The Himalayan Mountains in central Asia and Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the range and in the world, is one of the front lines for global warming in the world. Most climate scientists agree that the Himalayas, sometimes called the Third Pole because the range boasts the world's largest mass of non-polar ice, is quickly changing.

Annapurna, Himalayan MountainRange, Nepal.
[Photo: Jagdish Poudel]

The 1,500-mile-long range, straddling seven countries including China/Tibet, India, Nepal, Bhutan, and Pakistan, has over 46,000 glaciers that fill huge glacial valleys, cirques, and perch on the faces of high peaks like Mount Everest. These glaciers, a huge repository of fresh water, are, like the ice caps in Antarctica, Greenland, and the North Pole region, melting. Right now it's estimated that about 95 percent of the Himalayan glaciers are shrinking--the result of soot from coal- and wood-burning stoves, highway emissions, and industrial pollution in nearby countries. And as the glaciers melt, bare rock, which absorbs sunlight and warmth, is exposed, leading to more melting. Read more;

Michael Chrighton came up with the idea that global warming is a religion. Watch him stammer his way through an interview with Charlie Rose when asked to defend his position on global warming.

When Cameron Dueck set sail to the Canadian Arctic to witness what he calls “the front line of climate change”, he did so knowing he would have to brave seas that have killed scores of sailors and reduced men to cannibals.

For 450 years before the first successful voyage in 1906, people sought the Northwest Passage, a potentially lucrative shipping route linking Europe to Asia that would cut out the lengthy journey around the horn of South America.

Many died trying to find it, including Sir John Franklin whose HMS Erebus and HMS Terror attempted the fabled Passage in 1845 but sank without a trace. Their 129 men died eating each other on the unforgiving ice.

But by the time Dueck set off on his voyage more than 100 years later in June 2009, 35 sailing yachts had made the trip. The majority of those took place after 1990, made possible by a stark reality: the ice was now melting fast.

A new study examining nearly 40 years of satellite imagery has revealed that the floating ice shelves of a critical portion of West Antarctica are steadily losing their grip on adjacent bay walls, potentially amplifying an already accelerating loss of ice to the sea.

The most extensive record yet of the evolution of the floating ice shelves in the eastern Amundsen Sea Embayment in West Antarctica shows that their margins, where they grip onto rocky bay walls or slower ice masses, are fracturing and retreating inland.

As that grip continues to loosen, these already-thinning ice shelves will be even less able to hold back grounded ice upstream, according to glaciologists at The University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Geophysics (UTIG).

Reporting in the Journal of Glaciology, the UTIG team found that the extent of ice shelves in the Amundsen Sea Embayment changed substantially between the beginning of the Landsat satellite record in 1972 and late 2011.

These changes were especially rapid during the past decade. The affected ice shelves include the floating extensions of the rapidly thinning Thwaites and Pine Island Glaciers.

 Photo:  Pairs of Landsat satellite images showing changes in ice shelf margins in the eastern Amundsen Sea Embayment in West Antarctica between 1972 and 2011.

The striping visible in the 2011 images is due to an unrepaired malfunction in the Landsat-7 platform that occurred in 2003.

The Heartland Institute has killed its offensive climate change-denying billboard campaign after climate change deniers — including a right-wing GOP Senator — and activists all decried the ads. Heartland, a so-called think tank that specializes in producing questionable campaigns and questionable “evidence” for climate change deniers to then spread, created the billboards which feature images of the Unabomber and the words, “I still believe in Global Warming. Do You?,” suggesting that climate change adherents are mass-murderers, for no apparent reason. They have refused to apologize.

...

But the real probable reason for the end of the “experiment” — one Congressman threatened to pull his support of Heartland. The Hill reports that the billboard campaign “also rankled at least one Capitol Hill supporter of the group. Rep. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.), a climate skeptic who opposes emissions regulation, threatened to cancel his speech at the conference over the billboard.”

“The congressman will not participate in the upcoming Climate Change Conference if the Heartland Institute decides to continue this ad campaign, and he raised those same concerns to the Heartland Institute. He is glad to hear that these ads are coming down and wants to get back to the issues. He feels we can win this debate without the name-calling,” said Sensenbrenner spokeswoman Amanda Infield in an email.

Asked if he would attend the conference in light of the decision to yank the billboard, she replied, “If the ads are coming down, the congressman is planning to still participate.”

When a right wing radical like Jim Sensenbrenner thinks you’re too radical, you’re too radical.

 

The DB Climate Change Advisors has released its latest Global Climate Change Policy Tracker report [PDF], its fourth. The report has quite a bit of interesting info in it. Most important, from a global perspective, is that “the best case global outlook” based on potential current targets still leaves us is with “a 5.8Gt ‘gap’ compared to a 450ppm stabilization pathway.” And even 450ppm is way to high according to top climate scientists.

Climate scientists have been saying for years that one of the many downsides of a warming planet is that both droughts and torrential rains are both likely to get worse.

That’s what climate models predict, and that’s what observers have noted, most recently in the IPCC’s report on extreme weather, released last month.

It makes physical sense, too. A warmer atmosphere can absorb more water vapor, and what goes up must come down — and thanks to prevailing winds, it won’t come down in the same place.

The idea of changes to the so-called hydrologic cycle, in short, hangs together pretty well. 

According to a new paper just published in Science, however, the picture is flawed in one important and disturbing way.

Based on measurements gathered around the world from 1950-2000, a team of researchers from Australia and the U.S. has concluded that the hydrologic cycle is indeed changing.  Wet areas are getting wetter and dry areas are getting drier.

But it’s happening about twice as fast as anyone thought,  and that could mean big trouble for places like Australia, which has already been experiencing crushing drought in recent years.

Global warming is revving up the planet's cycle of evaporation and precipitation, making wet places even wetter and dry places drier, a new study suggests.

A team of researchers found the intensity of the water cycle increased roughly 4 percent over the last half of the 20th century by examining changes in the ocean's salt content.

This means more movement of water between the locations where it's stored, such as the atmosphere, oceans and lakes. Their results indicate that as a result, salty places are becoming saltier due to more evaporation, while fresh places are becoming fresher due to more precipitation.

 

Sunday is Earth Day, and some Republicans who aren't convinced of climate change may not be celebrating. 

Mitt Romney's views on the matter have evolved to "we don't know what's causing climate change," while Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), the ranking member on the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, has used the Bible to deny global warming.

Here is what the GOP presidential candidates and others have to say about climate change. 

On May 11, 1853, Thoreau recorded the first open flower of the highbush blueberry. Its distinctive white tubular flowers are easy to observe. In subsequent years he recorded the first blueberry flowers in Concord between May 14 and 19.

If Thoreau went looking for the first blueberry flowers of Concord in mid-May today, he would be too late — some bushes would be covered with flowers, while others would have only a few stragglers left hanging among the young green fruits. Since the 1850s, the first blueberry flowering has shifted three weeks earlier — the blossoms now generally open during the last two weeks of April. But this year, after a record warm winter, blueberry bushes began to flower on April 1, six weeks earlier than in Thoreau’s time.

Discovered in Green: The effects of nuclear fallout on bird sex, cars powered by the human bowels (sort of), how your meat-eating habits are destroying the earth and a sad story about oysters.

I recently visited the column of Shub Tnediserp Remrof to read an article he posted asking the question What is causing Climate Change? (Poll). In the discussion on the thread for that article 1+2=potatoe posed the following question (#3.5);

Feel free to enlighten me on how global warming is the cause for the unprecedented cold weather in Europe this past winter.

This is my response;

The global warming trend is causing more water to evaporate into the atmosphere, which in turn generates more precipitation. In many parts of the Northern Hemisphere that precipitation comes in the form of snow. Snow reflects most of the suns rays which causes colder temperatures.

Also, the rapid melting of the polar cap glaciers, the land glaciers and ice fields, plus the snow caps of the high peaks is causing copious amounts of fresh water to run into the oceans, changing the salinity levels, which it turn is having serious effects on the oceans currents.

Among the most important of those currents is the Gulf Stream that flows from the Gulf of Mexico northward along the west coast of Europe to the Northern Hemisphere, where it cools and flows back to the Gulf. That warm water is what gives the Northern Hemisphere the moderate temperatures we need and enjoy.

As a result of the salinity change I mentioned, the "pumping action" of the Gulf Stream is slowing down, bringing less warm water to the N. Hemisphere, thus causing colder temperatures.

You see 1+2, it's not as simple as 1+2=, it's a complicated series of integrated events that is causing the weather chaos we are experiencing. Floods in some places, drought in other places, extreme cold in the north, extreme heat in the south, more hurricanes, stronger hurricanes, more frequent and powerful tornadoes, earthquakes, ..... everything is being effected.

Some experts are saying, the now smaller polar caps weigh much less than they did before and the pressure change from that weight shift is causing the earths crust to move, causing the more frequent and more severe earthquakes the world has suffered in recent years.

Take my advice in #1.4 . Go to the links I provide, do some research. This GW and Climate Change thing is no bull@!$%#, it's a serious problem and we need to start preparing for the inevitable.

Man may not be causing all this chaos, but we are certainly contributing to it, and we damn well are going to be affected by it.

And don't forget;

"....For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being oblig'd by better Information or fuller consideration, to change Opinions even on important matters, which I once thought right but found to be otherwise.
[Benjamin Franklin]

There is nothing wrong with changing your position on things you believe, everybody has to do it from time to time.

That's it. .... What is your position on Climate Change?

Meat eaters in developed countries will have to eat a lot less meat, cutting consumption by 50%, to avoid the worst consequences of future climate change, new research warns.

The fertilisers used in farming are responsible for a significant share of the warming that causes climate change.

Researchers have been paying closer attention in the past few years to the impact of agriculture on climate change, and the parallel problem of growing enough food for an expanding population. Some scientists are at work growing artificial meat which would avoid the fertilisers and manure responsible for climate change.

Nitrous oxide, released by fertilisers and animal manure, is the most potent of the greenhouse gases that cause climate change

 

 

While the largest contributor to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions is the power industry, the second largest is the more often overlooked cement industry, which accounts for 5-6% of all anthropogenic CO₂ emissions.

For every 10 kg of cement produced, the cement industry releases a full 9 kg of CO₂. Since the world consumes about 3 trillion kg of cement annually, this sector has one of the highest potentials for CO₂ emission reductions.

But while processes are being explored to sequester the CO₂ from cement production, so far no process can completely eliminate it.

Jumping on this opportunity for improvement, a team of researchers from George Washington University in Ashburn, Virginia, has developed a method for cement production that releases zero CO₂ emissions.

In addition, the scientists estimate that the new production process will be cheaper than the existing process used in the cement industry.

Researchers at Oregon State University have definitively linked an increase in ocean acidification to the collapse of oyster seed production at a commercial oyster hatchery in Oregon, where larval growth had declined to a level considered by the owners to be "non-economically viable."

A study by the researchers found that elevated seawater carbon dioxide (CO2) levels, resulting in more corrosive ocean water, inhibited the larval oysters from developing their shells and growing at a pace that would make commercial production cost-effective. As atmospheric CO2 levels continue to rise, this may serve as the proverbial canary in the coal mine for other ocean acidification impacts on shellfish, the scientists say.

Results of the research have just been published in the journal, Limnology and Oceanography.

"This is one of the first times that we have been able to show how ocean acidification affects oyster larval development at a critical life stage," said Burke Hales, an OSU chemical oceanographer and co-author on the study. "The predicted rise of atmospheric CO2 in the next two to three decades may push oyster larval growth past the break-even point in terms of production."

The owners of Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery at Oregon's Netarts Bay began experiencing a decline in oyster seed production several years ago, and looked at potential causes including low oxygen and pathogenic bacteria. Alan Barton, who works at the hatchery and is an author on the journal article, was able to eliminate those potential causes and shifted his focus to acidification.

Barton sent samples to OSU and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory for analysis. Their ensuing study clearly linked the production failures to the CO2 levels in the water in which the larval oysters are spawned and spend the first 24 hours of their lives, the critical time when they develop from fertilized eggs to swimming larvae, and build their initial shells.

TREES are on the front lines of our changing climate. And when the oldest trees in the world suddenly start dying, it’s time to pay attention.

North America’s ancient alpine bristlecone forests are falling victim to a voracious beetle and an Asian fungus. In Texas, a prolonged drought killed more than five million urban shade trees last year and an additional half-billion trees in parks and forests. In the Amazon, two severe droughts have killed billions more.

The common factor has been hotter, drier weather.

We have underestimated the importance of trees. They are not merely pleasant sources of shade but a potentially major answer to some of our most pressing environmental problems. We take them for granted, but they are a near miracle. In a bit of natural alchemy called photosynthesis, for example, trees turn one of the seemingly most insubstantial things of all — sunlight — into food for insects, wildlife and people, and use it to create shade, beauty and wood for fuel, furniture and homes.

Trees are nature’s water filters, capable of cleaning up the most toxic wastes, including explosives, solvents and organic wastes, largely through a dense community of microbes around the tree’s roots that clean water in exchange for nutrients, a process known as phytoremediation. Tree leaves also filter air pollution. A 2008 study by researchers at Columbia University found that more trees in urban neighborhoods correlate with a lower incidence of asthma

One of climate change’s biggest impacts is on water systems. 

Unreliable water can impact both corporate bottom lines and jeopardize natural security, as two recent reports point out.

Climate-change drying out Western US, as snows melt ------------>

[Photo Credit: Greg Pederson, 2009, © Science/AAAS]

Climate change is changing precipitation patterns and intensity, increasing the incidence of droughts, floods, and erosion. These changes are making water supply and quality more difficult to obtain, affecting runoff and soil moisture, increasing water temperatures, decreasing snowpack and lake and river ice, threatening fish and aquatic species, and allowing saltwater intrusion and sea level rise. These changes are difficult to plan for, as past water patterns can no longer be used to predict the future. Read more;

Plants may thrive in the initial stages of global warming - but not for long. 

A study from Northern Arizona University shows that any improvements in growth caused by climate change disappear within ten years.

"We were really surprised by the pattern, where the initial boost in growth just went away," says doctoral student Zhuoting Wu. "As the ecosystems adjust, the responses changed."

The researchers subjected four grassland ecosystems to simulated climate change over a ten-year period. Whileplants grew more in the first year with the global warming treatment, this effect diminished over the next nine years and finally disappeared. Read more;

Preface: I first encountered the Green Dragon on a Newsvine post by Publius Redux where he introduced it with: “Now, here is a novel analysis of the undercurrent of urgency and irrationality characteristic of climate doomsayers’ prophecy. This explains the haunting familiarity of the preaching and proselytizing we have endured from the climate change fearmongers.” Curious, I tracked down an article about Resisting the Green Dragon by Dr. James Wanliss, Associate Professor of Physics at Presbyterian College. Finding no religious or scientific arguments that could possibly address the issues in the article, I wrote a play about what the future might hold for Dr. Wanliss, Publius and their followers.Sometime later I received a critique of my play from Dr. Wanliss and  subsequently offered to write a proper review if Dr. Wanliss would send me a copy, which he did. Dr. Wanliss said he wrote the book in part because he had been bullied by environmentalists. That is certainly a very bad thing, however replying in kind is usually not the correct response and revenge often hurts others than its intended victims. If you identify with environmentalism, mainstream religions, or believe we should be good stewards of the Earth, you may feel bullied while reading the book.

 The book claims not “to provide scientific or economic answers” as that is done by “multiple excellent resources that appear in the endnotes.” However those resources and end notes do not accurately represent the views of scientists, economists, or environmentalists – but are carefully picked from extreme positions, as are his examples. Dr. Wanliss gives examples of vegetarians, PETA members, Eco terrorists, environmental extremists, and someone who thinks men are “useless breathers” – and tries to claim they are representative of the Christian stewardship movement. They are not. Environmentalists may want you to make responsible choices, but that does not mean they want to “control how you live, eat, drive, and even the light you use to read by .” Environmentalists may have a goal of achieving balance in nature and sustainability, but Dr. Wanliss claims sustainability places “human life directly in the crosshairs of violent men.” And, are those violent men found in the Christian stewardship movement?

 The Cornwall Alliance: The book was published by the Cornwall Alliance which has chosen the Green Dragon as a symbol of their opposition to the growth of environmentalism in Christian churches. The Cornwall Alliance describes itself as a grassroots Christian movement. It does not disclose its funding sources but many paths to it come from corporations and fossil fuel interests and its message is certainly favorable to them. Dr. Wanliss says that he did not receive an advance from the Alliance and profits only from the royalties on the book. The Alliance has produced a series of videos based upon Resisting the Green Dragon , assailing its hold on the churches. There is little truth to much of the propaganda in the videos. They seem designed more to protect the profits of the fossil fuel companies than to protect the Earth, or the people who depend on the Earth for survival.

It became apparent in the early 1980s that carbon dioxide released by burning fossil fuels was causing changes in the environment that would impact mankind, particularly those in poor and indigenous societies who do not have the resources to adjust to the changing climate. Many churches have adopted statements encouraging environmentalism based upon good stewardship, some specifically mentioning the threat of greenhouse gases. For example, the denomination sponsoring the Presbyterian University where Dr. Wanliss teaches stated in 1989 and reaffirmed in 2008, its “serious concern that the global atmospheric warming trend (the greenhouse effect) represents one of the most serious global environmental challenges to the health, security, and stability of human life and natural ecosystems.”

Dragons: The Green Dragon on the dust cover of the book is a very ugly Dragon, but Dr. Wanliss may have misjudged what is in its heart. Though some mythical dragons were portrayed as evil, Draco in Dragonheart and Sapphira in Aragon imparted their ancient wisdom to mankind and helped them in the times of crisis. And it was the flying dragons in Avatar who helped the Na’vi drive out the greedy corporation destroying their planet and their homes for the sake of ore. Perhaps the Green Dragon is being vilified by the Cornwall Alliance so that we will not heed its message. 

 Science: Although Dr. Wanliss is a physicist, there is very little climate physics in the book. He seems to have arrived at many of his opinions about climate science, not from peer-reviewed literature, but by films made by Al Gore and Martin Durkin, neither of which are scientists. Dr. Wanliss points out the errors in The Inconvenient Truth, and rejects it entirely. However, Al Gore received a Nobel Peace Prize for his environmental work and his movie won an Oscar. The movie also had its day in court in Dimmock v Secretary of State for Education, a suit which sought to prevent the educational use of An Inconvenient Truth in England. The court ruled that, though the film had some errors, it was substantially founded upon scientific research and fact and could be shown.

Dr. Wanliss embraces Martin Durkin’s movie, The Great Global Warming Swindle, though it is based upon bad science and fraud. How do I know that? Mr. Durkin gives the impression he is a geophysicist but his degrees are in medieval history and financial journalism. The movie distorts the work of some of the scientists that appear in it. For example, Dr. Friis-Christensen, said, “parts of the graph were made up of fabricated data that were presented as genuine.” He should know as it was his research that was distorted to support claims that recent climate change was the result of solar activity. Also, Dr. Carl Wunsch points out that the movie uses his data but distorts it. Ihe ocean would have had to release more CO2 than they had absorbed, so impossible that he calls it fraud. The movie also distorts NASA’s temperature record, something that can be easily checked. The two graphs are below, with the screen shot on the left showing how Durkin redrew the graph to support his claim that most of today’s global warming occurred before 1940.

 A 2010 StanfordUniversity poll of 1,372 climate scientists found that 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in climate science agree that global warming is occurring and man activities are the main factor. Research shows that global warming is causing many undesirable changes in the Earth and that no natural factors are significantly responsible.

