When school children learn about the era when the world could have done something to avoid most of the effects of climate change, but didn’t, Senator James Inhofe will be remembered in much the same way we remember the most vile segregationists of the Old South – as an answer to a multiple choice question, or short paragraph, about global tragedy.
Jake Tapper’s CNN interview above is evidence that journalists are moving away from the “he said, she said” framing on climate change, and challenging science deniers more forcefully. Unfortunately, about 30 years too late to avoid “a compliant,ignorant, incompetent, lazy, bought-off, and cowed media” from becoming an answer on the same test.
Nevertheless, we expect similar headlines to grace the media on a regular basis as Senator Inhofe re-ascends to the chairmanship of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, the nation’s most powerful legislative seat in matters of the global life support system. It is important that those who support and surround Senator Thur.. I mean, Inhofe, be always and forever made to answer for that support, challenged to defend his manifest craziness, and reminded of it whenever they wish to weigh in on matters of substance and fact.
In case you don’t remember Strom Thurmond and his Inhofe-like prominence in the segregationist movement, see below. (racial language alert)
Stossel said that he believed that the “climate changes, always has, always will.” But he argued that a “climate catastrophe” was absurd.
“Every year, fewer people die from the weather because of fossil fuels,” the Fox Business host observed. “They are able to protect themselves. Big difference between ‘climate change is going to kill us,’ and ‘climate changes.’”
“So, you are saying that it would be reasonable to point out the pluses of fossil fuels,” Hasselbeck noted.
“In the short term, lives are being saved if the planet warms,” Stossel agreed. “There is some good evidence man contributes to global warming. But I say, so what? We can deal with that. It’s not a catastrophe. And cold is far worse for hurting people than warmth.”
Stossel added that other absurd things that people believed included ghosts, astrology and UFOs.
“What about wage war?” Hasselbeck wondered, referring to gender inequality in the workplace.
“It’s true, you women earn less than we men do,” Stossel replied. “But there are reasons for it. You, maybe, are more sensible. You have put more emphasis in not working in a horrible place, not working in dangerous places, you take time off to take care of a family. There’s a reason for that.”
“How do these ridiculous things get stuck in our heads?” Doocy asked.
Additionally entertaining and humorous when you know some back story. A number of us unfortunate enough to be on climate denier Marc Morano’s mailing list (I get it so you don’t have to) got the plaintive story about how a crew of deniers, “..one of the few skeptical voices of reason at the conference”, were kicked off the stage to make way for what they called “Kerry’s photo op”.
My spies tell me that the denialist presser was “..a total dud, with only ~5 people in attendance not counting their staff.”
Peak wind gusts reported: 147 mph at 9 a.m. PST on Mt. Lincoln near Truckee, California; 139 mph at 11:20 a.m. PST on the summit of White Mountain, California; 117 mph at 4:39 a.m. PST on Squaw Peak, Oregon; 112 mph at 7 a.m. PST on Slide Mountain near Reno, Nevada.
Top rainfall report: 9.04 inches at Venado in Sonoma County, California.
Seven-foot waves reported on Lake Tahoe.
Peak winds in populated areas include 71 mph in Reno, Nevada, and 63 mph in Walla Walla, Washington.
More than 150,000 customers without power as of 12:30 p.m. PST.
Heavy snow in the Sierra Nevada; chains or snow tires required on Interstate 80 there.
Winds gusts up to 95 mph reported in northeast Oregon.
A monster storm is battering California, Oregon and Washington with extremely high winds and flooding rainfall, and it will eventually bring blizzard conditions to the Sierra Nevada. The National Weather Service in Monterey, California, said earlier this week it’s “expected to be one of the strongest storms in terms of wind and rain intensity” since storms in October 2009 and January 2008. Below are the latest updates on the storm from The Weather Channel, National Weather Service forecast offices and news sources from around the region.
The UN’s Lima COP20 conference stands up very well in its final days against those who doubt or scorn international efforts to reduce climate impacts. It’s not just a lot of hot air. The congruence of international climate experts and decisionmakers is allowing organizations public and private, worldwide, to focus on exploring new solutions and filling critical information gaps.
