Annals of Global Warming: Research isn’t the road to riches

January 13, 2010

A popular theme among climate denialists claims that researchers are getting rich off of contracts to do research into global warming, and so they skew their data in order to make sure they can get future contracts.

This notion demonstrates an alarming lack of information about how research grants from government and other sources work.  Climate researchers aren’t buying big fancy homes and fast cars.  They aren’t getting rich off what little research money comes their way — that money goes into research.

Here’s one way to tell:  Canadian researchers into the changing conditions in the Arctic can’t get <i>to</i> the Arctic to do their work.  Were they getting rich off of grants, this would not happen.

Stories in Nature this week, and most of the stuff is available to the public, free:

J. England photo - Helicoptering research gear to researchers in the Canadian Arctic - Nature Magazine

J. ENGLANDGetting people and supplies into remote Arctic field sites requires expensive air support. - Nature photo

  • Canadian Arctic researchers left out in the cold

    The Arctic is one of the fastest-changing landscapes in the world: its glaciers, sea ice and animals are being radically affected by climate change, and the melting environment could in turn have huge impacts on rising temperatures. It is imperative that scientists continue to monitor these conditions. Yet Canadian scientists are finding it increasingly difficult to get out in the field to do their work, says John England in an Opinion piece. This is discussed further in an Editorial and with the author in the Nature Podcast, all free in Nature this week.

    Credit: J. England

Canada needs a polar policyJ. ENGLAND

Getting people and supplies into remote Arctic field sites requires expensive air support.

2 Comments | Cost of Green, Geography - Physical, Global warming, Green Politics, Research | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Annals of Global Warming: Black soot and glaciers in Tibet

January 5, 2010

Another in a series on the history of global warming; this comes from the Earth Observatory at NASA (visit that site — the image is more stunning, larger):

tibet_geos5_2009269

Black Soot and the Survival of Tibetan Glaciers

Posted December 15, 2009
Black Soot and the Survival of Tibetan Glaciers

Color bar for Black Soot and the Survival of Tibetan Glaciers
download large image (677 KB, JPEG) acquired September 26, 2009
download large animation image (9 MB, M4V) acquired August 1, 2009 – November 9, 2009

On the Tibetan Plateau, temperatures are rising and glaciers are melting faster than climate scientists would expect based on global warming alone. A recent study of ice cores from five Tibetan glaciers by NASA and Chinese scientists confirmed the likely culprit: rapid increases in black soot concentrations since the 1990s, mostly from air pollution sources over Asia, especially the Indian subcontinent. Soot-darkened snow and glaciers absorb sunlight, which hastens melting, adding to the impact of global warming.

NASA climate scientists combine satellite and ground-based observations of soot and other particles in the air with weather and air chemistry models to study how the atmosphere moves pollution from one place to another. This image is from a computer simulation of the spread of black soot (“black carbon” to climate scientists) over the Tibetan Plateau from August through November 2009. It shows black carbon aerosol optical thickness on September 26, 2009. (Aerosol optical thickness is scale that describes how much pollution was in the air based on how much of the incoming sunlight the particles absorbed.) Places where the air was thick with soot are white, while lower concentrations are transparent purple.

The highest concentrations of black soot are in the right-hand side of the image, over the densely populated coastal plain of China. But high concentrations occur over India, as well, and the black soot spreads across the southern arc of the Tibetan Plateau, which is defined by the towering peaks of the Himalaya Mountains. (Note: Topography has been exaggerated to highlight features that influence air movement). The animation shows how the black carbon pollution from India often circulates at high concentrations for several days against the base of the Himalaya, periodically “sloshing” over the rim of the mountains and spilling northward over the plateau, before being carried away over the Bay of Bengal or the Arabian Sea.

Writing about the implications of the study for the Goddard Institute for Space Studies Website, NASA climate scientist and study co-author James Hansen said, “[C]ontinued, ‘business-as-usual’ emissions of greenhouse gases and black soot will result in the loss of most Himalayan glaciers this century, with devastating effects on fresh water supplies in dry seasons. The black soot arises especially from diesel engines, coal use without effective scrubbers, and biomass burning, including cook stoves. Reduction of black soot via cleaner energies would have other benefits for human health and agricultural productivity. However, survival of the glaciers also requires halting global warming, which depends upon stabilizing and reducing greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide.”

NASA image by Gregory Shirah, Goddard Scientific Visualization Studio, based on model simulations from the Goddard Earth Observing System Model, Version 5 (GEOS-5). Caption by Rebecca Lindsey.

3 Comments | Climate change, climate_change, Geography - Economic, Geography - Physical, Geography - Political, Glaciers, Global warming, NASA, Rivers, Science, Water | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Annals of Global Warming: Warming in the middle troposphere, cooling in the lower stratosphere, 1995-2007

January 2, 2010

This is a post out of history, from the good people at NASA’s Earth Observatory, on July 6, 2007.  For those of who are not climate scientists or particularly advanced in our acumen in dealing with the large datasets and complex mathematics of global warming, this Earth Observatory Image of the Day may improve understanding.

Atmospheric Temperature Trends, 1979-2005

Posted July 6, 2007

Atmospheric Temperature Trends, 1979-2005

Climate models predict that the build up of greenhouse gases should warm the lower layer of the atmosphere, called the troposphere, and cool the layer above it, the stratosphere. Greenhouse gases accumulate in the troposphere where they absorb energy radiated from the Earth and re-emit energy back to the surface. Because the gases trap heat in the lower parts of the atmosphere, the stratosphere cools down. This pattern of warming in the lower atmosphere and cooling in the stratosphere is a hallmark of greenhouse gas warming in global climate models.

These images show temperature trends in two thick layers of the atmosphere as measured by a series of satellite-based instruments between January 1979 and December 2005. The top image shows temperatures in the middle troposphere, centered around 5 kilometers above the surface. The lower image shows temperatures in the lower stratosphere, centered around 18 kilometers above the surface. Oranges and yellows dominate the troposphere image, indicating that the air nearest the Earth’s surface warmed during the period. The stratosphere image is dominated by blues and greens, indicating cooling.