 Ecology: Dr. Wanliss does not seem aware of the principles of ecology or the interrelation among species, as he says: “There has been, in past decades, a cosmic shift towards a social climate that begins to favor the environment — polar bears, trees, and bugs — over human beings.” Well, where would we be without the bears, trees, the environment, and umm … bugs?  He thinks that “destruction of one species can enormously benefit many others” and that man had a right to hunt sperm whales to extinction if we needed the oil. However, he does not seem aware that many species depend on the nutrients that the whales distribute throughout the ocean.  Passenger pigeons, once an important source of food, were hunted to extinction. And whooping cranes and buffaloes almost disappeared forever, but were saved from extinction by chance and a tremendous effort on the part of conservationists. Would we have missed them? The book tells the story about the Canary being used to test the safety of coal mines, using it to point out that some bird lover may have objected, putting the bird’s safety above that of the miners. Ecologists now tell us that many species are beginning to disappear from the Earth and many more are threatened by global warming. Would we want our grandchildren to go into a coal mine where the Canaries are dying?

Economics: Cap and trade is considered to be the free market solutions to reducing carbon emissions. It may not be the best, but it will help and it appears to be the way the nations are heading. Dr. Wanliss argues against it because he thinks it will lead to the creation of a world government and because of its high cost. We all share the same atmosphere and it is necessary that all industrialized and developing countries cooperate, but that is not the same as establishing a world government. Dr. Wanliss claims the cost of cap and trade regulations would amount to an annual cost of “$120,000 for the average family of four”. That value is unrealistically high – and it also ignores the cost of not acting. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the cost of the cap-and-trade program by 2020 would average about $175 annually per household.

It is possible to estimate the cost of inaction on global warming. The Stern Report, using the results from formal economic models, estimates the overall costs and risks of climate change is equivalent to losing at least 5% of global GDP each year. And unaddressed, the cost could rise to 20% of GDP or more by 2050 – and increase the risk of an environmental catastrophe. Using 5% of the US GDP for 2010 would give an environmental cost of $727 billion. Reducing carbon emissions would also reduce particulates which the American Lung Association  cites as the primary cause 38,000 heart attacks and premature deaths each year as well as 1.5 million cases of acute bronchitis and aggravated asthma – which they estimate has an economic cost of $281 billion. Those two add up to about $1.01 trillion annually, and that is just for theUnited States. And what cost was should we put on premature death?

Religion: Dr. Wanliss’ view of the relationship between man, other species, and the Earth’s resources is based upon the doctrine of Dominionism. He bases this belief upon his interpretation of Genesis 1:28 “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.” From there, he uses a number of carefully selected Scriptures to argue how  “ the humans’ filling and ruling of the Earth can release it from bondage.” It is his view this will bring about the Second Coming which will render efforts to protect and sustain the planet useless.

 But, is the Earth not growing full? There are now 7 billion people on the planet and at our present birthrate, the population will double again this century. And have we not established dominion over the Earth? We now have fish and game laws, catch limits, and international treaties to protect other species as our needs have grown until we threaten their existence? The caveat in Dr. Wanliss’ argument is that the Second Coming will not occur until man has established Christian dominion. There are many religions on the Earth, and even among Christians, there are many different interpretations of the Scriptures. What he believes is necessary is very unlikely to happen in the next 50 years, and even if it did, there is no assurance that Dominionism is the true religion.

 Those who argue for Christian stewardship think that dominion means “benevolent rule”. Does it seem reasonable that God would make the heavens and the Earth and all the species, proclaim them good, and then give man a license to destroy them if he wished? And do some men have the right to seek dominion if by doing so they damage the lives and resources of other men? Dr. Wanliss makes a special point that dominion is not domination; however, men who wish to dominate and exploit the environment for profit will certainly find his arguments useful.

Native people: The book claims that the environmental movement is” dreadfully harmful to the environment and humans, particularly the poor” and at one point claims that environmentalists may be responsible for millions of deaths. It is most cynical and wrong to claim that environmentalists are somehow responsible for deaths and damage in the poorer countries of the world. Global warming is changing the environment and increasing the probability of severe weather events, particularly droughts. Last year’s drought on the Horn of Africa led to wides pread famine and many deaths among the poor. The people of Kashmir are concerned that the glaciers that feed their streams in the summer are receding – making less water available. The Sherpa of Tibet worry that their villages may be flooded by lakes that now form each summer from melting glaciers, held back by unstable ice dams.

The Inuit in Greenland cannot use their traditional hunting grounds at the ice is too thin for their dog sleds to traverse. Those in the Arctic are having to move their coastal villages to keep them from being eroded away by wave action of open seas, which used to be ice year-round. Their inland villages are threatened because the permafrost upon which they are built now becomes a quagmire in the summer. They are being forced to change a way of life that sustained them for centuries. While some may adapt, their way of life and culture will be destroyed, and many will likely end up among the poor and unemployed.

Population: Dr. Wanliss says God has commanded us to fill the Earth and that we should let God decide how many children we shall have. But do not men and women have free will and the right to decide such things?  And, what happens when the earth is full? The Earth’s population has just surpassed 7 billion people and, at our present birthrate, will reach 14 billion sometime in the latter part of the 21st century. The Earth is finite and evidence suggests that the carrying capacity of the Earth is somewhere between 10 and 12 billion. When a population exceeds the carrying capacity of its environment, there is usually a massive die off of the population. For us, this might mean the deaths of billions of people through starvation and wars over resources.

 Prudence: Dr. Wanless believes that man has a remarkable ability to reason, and that is certainly true.  God has given us science so that we may understand nature by observation and reason. Scientific research shows that carbon dioxide is a pollutant that is damaging the Earth and will do so even more in the future. The EPA has determined that CO2 is an endangerment that may be regulated under the Clean Air Act, and the Supreme Court has upheld that ruling. Dr. Wanliss opposes action to correct the problem and thinks that when the Earth is full and Christian dominion is achieved, God will make our problems disappear. What if he is wrong? We will have a very full and a very hot, inhospitable Earth through our own ignorance, and not through God’s will. The Green Dragon, though a mythical creature created by Dr. Wanliss, would be a good symbol for Prudence.

 Resist? Dr. Wanliss is advising us to resist the Green Dragon based upon his religious views and personal philosophy. His book would certainly encourage some interesting discussions about the meaning of Hebrew words, the interpretation of scriptures, the meaning of free will, and the responsibility Christians have toward mankind, other species, and the Earth itself. Those discussions should occur among scientist, theologians, and philosophers who have the knowledge to defend their ideas. However, it seems wrong to use the power and respect that people have for ministers and Scripture to criticize Christians who believe in good stewardship. The Cornwall Alliance does just that, as resisting the Green Dragon aligns with profit motives. The only time Jesus showed anger in the Bible was when he drove the money changers from the Temple. How might Jesus feel about the Cornwall Alliance using Dr. Wanliss’ book to bring their corporate interests into places of worship? Perhaps Dr. Wanliss should rethink whether he wishes for his book to be used in that way.

(c) 2012 J.C. Moore

This id the best the GOP has to offer?

Clearly Romney has laid down a marker, but he's known to change positions like the wind changes direction. Unfortunately, we don't know the particulars of Romney's positions since he don't take any questions from the media after ripping the president. Very stand up guy, that Romney.

One of the most striking changes that has taken place in the Arctic since the start of satellite monitoring in 1979 is the rapid decline of the perennial sea ice cover.

This ice is the sea ice that survives the summer melt season, and is typically the thickest part of the sea ice cover, sometimes spanning several years.

Sea ice extent has declined as the globe has warmed, but the ice cover has thinned as well. Thinner sea ice melts more easily, and as multiyear sea ice is lost, Arctic sea ice has declined more rapidly.

This NASA visualization shows the perennial Arctic sea ice cover from 1980 to 2012.

The grey disk at the North Pole indicates the region where no satellite data is collected.

A graph overlay shows the area's size measured in million square kilometers for each year. The '1980', '2008,' and '2012' data points are highlighted on the graph.

The U.S. National Research Council has just released a synthesis of reports from thousands of scientists in 60 countries who took part in the International Polar Year (IPY) 2007-08, the first in over 50 years to offer a benchmark for environmental conditions and new discoveries in the polar regions.

Among the major findings is that global warming is changing the face of Antarctica and the Arctic faster than expected. For example, in 2007 scientists documented a 27 percent loss of sea ice in a single year, Brigham-Grette says. Also, ice sheets around the poles are now showing evidence of serious retreat, expected to continue and perhaps accelerate over coming centuries as warm ocean currents melt the ice front faster than anyone had grasped before. Sea level rise from melting polar ice sheets is today slowly affecting every shoreline on the planet.

"As a result of this work, we have a new benchmark. Seven of 12 Antarctic Peninsula ice shelves are either gone or now in severe decline," she adds.

"This type of information makes the report all the more important because the changes we expect to see in the next few decades are going to be incredible."

Worldwide, scores of oceanographers, meteorologists, geologists, climate scientists, ecologists and other researchers contributed to the report.

For example, biologists document diatoms, microscopic phytoplankton at the base of the food chain, in North Atlantic waters where they hadn't been in 800,000 years, the last time the Arctic provided a cold barrier to migration, Brigham-Grette says.

Fish specialists see commercial and other species migrating ever northward to suitable habitats. "The fishermen are following," she says. "It's a whole new ballgame for the U.S. Coast Guard and those trying to regulate harvests."

The UMass Amherst geoscientist's own research using ancient sediment cores from Northeast Russia's Lake El'gygytgyn offers a new look at how Antarctic and Arctic warming over the last few million years occurred in sync when forced by the Earth system and feedbacks.

"We're beginning to see that when the west Antarctic ice sheet collapses, the Arctic warms up. This is a new benchmark linking warming events in these two places for the first time."

[Much more at the link]

Moreover, even if a person has come to a very logical conclusion about whether climatechange is real or not based on their evaluation of the science, "they're really not in a position to evaluate the science."

“How can science claim man is the cause of global warming when the temperature of the Earth was much warmer during the Medieval Warm Period (MWP)?”

The science Skeptics are quite adept at handwaving arguments, sometimes because they do not understand science and sometimes just to cast doubt on science by using clever arguments. One of their favorites is “How can science claim man is the cause of global warming when the temperature of the Earth was much warmer in the last millennium during the Medieval Warm Period (MWP)?”  You don’t really have to be a scientist to figure out that there were no accurate temperature records during the Medieval times and that much of the world was unknown.

 The Skeptics usually point to historical records such as those by H.H. Lamb, which describe record heat waves in the known world during the MWP. Skeptics rather ignore the fact that H.H. Lamb was so concerned about the effect of global warming that he founded the Climate Research Unit (CRU) to study the Earth’s temperature records. The scientific questions comes down to  (1) whether the MWP was worldwide, (2) how warm the Earth actually was during the MWP, and (3) what caused the MWP?

Since there were no thermometers and no worldwide network of weather stations during the MWP, scientists have used a variety of proxy data from ice cores, isotope ratios, sediments, geological records, and even tree rings to try to reconstruct the temperatures for the last thousand years. Though there are large uncertainties in proxy records and they require careful calibration, they do show a similar pattern as you can see in the figure below, which is made up of 10 different reconstructions.* (See end of article for references.)

 Though there are wide uncertainties in the proxy temperature records, taken together they form an overall pattern which answers the scientific questions. The proxy records show that that (1) there was a warm period from  AD 1000 to 1200, followed by a cooler period from  AD 1550 to1850  NASA identifies as the Little Ice Age, though it was not a true Ice Age. The record also show that (2) temperatures during the  MWP were quantitatively lower than the temperatures during the latter 20th century. To discover the cause of the MWP, it is necessary to look at another reconstruction.

While studying the cause of the past Ice Ages, scientists have identified the three  main factors which affect the Earth’s temperature, solar irradiance, greenhouse gases (primarily H2O and CO2), and particulates from volcanic activity. Below is a reconstruction of the three main factors controlling the Earth’s temperature. There are many interesting things in the records, but they show (3) the Earth was likely warmer worldwide during the MWP because of the higher solar radiation. It also shows that the solar radiation has been relatively constant during the last century while the other factors, primarily greenhouse gases, have increased.

 While it is possible to dispute or argue about the meaning of any of the individual records, it is rather disingenuous to claim that scientists “ have no data” or to dispute the obvious causes of the current global warming. To emphasize that, below is data from the last century, which is based on scientific records. While H20 and clouds accounts for about 75% of the greenhouse warming, their effect has increased only slightly( about 4%) while the amount of carbon dioxide has increased by about 39% in the last century.

 CO2: Man is now putting about 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air each year. About half of it dissolves in the ocean and they have become 20% more acidic in the last century. Much of the rest stays in the air, and  CO2 is building up in air:

 Temperature: CO2 is one of the greenhouse gases that warm the Earth, and NASA’s graph shows how its increase is changing the Earth’s temperature: The effect of particulates from the explosion of Pinaturbo can be seen in the temperature decline from 1991 to 1995.

 The Sun: The current global warming is often wrongly attributed to an increase in intensity of the sun. The sunspot activity does not show up above the noise in the temperature record above. The solar irradiance increased slightly until 1960 and has declined slightly since then.

 There is the scientific story. Disputes in science are settled by the data. Though Skeptics may dispute the evidence showing the current global warming is caused by man, the question is ” Where is the evidence?”  

  * References for temperature reconstructions:  The original version of this figure was prepared by Robert A. Rohde from publicly available data from NOAA and the references therein. The article stated: “For the purposes of this comparison, the author is agnostic as to which, if any, of the reconstructions of global mean temperature is an accurate reflection of temperature fluctuations during the last 2000 years. “ The reconstructions used, in order from oldest to most recent publication are:

• (dark blue 1000-1991): P.D. Jones, K.R. Briffa, T.P. Barnett, and S.F.B. Tett (1998). “High-resolution Palaeoclimatic Records for the last Millennium: Interpretation, Integration and Comparison with General Circulation Model Control-run Temperatures”. The Holocene 8: 455-471. doi:10.1191/095968398667194956

• (blue 1000-1980): M.E. Mann, R.S. Bradley, and M.K. Hughes (1999). “Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations”. Geophysical Research Letters 26 (6): 759-762.

• (light blue 1000-1965): Crowley and Lowery (2000). “Northern Hemisphere Temperature Reconstruction”. Ambio 29: 51-54. Modified as published in Crowley (2000). “Causes of Climate Change Over the Past 1000 Years”. Science 289: 270-277. doi:10.1126/science.289.5477.270

• (lightest blue 1402-1960): K.R. Briffa, T.J. Osborn, F.H. Schweingruber, I.C. Harris, P.D. Jones, S.G. Shiyatov, S.G. and E.A. Vaganov (2001). “Low-frequency temperature variations from a northern tree-ring density network”. J. Geophys. Res. 106: 2929-2941.

• (light turquoise 831-1992): J. Esper, E.R. Cook, and F.H. Schweingruber (2002). “Low-Frequency Signals in Long Tree-Ring Chronologies for Reconstructing Past Temperature Variability”. Science 295 (5563): 2250-2253. doi:10.1126/science.1066208.

• (green 200-1980): M.E. Mann and P.D. Jones (2003). “Global Surface Temperatures over the Past Two Millennia”. Geophysical Research Letters 30 (15): 1820. doi:10.1029/2003GL017814.

• (yellow 200-1995): P.D. Jones and M.E. Mann (2004). “Climate Over Past Millennia”. Reviews of Geophysics 42: RG2002. doi:10.1029/2003RG000143

• (orange 1500-1980): S. Huang (2004). “Merging Information from Different Resources for New Insights into Climate Change in the Past and Future”. Geophys. Res Lett. 31: L13205. doi:10.1029/2004GL019781

• (red 1-1979): A. Moberg, D.M. Sonechkin, K. Holmgren, N.M. Datsenko and W. Karlén (2005). “Highly variable Northern Hemisphere temperatures reconstructed from low- and high-resolution proxy data”. nature 443: 613-617. doi:10.1038/nature03265

• (dark red 1600-1990): J.H. Oerlemans (2005). “Extracting a Climate Signal from 169 Glacier Records”. Science 308: 675-677. doi:10.1126/science.1107046

• (black 1856-2004): Instrumental data was jointly compiled by the w:Climatic Research Unit and the UK Meteorological Office Hadley Centre. Global Annual Average data set TaveGL2v [2] was used.

A group of Skeptics once managed to take over an editorship at a peer-reviewed journal  and publish articles hostile to mainstream climate science. With the help of politicians and large funding sources, the hostilities have continued to this day.

Skeptics: Science values its skeptics as they make science strong and they sometimes make valuable contributions by opening new fields for investigation. True skeptics follow the methodologies and the ethics of science, which requires they subject their work to review by their peers and divulge conflicts of interest. There are some skeptics, particularly in the areas of climate science, who violate the ethical principles of science for money and power. To separate those from true skeptics, they will be designated here as “Skeptics”. They are usually just ignored by scientists, but there are problems when a Skeptic becomes a journal editor. 

Journal editors are almost completely responsible for seeing that articles are properly reviewed and scientifically sound before they are published. Some journals, such as  Energy and Environment, cater to Skeptics such as Sallie Baliunas, Patrick Michaels, Ross McKitrick, Stephen McIntyre, Roger Pielke Jr., Willie Soon, and Steve McIntyre; who publish articles there that would not be accepted by legitimate journals. The editor, Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, once said “the journal I edit has tried to keep this debate [climate scepticism] alive”.  Articles published in Energy and Environment are not taken seriously, but Skeptics hostile to climate science once managed a takeover of a reputable journal. An analysis by John Mashey showed the Skeptics managed to publish fourteen articles in Climate Research before they were caught gaming the peer review system.

Takeover: The takeover began in 1997, when Chris de Freitas became an editor at the reputable journal, Climate Research. There were 10 editors for the Journal and each worked independently, so it was possible for one editor to shepherd papers through the peer review process and see that they were published. The first paper  from a Skeptic, edited by de Freitas was by Patrick Michaels. The paper seemed to agree with the scientific findings of the IPCC reports, but it cast doubt at the end by concluding “this finding, instead adds further support to the emerging hypothesis that the Earth’s climate is not necessarily changing in a deleterious fashion”. Over the next six years, Chris de Freitas edited and published a series of fourteen papers by Skeptics who were interested in developing Dr. Michael’s “emerging hypothesis”. The articles caused so many complaints from scientists that some of the other editors questioned Dr. de Freitas about the quality of the papers he edited. He replied that they were on a “witch hunt”.

Restoring Order: The hostile takeover was uncovered after the fallout over a paper written by Sally Baliunas and Willie Soon. The paper reviewed the literature on the climate science of the last 1000 years, and concluded that the global warming in the 20^th century was not unusual and that natural forces, rather than man’s activities were the cause. An important piece of their evidence was the Medieval Warm Period, which they claimed was warmer worldwide than the latter 20^th century. But there was obviously something wrong with the paper. There were no accurate temperature records in Medieval Times, the Americas had not yet been discovered, and much of the Southern hemisphere was unknown. Proxy records from multiple sources show that the Medieval Warm Period amounted to only a small hump in the Earth’s temperature record. Shortly after its publication, the American Geophysical Union (AGU) issued a press release from thirteen of the scientists whose work was used in Baliunas and Soon’s paper, saying Soon and Baliunas seriously misinterpreted their research. The thirteen scientists then coauthored a paper explaining exactly why the Baliunas and Soon paper was in error.

 All this caused quite a furor at Climate Research. Five members the editorial board eventually resigned in protest and the newly hired chief editor, Hans von Storch stated the paper had serious errors and should never have been published. Tom Wigley, who often reviewed papers for Climate Research, wrote, “I have had papers that I refereed (and soundly rejected), under De Freitas’s editorship, appear later in the journal—without me seeing any response from the authors.” All this was followed by an unusual public statement from the publisher, acknowledging flaws in the journal’s editorial process. Under pressure, Chris de Freitas resigned shortly thereafter, and papers from the Skeptics stopped appearing in Climate Research.

Extended Hostilities: That should have ended the matter, except that some politicians found the conclusions of Baliunas and Soon’s paper to be advantageous to the fossil fuel industry to whom they owed allegiance. Political pressure was put on regulatory agencies to accept the results of the paper, in spite of its obvious flaws and distortions. The EPA was unwilling to include the paper in its assessment of climate science, so Sen. James Inhofe (R – OK) scheduled a meeting of the Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee to examine the paper.

