Get Energy Smart! NOW!

In a year with seeming unending demonstrations of mounting climate disruption and increasingly on-target science-based reporting on climate change, this PBS News Hour chose to present to the public a shallow ‘he-said, she-said’ report giving visibility to one of the blogosphere’s most prominent anti-science syndrome sufferers without providing the casual viewer any context for understanding this self-proclaimed “skeptic” and Anthony Watts’ jihad against actual climate science.

Others have and will dissect this story more fully.

Rather than delving into the slime of the story, solely two points indicating how problematic this story is and why it merits serious attention from the PBS Ombudsmen with guidance for future actual science-based reporting on climate change.

First is a very small but, imo, rather pointed indication of the situation. If you actually go to the story, which has the title “Climate Change Skeptic Says Global Warming Crowd Oversells Its Message” , take a moment to note the web page address: “Why the global warming crowd oversells its message”.  Anthony Watts, who has been shown to be removed from honest scientific engagement is taken at face value by PBS’ reporter to the extent that the, evidently, initial title for this post was fully supportive of Watts’ assertions.

More seriously, this question provides a good context as to the Newshour’s framing of the interview:

let’s start out with the basic idea that there’s this debate in this country over global warming. There’s some people who call it a complete hoax and there are some people who completely embrace it and so forth. Where do you stand in that spectrum?

Nowhere — and I mean nowhere — in this interview is even a hint that Watts is at odds with every single serious academic institution/organization in the world that has spoken on this issue.  PBS presents Watts as a reasonable man and provides its viewers absolutely no indication that Watts is at odds with the  Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences; NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS); the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); National Academies of Sciences (NAS); the Royal Society of the United Kingdom (RS); American Geophysical Union; American Institute of Physics; National Center for Atmospheric Research; American Meteorological Society; Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society; Woods Hole Research Center; American Astronomical Society; American Physical Society; Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society; and …. institution after institution after scientist after scientist.

As the PBS introduction says,

He doesn’t claim to be a scientist; he attended Purdue. He’s the author of a blog,

Perhaps an actual journalist, choosing to interview someone so at odds with the scientific community, might not have started off with ‘he says, she says’ balance framing but perhaps with questions like:

• Essentially every scientific institution with relevant expertise is in consensus that humanity is driving climate change. Why should anyone trust you over the Royal Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and thousands of scientists working on the world on this?
• Some might say that your innovative claim to fame was challenging weather station data due to urbanization and other shifts that might have skewed data. However, the scientific analysis of this issue have shown that there is not any traceable impact of ‘sites of concern’ on the data that shows a warming planet.  Again, with radically lowering Arctic Ice cover, massive imbalance of temperature records to hot records vs cold records, and other real-world impacts that align with a warming planet as climate scientists have long said could and would occur, why should Americans reject the scientific community and real world events and believe you?

Much easier, of course, to ask milquetoast questions and foster deception on PBS viewers and readers of PBS websites.

Thank you, PBS News Hour, for making it quite simple how much money to donate the next time I receive a request …

As Joe Romm concluded

The News Hour should look hard at what it is doing here and remember the golden rule of climate science journalism: If you want to write a golden story on climate science, spend your time talking to actual climate scientists.

Time for the Ombudsman to step up to the plate and stress the need for standards when it comes to science-related reporting. (You can write the PBS ombudsman here.)

[Read more →]

Even though every single relevant major scientific institution and organization in the world has stated that humanity is a major driving factor in modern climate change and that climate change creates risks for humanity if we don’t act, so many people fail to understand what was going on.  Can visualizations help change this?

Many struggle to find ways to effectively communicate the changes occurring with climate change through images and visualizations. Vice President Gore, in Inconvenient Truth, has images of trucks stuck in mud in the Arctic where there had been ice roads, babies in floods, storms, melting ice, and other powerful photos. There are also many graphs. There are cartoons. And …

In the past week, a number of high-quality paths to visualizing climate change came out. Here are three worth watching and sharing (feel free to suggest others in the comments).

At Climate Central, Michael D. Lemonick provides a stark way of seeing that, yes, summers in the U.S. really are getting warmer (no matter what George Will says).

One of the surest signs that the planet is getting warmer is the fact that record high temperatures are outpacing record lows. As of early August, for example we were able to report that with the year a little more than half over, 2012 had already surpassed all of 2011 in terms of record highs in the U.S.

So if you think summers are getting hotter, you’re absolutely right. It’s just one more reminder that the globe really is warming, thanks in large part to the heat-trapping greenhouse gases we keep pumping into the atmosphere.

