Plus Dr. Jeff Masters on "Heavy snowfall in a warming world"
February 8, 2010
Another massive mid-Atlantic precipitation event, another piece of nonsense from the anti-science crowd. Kevin Mooney of the American Spectator actually wrote an article titled, “Snowmageddon” Versus “Overwhelming Scientific Evidence,” which asserts:
This is the first time since record keeping started that two storms of such magnitude have hit the region during one winter. Already some localities are reporting the largest snowfall ever recorded.
To be sure, these events do not prove or disprove human caused global warming. But the momentum is now very much on the side of skeptical scientists who question these theories and President Obama should at least pull back from his awkward juxtapositions.
What’s particularly laughable about Mooney’s article is that according to the UAH satellite data so beloved of the anti-science crowd, the storm occurred on the warmest February 6 — and indeed, during the warmest winter — in the temperature record (data here — the orange line ending in the white box in the figure above tracks temperatures in 2010).
Capital Climate has an excellent analysis on Super Storm 2010, which finds:
No one can possibly undo all of the damage to climate science and individual scientists done by the diarrhea of disinformation spewing out of the anti-science crowd. In large part that’s because of the reckless laziness of many in the status quo media, such as CBS, who prefer easy sensationalism to thoughtful journalism.
Few scientists have been more victimized than Michael Mann, Director of Pennsylvania State University’s Earth System Science Center. Than again, few scientists have been more vindicated than Michael Mann (see “Penn State inquiry finds no evidence for allegations against Michael Mann” and below).
That’s why I feel compelled to keep doing my small part in helping to set the record straight as often as possible — and to publicize the tremendous work of others doing the same, such as the blogger Deep Climate, who has uncovered previously unknown details of just how some of the most fraudulent charges against Mann and the Hockey Stick graph were trumped up by the anti-science crowd in the first place.
Remember the question scientists are trying to answer: Is the planet now as hot (or hotter) than it has been in a millenium? Try two millennia (see this 2008 PNAS study, which is the source of the figure above, and this “seminal” 2009 Science study).
In the interests of not spending my time rewriting the terrific work done by others, let me urge you all to read Deep Climate, while I excerpt a very good summary by DeSmogBlog:
Defying conventional wisdom that a hardened partisan divide and looming midterm elections will prevent the type of compromises necessary for big reforms, business leaders and environmentalists are redoubling their efforts to advance an energy and climate bill in the Senate.
It’s a seemingly improbable goal, but upending that way of thinking is one of the objectives of a Capitol Hill lobbying blitz launched last week by executives from nearly 200 large and small companies. A dozen CEOs — including Shell Oil’s Marvin Odum, Duke Energy’s Jim Rogers and NRG Energy’s David Crane — are scheduled to meet with lawmakers and administration officials Tuesday.
“Comprehensive climate change legislation is not part of the liberal agenda,” said Crane, whose company operates a wide range of energy facilities that run from wind to coal to nuclear. “It’s a decidedly centrist thing. We reduce carbon emissions, and we reduce our dependence on Middle Eastern oil. Both parts of the political spectrum should come together on that.”
“Any capitalist with a pulse knows China is moving forward,” said Tad Segal, a spokesman for U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of business and environmental groups that favor reform. “We can solve a crisis at the same time we grow jobs.”
Another business coalition, called We Can Lead, which includes a mix of pro-reform businesses, is taking the campaign to the public by running television and print ads urging Congress to “move swiftly and boldly” and pass legislation.
“Historians will puzzle over the fact that Barack Obama, the best communicator of his generation, totally lost control of the narrative in his first year in office and allowed people to view something they had voted for as something they suddenly didn’t want,” says Jim Morone, America’s leading political scientist on healthcare reform. “Communication was the one thing everyone thought Obama would be able to master.”
So writesFinancial Times Washington Bureau Chief Edward Luce.
I’m doing a multipart series on progressive messaging, since the failure of that messaging is the second-most important reason we are not going to get a strong enough climate bill this year (assuming the conventional wisdom is wrong and we get one at all). Of course, the most important reason, by far, remains the self-destructive demagoguing and obstinacy of anti-science, pro-polluter ideologues.
The failure to advance a narrative (frame or extended metaphor) has been a disaster (see Part 1 and Part 2). It’s worth understanding why that happened.
Ex-gov writes "energy" on her hand, apparently so she'd remember to mention it.
