Month: March 2012

Boston Globe:

SALT LAKE CITY—Lawyers for an environmental activist convicted of disrupting a federal oil-and-gas auction say the man has been put into isolation at a federal prison because of an unidentified congressman’s complaint.

Tim DeChristopher was moved to an “isolation unit” March 9 at a federal prison in Herlong, Calif., where he gets little chance for exercise, writing or phone calls and has been let out only four times briefly in the past two weeks, his supporters at Peaceful Uprising said Wednesday.

The friends are organizing a protest in front of Salt Lake City’s federal courthouse for Thursday.

Peaceful Uprising:

On the evening of Friday March 9th, Tim DeChristopher (climate activist currently serving a 2-year prison sentence for outbidding oil and gas companies at an illegitimate BLM auction in 2008) was summarily removed from the minimum security camp where he has been held since September 2011, and moved into the FCI Herlong’s Special Housing Unit (SHU).
Tim was informed .. that he was being moved to the SHU because an unidentified congressman had called from Washington DC, complaining of an email that Tim had sent to a friend. Tim was inquiring about the reported business practices of one of his legal fund contributors, threatening to return the money if their values no longer aligned with his own.

According to Prison officials, Tim will continue to be held in isolated confinement pending an investigation. There is no definite timeline for inmates being held in the SHU — often times they await months for the conclusion of an investigation.

In the SHU, Tim’s movement and communications are severely restricted. In the past two weeks, he has been allowed out of his 8 X 10 cell (which he shares with one other inmate) four times, each time for less than an hour. The SHU could have been designed by Franz Kafka. Tim is allowed one book in his cell, and four in his property locker.  His writing means are restricted to a thin ink cartridge which makes correspondence extremely difficult.  He can still receive mail from the outside, but has no other form of communication other than 15 minutes of phone calls per month.

Alternet:

In the same March week that an unprecedented heat wave made even President Obama feel “a little nervous,” imprisoned climate change activist Tim DeChristopher languished mysteriously in isolation at the FCI Herlong’s Special Housing Unit in California.

According to a press release from DeChristopher’s Peaceful Uprising organization, an unidentified member of the US Congress possibly engineered the troubling transfer of the courageous “Bidder 70″–who brought national attention to reckless public land auctions in Utah and climate issues–due to personal correspondence between DeChristopher and a friend over a legal fund contributor.

According to Peaceful Uprising, the confinement to isolation limits DeChristopher’s outside telephone communication to 15 minutes per month, among other restrictions, and raises issues of cruel and unusual punishment, especially considering the long waiting list for similar measures:Tim will continue to be held in isolated confinement pending an investigation. There is no definite timeline for inmates being held in the SHU — often times they await months for the conclusion of an investigation.
Unanswered questions abound over DeChristopher’s extreme treatment and the role of Congressional members. He still faces nearly a year and a half of incarceration–potentially all of it to be served in isolation now.

Continue reading “Cruel? or just Unusual? Tim DeChristopher moved to Isolation.”

“The reporter of that Daily Mail article published it anyway, after we told him the angle  that he chose misrepresents our work. “

That’s the whole of the reply I received from Dr. Zunli Lu of Syracuse University after I queried him about the way his study was (mis)represented in the Daily Mail.

UPDATE: Dr. Lu’s full statement now available, discussed here.

The blaring headline “Is this finally proof we’re NOT causing global warming?” is catnip to the yokels of climate denial-dom, and guarantees the story will get linked by all the usual suspects. Then the Mail lures more hits with the cleavage and leg shots of models and actresses on the right side of the page. It’s classic form so familiar to Fox news watchers – boobies for boobs.

I’d been getting queries all day long from people who were confused by the article, and finally decided to check. ( gets tiresome asking these questions, especially when you already know the answer)

The gist is that there is a recent study out of Syracuse, that uses an interesting mineral as a new climate proxy, (an indirect method of indicating temperature from places and times where there were no thermometers)  and has found some comparable samples in Europe as well as in the West Antarctic peninsula.

Then, out comes the straw man – ”  the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) argues that the Medieval Warm Period was confined to Europe – therefore that the warming we’re experiencing now is a man-made phenomenon.”  The implication is that if there was anyplace on the planet that experienced temperatures close to 20th century warmth, anytime during that extended Medieval period, then by gum there ain’t no climate change, just like Rush said.