It looks to this observer as if most everyone here in Lima—and that’s representatives of close to 100% of the nations of the world—realizes that in sharing climate action, we can also share prosperity, at no one’s expense and to everyone’s benefit. Other commenters have described the movement as a new political will. Developing countries are beginning to achieve a higher level of trust in the “rich” nations of the world. The developed countries, which cause the most global pollution, have mostly come through with emissions and financing pledges that seem more just, fair, equitable, and attainable than the vaguer commitments of the past.
Real progress, to be precise. Antagonism dissipates, and accountability and transparency appear to be gaining ground. Here, much credit is due to President Obama and President Xi for breaking the US-China deadlock. Even Australia, a nation that stands to lose in the long run by keeping its coal, oil, and gas (and uranium?) in the ground, and where the party in power resists acknowledging anthropogenic climate change and cuts its once-vaunted environmental programs, has now tithed to the Green Climate Fund. Those who hinder the consensus are finding themselves isolated and kept out of significant political and financial dealing. Some details are still in question, though: amount of pledges by 2030 ($100 billion? $150 billion?), involvement of G7, G20, and other international groups, ability to adapt to current and new challenges, and even the GCF’s value vs. that of higher CO2 cuts.
Secretary of State John Kerry made a call to arms on climate change Thursday, telling developed countries to help lead the fight or get out of the way.
“If you’re a big, developed nation and you’re not helping to lead, then you are part of the problem,” Kerry told delegates from 190 nations gathered in Lima, Peru, for a United Nations climate change conference.
The gathering is meant to build momentum ahead of the final meeting in Paris next year.
“Ecosystems are visibly being destroyed before our eyes,” Kerry said, urging action. “This is not just a fight by Peru, but a fight for Peru.
“This is not just another policy issue measured against an array of global threats we face today — and there are many: terrorism, extremism … and climate change absolutely ranks up there equal with all of them,” Kerry continued.
I’m in the beautiful city of Lima, at the annual United Nations climate talks, or COP 20. Even as negotiators labor over “non-papers” and “elements of draft negotiating text,” the real buzz here is about the incredible opportunity to drive down global emissions by investing in renewable energy and energy efficiency. What makes this a particularly exciting time is that the costs of renewable energy are falling dramatically. The clean energy transition has never been more affordable – or, frankly, more urgently needed.
I’ll be posting my video on the US/China climate agreement on monday, from San Francisco, where I’ll be attending the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting.
It’s an important piece, one I’ll be following up on in coming months, because there are a lot of under-examined issues here.
One is – we assume that US carbon emissions are on the downswing, and to the best of my knowledge, that’s true. However, there are some emissions that we don’t count, because they are poorly understood. These include the gentle seeping of powerful greenhouse gases from thousands of abandoned wells around the country.
One study found that millions of abandoned oil and gas wells across the USA could release a significant quantity of methane into the atmosphere but are not included in total emission counts.
A second study found that only a few active natural gas wells produce the majority of known methane emissions.
Methane is a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping atmospheric heat and thus is a prime contributor to global warming. Methane accounts for nearly 9% of all greenhouse gases emitted as a result of human activity in the USA.
The Environmental Protection Agency said the oil and gas industry is the largest source of methane in the atmosphere in the USA, followed by livestock emissions and landfills.
The Kemper County Energy Facility—which envisions grabbing 65 percent of the CO2 from a 582-megawatt gasification power plant here—is nearing completion, with hundreds of construction workers on-site. It has enough piping to stretch across much of the state, constructed conveyer belts as tall as buildings and an operating coal mine, where massive trucks ferry unearthed lignite coal to a storage dome.
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Southern also is developing another technology—TROC (Transport Oxy-Combustion)—that “is in its early stages” but may be able to capture CO2 at a higher percentage than Kemper’s technology.
Yet Kemper has been plagued by cost overruns, rising from less than $3 billion to $5.5 billion today and putting pressure on Southern’s stock. UBS released a note in May, for instance, downgrading Southern to “sell,” noting ongoing discussions with Mississippi regulators on whether the plant’s spending was prudent.
Extreme weather contributed to cost problem
Electricity rates have increased 18 percent because of Kemper, and the result of the prudency review before the Public Service Commission could force the utility to absorb more of the costs (ClimateWire, April 30). The sale of the CO2 and other byproducts will offset costs for ratepayers.
