global warming
tlambert | September 5, 2006This week's "Ask a Science Blogger" question is:
I read this article in the NRO, and the author actually made some interesting arguments. 'Basically,' he said, 'I am questioning the premise that [global warming] is a problem rather than an opportunity.' Does he have a point?...
No. Robbins' article contains only one fact and that fact is wrong.
Most of his article is airy speculation about how warming will be beneficial, without looking at any of the scientific evidence on the question. He seems to be blithely unaware of stuff that happened the real world, like, oh, New Orleans:
But the…
tlambert | September 5, 2006So, what happens when you hire a coal industry PR guy as your environment writer? You get stories like this, by Matthew Warren:
Science tempers fears on climate change
The world's top climate scientists have cut their worst-case forecast for global warming over the next 100 years.
For the first time, scientists are confident enough to project a 3C rise on the average global daily temperature by the end of this century if no action is taken to cut greenhouse gas emissions. ...
In 2001, the scientists predicted temperature rises of between 1.4C and 5.8C on current levels by 2100, but better…
tlambert | September 3, 2006The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition posted a Bob Carter article repeating his bogus claim thatglobal warming ended in 1998. When folks left comments pointing out the flaws in Carter's arguments, the NZ CSC responded by deleting all the critical comments.
Meanwhile, over at Climate Audit, someone tried to post a link to my criticism of a Climate Audit post and discovered that they have blocked any comment that links to my blog. Charming.
Via Gareth Renowden.
cmooney | September 3, 2006
What a great cartoon by David Horsey for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Last night on the Karel show the host asked me if there really was a "Republican War on Science" or simply a bunch of bozos hijacking the good name of the Republican Party. It was a good question, and suffice it to say that if anyone does reclaim that good name, it will be moderates like Schwarzenegger.
P.S.: Finally, finally, the paperback Republican War on Science seems to have soared ahead of the hardcover on Amazon.com ratings. And now it looks as though the outdistancing will be permanent. My understanding is that…
cmooney | August 31, 2006I first heard of the Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam several years ago when he wrote a wrongheaded attack on the then-new phenomenon known as "blogging." Bloggers quickly eviscerated him; among other things, Beam had failed to comprehend one of their April Fool's jokes. As Catherine Seipp later summarized in the American Journalism Review:
Following a link on libertarian blogger Virginia Postrel's site (Dynamist.com), Beam found what he thought was a good example of "bizarre" blogging in Norwegian blogger Bjørn Staerk's (www.bearstrong.net) "left-wing raving." Unfortunately, free-marketeer…
loom | August 30, 2006From time to time, my Seed magazine hosts throw out a question for bloggers to answer. Today's question is concerns a column by James S. Robbins on global warming in the National Review Online. Robbins claims that global warming will be a great thing if it happens, which he doubts. The question is, does he have a point?
The question of what the full range of effects from global warming will be--both good and bad--is an important one, but Robbins shows little ability to offer an answer. His column overlooks important things, gets various facts wrong, and belies a general ignorance of and…
tlambert | August 29, 2006The graph below shows the predictions of James Hansen's 1988 climate model overlaid (in blue) with observed temperatures. Hansen's scenarios B and C have turned out to be very good predictions of what actually happened.
Of course, it is an article of faith amongst the global warming skeptics that the models are wrong, so what do they do?
Well, there are only two things you can do to make Hansen look bad -- you can misrepresent the results of his model, or you can misrepresent the instrumental record.
The first approach is the one taken by Pat Michaels, who dishonestly erased scenarios B…
cmooney | August 28, 2006
Tom Toles has long been one of my favorite cartoonists--but even I was a little stunned when I saw his latest work, which essentially says, don't vote Republican if you care about climate change. I'm not used to cartoonists being this directly political--but I'm also not sure I have any problem with it.
In fact, I think the basic idea that Toles expresses is correct: There is a fundamental difference between the two parties on global warming. It's silly to shy away from that fact by citing the handful of Republicans that diverge from their party on this issue, or for that matter, the handful…
cmooney | August 25, 2006There's been trouble at NASA lately. A suite of scientists from the agency's National Advisory Council have resigned over the agency's priorities, a dispute which seems to centrally turn on how the president's Moon-Mars plans have taken an emphasis away from purer scientific research. The NAC itself was reorganized just this spring, when it was put under the leadership of one Harrison M. Schmitt, a former Apollo astronaut who's also been a U.S. senator and is trained as a geologist.
But there's more that you ought to know about Harrison M. Schmitt. He is chairman emeritus, and former…
tlambert | August 24, 2006Charles Montgomery's excellent expose of the so-called "Friends of Science" group must have really hit a nerve, because it has drawn an over-the-top response from Terence Corcoran in the National Post. It appears that Corcoran was so incensed by it that he didn't bother to check whether anything he wrote was true. Andrew Weaver lists a few of things that Corcoran got wrong, the most telling of which is this:
6) I never dismissed "the original hockey-stick research debunking research debunking the 1,000-year claim as "simply pure and unadulterated rubbish"
In fact your newspaper already…
nisbetmc | August 23, 2006
Since last fall, poll questions across surveys have tapped public belief in the link between hurricanes and global warming. In this post, I provide a round up of poll findings in chronological order starting last year just after Katrina hit.