At the EPW hearing, Michael Mann represented the scientific viewpoint, presenting evidence from multiple sources showing that the Medieval Warm period was not uniformly worldwide and resulted only in a small hump in the Earth’s temperature record. Dr. Soon stood behind his work and, in response to a direct question about his funding sources, testified that he had not received any funds that might have biased his objectivity. However, the paper lists the American Petroleum Institute as a major source of funding. Documents received later from the Smithsonian Institution in response to FOIA requests, revealed that since 2001  Dr. Soon has received over $1 million in funding from oil and coal interests.

Sen. Inhofe was upset by the turn of events and tried to get him fired – Michael Mann that is. At Sen. Inhofe’s insistence, the University of Pennsylvania, a Quaker University, conducted two investigations into Dr. Mann’s research and found no misconduct. A 2010 Science article reviewed the investigations, declaring “Michael Mann is cleared, again. “ Dissatisfied with the ruling, Sen. Inhofe has tried to get the attorney general to charge Michael Mann with fraud. It doesn’t get much more hostile than that. Sadly, for the first time in history, scientists are collecting a legal defense fund to defend scientists against political attacks. And even worse, the scientific opinion of the senior member of our Environmental and Public Works Committee is based on a paper that would not have passed freshman English.

 (c) 2012 Que

Warm spring weather can help convince Americans that global warming is happening and a problem. But scientists must change the way they talk about this subject. They must leave their ivory towers and learn to speak about climate change in a language that people understand.

A recent study by the Brookings Institution shows that unusually warm winter weather has made climate-change converts out of many Americans. Unseasonable temperatures are continuing with warm spring weather in much of the United States. In Washington DC, which just recorded its warmest winter, the famed cherry blossoms have opened two weeks early.

The American public is generally illiterate when it comes to science (so says the National Science Foundation). And when American scientists complain about public illiteracy and lethargy on the vitally important subject of climate change, they also have themselves to blame. Read more;

THE MONITOR'S VIEW: Keep the climate challenge in focus

U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe’s long promised book, The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future is finally finished. It was published by WND Books, which has published other grand conspiracy books such as The Late Great USA: The Coming Merger with Mexico and Canada . The book will certainly be a hit with some lobbyists, politicians and corporate leaders. It may also be popular among scientists as it reveals some interesting things about Sen. Inhofe and give scientists an opportunity to examine his ideas and arguments.

 Sen. Inhofe has served as the mayor of Tulsa and is the senior Senator from Oklahoma. He has been a strong advocate for many of his constituents and he has been a strong critic of the lack of openness of some congressional procedures. He was instrumental in getting federal Superfund money to clean up the Pitcher lead mines in northeastern Oklahoma. A large area of northeastern Oklahoma was affected and millions of dollars have been spent to try to mitigate the environmental damage. No one knew at the time that lead was toxic, and Pitcher is a perfect example of how what you don't know can hurt you and be costly.

 Sen. Inhofe has often stated “Global warming is a hoax” but proving that may be difficult. Every major scientific organizations in the world has adopted a statement similar to that of the American Chemical Society: ”Careful and comprehensive scientific assessments have clearly demonstrated that the Earth’s climate system is changing rapidly in response to growing atmospheric burdens of greenhouse gases and absorbing aerosol particles. There is very little room for doubt that observed climate trends are due to human activities. The threats are serious and action is urgently needed to mitigate the risks of climate change.” A 2010 Stanford University poll of 1,372 climate scientists found that 97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in climate science agree that global warming is occurring and man activities are the main factor. The Greatest Hoax tries convincing otherwise by quoting media sources, politicians, lobbyist, and the 2-3% of the scientists who claim to be skeptics, though some receive substantial rewards for being skeptical.  Legitimate science is based upon evidence and reason, but many of the ideas put forward in this book are not.

Politics:  Sen. Inhofe says: “I am not a scientist. I do understand politics. “He says he went into politics because a Tulsa city engineer would not approve his request to move a fire escape on his building. Mr. Inhofe told him that he was going to run for mayor and fire him when he won. And he did. It is possible that the engineer was following the building code adopted by the city’s elected officials, and that there may have been a good reason to leave the fire escape where it was, such as it being easily assessable in case of a fire. That incident, however, explains Senator Inhofe’s attitudes toward regulations, regulators, and scientists whose research show the need for regulations. It also explains the Senators approach to regulations. He sees them as an impediment to business but he does not see that most regulations are developed to protect the public. One of his favorite targets is the EPA, which was created by Pres. Nixon to protect the environment. Sen. Inhofe chose to work on the Senate's Environmental and Public Works (EPW) committee so he could protect businesses from what he considers needless environmental regulations.

 The Hoax: Sen. Inhofe was apparently convinced “global warming is a hoax” by one of the worst hoaxes in recent Congressional history. It started when Dr. Willie Soon managed to get a paper through the peer review process at Climate Reviews with the help of an editor sympathetic to his views. The paper reviewed the literature on climate science, and concluded that the global warming in the 20th century was not unusual and that natural forces, rather than man's activities was the cause. An important piece of his evidence was the Medieval Warm Period, which he claimed was warmer than the latter 20th century. But there was something wrong with the paper. There were no accurate temperature records in Medieval Times, the Americas had not yet been discovered, and much of the Southern hemisphere was unknown. Dr. Soon's paper contradicted the evidence from hundreds of other peer-reviewed papers. It caused quite a furor at Climate Reviews which ended with 3 members the editorial board resigning in protest and the newly hired chief editor stating the paper had serious errors and should never have been published. The EPA was unwilling to include the paper in its assessment of climate science, so Sen. Inhofe scheduled a meeting of the EPW committee to examine the paper.

Shortly before the meeting, the American Geophysical Union (AGU) issued a press release from 13 of the scientists whose work was used in Dr. Soon’s paper; saying the paper distorted their research. At the hearing, Michael Mann represented the scientific viewpoint, presenting evidence from multiple sources showing that the Medieval Warm period was not worldwide and resulted only in a small hump in the temperature record. Soon stood behind his work and testified that he had not received any funds that might have biased his objectivity. However, the paper lists the American Petroleum Institute as a major source of funding and documents received since from the Smithsonian Institution in response to FOIA requests, revealed that since 2001  Dr. Soon has received over $1 million in funding from oil and coal interests. Sen. Inhofe was upset by the turn of events and tried to get him fired – Michael Mann that is. At Sen. Inhofe's insistence, the University of Pennsylvania, a Quaker University, has conducted 2 investigations into Dr. Mann's research and found no misconduct. A 2010 Science article reviewed the investigations, declaring “Michael Mann is cleared, again. “ Dissatisfied with the ruling, Sen. Inhofe has tried to get the attorney general to charge Michael Mann with fraud. Sadly, for the first time in history, scientists are collecting a legal defense fund to defend scientists against political attacks. And even worse, the scientific opinion of the senior member of our Environmental and Public Works committee is apparently based on a paper that would not pass freshman English.

 Endorsement: The Greatest Hoax was endorsed by Dr. R.M. Carter, a paleontologist from Australia, who was the star witness at Sen. Inhofe’s 2006 Senate hearing on Climate Change and the Media. No credible members of the media testified, and one might wonder why Sen. Inhofe would be interested in the media bias in Australia. Dr. Carter was likely there because he could be counted on to testify that historically the rise in global temperatures had always preceded rising carbon dioxide concentration; thus some natural cause must be releasing the carbon dioxide that is causing the temperature to rise. He was right about the role of carbon dioxide in increasing the Earth's temperature, but he rather ignored the possibility that the CO2 concentration was rising because the burning of fossil fuels was releasing 30 billion tons of CO2 annually.

After the hearing, Dr. Carter was challenged by climatologists to produce research showing the natural variability he claimed, but the paper he belatedly produced was soon refuted when significant errors were found in his reasoning. Though two of the four scientists who testified at the hearing were skeptics, all four agreed that the Earth had warmed about 1°C in the last century. Sen. Inhofe's own hearing had clearly refuted his claim: “Global warming is a hoax.” That was of little concern to Sen. Inhofe, as the main purpose of the hearing was to intimidate members of the press - as if that were needed. 

 Science: There is little science in the book, though much of the book is dedicated to discrediting science and scientists by quoting friends of his from the Heartland Institute, media personalities, and other politicians. He even sets up Al Gore as a strawman for scientists. In the book’s introduction, he displays a rather tasteless picture of Al Gore naked, and considerable space is devoted to vilifying him. That is a shame as Al Gore has served as a respected Senator, Vice President, and as a Presidential candidate came within a few hundred votes of being elected. Al Gore received a Nobel Peace Prize for his environmental work and his movie, An Inconvenient Truth, won an Oscar. The movie also had its day in court and won. Interestingly, the same Dr. Carter, who endorsed the book, was the star witness for the plaintiff in Dimmock v Secretary of State for Education, a suit which sought to prevent the educational use of An Inconvenient Truth in England. The court apparently did not agree with Dr. Carter and ruled that, though the film had some errors, it was substantially founded upon scientific research and fact and could be shown. Sen. Inhofe claims to be a free market capitalist, but he seems to take great umbrage that Al Gore has profited from his investments in green energy, apparently without realizing that most of those profits have been dedicated to promoting conservative causes, such as protecting the Earth.

 Though he may be a skilled politician, in the partisan sense, Sen. Inhofe is correct when he says “I am not a scientist.” He does not understand how scientific knowledge from many fields fits together to form a consistent view of nature. For instance, the book tells that after a large snowfall in Washington D.C., his grandchildren build an igloo and put up a sign: “Al Gore's New Home”. Sen. Inhofe used the picture to denounce global warming alarmism, though he should know that a single weather event proves nothing. And, if he were a scientist, he might understand how the warming oceans increase the probability of a record snowfall in Washington D.C. , making the igloo possible - and how carbon dioxide has made more probable the record heat waves in Texas and Oklahoma, making droughts and wildfires possible.

Sen. Inhofe shows he does not understand how science works when he brings up the “Coming Ice Age” story to discredit the scientific evidence.  The argument goes, “How can you trust science, when in the 1970s the scientists were predicting the coming of a new Ice Age, but now scientists claim that the Earth is warming?” In the 70’s, scientists found that increased industrialization was causing not only an increase in particulates, which would cause global cooling, but also an increase in CO2, which would increase global warming. There was no consensus among scientists about which effect would predominate.  A count of scientific papers in that decade showed that only 7 journal articles predicted that the global average temperature would continue to cool, while 44 papers indicated that the average temperature would rise. The research on global cooling was valuable as it showed a nuclear war was unwinnable as particulates from a nuclear exchange might create a nuclear winter, ending life on Earth as we know it.

 Scientific controversies are usually settled by the evidence, but this one was settled by the intervention of man. Particulates are visible and have serious health consequences. By 1980, regulations were in place to limit particulate emissions and, as that happened, the temperature of the Earth began increasing again. The fossil fuel companies became alarmed, as it was becoming apparent that we should also limit carbon emissions to keep the Earth's temperature at equilibrium, so they began a propaganda campaign to convince us that carbon dioxide was harmless. If you believe that, remember the lesson of Pitcher, Oklahoma. What you don't know can hurt you and be very costly.

 Cap and Trade: Sen. Inhofe claims that cap and trade is the “crown jewel” of a global conspiracy of scientists, Hollywood stars, and media personalities who want to take away your freedom and create a world government. However, cap and trade was devised by free-market conservatives for President Reagan, who used it successfully to stop the acid rain drifting into Canada from our Northeastern power plants. It was part the Clean Air Act signed into law by President Bush I and many prominent Republicans, including John McCain, have supported it. Cap and trade is considered to be the market solution to reducing carbon emissions. It is described by the EPA as “an environmental policy tool that delivers results with a mandatory cap on emissions while providing sources flexibility in how they comply. Successful cap and trade programs reward innovation, efficiency, and early action and provide strict environmental accountability without inhibiting economic growth.” Does that sound like it “Threatens Your Future” , as the subtitle of the book claims? And, it  cannot be making Al Gore rich - or be the cause of rising energy prices - as it has not yet been enacted for carbon emissions.

 Costs: Sen. Inhofe main objection to environmental regulations is their tremendous cost; but an accurate analysis of costs and benefits are not in the book. He just claims that it would cost each U.S. household $3,100 a year, a cost that has great sticker shock, but is totally inaccurate. Dr. John Reilly, the MIT economist whose work was used to arrive at that number, has publicly criticized a Republican lobbyist for distorting his work to arrive at that inflated value. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the cost of the cap-and-trade program by 2020 would average about $175 annually per household, and that associated savings would reduce the federal deficit by about $19 billion over the next decade. A recent report by the National Academy of Sciences details other high economic costs of inadequate environmental legislation, such as reduced streamflow, rainfall, and crop yields. Yet Congress has refused to act on the matter.   

Also, Sen. Inhofe seems to have left some important items out of his balance sheet, such as the true cost of using fossil fuels. The true cost of a resource should include repairing damage caused by its use and disposing of the waste. We are in effect subsidizing the fossil fuel industry by allowing them to freely discharge their wastes into the environment. Some of the “true costs” of fossil fuel use, such as health and environmental costs can be estimated. Nicholas Stern, former chief economist of the World Bank and one of the world's top economists, has used the results from formal economic models to examine the potential cost of failure to limit our carbon emissions. He estimates that the overall costs and risks of climate change will be equivalent to losing at least 5% of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) each year, now and forever. If a wider range of risks and impacts is taken into account, the cost of mitigation and damages could rise to 20% of GDP or more in the future - and we would run the additional risk of an environmental catastrophe.

Taking 5% of the US GDP for 2010, would give an environmental cost of $727 billion. As to health costs, the American Lung Association estimates that the EPA’s proposed guidelines for particulates could prevent 38,000 heart attacks and premature deaths, 1.5 million cases of acute bronchitis and aggravated asthma, and 2.7 million days of missed work or school. They estimate the economic benefits of reduced exposure to particulates alone could reach as much as $281 billion annually. Those two add up to about $1.08 trillion. The calculations do not include all the environmental and health costs, but they do show about how much we are subsidizing the fossil fuel industries by ignoring the damage to people’s health and the environment.

Sen. Inhofe, in his Rachel Maddow interview, stated that the cost of cap and trade would be $30-$40 billion annually. That is about 1/30 of what the environmental and health costs might eventually be. Then, it is rather hard to put a value on those premature deaths or the added risk of environmental catastrophes. The number of billion-dollar weather disasters has increased fivefold over the last 30 years, and insurance giants such as Suisse Re now consider man-made global warming real, and a risk factor in setting insurance rates. Increased insurance rates will be an additional out of pocket cost, which could easily offset the $175 the CBO estimated that cap and trade would cost.

 Scientists: To get around the strong consensus of scientists, the book claims there is a global conspiracy of liberal scientists bent on creating a world government, that climate science is a religion, that climate scientists are in it for the money, and that Climategate proves climate scientists are dishonest. None of those claims are supported by verifiable evidence. Most scientists are good citizens, conservative in their statements and actions. Most are religious, with stewardship and concern for their fellow man being part of their religion. The Presbyterian church, where Senator Inhofe claims membership, stated in 1989 and reaffirmed in 2008, its “serious concern that the global atmospheric warming trend (the greenhouse effect) represents one of the most serious global environmental challenges to the health, security, and stability of human life and natural ecosystems.”

 The book calls climate scientists “alarmists” in a derogatory sense, but many are becoming alarmed. Research shows that the Earth’s climate is changing because of our emissions of CO2, yet Congress has not acted to solve the problem. Scientists were criticized for considering the problem catastrophic, but they realize our carbon emissions will have an affect for 100 years or more into the future and inaction will threaten our food and water supply,increase the risk of severe weather events, and a possibly lead to an environmental catastrophe. Remember what happened at Pitcher, Oklahoma because lead mining was considered harmless.

 Sen. Inhofe often calls those who disagree with him “liberals”, but the meaning of liberal and conservative seem to be flexible. During the American Revolution, it was the liberals who wanted to create a democracy and conservatives who thought that King George had a divine right to rule. Sen. Inhofe uses “liberals” to describe environmentalists and others who want to preserve the earth - and uses “conservatives” for those who want to conserve power and profits. He even describes Rachel Maddow as one of his favorite liberals, and in his book he said “Rachel’s segment was one of the last major efforts to go after me just days before I landed in Copenhagen and declared vindication.” However in his recent interview on Rachel’s show, she showed the clip. Nowhere in the clip does it mention Copenhagen or climate change. Rather than apologize, he said he couldn’t remember everything he said in the 350 pages of fine print in the book, raising questions about how much of the book he actually wrote. Apparently liberal can also mean “pesky”.

 Big Oil: Sen. Inhofe tells some good stories of the old days in the Oklahoma oilfields, but back then Tulsa was the Oil Capital of the World and our domestic oil producers were a different breed from today’s multinational oil companies. They have little loyalty to the United States and little concern for our citizens or the environment. They have created some of the greatest man-made environmental disasters and resisted compensating their victims fairly. After the furor over the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, BP’s CEO commented “I want my life back”, but he could not give back the 11 lives lost because of his decisions. Although he promised to compensate Americans damaged by the oil spill, BP appointed a lawyer to disperse the funds, who made many of the victims “take it or leave it” offers. After the Exxon Valdez oil spill, Exxon Mobil went all the way to the Supreme Court to avoid paying the $5 billion in damages owed the native Alaskans. Koch oil was charged in Oklahoma of cheating Native Americans and the government out $5 billion in oil royalties. They settled the case out of court for a 10th of the $5 billion, with no admission of wrongdoing. Who says crime doesn't pay?

 Last year, the world's 5 largest oil companies received $4 billion in tax break subsidies. Yet, they reported $171 billion in profits, while most US businesses and citizens struggled with financial losses, in part caused by the steep rise in fuel prices. Sen. Inhofe says his goal is “energy self-sufficiency” for the United States, yet last year the leading US export was fuels, so Big Oil companies are selling American oil abroad, creating a shortage in the United States that is driving up prices. Increasing their profits is their main goal, even though carbon emissions may cause a man-made environmental disaster much greater than oil spills. To defend their profits, these companies are now the major contributors to the science denial machine that Sen. Inhofe defends in his book.

 Heartland Foundation: Sen. Inhofe was able to poke fun at himself when he said” Nature strikes back”, referring to a serious illness he contacted while swimming in a lake contaminated with toxic blue-green algae, whose growth was fueled by water pollution and the heat wave and Oklahoma. The illness caused him to miss the meeting of the Heartland Institute where he was to be a keynote speaker. His relation to the Heartland Institute is troubling. The Heartland Institute, once a major source of propaganda designed to prove there was no link between smoking, cancer, and lung disease, has now turned its considerable experience and resources into producing propaganda disputing the link between carbon emissions and global warming. Big Oil provides much of the funding for the Heartland Institute, and other similar “conservative” think tanks, who channel millions of dollars into the denial of science. The Heartland Institute is a gathering place for Big Oil’s lobbyists, loyal politicians, and paid skeptics. Many of those are the sources of information for Sen. Inhofe's book. How accurate is that information likely to be?

 Skeptics:  Science values its skeptics as they make science strong by pointing out areas that need more investigation, and they sometimes making valuable contributions to science. When Richard Muller questioned NASA's temperature records, he evaluated all 6 billion pieces of weather station data, and came to the conclusion that the temperature record was accurate. When O'Donnell doubted Steig’s work showing Antarctica was warming, he re-analyzed the data and found that indeed Antarctica, the coldest place on Earth, was getting warmer.

 Skeptics are expected to follow the methodologies and the ethics of science, to subject their work to review by their peers, and to divulge conflicts of interest. Many of those Sen. Inhofe praises as “climate skeptics” do not meet those criteria. They profit from being skeptical and, when research shows them wrong, they continue to repeat their skeptical arguments anyway. An example is Anthony Watts, who started the Surface Station Project to examine the data from weather stations, which he claimed had errors. The AGU took his skepticism seriously and did a thorough study on the weather stations, finding the data was reliable. They had offered Watts a chance to participate in the research, but he missed his chance to be a scientist when he refused. And though the question has been answered, Mr. Watts is still repeating the same criticisms - and collecting substantial donations to continue his Surface Station Project. There are many skeptics like Mr. Watts, who receives generous grants from think tanks, not for fundamental research, but to come up with ideas to cast doubt on the IPCC, climate research, and the work of legitimate scientists. Many of the paid skeptics appear in Sen. Inhofe's book as his sources for information, quotes, and references.

