global warming
nisbetmc | September 23, 2008Appearing on NPR's Fresh Air to discuss his new book "Hot, Flat, and Crowded," Friedman was asked by host Terry Gross whether or not the term "green energy" might be implicitly off-putting to many Americans. As Gross put it to Friedman "How do you shatter the boring, 'granola' image of the green energy industry?"
Here's what Friedman said (full transcript of interview):
That's what the book is about. The problem is the term "green" was really owned by its opponents. To name something is to own it. The people who named it "green" named it a "liberal, tree-hugging, girlie-man, sissy,…
nisbetmc | September 23, 2008At the WPost, Juliet Eilperin pens a lengthy feature on the differences between Palin and McCain over the causes of global warming. Palin believes that the effects of climate change are impacting Alaska and has advocated for action, but continues to hedge on whether or not humans are a cause. McCain, on the other hand, believes that "the science of man made global warming has really been proven."
Palin's rejection of scientific consensus may simply be politically strategic, playing to a conservative base, or she may be victim to the counter-framing of climate skeptics. Either way, Palin's…
illconsidered | September 22, 2008 Sipping from the internet firehose...
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H.E.Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
(skip to bottom) September 21, 2008 Melting Arctic, Arctic Geopolitics, Permafrost, CO2 Uptake, Early Anthropogenic Hypothesis, Abrupt Climate Change, Tutorials Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Food Production Hurricanes, Temperatures, Ozone, Paleoclimate, ENSO, Glaciers, Sea Levels, Satellites Impacts, Forests, Wildfires, Floods & Droughts Transportation, Sequestration, Geoengineering Journals, Misc. Science Kyoto…
nisbetmc | September 11, 2008Following up on her testimony before Congress yesterday, MIT President Susan Hockfield writes in the Washington Post today that the U.S. needs a Manhattan Project-scale investment in renewable energy R&D.
Drawing on the metaphor of Vannevar Bush's pact between government and science, Hockfield describes that part of the problem is the absence of serious R&D investment from the major energy companies, despite what they might tell us in TV advertisements:
Today, the United States is tangled in a triple knot: a shaky economy, battered by volatile energy prices; world politics weighed…
sheril | September 7, 2008Go read my NexGen coblogger's post at Climate Progress. Romm's got a frightening interview with Barb Davis White, who's running for the 5th Congressional District Congress in Minnesota:
ROMM: Where are you on global warming?
WHITE: Well, global warming really has not been proven. There are 30,000 scientists, including Al Gore's professor, from Princeton, who says that we are now in a cooling stage. And ev-every -- also every other climate that has been warmed had better grapes.
ROMM: So you don't believe in global warming and you don't think that people caused it.
WHITE: No, I think global…
tlambert | September 6, 2008Naomi Oreskes and Jonathan Renouf have a fascinating article in the Sunday Times about the secret climate change war in the early 80s:
Even today few people have heard of Jason. It was established in 1960 at the height of the cold war when a group of physicists who had helped to develop the atomic bomb proposed a new organisation that would - to quote one of its founders - "inject new ideas into national defence".
So the Jasons (as they style themselves) were born; a self-selected group of brilliant minds free to think the unthinkable in the knowledge that their work was classified.…
tlambert | September 5, 2008The latest report from the NSIDC on Artic sea ice is out, and states:
Record ice loss in August
Following a record rate of ice loss through the month of August, Arctic sea ice extent already stands as the second-lowest on record, further reinforcing conclusions that the Arctic sea ice cover is in a long-term state of decline. With approximately two weeks left in the melt season, the possibility of setting a new record annual minimum in September remains open.
Extent is now within 370,000 square kilometers (140,000 square miles) of last year's value on the same date and is 2.08 million square…
nisbetmc | August 29, 2008From an interview this month with NewsMax:
What is your take on global warming and how is it affecting our country?
A changing environment will affect Alaska more than any other state, because of our location. I'm not one though who would attribute it to being man-made.
nisbetmc | August 28, 2008
Gore endorsing Obama for the Democratic nomination during the primary campaign.
Standing on stage before a national TV audience at Mile High Stadium, Al Gore was a symbolic reminder of what could have been. He also delivered perhaps the best negative narrative about McCain of the convention. "I believe in recycling, but recycling Bush's policies is ridiculous," Gore told the 70,000 strong crowd.
Yet as I noted last week, what might be good for the convention and the Democratic party is probably not good for Gore's tireless work to mobilize a diversity of Americans on climate change. Indeed,…
tlambert | August 27, 2008The Register, an occasionally accurate online IT newspaper, has been running a series of warming denial pieces, by one Steven Goddard. Goddard has been trying to cast on temperature and ice data. Unfortunately, he does a whole lot of cherry picking. For example:
A second important issue with NASA's presentation is that they use the time period of 1951-1980 as their choice of baseline. This was a well known cold spell, as can be seen in the 1999 version of the NASA US temperature graph below.
