Here’s some news for people on all sides of the climate change debate: Winters still get cold, often unbearably cold, especially if you live in a place like Crane Lake, Minn., which hit 38 below zero this week.
But no matter how low the temperature dropped in your area today, that doesn’t mean global warming isn’t happening.
So as Americans debate whether a warming planet can still have punishing winters and try to figure out what a “polar vortex” is – with everyone from Rush Limbaugh to the Drudge Report and a few other commentators talking about it – we’d like to add a dose of science to the conversation.
Let’s look at the claims skeptics are making one by one:
1) “Polar vortex” is a concept “created to make you think winter is caused by global warming.”
Yesterday on his radio program and website, Rush Limbaugh called a “hoax” the claim that global warming was causing the cold weather snap, and that the media had invented the term “polar vortex” to explain it all away.
Actually, the term “polar vortex” is not a new one. It’s used by meteorologists to describe a pattern of winds that swirl around the North Pole, as Weather Underground’s Dr. Jeff Masters describes it in a blog post today:
“In the winter, the 24-hour darkness over the snow and ice-covered polar regions allows a huge dome of cold air to form. This cold air increases the difference in temperature between the pole and the Equator, and leads to an intensification of the strong upper-level winds of the jet stream. The strong jet stream winds act to isolate the polar regions from intrusions of warmer air, creating a ‘polar vortex’ of frigid counter-clockwise swirling air over the Arctic.”
For a historical perspective, here’s an article from the August 1950 issue of the scientific journal Tellus, describing a lab experiment that replicated the effects of the polar vortex.
Month: January 2014
Classic Crocks Reposting: Climate Extremes 2011
This past two weeks has been a roller coaster ride of one extreme after another across the US – see video elsewhere on this page – and the rest of the planet.
Although climate deniers were out in force last week with the “it’s cold thars a new ice age a’-comin” canard, what is getting thru to the American people is not that temps are cold, but that the swings have become so extreme and so frequent.
I made this video at end of summer 2011, to illustrate the contrast between “global cooling” climate denial hucksters, and the actual brutal hot conditions that were just a preamble to 2012’s record year.
It’s hard to believe I’ve been doing these things for 5 years now – between the Climate Crocks material, and the newer This is Not Cool series thru the Yale Forum, there are way more than a hundred vids.
I’ll be doing more repostings in coming months, as I am working thru old material in hopes of recutting into a longer Climate Crocks feature. More on this in coming weeks – but if you have any favorites from the Climate Crocks playlist, let me know.
January 2014: From Vortex to Whiplash
Report from NBC’s Today Show on a week of weather extremes, cold to balmy, deepening drought in west, to 22 inch torrent in 24 hours in Palm Beach.
The reality is sinking in.
D. R. Tucker: Resentment Rules the Right
Yesterday I reposted Dana Nuccitelli’s Guardian piece on the puffery of climate denial media. Turns out that kind of touched a nerve in that part of the denio-sphere where bloggers don’t use their real names. They’d like me to link to them, I’m sure.
Writer D. R. Tucker is a veritable research team constantly sending me his finds on the climate front from the far reaches of the web.
Here is his reaction to Nuccitellis’ piece.
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While The Guardian’s Dana Nuccitelli is right to note the consequences of conservative callousness towards the climate, I thought he missed an obvious point about such callousness: the fact there are plenty of permanently ignorant people who actually want to be misinformed and lied to.
Nuccitelli observes:
Another conservative media outlet, the Weekly Standard, has occasionally run articles encouraging the Republican Party to stop denying science and start engaging in constructive debate about the best climate solutions. Unfortunately, those types of constructive articles are the exception rather than the norm. Last week, The Weekly Standard instead ran a puff piece about contrarian climate scientist Richard Lindzen that embodied the fundamental problems in most conservative media coverage of climate change.
Dick Lindzen has long been a favorite of wingnut media; he was a frequent guest on right-wing Boston talk radio in the late-2000s, his razor tongue slicing away at climate activists. However, he wasn’t brought on to those shows just for the heck of it; he was brought on because there were plenty of listeners who wanted to be told that climate change was just a big hoax, that Al Gore was a doofus, and that climate scientists were engaged in the biggest conspiracy since that totally fake moon landing.
Nuccitelli further observes:
This Weekly Standard article exemplifies the problem with today’s conservative media, as they ironically help stick us with government greenhouse gas regulations rather than encouraging a potentially more effective free market approach favored by economists, including conservative ones.