For critics like Miller, it doesn’t make sense to build a plant that some claim won’t be able to produce power and capture CO2 at planned rates. “Just because it’s built doesn’t mean it’s going to work as planned,” he said, citing an analysis by Element VI Consulting, a group co-founded by a former Sierra Club counsel. Other environmentalists also criticize the idea of reducing emissions from one fossil fuel to release more of another via oil recovery.
For more than 40 years, companies have been drilling for carbon dioxide in southwestern Colorado. Time and geology had conspired to trap an enormous bubble of CO2 that drillers tapped, and a pipeline was built to carry the greenhouse gas all the way to the oil fields of west Texas. When scoured with the CO2, these aged wells gush forth more oil, and much of the CO2 stays permanently trapped in its new home underneath Texas.
More recently, drillers have tapped the Jackson Dome, nearly three miles beneath Jackson, Mississippi, to get at a trapped pocket of CO2 for similar use. It’s called enhanced oil recovery. And now there’s a new source of CO2 coming online in Mississippi — a power plant that burns gasified coal in Kemper County, due to be churning out electricity and captured CO2 by 2015 and sending it via a 60-mile pipeline to oil fields in the southern part of the state.
Regular readers, you may find this a review. But as a growing majority of the population wake up to the true enormity of the climate crisis, there continues to be a need to for background information on how we got here.
An awful lot of people – way more than you’d imagine, think that this whole global warming thing was cooked up by Al Gore in 2006.
Above, historical footage of Mike MacCracken’s speech to Sandia Labs about the then-current science of climate change.
Dr. MacCracken was then leading a Department of Energy study group on the issue.
I thought of this when friend sent an item from the New York Times, from this day in 1985, that sounded disturbingly familiar.
Scientists have warned that carbon dioxide, from the burning of fossil fuels, and other man-made gases, such as methane and chlorofluorocarbons, are accumulating in the atmosphere. These gases trap in the earth’s atmosphere solar infrared radiation that would otherwise escape back into space. Projections based on mathematical models indicate the average temperature at the surface of the earth, starting by the end of this century, could increase by as much as 9 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100.
Because the rise in temperature is expected to be higher at the earth’s poles, another effect of the climate change is expected to be a melting of the icecaps and a rise in the level of the oceans of seven feet or more.
Here, CBS video from 1980:
1985 NYTimes again:
Dr. Carl Sagan of Cornell University’s Center for Radiophysics, said the problem ”transcends our generation.”
”If we don’t do the right thing now, our children and grandchildren will have to face serious global problems,” Dr. Sagan warned. He suggested a number of steps that could be taken now, including more efficient use of fossil fuels and more dependence on solar energy and other alternatives to oil and coal. In theory, he said, ”safe” nuclear fission and nuclear fusion could also be energy sources that did not contribute to the problem.
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Senator Dave Durenberger, the Minnesota Republican who heads the subcommittee, said: ”One of the frustrations of dealing with this issue is that it is virtually beyond the grasp of human imagination. Despite what the best scientific minds in the world tell us, our instinct is to reject them out of hand.”
It was about this time that fossil fuel companies, concerned about possible regulation of carbon release, began to look at models for how to fight back against inconvenient scientific data. The Tobacco industry was, at the time, a model of successful obfuscation and delay on an important public health issue, where the science was undeniable. Continue reading “1985: “Action Urged to Avert Climate Shift””
Prominent scientists, science communicators, and skeptic activists, including Bill Nye “the Science Guy,” physicist Lawrence Krauss, Cosmos co-creator Ann Druyan, and many others are calling on the news media to stop using the word “skeptic” when referring to those who refuse to accept the reality of climate change, and instead refer to them by what they really are: science deniers.
The statement, signed by 48 Fellows of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI), comes as a response to a New York Times article from Nov 10, 2014, “Republicans Vow to Fight EPA and Approve Keystone Pipeline,” which referred to Sen. James Inhofe, who believes climate change to be an elaborate hoax, as “a prominent skeptic of climate change.”
“As scientific skeptics, we are well aware of political efforts to undermine climate science by those who deny reality but do not engage in scientific research or consider evidence that their deeply held opinions are wrong,” says the joint statement. “The most appropriate word to describe the behavior of those individuals is ‘denial.’