Why use a graph of US temperatures instead of world temperatures? The "cold spell" is more…
sheril | August 26, 2008originally published August 16, 2007 by Chris C. Mooney
So: Whenever I have a new book out--or an old one out in paperback--I tend to do a lot of radio shows. And as a result, I've noticed a particular phenomenon that has started to get on my nerves a bit: Some hosts like to throw open the telephone lines, and whenever they do, you suddenly get a huge flood of callers who doubt human induced global warming and spout wild contrarian claims like the following (all of which I heard on the Jim Bohannon Show last night):
1. It's warming on other planets too, so isn't it something about the sun?
2…
sheril | August 25, 2008originally published May 21, 2007 by Sheril R. Kirshenbaum
In the first installment of Intersection-ing sans Chris, I've decided to address all this hullabaloo on Global Warming.. Is it real? More and more, scientists are criticized as alarmists jumping on the apocalyptic panic bandwagon while the rest of us have more important things to worry about. War, growing national debt, nuclear proliferation, and K-Fed's attempt at a hiphop career to name a few. So how dramatically has the state of the world shifted since humans came onto the scene? Can it be we just have an ego problem - bragging…
tlambert | August 21, 2008Another post on John Mashey's virtual blog. Everything that follows is from comments posted here by Mashey, lightly edited.
This long essay grew from a dialog in this thread into something that may be a more general resource than just some answers to Mr Manny.
There are 3 parts so far:
Part 1 Motivation & Approach to Science
Part 2 Relevant Personal Background
Part 3 Answers to Questions, Sources
Part 1 Motivation & Approach to Science
1.1 Why This?
I'm always curious when people with decent-or-better educational backgrounds strongly espouse conclusions directly opposite that of…
tlambert | August 20, 2008Alicia Newton, an Associate Editor of Nature Geoscience, discovers the truth about CO2Science:
But rather than its promise of "separating reality from rhetoric in the emotionally-charged debate that swirls around the subject of carbon dioxide and global change", on the contrary CO2 Science twists the most recent science, ever so subtly, to suggest that there is no link between carbon dioxide levels and climate change.
I think she is rather understating it. My experience is that the usual twist angle at CO2 Science is 180 degrees.
Coby Beck decides to make lemonade out of Marohasy's lemons:…
nisbetmc | August 19, 2008
One image of Gore: A partisan activist and leader.
CNN reports this afternoon that Al Gore will have a major speaking slot at the Democratic convention, joining Obama on stage the last night of the convention in front of a stadium crowd of 70,000.
I am a big fan of Al Gore and often think about how history and this country would be different if Gore had run a more competent presidential campaign in 2000. Yet I can't also help but observe the strong partisan message that Gore continues to indirectly send on climate change.
Various poll analyses reveal that despite Al Gore's Nobel prize…
tlambert | August 19, 2008It seems like extreme gullibility must be a job requirement for reporters at Channel Nine. You might recall how Adam Shand uncritically accepted everything he was told by global warming skeptics and aggressively disputed the mainstream science. Tara Brown has gone down the same path on Channel Nine's 60 minutes.
TARA BROWN: No doubt the ice is melting, but the big question is - are we to blame? The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change reports it is 90% certain we are. But other equally eminent scientists believe what were seeing is just part of Nature's great cycle.…
bleimanb | August 15, 2008Scientists have turned to elephant seals to collect data on the changing climate of Antarctica, one of the areas most sensitive to climate change. Previously, the scientists had what they called a "blind spot" under the sea ice, particularly in understanding how quickly sea ice forms during the winter months. The team, led by Jean-Benoit Charrassin of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, attached data collecting sensors to local elephant seals, which then dove distances up to a mile below the surface of the water in search of food.
Scientists outfit an elephant seal with a data…
tlambert | August 14, 2008People have noticed that there was an advertisement for Bjorn Lomborg's Cool It! on ScienceBlogs. Seed's sales staff know not to accept ads for Creationists, psychics and pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo, so how did Lomborg slip through?
Well, he's managed to present himself as being in the middle ground. Lomborg makes himself look reasonable by saying that he accepts the science, that AGW is occurring, but that it won't be that bad. But what Lomborg really does is cherry pick and systematically misrepresent the science. You don't have to take my word for this. See, for example, Kevin…
tlambert | August 12, 2008Barry Brooks, Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change at the University of Adelaide, has started a blog, Brave New Climate. Check it out.
Of particular interest to Deltoid readers is his post on David Evans. After his claims about a missing hot spot signature were refuted, it seems that Evans responded not with a correction, but by repeating them again.
tlambert | August 11, 2008Last year I wrote about Steve Milloy's latest scam -- a $100,000 if you prove the existence of harmful AGW. Of course, since Milloy judges whether your prove is good enough, you know he'll never pay up, just as you know that Kent Hovind will never pay his $250,000 for a proof of evolution.
The latest effort along these lines is Michael Duffy's offer of $1,000 for references to journal papers that:
1 examine the causal link between anthropogenic carbon dioxide and warming, and
2 quantify the extent of the warming from anthropogenic carbon dioxide.
Now it's possible that this offer is made in…