 Vindication: In one chapter of the book, Sen. Inhofe claims vindication, but it is hard to imagine sufficient vindication for displaying a picture of Al Gore naked. Sen. Inhofe claims he is vindicated by the Climategate e-mails, where hackers broke into the computers of England’s Hadley Climatic Research Unit (CRU), and stole 10 years of e-mails exchanged between the scientists. The incident was dubbed “Climategate” , but it was in no way like Watergate. In Wategate, the thieves were caught and punished and those who masterminded the plot were publicly disgraced. In Climategate, the thieves have been hailed by Sen. Inhofe and his friends as heroes - and the victims of the theft have been vilified. Quotes from the stolen e-mails were taken out of context, distorted, and released to media sources with claims the CRU scientists engaged in illegal and unethical acts. It seems strange that Scotland Yard is searching for the hackers, while Sen. Inhofe is gleefully helping spread the misinformation. As of today, eight independent formal investigations have been completed and none have found any scientific misconduct by the scientists involved. The hackers, who are clearly criminals, have not been caught. So, rather than being like Watergate, the e-mail scandal was actually more like Stargate, fictional fantasy. The accusations of wrongdoing by some who claim to be scientists, made before the matter could be investigated were particularly egregious as scientist’s ethical codes say that:” Public comments on scientific matters should be made with care and precision, without unsubstantiated, exaggerated, or premature statements.”

Winning: Sen. Inhofe claims he is winning, but he can't be talking about the scientific debate. All the world’s major scientific organizations think he is losing, as do 97 - 98% of the climate scientists, and 83% of American voters.  A 2011 Stanford poll found that 83% of Americans say that global warming is happening with 88% of Democrats and 54% of Republicans saying it is the result of human action. Attacking scientists may prove to be contrary is Republican party's best interest. While polls find scientist’s trustworthiness is  highly rated , with 84% having a favorable view of scientists, Congress' approval has now dropped to around 9%. This may be indicative of the public’s dissatisfaction with the partisanship and gridlock in Congress, for reasons on display in this book.

Although some members of Congress and some of the public may listen to Sen. Inhofe, nature doesn't. No matter how much he claims “hoax”, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing, the temperature of the Earth is rising, the oceans are becoming more acidic, glaciers and polar ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, the climate is changing, the probability of severe weather events is increasing, and weather-related natural disasters are becoming more frequent and more costly. It's time we examine more closely who actually winning by ignoring global warming.

(c) 2012 Que

The Republican Party isn’t exactly known for its environmental activism.

Reagan refused to take action on one of the biggest environmental issues of his era-acid rain-and systematically weakened the clout of the EPA. George H.W. Bush ended his term with a freeze on environmental regulations, and his son refused US support for the Kyoto Protocol.

Yet rarely have Republicans been so overtly hostile to existing environmental protections as the current legislators in the 112^th Congress.

Since the most recent election, Republicans in the House of Representatives have led a series of unprovoked assaults on the EPA. The attack has been two-pronged, with one focus on the EPA’s budget and the other on its powers of regulation.

The Republican’s budget proposal would slash the EPA’s budget by an unprecedented $30 billion—one third of the EPA’s budget, and the biggest cut to any other federal agency.

It would also do away with the critical posts of the energy and climate advisor to the President and the State Department envoy to UN climate negotiations.

As if slashing funding weren’t enough, Republicans are also working to dismantle the EPA’s regulatory powers.

I sit at the computer or at the television sometimes and I wonder how the race for the presidency and all down field races for offices on both federal and state levels can be close. I'm not naive, but given the state of the United States and ultimately the world, voters seem to have a clear opportunity to act in favor of their own interests when they go into the voting booth. But they don't.

There does seem to be a dichotomous we vs. they attitude in political choice. You are either a liberal or a conservative. A republican or a democrat. There aren't many people who are nuanced in their viewpoints which force a knowledged choice. Many people don't even know what the choices are.

I was struck this week at an interview that was being held with Governor Rick Perry {R, Tx} about the loss of federal funding because of his state's refusal to allow flow through money to go to Planned Parenthood. The interviewer asked the governor why he was allowing all this money to be held back from his state when it was not allowed, by law, to be used for the thing that the governor objected to, abortions. Governor Perry looked at the interviewer, like a deer in the headlights of a car, and eventually said that they just wanted to be surer.

This election is shaping up to be a big issues election. What it is not shaping up to be is an election with a lot of nuance. Choose a side and vote. Identify with a tribe and live that life. When that happens, the more practical of the parties should win. Just look at some of the stark dichotomies that have already been laid out. I list them without endorsement or comment, hoping that the reader will provide commentary to the list.

1. Who is in charge of healthcare?    The employer, the employee, the insurer, or the government
2. What constitutes religious liberty?   Traditional views of church / state vs. the church as activists in the state
3. How should Americans be taxed?   Are the rich overtaxed or undertaxed? Are the poor undertaxed or overtaxed?
4. How should we deal with Iran?      Destroy their potential nuclear capability or block economics?
5. How do we deal with high energy prices?    Drill, baby, drill or green energy?
6. Does the state have control over women's healthcare?    Yes or no?
7. Can debt reduction occur without infrastructure growth?   Private or public initiative to create jobs.
8. How do we deal with immigration?    Deportation or path to citizenship
9. How do we deal with climate change?   Regulations or no regulations
10. How do we keep jobs from going overseas?   Revision of trade agreements or subsidizing businesses.

I could easily keep going and list dozens of other issues that we tend to see as republican or democratic issues. We have become a country where a political party is able to take a unitary view on each issue and tell people in their party to take it or go somewhere else. I mention all of these issues, not because the current republican positions are wrong or the democratic positions are right, but because they are complex issues. They have no easy solutions. They are nuanced.

Unless we, as the American voter, force candidates to take thoughtful, global approaches to all of these problems, we're going to have a country that is going to remain irrevocably shattered. Somewhere along the line we have to be smarter than our politicians. We have to let them know that there are Americans out here who demand real solutions. Without that, maybe we should fire them all and start over.

Pressures on Earth's ecosystem are now so great that future generations could be doomed to falling living standards, the OECD said on Thursday in a report looking to the mid-century.

"Providing for a further two billion people by 2050 and improving the living standards for all will challenge our ability to manage and restore those natural assets on which all life depends," it warned.

"Failure to do so will have serious consequences, especially for the poor, and ultimately undermine the growth and human development of future generations."

The report made these points:

CLIMATE CHANGE:  Carbon emissions from energy use are likely to rise by 70 percent by 2050, "locking in" more disruptive climate change.

On present trends, the world's average temperature will be 3-6 degrees Celsius (5.4-10.8 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than in pre-industrial times, compared with the UN's target of 2 C (3.6 F).

BIODIVERSITY:  Species loss is set to continue, especially in Asia, Europe and southern Africa.

According to a scientific benchmark called mean species abundance, diversity of land species is expected to fall by 10 percent by 2050 compared with today. Already about a third of freshwater species diversity has been lost.

HEALTH:  No country will be spared worsening problems of air pollution, according to the OECD's scenarios. Levels in some cities, particularly in Asia, already far exceed World Health Organisation (WHO) safety limits.

"With growing transport and industrial air emissions, the global number of premature deaths linked to airborne particulate matter is protected to double to 3.6 million a year, with most deaths occurring in China and India," it said.

But rich countries, too, will be hit. Ground-level ozone -- a respiratory irritant caused by the reaction of traffic fumes with sunlight -- will be a danger to their ageing, highly urbanised populations.

Rising seas fueled by global warming have doubled the risk of so-called once-a-century floods, according to a trio of environmental reports released Wednesday.

These new reports -- one from the non-profit group Climate Central and two others published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Research Letters -- offer a detailed picture of where the most severe risks are along coastlines of the contiguous 48 states.

Science is about using observation and reason to understand the physical world. Some people are suspicious of computer models and theories; so here is some of the the basic data in pictures and graphs.

Ice core data gives a good picture of what has happened to the Earth in the last several ice ages. Please note that the concentration of CO2, which amplifies the effect of the Milankovitch cycles, did not rise above 300 ppm in the warmer interglacial periods - but now the CO2 concentration is  392 ppm – much higher than any time in the ice core record:

CO2: Man is now putting about 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air each year. About half of it dissolves in the ocean and they have become 20% more acidic in the last century. Much of the rest stays in the air, and  CO2 is building up in air:

Temperature: CO2 is one of the greenhouse gases that warm the Earth, and NASA’s graph shows how its increase is changing the Earth’s temperature:

The Sun: The current global warming is often wrongly attributed to an increase in intensity of the sun. The sunspot activity does not show up above the noise in the temperature record above and the solar irradiance increased slightly until 1960 and has declined slightly since then.

 Arctic Ice: Many of the changes in the Earth are subtle but here is one of NASA’s pictures  which clearly shows  how the Earth is changing:

 Arctic ice:  These two graphs show how both the extent and the volume of the Arctic ice is changing.

      Arctic ice volume at each years minimum.

 Antarctica: Research by Steig and by O’Donnell  show that Antarctica is warming. The warmer oceans result in more snowfall which increases the inland glacier mass, but the erosion of ice by the warmer oceans is causing an overall loss of ice mass.

Antarctic Ice Mass from GRACE satellite data.

 Greenland: The Greenland ice sheets are also beginning to decline.  

Ocean Level Rise: The melting ice sheets and thermal expansion is causing the oceans to rise by about 3 mm per year which, though it seems small, amounts to an increase in ocean volume of 1190 cubic kilometers/yr.

     Rise in Sea Level.

 Severe Weather: Warmer temperatures increase both the rate of evaporation and the energy and moisture in the air. This increases the risk of severe weather, droughts, and wildfires. Large insurance companies such as Suisse Re now consider global warming a risk factor as there has been a fivefold increase in billion-dollar weather events in the last 30 years.

Droughts: Below is the Palmer Drought Index which includes most of the continental areas used for food production. Zero represents average rainfall and -4 represents extreme drought. After 1980, drought conditions have grown worse worldwide, and no one disputes the effect of droughts on food production.

Note : This post was updated on 04/03/2012 .

(c) 2012 Que

The Greenland ice sheet is likely to be more vulnerable to global warming than previously thought.

The temperature threshold for melting the ice sheet completely is in the range of 0.8 to 3.2 degrees Celsius global warming, with a best estimate of 1.6 degrees above pre-industrial levels, shows a new study by scientists from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

Today, already 0.8 degrees global warming has been observed. Substantial melting of land ice could contribute to long-term sea-level rise of several meters and therefore it potentially affects the lives of many millions of people.

Previous research suggested a threshold in global temperature increase for melting the Greenland ice sheet of a best estimate of 3.1 degrees, with a range of 1.9 to 5.1 degrees.

The new study's best estimate indicates about half as much.

"Our study shows that under certain conditions the melting of the Greenland ice sheet becomes irreversible.

This supports the notion that the ice sheet is a tipping element in the Earth system," says team-leader Andrey Ganopolski of PIK.

"If the global temperature significantly overshoots the threshold for a long time, the ice will continue melting and not regrow – even if the climate would, after many thousand years, return to its preindustrial state."

This is related to feedbacks between the climate and the ice sheet: The ice sheet is over 3000 meters thick and thus elevated into cooler altitudes. When it melts its surface comes down to lower altitudes with higher temperatures, which accelerates the melting.

Also, the ice reflects a large part of solar radiation back into space. When the area covered by ice decreases, more radiation is absorbed and this adds to regional warming.

Dr. James Hansen has been studying atmospheres since before we knew why Venus is so hot (he was intimately involved in that work).  But in the early 1980s, Hansen's focus shifted to studying our own atmosphere. 

His pioneering work in the analysis of Earth's energy budget resulted in the publication of one of the first predictive works identifying specific impacts that we would face as a result of human-caused climate change.

Hansen's 1981 article in Science Magazine listed those predictions:

• 20th century: Global warming in the 1980s, and subsequent warming by the end of that century which would exceed random noise levels normally seen in weather
• 21st century:  shifting of climate zones (hit the 'Play' button in the lower right-hand corner)
• creation of drought zones
• erosion of ice sheets
• rising sea levels, and
• opening of the fabled Northwest Passage

I've provided links in those predictions.  You can judge for yourself whether Dr. Hansen was correct.  Many of them have happened far faster than even Hansen thought.

Earlier this month, Dr. Hansen gave a 17-minute presentation at the TED Conference.  While I hope that everyone will watch the entire video, I've included a few excerpts from his presentation to whet your appetite, or even just give an overview for those who don't have the time to watch the entire video.

Selected excerpts:

"[Earth's] total energy imbalance now is about six tenths of a Watt per square meter. That may not sound like much, but when added up over the whole world, it's enormous.

It's about 20 times greater than the rate of energy use by all of humanity.

It's equivalent to exploding 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs per day, 365 days per year.

That's how much extra energy Earth is gaining each day. This imbalance, if we want to stabilize climate, means that we must reduce CO2 from 391 ppm (parts per million) back to 350 ppm. That is the change needed to restore energy balance and prevent further warming."

...

But instead of placing a rising fee on carbon emissions to make fossil fuels pay their true cost to society, our governments are forcing the public to subsidize fossil fuels by $400 to $500 billion dollars per year, worldwide - thus encouraging extraction of every fossil fuel: mountaintop removal, long-wall mining, fracking, tar sands, tar shale, deep ocean, Arctic drilling.

This path, if continued, guarantees that we will pass tipping points, leading to ice-sheet disintegration that will accelerate out of control of future generations, a large fraction of species will be committed to extinction, and increasing intensity of droughts and floods will severely impact breadbaskets of the world, causing massive famines and economic decline.

Imagine a giant asteroid, on a direct collision course with Earth.

That is the equivalent of what we face now. Yet we dither, taking no action to divert the asteroid, even though the longer we wait, the more difficult and expensive it becomes.

If we had started in 2005, it would have required emission reductions of 3% per year to restore planetary energy balance and stabilize climate this century.

If we start next year, it is 6% per year.

If we wait ten years, it is 15% per year - extremely difficult and expensive, perhaps impossible.

But we aren't even starting."

Watch the video here:

Greenhouse gases that drive man-made climate change are also dangerously changing ocean chemistry, likely faster than at any other time in the past 300 million years, according to research coordinated between New York state and the United Kingdom.

The change — known as ocean acidification — is associated with several massive extinctions of marine life in that period of Earth's history, and now presents a growing threat, said study lead author Barbel Honisch, a paleoceanographer at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

Located in Rockland County on the Hudson River, where the ocean tides stretch upriver to Troy, the observatory was joined by the University of Bristol in southern England in the report, which examined several hundred independent studies from around the world done over the last two decades.

The work is the first of its kind to survey the geologic record of the oceans for such a vast time period. Read more: 

Research by Michael E. Mann confirmed the reality of global warming. Little did he know that it would also expose him to a vicious hate campaign.

The scientist who has borne the full brunt of attacks by climate changedeniers, including death threats and accusations of misappropriating funds, is set to hit back.

Research by US physicist and climatologist Michael E. Mann demonstrating an increase in global temperatures infuriated climate change deniers. ------->
[Photograph: Greg Rico]

Michael E. Mann, creator of the "hockey stick" graph that illustrates recent rapid rises in global temperatures, is to publish a book next month detailing the "disingenuous and cynical" methods used by those who have tried to disprove his findings. The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars is a startling depiction of a scientist persecuted for trying to tell the truth. Read more;

Jay Zwally, NASA scientist, says that the Arctic has probably reached a 'tipping point'.

"The sea ice is decreasing faster than all the models predicted," says Jay Zwally, the ice satellite project scientist at NASA Goddard.

"We not only have the warming of the atmosphere, we have a warming of the ocean that is affecting this.

It has been surprising to everybody, this decrease in area. This is a marked departure, and this is suggesting to us that maybe we are getting at this tipping point."

Video below:

We conclude that the recent decline of Arctic sea ice has played a critical role in recent cold and snowy winters.

Scientists have tied the rapid decline of Arctic sea ice, caused by global warming pollution, to the recent extreme winters that hit the United States last year and Europe this year. In “Impact of declining Arctic sea ice on winter snowfall,” a new report published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers find that the loss of polar ice has changed atmospheric circulation and increased atmospheric water vapor, driving the popularly-dubbed “snowpocalypse” conditions:

 Sea ice decline is contributing to catastrophic, deadly winters in two ways, the researchers find. The loss of ice changes wind patterns over the northern oceans, which in turn disrupts the jet stream, allowing cold polar air to plunge across the northern hemisphere. Read more;

A little while back a Newsviner seeded this article: Why the Climate Skeptics Are Winning.

As with any article on the allegedly controversial subject of AGW a lively exchange ensued. Now my belief is that it’s settled science that AGW is occurring and is likely to be catastrophic to life on earth in general, which includes us of course. I also believe healthy skepticism is a good thing and that it pays to be a critical thinker. But at some point skepticism can slip over the edge and become denial, which is decidedly not healthy.

In these discussions typically the folks that accept AGW do their best to provide pertinent links to the science and engage the deniers in rational debate. The deniers respond in a number ways like repeating conservative talking points (over, and over), quote renegade scientists, provide links to the Heartland Institute, talk about so-called climate-gate, and so forth. What the deniers almost never do is effectively dispute the growing body of scientific studies and data that supports the reality of AGW.

The debates continue until they degrade into snark contests. The rationalists and science cannot make headway with people that hold on to climate-gate emails like a dog chewing on an old sock. Like the dogs the deniers won’t let go even if you grab the sock and lift them off the floor with it. It’s frustrating.

So what does this have to do with Monty Python? Well at best it is silliness taken to great heights. It occurred to me that these debates are a lot like King Arthur’s fight with the Black Knight in Monty Python’s Holy Grail. Basically Arthur hacks off all the Black Knight’s limbs and yet the Black Knight wants to fight on. With a AGW denier as the Black Knight here’s the dialog:

King Arthur: [after Arthur's cut off both of the Black Knight's arms] Look, you stupid Bastard. You've got no arms left.

Black Knight: Yes I have.

King Arthur: *Look*!

Black Knight: It's just a flesh wound.

[the Black Knight continues to threaten Arthur despite getting both his arms and one of his legs cut off]

Black Knight: Right, I'll do you for that!

King Arthur: You'll what?

Black Knight: Come here!

King Arthur: What are you gonna do, bleed on me?

Black Knight: I'm invincible!

King Arthur: ...You're a loony.

So why bother to fight the Black Knights? Because what you tolerate, you encourage. As frustrating and ridiculous as it seems we need to keep shining a light into their darkness. We need to call them out on their brainless, illogical, and paranoid conspiracy theories and not permit them to rant, obfuscate, and delay while the planet burns.

To the AGW deniers and right wing think tanks and purchased politicians and the Knights who say Ni, I say this (also from the Holy Grail):

 I don't want to talk to you no more, you empty headed animal food trough wiper. I fart in your general direction. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.  

At the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, an experimental plot was in full flower on a recent February afternoon, as the thermometer edged toward 60.

The horticulturalists in the Bronx call it the global-warming garden, and in a winter notable for its consistent mildness, it is hardly unusual. From the Shakespeare Garden in Central Park to the Chicago Botanic Garden, flowering bulbs and other plants are bursting out two to four weeks ahead of schedule. Snowdrops are up; daffodils, crocuses and hellebores are already in flower; trailing phlox has opened; and, farther afield, even magnolia trees are starting to bloom on the National Mall in Washington.

Most scientists, on achieving high office, keep their public remarks to the bland and reassuring.

Last week Nina Fedoroff, the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), broke ranks in a spectacular manner.

She confessed that she was now “scared to death” by the anti-science movement that was spreading, uncontrolled, across the US and the rest of the western world.