This NASA graphic impressively provides 131 years of temperature data in 26 seconds.

The global average surface temperature in 2011 was the ninth warmest since 1880, according to NASA scientists. The finding continues a trend in which nine of the 10 warmest years in the modern meteorological record have occurred since the year 2000.  … The comparison shows how Earth continues to experience warmer temperatures than several decades ago. The average temperature around the globe in 2011 was 0.92 degrees F (0.51 C) warmer than the mid-20th century baseline.

Global temperatures have warmed significantly since 1880, the beginning of what scientists call the “modern record.” At this time, the coverage provided by weather stations allowed for essentially global temperature data. As greenhouse gas emissions from energy production, industry and vehicles have increased, temperatures have climbed, most notably since the late 1970s. In this animation of temperature data from 1880-2011, reds indicate temperatures higher than the average during a baseline period of 1951-1980, while blues indicate lower temperatures than the baseline average. (Data source: NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Visualization credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio)

“We know the planet is absorbing more energy than it is emitting,” said GISS Director James E. Hansen. “So we are continuing to see a trend toward higher temperatures. Even with the cooling effects of a strong La Niña influence and low solar activity for the past several years, 2011 was one of the 10 warmest years on record.”

PIOMAS Arctic Sea Ice Volume 1979 – 2012 September 2nd (Source data for this graph.) (Tip of the hat to Joe Romm, Arctic Death Spiral, The Video.)

Since 1979, the volume of Summer Arctic Sea Ice has declined by 75% and accelerating. The first summer with an ice-free Arctic Ocean for at least a day is expected to happen within a decade. This video by Andy Lee Robinson illustrates the dramatic decline since 1979 until 2nd September 2012 (day 246).

The important point about this — it is about “volume” of ice rather than the more typically shown “ice coverage”.  While there is less ice cover, as (if not more) ominously, the ice is getting ‘younger’ and thinner year-to-year. And, thus, we have seen (well, scientific measurements have seen since so few humans set eyes on it) a 75 percent reduction in the volume of summer Arctic sea ice over the past 43 years.  Hmmm … hide your lying eyes because there is no evidence of a warming climate to be seen there.

WRI’s Extreme Weather and Climate 2012 timeline. As Paul Douglas put it,

Here is a remarkable timeline summary of 2012: the warmest, and probably the most severe year in U.S. history, but an unusual number of extremes were witnessed worldwide.

Last night, in his speech at Charlotte, the President spoke directly to climate issues. With a direct slap at Mitt Romney’s sad climate joking to anti-science cheering, the President said:

And yes, my plan will continue to reduce the carbon pollution that is heating our planet – because climate change is not a hoax. More droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke. They’re a threat to our children’s future. And in this election, you can do something about it.

While the Democratic Party platform had strong words on climate issues (although quite toned down from 2008), commentators were noticing a dearth of climate mentions during the convention. As we played “climate spotting”, the references to climate or climate-related issues were few and far between. This changed yesterday, with comments by Barney Frank and John Kerry. And, then, the clincher: the President’s emphasis that “climate change is not a hoax” and that climate disruption / extreme weather event implications “are not a joke.”

An item of note: those at the convention gave the climate change paragraph among the most positive reaction given to any part of the speech.

And, even more astounding, the “Village” seems to have noticed.

• Politico rated the speech’s “best lines” and this was #5 of 15 — and #2 in terms of policy-related quotations.
• MSNBC rated applause lines — “And, in this election, you can do something it” was #6 with 17.2 seconds of applause.

At the Presidential and Congressional levels, 2012 is truly an election about science. Science is truly a differentiator between the parties — with climate science being the most extreme example of this.  And, on this, the American public us (and America’s scientists are) not sympathetic to the Republican Party.

And, climate change is an issue that lends itself to coherent discussion.

And, climate change is a winning political issue.

And, the Obama-Biden Campaign seems to be waking to the power of climate as an issue.

And, the President showed this last night.

Climate Solutions for a Stronger America is a communications “guide for engaging and winning on climate change & clean energy” intended for politicians and others regularly engaged on debate.  This guide, driven by the work of Betsy Taylor, lays out an effective communications path for politicians who want — amid all the other issues of the day — to include climate change issues within their discussions but might find it challenging amid the cacophony of deception coming from the RWSM and other fossil-foolish outlets.

