Averting the worst consequences of human-induced climate change is a “great moral issue” on a par with slavery, according to the leading Nasaclimate scientist Prof Jim Hansen.
He argues that storing up expensive and destructive consequences for society in future is an “injustice of one generation to others”.
In his lecture, Hansen will argue that the challenge facing future generations from climate change is so urgent that a flat-rate global tax is needed to force immediate cuts in fossil fuel use. Ahead of receiving the award – which has previously been given to Sir David Attenborough, the ecologist James Lovelock, and the economist Amartya Sen – Hansen told the Guardian that the latest climate models had shown the planet was on the brink of an emergency. He said humanity faces repeated natural disasters from extreme weather events which would affect large areas of the planet.
“The situation we’re creating for young people and future generations is that we’re handing them a climate system which is potentially out of their control,” he said. “We’re in an emergency: you can see what’s on the horizon over the next few decades with the effects it will have on ecosystems, sea level and species extinction.”
WASHINGTON — Tennessee is poised to adopt a law that would allow public schoolteachers to challenge climate change and evolution in their classrooms without fear of sanction, according to educators and civil libertarians in the state.
Passed by the state Legislature and awaiting Republican Gov.Bill Haslam‘s signature, the measure is likely to stoke growing concerns among science teachers around the country that teaching climate science is becoming the same kind of classroom and community flash point as evolution. If it becomes law, Tennessee will become the second state, after Louisiana, to allow the teaching of alternatives to accepted science on climate change.
The Tennessee measure does not require the teaching of alternatives to scientific theories of evolution, climate change, human cloning and “the chemical origins of life.” Instead, the legislation would prevent school administrators from reining in teachers who expound on alternative hypotheses to those topics.
The measure’s primary sponsor, Republican state Sen. Bo Watson, said it was meant to give teachers the clarity and security to discuss alternative ideas to evolution and climate change that students may have picked up at home and want to explore in class.
In the world of science denial, anything you want is possible!!
On Spaceship Earth, none of us are passengers. We are all crew. And we’re going to need all hands on deck to solve this planetary emergency – so I welcome any and all who follow science and fact, and I hope folks from ConservAmerica will let me know whenever they have something important to share.
All conservatives out there who believe Rachel Maddow gets her facts wrong, is prone to exaggeration, and indulges in misrepresentation for its schlocky entertainment value, please raise your hands.
Well, Maddow did it again in her nightly tirade April 5. She said our organization’s new name, ConservAmerica, indicates that we’re giving up on the Republican Party. Maddow also couldn’t resist a puerile cheap shot—likening the name ConservAmerica to the name of a shady mortgage dealer.
Since Maddow didn’t bother contacting us to get our side of the story—journalism 101, folks—we’ll put our side of the story out there.
ConservAmerica is a Republican organization. Always has been. We were founded in 1995 to restore the Republican Party’s great conservation tradition, which is grounded in the timeless conservative ethic of stewardship.
The name change reflects the need to draw more recognition to the inherent connection between conservation and conservatism.
Maddow—highlighting her partisan tendencies—didn’t report our stated reason for the name change, but simply made up her own reason.
Real conservatism is about prudence and responsible stewardship. We want to make that case more strongly. Our mission is the same, and whether Rachel Maddow cares about the truth or not, we are as Republican today as we were last week.
Hmm. GOP lawmakers and presidential candidates reject climate science, intend to gut EPA funding, characterize the cap-and-trade plan they came up with as a radical socialist plot, want to weaken clean air and clean water laws, and a group called Republicans for Environmental Protection feels compelled to remove the word “Republican” from its name … but talk radio and “the left” are giving people the wrong idea about the contemporary GOP?
To be sure, the problem is not with ConservAmerica, which is led by credible officials who clearly want to do the right thing. Rather, the problem is with those officials’ party, which insists on ignoring sensible voices like ConservAmerica’s.
As Daniel Weiss, director of climate strategy for the Center for American Progress Action Fund, told Politico, “Under either name … they face a fundamental challenge that the pro-conservation party of Roosevelt, Nixon, Schwarzenegger and McCain has become the climate science denial party of Romney, Santorum and Limbaugh.”