February 7, 2010
The annual convention of hypocrites with short memory (aka the Tea Partiers) paid FoxNews commentator Sarah Palin $100,000 to repeat conservative talking points:
Sarah Palin says President Barack Obama’s proposed 2011 budget is “immoral” because it increases the national debt, which she called “generational theft.”
Palin told the national “tea party” convention Saturday that America’s national debt, which is held largely by other nations, “makes us less free” and “should tick us off.”
The 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee got one of several standing ovations from the gathering of about 600 people when she said the nation is drowning in debt. The Obama administration argues that much of the nation’s debt is being caused by tax cuts and a Medicare drug program enacted under former President George W. Bush.
Given that anti-science conservatives like Palin are the champions of the most grievous imaginable “generational theft” — doing nothing to stop catastrophic climate change — and given that they continue to push this “generational theft” meme, I’m going to update my earlier response (see “The Generational Theft Act of 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002, 2001….).”
But first, yes, those are crib notes on her left hand — top word “energy” — as HuffPost (and photo below) show:
Once-great network airs charges it knew to be false
February 7, 2010
“You know you’re in trouble when you’re being spoofed on YouTube.”
So begins one of the most shockingly unprofessional “news stories” you are ever likely to see from a major network that isn’t Fox.
The news organization that gave us Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite now bases its reporting on YouTube videos. Thursday, CBS libeled climatologist Michael Mann on the basis of nothing more than a jingle someone uploaded to the Web:
The center-right Washington Post publishes another inane attack on liberals
February 6, 2010
I’m going to invent a new word — CONservativeDESCENDING. It carries the traditional meaning “displaying a patronizingly superior attitude” but it only applies to people displaying such an attitude while adopting an anti-scientific position, while descending into disinformation and obfuscation that threatens all of our children and countless generations beyond them.
After all, everyone with strongly held views appears condescending to those who disagree with them, but only those who are CONservativeDESCENDING can be patronizingly superior while being objectively wrong. Indeed, the fact that just about everyone appears condescending to those who disagree with them makes it utterly inane for the Washington Post to publish an Outlook piece Sunday, “Why are liberals so condescending?” — and have a “Q&A, Mon., 11 a.m.: Outlook: Why are liberals so condescending to conservatives?”
Before addressing the nonsensical thesis of the piece in as un-condescending a manner as possible, let me first note that the piece is doubly nonsensical being published in the Post, which is the home of the single most condescending person in the country — or at least the single most condescending person who has a media megaphone, the person who defines the word CONservativeDESCENDING. Indeed, while I defy you to find any liberal columnist for the Post who routinely displays a patronizingly superior attitude to conservatives, I defy you to find a George Will column that does not display a patronizingly superior attitude to liberals.
This Wonk Room repost is by guest blogger is Tom Kenworthy, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress.
When president-elect Barack Obama nominated Colorado Sen. Ken Salazar to head the Department of Interior at the end of 2008, some voices in the conservation community wondered whether the moderate Democrat with ties to ranching and other traditional western industries was the best choice to chart a new direction in managing one-fifth of the nation’s land.
But immediately after taking office, Salazar quickly moved to dispel many of those worries with a series of directives that forcefully demonstrated that the Bush era had ended, particularly on policies related to energy development on federal lands:
After the 90-minute panel on “The Science of Climate Change” with Dr. Christopher Field and Dr. Michael MacCracken (video and PPTs here), I interviewed them both.
First, here’s Christopher Field, the director of the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, professor of biology and environmental earth system science at Stanford University, and the Working Group II Co-Chair for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:
Activists can work for years before Congress takes notice.
Just ask Theo Colborn, a scientist in Colorado who started studying the environmental impact of natural gas drilling in 2002. She has worked with dozens of grassroots groups to highlight the dangers of a natural gas extraction method.
Earlier this month, Colborn’s message reached Capitol Hill. Lawmakers spent the better part of a hearing on ExxonMobil’s proposed merger with XTO discussing hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.”
Companies use the technique, which requires pumping millions of gallons of chemical mixtures into the ground, to extract natural gas from shale rock. Environmental groups say the process contaminates drinking water.
XTO, a natural gas supplier, owns many of the nation’s shale reserves, and ExxonMobil plans to mine those for natural gas. The oil executives testified that fracking would create jobs and provide Americans a domestic fossil-fuel alternative.