Based on recent (and targeted) polling, “Climate Solutions” lays down a three pillar argument stream resting on core American values.  As put in the document,

Voters are seeing the effects of climate disruption in their daily lives, are concerned about the impacts, and are hungry for leadership and solutions. A large body of recent research shows a solid majority of voters respond favorably to confident, pro-clean energy, climate lead- ership messages grounded in three core American values

The values:

• Responsibility:  We have a responsibility — to ourselves, each other, our children — to act to reduce climate disruption impacts.
• Patriotic Pride: “America can rise to the challenge.”  How dare anyone say Americans can’t achieve a cleaner energy future.
• Accountability: “The billionaire Koch Brothers and Big Oil … rig the system” and it is time to put an end to it.

These value streams link together to create a powerful narrative structure which hits classic literary and political rhetoric advice:

• A quest for a clean energy future and confronting climate change. This quest will enable creation of new industries and jobs via practical and cost-effective solutions.
• A menacing threat that threatens America and all Americans from mounting climate disruption as exemplified with wildfires, droughts alternated with floods, record temperatures. “It doesn’t have to be this way.”
• A clear set of villains exists as “Big Oil, the Billionaire Koch Brothers, and fossil fuel Super-PACs are rigging the system and blocking clean energy solutions. They are trying to buy the election and keep fossil fuel interests in control.”
• True heroes exist as well as people “are standing up for clean energy” and are “trying to do your part. … And all of us are fighting back against the billionaire Koch Brothers who have a stranglehold on our political system and energy future. These climate heroes and many others get up every day and work hard, play fair and invest in America’s future.”

And, at the core of the guide and fundamental to this narrative:

There is no need to do anything but speak the truth.

[Read more →]

This guest post comes from John Cook, University of Queensland

and was originally published at The Conversation.

In a previous article on The Conversation, Stephan Lewandowsky asked, why do people reject science? I’m going to take a slightly different angle and consider how people are able to reject climate science in the face of strong evidence.

A growing body of research has found that when a person’s worldview is threatened by scientific evidence, they interpret the science in a biased manner. One issue where this influence is strongest is climate change.

For supporters of an unregulated free market, regulating polluting industries to reduce global warming is so unpalatable that they are far more likely to reject that climate change is happening.

The mechanism by which ideology such as this influences our scientific views is confirmation bias. We place greater weight on evidence that confirms our beliefs, while ignoring or resisting conflicting evidence. This can be a challenge when confronted with a convergence of evidence and a scientific consensus, but confirmation bias is up to the task. Let’s look at some examples.

[Read more →]

What if (in the vein of Network and “I’m mad as hell and not going to take it anymore”) a weather forecaster went truly off script and expressed, with the passion it merits, the seriousness of our climate situation?

With that question in mind, here is a look at what the Labor Day weekend forecast should have been in a reality-based world.

Full transcript after the fold and a hat tip to the creators.

The American Meteorological Society (AMS) recently updated its climate change statement which is substantive, long, and worth reading.

Forecast the Facts is working to foster more serious climate discussion by meteorologists while shining light who propagate falsehoods about climate science.

And, as to why that matters, see Daniel Souweine’s Hey, weather man: Where’s the climate coverage?

[Read more →]

In contrast to its total absence from the Republican Party platform (as a sign of the GOP’s anti-science global warming denial), the Democratic Party platform directly engages on climate change issues — with the term appearing 18 times in the platform.

Note: the photo to the right comes from the Democratic Party’s platform page.

[Read more →]

For too long, the Democratic Party “machine” has been eerily silent when it comes to the scientific consensus on climate change and the risks that catastrophic climate chaos creates for America and Americans. While much has been said and heard on ‘clean energy’ and ‘green jobs’, the words “climate change” and “global warming” have almost seemed to disappear from the Democratic Party’s lexicon as the Republican Party headed into ever-more extreme rejection of science with embrace and promotion of fossil-foolish global warming denialism. Thus, when it came to political leadership, the voice in the Village Square has been overwhelming shrill rejection of scientific knowledge.

The Democratic Party’s aversion to climate discussions derived from a mistaken ‘Village’ perception that climate change was somehow a losing political issue. This mistaken perception derived, it seemed, from concerns over how Faux-News watchers might react with serious discussion of climate science issues. In fact, as a Yale University report (pdf) recently documented, engaging on climate change is a winning political issue for Democratic politicians. Discussing climate issues won’t get Tea Party-ites any angrier but they will engage with open-minded independent voters concerned about climate issues and motivate Democratic Party activists disheartened by what they see as inadequate engagement on the most critical issue that humanity faces.

