Month: January 2015

Michelle Obama’s guest for the State of the Union address will be:

a) female

b) Hispanic

c) Climate Scientist

d) all of the above

I’ve noted before that demographically important Hispanics are much more concerned about climate change than white voters.

The Hill:

A climate change and sea-level rise researcher will sit with first lady Michelle Obama during Tuesday night’s State of the Union address.

Nicole Hernandez Hammer’s research focuses on “how cities and regions most vulnerable to the effects of climate change also have large concentrations of Hispanics,” the White House said Monday.

Hammer, an immigrant from Guatemala, lives in southeast Florida, where much of her research is focused.

She also leads efforts in her area for the Union of Concerned Scientists and Moms Clean Air Force. She is among 21 guests planning to attend President Obama’s speech with the first lady.

Outreach to minorities has been a priority for Obama and his administration as part of his second-term push to fight climate change.

Officials have also put an emphasis on sea-level rise, which scientists believe to be an inevitable consequence of human-induced climate change.

WhiteHouse.gov:

As a sea-level researcher, Nicole Hernandez Hammer has studied how the cities and regions most vulnerable to the effects of climate change and sea-level rise also have large Hispanic populations — something she learned firsthand growing up in South Florida

A Guatemalan immigrant with Cuban heritage, today Nicole works to mobilize the Latino community to better understand and address climate change’s disproportionate effects on the health of Hispanics.

Most recently, that means working with Moms Clean Air Force to increase public awareness of climate change on children’s health specifically.

Nicole lives in Southeast Florida with her husband and her son.

Part of the work I do involves giving sea-level rise tours of South Florida to reporters, politicians, and other scientists. As important as it is to show people what is at risk, the truth is, I really do not enjoy giving these tours. I dislike pointing out areas that now regularly flood, and will be underwater in my lifetime. To me, it’s not just any place — it’s my home.

Continue reading “Climate Researcher to Sit with First Lady During State of the Union”

All weekend I’ve been watching the media coverage of NASA and NOAA’s announcement, Friday, that 2014 set a new record for global temperatures.
What we’re seeing is the mainstream media, in the US, and, I think, every country now, coming around to where they should have been 25 years ago – firmly on board with the science. Still a few examples of false balance, but overall, the coverage, especially on television networks, overwhelmingly on the factual side.

Meanwhile, since I’m on the mailing list of some of the most obnoxious climate troll sites, I’ve been getting a stream of panicky “Not so fast..” items from the science denial side.  I won’t do them the favor of a link.
The dynamics of the public dialogue are now swinging firmly against them – in that, to make their point (“warming is not a threat”), they have to repeat what is now the media framing, ie global warming is happening and getting worse, thereby reinforcing that meme. It’s the same bind they’ve been in with the “97 percent of experts agree” meme, –  by trying to refute it, they end up repeating it more and more – and what we’ve learned in the climate communication biz over the last decade, is that repeating the opposing talking point simply reinforces it further.

Tom Zeller in Forbes:

The revelation late last week that global average temperatures set a new record in 2014 seemed to underscore a political and cultural shift on climate change that, by many accounts, was already well underway. From the stock markets and Wall Street to the boardrooms of Big Oil — and even the living rooms of Republican voters — the era of reflexive skepticism and denial of basic climate science appears to be coming to a close.

That won’t likely mean an end to partisan bickering, of course. But as the adage goes, the first step to solving a problem is admitting that you have one.

That’s precisely what the American Petroleum Institute did when it released its annual State of American Energy Report two weeks ago. Amid its bullish assessment of the nation’s ongoing boom in shale oil and gas, the leading fossil fuel trade group clearly and unequivocally acknowledged the threat of global warming, and highlighted — at some length — the steady rise of solar power as an encouraging sign.

“Few things threaten America’s future prosperity more than climate change,” the report declared. “But there is growing hope: Every 2.5 minutes of every single day, the U.S. solar industry is helping to fight this battle by flipping the switch on another completed solar project.” The report goes on to note that the solar power sector has shaved installation costs and enjoyed over 40 percent growth over the last year:

Simply put, when looking at America’s energy future, solar can be a real game changer, providing more and more homes, businesses, schools and government entities across the United States with clean, reliable and affordable electricity while also helping states to meet proposed new obligations under … the Clean Air Act.