The problem is that, as radio host Sam Seder observed in his January 2 appearance on MSNBC’s “All In with Chris Hayes,” the very point of right-wing media is to shill for various corporations, including the fossil-fuel industry. I would add that another point of right-wing media is to play to the prejudices of those who believe corporations can do no wrong, and that climate scientists can do no right. Why would the Weekly Standard acknowledge scientific reality? What’s in it for them? The pieces they once ran favorable to climate action were just throwaways, scraps tossed to whatever remaining moderate Republican readers they have left.
I no longer buy the argument that if we just communicate facts to right-wingers, they will leap to climate action. Life doesn’t work that way. There are people who, quite frankly, cannot or will not process facts.
CBC: Mike Mann on the Vortex
Mike is getting pretty good at this, not only in his interviews, but his powerpoint is one of the very best out there.
We are developing a cadre of master explainers, and it is beginning to have an impact.
Sting: Someone to Watch Over Me
From the track of the Ridley Scott movie of the same title.
Mimi Rogers at her gorgeous peak.
Opening sequence is where the song plays – here.
Climate whiplash Impacts US, UK as well.
Sara Penryhn Jones, Dark Snow Project’s ace videographer, travelled with us in July to the topographic center of the southern Greenland Ice sheet.
She is now our official UK correspondent. I asked whether she had been impacted by the severe whiplash weather we have been seeing in the US. Indeed, her base at the University of Aberystwyth, Wales, saw huge and destructive waves related to recent storms that impacted North America. She included this picture as part of her message.
• Sir David King, the government’s special envoy on climate change, says Britain needs to spend much more on flood defences. “The important thing to get across is the simple notion that storms and severe weather conditions that we might have expected to occur once in 100 years, say, in the past may now be happening more frequently,” he told BBC Radio 5 Live.
• The Met Office issued a “be aware” yellow warning for wind as gusts of up to 70mph are expected on the west and south-west coast of Britain and the east coast of Northern Ireland today. This will cause “exceptionally high waves”, it predicted.
• The Meteo Group warned of coastal flooding from “turbulent seas and huge waves”
Big Coal’s War on Water
They need the water. Your baby will have to look elsewhere. STFU.
“I believe we’re at a point where we see light at the end of the tunnel,” Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin said. Water samples had shown positive signs that traces of a coal-cleaning chemical were slowly fading from the supply for nine counties, he said.
There was still no timeline on when residents could use their water again, however, forcing residents and businesses to get creative on how they could safely cook, wash their hands and wash their clothes.
WITH so much focus on carbon emitted from the nation’s power plants, another environmental challenge related to electricity generation is sometimes overlooked: the enormous amount of water needed to cool the power-producing equipment
In the United States almost all electric power plants, 90 percent, are thermoelectric plants, which essentially create steam to generate electricity. To cool the plants, power suppliers take 40 percent of the fresh water withdrawn nationally, 136 billion gallons daily, the United States Geological Survey estimates. This matches the amount withdrawn by the agricultural sector and is nearly four times the amount for households.
Battles for water among these competing interests are becoming more common, and power plants are not always winning. A recent analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists revealed many examples from 2006 to 2012 of plants that had temporarily cut back or shut down because local water supplies were too low or too warm to cool the plant efficiently.
In a Friday statement, the group Appalachian Voices made a connection between the ongoing regional water crisis and the coal industry that went beyond just the chemical involved.
“An increasing number of private wells in southwestern and central West Virginia, where the spill occurred, have been contaminated by decades of coal mining and processing,” the group said. “One result has been an ongoing expansion of municipal water systems to rural communities that would otherwise rely on well water.”
At the same time, shrinking revenues and declining investments in public infrastructure have led more and more small communities to contract with private companies like West Virginia American Water to provide drinking water services.
“Driven by profit margins, companies have aggressively consolidated their businesses, leading them to serve ever larger distribution networks from only a handful of treatment plants and drinking water intakes,” Appalachian Voices said. That’s how, the group said, one chemical spill into one river cut off drinking water access to roughly 16 percent of West Virginia’s population.
Inner Mongolia’s rivers are feeding China’s coal industry, turning grasslands into desert. In India, thousands of farmers have protested diverting water to coal- fired power plants, some committing suicide.