Jeremy Shakun is lead author of the new study in Nature this week, confirming from multiple proxy records that “temperature is correlated with and generally lags CO2 during the last (that is, the most recent) deglaciation.”
“People drilled down through the Antarctic ice sheets, and we actually have a record of [the link between CO2 and temperature] that goes back to almost a million years ago,” Shakun told me in a recent interview. From these air bubbles, scientists could figure that carbon dioxide rose and fell over our planet’s most recent ice age, suggesting that carbon dioxide had something to do with rising temperatures that ended that same ice age. “…if you look at these two [CO2 and temperature] together, you see that they have this amazing correlation. It’s a better correlation than you almost ever get from nature – the two just go lockstep up and down together over the ice ages for the last 1 million years almost,” Shakun said. But just what exactly was that relationship? This is where strong debate has plagued many scientists’ efforts to pin the blame on carbon dioxide.
“People have realized that there is clearly some link between CO2 and temperature in the past, but the question you get to is, well, how does it work? Which one is cause and which one is effect? How do the two interplay off of each other?” Shakun said.
The curveball, as Shakun puts it, is that when scientists looked more closely at the ice-core records they had from Antartica, they found that the temperature in Antartica actually started changing a bit before the CO2 did. Not exactly the best of news for scientists and climate change communicators trying to stave off arguments from climate deniers that there is no ‘CO2 problem’ today.
“This is something that [current] global warming skeptics have jumped on, to say ‘ah jeez, obviously CO2 must not cause warming because if we look in the past, in these ice cores, the CO2 comes after the warming… so we are in the clear today’,” Shakun said. Climate deniers have pointed to the fact that CO2 might be an effect of global warming, but not a cause. They argue, based on these important old records, that carbon emissions don’t really matter for climate.
A clutch of recent studies reinforces evidence that people are causing climate change and suggests debate should now move on to a more precise understanding of its impact on humans.
The reports, published in various journals in recent weeks, add new detail to the theory of climate change and by implication cast contrarians in a more desperate light.
To be clear: there’s nothing wrong with doubting climate change; but doubts based on ignorance, a political bias or fossil fuel lobbying don’t help.
The basics, well known, are that rising greenhouse gas emissions are almost certainly responsible for raising global average surface temperatures (by about 0.17 degrees Celsius [app. 0.3°F] a decade from 1980-2010), in turn leading to sea level rise (of about 2.3 millimeters [0.0905 inches] a year from 2005-2010) and probably causing more frequent bouts of extreme heat waves and possibly more erratic rainfall.
Vast uncertainties remain about the risk of runaway warming, and the urgency: for example, about what level of greenhouse gas emissions will cause how much sea level rise this century.
The latest studies suggest firmer evidence for a human finger print, for example showing that pollution is largely responsible for a slow cycle in sea surface temperatures in the last century.
Recent studies also cast more light on trends, for example showing that the world has seen hotter years since 1998 (previously held by some as a record); and presenting firmer forecasts for 2050.
And others show lessons from the end of the last Ice Age: for example that rises in carbon dioxide preceded (and, by implication, caused) warming; and that sea levels at one point were rising by several meters a century.
None of these are individually particular clinchers – the problem was already clear – but collectively they pin down uncertainty seized on by skeptics.
DOUBT
Climate science was under a cloud after a “climategate” scandal of scientists’ emails leaked in 2009 was used by skeptics to suggest that they had deliberately manipulated data – allegations rejected by several public enquiries.
And a major U.N. panel report made a couple of factual errors, most notably saying that all Himalayan glaciers may melt by 2035, which seemed a typographical error meant to read 2350.
In retrospect, it’s incredible that these cast doubt on the scientific theory.
Rising levels of carbon dioxide drove much of the global warming that thawed Earth at the end of the last ice age.
That’s the conclusion a team of scientists has drawn in a new study examining the factors that closed the door on the last ice age, which ended about 20,000 years ago.
The “conservative” spokesperson here demonstrates perfectly Chris’ thesis that the Foxis of Evil provides an “alternative facts” echo chamber, even quoting Rick Santorum as an authority. Amazing, revealing, pathetic, and sad.
We all know that many American conservatives have issues with Charles Darwin, and the theory of evolution. But Albert Einstein, and the theory of relativity?