Zeller notes that the same publication also contains the mandatory fossil industry talking points about new EPA coal regs, yadda yadda – and everyone knows that the Petroleum Industry has been behind the most toxic and damaging anti-science propaganda over the decades.
But the fact remains, that, for anyone that wishes to be viewed as sentient, much less, serious – on energy issues – an acknowledgement of the challenge of climate, and the onrush of renewable energy technology, is no longer optional.

Continue reading “With New Temp Record – Climate Change Becoming Conventional Wisdom. Deniers Freak Out, Backpedal”

As our series of interviews at last month’s American Geophysical Fall Meeting unfolded, I knew that what we were recording was something more than just news, but rather a historically significant documentation of a watershed transition – the scientific community’s sense of growing urgency, dread, and dire warning, about climate shifts, at a moment when the hinge of history is swinging to a broad recognition by the global populace.
I’m not going to let this material sit on my Hard drive.
Tomorrow, I’ll post my first This is Not Cool video on the event, for Yale Climate Connections, and you’ll see that here as well.

In addition, since we conducted long interviews, there is far more material than can be contained in short 5 or 10 minute collages – I’ll be posting as well minimally edited versions of the conversations – which include some of the most significant global players in the investigation, from various fields.  This is going to extend over months.

Today, I’m starting with Part one of our chat with Eric Rignot of NASA – one of the most highly credible, sober, and respected voices in the glaciological community.  I had done a quick interview with Rignot on the AGU floor in 2012, and noted that he was cautious, conservative, not willing to make categorical statements.
In last month’s interview, the there was a much greater sense of urgency.

I’ll follow with the additional portions of the current interview over the coming week.

Below, significant video following Rignot’s most recent paper from spring of 2014, generally known as the “holy shit moment” of Antarctic ice.

Continue reading “A New Series: The AGU Interviews”

More supercomputing power to crunch more data, to better forecast in a changing climate.
Also, see below.

Most folks are aware that the much anticipated “Avengers 2” movie will feature a renegade artificial intelligence as the main villain.  After seeing the trailer above, I’m more interested in seeing “Ex Machina” , which, stripped of the super hero imaginary quality, might be a little more unsettling.   The second “Age of Ultron” trailer, if you have not seen it, is below.

Elon Musk is only one of the notable technology experts to express deep concerns about Artificial Intelligence – the impact of thinking machines. Now a group of well known science and tech professionals, including Musk and Physicist Stephen Hawking,  have signed a letter expressing the need for extreme caution in the development of machine intelligence.

Huffington Post:

Dozens of scientists and innovators including Stephen Hawking and executives from Google, Amazon and Space X have made a pre-emptive call for artificial intelligence research to specifically avoid causing the end of the world.

The letter states that studies into advanced AI must focus on positive aims, and put restrictions on areas that might lead down a dark path.

“Our AI systems must do what we want them to do,” the letter warns.

“Because of the great potential of AI, it is important to research how to reap its benefits while avoiding potential pitfalls.”

It’s quite beside the point whether machines develop so as to “think like humans”, or “become self aware”.
What’s almost more frightening are the possible development of machines that demonstrate some kind of brute force intelligence, and may interact, or partner with, human beings who have less-than-enlightened intentions.

Old school sci-fi comics have riffed on this theme from early on.

Scientists letter from the Future of Life Institute:

Artificial intelligence (AI) research has explored a variety of problems and approaches since its inception, but for the last 20 years or so has been focused on the problems surrounding the construction of intelligent agents – systems that perceive and act in some environment. In this context, “intelligence” is related to statistical and economic notions of rationality – colloquially, the ability to make good decisions, plans, or inferences. The adoption of probabilistic and decision-theoretic representations and statistical learning methods has led to a large degree of integration and cross-fertilization among AI, machine learning, statistics, control theory, neuroscience, and other fields. The establishment of shared theoretical frameworks, combined with the availability of data and processing power, has yielded remarkable successes in various component tasks such as speech recognition, image classification, autonomous vehicles, machine translation, legged locomotion, and question-answering systems.

As capabilities in these areas and others cross the threshold from laboratory research to economically valuable technologies, a virtuous cycle takes hold whereby even small improvements in performance are worth large sums of money, prompting greater investments in research. There is now a broad consensus that AI research is progressing steadily, and that its impact on society is likely to increase. The potential benefits are huge, since everything that civilization has to offer is a product of human intelligence; we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools AI may provide, but the eradication of disease and poverty are not unfathomable. Because of the great potential of AI, it is important to research how to reap its benefits while avoiding potential pitfalls. Continue reading “AI Fi: Artificial Intelligence in the Movies”

Washington Post:

It is official: According to both NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the year 2014 was the hottest ever measured, based on records going back to the year 1880.

