Month: December 2015

Marshall Shepherd is former chair of the American Meteorological Society. He directs the Program for Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Georgia.

Marshall Shepherd in Forbes:

A tweet by Dr. Jason Patton at Oklahoma State Universityinspired this question,

How many of you will check “satellite-derived temperatures” today to determine what you are going to wear or whether you should cover your flower bed tonight?

Actually this statement is a bit tongue-and-cheek because satellite
derived estimates have a different objective. A public narrative has emerged that misrepresents how climate scientists record temperature. I spent the first half of my career at NASA  and served as Deputy Project Scientist for the Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) mission now in orbit. I also teach a Satellite Meteorology/Climatology class. Satellite datasets are important complementary datasets, but they are not typically used to validate ground measurements. With GPM, we meticulously established a ground validation program so that we have a robust set of “ground” measurements to tell us if measurements from 350-800 km in space are “accurate.”

At a recent Congressional hearing, Senator Ted Cruz stated that satellite data shows “no significant global warming for the past 18 years.” An article in Mother Jones summarizes an important exchange between the Senator and Admiral David Titley, a decorated Navy admiral and professor at Penn State University. Titley’s response has become an instant classic:

I’m just a simple sailor,but it’s hard for me to see the pause on that chart.

He was pointing to his chart of over 100 years of data. He also pointed out that Cruz was referencing a dataset that began just prior to a relative maximum in temperature associated with the 1998 El Nino.

Continue reading “What’s it Like Outside? Let me Check the Satellite…”

More of Admiral David Titley from this week’s hearing.  Admiral Titley, now retired, is former Chief Oceanographer and Navigator of the US Navy, and a PhD meteorologist.  He is currently teaching at Penn State.

Science:

As per congressional ground rules, the minority Democrats were allowed to invite one witness. The Democrats chose David Titley, a retired rear admiral and former oceanographer for the Navy who is now a professor at Pennsylvania State University, University Park. It’s a cliché to say that one person was the voice of reason in an otherwise chaotic setting. But Titley performed that role, to the point of bailing out Markey by explaining that global temperatures are affected by natural and internal variability, over which people have no control, as well as by human activity. “And I think that the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] and many other bodies agree that the human-caused forcing is very, very significant,” he said.

Cruz has not translated his views into any proposed legislation. That’s not surprising: His icy relations with his Republican colleagues in the Senate, much less with Democrats, have essentially blocked him from the dealmaking needed to implement any of his ideas.

But legislating is not his goal; rather, Cruz prefers a debate in which he can win political points. Yesterday’s hearing fit that mold: He ended it by listing seven “facts” to which Democrats have offered “no effective response.”

Those facts include his belief in the benefits of CO₂ and the additional greenery covering the planet, and his disdain for the staggering amount of evidence on how rising carbon emissions have affected air and ocean temperatures, ocean acidity, the polar regions, inland glaciers, and sea levels. Cruz also brushes aside how those emissions have disrupted what Titley called “the climate stability” that has allowed modern civilization to flourish.

Titley talked about his evolving position on climate science at a Pentagon TED talk in 2010. Continue reading “David Titley: I Was a Climate Skeptic”

Part 2 of my extended interview with Marc Morano, another chapter in my continuing effort to understand the mysterious mirror-dimension of climate science deniers.

UPDATE:

Let me know if this video is working. As I see it, it does show up, but in rushing to pull it together before leaving town, I erred in editing and left a long stretch of black nothing after the desired 3:15  of content. So when he stops talking and goes to black, that’s it. 

I’m traveling, and sitting in an airport right now, without access to the original file. Apologies. 

Wikipedia:

Jumping the shark is an idiom popularized by Jon Hein that was used to describe the moment in the evolution of a television show when it begins a decline in quality, signaled by a particular scene, episode, or aspect of a show in which the writers use some type of gimmick in an attempt to keep viewers’ interest, which is taken as a sign of desperation, and is seen by viewers to be the point at which the show strayed irretrievably from its original formula. The phrase is based on a scene from a fifth-season episode of the sitcom Happy Days when the character Fonzie jumps over a shark while on water-skis.

Daily Climate:

In an email exchange a few months ago for another story, historian Naomi Oreskes counseled me that climate denial would only get more bold and unhinged as the impacts of climate change became more obvious.

With their rhetoric around the Paris climate talks, anti-science firebrands are making their nemesis, Dr. Oreskes, seem prescient.

Attorney Arkady Bukh, guest blogging on Anthony Watts’ go-to website for climate denial, drew a lengthy analogy between advocates of action on climate change and the “People’s Temple” religious cult.

Leader Jim Jones, a former San Francisco street preacher, ordered over 900 of his followers to commit mass suicide in Guyana in 1978.  They complied. Now, 37 years after their tragic demise, they’re being compared to the science community, defense strategists, environmental activists, and a pope.