Globally, the troposphere warmed, and the stratosphere cooled during this period. Local trends varied. The greatest tropospheric warming was in the Arctic, where warming is amplified as snow and ice melt. The Antarctic, on the other hand, showed cooling. Some researchers have explained the localized cooling as a side effect of the ozone hole on atmospheric circulation over Antarctica. Loss of ozone cools the stratosphere, a change which intensifies the vortex of winds that encircle the continent. The stronger vortex isolates the air over the continent, cooling the stratosphere even further. At different times of the year, the unusually cold air dips down from the stratosphere and into the troposphere.

The cooling trend in the stratosphere was probably not solely due to greenhouse gas warming at lower altitudes; loss of ozone also cools the stratosphere. In the stratosphere, two warm spots over Antarctica and the Arctic appear to defy the overall cooling trend. One explanation for these warm spots is that polar stratospheric temperatures can fluctuate widely. The poles, especially the Arctic, experience periodic events known as sudden stratospheric warmings, during which the vortex of winds that circles the poles breaks down. When this happens, the stratosphere can warm several tens of degrees Celsius in a few days. Although these events are more common in the Arctic, a significant sudden stratospheric warming also occurred in the Antarctic stratosphere in 2002 and may help explain the apparent warming trend. Whether the localized warming trend is significant is still uncertain.

The measurements were taken by Microwave Sounding Units and Advanced Microwave Sounding Units flying on a series of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) weather satellites. The instruments record microwave energy emitted from oxygen molecules in the atmosphere. Warmer molecules release more energy than cooler molecules, so scientists can measure the temperature of the atmosphere by recording the amount of microwave energy being emitted. Early analyses of these measurements showed little or no warming in the troposphere, where models predicted that warming should be occurring. For a time, these measurements caused some people to question the validity of global climate models and greenhouse gas warming. Scientists discovered, however, that the satellites carrying the microwave instruments had drifted in their orbits over time, so that more recent measurements were taken at a different time of day than older measurements. Once scientists accounted for this bias and other differences between the individual instruments, the measurements showed a warming trend in the troposphere, consistent with surface observations of rising global temperature.

Re-analysis of the satellite measurements answered one of the frequently asked questions about global warming: why didn’t the early satellite data show warming in the lower layer of the atmosphere? To read more on this topic, see Global Warming Questions & Answers, which addresses this and other common questions about global warming.

    Further reading

  • Global Warming Questions & Answers on the Earth Observatory.
  • Global Warming, a fact sheet published on the Earth Observatory.
  • Fu, Q., Johanson, C.M., Warren, S.G., Seidel, D.J. (2004, May 6). Contribution of stratospheric cooling to satellite-inferred tropospheric temperature trends. Nature, 429, 55-58.
  • Johanson, C.M., Fu, Q. (2007 June). Antarctic atmospheric temperature trend patterns from satellite observations. Geophysical Research Letters, 34, L12703.
  • Karl, T. R., Hassol, S. J., Miller, C. D., and Murray, W. L., editors. (2006). Temperature Trends in the Lower Atmosphere: Steps for Understanding and Reconciling Differences. A Report by the Climate Change Science Program and the Subcommittee on Global Change Research, Washington, DC. Accessed June 8, 2007.
  • Ramaswamy, V., Schwarzkopf, M.D., Randel, W.J., Santer, B.D., Soden, B.J., Stenchikov, G.L. (2006, Feb 24). Anthropogenic and natural influences in the evolution of lower stratospheric cooling. Science, 311, 1138-1141.
  • Remote Sensing Systems. (2007, June 12). Description of MSU and AMSU Data Products. Accessed July 5, 2007.

NASA image created by Jesse Allen, using data provided courtesy of Remote Sensing Systems. Caption information courtesy Carl Mears, Remote Sensing Systems, and Paul Newman and Joel Susskind NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

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2 Comments | Clean Air Act, Climate change, climate_change, Cost of Green, Global warming, Green Politics, Science, Technology, War on Science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Chinese government behind “climategate” hacking?

January 1, 2010

Conspiracy fans — a category which appears to include almost all climate change denialists — won’t like the news from Planet Green’s “Planet 100.”  This little news show claims evidence that China was the source of the hacking of the University of East Anglia’s climate related e-mails.

Why won’t the denialists like it?  They won’t like it because it makes sense:  Who stood to profit from embarrassing scientists just before the Copenhagen meetings?  China, who wished to avoid any binding agreements, would gain simply by sowing confusion.

Evidence is pretty thin, but for the first time since the hacked e-mails were published, there’s a plausible motive.   Also, the source is also not wholly pristine or reputable in science stuff — the Daily Mail of London, which specializes in gossipy tabloid news.  Watch that space.

P.S.  — Don’t miss the squid invasion story in the same newscast.

Resources:

3 Comments | China, Climate change, climate_change, Cost of Green, Ethics, Global warming, Green Politics, Political Smear, Politics, Technology | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Global warming politics: ‘Blame the teachers first’

December 29, 2009

Note to teachers: They hate you out there global warming denial land.

Watt’s Up denizens ramble in a state of confusion about how the planet can be warming while local records fall in cold weather.  [Note to Anthony Watts:  Have you explained to your readers that seasons are not governed by CO2 levels, but instead by the tilt of the Earth?]

How to clear up the confusion? Blame it on the teachers.  No kidding.  Here’s the comment from “r”:

r (08:12:32) : [about 62 comments down]

Forget the main stream media. The real roots of this movement, strangely enough, are in grade school and collage teachers.

College teachers are out of touch with the real world. They live in the insulated bubble of academia. They go to school for so long, all they know is school. They never get any experience in the real world of any industry. Therefore, they preach the socialist agenda because it sounds good on paper. The young people they teach do not protest because they don’t know any better yet. Their parents continue to give money to these colleges because they have no idea what their children are actually learning.

Grade school teachers despite having increased course work on classroom management are not required to take many classes in science. They cannot teach science because they don’t understand it themselves. Global warming was introduced to my children through Scholastic Magazine given out at school. The magazine is used as part of the curriculum. The teachers never questioned it. The children were frightened by it and peer pressure keeps anyone from dissenting. The parents are learning about global warming from their children as in 1984.

In fact it is harder for me to protest the fraud of global warming at my own school than it is to protest in the media. I run the risk of alienating myself and my children at school.

If anybody would like to send my schools a note telling them to stop teaching the global warming fraud with reasons why, I would be grateful.