The truth is that the medieval period covers anywhere from 800 to 1400 CE, and within that period there were temperature fluctuations in all parts of the planet just as there are today. The IPCC points out that

“Local temperature fluctuations, even those over just a few decades, can be several degrees celsius, which is larger than the global warming signal of the past century of about 0.7°C.”

Because there are a number of records of these local temperature fluctuations, climate deniers often use this or that data set to obscure the more important global perspective.

That perspective was well stated by the National Academy of Science, in its 2006 evaluation of the paleo-temperature record –

..the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world, which in many cases appear to be unprecedented during at least the last 2,000 years.

and added, significantly –

Not all individual proxy records indicate that the recent warmth is unprecedented, although a larger fraction of geographically diverse sites experienced exceptional warmth during the late 20th century than during any other extended period from A.D. 900 onward

I have another message in to Dr. Lu, asking for a little more clarification. I would imagine he sensibly wants to keep his distance from the crazies on this, but I’m hoping he’ll provide some perspective.

So, the anwer, if anyone asks is, OF COURSE the story is wrong. It’s the Daily Mail. If you want to see how the Daily Mail interacts with the climate denial media, watch the video below, a perennial favorite.

Continue reading “Birth of a Climate Crock. Scientist Disavows Daily Mail Story on MWP”

Not too long ago the “Wall Street 16”, a group of spokespeople for the fossil fuel industry, published a widely distributed piece in the Wall Street Journal, further confirming that once-great paper’s morph into just one more tentacle of Rupert Murdoch’s Foxis of Evil.

Now the leader of that group, the hapless Will Happer, (long time promoter of tobacco pseudo science,  climate killing greenhouse gases, and anything else right wing funders will task his Marshall Institute “think” tank to take on) is back again with another empty repetition of old climate denial saws, currently ricocheting around the denial-o-sphere.

Ben Santer took Happer to task in a recent lecture at Chico State University above, and Barry Bickmore takes it the current piece below.

Barry Bickmore:

A few months ago, I gave a talk at Utah Valley University entitled, “How to Avoid the Truth About Climate Change” (click here for video).  In the talk, I introduced the concept of “truth-challenged individuals”–people who are better than the rest of us at ignoring evidence that contradicts what we want to believe–and gave a few examples.  Well, it’s time to add another such individual to the list–Prof. Will Happer, a physicist at Princeton.

In 2010, Prof. Happer testified before a committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, “Over the past ten years there has been no statistically [significant] global warming. This is not at all what was predicted by the IPCC computer models.”  The problem was that the IPCC models DO predict there will be whole decades of less rapid warming or even some cooling as the temperature gradually rises.  But since the weather is “chaotic” in the short term, exactly WHEN these short-term dips in the temperature trend will occur is hard to predict, so different models (or even the same models run with slightly different starting conditions) will project the dips at different times.  This FACT is clearly evident in the following graph, taken from Fig. 10.5 of the IPCC AR4 Working Group 1 Report.   It shows climate model temperature projections for the A2 emissions scenario, with the individual lines representing individual models or averaged groups of models.  Just look at some of the more squiggly lines, which represent individual models.  They go up for several years, then they go down for several years, but in the long term the trend is up.

Oh, I’m certainly not the first one to point this out about Happer’s false testimony.  Ben Santer and his colleagues published a paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research last year, in which they showed, “Claims that minimal warming over a single decade undermine findings of a slowly-evolving externally-forced warming signal [e.g., as in Investor’s Business Daily, 2008; Happer, 2010] are simply incorrect.”  (Click here for a free pre-publication version of Santer’s paper.)

Well, now Happer has made the same claim again in the Wall Street Journal.

If anyone can point out where Prof. Happer has dealt with Santer’s refutation of his (obviously) false testimony, please do so in the comments.  To me, it looks like he’s simply ignoring it.

Mike MacCracken, who I recently showcased for his 1982 talk on climate change, has also taken Happer to task in some detail, in a piece that makes are fine primer on the well-worn myths of climate denial – here.

I normally ignore the inside baseball back-and-forth that occupies too many people’s time on the blog-o-sphere, but this is just too hilarious.

Readers may remember last week, His Esteemed Splendiforousness “Lord” Christopher Monckton was formally challenged to a point by point debate by the video blogger Potholer (Peter Hadfield), who had produced a series of videos (see example above) eviscerating one by one His Infallible Excellency’s talking points, and providing the primary source material in doing so.