It now surpasses all past scorchers, including 1998, 2005, and 2010. Indeed, except for 1998, says NASA, the ten hottest years recorded have all occurred since the year 2000.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about the new record is that it occurred even though 2014 was not an El Niño year, of the sort that usually power the already up-trending global average temperature to new highs.

“This is the first year since 1997 that the record warmest year was not an El Niño year at the beginning of the year, because the last three have been,” says Gavin Schmidt, who directs NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, which collaborated on the analysis.

 

Oceanographer Stefan Rahmstorf told the New York Times:

“Obviously, a single year, even if it is a record, cannot tell us much about climate trends,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, head of earth system analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “However, the fact that the warmest years on record are 2014, 2010 and 2005 clearly indicates that global warming has not ‘stopped in 1998,’ as some like to falsely claim.”

Scientists have been telling us for years that the whole “pause” mythology is based on cherry picked measurements and shallow understanding.

Dana Nuccitelli in the Guardian:

This is all happening during a time when we’re constantly being bombarded with inaccurate claims of a global warming “pause.” These mistaken claims stem from the fact that the rate of global surface warming has slowed a bit over the past 15 years, in large part because we’ve seen more La Niña events and fewer El Niño events during that time, and also due to heightened volcanic activity.

In fact, at any point over the past five decades we can find a period during which global surface warming “paused.” Yet each such period was hotter than the last. That’s because each is just a temporary effect caused by a period with a predominance of La Niña events and other short-term cooling temperature influences. As this figure shows (click here for an larger version), underneath the short-term noise, human-caused global warming continues unabated.

Continue reading “Reality Closes in on Climate Deniers – 2014 Hottest Year”

Here’s one reason why the fossil fuel lobby wants to stifle science in US government agencies.  Truth is rarely welcome in the halls of power, and this year less than most. In particular, inconvenient truths about the long term effects of adding carbon to the atmosphere – such as the loss of arctic sea ice, one of the most telling and potentially catastrophic effects of climate change. See above.

NASA:

The most visible change in the Arctic region in recent years has been the rapid decline of the perennial ice cover. The perennial ice is the portion of the sea ice floating on the surface of the ocean that survives the summer (as opposed to seasonal ice, which is the ice around the Arctic basin’s periphery that melts during the summer, resulting in what scientists call the annual “Arctic minimum”). This ice that spans multiple years represents the thickest component of the sea ice cover.

This visualization shows the perennial Arctic sea ice from 1979 to 2014. A graph overlay shows the area’s size measured in million square kilometers for each year.

Now there is concern that, with a shift in the balance of power in the Senate, famously anti-science Senator Ted Cruz will be taking control of a key subcommittee that controls NASA funding.

Huffington Post:

“One of the problems with the Obama administration is that it has degraded NASA. It has degraded for space exploration, degraded manned exploration because the Obama administration has undervalued that and shifted to funding other priorities,” Cruz said in a statement. “It shifted the funding to global warming pursuits rather than carry out NASA’s core mission.”

The agency has conducted research on climate change, recently kicking off five projects to study how the earth’s atmosphere affects global warming.

Meanwhile, Cruz has claimed there isn’t enough evidence to prove global warming is occurring, telling CNN he was skeptical of the “so-called scientific theory.”

“Contrary to all the theories that — that they are expounding, there should have been warming over the last 15 years. It hasn’t happened,” Cruz said in February of 2014.

It’s long been the dream of so called conservative lawmakers to hamstring dedicated scientists studying the life support system of the planet.

It’s always couched in heroic rhetoric about NASA’s “original mission” of space exploration, competing with the Roosskies, etc. Continue reading “Will an Anti Science Congress Bind and Gag NASA?”

The threats to science don’t stop at government agencies.  Across the country, at the state level, fossil fuel interests, as well as fearful and ignorant local officials, have engaged in actions to degrade science programs.

One of the organizations that has historically pushed back against the anti-science lobby has been the National Center for Science Education, helmed until last year by Anthropologist Eugenie Scott. Dr. Scott sat for an interview last month (above) in San Francisco, and described how her organization moved from a focus on evolution, to defending Climate science as well.