The struggle to control the world’s water is intensifying around energy supply. China and India alone plan to build $720 billion of coal-burning plants in two decades, more than twice today’s total power capacity in the U.S., International Energy Agency data show. Water will be boiled away in the new steam turbines to make electricity and flush coal residue at utilities from China Shenhua Energy Co. (1088) to India’s Tata Power Co. (TPWR) that are favoring coal over nuclear because it’s cheaper.
Newsweek Science Writer Looks back on Infamous 1975 “Ice Age” Piece
Above, a Climate Crocks greatest hit, “In the 70s, They Said There’d Be an Ice Age”. With last week’s cold snap in eastern North America, deniers are once again assuming an ice age must be coming.
Below, the Daily Climate looks back at the persistence of that silliness.
Doug Struck in The Daily Climate:
BOSTON – Temperatures have plunged to record lows on the East Coast, and once again Peter Gwynne is being heralded as a journalist ahead of his time. By some.
Gwynne was the science editor of Newsweek 39 years ago when he pulled together some interviews from scientists and wrote a nine-paragraph storyabout how the planet was getting cooler.
Ever since, Gwynne’s “global cooling” story – and a similar Time Magazine piece – have been brandished gleefully by those who say it shows global warming is not happening, or at least that scientists – and often journalists – don’t know what they are talking about.
Fox News loves to cite it. So does Rush Limbaugh. Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., has quoted the story on the Senate floor.
Gwynne, now 72, is a bit chagrinned that from a long career of distinguished science and technology reporting, he is most remembered for this one story.
“I have, in fact, won prizes for science writing,” he said, with just a whiff of annoyance, in an interview this week.
Popping up – again and again
His April 28, 1975 piece has been used by Forbes as evidence of what the magazine called “The Fiction of Climate Science.” It has been set to music on a YouTube video. It has popped up in a slew of finger-wagging blogs and websites dedicated to everything from climate denial to one puzzling circuit of logic entitled “Impeach Obama, McCain and Boehner Today.“
Continue reading “Newsweek Science Writer Looks back on Infamous 1975 “Ice Age” Piece”
Puffing Lindzen
Dana Nuccitelli’s recent piece in The Guardian has generated some comment.
Dana notes that Climate denial warhorse Dick Lindzen has finally retired from MIT, and lets the door hit him on the way out.
Scurrillous and unkind rumors have it that Lindzen’s health is poor, related to his long time smoking habit – which, some say, he always insisted was not nearly so dangerous as all those crazy doctors said.
I’ll have reaction to this piece tomorrow from contributor D. R. Tucker.
Dana Nucictelli in the Guardian:
The conservative media may currently be the single biggest roadblock to addressing the threat posed by human-caused climate change. There is virtually no support for any sort of climate policy among Republicans in US Congress, because even acknowledging the reality of global warming guarantees a wave of attacks by the extreme right-wing of the Republican Party and a probable primary election challenge. This politicization of science has been caused in large part by the conservative media like Fox News, who treat climate change like a punch line.
Another conservative media outlet, The Weekly Standard has occasionally run articles encouraging the Republican Party to stop denying science and start engaging in constructive debate about the best climate solutions. Unfortunately, those types of constructive articles are the exception rather than the norm. Last week, The Weekly Standard instead ran a puff piece about contrarian climate scientist Richard Lindzen that embodied the fundamental problems in most conservative media coverage of climate change.
Richard Lindzen is one of the approximately 3 percent of climate scientists who believe the human influence on global warming is relatively small (though Lindzen is now retired, no longer doing scientific research). More importantly, he’s been wrong about nearly every major climate argument he’s made over the past two decades. Lindzen is arguably the climate scientist who’s been the wrongest, longest.
The Weekly Standard devotes the first page of its piece to establishing how smart Lindzen is – and he certainly is a smart man, but as climate scientist Ray Pierrehumbert put it,
“It’s okay to be wrong, and [Lindzen] is a smart person, but most people don’t really understand that one way of using your intelligence is to spin ever more clever ways of deceiving yourself, ever more clever ways of being wrong. And that’s okay because if you are wrong in an interesting way that advances the science, I think it’s great to be wrong, and he has made a career of being wrong in interesting ways about climate science.”
Make no mistake about it; Lindzen has made a career of being wrong about climate science. Unfortunately, while the Weekly Standard piece goes through Lindzen’s many contrarian climate arguments, it misses the key point that they haven’t withstood scientific scrutiny or the test of time: