Month: May 2015

One more reason to love Lubbock.

Dr. Katharine Hayhoe shows how to answer the first questions most people ask about climate change, for an audience in the Heart of Texas.

Fresh off her quietly dazzlling presentation to the Austin City Council, Hayhoe gives another master class on climate communication.

Description:

Climate change is one of the most pressing issues facing the United States and the world. Over the coming century, it is expected to affect agriculture, energy, health, infrastructure, natural resources, national security and water availability. This assessment, which represents the most up to date and comprehensive overview of climate change impacts on the U.S., provides critical input to planning and policy at the state and national level to reduce the human influence on climate and adapt to future change.

Katharine Hayhoe, Ph.D., is director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech, part of the South-Central Climate Science Center. Her research focuses on developing and applying high-resolution climate projections to evaluate the future impacts of climate change on human society and the natural environment.

Hayhoe has published more than 70 peer-reviewed publications and served as lead author on key reports for the U.S. Global Change Research Program and the National Academy of Sciences. Hayhoe is currently serving as lead author for the 2014 Third U.S. National Climate Assessment.

Hayhoe earned a bachelor’s of science in physics and astronomy from the University of Toronto and an M.S. and Ph.D. in atmospheric science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

Below, Dr. Hayhoe’s “Elevator Pitch” on climate change: Continue reading “What if Climate Change is Real? Katharine Hayhoe TEDX at Texas Tech”

Sample from the learning materials John Cook and his team are presenting on the new Massive Online Open Course – “Making Sense of Climate Denial”.

Much of the video comes from our Historic Interviews conducted in San Francisco this past December at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting.

Description:

Climate change is real, so why the controversy and debate? Learn to make sense of the science and to respond to climate change denial in Denial101x, a MOOC from UQx and edX.

Denial101x isn’t just a climate MOOC; it’s a MOOC about how people think about climate change

Sydney Morning Herald:

The aim to limit global warming to two degrees of pre-industrial levels is “crazy” and “a prescription for disaster”, according to a long-time NASA climate scientist.

The paleo-climate record shows sea-levels were six to eight metres higher than current levels when global temperatures were less than two degrees warmer than they are now, Professor James Hansen, formerly head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and now at Columbia University in New York, said.

“It’s crazy to think that 2 degrees celsius is a safe limit,” Professor Hansen told RN Breakfast on ABC Radio on Tuesday, adding that this would lock in several metres of sea-level rise by the middle of the century,

New satellite data over the past decade indicate that the ice sheets are disintegrating faster than had been modelled by climate scientists.

“The ice sheets are losing mass faster and faster, with a doubling time of about 10 years,” Professor Hansen said. “If that continues, we would get sea-level rises of several metres by 40-50 years.”

“The consequences are almost unthinkable. It would mean that all coastal cities would become dysfunctional,” he told ABC Radio.

Senator James Inhofe for CNN:

If there was ever any doubt that the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan is an energy policy plan, not a carbon reduction plan, all you have to do is look at how they treat nuclear energy.

Nuclear is our largest source of carbon-free energy, generating over 60% of our carbon-free electricity. Surely President Barack Obama’s climate plan, allegedly aimed at reducing the United States’ overall carbon emissions, would revitalize the nuclear industry, lead to increased plant construction and help meet aggressive carbon reduction targets. Well, think again.

James Hansen, the former head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in 2013 that “continued opposition to nuclear power threatens humanity’s ability to avoid dangerous climate change.”

Yet Wednesday, the White House will celebrate Earth Day and promote its work to fend off climate change, while strategically ignoring its largest tool to cut carbon emissions — nuclear energy — as well as the warning of one of the administration’s favorite climate scientists.

Despite the fact that nuclear power is carbon-free, the Obama administration’s energy policy plan is biased against it. This bias is created by how Environmental Protection Agency credits nuclear power in its models of both current emissions and plan implementation. EPA’s modeling is divorced from reality.