“We are sliding back into a dark era,” she said.

“And there seems little we can do about it. I am profoundly depressed at just how difficult it has become merely to get a realistic conversation started on issues such as climate change or genetically amodified organisms.”

By Col. Gary Wamsley
Berthoud, CO

When I read the original articles on the release of confidential documents from the Heartland Institute board meeting, I was infuriated.

I reacted by sending a strongly worded email to the president and all the board members of the Heartland Institute.

Surprisingly, one board member and Institute president Joseph Bast responded to my email.

Bast’s response is one that I would consider threatening. He said he was turning the email over to their legal department, the forensic staff and the FBI. He also warned me not to delete any emails.

Apparently, I was supposed to be frightened by the specter of this multimillion dollar non-profit (?) spending resources on an old veteran. The whole idea seems ludicrous and they know it.

Still, I am not afraid of the battle if it comes. This is a tactic that big money often used to suppress free speech. See Gleen Greenwald’s article in Salon “Billionaire Romney donor uses threats to silence critics.”

During my career I have been in position for many sensitive positions and have had top secret clearances, I have been investigated by the Civil Service Commission, the FBI and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. I feel secure that the government knows who I am.

I decided to publish these emails so that you can judge the exchange for yourself.

From: Gary Wamsley [mailto:editor@berthoudrecorder.com] Sent: Friday, February 17, 2012 5:16 PMTo: Joseph BastSubject: Heartland Institute disinformation campaign

You should be ashamed of yourself. The United States already has a problem in keeping up with the rest of the world in science education and now you want to play a role in further destroying our nation as well as our planet.

You are a traitor to your own country. I did not spend 30 years in the military to protect the likes of you.

Gary Wamsley
Colonel, USAF, Retired

From: Joseph Bast <JBast@heartland.org>Date: Sat, 18 Feb 2012 09:46:00 -0600To: Gary Wamsley <editor@berthoudrecorder.com>Cc: Jim Lakely <JLakely@heartland.org>Subject: RE: Heartland Institute disinformation campaign

Mr. Wamsley,

much more at this link...

...leading the race into a new scientific dark age.

Most scientists, on achieving high office, keep their public remarks to the bland and reassuring. Last week Nina Fedoroff, the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), broke ranks in a spectacular manner.

She confessed that she was now "scared to death" by the anti-science movement that was spreading, uncontrolled, across the US and the rest of the western world.

"We are sliding back into a dark era," she said. "And there seems little we can do about it. I am profoundly depressed at just how difficult it has become merely to get a realistic conversation started on issues such as climate change or genetically modified organisms."

------------------------------------------------------

As Fedoroff pointed out, university and government researchers are hounded for arguing that rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are changing the climate. Their emails are hacked while Facebook campaigns call for their dismissal from their posts, calls that are often backed by rightwing politicians. At the last Republican party debate in Florida, Rick Santorum insisted he should be the presidential nominee simply because he had cottoned on earlier than his rivals Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney to the "hoax" of global warming.

"Those of us who grew up in the sixties, when we put men on the Moon, now have to watch as every Republican candidate for this year's presidential election denies the science behind climate change and evolution. That is a staggering state of affairs and it is very worrying," said Professor Naomi Oreskes, of the University of California, San Diego.

Oreskes is co-author, with Erik Conway, of Merchants of Doubt, an investigation into the links between corporate business interests and campaigns in the US aimed at blocking the introduction of environmental and medical measures such as bans on smoking and the use of DDT, laws to limit acid rain, legislation to end the depletion of ozone in the atmosphere and attempts to curb carbon dioxide emissions.

In each case, legislation was delayed by years, sometimes decades, thanks to the activities of a variety of foundations – such as the Heartland Institute – which are backed by energy companies such as Exxon and billionaires like Charles Koch.

These institutions, acting as covers for major energy corporations, are responsible for the onslaught that has deeply lowered the reputation of science in many people's minds in America. This has come in the form of personal attacks on the reputations of scientists and television adverts that undermine environment laws. The Environmental Protection Agency, which is responsible for blocking mining and drilling proposals that might harm threatened species or habitats, has become a favourite target.

"Our present crisis over the rise of anti-science has been coming for a long time and we should have seen it coming," adds Oreskes.

This point was backed by Francesca Grifo of the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), although she added that one specific event had brought matters to a head this year: the decision by the United States supreme court to overrule the law that allowed the federal government to place limits on independent spending for political purposes by business corporations.

"That has opened the gates for corporations – often those associated with coal and oil industries – to flood the market with adverts that support rightwing politicians and which attack government bodies that impose environmental regulations that these companies don't like," she said. "The science that supports these regulations is attacked as well. That has made a terrible difference over the past year and it is now bringing matters to a head."

Her remarks are backed by a UCS report, Heads They Win, Tails We Lose: How Corporations Corrupt Science at the Public's Expense, which was published at the Vancouver meeting on Friday. It chronicles the methods used by corporate businesses to attack their targets: harassing individual scientists, ghost-writing scientific articles to raise doubts about government research, and undermining the use of science to form government policy.

Compiled from:

The Agonist - World Leader In Anti-Science

and

The Guardian - Attacks paid for by big business are 'driving science into a dark era'

Those who follow events in the climate change arena are by now quite familiar with the leak of internal Heartland Institute documents this week, and the ensuing firestorm.

This post will not revisit the contents of the leaked documents.  Links to them can be found in many, many places on the Internet, including here.

This post, instead, focuses on the urgent need for Conservatives to end the tactics of distortion, diversion, and defamation, and to begin to work with the science community and policy-makers to solve the biggest challenge we face - human-caused climate change.

I start with an open letter to the Heartland Institute, written and sent today by some of the world's most respected climate scientists.

                                                  An Open Letter to the Heartland Institute

"As scientists who have had their emails stolen, posted online and grossly misrepresented, we can appreciate the difficulties the Heartland Institute is currently experiencing following the online posting of the organization’s internal documents earlier this week.

However, we are greatly disappointed by their content, which indicates the organization is continuing its campaign to discredit mainstream climate science and to undermine the teaching of well-established climate science in the classroom.

We know what it feels like to have private information stolen and posted online via illegal hacking. It happened to climate researchers in 2009 and again in 2011. Personal emails were culled through and taken out of context before they were posted online. In 2009, the Heartland Institute was among the groups that spread false allegations about what these stolen emails said.

Despite multiple independent investigations, which demonstrated that allegations against scientists were false, the Heartland Institute continued to attack scientists based on the stolen emails. When more stolen emails were posted online in 2011, the Heartland Institute again pointed to their release and spread false claims about scientists.

So although we can agree that stealing documents and posting them online is not an acceptable practice, we would be remiss if we did not point out that the Heartland Institute has had no qualms about utilizing and distorting emails stolen from scientists.

We hope the Heartland Institute will heed its own advice to “think about what has happened” and recognize how its attacks on science and scientists have helped poison the debate over climate change policy. The Heartland Institute has chosen to undermine public understanding of basic scientific facts and personally attack climate researchers rather than engage in a civil debate about climate change policy options.

These are the facts: Climate change is occurring. Human activity is the primary cause of recent climate change. Climate change is already disrupting many human and natural systems. The more heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions that go into the atmosphere, the more severe those disruptions will become. Major scientific assessments from the Royal Society, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, United States Global Change Research Program and other authoritative sources agree on these points.

What businesses, policymakers, advocacy groups and citizens choose to do in response to those facts should be informed by the science. But those decisions are also necessarily informed by economic, ethical, ideological, and other considerations. While the Heartland Institute is entitled to its views on policy, we object to its practice of spreading misinformation about climate research and personally attacking climate scientists to further its goals.

We hope the Heartland Institute will begin to play a more constructive role in the policy debate. Refraining from misleading attacks on climate science and climate researchers would be a welcome first step toward having an honest, fact-based debate about the policy responses to climate change."

The letter is signed by the following:

• Ray Bradley, PhD, Director of the Climate System Research Center, University of Massachusetts
• David Karoly, PhD, ARC Federation Fellow and Professor, University of Melbourne, Australia
• Michael Mann, PhD, Director, Earth System Science Center, Pennsylvania State University
• Jonathan Overpeck, PhD, Professor of Geosciences and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Arizona
• Ben Santer, PhD, Research Scientist, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
• Gavin Schmidt, PhD, Climate Scientist, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies
• Kevin Trenberth, ScD, Distinguished Senior Scientist, Climate Analysis Section, National Center for Atmospheric Research

Less than two months ago, Conservative columnist Peter Wehner wrote about the need for Conservatives to step up to the plate, admit that human-caused climate change was real, and add their voices to the development of real solutions - before it's too late. 

His articles on the topic, “Conservatives and Climate Change, Part I and Part II”, were published in the neo-conservative magazine Commentary.

Mr. Wehner has impeccable Conservative credentials, having served under Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and most recently as deputy assistant to President George W. Bush. 

And Mr. Wehner wrote this:

“The world is getting warmer. The warming is almost certainly caused, at least in large part, by human activity. And rising temperatures could pose a future risk, though how significant of a risk is open to interpretation. . . This is not a liberal invention; it’s physics.

Conservatives should be part of that conversation. There’s an intellectually credible case to be made that it’s unwise to embrace massive, harmful changes to our economy in the face of significant uncertainties . . . [yet] to acknowledge global warming does not necessarily lead one to embrace Al Gore’s environmental agenda.

But rather than offer constructive ideas on how to deal with global warming, some conservatives simply deny global warming has occurred. Their concern is that admitting global warming is real opens the door to government restriction on liberty, so it’s simply better to keep the door bolted shut. . .

[Yet] the problem for those who deny global warming is empirical: Earth’s temperatures have increased and human activity has contributed to it. To deny this is to deny reality, to subordinate truth to ideology. And in the long run that can only damage conservatism.”

Mr. Wehner is not alone.  As I posted last July, a number of presentations at the Heartland Institutes's own annual convention last year faced the reality of human-caused climate change.

With calls from both the scientific community and a (growing) number of Conservatives, to put aside tactics meant to divert attention or undermine science, and to begin working to actually solve this problem, perhaps there's hope.

The ball is in Heartland's court.  Many of us will be watching.

With global efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions stalled, the United States and five other countries are starting a new program to cut other pollutants — including methane, soot and hydrofluorocarbons — that contribute to global warming.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is set to announce the five-year initiative Thursday morning.

Canada, Sweden, Mexico, Ghana and Bangladesh are also participating.

The plan will be administered by the United Nations Environment Program, with a $12 million contribution from the United States for the first two years. Canada will add $3 million; contributions from the other countries are not known.

Carbon dioxide — from burning fossil fuels — plays the largest role in pushing up global temperatures, climate scientists say.

But methane, soot and hydrofluorocarbons also contribute to global warming.

Combined, those three pollutants are believed to account for 30 to 40 percent of the nearly one degree Celsius rise in global temperatures since the beginning of the 20th century.

If adopted globally, measures to reduce soot and methane emissions could slow global warming by about a half a degree Celsius by 2030, according to research published in January.

Leaked documents suggest that an organization known for attacking climate science is planning a new push to undermine the teaching of global warming in public schools, the latest indication that climate change is becoming a part of the nation’s culture wars.

The documents, from a nonprofit organization in Chicago called the Heartland Institute,  outline plans to promote a curriculum that would cast doubt on the scientific finding that fossil fuel emissions endanger the long-term welfare of the planet.

“Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective,” one document said.

While the documents offer a rare glimpse of the internal thinking motivating the campaign against climate science, defenders of science education were preparing for battle even before the leak.

Efforts to undermine climate-science instruction are beginning to spread across the country, they said, and they fear a long fight similar to that over the teaching of evolution in public schools.

In a statement, the Heartland Institute acknowledged that some of its internal documents had been stolen.

...The documents say that the Charles G. Koch  Charitable Foundation contributed $25,000 last year and was expected to contribute $200,000 this year.

The documents suggest that Heartland has spent several million dollars in the past five years in its efforts to undermine climate science, much of that coming from a person referred to repeatedly in the documents as “the Anonymous Donor.”

A guessing game erupted Wednesday about who that might be.

The documents say that over four years ending in 2013, the group expects to have spent some $1.6 million on financing the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, an entity that publishes periodic reports attacking climate science and holds lavish annual conferences.

Much, much more at the link.  I strongly encourage reading the entire article.

"It's a rare glimpse behind the wall of a key climate denial organisation," Kert Davies, director of research for Greenpeace, said in a telephone interview. "It's more than just a gotcha to have these documents. It shows there is a co-ordinated effort to have an alternative reality on the climate science in order to have an impact on the policy."

So forget arguing, arguing, arguing with a tribe unmoored from reality. Start organizing, organizing, organizing the cohorts that are amenable to reality. Prepare them for when it’s their turn to take over. Time will do the rest.

Great article on why it's a waste of time to argue with global warming deniers and who global warming deniers are. It also talks about some of the other strange beliefs this cohort has. They're detached from reality and this article hits it on the head.

First I want to offer my thanks to Physicist-retired and Pacific Northwest Blogger for their inspiration and encouragement to write this article. In PR's article PNWB provided a link to What NASA's Blue Marble Photo Reveals About Climate Change. The author of the Blue Marble article said a couple of things which ultimately became the inspiration for my comments in PR's article and this article.

Talking about unprecedented profits made by fossil-fuel companies the Blue Marble author said...

Telling the truth about climate change would require pulling away the biggest punchbowl in history, right when the party is in full swing. And that's why those of us battling for the future need to raise our game.

...and talking about why the fossil-fuel companies don't want to invest their huge profits in "new clean technology" he said...

...their value is largely based on fossil-fuel reserves that won't be burned if we ever take global warming seriously.

Fact #1: A small concentration of CO2 is a big deal.

How can so little CO2 have a significant effect?
 
...It’s like your mouth.  Your taste buds are designed to detect particular tastes, and most things you put in your mouth don’t have those tastes. 

Everyone would agree, for example, that water does not taste spicy.  Only a few compounds produce that “heat” sensation in the taste buds.  The one that does it for hot peppers is called capsaicin. 

Most people can easily detect one drop of capsaicin in a glass of water.  If you put enough capsaicin in a glass of water to match the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere (one molecule of capsaicin for every 2600 molecules of water), it tastes like you’re drinking a liquefied jalapeño pepper straight up.
 
If you hear or read somewhere that the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is so small that it must be unimportant, your source is either too naive to know better or trying to deceive you.
 
Fact #2: The fraction of CO2 molecules in the atmosphere that were produced by man is different from the fraction of CO2 molecules in the atmosphere that are there because of man.
 
...For every two man-produced molecules of CO2 that have been taken up by plants or absorbed in the ocean, there’s one molecule of natural CO2 that would have been taken up or absorbed, except that its place was filled by a man-produced molecule of CO2. 

So it’s been effectively squeezed out into the atmosphere.
 
If you hear or read somewhere that the amount of man-produced CO2 in the atmosphere is only a small fraction of the total CO2 in the atmosphere and that therefore man is having a small effect, your source is either too naive to know better or trying to deceive you.
 
Fact #3: Carbon dioxide is good for plants, in the sense that it makes them grow more rapidly.
 
A common skeptic argument is that CO2 is good for plants.  From these simple numbers, we see that plants as a whole are certainly benefiting from climate change, in the sense that they are extracting more carbon from the atmosphere and turning it into plant material than before.
 
If you hear or read somewhere that man’s addition of CO2 to the atmosphere has been generally harmful to plant productivity, your source is either too naive to know better or trying to deceive you.
 
More details on the CO2-plant connection
 
As long as the climate effects are small, they don’t matter much, but to the extent that climate changes faster than plants can move around to keep up with it, climate change will be bad for native plants. 

Worse, in the tropics, the climate may change into something with no existing analogue on Earth and thus no pre-adapted species ready to move in.  

Is there any source out there that has all three of these facts correct? 

I know of one: the IPCC.  (Anyone who says the IPCC isn’t reliable should be asked, “Compared to what?”)

Earth's glaciers and ice caps outside of the regions of Greenland and Antarctica are shedding roughly 150 billion tons of ice annually,  according to a new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder.

The research effort is the first comprehensive satellite study of the contribution of the world's melting glaciers and ice caps to global sea level rise and indicates they are adding roughly 0.4 millimeters annually, said CU-Boulder physics Professor John Wahr, who helped lead the study.

The measurements are important because the melting of the world's glaciers and ice caps, along with Greenland and Antarctica, pose the greatest threat to sea level increases in the future, Wahr said.

The researchers used satellite measurements taken with the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE, a joint effort of NASA and Germany, to calculate that the world's glaciers and ice caps had lost about 148 billion tons, or about 39 cubic miles of ice annually from 2003 to 2010.

The total does not count the mass from individual glacier and ice caps on the fringes of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets -- roughly an additional 80 billion tons.

"This is the first time anyone has looked at all of the mass loss from all of Earth's glaciers and ice caps with GRACE," said Wahr.

"The Earth is losing an incredible amount of ice to the oceans annually, and these new results will help us answer important questions in terms of both sea rise and how the planet's cold regions are responding to global change."

A day before Republicans voice their presidential preferences in the Colorado caucuses, Rick Santorum dismissed climate change as “a hoax” and advocated an energy plan heavy on fossil fuels.

“We were put on this Earth as creatures of God to have dominion over the earth, to use it wisely and steward it wisely, but for our benefit not for the earth’s benefit,” Santorum told an audience at the Colorado School of Mines where he was a guest speaker Monday at the Colorado Energy Summit.

“We are the intelligent beings that know how to manage things and through that course of science and discovery if we can be better stewards of this environment, then we should not let the vagaries of nature destroy what we have helped create,” Santorum said to applause from the conservative crowd.

The former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania argued that science has been hijacked by politicians on the left, and that climate change is “an absolute travesty of scientific research that was motivated by those who, in my opinion saw this as an opportunity to create a panic and a crisis for government to be able to step in and even more greatly control your life,” Santorum said...

Gingrich, speaking before Santorum at the Colorado Energy Summit, said he greatly regretted a commercial he shot with Nancy Pelosi that addressed cap-and-trade legislation...

While Gingrich and Santorum don’t agree on whether the 58th Speaker of the House ever favored cap-and-trade legislation, they do share a common disdain for the Environmental Protection Agency. If he is elected president, Gingrich said he would abolish the EPA and replace it with something he calls the Environmental Solutions Agency. He also said he would fundamentally overhaul the Department of Interior and on his first day in office, he would sign an executive order approving the controversial

Oil and gas, he said, is “so central” to the nation’s future energy portfolio.

“Environmentalists,” Gingrich added, “have been infiltrated over the last 40 years by people on the left who are against business and against local control and they use the environment as an excuse.”

A small group of leading climate scientists, financially supported by billionaires including Bill Gates, are lobbying governments and international bodies to back experiments into manipulating the climate on a global scale to avoid catastrophic climate change.

The scientists, who advocate geoengineering methods such as spraying millions of tonnes of reflective particles of sulphur dioxide 30 miles above earth, argue that a "plan B" for climate change will be needed if the UN and politicians cannot agree to making the necessary cuts in greenhouse gases, and say the U.S. government and others should pay for a major program of international research.

Solar geoengineering techniques are highly controversial: while some climate scientists believe they may prove a quick and relatively cheap way to slow global warming, others fear that when conducted in the upper atmosphere, they could irrevocably alter rainfall patterns and interfere with the earth's climate.

Geoengineering is opposed by many environmentalists, who say the technology could undermine efforts to reduce emissions, and by developing countries who fear it could be used as a weapon or by rich countries to their advantage.

In 2010, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity declared a moratorium on experiments in the sea and space, except for small-scale scientific studies.

Pressure to find a quick technological fix to climate change is growing as politicians fail to reach an agreement to significantly reduce emissions.

Environmentalists are torn 

"I have spent my entire career thinking of myself as an advocate on behalf of public lands and acting for their protection," said Johanna Wald, a veteran environmental attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. "I am now helping facilitate an activity on public lands that will have very significant environmental impacts. We are doing it because of the threat of climate change. It's not an accommodation; it's a change I had to make to respond to climate."