Six months ago, those concerned on climate issues saw a ray of hope that Presidential candidate Barack Obama might engage heavily in climate issues. In a Rolling Stone interview, the President correctly noted (in what is actually an understatement) that “those who have looked at the science of climate change are scared and concerned about a general lack of sufficient movement to deal with the problem.” The President also predicted that climate change would become an issue in the 2012 campaign.

After that ray of hope, however, the silence from the White House and Obama-Biden campaign seemed deafening with the slightest of mentions of climate on the campaign’s “environment” webpage (commenting that fuel efficiency measures will reduce carbon emissions and help address climate change) and week following week without campaign commentary or White House press conferences about climate change even as the nation burned (both with high temperatures and fires), faced record droughts, crop yields were being devastated, and … The crickets were thriving amid the stunted corn stalks.

The Republican Party continues to play to its anti-science base with candidate Mitt Romney and those at the Republican National Convention seeing climate change to be a joking issue.

With Mitt’s joking false pitting of economy vs the environment (when, to be clear, it is environment + economy), President Obama’s prediction that climate change would become an issue in the 2012 campaign seems to be coming true.

Since then, in multiple campaign events, President Obama has made comments along these lines:

The decisions we make as a country on big issues like the economy and jobs and taxes and education and energy and war and climate change — all these decisions will directly affect your life in very personal ways. And I’ve got to say, this is something I’m acutely aware of when I make these decisions, because they’re decisions that are going to affect Malia and Sasha, my daughters, as well.

….

Governor Romney wants to pass a new $5 trillion tax cut targeted towards the wealthiest Americans. That’s not going to cut our debt. Ignoring inequality doesn’t make it go away. Denying climate change won’t make it stop. These things won’t make for a brighter future. They won’t make your future stronger.

As Joe Romm put it so well in an analogy to Harry Potter, the President is speaking outloud the name that can’t be said.

And, the President’s lines in speeches are being echoed in campaign mailings. From an email in my inbox,

Here’s something Mitt Romney actually joked about with pride — and plenty of scorn — while formally accepting the Republican nomination for president of the United States:

“President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet.”

And the crowd went wild.

It is nothing short of terrifying to imagine a party that openly mocks climate change taking back the White House.

It is “terrifying to imagine a [major political] party that openly mocks climate change” let alone dealing with the reality that global warming denial dominates one of America’s two major parties and that this energetic anti-science attitude could occupy the Oval Office.

The campaign took the correct measure and moved from climate science to climate change mitigation, highlighting the difference between Obama-Biden and Mittens-LyinRyan when it comes to clean energy programs

The contrast between our candidate and theirs couldn’t be any clearer.

President Obama has more than doubled the amount of electricity we get from wind and solar over his first term — and his plans for wind power are expected to help grow the wind industry to support 100,000 jobs by 2016. Both Romney and Ryan want to kill the wind production tax credit, which could come at the expense of 37,000 American jobs. Oh, but they would keep giving $4 billion in tax breaks to Big Oil every single year.

And just this week, while President Obama’s administration finalized historic fuel economy standards to double our vehicles’ mileage by 2025 and cut carbon pollution from vehicles in half, the GOP adopted a platform that could kill investments in clean energy, and calls on Congress to prohibit the EPA from moving forward with new greenhouse gas regulations.

Surprise, surprise — according to the Los Angeles Times, the platform “was written at the direction of the Romney campaign,” making it heavily influenced by Big Oil interests.

So there you have it — the stakes for clean air, clean water, and clean energy jobs couldn’t be higher.

While most Americans wouldn’t, at this time, define the November choice in this way: this is truly an election about science — climate science and what to do about climate change not least of these issues.

Climate change’s emergence into the political dialogue in the past week suggests that the Obama-Biden campaign is waking up to how climate change — and respect for science (and scientists) — is not just an important policy arena but a winning political issue.

Note: An excellent, related discussion by Peter Sinclair, Is Obama Rolling Out a Climate Campaign?

As the reality of the arctic ice melt sinks in over coming weeks, and as extreme weather continues, Romney, and the GOP in general, may regret having made this a go-to soundbite in the campaign. There are rumors that Romney will begin trying to walk back the climate rhetoric, more on that later, but the party as a whole is way out on a limb.

The question is, will Obama take advantage of the increasingly obvious disconnect, and begin to make climate an issue?

(Important) NOTE:  The difference on climate change when it comes to Party platforms is stark.  Climate Change is not in the GOP platform.  The term appears 18 times in the Democratic Party Platform with some strong language. See here for extracts and a quickly look analysis.