Faced with real, checkable, online debate, where he would have to name his sources, put it in writing, and provide links for readers to fact check him (hmmm..sort of the way I do it in this video series) His CowardlyLion-ness decided to, well, run.

The host of the discussion, Pseudo-Science enthusiast Anthony Watts, told his faithful last weekend that, after I released a video of a Skype interview with Potholer discussing the situation, he would no longer provide a platform for discussion, since Potholer was “colluding” with that “hateful greenman”.

Cedric Katesby says:

March 24, 2012 at 8:13 am

Monckton will hopefully find the time to come back to WUWT and be ready to debate his critics.
Looking forward to it.

REPLY: While I can’t hear what Hadfield is saying (he sounds like a British mumble to me) they seem totally infatuated with their manhunt, so much for Hadfield’s repeated claims of being “dispassionate and logical”. Thanks for posting this. When he starts colluding with that hateful “greenman”, all semblance of rational debate is destroyed.

This video then cements my decision not to provide any further space to Hadfield here. – Anthony

The Fossil Fuel industry and its wholly owned media subsidiary, the Foxis of Evil, have declared a fatwah on electric vehicles, and even General Motors is wondering just how much they are willing to lie to stamp out the threat to their business model. The bonehead me-too media has done its part to snuff out an emerging industry, as well. But the over-arching greed that defines the oil barons may yet be their undoing.

SF Gate:

To drivers, the high price of gasoline is a scourge. To the electric car industry, it could be a game-changer.

Nissan’s electric Leaf and the Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid both hit dealer showrooms in late 2010, riding a wave of carefully cultivated hype. But first-year sales were lackluster at best, as consumers balked at the high sticker prices and unfamiliar engineering.

This year’s gas-price spike could change that.

Technology that looked like a gamble to many car buyers last year might look more like an insurance policy now.

“Every time it goes up, my phone rings a little more,” said Ron Coury, with the Northbay Nissan dealership in Petaluma. “It’s the ones who’ve been sitting back and watching, and now they’re sticking their feet in the water.”
–

“It gives us the opportunity to convert people, but it’s an opportunity we have to seize,” said Brendan Jones, director of electric vehicle marketing for Nissan North America.

General Motors has launched a new ad campaign that explains how the Volt works and emphasizes the car’s ability to evade the gas station. The Volt operates as an electric car for the first 25 to 50 miles of a trip, before a gasoline motor kicks in. Like the all-electric Leaf, the Volt recharges its batteries via a specialized power plug, with most owners recharging at night.

“I do think that it is probably forcing people to consider fuel-efficient transportation, and the Volt certainly is a gold-medal opportunity for a lot of customers,” said Dan Akerson, GM’s chief executive officer. He referred to the new ads as an effort to “relaunch” the Volt.

Forbes: Now’s the Time to Buy a Volt-

So, in 2010, when I moved back to the U.S. from my old São Paulo home, I bought a black, third-generation Prius II. It’s an updated model of the car Larry David drives in Curb Your Enthusiasm, and as a car goes, it’s got room for five, it’s got speed — I am constantly doing 80 in that thing and not realizing it — and it does what I want it to do most, reduces my gasoline expenses.  I”m saving the earth and screwing oil companies one mile at a time.

The Prius gets 50 mpg’s on average. It cost just $23,000. It’s okay looking. But the Chevy Volt is even better looking, sort of like a brand new girlfriend.

If gasoline is going to $6 a gallon, as libertarian presidential candidate Ron Paul thinks, and as Steve Odland considered here at Forbes last week, then I want a car that doesn’t need any gasoline at all. Oil can go to $150 a barrel and my transportation expenses won’t rise a cent. I feel like I’m beating the market, and that feels pretty good; pretty, pretty, pretty good.
–

Inside, the first thing I notice are the interior door panels. They have circuit board imagery designed on them. This thing is so 21st Century. The dash board is all digital, and has a more futuristic feel to it than the Prius.  Keep in mind, I’m a layman. I’m not a Car & Driver guy out to test how much torque this thing has. I don’t even know what torque is. I just know it’s a word.  But I quickly learn that the Volt has no transmission, so it is all torque. No shifting gears. It’s just step on the pedal and watch it move.

Continue reading “With Gas Prices High, Electric Cars Ready to Seize Opportunity”