Continue reading “Has Climate Denial Jumped the Shark?”

Peter Gleick in Huffington Post:

Despite the apparent inability of many of our current policy makers to accept the scientific reality of climate change, the science is not new. Fifty-nine years ago, on October 28, 1956, the New York Times ran a story in their Science in Review section entitled “Warmer climate on the earth may be due to more carbon dioxide in the air.” The full text of that article is reprinted below and is available from the New York Times archive, here.

Waldemar Kaempffert in the New York Times, 10/28/1956:

The general warming of the climate that has occurred in the last 60 years has been variously explained. Among the explanations are fluctuations in the amount of energy received from the sun, changes in the amount of volcanic dust in the atmosphere and variations in the average elevation of the continents.

According to a theory which was held half a century ago, variations in the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide can account for climatic change. The theory was generally dismissed as inadequate. Dr. Gilbert Plass re-examines it in a paper which he publishes in the American Scientist and in which he summarizes conclusions that he reached after a study made with the support of the Office of Naval Research. To him the carbon dioxide theory stands up, though it may take another century of observation and measurement of temperature to confirm it.

Abundant gases

In considering the theory, Dr. Plass reminds us that the most abundant gases in the atmosphere are nitrogen and oxygen. There is also a little argon. These cannot absorb much of the heat radiated by the earth after it has been warmed by the sun. If they could, the climate would be far colder than it is today, because the passage of heat to outer space would not be stopped.

Regular watchers of my videos know that I have pulled out a recorded science presentation from that same year, 1956, that discusses the same Dr. Plass and his work, in detail.

Three other gases could check the radiation of heat. These are carbon dioxide (the gas that fizzes in ginger ale), water vapor and ozone. All these are relatively rare.

To explain what happens, Dr. Plass resorts to the familiar greenhouse analogy. The rays of the sun pass through the transparent glass, but the outgoing energy (heat) from the plants in the greenhouse cannot pass through. Heat is trapped in the greenhouse, with the result that is warmer inside than outside.

The atmosphere acts like the glass of a greenhouse. Solar radiation passes through to the earth readily enough, but the heat radiated by the earth is at least partly held back. That is why the earth’s surface is relatively warm. Carbon dioxide, water vapor and ozone all check radiation of heat. Continue reading “Climate Science, New York Times, 1956”

More record flooding in the UK this week fits the profile of climate enhanced precipitation activity. I profiled the extraordinary storms of 2014 in the video above, which featured an interview of Glaciologist Alun Hubbard, whose house had just been hammered by hurricane force winds.

I’ll be chatting with Alun again in San Francisco next week. Meanwhile, here’s an update on current storms.

Belfast Telegraph:

While scientists will not point to a single event and say it has been caused by global warming, they are clear that human influence on the climate is loading the dice in favour of these extreme events.

Greenhouse gas emissions from power generation, industry, transport, deforestation and agriculture are pushing up global temperatures.

Warmer temperatures mean the atmosphere can hold more water, with humidity increasing around 5% for every 1C rise, which in turn prompts more intense rainfall and storms.

Heavy rainfall can cause flash flooding, where rain falls too quickly to soak into the ground – especially if it is already saturated from previous storms, or baked hard by previously dry conditions as in the 2007 summer floods – and causes floods on road and land surfaces.

Continue reading “UK Again in Climate Crosshairs”

Closest thing to David Titley getting angry during the Ted Cruz hearing the other day.

Is there anyone else that could withstand Mr Cruz insufferable demeanor as well as this?

Ars Technica:

After Senator Cruz pushed Titley to answer a question about the satellite records, which he claimed “the global warming alarmists don’t want to talk about,” Titley let loose. “Let’s talk about the satellite measurements,” Titley said. “Let’s talk about orbital decay. Let’s talk about overlapping satellite records. Let’s talk about stratospheric temperature contamination. I think Dr. Christy and Dr. [Roy] Spencer, when they’ve put this out, they have been wrong, I think, at least four consecutive times. Each time the data record has had to be adjusted upward. There have been several sign errors. So, with all due respect, sir, I don’t know which data, exactly, your staff has, whether it’s the first or second or third or fourth correction to Dr. Christy’s data. We used to have a negative trend, and then we had no trend, and now we begrudgingly have an upward trend.”

 

Insightful 2013 post by John Abraham is relevant this week.

John Abraham in the Guardian:

By now, we must all be aware that it no longer takes hard work and talent to become a celebrity. The media (and public) are drawn to loud and flamboyant caricatures, not careful and studious characters. To most this means not much more than the annoyance of hearing about the latest celebrity “scandal.” But for all of us here on planet Earth, it has very real consequences.

New research clarifies exactly what those consequences are: Celebrities in scientists’ lab coats have played a role in the public discourse on climate change that far outweighs their scientific credibility.