If you’re surprised, allow me to introduceConservapedia, the right-wing answer toWikipedia and ground zero for all that is scientifically and factually inaccurate, for political reasons, on the Internet.
Claiming over 285 million page views since its 2006 inception, Conservapedia is the creation of Andrew Schlafly, a lawyer, engineer, homeschooler, and one of six children of Phyllis Schlafly, the anti-feminist and anti-abortion rights activist who successfully battled the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s. In his mother’s heyday, conservative activists were establishing vast mailing lists and newsletters, and rallying the troops. Her son learned that they also had to marshal “truth” to their side, now achieved not through the mail but the Web.
So when Schafly realized that Wikipedia was using BCE (“Before Common Era”) rather than BC (“Before Christ”) to date historical events, he’d had enough. He decided to create his own contrary fact repository, declaring, “It’s impossible for an encyclopedia to be neutral.” Conservapedia definitely isn’t neutral about science. Its 37,000 plus pages of content include items attacking evolution and global warming, wrongly claiming (contrary to psychological consensus) that homosexuality is a choice and tied to mental disorders, and incorrectly asserting (contrary to medical consensus) that abortion causes breast cancer.
The whopper, though, has to be Conservapedia‘s nearly 6,000 word, equation-filled entry on the theory of relativity. It’s accompanied by a long webpage of “counterexamples” to Einstein’s great scientific edifice, which merges insights like E=mc2 (part of the special theory of relativity) with his later account of gravitation (the general theory of relativity).
“Relativity has been met with much resistance in the scientific world,” declaresConservapedia. “To date, a Nobel Prize has never been awarded for Relativity.” The site goes on to catalogue the “political aspects of relativity,” charging that some liberals have “extrapolated the theory” to favor their agendas. That includes President Barack Obama, who (it is claimed) helped published an article applying relativity in the legal sphere while attending Harvard Law School in the late 1980s.
“Virtually no one who is taught and believes Relativity continues to read the Bible, a book that outsells New York Times bestsellers by a hundred-fold,” Conservapedia continues. But even that’s not the site’s most staggering claim. In its list of “counterexamples” to relativity, Conservapedia provides 36 alleged cases, including: “The action-at-a-distance by Jesus, described in John 4:46–54, Matthew 15:28, and Matthew 27:51.”
As the Earth’s orbital and axial characteristics changed over thousands of years, increases in corresponding solar incidence at key northern latitudes gradually brought the planet out of the last ice age. This is the picture that has long been the best fit for the observations, and has now been further confirmed by a team from Oregon State.
The prevailing view over the last decade has been that the change in insolation gradually brought about a rise in greenhouse gases, which took a long time to begin percolating out of ocean and soils, and were a critical component of the forcing that brought the planet into the current interglacial. This lag has often been deviously used by denialists in arguing that greenhouse gases have no effect on global temps. The video above tells that story.
One of the difficulties in telling this story, is that climate scientists have been putting together a puzzle using only one piece – the ice core data from a single location in Antarctica. The “lag” issue emerged as an artifact of the paucity of data.
The new research, drawing on 80 proxy records from diverse locations around the planet to show that “temperature is correlated with and generally lags CO2 during the last (that is, the most recent) deglaciation”.
Rising levels of carbon dioxide have for the first time been definitively linked to the global warming that led to the last Ice Age.
A team at Oregon State University reconstructed globally averaged temperature changes during the end of the last Ice Age, in contrast to previous studies, which only compared CO2 levels with local temperatures.
They found that average temperature around the Earth correlated with – and generally lagged behind – rising levels of CO2.
“Carbon dioxide has been suspected as an important factor in ending the last Ice Age, but its exact role has always been unclear because rising temperatures reflected in Antarctic ice cores came before rising levels of CO2, says Jeremy Shakun, a former doctoral student at OSU and now a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard and Columbia.
“But if you reconstruct temperatures on a global scale – and not just examine Antarctic temperatures – it becomes apparent that the CO2 change slightly preceded much of the global warming, and this means the global greenhouse effect had an important role in driving up global temperatures and bringing the planet out of the last Ice Age.”
