global warming
tlambert | February 15, 2006
Pat Michaels is notorious for lying about the predictions that James Hansen made in testimony before Congress in 1988. In his paper Hansen showed the results of three possible scenarios, but in his testimony before congress Hansen only showed emphasised the results of the most likely one, scenario B. As the graph here shows, scenario B turned out to be a very good prediction. However, in 1998 Michaels published a blatant lie about Hansen, erasing B and C and claiming that scenario A was his prediction.
Believe it or not, Michaels isdoing it again
[Hansen] distorted in front of the U.S.…
cmooney | February 13, 2006Apparently he did, at least according to Fred Barnes' new book, Rebel-in-Chief: Inside the Bold and Controversial Presidency of George W. Bush. I haven't read Barnes' book; I'm relying on a review of it by Ronald Brownstein, which includes the following:
Those who admire Bush will find plenty to celebrate in Barnes' portrayal of a president who is resolute and visionary, yet humble and pious. Perhaps inadvertently, Barnes also includes plenty of evidence likely to horrify those who oppose Bush (for instance, Barnes reports that the president fundamentally doesn't accept the theory of global…
tlambert | February 13, 2006
Four Corners has aired a story "The Greenhouse Mafia". Guy Pearse relates how industry lobbyists boasted how they wrote ministerial briefings, costings and cabinet submissions for the government, even though this is an obvious conflict of interest. And several scientists told how they were forbidden from commenting on certain climate change issues. The Age has a summary here, the transcript of the show is here, and more transcripts and forums on the show are here. There is also discussion at Larvatus Prodeo. Guy Pearse's full interview has this on our old friends, the Lavoisier Group:…
cmooney | February 10, 2006There's no longer any reason to feel sorry for this George Deutsch character. I had figured he might be a young guy in way over his head, and therefore worthy of our forgiveness or even sympathy. Well, forget it. Deutsch didn't know when to shut up and slink away. Now, in an attempt to "defend himself," he's dug a deeper hole with comments like this:
Speaking to a Texas radio station and then to The New York Times, Mr. Deutsch said the scientist, James E. Hansen, exaggerated the threat of warming and tried to cast the Bush administration's response to it as inadequate.
If Deutsch still thinks…
cmooney | February 7, 2006Andy Revkin is confirming a report, which originated on a blog, that NASA's now-notorious George Deutsch did not actually graduate from Texas A & M (as his resume had asserted). Revkin's also reporting that Deutsch has resigned from NASA. Ouch.
In a way, I feel sorry for Deutsch. I mean, who on earth put him in this situation? A presidential appointee, involved in controlling what scientists are saying? Clearly, James Hansen is right to observe that the issue is bigger than Deutsch. As he puts it in Revkin's story: "He's only a bit player...the problem is much broader and much deeper and…
cmooney | February 6, 2006The Boulder Daily Camera has the latest on NASA PR flacks torquing findings in the field of climate science. It seems that sea ice experts at the University of Colorado are angry about the way NASA altered a press release announcing the results of their research--which, of course, showed declining sea ice extent and warned about feedbacks that could lead to still more rapid melting:
NASA and the CU data center had agreed to issue a joint press release. But NASA's release, which appeared several hours after CU's, differed in tone and content. Scambos' quotation about rapid ice decline did not…
cmooney | February 1, 2006Sounds like fun, no? Yesterday in the Times, Cornelia Dean reported on a science policy meeting for members of Congress:
More than 100 committee staff members, Congressional aides and at least one senator, Jeff Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico, crammed into a basement meeting room. With all of the seats filled, people leaned on walls, sat on the floor and spilled out into the hall.
I'm glad members of Congress are getting cramped together to think about how they ought to structure their science advice, even if the necessary revival of the Office of Technology Assessment still seems quite far…
cmooney | January 30, 2006House Science Committee chair Sherry Boehlert--who has countered attacks on science before--isn't going to stand for the current games at NASA that are being played to restrict scientists from speaking. In a letter to NASA administrator Michael Griffin, Boehlert writes the following:
It ought to go without saying that government scientists must be free to describe their scientific conclusions and the implications of those conclusions to their fellow scientists, policymakers and the general public. Any effort to censor federal scientists biases public discussions of scientific issues,…
cmooney | January 30, 2006Juliet Eilperin, too, had a front page story in the Post yesterday about global warming. Alas, it wasn't as juicy as the Times piece about James Hansen (though it included a bit about him). It was mainly about the future risk of dangerous or abrupt climate change, but I found myself puzzled by the story framing introduced in the very first paragraph:
Now that most scientists agree human activity is causing Earth to warm, the central debate has shifted to whether climate change is progressing so rapidly that, within decades, humans may be helpless to slow or reverse the trend.
Isn't Eilperin…
cmooney | January 30, 2006Well, folks, Andy Revkin has done it again. Previously I have written about how Revkin has basically broken every major story about abuses of climate science, and climate scientists, by the Bush administration. And I must say, it's quite a litany of abuses. That's why I'm glad that so many bloggers (here, here, and here) have realized that Revkin's latest story provides yet another point of evidence of the "Republican War on Science."