This guest post comes from SolarMom — a very knowledgeable scientist who I (and I hope you) find worth listening to …

Twenty years ago my parents took their nest egg (attained back when nest eggs were attainable) and retired to a condo a half block from the ocean, in a well-heeled south Florida town. It’s the type of place (“fantasyland”, our 16-year-old daughter calls it) where ladies lunch and men wear Bermuda shorts and supple Italian loafers with no socks; where the local politicians talk of “preserving our way of life”; and where the visiting children and grandchildren mostly hail from Westchester or the upper East Side.

My dad passed on a while back, but mom remains, 80-something and tottering but with critical faculties intact. Each winter break we pack up the minivan and depart our liberal southern college town – yes, there is such a thing – for a spell in fantasyland as soon as school lets out.

I spend a lot of time keeping up with goings-on in the world of clean energy and green jobs, and with the latest Congressional anti-EPA shenanigans. For a while now, I’ve also been reading a lot about the bigger picture outlook for the coming decades: peak oil, resource depletion, food insecurity, and the looming specter of climate change.

Lounging by the beach on our most recent foray to the edge of the continent (as our 14-year-old son likes to put it), my husband and I chatted about the likelihood that the entire town all around us will be underwater in something like 50 years, despite – and in part because of – the obliviousness of the privileged residents and their descendants to that fact. Apres moi le deluge I guess, as hard as it is to imagine while surveying the picturesque vacation scene. (“You’re not going to keep my apartment after I’m gone, are you” Mom has asked wistfully more than once. Well…no.)

[Read more →]

Marc Morano is the Andrew Breitbart of the climate science world. Powerful packaging of material that doesn’t stand up well to any serious scrutiny. And, he has been very good at gaining lots of media and other attention with partial truths and utter mistruths about climate issues whether from his current “Climate Depot” hat, supporting Jim Inhofe’s climate denial machine, or otherwise. In essence, Morano is well compensated for his having created a wide network to which he sends out misleading to outright false information in a ‘pretty package’ that captures the slavishly devoted attention of anti-science syndrome sufferers and confuses those who do not have the energy/resources to check behind the false blaring headlines and ever-so convincing lying with statistics.

Amusingly, one of Morano’s recent posting of a title to link to another’s sad post clearly demonstrated that his misunderstanding and misrepresentation is not limited to the physics of climate science but also goes into the social sciences.

Morano’s title — which uses a sad attempt at a pejorative against Forecast the Facts‘ thoughtfully competent Brad Johnson — reads:

Warmist Brad Johnson Adopts Young Earth Creationism: Johnson: ‘As RNC climate deniers party, Arctic sea ice is in free fall, about to go under 4 m km2 for first time in human history‘

Brad’s item links to a chart entitled “A new record minimum of the Arctic sea ice extent was set on 24, August, 2012”

And, following his attacking title, Morano gives his doting followers what is supposed to be the killer line to embarrass and demean Brad:

Reality Check: ‘According to Dr. Walt Meier at NSIDC, the Arctic was completely free of ice sometime between 5,000 and 15,000 years ago. Apparently Brad Johnson believes that human history is less than 5,000 years.

And, well, if Brad Johnson “believes that human history is less than 5,000 years” he would only be off by a few hundred years — at most.

There is a very simple guideline when talking about the past — in terms of humanity: history and pre-history.

• When does history begin? With the written record.
• What about pre-history?  Simply put, everything before that written record is “pre-history”.

A complication is that “history” doesn’t begin at the same date for all civilizations and peoples.

From the Wiki entry on Pre-history:

The date marking the end of prehistory in a particular culture or region, that is the date when relevant written historical records become a useful academic resource, varies enormously from region to region. For example, in Egypt it is generally accepted that prehistory ended around 3200 BC, whereas in New Guinea the end of the prehistoric era is set much more recently, at around 1900 AD. In Europe the relatively well-documented classical cultures of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome had neighbouring cultures, including the Celts and to a lesser extent the Etruscans, with little or no writing, and historians must decide how much weight to give to the often highly prejudiced accounts of the “prehistoric” cultures in Greek and Roman literature.

3200 + 2012 = 5212. That is roughly the number of years in “human history” on the NIle Delta, for example, according to the basic academic definition of the term.

Since Meier states that the Arctic was free of ice somewhere between 5,000 to 15,000 years ago, it seems likely (if the Arctic was actually ice-free) that this occurred in pre-history and not history.

Chalk up yet another of the sadly unending examples of Morano deception about and lack of understanding of science — in this case, social science.