more is more" in our 21st century lifestyle.

We made an assumption — as a society and as individuals — that more was better. It seemed a reasonable bet, and for a while it may have been true. But in recent years economists, sociologists and other researchers have begun to question that link. Indeed, they're finding that at least since the 1950s, more material prosperity has yielded little, if any, increase in humans' satisfaction

That may be true in some general sense but as a music fan, I'm grateful for the recording technology advances since the 50s.

The wedges approach to reducing emissions

2007-03-25T08:48:00.000-05:00

The "wedges" approach to climate change mitigation is one that needs more coverage in the press. The basic idea is that we need to do several things, not just one or two, to reduce CO2 emissions. Carbon caps are not enough by themselves. Energy efficiency is not enough by itself. You can read more at the HQ for this idea, the Princeton Environmental Institute.

Here's a small, very small, start at some media coverage. An original article by Shawn Dell-Joyce in the Middletown, NY, Times Herald-Record does a good job introducing the idea.

A good explanation also appears in this essay by truthout's Kelpie Wilson. Its important to consider the economic costs of each wedge when deciding what to do. Unfortunately, estimating those costs is an inexact science.

The new skepticism -- From denial to fatalism

2007-03-23T00:47:00.000-05:00

One of the articles below mentions that the conventional wisdom in Washington is that "the debate is over" on global warming. That is, there is no longer any serious debate on if the planet is warming and if human activity is the cause: it is and they are. This means Congress, or at least most of Congress, has finally caught up with the scientific facts.

Now comes the debate about what to do about it. And almost overnight, the skeptics have thrown off their global-warming-is-real skepticism* and replaced it with we-can-do-anything-about-it skepticism.

Paul Krugman recently remarked on this phenomenon in an article on the shrinking middle class:

...One thing I've been noticing on multiple debates in public policies -- climate change is another one -- is there seems to be an almost seamless transition from denial to fatalism. That for 15 or 20 years the people would say, "No, what you're saying is not happening." And then almost immediately they'll turn around and say, "Well, yeah, sure it's happening, but there's nothing that can be done about it."

As usual, Krugman hits it right on the head.

Although the approach may have changed, the underlying goal is the same: do absolutely nothing to apply even modest changes to our fossil-fuel based energy system. This laissez-fair philosophy is an essential part of conservatism which is partly why the climate change debate, which has also been a debate about what to do, tends to break along political lines.

*(Please note that "skepticism" is a natural part of science and calling anti-global warming science people "skeptics" gave them to much credit. This is why myself and others instead call them "deniers".)

The Broad article

2007-03-23T00:12:00.000-05:00

The recent article by William J. Broad in the NY Times about supposed over hyping of climate change by Al Gore has been addressed by the folks at realclimate.

A slightly different take comes from this essay by Joe Brewer on the use of frames in the global warming obfuscation effort. Mr. Brewer has an interesting perspective since he has an M.S. in atmospheric science from the University of Illinois and is a fellow in the Rockridge Institute which promotes the idea of frames and their use in politics.

Broad's horrible article should be an embarrassment for any newspaper. So why did it happen in Times?

One view comes from the Daily Howler, who has passionately documented the mainstream media's War on Gore of which the Broad article is a sample. Howler's thorough put-down of Broad's article and subsequent media coverage is in 5 parts: part1, part2 , part3 , part4, part5 (scroll down each page for parts 2-5). A sample quote:

A question came to our analysts’ minds as they worked their way through the endless jumbles of Broad’s report. Here it is: Could a college student present such work without being rebuked by his Teaching Assistant? One would hope that the answer is no—that American teens are held to a higher standard than Broad observes in this report. And yet, amazingly, we see such work misleading the public at the very highest levels of American journalism! For reasons only the gods can explain, Broad is part-owner of two Pulitzer Prizes, and his piece appears in “Science Times”—a section which would surely count as one of the headiest regions in all of American newspapering. But his work is an utter failure—a joke.

So why did this bizarre essay, which misreports facts the Times got right in its earlier coverage of the IPCC release, appear in the "paper of record"?

Media Matters patiently dissects the Broad piece here, here and here with a piece by Eric Boehlert here.