Here are the principal’s emails: Vince.DiGrandi@WappingersSchools.org
Tom.Stella@wappingersschools.org

Perhaps I can do the same for someone else.

Thanks in advance.

Here’s what I recommend:  Send an e-mail to the two people listed above, and congratulate them for offering real science to their students.  Tell them you’ve heard that there is a national campaign to stop them from teaching good science, and that you support them and hope the campaign fails.

Anyone who lies to his kids about science, about the environmental issues we face, about life in general, will indeed alienate themselves from their children, if the children are lucky.  “r” wishes his kids to be taught voodoo science.  Shame on him.

I wonder what “r” thinks of his own teachers.

5 Comments | Climate change, climate_change, Cost of Green, Education, Global warming, History, Politics, Rampant stupidity, Science, Teachers, Voodoo science, War on Education, War on Science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

The unbearable lightness of climate denialist thought

December 28, 2009

Maybe “emptiness” would be a better description.

Carbon dioxide’s greenhouse gas functions were discovered in the 19th century.  The physics are beyond dispute by rational people.

But that doesn’t stop the hard-core denialists from searching for a way to deny the undeniable.  Anthony Watts hosts a guest post from a guy who says that because the atmosphere is complex, the physics of global warming do not apply.

The guest poster is Willis Eschenbach.  His argument?  Well, rivers don’t run straight to the sea; they meander.  Ergo, water doesn’t run downhill in a complex system.   Consequently, no global warming.  In another place he argues that humans are not metal, therefore, no global warming.

I mean — sweet Mother of Pearl! —  this guy even denies the existence of the Army Corps of Engineers, and river straightening:

The results of changes in such a flow system are often counterintuitive. For example, suppose we want to shorten the river. Simple physics says it should be easy. So we cut through an oxbow bend, and it makes the river shorter … but only for a little while. Soon the river readjusts, and some other part of the river becomes longer. The length of the river is actively maintained by the system. Contrary to our simplistic assumptions, the length of the river is not changed by our actions.

No wonder they place all their bets on stealing e-mails from scientists.  Somebody show that man the South Platte River through Denver, Colorado, or the Los Angeles River through Los Angeles, or the Mississippi from Arkansas to the Gulf.  Somebody give that man a paddle!

Here are a couple of clues:  First, water always runs downhill — capillary action being the exception.  Eschenbach doesn’t propose capillary action as a driver of river meandering.  Any hydrologist will tell  you, however, that even a meandering river runs downhill.  Second, human beings don’t conduct heat like metal blocks.  Even a dead human won’t conduct heat like a copper block, but especially a living human will radiate heat away through several different paths, so that heating the feet of a human will not cause a concomitant rise in temperature of the head.  But, heck, if you soak the human’s head in hot water, it won’t warm like a block of steel, either.  The examples offered in this piece get pushed past the brink of absurdity.  It’s impossible for me to believe that Eschenbach — or Watts — fails to understand the physics so greatly.  I can only imagine that they are driven by a fanatic devotion to an idea of the result they hope to see, and that blinds them to the errors they make.

Finally, water’s flow, downhill or up with capillary action, doesn’t negate global warming.  Human conductivity affects warming not at all, also.

(No, “constructal theory” doesn’t have much to do with it.  Constructal theory generally doesn’t apply to atmospheric conditions, since the air is, technically, not alive, but a dynamic fluid system already highly evolved for these purposes.  Even for those cases in which contructal ideas apply to non-living systems, constructal theory does not claim that laws of physics are suspended or held in abeyance, as Eschenbach claims at Watts’s blog.  The idea of constructal theory is that systems not in equilibrium, will, over time, figure out (evolve) more efficient means to get into equilibrium.  This has nothing to do with the fact of CO2 acting as a greenhouse gas.  Constructal theory would only suggest that, over time, the atmosphere would develop systems to get heat distributed better despite CO2, which means that warming would not be held in abeyance at all, but spread out further and farther.)

Watts is already hot that I posted science links at his place on another post.  Go see what other commenters can get away with.  Can the camel’s nose of real science push into the WUWT tent?

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5 Comments | air pollution, chemistry, Climate change, climate_change, denialism, Global warming, Green Politics, Paranoia, Physics, Rampant stupidity, Research, Science, Voodoo science, War on Science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Anthony Watts: ‘Don’t bother me with the sarcastic facts’

December 27, 2009

Somebody needs to come up with new corollaries of Poe’s Law to cover climate skeptics.

Anthony Watts posts a series on polar bears, with Grandpa Bear kvetching about what his grandson is learning in public polar bear school about climate change.

I commented, posting a link to the press release of the Polar Bear Study Group, the world’s longest-established and most-respected organization on polar bear populations and population health.  It’s a rather dull press release, really, on the last meeting of the group last summer:

The PBSG renewed the conclusion from previous meetings that the greatest challenge to conservation of polar bears is ecological change in the Arctic resulting from climatic warming.  Declines in the extent of the sea ice have accelerated since the last meeting of the group in 2005, with unprecedented sea ice retreats in 2007 and 2008. The PBSG confirmed its earlier conclusion that unabated global warming will ultimately threaten polar bears everywhere.

The PBSG also recognized that threats to polar bears will occur at different rates and times across their range although warming induced habitat degradation and loss are already negatively affecting polar bears in some parts of their range. Subpopulations of polar bears face different combinations of human threats.  The PBSG recommends that jurisdictions take into account the variation in threats facing polar bears.

The PBSG noted polar bears suffer health effects from persistent pollutants.  At the same time, climate change appears to be altering the pathways by which such pollutants enter ecosystems. The PBSG encourages international efforts to evaluate interactions between climate change and pollutants.

The PBSG endorses efforts to develop non-invasive means of population assessment, and continues to encourage jurisdictions to incorporate capture and radio tracking programs into their national monitoring efforts. The members also recognized that aboriginal people are both uniquely positioned to observe wildlife and changes in the environment, and their knowledge is essential for effective management.

All I posted was the link.

The response at Watts’ What’s Up With That?

Censored:

Ed Darrell (20:50:48) :

[snip – pointless sarcasm]

Is that emblematic of the state climate “skeptics” are in these days, that a dull recitation of the facts is “sarcasm?” “Don’t confuse us with the facts,” they seem to be saying.  And, if they really think they’re making headway with stolen e-mails, why are they so crabby?