The impacts of Katrina and Rita received saturation news coverage. The televised drama combined with the frame contest to connect the storm to global warming was very likely to move public opinion. According to Pew, more Americans reported paying "very close" attention to the Katrina story (73%) than any other event in recent American history, with…
tlambert | August 18, 2006William Connolley writes about a dodgy-sounding conference on global warming. (Jaworowski is presenting, for example.)
In comments the organizer, Peter Stilbs, explained:
I do not really understand your arrogance against Jaworowski - I have seen that elsewhere on the web too. Reading what he has to say about the problems of temperature reconstructions from trapped air bubble content in ice contrasts starkly to the "no problems at all" - message you see from the Berne(Switzerland) group ...
McIntyre and McKitrick were the first to demonstrate that the Mann hockey stick was pure crap and…
tlambert | August 16, 2006Don Boudreaux says that we shouldn't try to prevent global warming because
Capitalism produces so much food that we are never malnourished; it produces ample clothing and sturdy homes to protect us from the elements; it produces the soaps, shampoos, toothpastes and detergents that we use every day to cleanse our bodies and living spaces of bacteria and other dirt. And by continually substituting machines for human labor, capitalism progressively makes our work less backbreaking and less perilous.
Those of us who recognize these important benefits of capitalism -- those of us who understand…
scientificactivist | August 15, 2006Since I've been on the road so much lately, I haven't really had a chance to follow up on some of the more interesting links forwarded to me lately. Each probably deserves its own post... but I'm going to dump them all into this post anyway. Besides, there seems to be a common thread running through all of them.
First up is an interview with climate scientist Ben Santer in Environmental Science & Technology. Santer was a lead author on the president's recent Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) and has been a target of anti-environmental groups since he was a lead author on a 1995…
tlambert | August 12, 2006Charles Montgomery has a detailed expose in the Globe and Mail on the activities of Tim Ball and the Friends of Science. It turns out that the University of Calgary has been used to launder oil company money to fund the Friends of Science:
There was plenty of money for the anti-Kyoto cause in the oil patch, but the Friends dared not take money directly from energy companies. The optics, Mr. Jacobs admits, would have been terrible.
This conundrum, he says, was solved by University of Calgary political scientist Barry Cooper, a well-known associate of Stephen Harper.
As his is privilege as a…
scientificactivist | August 11, 2006This week's installment of Fantastical Fridays discusses a not-so-impressive finding reported in the media in January 2006. From the archives:
(30 January 2006) To all of those who worried about the United States' dependence on Middle Eastern oil, who tried to raise awareness about dwindling global oil reserves, or who fought for decent fuel economy standards, you can all go home now. We found the answer: methane... methane hydrate. Boy were we misguided, thinking that renewable or clean energy sources might be a part of the solution. USA TODAY reports on humanity's newfound salvation…
tlambert | August 10, 2006Science-hating Miranda Devine reviews An Inconvenient Truth. Not surprisingly, she hated it. Apparently it is stodgy and full of hyperbole. Despite the fact that climate researchers say that Gore got the science right, Devine trots out geologist Bob Carter to say "Gore's circumstantial arguments are so weak that they are pathetic." Carter provided no evidence to support his claim, but this didn't bother Devine. People who say stuff that she wants to believe don't need evidence.
There's more, including an appearance of the mythical DDT ban, but I've outsourced the heavy lifting to Stephen…
scientificactivist | August 10, 2006From the archives:
(23 April 2006) The media is by its very nature sensational, and on the issue of global warming this can swing both ways. Therefore, there was a big fuss over a study in Nature this past Thursday that seemed to lay out a more conservative estimate for the expected increase in temperature due to global warming. Although some coverage was more damning than others, the quantity of press on the subject was extensive.
As an article the next day in Science explained, though, all the Nature paper did was narrow down the range of possible scenarios to what was already the widely…
scientificactivist | August 9, 2006From the archives:
(19 January 2006) Today's issue of Nature features several interesting articles about the effects of global warming. Two are research articles, with one revising estimates of the expected increase in sea level due to global warming and the other demonstrating how certain important marine ecosystems could be vulnerable to changes in ocean currents due to global warming. The journal also contains an editorial and a news feature about the need to monitor ocean currents more closely to better assess the consequences of global warming and to warn us of impending climate…
scientificactivist | August 8, 2006From the archives:
(13 January 2006) What do global warming and epidemic diseases have in common? Apparently they have a lot, at least when it comes to amphibians.
Microorganisms have a knack for showing up in unexpected places. In the 1980s, two scientists discovered a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori that causes over 80% of stomach ulcers, once thought to be primarily caused by stress. This turned medical dogma upside-down and earned them the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine . Even microorganisms aren't safe from other microorganisms, with bacteria, for example under constant…