That unusual collaboration — along with generous federal subsidies and allotments of public land — has sparked a wholesale remodeling of the American desert.

Even if only a few of the proposed projects are built, hundreds of square miles of wild land will be scraped clear. Several thousand miles of power transmission corridors will be created.

The desert will be scarred well beyond a human life span, and no amount of mitigation will repair it, according to scores of federal and state environmental reviews.

In the fight against climate change, the Mojave Desert is about to take one for the team.

 

There is evidence that the authors of a recent paper may have gamed the peer review system to publish a biased climate science paper.

 

The Review Process: When a paper is submitted to a journal for publication, the editor removes the name of the author and sends the manuscript to several experts in the area, usually three, for review. The editor keeps the names of the reviewers confidential. If an error is found, the reviewer’s comments are returned to the author with suggestions for corrections. It is a good system for ensuring the quality of research publications, but even then papers are sometimes published that contains errors. The reviewers may miss an error, a biased editor may publish the paper in spite of flaws, or authors may exploit loopholes in a journal’s rules to get a paper published. Some journals allow the author to suggest names of reviewers and the editor often picks reviewers from the list. Most scientists submit names of reliable reviewers as it is an embarrassment to have errors found in their paper after publication. However, even if the papers are properly reviewed, the practice can bring accusations of “pal” review. Since reviewer’s names are kept confidential by the editor, it is difficult to know for sure whether that may have happened. However, there is evidence that the authors of a recent paper may have gamed the system by suggesting a set of reviewers that shared their bias. See what you think.

The paper: Last July 25th, Roy Spencer and Danny Braswell authored a paper in the rather specialized technical journal, Remote Sensing, titled “On the Misdiagnosis Of Surface Temperature Feedbacks From Variations In Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance“.  The paper claimed “The sensitivity of the climate system to an imposed radiative imbalance remains the largest source of uncertainty in projections of future anthropogenic climate change. Here we present further evidence that this uncertainty from an observational perspective is largely due to the masking of the radiative feedback signal by internal radiative forcing, probably due to natural cloud variations.”  It seems that only an expert in climatology would know what that means or what its implications were, but in three days a sensationalized version of the paper appeared on internet sites, in major business magazines, and in news articles in major newspapers. Millions of people likely read about the paper.

The Publicity: The renewed public interest in science should have made climate scientists pleased; however, they were not. Beneath the technical language is a claim that the climate sensitivity to CO2 has been misinterpreted by climate scientists because of natural cloud variations. Were it true, it would mean that natural forces, not man, were responsible for much of the observed global warming. That idea had been examined before and found to be inconsistent with the evidence, but the idea is one that some climate skeptics have been promoting. And, they are part of a well-funded pipeline that carries misinformation about climate science to major news outlets before all the facts can be known.

Forbes: One main branch of the misinformation pipeline runs through the Heartland Institute, where James Taylor is listed as a senior fellow. James Taylor once wrote articles for the tobacco industry suggesting that secondhand smoke was not harmful, and he has now turned his talents to denying the ties between rising CO2 levels and global warming. Inexplicably, James Taylor has been hired by Forbes magazine to write on energy and environmental topics. James Taylor picked up on Spencer’s paper and wrote an article for Forbes titled, New NASA Data Blows Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism. Not only was the title inaccurate and misleading, but the article was clearly an opinion article, miscategorized as news.  The editors of Forbes might not have known that Spencer’s “NASA Data” was the same data that climate scientists use to reach a very different conclusion, but perhaps they should have noticed that no reasonable news story would describe climate scientists as “alarmists” 15 times. The business community considers legislation that would reduce our carbon emissions to be anti-business, and business newspapers such as Investors Business Daily, the Wall Street Journal, and Forbes often are biased toward the skeptic’s position. The bias shows up in story selection, opinions miscategorized as news, a disproportionate number of skeptics articles on opinion pages, and  in sensationalized headlines. From Forbes, the article was picked up as a news story by other business magazines, Yahoo! News, MSNBC, and skeptic’s blog sites, which had a field day with the article. It is sad that millions will have read the distorted article, but few will ever read the climate scientist’s rebuttal. The article will soon sink into obscurity,  but it will have accomplished it’s purpose, which was to spread doubt about climate change.

Reproducibility: Publication in a peer-reviewed journal is not the only requirement for a paper to become accepted as part of the science literature. The research must stand up to the scrutiny of other experts in the field and it must be reproducible by other scientists with comparable knowledge and skill. Spencer’s paper reached the news media before climate scientists had a chance to respond, but they soon found a number of obvious errors in the paper. Trenberth and Fasullo summed it up:”The model has no realistic ocean, no El Niño, and no hydrological cycle, and it was tuned to give the result it gave. The bottom line is that there is NO merit whatsoever in this paper.”  Given time, A.E. Dessler analyzed Spencer’s paper in detail and published a rebuttal. The abstract in Geophysical Review Letters reports the key points of his paper:

• Clouds are not causing climate change;
• Observations are not in disagreement with models on this point;
• Previous work on this is flawed;  ( referring specifically to Spencer’s paper in Remote Sensing).

Clearly, Spencer’s paper had serious methodological flaws and was not reproducible. How did the paper get through Remote Sensing’s peer review process? The answer would likely not have been found, except for the publicity.

The Catastrophe: The editor of Remote Sensing, who had been trying to build the reputation of the Journal, considered the publicity a catastrophe. The instructions in Remote Sensing asks authors to suggest five reviewers, and it is possible that Spencer could choose five skeptics.  The editor would not have to pick from those, but apparently in this case he did.  In the next issue of Remote Sensing, the editor, Dr. Wolfgang Wagner, resigned and issued a public apology for this article saying, “With this step I would also like to personally protest against how the authors and like-minded climate skeptics have much exaggerated the paper’s conclusions in public statements.” “The problem is that comparable studies published by other authors have already been refuted in open discussions and to some extent also in the literature, a fact which was ignored by Spencer and Braswell in their paper and, unfortunately, not picked up by the reviewers. “ And he concluded, “But, as the case presents itself now, the editorial team unintentionally selected three reviewers who probably share some climate sceptic notions of the authors.”

(c) 2012 Que 

 At least 81 dolphins have been found dead or died shortly after being discovered on Cape Cod in a series of largely unexplained strandings that began early last month, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

More than 100 dolphins, identified as common and Atlantic white-sided, have been found stranded along the rocky Massachusetts shoreline since January, said NOAA spokeswoman Teri Rowles and activists involved in the rescue effort.

The mammals have at times washed up in groups of as many as 10, added Katie Moore, a manager for the International Fund for Animal Welfare.

 

"Usually in the winter, the harbor ices over and inhibits the animals from coming close to the shore," Flanagan said. "But now that the water is warmer, we're seeing lots more dolphins washing up than ever before."

A favorite tactic of those who deny global warming is to exagerate the importance of the temperature record of the contiguous United States (the lower 48 states of the continental USA).

It’s only 1.6% of the surface area of the planet, so it’s not truly representative of the globe as a whole.

But what the heck, it is part of planet earth, so it’s interesting to examine the temperature history of the contiguous U.S., aka the “lower 48 states,” aka “USA48.”

[See graph]

Another recurring tactic is to portray USA48 temperature change (and other things too) unrealistically.

...Splitting the record into pieces at 1998 is yet another common tactic.

Not only does doing so omit the extreme 1998 rise from earlier data, it also makes for an artificially high starting point for subsequent data — kinda like tracking the heights of men walking through a doorway but deliberately starting with Shaquille O’Neal, because you know that whoever comes afterward is likely to be shorter.

Should we take to calling that tactic the “Shaq attack”?

No Need to Panic About Global Warming say sixteen scientists.

The Wall Street Journal Op-ed piece last week seems to have caused quite a stir.  After all, scientists say there's no need to panic! 

And if scientists say something, we should listen.

Given that 97%+ of scientists publishing in the field of climate science have already warned us that this is a serious issue, what are we to make of this latest list of dissenters? 

Are they qualified to speak on this subject?  What have they published in this field?  And where do they get their funding?

Let's take a look at the WSJ 16:

Claude Allegre, French politician and Geochemist;  author of The Climate Lie which is shown to have at least 100 actual errors and approximations.  Mr. Allegre apparently does not 'believe' that CO2 is a 'real' greenhouse gas.

J. Scott Armstrong, Professor of Marketing - University of Pennsylvania.

Jan Breslow M.D., Physician, specializing in pediatrics and atherosclerosis, Rockefeller University.

Roger Cohen, Manager, Strategic Planning and Programs ExxonMobil Corporation (retired).  Cohen seems to have forgotten that sulfur dioxide particles in the atmosphere reflect sunlight (among many, many other things).

Edward David, former President of Research and Engineering for Exxon Corporation.

William Happer, board member, George Marshall Institute , funded by oil, gas (especially ExxonMobile), and right-wing think tanks.

Michael Kelly, electrical engineer, University of Cambridge.

William Kininmonth, meteorologist, and (along with Lord Christopher Monckton) science adviser to the Exxon-funded Science and Public Policy Institute.  Yes, that Lord Monckton.

Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric sciences, MIT, and another member of the Exxon-funded Heartland Institute.

James McGrath, polymer chemist, Virginia Technical University.

Rodney Nichols, member, American Council on Science and Health - funded by Exxon, Amoco, Archer Daniels Midland, Dow Chemical, and various other industry interests.  Former Director, Heartland Institute.

Burt Rutan, BS, aeronautical engineering.  Fine engineer - not a climate scientist.

Harrison H. Schmitt, geologist, Apollo 17 astronaut and former U.S. senator.  Featured speaker  at the (do I have to say it again?)  Exxon-funded Heartland Institute.  Frequent guest on Alec Jones's show.

Nir Shaviv, professor of astrophysics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem.  Claims cosmic rays cause climate change, and that CO2 has never caused any  warming.  Once again, featured speaker, Heartland Institute.

Henk Tennekes, former director, Royal Dutch Meteorological Service. Featured writer for the (again, Exxon-funded) Science and Public Policy Institute.

Antonio Zichichi, Italian nuclear physicist.  Heartland Institute 'Global Warming Expert'.  No publications in that field whatsoever. 

Several running themes emerge from this list:

• Amazingly strong links to Exxon and other fossil fuel/chemical interests - as well as Right Wing Think Tanks
• Little to no actual research in climate science has been conducted by any of these 'experts'.  In fact, it's pretty much 'no'.

You do the math.  The WSJ will certainly be hearing from me about this blatant attempt to mislead the public.  Of course, it's not the first time they've been caught doing it.  See, for example, this analysis by Discover Magazine:

Wall Street Journal: neutrinos show climate change isn’t real

Enter the OpEd page of the Wall Street Journal, with one of the most head-asplodey antiscience climate change denial pieces I have seen in a while — and I’ve seen a few.

Which begs the question 'Why'?  Is there a clue in the list above?

The global average surface temperature in 2011 was the ninth warmest since 1880 - and the warmest La Nina year on record.

Last year's temperatures reinforce a trend that sees 9 of the 10 warmest years happening since 2000.  The average temperature around the globe in 2011 was 0.92 degrees F (0.51 C) higher than the mid-20th century baseline.

This NASA simulation puts those numbers in perspective.  In just 26 seconds, we can see the world become a much, much warmer place.  Yellow/orange/red areas are warming.  Blue areas are cooling.

Watch the video:

This video is public domain and can be downloaded at: ‪http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/goto?3901 Like our videos? Subscribe to NASA's Goddard Shorts HD podcast: ‪http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/iTunes/f0004_index.html‬ Or find NASA Goddard Space Flight Center on facebook: ‪http://www.facebook.com/NASA.GSFC‬ Or find us on Twitter: ‪http://twitter.com/NASAGoddard

When the standards are in full effect, we’ll cut our nation’s electric bill by about $12.5 billion a year and eliminate the need for 30 large power plants and all the pollution that comes from them. It’s a big deal.

Indeed it is. So why have Republicans fought it?

Some members of Congress falsely claimed that the legislation would ban all incandescent bulbs and require the purchase of compact fluorescent bulbs (CFLs). In fact, the legislation does not ban any class of bulbs, but rather requires that a 100-watt bulb now use a maximum 72 watts to give off the same 1,600 lumens. In December, Republican members of the U.S. House of Representatives managed to defund enforcement of the new legislation until October of this year, but despite that, the lighting industry is moving ahead with the new standards.

“Global warming” and “climate change” succinctly describe a complicated phenomenon, and in just a few decades they have become common descriptors. But while global warming would be bad for the Earth as a whole, the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere would affect different areas in different ways, and local climate change is what matters to many people. 

Two factors will likely determine whether a particular region will prosper or suffer as climate change progresses: starting with temperature and adaptability.

You don’t hear much talk about it, but countries that are cold right now could see very real benefits from a few extra degrees. Consider the Northern Sea shipping route, which runs through the Arctic waters north of Europe and Asia. It’s a faster and cheaper way to ship oil from Russia and Norway to markets around the world, but it’s currently too icy to navigate for much of the year. Climate change could open the route earlier and keep it clear later. It may also allow companies to extract new oil and mineral wealth from beneath the sea.

However, Karen O’Brien, a professor of sociology and human geography at the University of Oslo  cautions policymakers against irrational climate-change exuberance. “Once you go above [an increase of] three or four degrees Celsius [about five to seven degrees Fahrenheit], it’s hard to imagine anyone benefiting. Changes in precipitation patterns and volume could undermine the temperature benefits, and the warmer winters could open the area to new pests and invasive species.” Read more;

If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants. ... Sir Isaac Newton

 Peer review:  Every scientist’s work depends upon the evidence and reasoning of all the scientists who preceded him. To ensure that previous work is reliable, scientific journals have established a peer review process to ensure that published papers are free of errors in reasoning and methodology. Normally,when a paper is submitted for publication, the editor of the journal removes the name of the author and sends the manuscript to a number of experts in the area for review. The editor keeps the names of the reviewers confidential. In case an error is found or corrections suggested, the reviews are returned to the author with suggestions for improvement. When the reviewer's concerns are addressed to the editor's satisfaction, the article is published. It is a good system for ensuring the quality of research publications, but in a few cases ways have been found to game the system.           

Biased Editors: The editors of journals published by major science organizations are chosen for their expertise in the area and for their fairness. However, any organization may publish a journal and claim their articles are peer-reviewed.  For example, a recent op Ed article in the Tulsa World claimed "Climate predictions must be science-backed". That's certainly true, but the author claimed his opinion was backed by a “a peer-reviewed article based on NOAA  data which proves that CO2 may not be the cause of global warming.”  However, no peer reviewed article reaching that conclusion could be found. When I contacted the author for his source, he referred me to an article by Ferenc Miskolczi published in Energy and Environment. Though Miskolczi's article is based on NOAA's data, it finds that adding CO2 to the atmosphere does not change its spectroscopic properties - a conclusion violating the laws of physics. Miskolczi's article was criticized by van Dorland and Forster, who wrote: "Miskolczi (2010) theorizes that atmospheric CO2 increases cannot be a cause of global warming. We show his theory to be incorrect both in its application of radiation theory and from direct atmospheric observations." How did such a paper get published?

The editor of a journal is almost completely responsible for seeing that articles are properly reviewed and for deciding if they should be published. Sourcewatch says that Energy and Environment is a peer-reviewed social science journal published by Multi-Science and the editor is Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, who is described as a reader in geography. Many climate change skeptics such as Sallie Baliunas, Patrick Michaels, Ross McKitrick, Stephen McIntyre, Roger Pielke Jr., Willie Soon, and  Steve McIntyre publish articles there that would not be accepted in major journals. Sourcewatch says the editor admits in an article published online that "the journal I edit has tried to keep this debate [climate scepticism] alive". She also states “I’m following my political agenda -- a bit, anyway ... But isn't that the right of the editor?"

Not really, if you want to claim to be a peer reviewed science journal.

A South Florida plan to prepare for rising sea levels and other consequences of climate change has drawn intense criticism from a small segment of the public who see a conspiracy to weaken the United States.

"Bogus science." "Socialist power grab." "A UN-based manmade global warming agenda that will tangle us all up in a nightmare."

These are among the public comments received in response to the Draft Southeast Florida Regional Climate Action Plan, produced by Broward, Miami-Dade, Monroe and Palm Beach counties.

The plan contains 108 recommendations, including redesigning low-lying roads and moving drinking-water wells inland.

Like similar actions elsewhere in the United States, it has run into the intensely held belief among a portion of the public that climate change is a fraud, perpetrated to destroy property rights, raise taxes and ruin the economy.

Although national and international scientific panels have concluded that climate change is real and human-caused, critics disagree.

Wrote Donald Sexauer: "The whole global warming theory is based on bogus findings that tried to hold down the beliefs of dissenting scientists."

"The Progressive Elite need taxes … and we all know they will lie, cheat and steal to get it," wrote Doug Weber.

"Forget it folks, the science is a fraud."

Craig Rosebraugh, a US filmmaker and political activist, has produced a feature-length documentary that demands to be seen.

Greedy Lying Bastards is still awaiting a firm release date – sometime in 2012 is the current promise – but, if the trailer and impressive roster of interviewees are anything to go by, it's likely to cause quite a stir.

Filmed over the past two years and across nine countries, Greedy Lying Bastards claims to be a "searing indictment of the influence, deceit and corruption that defines the fossil fuel industry":

Rosebraugh documents the impact of an industry that puts profits before people, wages a campaign of lies to thwart measures to combat climate change, uses its clout to minimize infringing regulations and undermined the political process in the U.S. and abroad…

By interweaving the stories of the victims of the Gulf oil spill and the global climate crisis, he lays bare the industry's deliberate pattern of irresponsibility.

And, while oil companies worldwide exert influence over policies that will protect their revenues, those who speak out against the industry's reckless practices risk their livelihoods, and in some instances, their lives.

"Greedy Lying Bastards" details the people and organizations casting doubt on climate science and claiming that greenhouse gases are not affected by human behavior and includes interviews with scientists, industry experts, international political delegates, climate change victims as well as deniers, and people affected by the practices of the fossil fuel industry.

Among them: UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon; Rep. Henry Waxman; former EPA head Christine Todd Whitman; leading climate science skeptics Myron Ebell, Christopher Lord Monckton, and Jay Lehr; Ken Wiwa, the son of the slain Nigerian environmentalist; farmers in Peru and Uganda; and Mike Robichaux, one of the few doctors willing to treat Gulf residents sick with chemical poisoning from the BP spill, Republican Presidential candidates, Texas governor Rick Perry and Minnesota representative Michele Bachman, as well as other prominent politicians like Senator James Inhofe, from oil-rich Oklahoma.

The Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies said it had been testing the performance of baby coral fish in sea water containing higher levels of dissolved CO2 for several years.

"And it is now pretty clear that they sustain significant disruption to their central nervous system, which is likely to impair their chances of survival," said Phillip Munday, a professor who reported the findings.

In a paper published in the journal Nature Climate Change, Munday and his colleagues also detail what they say is world-first evidence that high CO2 levels in sea water disrupts a key brain receptor in fish.

This causes marked changes in their behaviour and sensory abilities.

"We've found that elevated CO2 in the oceans can directly interfere with fish neurotransmitter functions, which poses a direct and previously unknown threat to sea life," said Munday.

The team began by studying how baby clown and damsel fishes performed alongside their predators in CO2-enriched water.

They found that while the predators were somewhat affected, the baby fish suffered much higher rates of attrition.

"Our early work showed that the sense of smell of baby fish was harmed by higher CO2 in the water, meaning they found it harder to locate a reef to settle on or detect the warning smell of a predator fish," said Munday.

The team then examined whether fishes' sense of hearing -- used to locate and home in on reefs at night, and avoid them during the day -- was affected.

"The answer is, yes it was. They were confused and no longer avoided reef sounds during the day. Being attracted to reefs during daylight would make them easy meat for predators."

It's risky but may become necessary.