“It’s tantamount that we find a way to continue that practice because it is such a valuable resource,” XTO Founder Bob R. Simpson testified.
Hmm. He meant “paramount” and not “tantamount.” Or perhaps the transcriber got it wrong. Hard to tell these days with the general decline in editing skills. The bigger question is why didn’t the reporter or the editor notice the mistake?
Indeed, the January “cold snap” not only didn’t prove the case for (nonexistent) global cooling — it turns out that January was uber-hot around the globe! As leading anti-science guy Roy Spencer posted Thursday (including the figure above):
The global-average lower tropospheric temperature anomaly soared to +0.72 deg. C in January, 2010. This is the warmest January in the 32-year satellite-based data record….
Note the global-average warmth is approaching the warmth reached during the 1997-98 El Nino, which peaked in February of 1998.
Of course, right now we’re only in a moderate El Nino. In 97-98, we had a monster El Nino. And Spencer doesn’t mention that this record is especially impressive because we’re at “the deepest solar minimum in nearly a century.”
The point is, notwithstanding the all-too-effective disinformation campaign of the anti-science crowd, it’s getting hotter — thanks primarily to human emissions.
Sean Pool is a special assistant for energy policy at American Progress.
Riddled with ever-escalatingcost overruns, years of delays, and a lack of public support, its baffling why the nuclear industry continues to enjoy the support of so many “fiscally conservative” members of the US legislature.
Earlier this week CAP’s Dan Weiss blogged here about Obama’s nuclear error, explaining that the President has proposed in his 2011 budget to triple loan guarantees for the nuclear industry — from$18.5 billion to $54 billion — without extracting any concrete promises from nuke proponents to support comprehensive climate and clean energy legislation in return.
The other problem is that there weren’t any credible applicants even before the funding increase, let alone for a program three times the size, as this NGO analysis reveals:
New conservative policy shop to be headed by a one-time supporter of cap-and-trade!!
February 4, 2010
I don’t normally agree with the uber-conservative American Spectator — and vice versa (see here). But there is, as they say, a first time for everything.
In a piece titled, “Norm Coleman’s Right-Wing CAP,” their assistant managing editor writes about the Center for American Progress (CAP), where I work:
Another feature that sets CAP apart from the right-wing organizations is its messaging operation. It was a leader in sending out a daily briefing and using blogs to disseminate research, which are both now common practices among think tanks. But it also took the unusual step of hiring professional bloggers to spread its ideas. Joseph Romm, a giant among environmental experts, blogs for their climateprogess.org. And CAP hired Matt Yglesias, a prominent young liberal blogger, away from the Atlantic to blog under their umbrella.
Thanks. Let me tell you this kind of thing is very helpful around performance evaluation time.
I do, of course, have to correct one mistake here, which long-time readers may spot….
The review, by a panel of senior administrators at Pennsylvania State University, found no evidence that climatologist Michael Mann had manipulated research that indicates humans are causing global warming.
The anti-scientists hate Mann, one of the country’s leading climatologists, for his role in creating the Hockey Stick graph, which they still maintain is fraudulent, when in fact it was essentially vindicated in a thorough examination by a panel of the National Academy of Sciences (see NAS Report and here).
Even more important than the fact that the original analysis was defensibly correct, is that the conclusions were correct [which could be true even if the analysis had flaws in it]. Is the planet now as hot (or hotter) than it has been in a millenium? Try two millennia — see “Sorry deniers, hockey stick gets longer, stronger: Earth hotter now than in past 2,000 years,“ which discusses the PNAS study that is the source of the above graph.
The event was a big success, I thought, mainly because we had two top climate scientists, Christopher Field and Michael MacCracken, who had a lot of experience with the IPCC.
Some people complained that you couldn’t see the PPTs. So we have posted them here, which you can open in a separate window while you watch this:
Advanced, cellulosic biofuels — made from agricultural waste, wood chips, or low input crops such as switchgrass — hold great promise to reduce oil use and greenhouse gas pollution. Advanced biofuels that deliver measurable life cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions, minimize the use of food based feedstocks and, minimize public health and environmental impacts should be encouraged. But, in order to capture the promise of advanced biofuels, we must also make the short term investments in the infrastructure for the current generation of biofuels.
On Wednesday, President Obama announced three key initiatives to build this infrastructure so that we can increase biofuel production, improve nationwide efforts in the development of biofuels, and lessen our dependence on oil.
This 
Sean Pool
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