More politics than science, more bluster than discussion.

This cartoon scares them, too.  Maybe they know something’s up:

Chris Riddell cartoon, December 20, 2009, The Observer

Chris Riddell cartoon, December 20, 2009, The Observer

Follow up: Gail Zawacki at Wit’s End neatly captures the tell-tale signs of denialism at work.  Carol Kane had a great line in Annie Hall: “I love being reduced to a cultural stereotype.”  Denialists everywhere appear to share that emotion.

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15 Comments | Cartoons, Climate change, climate_change, Cost of Green, denialism, Global warming, Green Politics, Natural history, Politics, Science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Investigative report: Climate science e-mails ugly, science is correct; “skeptics'” response even uglier

December 14, 2009

Associate Press put a team of five reporters on the e-mails purloined from the Hadley climate science group in England.  AP sought advice on interpreting the messages from other scientists involved in ethical science issues.

To the best of my knowledge, this is the only group that has gone through the entire mass to see what is really shown — more than a million words, the AP story estimated.

Veteran climate issue reporter Seth Borenstein wrote up the story:  Scientists in the heat of research and interpretation, on deadline with government policy makers, often attacked unfairly — one received death threats for his work on climate change.  Under those conditions, one might understand that the scientists were defensive and rude, in private, about their critics.  One of the critics harassed scientists with repeated FOI requests, then didn’t use the data.  In one case, a critic published a paper based on bad data — what the critics accused the scientists of doing.

But in the end, there was no pattern of data fixing.   Independent reviews today confirm that independently-generated studies confirm the warming the scientists wrote about.

Of course, that doesn’t stop the hecklers of the scientists from complaining, either about the science or the way it’s reported.  Rather than deal with the material AP reported, for example, warming blogger Anthony Watts attacked the reporter who wrote the story, complaining that he is “too close” to the story, since he seems to have been covering the story long enough that his e-mail appears in the purloined e-mails.

‘You can’t report the news because you know too much,’ is Watts’s complaint.

In the e-mail cited, Seth Borenstein wrote to some of the world’s best scientists in the field and asked their opinions about a paper making some contrary claims.

To Watts, seeking information from the experts is beyond the pale.  He calls it an ethical infraction.

Watts is unbound by such ethical rules, however, and so can make up stuff like this with abandon.  Watts’ charge is hooey, foul play, and stupid.  In the headline to his post, Watts wrote, “AP’s Seth Borenstein is just too damn cozy with the people he covers – time for AP to do something about it.”

That’s right, AP — it’s time Borenstein got a promotion for doing the legwork, honestly, that critics of the science have refused to do.  Borenstein’s reporting is important.  The story goes beyond mere repeating of press releases, beyond the mere “he-said/he-said” norm.  Borenstein, in unemotional, clear and cool terms, indicted the critics of warming, by factually reporting the events.  Give that man and his team a Pulitzer Prize.

Why shouldn’t reporters go to the experts?  Why shouldn’t they ask the opinions of all sides in a science debate?

Think about it for a moment:  Watts’s complaint is that Borenstein sought fairness in reporting on Watts’s side’s claim.  Because Borenstein refused to show the bias Watts wants, Watts went after Borenstein.

Could there be a more clear and dramatic illustration of why the scientists’ ire is raised by such silly criticism?

Watts quotes at length from the Associated Press Statement of News Values and Principles, slyly implying by doing so that Borenstein violated the rules somewhere.  Not so.

Watts worries about “getting too cozy with sources.”  Read his blog.  Watts prefers to be the source — but he also reports on the debate.

Watts would do well to read that AP ethical statement again, and take it to heart.

His charges are groundless, scurrilous in the light of the AP team’s going to great lengths to be fair to all sides.  Watts and other critics bank on people being shocked that scientists get angry.   Watts and his colleagues have campaigned across the web, on television and in print, to have these scientists tarred and feathered, and their science dismissed — though there is not handful of feathers to weigh against the mountains of evidence the scientists accumulated and published over the past 50 years.

Do not take my word for it.  Read the AP story.  Read Watts’s rant.  Read the e-mails, if you wish (you can find them from my opinionated take on the flap).  Check with the scientists you know and trust on their views of the science done and reported.

I won a couple of minor investigative journalism awards in college.  I have been a member of the Society of Professional Journalists off and on since 1974 (not much since I quit doing that stuff full time).  I have worked with some of the best investigative journalists and Congressional investigators in my duties with the Senate.  I’ve been a member of the FOIA committees in Utah and Maryland.  I’ve lobbied in three states for freedom of information.  I know a little bit about investigative reporting and fairness.  And yes, IAAL.

Borenstein’s piece is solid and good.  In light of the firestorm Watts hopes to bring down on it, Borenstein’s article is a shining example of high ethics in journalism.  It deserves your reading.

If the critics had data denying warming, or denying human causation of warming, why are they hiding it so well?  If they have the data to prove the scientists are in error, why not publish it, instead of sniping at a wire service reporter who merely tells the story?

Critics don’t have the data to contest the hard work of the scientists.  They don’t have the data to make a case against either warming or human causation.  And now we all know.

Post Script:  Um, and , you know, it’s not like Borenstein hasn’t done some stuff over the years to make it look like he’s been on Watts’s side:  Stoat, Mooney’s Intersection, Island of Doubt.  Watts’ fit may put a gloss on Borenstein’s work that wasn’t there to begin with.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/12/14/tech/main5977430.shtml

Help others investigate the facts:

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14 Comments | Accuracy, air pollution, Climate change, climate_change, Cost of Green, Environmental protection, Ethics, Global warming, Green Politics, History, Political Smear, Politics, Science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Slight fluctuations from 1998’s record heat doesn’t mean warming is done

December 14, 2009

Sometimes you find rational discussion and good information in the newspaper.

This story moved on the McClatchy wire last August (I just recently came across it):

Drop in world temperatures fuels global warming debate

By Robert S. Boyd | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Has Earth’s fever broken?

Official government measurements show that the world’s temperature has cooled a bit since reaching its most recent peak in 1998.