America is thinking too small when it comes to energy efficiency, while also making the mistake of "crowding out" economically beneficial investments in energy efficiency by focusing on riskier and more expensive bids to develop new energy sources, according to a major new report from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE).

Titled "The Long-Term Energy Efficiency Potential: What the Evidence Suggests," the new ACEEE report outlines three scenarios under which the U.S. could either continue on its current path or cut energy consumption by the year 2050 almost 60 percent, add nearly two million net jobs in 2050, and save energy consumers as much as $400 billion per year (the equivalent of $2600 per household annually).

According to ACEEE, the secret to major economic gains from energy efficiency is a more productive investment pattern of increased investments in energy efficiency, which would allow lower investments in power plants and other supply infrastructure, thereby substantially lowering overall energy expenditures on an economy-wide basis in the residential, commercial, industrial, transportation, and electric power sectors.

Examples of potential large-scale energy efficiency savings identified by ACEEE include the following:

* Electric Power.

Our current system of generating and delivering electricity to U.S. homes and businesses is an anemic 31 percent energy efficient.

That is, for every three units of coal or other fuel we use to generate the power, we manage to deliver less than one unit of electricity to our homes and businesses.

What the U.S. wastes in the generation of electricity is more than Japan needs to power its entire economy.

What is even more astonishing is that our current level of (in)efficiency is essentially unchanged in the half century since 1960, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower spent his last year in the White House...

(more at the link)

Global warming isn't something that's going to happen, it's already happening.

After a series of bitter political fights, the US Congress allowed a subsidy for ethanol fuel to expire at the end of 2011, ending a program harshly criticized by environmentalists and others.

By taking no action, US lawmakers ended the credit of 45 cents per gallon refiners get for blending ethanol, which in the US market is made mostly from corn, into gasoline. Also terminated was a tariff on imports of 54 cents per gallon which was criticized by Brazil, a producer of sugar cane-based ethanol.

The programs were in place since the 1980s as a means of curbing US use of imported petroleum.

But over time, criticism grew that growing ethanol use diverted too much corn from food to fuel, and led to environmental and land use problems, by adding to incentives to plant more corn.

The program also cost taxpayers some $6 billion annually.

"The end of this giant subsidy for dirty corn ethanol is a win for taxpayers, the environment and people struggling to put food on their tables," said Michal Rosenoer of Friends of the Earth.

"Corn ethanol is extremely dirty. It leads to more climate pollution than conventional gasoline, and it causes deforestation as well as agricultural runoff that pollutes our water."

Their property rights are absolute and cannot be intruded upon by the state or by anyone else. Any interference with, or damage to, the value of their property without their consent – even by taxation – is an unwarranted infringement. This, with local variations, is the basic philosophy of the Republican candidates, the Tea Party movement, the lobby groups that call themselves "free market thinktanks" and much of the new right in the UK.

It is a pitiless, one-sided, mechanical view of the world, which elevates the rights of property over everything else, meaning that those who possess the most property end up with great power over others. Dressed up as freedom, it is a formula for oppression and bondage. It does nothing to address inequality, hardship or social exclusion. A transparently self-serving vision, it seeks to justify the greedy and selfish behaviour of those with wealth and power.

Even more reason to go slow or better yet, just say no to fracking. Put the effort into renewables.

Thanks and get well to my friend Ambivalent!

Critics of climate research dubbed the stolen CRU E-mails incident “Climategate” to discredit climate scientists. But, was it more like Watergate or Stargate?

This article was written over a year ago, but there has been a release of another batch of e-mails,  dubbed Climategate II. Those e-mails were apparently stolen at the same time but were not considered  sensational enough to be distorted and released with the first batch.

The Incident: Last year, hackers broke into the computers of England’s Hadley Climatic Research Unit (CRU), and stole 10 years of e-mails exchanged between the scientists. The stolen e-mails were released to media sources and posted online with claims the CRU scientists engaged in illegal and unethical acts.(1) Words taken from the e-mails made it appear that the CRU scientist scientists ‘tricked” the data, “hid a decline in data”, “withheld data”, “changed data” and “tried to keep dissident scientists from publishing” . The CRU scientists have been roundly accused of wrongdoing by AGW skeptics, opposition politicians, uninformed bloggers, and dissident scientists who roundly criticized the CRU scientists for ethical violations and illegal acts. Phil Jones, the CRU director, stepped down and called for a full and independent review of the incident. Critics of the CRU scientist’s research have dubbed it “Climategate”, saying it is a huge scandal that undermines all the climate research on global warming.

Watergate: It is certainly not like Watergate. The Wategate thieves were caught and punished and those who masterminded the plot were publicly disgraced. In Climategate, the thieves have been hailed by some as heroes and the victims of the theft have been vilified. Just before the U. S. Senate was to vote to ratify the Kyoto treaty, an article was published in the Wall Street Journal that proclaimed” Science Has Spoken, Global Warming Is a Myth” that was meant to derail approval. The article turned out to be a hoax.(2) The timing and nature of the release of the CRU e-mails would suggest that the real purpose of “Climategate” may have been to derail a meaningful treaty on climate change at the upcoming Copenhagen meeting.

Why does it matter? The CRU scientist’s research has long been the center of a heated controversy about whether the observed rise in Earth’s mean temperature since 1900 was caused by man or whether it is just part of the normal pattern caused by natural forces. Measured values of the Earth’s mean temperature began in about 1850 and CRU scientists’ research was an effort to extended the Earth’s mean temperature data back to before measurements were taken. They did so by examining proxy data such as tree rings, coral growth, and ice core samples. Their research showed that the temperature of the Earth was reasonably stable from about 1000 A.D. until 1900 when it began to rise rapidly to the present. Their graph was dubbed the “hockey stick graph” from its shape. Opponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) have derided the graph and tried to vilifiy the CRU scientists as their research showed the Earth’s recent warming trend was caused by CO2 from burning fossil fuels rather than cycles in nature.

The Hackers: Those critical of the scientific work by the CRU scientists have been gleeful about the hacked e-mails and some even claimed that the hackers are heroes. One story claimed the hacking was justified since a request for the e-mails under the freedom of information (FOI) act was refused due to insufficient reason. The reluctance to release data was possibly because Phil Jones, the CRU director, had once released his raw data for a 1990 research paper to a former London financial trader, Douglas J. Keenan. Keenan combed through the data and then tried to have the FBI arrest Jones’ co-author for fraud. An investigation later cleared them of any wrongdoing. Under the FOI act, the next step would have been to seek redress in the courts – not by hacking the CRU computers.

A rather ridiculous claim was that since the science research was funded by public money, the public had a right to the documents. Military research is done with public money and those who think its OK should try hacking into the Pentagon. Another story claimed that the e-mail release was a public service done by a whistleblower. However, the timing speaks against that interpretation as many of the documents are 10 years old. A whistleblower should possibly have blown the whistle back when an alleged ethical offense occurred rather than just weeks before the Copenhagen Convention. The latest theory, since the e-mails were first released from a server in Siberia, is that professional Russian hackers were responsible. It would be interesting to know who might have paid them.

An impartial look: Many of the claims against the CRU scientists have been shown to be words taken out of context. Many people know mathematical “tricks” that are an aid in calculation and are certainly not meant to fool anyone. The “decline” was not a decline in temperature but referred to a “decline” in the number of samples available. Every measuring instrument must be standardized, and data is often corrected after being taken to bring it in line with the standardization. The paper the CRU scientists were trying to suppress had errors but was published anyway. Climatologists are aware of the errors but the discredited paper still has a claim to authenticity to the public as it was published in a refereed journal. To clear up the matter, Phil Jones has stepped down and called for an independent investigation but that will not be completed before the Copenhagen Convention and the charges are “out there”.

The Associated Press examined the e-mails to see what the truth might be in the matter. (3) Five reporters and seven scientists with credentials in research ethics, climate science, and science policy examined the 1,073 E-mails stolen from climate scientists. The Associated Press concluded that although the E-mails show the CRU scientists stonewalled skeptics and discussed hiding data, the messages don’t support claims that the science of global warming was faked. Mark Frankel, director of scientific freedom, responsibility and law at the American Association for the Advancement of Science upon reviewing the E-mails summed up the scientists position saying he saw “no evidence of falsification or fabrication of data, although concerns could be raised about some instances of very ‘generous interpretations.’” Also, Daniel Sarewitz, a science policy professor at Arizona State University added “This is normal science politics, but on the extreme end, though still within bounds.” Several formal investigations into the allegations have cleared the scientists involved of any wrongdoing.

Note added 8/23/2011: As of today, eight independent formal investigations have been completed and none has found  any incidences of scientific misconduct by the the scientists involved. The hackers, who are clearly crimnals, have not been caught. Those who engaged in libel against the scientists have not been charged, and I know of none who apologized.   

Stargate: So, rather than being like Watergate, the e-mail scandal was actually more like Stargate, fictional fantasy. It should, however, be a reminder to every scientist to be professional in what is put in e-mails. The critics should be chastised as those accused are usually presumed innocent until guilt is proven. The CRU scientists were clearly tried in the press and many “news reports” amounted to little more than sensationalized speculation. The accusations by dissident scientists are particularly egregious as scientist’s ethical codes say that:” Public comments on scientific matters should be made with care and precision, without unsubstantiated, exaggerated, or premature statements.” However, the critics were in a hurry as Copenhagen was approaching.

(1) For a description, see: http://www.pewclimate.org/blog/gulledgej/thanksgiving-i%E2%80%99m-thankful-we-base-policy-decisions-peer-reviewed-science-instead-emai

(2) The hoax is described at http://jcmooreonline.com/2009/09/05/the-%E2%80%9Cglobal-warming-is-a-myth%E2%80%9D-hoax/

(3)http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5gRa5F7Lv_zO0ZKaHmbQENlyV3KdgD9CHUS980

(c) 2010 Que  

I stumbled across an amazing time-lapse history of atmospheric CO2 this morning.

Beginning with data from Mauna Loa, Antarctica, and local signals around the world - and moving backwards in time (incorporating data from numerous sources, including ice cores and other proxies) - the magnitude of exactly what we're doing to this planet emerges.

The video reconstruction is about 3 minutes long.  Watch it all the way through - full screen mode is recommended.

Scientists said on Tuesday that they had discovered the world's first hybrid sharks in Australian waters, a potential sign the predators were adapting to cope with climate change.
The mating of the local Australian black-tip shark with its global counterpart, the common black-tip, was an unprecedented discovery with implications for the entire shark world, said lead researcher Jess Morgan.

In a recent article in National Journal, Americans for Prosperity (AFP) President Tim Phillips said there is no question that AFP and others like it have been instrumental in the rise of Republican candidates who question or deny climate science: “We’ve made great headway. What it means for candidates on the Republican side is, if you … buy into green energy or you play footsie on this issue, you do so at your political peril.”

AFP is a section 501(c)(4) organization, meaning it does not have to disclose its donors, but has been tied to significant funding from the Koch Family Foundations - founded by the billionaire Koch brothers of Koch Industries – as well as smaller donations from companies like ExxonMobil. Koch Industries and ExxonMobil are among the largest funders of studies questioning climate change science, often drawn upon by conservative politicians to legitimize their view that regulation of greenhouse gases (GHGs) is not needed because the science is still under debate.

“To find a wild hybrid animal is unusual,” the scientists wrote in the journal Conservation Genetics. “To find 57 hybrids along 2,000 km [1,240 miles] of coastline is unprecedented.”

James Cook University professor Colin Simpfendorfer, one of the paper’s co-authors, emphasized in an e-mail that he and his colleagues “don’t know what is causing these species to be mating together.” They are investigating factors including the two species’ close relationship, fishing pressure and climate change.

 

Each year, this site takes a poll to find those most deserving of recognition in the Environmental Hall of Fame and the Environmental Hall of Shame. Nominations are now open for those who have most affected the environment by words or action. With the ongoing  debate about environmental regulations, a number of possible nominees should be easy to find.  Please place your nomination in the comment section. If you wish, you may  include a short reason that your nominee should be chosen and suggest a suitable gift if they win. 

For example, Congressman John Sullivan might be nominated in the Hall of Shame category for introducing a bill in Congress that would require the EPA to do a cost-benefit analysis  for every rule it makes. His legislation would create a huge amount of paperwork for the EPA and would make its job impossible to do, which seems to be his goal. A suitable gift might be a large piggy bank in which to keep the donations that action has earned him. Or, Congressman Frank Lucas may be nominated in the Hall of Fame category for acknowledging that climate change might affect our food supply. A suitable gift might be a crystal ball, so that he can show other members of the Congress what the future might look like if we do not act to mitigate climate change.

Nominations will be taken until January 31st, 2012. The nominees will then be  listed  and this site will conduct a poll in February to determine the winner in each category.   The  2011 year’s winner in the Environmental Hall Fame category will receive the “Most Noble Prize in Environmental Science” and a  suitable gift. The winner in the Hall of  Shame category will receive the “Ignoble Prize”and a gift also.  Past years winners and their gifts were:

                      Hall of Fame    -    Gift                                             

2010        RealClimate.org  - A recommendation from this site. ( Priceless)  

2009        Benno Hansen,  ThinkAboutIt Blogger - A Subscription to Science News.           

                      Hall of Shame    

2010         Koch Brothers - A petition to the Wizard of Oz for a social conscience.

2009         SpaceGuy,  Newsvine Blogger - The movie Wall-E, his view of the future of Earth.

You may suggest a suitable prize for your nominee. Please be imaginative, as particularly thoughtful or humorous  nominations will  be recognized and published on this site.

(C) 2012  Que  

Just-released analysis of atmospheric methane above the Arctic.  Top photo: November 2010.  Bottom photo: November 2011.

For those who have been following the studies focused on methane release in the Arctic, these pictures may be sobering - but hardly surprising.  We read the reports  from Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov in 2010, describing a potentially dangerous new development - perforations in the permafrost on the floor of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, which could allow a rapid release of methane from below:

A section of the Arctic Ocean seafloor that holds vast stores of frozen methane is showing signs of instability and widespread venting of the powerful greenhouse gas, according to the findings of an international research team led by University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semiletov.

The research results, published in the March 5 edition of the journal Science, show that the permafrost under the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, long thought to be an impermeable barrier sealing in methane, is perforated and is starting to leak large amounts of methane into the atmosphere.

Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.

"The amount of methane currently coming out of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf is comparable to the amount coming out of the entire world's oceans," said Shakhova, a researcher at UAF's International Arctic Research Center. "Subsea permafrost is losing its ability to be an impermeable cap."

..."Our concern is that the subsea permafrost has been showing signs of destabilization already," she said. "If it further destabilizes, the methane emissions may not be teragrams, it would be significantly larger."

Then, just last September, Shakhova and Semiletov put together a hastily-organized mission back to the Eastern Arctic.  There, they "discovered methane fields of a fantastic scale", and "torch-like structures, bubbling through the water column and injected directly into the atmosphere from the seabed".

The scale and volume of the methane release has astonished the head of the Russian research team who has been surveying the seabed of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf off northern Russia for nearly 20 years.

In an exclusive interview with The Independent, Igor Semiletov of the International Arctic Research Centre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, who led the 8thjoint US-Russia cruise of the East Siberian Arctic seas, said that he has never before witnessed the scale and force of the methane being released from beneath the Arctic seabed.

"Earlier we found torch-like structures like this but they were only tens of metres in diameter. This is the first time that we've found continuous, powerful and impressive seeping structures more than 1,000 metres in diameter. It's amazing," Dr Semiletov said.

...Dr Semiletov's team published a study in 2010 estimating that the methane emissions from this region were in the region of 8 million tons a year but the latest expedition suggests this is a significant underestimate of the true scale of the phenomenon.

Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, which has been linked to abrupt changes in the Earth's climate before.  During the PETM, a deadly thermal maximum event 55 million years ago, the Earth warmed very rapidly - 5C to 8C in 20,000 years.  Methane is considered to be the most likely driver of this rapid climate change.

And in 2008, Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory  identified potential methane releases in the Arctic as one the most serious scenarios for abrupt climate change:

... in the Arctic, methane hydrate deposits exist near the edge of the safe temperature-pressure zone; in these locales, methane release could be abrupt.

The resultant rapid warming would trigger yet more releases of methane: permafrost would melt, the deep sea would become a dead zone, the hole in the Arctic ozone would grow bigger and occur more frequently.

Back in 2008, Shakhova and Semiletov concluded that "release of up to 50 Gt of predicted amount of hydrate storage [is] highly possible for abrupt release at any time". That would result in "∼12-times increase of modern atmospheric methane burden with consequent catastrophic greenhouse warming."

Are these new pictures confirmation that an abrupt release of methane is imminent? 

We may know soon - Shakhova and Semiletovplan to publish their findings from the 2011 mission next month.

Further reading:  Methane Hydrates in Quaternary Climate Change: The Clathrate Gun Hypothesis

Last week, scientists from New Hampshire's premier universities issued a plea to GOP Presidential candidates:  Please Face Facts.

The facts these scientist want our Presidential contenders to face focus on climate change.  And New Hampshire scientists have more than a few compelling facts at their disposal.  Consider the list of recent climate-related changes that these scientists have observed:

→ A region-wide winter warming trend of almost 4F

→ Number of days with snow on the ground down an average of one week

→ Peak snowmelt runoff occurring 7–10 days earlier

→ Increasing extreme rainfall events and flooding

→ Influx of pests

→ Significant increase in severe storms.

→ Cost of natural disasters up almost 900%

→ Sea level rise of seven inches during the past century

It isn't the first time that scientists have reached out directly to politicians regarding climate change.  A similar plea was made to the same candidates in Iowa just a few weeks ago.  But if appeals from the experts are having an effect, that effect is as elusive as the 'smoking gun' in ClimateGate.

A few recent quotes by these candidates on the subject of climate change does not show progress:

Mitt Romney:  "My view is that we don't know what's causing climate change on this planet...  let's aggressively develop our oil, our gas, our coal, our nuclear power."

Ron Paul:  "You know, the greatest hoax I think that has been around in many, many years if not hundreds of years has been this hoax on the environment and global warming."

Newt Gingrich:  “I don’t know whether global warming is occurring” when distancing himself from a 2007 climate change ad he made with Nance Pelosi.  Gingrich goes on to call the ad "probably the dumbest single thing I’ve done in years".

Rick Santorum:  "The idea that man...[] is somehow responsible for climate change is, I think, just patently absurd...   It's just an excuse for more government control of your life."

Most remaining candidates have similar, if not even stronger, views on the subject.

Following is a copy of the letter sent by New Hampshire scientists to the GOP candidates running for President in 2012. 

It will be interesting to see if any of these candidates can be persuaded by the facts.

Science and Public Policy in New Hampshire December, 2011

Back in 1876, Mark Twain aptly remarked “One of the brightest gems in the New England weather is the dazzling uncertainty of it.”

Our location halfway between the equator and the North Pole and sandwiched between the Appalachian Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean makes our weather more variable than most other places on Earth. New Hampshire’s culture, environment, and economy are fundamentally integrated with our seasonal climate that traditionally and reliably served up resplendent summers, crisp autumns with spectacular fall foliage, a white Christmas and winter sports, and the eternal hope of spring.

Our citizens have adapted to changing economic and climatic conditions to keep New Hampshire consistently ranked near or at the top as a state with the best quality of life.

New Hampshire’s climate has experienced substantial changes over the past half century. Over this period, the northeastern United States has experienced a region-wide winter warming trend of almost 4F.

The number of days with snow on the ground has decreased an average of one week.

Pond hockey and ice fishing have taken a hit as ice breaks up on our lakes more than a week earlier than it used to.

Peak snowmelt runoff in the spring now occurs 7–10 days earlier in northern New England rivers.

Increasing extreme rainfall events and flooding, rising seas, and an influx of pests (Lyme-disease-bearing ticks at the top of the list) have emerged as the latest and potentially most serious challenges to our health and our quality of life.

We have also endured a significant increase in severe storms. This has resulted in flooding and power outages across the region, including major events in 2005, 2006, 2007, 2010 and 2011.

