Stephen Schneider: Science and Distortion
“A year in the making, this video pays tribute to a critical scientific and academic figure in postmodern history: the late Climatologist and Stanford Professor Stephen Schneider (1945-2010) This video was screened before a live audience by Climate One of the Commonwealth Club of California in downtown San Francisco on Dec 6, 2011 as the [...]
The Rachel Maddow Show, March 31: Climate Change Denial, Brought to You by the Koch Brothers
Climate Change Denial, Brought to You by the Koch Brothers. Jim Hoggan, co-founder of the DeSmog Blog, discusses how the oil and gas industry’s massive efforts to direct the climate change debate have “poisoned” public discussion on the issue.
CAN Report: Canadian Scientists Muzzled by Harper Government
The scandal is growing at Environment Canada of how Canadian climate researchers are being “muzzled” by draconian policies of Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
The Montreal Gazette has reported on a leaked document showing that the information restrictions brought in by the Harper government had severely restricted the media’s access to government researchers.
Solar Minimum Induced Global Cooling? Don’t Bet On It
Will the media continue to ignore all the extreme weather that scientists have been predicting for years would become more common as we pour more heat trapping gases into the atmosphere? Given that we’ve only warmed about a degree Fahrenheit in the past half century and much of this country projected to warm 9°F or more on our current emissions path, it’s hard to imagine the kind of extreme weather we will ultimately be seen.
Bill McKibben: The Attack on Climate-Change Science
“In early 2009,” writes Bill McKibben in a soon-to-be-published new book, “just as Obama was getting set to unveil his energy plans, word came that 2,340 lobbyists had registered to work on climate change on Capitol Hill (that’s about six per congressman), 85 percent of them devoted to slowing down progress.” By early 2010, you can see the results of such efforts, multiplied many times over by the staggering levels of support available for anti-climate-change work from the richest industry on the planet: the energy business. All this was not helped, of course, by the much hyped “climate-gate” which proved that climate-change scientists were fallible human beings and not simply extraterrestrial super-brains. These “scandals” were, in turn, blown up to proportions that seemed to blot out the very image of the disappearing Arctic icepack.
Not surprisingly, perhaps, the latest poll on the American public’s attitude toward climate change shows startling drops in the belief in the very existence of climate change, in humanity’s role in causing it, and in its import for the planet: a 14-point drop since October 2008 in Americans who believe climate change is happening at all (to 57%), a 10-point drop in those who believe that human activity is at the root of the problem (to 47%), and a 13-point drop in those who claim to be “somewhat” or “very” worried about the problem (to 50%).
What’s strangest in all this is that the evidence for our changing planet seems to stare us in the face — from the previously mythical, now navigable Northwest Passage to melting glaciers just about everywhere to more intense storms (including, of course, more intense snowstorms because, despite the name “global warming,” no one has yet banished winter from the planet). What makes this sadder yet is that, if the U.S. refuses to deal with our planet’s health and well-being (and ours), everything becomes so much harder, so much less likely. If you want to put all of this into some reasonable perspective, when you’ve finished Bill McKibben’s latest piece, think about ordering his new book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet (to be published this April). The title is unsettling — especially for an editor, with those two “a”s in Eaarth — and the book more so, but it’s not without hope and it could be the necessary guide to, and text for, the new planet with ever quirkier weather on which, after so many thousands of years, we humans suddenly find ourselves.
Newsweek’s Lengthy Attack on Climate Scientists Exposed by ClimateProgress.org
In a new black eye for Newsweek, their lengthy attack on climate scientists has been exposed as relying on massaged data and tawdry innuendo. While they have already corrected a number of mistakes, they left a bunch in, and decided not to change the overall theme of their now baseless story. That would have meant gutting the sensationalistic headline and visuals they apparently believe they need to grab eyeballs for their ever-shrinking magazine.
Revised Essay on Regional Cold Anomalies by Dr. James Hansen, With New Graphs and Photos
The Earth has been in a period of rapid global warming for the past three decades. The assertion that the planet has entered a period of cooling in the past decade is without foundation. On the contrary, we find no significant deviation from the warming trend of the past three decades. Weather fluctuations exceed the magnitude of average global warming over the past half century. However, the perceptive person should be able to notice that climate is warming on decadal time scales. The global temperature trend over the past few decades has been strong enough that there is a noticeable “loading” of the climate dice that define the probability of unusually warm or cool seasons.
56 newspapers around the world in 20 languages publish the same editorial calling for action from world leaders on climate change
Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.
Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year’s inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world’s response has been feeble and half-hearted.
State of Climate Science: Videos of US Senate Select Committee Hearing
With the international climate change talks in Copenhagen fast approaching, there is real urgency to reach diplomatic consensus on a planetary solution. In a hearing hosted by Chairman Edward J. Markey on December 2, 2009, the US Senate Select Committee explored with climate scientists from the Obama administration, Dr. John Holdren and Dr. Jane Lubchenco, the urgent, consensus view on our planetary problem: that global warming is real, and the science indicates that it is getting worse.
James Hansen says whole approach at Copenhagen is “so fundamentally wrong that it is better to reassess the situation”
In an interview with the Guardian, James Hansen, the world’s pre-eminent climate scientist, said any agreement likely to emerge from the negotiations would be so deeply flawed that it would be better to start again from scratch.
“I would rather it not happen if people accept that as being the right track because it’s a disaster track,” said Hansen, who heads the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York.