That’s given global warming skeptics new ammunition to attack the prevailing theory of climate change. The skeptics argue that the current stretch of slightly cooler temperatures means that costly measures to limit carbon dioxide emissions are ill-founded and unnecessary.

Proposals to combat global warming are “crazy” and will “destroy more than a million good American jobs and increase the average family’s annual energy bill by at least $1,500 a year,” the Heartland Institute, a conservative research organization based in Chicago, declared in full-page newspaper ads earlier this summer. “High levels of carbon dioxide actually benefit wildlife and human health,” the ads asserted.

Many scientists agree, however, that hotter times are ahead. A decade of level or slightly lower temperatures is only a temporary dip to be expected as a result of natural, short-term variations in the enormously complex climate system, they say.

McClatchy’s story would be accurate today, even after the records show that the last decade is the hottest ever — such a long shelf-life shows good research and writing by McClatchy’s reporters.  McClatchy’s story doesn’t contradict this press release last week from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO):

2000–2009, THE WARMEST DECADE

Geneva, 8 December 2009 (WMO) – The year 2009 is likely to rank in the top 10 warmest on record since the beginning of instrumental climate records in 1850, according to data sources compiled by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). The global combined sea surface and land surface air temperature for 2009 (January–October) is currently estimated at 0.44°C ± 0.11°C (0.79°F ± 0.20°F) above the 1961–1990 annual average of 14.00°C/57.2°F. The current nominal ranking of 2009, which does not account for uncertainties in the annual averages, places it as the fifth-warmest year. The decade of the 2000s (2000–2009) was warmer than the decade spanning the 1990s (1990–1999), which in turn was warmer than the 1980s (1980–1989). More complete data for the remainder of the year 2009 will be analysed at the beginning of 2010 to update the current assessment.

This year above-normal temperatures were recorded in most parts of the continents. Only North America (United States and Canada) experienced conditions that were cooler than average. Given the current figures, large parts of southern Asia and central Africa are likely to have the warmest year on record.

If only all reporting were so accurate.

1 Comment | Academic freedom, Climate change, climate_change, Global warming, Journalism, Newspapers, Science | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

If only hysteric, misplaced paranoia could reduce greenhouse gases . . .

December 10, 2009

“I got this idea for a movie!”

“Not another vampire who sucks the sap of only endangered species plants, please, Bob.”

“No, really, you gotta hear this!  Heck, it might even be real.”

“Whaddya mean by that, Bob?”

“I mean this whole Copenhagen thing!  World leaders getting together in secret to plot the destruction of world industry!”

“Copenhagen’s meetings are wide open, Bob.  It’s on the news everywhere.  And did you ever notice that most of the world leaders there are capitalists, and that they owe their election to other capitalists, frequently of the oil-drilling and coal-mining sort?”

“That’s what they want you to think!”

“Well, I think that way whether they want me to or not, Bob.  Money, you know?  I love it.  I follow it.  There’s no money in controlling climate change.  If there were, I’d be Copenhagen right now.”

“You’re missing the point!  These guys are meeting to take the money away from guys like you.”

“Pierre, here at the restaurant, does a pretty good job of taking money from guys like me, in return for a good arugula salad and a chunk of rare roast beef.”

“That’s not what I mean!”

“I think you’ve got another crazy idea that won’t make a good movie.  I’ll let you talk through the arugula, Bob.  When the roast beef comes, I don’t want stupid plots that won’t sell on the table — so it better be good, or we’ll change the topic.”

“Okay, here goes:  Mad climate scientists create a scare about global warming, and everybody gives them their money, and they the rest of the movie is about the chase to catch them before they get to a secret beach in the Maldives or Marshall Islands where they’ll hide forever in their secret lair.”

“I’m not impressed yet, Bob.  Why would anyone think a climate scientist would be so power hungry?

“They meet in Al Gore’s mansion.  Al Gore’s the power-hungry villain!”

“Al Gore?  He lost an election to George F. Bush, for cryin’ out loud.  Nobody would believe that.”

“You mean W — ‘George W. Bush.'”

“Have you seen what the stock market’s been like lately, Bob?  No, of course not.  You don’t own stocks in regular companies — gun makers and gold dealers only — but after what happened to my portfolio, I mean F.  He’s George F. Bush to me.”

“C’mon, it’s ripped from the headlines!”

“It’s about as exciting as the crossword puzzle, Bob.  That’s not a movie — it’s a new sleep drug.  I couldn’t sell it to a religious group trying to make a movie about Charles Darwin, even if we dressed Gore up as Darwin.  Even they’d see through the plot, Bob.”

“Archie!  It’s a great movie!  Think of the special effects!”

“Think of the NoDoz concession.  Theatres don’t have ’em.  Climate scientists taking over the world is like the Joffrey Ballet as the perps on the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.  It’d be like getting toe-shoed to death.”

Oh, c’mon, Arch.  I got half the screenplay already done!”

“Well you need more research.”

“What?”

“Maldives.  Marshall Islands.  They’re the poster islands for climate change.  They’re the first nations to go as the sea rises.  All the geeks will know that, and so they’ll laugh at your movie.  Geeks laughing at you isn’t good box office.”

“We can do it like Superman!  You know a Fortress of Solitude somewhere in the ice.”

“No ice would kinda make that plot device not work, wouldn’t it, Bob?”

“Oh, c’mon.  No one really thinks the ice is disappearing!”

“Bob — remember our agreement?”

“What?”

“Beef’s here.  Shuttup.”

“Huh?  Oh, yeah.  Oh.  Yeah.”

“Okay, Archie.  How about this:  There really are gods, and hysteria makes them happy.”

“Hysteria.  Yeah.  There’s value in that.”

“No, I mean it.  Hysteria makes the gods happy, and so then they do good things for people.”

“Like what?”

“Well . . . like . . . like cleaning up global warming.  Yeah, that’s it!  Blind hysteria makes global warming go away!”

“Nobody’ll believe that, either, Bob.  If that worked, global warming would have been gone ten years ago.  Shuttup and eat your beef.”

1 Comment | Climate change, climate_change, Cost of Green, Environmental protection, Green Politics, History, Science | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

The Curse of “Not Evil, Just Wrong” — still evil and wrong

December 10, 2009

At the first post on this material, the thread got a little long — not loading well in some browsers, I hear.

So the comments are closed there, and open here.