From 1986 to 2004, presidentially declared disasters in the state of New Hampshire cost the federal government on average $3.5 million per year; from 2005 to 2008, they cost an average of $25 million per year.

In addition, power outages that used to last a day or two now commonly extend over a week or two.

Perhaps the most insidious change has been relative sea level, which has risen seven inches during the past century. This means more coastal flooding as storms move onshore, especially when a nor’easter occurs at high tide.

These shifts in New Hampshire’s climate are clearly connected to changes in global climate. Unfortunately much of the change is accelerating.

Given the inertia of the climate system, the most we can do now is decrease the rate of climate change. 

As the global climate continues to evolve, we will face new challenges to maintain our health, the prosperity of our state, and our quality of life. The US National Academy of Sciences together with all major scientific societies has affirmed that most of the observed increase in global temperatures over the past six decades is due to increases in anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.

In its recent Quadrennial Defense Review the Pentagon stated that “climate change, energy security, and economic stability are inextricably linked.”

We urge all candidates for public office at national, state, and local levels, and all New Hampshire citizens, to acknowledge the overwhelming balance of evidence for the underlying causes of climate change, to support appropriate responses to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases, and to develop local and statewide strategies to adapt to near-term changes in climate.

Ignoring the issue of climate change places our health, our quality of life, our economic vitality, and our children’s future at risk.

See the signatories of this letter here:

http://carbonsolutionsne.org/resources/reports/pdf/111228_Climate%20Science%20and%20NH2-1.pdf

It is said that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

That statement has proven itself true time after time in both politics and business, but I would like to amend that statement slightly: Power corrupts, but money and power corrupt absolutely.

This year has been no different. We’ve seen unprecedented amounts of money flowing from the dirty energy industry into the hands of politicians in order to achieve everything on their corporate wish lists.

From near constant hammering of the Environmental Protection Agency, to getting approval for dirty energy projects, corporate money has corrupted every level of politics this year.

I already covered the extensive efforts of the Koch brothers in a previous post, but they are hardly the only culprits who are attempting to undermine democracy and decency by pouring money into politics.

Here are a few other stories of interest that DeSmogBlog has covered over the last 12 months:

The biggest “non-event” for climate denier dollars this year was the Heartland Institute’s “Denial-a-palooza” conference:

Today, the Canadian oil sands, also called tar sands, are recognized as one of the largest reservoirs of petroleum in the world.

But extracting the resource from this unique geological formation is costly-both economically, and environmentally.  It takes a great deal of labor, energy, and water to squeeze the thick, sticky bitumen from the ancient mix of sand, clay and water.

Only the surging oil prices of the past decade have made the oil sands business feasible.

Controversy now abounds over efforts to build gateways for bringing more of this oil to market, especially over TransCanada's proposed Keystone XL pipeline to the refining centers of Texas.

Now, for the first time, it is possible to step back through history and see the expansion of the oil sands business, thanks to the Landsat Earth-observing satellites managed by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey.

The first of a series of images released last week by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center shows the area around the Athabasca River long before the great oil sands boom was under way.

Even then, a large storage pond of toxic mine tailings was already visible. Beneath them, the first mine lay closest to the river, with the second active mine just to its left.

See the satellite photo series at the link.

Glaciers are retreating at an unexpectedly fast rate according to research done in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca by McGill doctoral student Michel Baraer.

They are currently shrinking by about one per cent a year, and that percentage is increasing steadily, according to his calculations.

But despite this accelerated glacial shrinking, for the first time, the volume of water draining from the glacier into the Rio Santa in Northern Peru has started to decrease significantly.

Baraer, and collaborators Prof. Bryan Mark, at the Ohio State University, and Prof. Jeffrey McKenzie, at McGill, calculate that water levels during the dry season could decrease by as much as 30 percent lower than they are currently.

“When a glacier starts to retreat, at some point you reach a plateau and from this point onwards, you have a decrease in the discharge of meltwater from the glacier,” explained Baraer.

“Where scientists once believed that they had 10 to 20 years to adapt to reduced runoff, that time is now up,” said Baraer.

“For almost all the watersheds we have studied, we have good evidence that we have passed peak water.”

This means that the millions of people in the region who depend on the water for electricity, agriculture and drinking water could soon face serious problems because of reduced water supplies.

House Republicans waged systematic war against the environment this year, attacking environmental protection through climate denial, oil drilling, weakening public lands and water protection, and obstructing responsible regulation — just to name a few.

In summation, a House Committee on Energy and Commerce minority report reveals that the House voted 191 times to undermine the protection of the environment, thus “amassing the worst environmental record of any Congress in history.”

– 27 votes to block action to address climate change, including votes to overturn EPA’s scientific findings that climate change endangers human health and welfare; to block EPA from regulating carbon pollution from power plants, oil refineries, and vehicles; to prevent the United States from participating in international climate negotiations; and even to cut funding for basic climate science..

– 77 votes to undermine Clean Air Act protections, including votes to repeal the health-based standards that are the heart of the Clean Air Act and to block EPA regulation of toxic mercury and other harmful emissions from power plants, incinerators, industrial boilers, cement plants, and mining operations.

– 28 votes to undermine Clean Water Act protections, including votes to strip EPA of authority to set water quality standards and enforce limits on industrial discharges; to repeal EPA’s authority to stop mountaintop removal mining disposal; and to block EPA from protecting headwaters and wetlands that flow into navigable waters.

– 47 votes to weaken protection of public lands and coastal waters, including votes to curtail environmental review of offshore drilling; to halt reviews of public lands for possible wilderness designations; and to remove protections for salmon, wolves, and other species.

The BBC's landmark series Frozen Planet ended yesterday with a stark exploration of the effects of climate change already apparent in the Arctic and Antarctic, where warming is occurring twice as fast as it is in the rest of the world.

Here's our rundown of six scientific concepts covered in the episode.

1.  First, Attenborough says sea ice thickness has halved since the 1980s and Arctic sea ice extent has has decreased by nearly a third, the average Arctic sea ice thickness at the end of the melt season has roughly halved since the 1980s...

2.  All this has got to be good news for somebody.  And it is: according to Attenborough, trans-Arctic summertime shipping lanes are likely to open up over the next few decades, cutting journey time between Europe and Asia...

3.  Next, the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet.  Cue stunning shots of sapphire-blue lakes of melt water in the second-largest ice mass on the planet - six times the size of the UK.

New satellite data, which we wrote about here, shows the Greenland ice sheet lost mass at the edges over the past decade...

4.  The programme also documents glacier retreat in South Georgia.  As Attenborough writes in the Radio Times:

"I first went to South Georgia, the mountainous, glacier-draped island just north of the Antarctic Circle, in 1988.  At that time, the Cook Glacier that flows down to St Andrew's Bay reached the waterline.

Last year, a Frozen Planet team discovered that the glacier had retreated by 400 metres."...

5.  The programme also observes that penguin populations are reacting to glacier retreat in different ways.  Attenborough writes:

"the [St Andrew's] Bay's king penguin colony now has far more beach front and is thriving as a result."   Further south, however, another species of penguin - the Adélie - is suffering.  The southern part of the Antarctic Peninsula where they once flourished is now the most rapidly warming region in the whole of the southern hemisphere."...

6.  The loss of thousands of kilometers of the permanent ice shelf around the Antarctic Peninsula provides some amazing footage.

According to a briefing by the British Antarctic Survey that looks at The Antarctic Peninsula's retreating ice shelves, since the 1950s, a total of 25,000 km2 of ice shelf has been lost from around the Antarctic Peninsula as the amount of meltwater reaching them becomes too great for them to tolerate...

Dr Semiletov's team published a study in 2010 estimating that the methane emissions from this region were about eight million tonnes a year, but the latest expedition suggests this is a significant underestimate of the phenomenon.

In late summer, the Russian research vessel Academician Lavrentiev conducted an extensive survey of about 10,000 square miles of sea off the East Siberian coast.

Scientists deployed four highly sensitive instruments, both seismic and acoustic, to monitor the "fountains" or plumes of methane bubbles rising to the sea surface from beneath the seabed.

"In a very small area, less than 10,000 square miles, we have counted more than 100 fountains, or torch-like structures, bubbling through the water column and injected directly into the atmosphere from the seabed," Dr Semiletov said.

"We carried out checks at about 115 stationary points and discovered methane fields of a fantastic scale – I think on a scale not seen before.

Some plumes were a kilometre or more wide and the emissions went directly into the atmosphere – the concentration was a hundred times higher than normal."

Dr Semiletov released his findings for the first time last week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco.

Previous studies have hinted that capturing CO₂ directly from the air could cost a few hundred dollars per metric ton of CO₂.

At a rate of $300 per metric ton, that would total more than $10 trillion to completely counteract the estimated 33.5 billion tons of CO₂ emissions generated by humans—a tremendous cost, yet one that is still economically viable.

But Kurt House, a geoscientist with C12 Energy in Berkeley, California, and his colleagues suggest online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that slurping a ton of CO₂ from the atmosphere may actually be much more expensive.

Among other techniques, the researchers estimated the costs of this form of carbon capture by comparing it with the price of scrubbing other pollutants such as oxides of sulfur and nitrogen from industrial emissions before they leave a power plant's smokestack.

Although pulling CO₂ from ambient air rather than a smokestack, where CO₂ concentrations can be as high as 12%, would be more difficult, it is technically possible.

The problem, House says, is that it's energetically as well as economically expensive to do so.

Capturing CO₂ once it's in the atmosphere takes about four times the energy generated by burning the fossil fuel in the first place, he notes.

Overall, just to capture CO₂ would cost at least $1100 per ton, the researchers estimate.

That's a total price tag of at least $33 trillion just to hold atmospheric concentrations of CO₂ steady.

Then, once the gas is captured, even more energy must be expended to compress the gas into a liquid and then dispose of it.

And unless the energy needed to drive these processes are carbon-neutral—that is, unless they produce no CO₂ emissions of their own—the net result might add CO₂ to the atmosphere, not reduce it.

Ocean acidification — caused by climate change — looks likely to damage crucial fish stocks.

Two studies published today in Nature Climate Change reveal that high carbon dioxide concentrations can cause death and organ damage in very young fish

...Christopher Gobler, a marine biologist at Stony Brook University in New York, decided to test the effects of rising CO₂ levels on the growth and survival of Menidia beryllina, a common schooling fish found in estuaries along the North American coast.

He and his colleagues placed the fish embryos into CO₂ concentrations comparable to current levels in the seas (about 400 p.p.m.), those expected by mid-century (about 600 p.p.m.) and at levels projected for the end of the century (about 1,000 p.p.m.)^".

“Right away, we saw results,” says Gobler. “Survival rates were cut in half or worse with high concentrations of CO₂.”

When CO₂ concentrations reached 1,000 p.p.m., one-week survival rates dropped by 74%.

The other study, led by Andrea Frommel, a fisheries biologist at the Leibniz-Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany, looked at the effects of acidification on the larvae of Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) over a two-and-a-half month period.

The team reared the fish larvae under three conditions: present day ( about 380 p.p.m.), year 2200 (about 1,800 p.p.m.) and an extreme coastal upwelling scenario (about 4,200 p.p.m), where winds bring large amount of CO₂-rich deep water to the surface.

As CO₂ levels increased, the cod larvae fared less well, developing severe damage to their liver, pancreas, kidney, eye and gut about a month after hatching.

Climate talks at Durban have failed to reach agreement on targets to lower greenhouse gas emissions.

Hopes for this summit were never high.  There was a brief glimmer yesterday, when India and China seemed to be open to language that would set the stage for a global agreement. 

The U.S. balked - and the talks fell apart.

That's not to say that climate delegates from around the world don't understand the magnitude of the problem. 

They do.

From the draft text of the summit's Durban Mandate:

"Recognizing that climate change represents an urgent and potentially irreversible threat to human societies and the planet and that this requires to be urgently addressed"

and

"noting with grave concern the significant gap" between what countries are willing to pledge, versus what is really needed...

But even with that understanding, in the end, it seems that nothing meaningful will be done.

And so we are left with this:  Grenada minister Karl Hood implores the world to cap the rise in global temperature at 1.5C.

"If they're saying that 1.5 isn't possible, are you asking us then to accept annihilation?"

Yale released this chart in November.

Now they have released “the second and third reports from our latest national survey on Americans’ climate change and energy beliefs, attitudes, policy support, and behavior.” Key findings:

Public understanding that global warming is happening stayed at 63 percent, while belief that it is caused mostly by human activities increased three points since May 2011, to 50 percent.

A majority of Americans (57%) now disagree with the statement, “With the economy in such bad shape, the US can’t afford to reduce global warming” – an 8 point increase in disagreement since May 2011.

65 percent said that global warming is affecting weather in the United States.

58 percent of Americans said that the record heat waves last summer strengthened their belief that global warming is occurring, up 4 points since May 2011.

38 percent of Americans said they have personally experienced the effects of global warming, up 4 points since May of 2011.

Americans trust “climate scientists” (74%) as a source of information about global warming more than any other group, including “other kinds of scientists” (65%) and the mainstream media (38%)

Scientists often criticize the media for not presenting the facts about climate change. Today, the Tulsa World showed great courage for defending the science and refuting Sen. Inhofe claim of "victory in his efforts to debunk man-made global warming as a hoax."

Their statement is classic:

While there are scientists and politicians on both sides of the issue, those who see climate change as a genuine threat are mostly scientists and most of those who deny it are politicians.

While the science supporting climate change has only gotten stronger, the onetime Republican consensus on the issue has fallen apart..The reason, quite simply, is the right-wing polluter Koch Industries and its political front group Americans for Prosperity.

As Political Correction notes, just three years ago, Republicans including Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) all expressed a belief in human-caused climate change. Presidential candidate Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) even supported legislation to reduce carbon pollution. But all of these prominent leaders have since joined the rest of the Republican party “in a sudden and near-unified retreat to silence or denial.”

What’s changed for Republican politicians is “the influx into electoral politics of vast sums of money from energy companies and sympathetic interest groups”:

Republicans have long had close financial ties to the fossil-fuel industry, of course. Between 1998 and 2010, the oil-and-gas industry gave 75 percent of its $284 million in political contributions to Republicans. [...]

Among the most influential of the new breed of so-called super PACs is the tea party group Americans for Prosperity, founded by David and Charles Koch, the principal owners of Koch Industries, a major U.S. oil conglomerate. As Koch Industries has lobbied aggressively against climate-change policy, Americans for Prosperity has spearheaded an all-fronts campaign using advertising, social media, and cross-country events aimed at electing lawmakers who will ensure that the oil industry won’t have to worry about any new regulations.

When the US Discovery Channel stated it was not going to show the episode of the BBC's series Frozen Planet which focuses on the effects of climate change on the polar regions the news was greeted with disappointment by US commentators.

But now it seems that Discovery have changed their minds and the series will show in full in the spring, including the climate-themed episode that shows this Wednesday in the UK.

Press reports earlier this month suggested that the final programme of the series had been marketed separately in order to help the show sell better abroad.

There were also suggestions that the US market might be less interested in a climate themed episode, although as in the US the series is to be narrated by Alec Baldwin, and the climate episode differs from others by featuring David Attenborough on screen extensively, this may be a more mundane explanation.

However Discovery announced today that the polar climate episode will air along with the rest of the series.

Associated Press report:

"Discovery Channel's documentary series "Frozen Planet" will premiere March 18, and will encompass seven episodes including a program on climate change hosted by David Attenborough.

"On that seventh episode, the famed British naturalist will investigate what rising temperatures will mean for the planet and life on it."

By Charlie Smith, December 3, 2011

Last night, I had the misfortune to endure a dreadful editorial  by right-wing talk-show host Charles Adler on the topic of climate change.

The head of Adler Nation, who's given a big platform every night on CKNW Radio by Corus Entertainment, compared David Suzuki to a sleazy television evangelist who was only interested in draining the pockets of naive widows. Adler also had had this to say:

Global warming “science” is nothing more than a faith-based religion with a doomsday prophecy. All those who question their faith are heretics. Thankfully they don’t yet have the power to launch an inquisition.

The faithful ignore the latest studies from their own commune that take dire global warming projections off the table. “Green” technologies have all proven both expensive and even environmentally hazardous.

The facts bear repeating. There is no proven connection between man-made CO2 and global temperatures. Their shaky system of fear can’t hold up to scrutiny.

I've heard similar rubbish from Rex Murphy, who is given a national platform by the CBC to host the Cross Country Checkup show and to appear every Thursday night onThe National.

Over at the National Post, Murphy offers more of this nonsense, as do a fleet of other columnists, most notably Peter Foster. Read more;

Danish government proposals on Friday called for sourcing just over half of its electricity from wind turbines by 2020, and all of its energy from renewable sources in 2050. 

The government also invited the parties in parliament to negotiations on the proposal to shape energy policy to 2020.

Denmark will take over the presidency of the European Union for six months from January 1 and aims to promote ambitious climate and energy goals for Europe.

It is already the world leader in wind power, getting a fifth of its power from wind turbines.

"This is an historical effort to become even better at saving energy and create an even more competitive and energy-effective company culture in Denmark, also for households," Minister for Climate, Energy and Building Martin Lidegaard said.

The portion of Denmark's electricity from wind and other renewables would rise to 52 percent by 2020 under the new plan, topping a 50 percent target in a government policy program adopted last month.

November 16, 2011 - What's the biggest story of the last several weeks? Rick Perry’s moment of silence, all 53 seconds' worth? The Penn State riots after revered coach JoePa went down in a child sex abuse scandal? The Kardashian wedding/divorce? The European debt crisis that could throw the world economy into a tailspin? The Cain sexual harassment charges? The trial of Michael Jackson’s doctor?

The answer should be none of the above, even though as a group they’ve dominated the October/November headlines. In fact, the piece of the week, month, and arguably year should have been one that slipped by so quietly, so off front-pages nationwide and out of news leads everywhere that you undoubtedly didn’t even notice. And yet it’s the story that could turn your life and that of your children and grandchildren inside out and upside down.

According to British Antarctic Survey scientist Dr Dominic Hodgson, we are currently in "a new phase of polar deglaciation".

Dr Hodgson's research compared Arctic and Antarctic ice shelf retreat over the last twelve thousand years and found that the last few decades is the only point in that period when ice shelves have retreated simultaneously at both poles.

Ice shelves are floating bodies of ice, ranging from fifty to several hundreds of metres in thickness, that stick out to sea from continental ice sheets, like the ones covering Greenland and the Antarctic.

There have been major ice shelf break-ups in both the Arctic and Antarctic recently.

The largest remaining Arctic ice shelf, the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf on Ellesmere Island in Canada, has spent the last decade disintegrating, releasing billions of cubic metres of fresh water and massive icebergs into the Arctic Ocean.

Ice shelves have also been observed in retreat on the Antarctic Peninsula, with the Wilkins Ice Shelf observed to be breaking up, and the Larsen Ice Shelf retreating over the last decade.

Hodgson's commentary paper, published ahead of print on the website of US journal Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), discusses a selection of recent research into ice shelf retreat. He raises the interesting point that ice shelf retreat has not happened in both polar regions at the same time, according to the 12,000 year records for both Arctic and Antarctic ice shelves which have recently retreated. In contrast, the past few decades have seen ice shelf retreat at both poles at the same time.

A new report from the Defense Science Board (PDF) recommends that the U.S. Department of Defense needs to have a much broader understanding of global climate change because—get this—it represents a fundamental threat to U.S. and international security. To help the DoD wrap its head around climate change, the report recommends the agency manage a widespread information system for climate change data that gathers intelligence and other climate data from a number of federal agencies and from extra-governmental sources. The idea is to enable the Department of Defense to forecast and, perhaps, mitigate the negative impacts of climate change—and the security threats it represents.

The DoD’s climate information system would bring together data from multiple federal sources, including NASA, the U.S. Geological Survey, the CIA, The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Defense, Energy, State, and Agriculture, and meld them together with data from private climate researchers and experts. One goal of the system would be to produce actionable climate forecasts. Read more;