First, EPA’s “Base Case for the Proposed Clean Power Plan” purports to depict the current state of the industry as the future would unfold without the Clean Power Plan. This base case assumes no new nuclear construction and indicates the retirement of 96 of our 99 operating nuclear plants by 2050.

E&E Publishing:

Based on the opinion piece, one Australian newspaper wrote that Inhofe, chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, appeared to be “changing his mind” on climate change. The paper noted that the senator cited NASA climatologist James Hansen’s support for nuclear power and backed the energy source as an effective means of cleaning the air.

Continue reading “James Hansen: 2 Degrees is a Recipe for Disaster”

FierceEnergy.com:

Results from an April 2015 survey of financial professionals demonstrate a strong interest among investors in low-carbon and fossil-free portfolios.

The number of investment professionals in the United States offering fossil fuel-free portfolios to investors nearly doubled from 2013 to 2015 — up from 22 percent to 42 percent — amid growing signs of retail and institutional investor interest in such choices, according to a survey by First Affirmative Financial Network —  in which 510 socially responsible investment (SRI) professionals, including advisors, asset managers, institutional investors, and representatives responded.

Fossil fuel divestment has become a high priority for many investors over the past couple of years, and the steady growth in the number of investment professionals offering fossil-fuel-free portfolios is an indication the trend will continue, according to First Affirmative Financial Network.

The survey suggests that the majority of respondents believe 2015 is the right time for investors to assess and even alter their investments in fossil fuels, with a full 73 percent holding this view. Respondents indicate that institutional investors are even more interested in divesting of fossil fuels in 2015 — rising from 49 percent in 2014 to 61 percent in the 2015 survey. Another two-thirds of respondents (67 percent) indicated that retail investors want fossil-free investing choices.

DesmogBlog:

Documents obtained by DeSmogBlog reveal an alarming rate of corrosion to parts of TransCanada’s Keystone 1 pipeline. A mandatory inspection test revealed a section of the pipeline’s wall had corroded 95%, leaving it paper-thin in one area (one-third the thickness of a dime) and dangerously thin in three other places, leading TransCanada to immediately shut it down. The cause of the corrosion is being kept from the public by federal regulators and TransCanada.

“It is highly unusual for a pipeline not yet two years old to experience such deep corrosion issues,” Evan Vokes, a former TransCanada pipeline engineer-turned-whistleblower, told DeSmogBlog. “Something very severe happened that the public needs to know about.”

When TransCanada shut the line down, the company and the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) told the press that the shutdown was due to “possible safety Issues.” And although an engineer from PHMSA was sent to the site where TransCanada was digging up the pipeline in Missouri, no further information has been made available publicly.

Only after DeSmogBlog made a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to PHMSA in August 2013 — which the agency partially responded to this April — was the information revealing the pipeline had deeply corroded in multiple spots exposed. The documents also disclosed a plan to check for a possible spill where the corrosion was detected.

Continue reading “TransCanada Pipeline “95% Worn” after Two Years”

I asked Lauren Kurtz, Attorney for the Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, to give us an update on the latest embarrassment for the crank legal team currently known as E&E Legal, aka American Traditions Institute – the group that was soundly spanked by the Virginia Supreme Court last year, after its attempt to tie up the University of Virginia in pointless wrangling. Turns out judges in Arizona were no more sympathetic to science-denier attacks on academic freedom.