The meme is spreading, my friends.
In any case, the latest news reported by Revkin--about more attempts to silence NASA climate expert Jim Hansen--reveals an…
cmooney | January 30, 2006Almost a year ago the Washington Post, following on my own work in Mother Jones, reported on Fox News "junk science" columnist Steven Milloy's ties to ExxonMobil. The piece was by Howard Kurtz, and it included a reaction from Milloy:
Milloy says Mother Jones has taken "old information and sloppily tried to insinuate that ExxonMobil has a say in what I write in my Fox column, which is entirely false. . . . My columns are based on what I believe and no one pays me to believe anything." Despite a mainstream scientific consensus, Milloy says that "the hysteria about global warming is entirely…
cmooney | January 29, 2006Media Matters has the latest on dubious statements about science by the editorial page of this seemingly august paper. It seems that two ed page folks have claimed that new findings about methane emissions from trees somehow undercut the case for concern about human caused global warming.
This is a ridiculous position: No matter what's going on with methane, we're still pumping oodles of CO2 into the atmosphere. That's not changing fast, and CO2 is the greenhouse gas that everyone is most worried about (not to say that the others don't matter). So this commentary from the Journal editors,…
cmooney | January 29, 2006There has been a ton of news lately on the climate change front. This is just to let all of you know that I have been assimilating it all, and will be blogging furiously about it tomorrow. I'm devoting the whole day--heck, perhaps the whole week--to this subject. Standby....
cmooney | January 20, 2006Bill Ruckelshaus. Russell Train. Lee Thomas. Bill Reilly. Christie Todd Whitman. What do these names all have in common?
Answer: All are former administrators of the Environmental Protection Agency. All take human-caused global warming seriously. And all are Republicans--moderate Republicans, of a very different breed from the ones who are (generally) running our government today.
The GOP has a proud environmental tradition, of that there can be no doubt. Just think of Teddy Roosevelt. The tradition lives on, albeit in a kind of exile, in these five Republican former EPA heads--none of whom,…
tlambert | January 20, 2006The Winter 2005 issue of the Nieman Reports has many articles about the news coverage of Evolution and Global Warming. Both topics, of course, are ill served by the tradition of "he said, she said" which gives undue prominence to advocates from the Discovery and Competitive Enterprise Institutes. You can read the entire issue (5.8 MB PDF) or just the Intelligent Design section, the Global Warming section or the Global Warming section with multimedia (2.3MB PDF+QuickTime).
cmooney | January 19, 2006Lots of folks have been posting stuff from their prior blogs. I'm not going to do too much of that, but I would like to breathe some more life into one discovery from my old blog--a rather scandalous quote from Energy and Commerce committee chair Joe Barton on climate science.
Nowadays everybody knows Barton for his outrageous attack on Michael Mann and his colleagues over the "hockey stick." But do they know what he said in 2001 in denouncing the Kyoto Protocol? To wit:
Second thing that the citizens of the United States need to understand about Kyoto is that the science is not settled. In…
tlambert | January 17, 2006Pat Michaels says that Kyoto would destroy the US economy:
In a nutshell, that's why the European governments are so exercised about Bush's "no" to Kyoto. They see it as an international instrument that would destroy the economy of their major competitor, even as they know it doesn't do a thing about global temperature. These facts are evident.
James Lovelock says global warming will make most of the planet uninhabitable
We are in a fool's climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will…
tlambert | January 17, 2006Pat Michaels has responded
to my post pointing out several errors in his post about frog extinctions:
It has subsequently been pointed out to us that the points on our Figure 1 (Pounds et al. Figure 4c) are not actually amphibian populations but simply a sampling of weather stations in the regions studied by Pounds et al.
It seems that Michaels could not bring himself to mention my name or link to my correction. (Nor do they accept trackbacks.)
Michaels comes with a different way of calculating the percentage of species that could become extinct because of the change in temperatures:
we…
cmooney | January 17, 2006I feel kinda bad: Rasmus at RealClimate has gone and done a massive post in response to an idle question I asked on my old blog about whether an Amazonian drought could be definitively linked to climate change. (Answer: Not at this point, if ever...) The post, though, really shows the virtue of RealClimate as the web's leading source of climate science discussion and explanation, so I encourage you to check it out.
tlambert | January 15, 2006Carl Zimmer has a useful summary of the recent Nature paper that links global warming with frog extinctions. Brian Schmidt comments:
I was curious about the fact that none of the climate-focused bloggers on my blog roll had written on the subject. Then it occurred to me - they're climatologists, not biologists, so they decided not to write about something outside of their expertise.
Pat Michaels wasn't bothered by this. In fact, he reckons that he's demolished the paper:
I have to say that this was the easiest shoot-down in some time,
because, in my humble opinion, it was the worst paper…