National Journal:

January 14, 2015 –  The West Virginia Board of Education on Wednesday voted to reject a set of public-education standards that cast doubt on the existence of man-made climate change.

The decision arrives amid vocal criticism from science and education activists who have denounced alterations to the standards intended to spark debate over the human role in global warming.

Last month, the state Board of Education voted to adopt the Next Generation Science Standards, an academic framework that calls on teachers to teach man-made climate change in public-school classrooms.

The Next Generation standards instructed students:

Ask questions to clarify evidence of the factors that have caused the rise in global temperatures over the past century.

At the request of a board member who does not consider global warming settled science, however, the board altered the standards prior to their final adoption to cast doubt on the existence of global warming and the role of human activity in changing the planet’s climate.

This is how the earlier excerpt was altered:

Ask questions to clarify evidence of the factors that have caused the rise and fall in global temperatures over the past century.

But on Wednesday, the board reversed itself once again, returning to the original, unedited standards and reopening them to public comment. The new West Virginia science standards will take effect in the state during the 2016-17 academic year. A final vote to adopt the standards is slated for March.

Make no mistake, anti-science attacks do not originate at the grass roots, they are carefully cultivated by a network of PR firms and think tanks devoted to serving far right wing causes and shadowy funders.  The Heartland Institute is one such organization, which is quietly allying itself with young earth creationists to rewrite state regulations and hobble science teachers across the country.

Washington Post:

The debate in West Virginia follows Wyoming’s decision last spring to reject the Next Generation Science Standards in part because of their approach to climate change. Coal is an important industry in both states.

Continue reading “Classroom Climate Science Weathers Latest Attack from Far Right”

A common tactic of the anti-renewable crowd is to spread rumors that renewable energy will depress home values.  Real world experience says, “Not so.”

New study says solar enhances home values.

Phys Org:

A multi-institutional research team of scientists led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkley Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), in partnership with Sandia National Laboratories, universities, and appraisers found that home buyers consistently have been willing to pay more for homes with host-owned solar photovoltaic (PV) energy systems —averaging about $4 per watt of PV installed—across various states, housing and PV markets, and home types. This equates to a premium of about $15,000 for a typical PV system. The team analyzed almost 22,000 sales of homes, almost 4,000 of which contained PV systems in eight states from 1999 to 2013—producing the most authoritative estimates to date of price premiums for U.S. homes with PV systems.

“Previous studies on PV home premiums have been limited in size and scope,” says Ben Hoen, the lead author of the new report. “We more than doubled the number of PV home sales analyzed, examined a number of states outside of California, and captured the market during the recent housing boom, bust, and recovery.”

This last worry – about property value loss — appears unfounded, according to a study released (January 2014) by researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and the University of Connecticut. After analyzing more than 122,000 home sales in urban areas near 26 wind farms in Massachusetts, the researchers concluded that there was no statistical evidence that wind farms impact the value of nearby urban properties.

Interestingly, researchers found that in some cases, the announcement of a new wind farm may have contributed to a drop in some home prices. But after construction was completed, home prices appeared to be unaffected, according to the study.

That’s good news for the wind industry.

U.S. wind power capacity is likely to grow by 9% in 2014 to about 66,000 megawatts, and jump an additional 15% to 75,000 megawatts by the end of 2015, according to a Tuesday forecast by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Wind farms aside, the Lawrence Berkeley study found that Massachusetts home prices did appear to suffer if a property was near a landfill, power transmission line, highway or prison. Conversely, home values tended to be higher for properties near a beach or park, according to one of the study’s less-surprising findings.

Michigan Land Use Institute:

(Wind Energy Consultant Larry) Flowers also points to the evidence that wind power development has little, if any, effect on property values.

“I remember, 10 years ago, in Ludington, Mich., there was a proposal for a wind farm, and there were fears about its effect on local property values,” he recalled. “We said there would be no significant impact, but we had no data, only our own experience.

“But now there’s data from all around the nation and the world,” he said. “With 70,000 megawatts of wind power installed in the U.S., we have a lot of data. Researchers looked at housing transactions, using sophisticated measures to exclude factors that muddle the findings—changing economies, demographics, industrial versus rural areas. The same answer always comes out: There is no significant effect on property values. But it’s hard to tell people who haven’t experienced it themselves.”