Lauren Kurtz for Columbia Law School Climate Law Blog:

On March 24, after years of litigation, the Arizona Superior Court, Pima County, ruled in favor of the University of Arizona and its efforts to protect climate scientists’ correspondence and prepublication work.[1]  In particular, in Energy & Environment Legal Institute v. Arizona Board of Regents, et al., the court upheld the University’s decision to deny large portions of open records requests by Energy & Environment Legal (known as E&E, and formerly named the American Tradition Institute or ATI), a group that has repeatedly sought to use open records laws to access troves of researchers’ private files.[2]  E&E has been described as having “a core mission of discrediting climate science and dismantling environmental regulations” in part through “filing nuisance suits to disrupt important academic research,” and the group has been linked to the fossil fuel industry, “major conservative players,” and “organizations opposing action on climate change.”[3]

State and federal open records laws promote government transparency by allowing citizens to request administrative records, with exemptions for national security, trade secrets, and similar issues.  But open records laws have also become common tools of those seeking to harass scientists,[4] and open records requests for large swaths of documents (including private emails) have been made on scientists employed by the government or public universities, or who otherwise receive public funding.  The scientists must then review and produce potentially thousands of documents – sometimes in a matter of days, depending on the applicable laws – or marshal a legal response explaining why the requests are invalid.

In the Arizona case, E&E filed multiple requests under Arizona’s open records laws for the files of University of Arizona climate scientists Dr. Malcolm Hughes and Dr. Jonathan Overpeck, seeking thirteen years of documents – including emails dating back to the 90s.  (E&E has also unsuccessfully gone after Dr. Michael Mann’s emails in Virginia,[5] as well as many others.[6])  The University of Arizona produced some documents but denied release of several thousand others.[7]  The University stated the withheld documents contained protected intellectual property, including trade secrets and prepublication data and drafts; it also applied Arizona’s general records exemption that it was “in the best interests of the state” to withhold the documents.[8]  The University argued that releasing the scientists’ files would undermine academic collaboration and chill researcher correspondence – particularly between publicly funded scientists and privately funded ones, who are not at risk of such disclosure.  This in turn would harm the scientific process and reduce the competitiveness of Arizona’s public universities, as researchers would become more reluctant to work at Arizona public universities or with public university scientists.[9]

Continue reading “Arizona Court Slaps Down the Koch’s Anti-Science Team”

“Drinking a cup of tea, I stop the war.”

– Paul Reps

Nice media campaign from Morningstar Farms.

What you do does matter.

Ever notice how stupid people always try to pull you down to their level?

“Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.”
― Mark Twain

One of the most powerful weapons for bludgeoning stupid people who desperately wish to cling to the notion that climate change is all a conspiracy to make them look, well, stupid – is the steady flow of good, well presented and richly visual information from NASA. Polling shows that professional scientists at our government research agencies are consistently rated as the most credible sources of good information on climate science.

Hence the move by Congress to destroy NASA’s Earth Observing capability.

Above: Jane Lubchenco, former NOAA administrator, discusses using satellites to monitor weather patterns. If rushed, go to 2:16 for the punchline.

Dr. Marshall Shepherd for Capitol Weather Gang:

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, one of the few people that has actually seen our home planet from the vantage point of space, issued a statement noting that proposed cuts, “gut our Earth science program and threatens to set back generations worth of progress in better understanding our changing climate, and our ability to prepare for and respond to earthquakes, droughts, and storm events…” This statement is measured and appropriate, but I am writing to amplify this statement.

Continue reading “Dumbing NASA Down”

Verge:

I’ve watched a lot of handsomely paid CEOs get on stages for keynote presentations over the past decade, and none were as good as the one I saw Elon Musk give Thursday night in California as he introduced Tesla’s new battery system. I’m sure many people will disagree — I mean, how can you compete with Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone in 2007 — but ultimately Jobs was selling a better smartphone. Musk is selling a better future.
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Here’s what I loved about Musk’s presentation. First of all, it was short, clocking in at about 20 minutes. Musk didn’t waste anybody’s time. He used that time to present a problem of critical importance (eliminating humanity’s use of fossil fuels), explained how it can be addressed, and offered a plausible solution in the form of a new product — one that’s priced within reach of a lot of people and available to order. Amazingly, all of those things are actually pretty rare to see in one show. Tesla’s presentation was inspiring, and Musk wasn’t selling some fancy sci-fi trinket that has the benefit of Star Trek nostalgia. Dude was selling a battery.