In fashion we wish were different but seems all too typical, so-called skeptics of global warming defend their position with invective and insult.  But they are vigorous about it.  What do you think?  What information can you contribute?

Here’s the post that set off the denialists, anti-science types and DDT sniffers, and a tiny few genuinely concerned but under-informed citizens:

AP caption: Former Vice President Al Gore, left, listens to speakers during a meeting at the Grove Missionary Baptist Church in Buckingham, Va., Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2019. Gore visited the area that is the proposed site for a compressor station for the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
Should be obviously silly for anyone to argue former divinity student Al Gore is evil, as this film implies despite the demurrer. It should also be obviously that it’s evil to call Gore wrong on these issues; but that doesn’t stop brown Earther critics of scientists and Al Gore.

I warned you about it earlier. Crank science sites across the internet feature news of another cheap hit on Rachel Carson and science in movie form.

“Not Evil, Just Wrong” is slated for release on October 18. This is the film that tried to intrude on the Rachel Carson film earlier this year, but managed to to get booked only at an elementary school in Seattle, Washington — Rachel Carson Elementary, a green school where the kids showed more sense than the film makers by voting to name the school after the famous scientist-author.

The film is both evil and wrong.

Errors just in the trailer:

  1. Claims that Al Gore said sea levels will rise catastrophically, “in the very near future.” Not in his movie, not in his writings or speeches. Not true. That’s a simple misstatement of what Gore said, and Gore had the science right.
  2. ” . . . [I]t wouldn’t be a bad thing for this Earth to warm up. In fact, ice is the enemy of life.” “Bad” in this case is a value judgment — global warming isn’t bad if you’re a weed, a zebra mussel, one of the malaria parasites, a pine bark beetle, any other tropical disease, or a sadist. But significant warming as climatologists, physicists and others project, would be disastrous to agriculture, major cities in many parts of the world, sea coasts, and most people who don’t live in the Taklamakan or Sahara, and much of the life in the ocean. Annual weather cycles within long-established ranges, is required for life much as we know it. “No ice” is also an enemy of life.
  3. “They want to raise our taxes.” No, that’s pure, uncomposted bovine excrement.
  4. “They want to close our factories.” That’s more effluent from the anus of male bovines.
  5. The trailer notes the usual claim made by Gore opponents that industry cannot exist if it is clean, that industry requires that we poison the planet. Were that true, we’d have a need to halt industry now, lest we become like the yeast in the beer vat, or the champagne bottle, manufacturing alcohol until the alcohol kills the yeast. Our experience with Rivers and Harbors Act of 1899, the Clean Air Acts and the Clean Water Act is that cleaning the environment produces economic growth, not the other way around. A city choked in pollution dies. Los Angeles didn’t suffer when the air got cleaner. Pittsburgh’s clean air became a way to attract new industries to the city, before the steel industry there collapsed. Cleaning Lake Erie didn’t hurt industry. The claim made by the film is fatuous, alarmist, and morally corrupt.

    When the human health, human welfare, and environmental effects which could be expressed in dollar terms were added up for the entire 20-year period, the total benefits of Clean Air Act programs were estimated to range from about $6 trillion to about $50 trillion, with a mean estimate of about $22 trillion. These estimated benefits represent the estimated value Americans place on avoiding the dire air quality conditions and dramatic increases in illness and premature death which would have prevailed without the 1970 and 1977 Clean Air Act and its associated state and local programs. By comparison, the actual costs of achieving the pollution reductions observed over the 20 year period were $523 billion, a small fraction of the estimated monetary benefits.

  6. “Some of the environmental activists have not come to accept that the human is also part of the environment.” Fatuous claim. Environmentalists note that humans uniquely possess the ability to change climate on a global scale, intentionally, for the good or bad; environmentalists choose to advocate for actions that reduce diseases like malaria, cholera and asthma. We don’t have to sacrifice a million people a year to malaria, in order to be industrial and productive. We don’t have to kill 700,000 kids with malaria every year just to keep cars.
  7. “They want to go back to the Dark Ages and the Black Plague.” No, that would be the film makers. Environmentalists advocate reducing filth and ignorance both. Ignorance and lack of ability to read, coupled with religious fanaticism, caused the strife known as “the Dark Ages.” It’s not environmentalists who advocate an end to cheap public schools.
  8. The trailer shows a kid playing in the surf on a beach. Of course, without the Clean Water Act and other attempts to keep the oceans clean, such play would be impossible. That we can play again on American beaches is a tribute to the environmental movement, and reason enough to grant credence to claims of smart people like Al Gore and the scientists whose work he promotes.
  9. “I cannot believe that Al Gore has great regard for people, real people.” So, this is a film promoting the views of crabby, misanthropic anal orifices who don’t know Al Gore at all? Shame on them. And, why should anyone want to see such a film? If I want to see senseless acts of stupidity, I can rent a film by Quentin Tarantino and get some art with the stupidity. [Update, November 23, 2009: This may be one of the most egregiously false charges of the film. Gore, you recall, is the guy who put his political career and presidential ambitions on hold indefinitely when his son was seriously injured in an auto-pedestrian accident; Gore was willing to sacrifice all his political capital in order to get his son healed. My first dealings directly with Gore came on the Organ Transplant bill. Gore didn’t need a transplant, didn’t have need for one in his family, and had absolutely nothing to gain from advocacy for the life-saving procedure. It was opposed by the chairman of his committee, by a majority of members of his own party in both Houses of Congress, by many in the medical establishment, by many in the pharmaceutical industry, and by President Reagan, who didn’t drop his threat to veto the bill until he signed it, as I recall. Gore is a man of deep, human-centered principles. Saying “I can’t believe Al Gore has great regard for real people” only demonstrates the vast ignorance and perhaps crippling animus of the speaker.]

That’s a whopper about every 15 seconds in the trailer — the film itself may make heads spin if it comes close to that pace of error.

Where have we seen this before? Producers of the film claim as “contributors” some of the people they try to lampoon — people like Ed Begley, Jr., and NASA’s James E. Hansen, people who don’t agree in any way with the hysterical claims of the film, and people who, I wager, would be surprised to be listed as “contributors.”