The theory is that the Earth’s natural wobble affected the amount of sunlight striking the northern hemisphere, melting ice sheets that covered Canada and Europe. Fresh water flowed into the Atlantic Ocean, where it formed a lid over the sinking end of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation.
This put an end to the movement of warm water up from the tropics which had delivered heat to the northern latitudes.
The discovery has implications, of course, for how human-generated carbon dioxide will affect the planet in future.
“CO2 was a big part of bringing the world out of the last Ice Age, and it took about 10,000 years to do it. Now CO2 levels are rising again, but this time an equivalent increase in CO2 has occurred in only about 200 years, and there are clear signs that the planet is already beginning to respond,” says Shakun.
Despite the best efforts of the right wing noise machine, sales of the Chevy Volt, probably the most advanced piece of automotive engineering to come out of Detroit in our generation, are starting to perk. Not clear to what degree Fox News recent 180 on the car (above if you haven’t seen it) might be having on sales, but somebody seems to be getting the message that maybe saving money on gas, being an early adopter of hot new technology, and supporting American workers, might not actually be against conservative “values”.
It may be way too early to write off the Chevrolet Volt despite the fact that General Motors decided to stop making the plug-in hybrid model for five weeks and won’t start up again until April 23.
Exhibit No. 1 in this argument: today’s sales results for March, which showed Volt sales zooming to 2,289 units for the month, a full 277 percent ahead of a year earlier and about the same percentage ahead of poor sales in January of this year.
That result gave Volt by far its best sales month ever and could inject some life back into a proposition that lately has been much more about politics than about the product.
GM didn’t indicate in its mid-morning sales press release why Volt sales picked up so much ground. And in a subsequent conference call with Wall Street analysts and automotive journalists, Alan Batey, vice president of sales for Chevrolet, didn’t shed much light either. He said that of the monthly total, 2,129 were retail sales, and 160 were fleet orders for Volt. He discounted a suggestion that attractive lease offers were behind Volt’s surge, noting that such offers were about the same in March as in January and, actually, as a year ago.
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In any event, there appeared to be some hope that strong Volt sales in March comprised more than just a one-month blip. Early last month, GM announced February sales results for Volt that had recovered to 1,023 units from only about 600 units in January — a month that had been dominated by continued publicity over Volt’s fire-crash issue. But then last month, GM also announced the suspension of Volt production and further soured the waters by blaming media “exaggeration” of the fire risk for Volt’s slump.
While many analysts jumped all over GM’s move as an indicator of corporate resignation that Volt sales would be going into the dumper over the long term, there were some complications. First of all, the move to stop Volt output temporarily involved factors of production balancing that were significant. GM also has begun to ramp up output of the new-generation Chevrolet Malibu at the Detroit-Hamtramck plant where Volt is built, and manufacturing executives wanted to throttle back Volt production somewhat anyway to synchronize it with full-volume manufacture of Malibu. GM is spending $120 million on tooling at the plant to ready it for the new Malibu.
Volt continues to make the most common sense to many consumers of any of the new-era EVs because it carries a gasoline engine, unlike the Nissan Leaf. And now Nissan is adding some “content” to Leaf, presumably at least in part in recognition of the need to make the model a more competitive proposition to Volt.
There have been more tornadoes so far this year compared to the same time period during the extremely active 2011.
According to graphs provided by the Storm Prediction Center, there were 379 preliminary tornado reports through March 25 in 2012. Compared to past years, this is a very busy start to the severe weather and tornado season.
There was a total of 154 tornadoes from January through March of 2011. The three-year average number of tornadoes in January, February and March add up to 124.
The only other recent year where the number of tornadoes surpassed this year was in 2008, when 491 tornadoes touched down through March 25.
The March 2, 2012, Tornado Outbreak was the biggest of 2012 with 132 tornado reports and at least 61 confirmed tornadoes so far.
We are in a very active tornado and storm season.
More on this in an upcoming video. But the thumbnail is, it is too early to tell if there is a trend in tornadoes related to rising global temperature. Total numbers of tornadoes reported has gone up, but new technology and changes in reporting practices are no doubt a large component of the picture.
Improved spotting and meteorological techniques have no doubt raised the numbers of smaller tornadoes that are being detected. Meanwhile, the number of large, destructive tornado reports shows no meaningful trend.