“Not all individuals who call themselves climate change skeptics are deniers. But virtually all deniers have falsely branded themselves as skeptics. By perpetrating this misnomer, journalists have granted undeserved credibility to those who reject science and scientific inquiry.”
Signatories to the statement, drafted by physicist and science communicator Mark Boslough, also included Nobel laureate Sir Harold Kroto, philosopher Daniel C. Dennett, science education advocate Eugenie Scott, and David Morrison, Director of the Carl Sagan Center for the Study of Life in the Universe at the SETI Institute, as well as CSI executive director Barry Karr, Skeptical Inquirer editor Kendrick Frazier, and Center for Inquiry president and CEO Ronald A. Lindsay.
CSI promotes scientific inquiry, critical investigation, and the use of reason in examining controversial and extraordinary claims. It is an affiliate of the Center for Inquiry. The complete statement is available at bit.ly/DeniersNotSkeptics.
Public discussion of scientific topics such as global warming is confused by misuse of the term “skeptic.” The Nov 10, 2014, New York Times article “Republicans Vow to Fight EPA and Approve Keystone Pipeline” referred to Sen. James Inhofe as “a prominent skeptic of climate change.” Two days later Scott Horsley of NPR’s Morning Edition called him “one of the leading climate change deniers in Congress.” These are not equivalent statements.
Predictions that were made in the spring projected a possibly huge El Nino, on the scale of the historic 1998 event, which would put global temperatures into overdrive. What we’re getting seems, so far, to be somewhat more of a moderate cycle, but with the potential to make 2015 a record breaking year for global temperatures, whether 2014 sets a new record or not.
Above, good recap of what an El Nino is and why its imporant.
Japan’s weather bureau said on Wednesday that an El Niño weather pattern, which can trigger drought in some parts of the world while causing flooding in others, had emerged during the summer for the first time in five years and was likely to continue into winter.
That marks the first declaration by a major meteorological bureau of the much-feared El Niño phenomenon, which had been widely expected to emerge this year.
El Niño – a warming of sea-surface temperatures in the Pacific – can prompt drought in south-east Asia and Australia and heavy rains in South America, hitting production of food such as rice, wheat and sugar.
The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) forecast last month that the possibility of an El Niño pattern forming this winter was higher than the 50% it had projected in its previous monthly prediction.
But on Wednesday it said that an El Niño had emerged between June and August, continuing into November.
“We can’t tell whether or not El Niño will continue until spring, but we can say that there is a higher chance of it continuing in the winter,” said Ikuo Yoshikawa, a JMA forecaster.
Here, my spring, 2014, interview with Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, on signs of a new El Nino, and the “PDO”, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which is another big driver of global weather and global temperatures.
Leading climate scientist Kevin Trenberth has told reportingclimatescience.com that he believes the pause in global warming may be caused by long term changes in the Pacific Ocean.
Trenberth and colleague John Fasullo argue in a new scientific paper that the massive El Nino Pacific Ocean warming event that occurred in 1997 and 1998 triggered the pause. They say that the El Nino caused a large loss of heat from the deep ocean to the sea surface that resulted in a cooling of the oceans. Since then the deep ocean has been absorbing heat back from the upper ocean and so cooling the atmosphere.
The implication is that the heat being absorbed from the atmosphere by the oceans has offset the underlying and ongoing warming of the atmosphere due to green house gases. As the deep ocean waters have slowly warmed they have taken heat from the upper ocean which has then cooled the atmosphere. This is the cause of the apparent hiatus in global warming that has manifested itself as a halt in the rise in global mean atmospheric temperatures seen in the second half of the 20th century.
Trenberth and Fasullo, from the US National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder Colorado, suggest that long term oscillations in the Pacific Ocean, known as Pacific Decadal Oscillations (or PDOs) drive alternate 20-plus year cycles of upper ocean warming and cooling which also involve heat being exchanged with the atmosphere. The implication of this is that when the Pacific is in a negative phase the upper ocean loses heat and so cools the atmosphere, and that when it is in a positive phase the upper ocean warms and so heats the atmosphere.
“It is not so much that the atmosphere warms up rather that the upper levels of sea get warmer and these interact more directly with the atmosphere,” Trenberth said. So a warmer sea surface leads to a warmer atmosphere. “More heat penetrates to the deep ocean in the negative phase and that is not the case in the positive phase,” he explained.