It’s easy to suppose these producers used the same ambush-the-scientist technique used earlier by the producers of the anti-science, anti-Darwin film “Expelled!“

Here, see the hysteria, error and alarmism for yourself:

Ann McElhinney is one of the film’s producers. Her past work includes other films against protecting environment and films for mining companies. She appears to be affiliated with junk science purveyors at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an astro-turf organization in Washington, D.C., for whom she flacked earlier this year (video from Desmogblog):

Remember, too, that this film is already known to have gross inaccuracies about Rachel Carson and DDT, stuff that high school kids could get right easily.

Anyone have details on McElhinney and her colleague, Phelim McAlee?

More:

Related posts, at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub:

133 Comments | Accuracy, Climate change, climate_change, Cost of Green, Environmental protection, Freedom of Information, Global warming, Green Politics, History, Junk science, Natural resources, Political Smear, Politics, Rachel Carson, Science, Uncomposted Organic Fertilizer, Voodoo history, Voodoo science, War on Science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

What if Al Gore were wrong about global warming? That would be great news.

December 6, 2009

It’s a point that the denialists just don’t get.  If Gore were wrong, if warming isn’t occurring, or if the warming were found to be part of a deeper cycle and all we need to do is hang on for another five or six years until the cycle shifts, that would be great news.

No one would complain about a study that actually showed that.

But no study shows that.  And the e-mails that somebody purloined from an English research center, if the worst allegations about scientists were true, can’t affect warming.  In fact, as I understand it, the chart that was “doctored” got its new, non-tree-ring data from actual thermometer readings — which, of course, show warming.

Worse, the chart’s predictions for following years turn out to be low!  Warming is outpacing some of the pessimists’ predictions.

Johann Hari, a columnist with the internet-fueled London Independent, discusses how good the news would be, in a missive at Huffington Post.

Every day, I pine for the global warming deniers to be proved right. I loved the old world – of flying to beaches wherever we want, growing to the skies, and burning whatever source of energy came our way. I hate the world to come that I’ve seen in my reporting from continent after continent – of falling Arctic ice shelves, of countries being swallowed by the sea, of vicious wars for the water and land that remains. When I read the works of global warming deniers like Nigel Lawson or Ian Plimer, I feel a sense of calm washing over me. The nightmare is gone; nothing has to change; the world can stay as it was.

But then I go back to the facts. However much I want them to be different, they sit there, hard and immovable. Nobody disputes that greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere, like a blanket holding in the Sun’s rays. Nobody disputes that we are increasing the amount of those greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. And nobody disputes that the world has become considerably hotter over the past century. (If you disagree with any of these statements, you’d fail a geography GCSE).

Alas, there is no significant or credible evidence that warming is not occurring, nor that we humans are not playing a huge role.

So, in Copenhagen where the world’s leaders and other policy makers are meeting this week to discuss the situation, there will be no champagne to toast an end to global warming.

That would be good news.  It’s not the news we get.

Also see:

1 Comment | air pollution, Climate change, climate_change, Cost of Green, Disasters, Environmental protection, Green Politics, Politics, Public health, Science | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Time to start making huge stone heads

November 29, 2009

Well, maybe not yet.

But consider Jared Diamond’s 1997 essay in Discover:

In just a few centuries, the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism. Are we about to follow their lead?

Among the most riveting mysteries of human history are those posed by vanished civilizations. Everyone who has seen the abandoned buildings of the Khmer, the Maya, or the Anasazi is immediately moved to ask the same question: Why did the societies that erected those structures disappear?

Diamond’s essay appears in different, and longer form (as I recall) as a chapter in his book Collapse.  That book is all about why civilizations collapse.

A lot of it boils down to wasting of resources.  Easter Island had not always been the grass-only rock with just a couple of thousand people clinging to a desperate existence, as Dutch explorer Jacob Roggeveen found it on Easter Sunday, 1722 (April 5).  When the ancestors of the tiny population found the island, it had forests, and probably animals, and rich enough resources to support a larger population.

Until they deforested it, hunted to near extinction every animal that couldn’t escape, and caused the collapse of their own civilization.

Is this an analogy for what humans are doing to the planet now with pollution, especially atmospheric-warming air pollution?

Diamond concluded his essay:

I suspect, though, that the disaster happened not with a bang but with a whimper. After all, there are those hundreds of abandoned statues to consider. The forest the islanders depended on for rollers and rope didn’t simply disappear one day-it vanished slowly, over decades. Perhaps war interrupted the moving teams; perhaps by the time the carvers had finished their work, the last rope snapped. In the meantime, any islander who tried to warn about the dangers of progressive deforestation would have been overridden by vested interests of carvers, bureaucrats, and chiefs, whose jobs depended on continued deforestation. Our Pacific Northwest loggers are only the latest in a long line of loggers to cry, “Jobs over trees!” The changes in forest cover from year to year would have been hard to detect: yes, this year we cleared those woods over there, but trees are starting to grow back again on this abandoned garden site here. Only older people, recollecting their childhoods decades earlier, could have recognized a difference. Their children could no more have comprehended their parents’ tales than my eight-year-old sons today can comprehend my wife’s and my tales of what Los Angeles was like 30 years ago.

Gradually trees became fewer, smaller, and less important. By the time the last fruit-bearing adult palm tree was cut, palms had long since ceased to be of economic significance. That left only smaller and smaller palm saplings to clear each year, along with other bushes and treelets. No one would have noticed the felling of the last small palm.

By now the meaning of Easter Island for us should be chillingly obvious. Easter Island is Earth writ small. Today, again, a rising population confronts shrinking resources. We too have no emigration valve, because all human societies are linked by international transport, and we can no more escape into space than the Easter Islanders could flee into the ocean. If we continue to follow our present course, we shall have exhausted the world’s major fisheries, tropical rain forests, fossil fuels, and much of our soil by the time my sons reach my current age.

Resources:

Jared Diamond in a 2003 appearance at TED:

3 Comments | Anthropology, Archaeology, Conservation, Cost of Green, Environmental protection, Global warming, Green Politics, History, History Methods and Tools, Natural resources, Science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Yeah, it’s ironic (hacked e-mails and global warming)

November 26, 2009

James’s Empty Blog:

It is hard to miss the irony in people eagerly poring through illegally-obtained private email, looking for ethical breaches by the writers! I’m sure we can all imagine the outrage if one of the emails revealed that a scientist had hacked into one of the sceptics’ computers and was reading all their correspondence. So a bit of perspective is called for here.

James Is A Scientist (IANAS), and he has much good stuff to say (read some of the other posts about the hacked e-mails while you’re there) — but you gotta wonder about a blog that follows such a post with this:

Prawns, Jules Berry

Prawns not in their native habitat. Probably Tastimus deliciousus

Tip of the old scrub brush to Stoat.

1 Comment | Accuracy, Climate change, climate_change, Ethics, Food history, Global warming, How do we know what we know, Research, Science | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

Smoking guns in the CRU stolen e-mails: A real tale of real ethics in science

November 22, 2009

Climate skeptics fear that some climate scientists have cooked their data in order to produce a pre-ordained outcome from their research.  Many of these people are excited this weekend at the public release of e-mails purloined from Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University in England, from one of the leading climate research labs.  Every crank science and crackpot political site has a story touting the end of research on global warming.

Sure enough, with just a few minutes of searching the e-mails, I found references to ethical breaches in cooking of data, and a discussion about how to talk about  the data and the issue in public.

The paper involved is this one:

David H. Douglass, John R. Christy, Benjamin D. Pearsona and S. Fred Singer, “A comparison of tropical temperature trends with model predictions,” INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CLIMATOLOGY, Int. J. Climatol. (2007).  Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/joc.1651

Unless you follow this issue closely, you probably don’t see the problem with publicizing the ethical breaches scientists thought they saw in this paper and its publication.  Also, if you are a “skeptic” who is chronically apoplectic over Al Gore’s success in informing people about climate change and winning prizes and making money, you may be thrilled that there is a scientist anywhere worried about ethical lapses by scientists involved in this controversy, and you can’t wait to see them brought to justice (cooking data is a federal crime in the U.S., if done with federal research money).

[Yes, I think there are ethical questions about publishing anything from these e-mails, let alone links so the viewing public can read them completely.  However, since much of this material has already been cherry picked and quote mined by political activists who hope to stop action to mediate and stop global warming, I think a good case can be made that, to be fair, we should look at the entire collection to see what they really reveal.  There may be criminal liability for some of the disclosures I’m discussing here — but that liability does not fall on the scientists who have been unfairly impugned in the last few days.  The liability falls instead on the critics of warming.  Let’s be fair.  In  a fair fight, truth wins.]

So, hold your high-fives and “I-told-you-sos” until you look at the data, at the information found.

One of the e-mails is quite explicit:

I think the scientific fraud committed by Douglass needs to be exposed. His co-authors may be innocent bystanders, but I doubt it.

Fraud?  Right there in front of everyone?  In the climate debate?

In the end, the scientists in the discussion determined not to hold a press conference to announce a finding of fraud, but instead to hunker down and work on publishing datasets that would contradict the alleged fraudulent paper, and establish their case with data instead of invective and press conferences.

They even declined to rush to inform the public of the fraud after a lengthy series of attempts to duplicate the results with well-known, accurate methods on accepted data:

Bottom line: Douglass et al. claim that “In all cases UAH and RSS satellite trends are inconsistent with model trends.” (page 6, lines 61-62). This claim is categorically wrong. In fact, based on our results, one could justifiably claim that THERE IS ONLY ONE CASE in which model T2LT and T2 trends are inconsistent with UAH and RSS results! These guys screwed up big time. [emphasis added by MFB]

Anthony Watts and others may be justified in asking that the scientists who wrote this fraudulent paper should be summarily dismissed, and in questioning why other scientists dallied in exposing the fraud.

But there is this to consider:  The paper in question is a paper critical of warming hypotheses, and it was co-authored by at least a couple of the most strident critics of Al Gore, James Hansen, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The smoking gun was used to shoot down a hasty effort to brand climate-change critics as unprofessional and wrong.  The smoking gun was used to enforce the hard ethical rules of science:  Don’t speak until your data allow a fair conclusion.

The smoking gun e-mails show correct and careful behavior by the scientists who contributed to the IPCC report, but unethical behavior by the critics whose backers, we might assume, stole the e-mails in the first place, and published them without understanding the depth of moral character demonstrated by most scientists in the conduct of their professions.

Now, I have not analyzed every possible permutation of this thread, only those with the title shown.  I used the “Alleged CRU e-mails — searchable” cited by Anthony Watts and others.  I stumbled into the thread discussing the paper by “Douglass, et al.”  I then did a search for e-mails discussing “Douglass,” and limited it to the thread on this point.  I suspect there are other e-mails in that thread in which Douglass’s name is wholly missing, and which did not turn up  in the search.

Now you know the rest of the story.  Fred Singer is a leading denialist, one of the organizers of the political campaign to blunt the publication and discussion of evidence of global warming and what to do about it.  The Douglass, et al. paper under discussion was a key component of the denialists’ campaign in 2007.  The purloined e-mails point to unethical behaviors by the scientists on the anti-warming side, the so-called “skeptics.”

So, from a quick dive into the data we learn:

  1. Climate scientists talk like Boy Scouts trying to impress a Board of Review.
  2. Climate scientists are extremely careful with data.
  3. When they think no one is looking, climate scientists behave ethically.
  4. When they think have found a piece of fraud, climate scientists are careful to recheck their numbers several times and in several ways before saying anything.
  5. Instead of holding a press conference, climate scientists like to keep the fisticuffs in the confines of juried journals.
  6. Climate “skeptics” are full of themselves, and probably wrongly accuse climate scientists of fixing data.
  7. Fraud in climate science may occur, but generally on the side of those who argue against warming or who advocate inaction as a response.
  8. The claims of smoking guns that negate the case for doing something about global warming are most likely hoaxes.

Here are the texts I looked at:

Update, November 25, 2009: Be sure to check out these posts, at George Monbiot’s blog in the comments, at Stoat,  and here at the Bathtub. This is the best judgment on the affair, I think, from Our Kingdom at Open Democracy:  “Respect to any climate-deniers who invest all their pension funds in seashore hotels in the Maldives… otherwise, they should step aside, and let the work of saving the future begin.”

Smoke this:

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89 Comments | Climate change, climate_change, Ethics, Global warming, Green Politics, Hoaxes, Scandals, Science | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell

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