In the journal Celebrity Studies, Dr. Maxwell Boykoff and Shawn Olson trace the history of climate contrarians back to the 1980s and discuss their potential motivations and strategies. The study identifies these contrarians as a “keystone species;” climate contrarians are more influential than their scant numbers and limited expertise would suggest, and exert an outsized media impact. According to the authors, it’s these keystone species that hold the ecosystem of climate denial together. Since, as we all know, 97% of climate scientists affirm the reality of human-caused climate change, what is it that motivates this handful of contrarians who make no small effort to attract so much more than 3% of the media’s attention?

The 1960s and 1970s brought a wave of environmentalism through America. By the 1980s, conservatives were ready for their own counter-movement. Out of the earlier “Sagebrush Rebellion” and a desire to stem conservation efforts in the American west, the “Wise Use” movement gained prominence in 1988. The authors explain how members of trade organizations and off-roaders came together at a Christian-right conference to create “a unified platform aimed to ‘destroy environmentalism.’ ”

This movement, the authors argue, marked the creation of the specious dichotomy of environment versus economy as well as an early example of astroturfing — when you present an organization funded and defined by corporate interests as supposedly grassroots. The “grassroots” Wise-Use movement counted none other than President of the United States Ronald Reagan among its supporters.

The Wise Use movement claimed to fight distant urban elite environmentalists on behalf of everyday rural residents. In reality, the movement itself was closely tied to and funded by urban elites and their corporations, and the movement served the business interests of these institutions. Coalescing under the auspices of free-market ideology, Wise Use argued that environmental regulations threatened the profits of companies, and insisted the residents of the environment being regulated had a right to speak out.

Continue reading “Look At Me! I’m an Expert!”

A casual observer of Ted Cruz’ bizarre freak show of a hearing the other day might have assumed that one of the witnesses, Mark Steyn,  was merely another petulant, insufferable, radio schlockjock Rush Limbaugh Wannabee, ever-so-sure-the-scientists-are-trying-to-fool-him conspiracy nut.

But they would have missed Mr Steyn’s sensitive groovy side. Turns out he’s a really swingin’ cat, in a far right wing hater kind of way. No, I didn’t buy any of his music, merely recorded some mercifully short snips from the Amazon page where he peddles this stuff.

If you loved that, you’ll go gaga for Steyn’s Christmas album..below.

Continue reading “Ted Cruz’ Groovy Climate Expert”

Politico:

Megyn Kelly did not hold back during the premiere of her new show, “The Kelly File,” Monday on Fox News, bluntly kicking off with her first guest Sen. Ted Cruz.

“What’s it like to be the most hated man in America?” Kelly asked the Texas senator.

From the epic compendium of climate denial canards in his opening, to his choice of one of the goofiest panels of hacks and right wing ideologues imaginable, yesterday’s hearing before Ted Cruz’ Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness was an exercise in hallucinatory disconnect from reality, given the unfolding dimensions of not only of a planetary disaster as we head into possibly a third year of record warmth, but a political disaster for climate deniers, as an expanding majority of Americans are now calling for real action on climate science – action that Senator Cruz and his party oppose more fiercely with each passing day.

One senior scientist tells me: “to me, this hearing was a love note to the Koch Brothers from Ted Cruz.
it’s his way of asking them if they would consider going steady w/ him…”

Media Matters:

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), the climate science-denying presidential candidate who chairs the Senate Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness, convened a December 8 hearing that purported to answer whether the “debate over the magnitude of human impact on earth’s climate” is being driven by “data or dogma.” One of Cruz’s star witnesses is frequent Rush Limbaugh Show guest host Mark Steyn, whose extreme attacks on a climate scientist appear to be the main reason he was invited to participate.

The most obvious explanation for Steyn’s appearance would seem to be that Cruz couldn’t find enough scientists who oppose the 97 percent of climate scientists that say human activities are causing climate change, so he had to turn to a talk radio shock jock instead. But the fact that Steyn is “not a scientist” only scratches the surface of why he is unqualified to testify on global warming.

Steyn has a long history of making extreme and scientifically illiterate claims that could give Cruz a run for his money.  For instance, Steyn alleged in 2009 that “[t]here has been no global warming this century.” In 2010, he declared that “environmentalism is fundamentally anti-human.” Most recently, Steyn was seen proclaiming that Democratic presidential candidate and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ remarks describing the link between climate change and terrorism were “insane,” and even imagining terrorists “sawing Bernie Sanders’ head off” while Sanders worries about “an emissions trading scheme.” According to Science Blogs’ Greg Laden, Steyn also “recently self published a book made up, apparently, of cherry picked quotes and related material in an effort to discredit top climate scientists.”

Also included on the panel Ned Flanders look-alike and famous-for-being-serially-wrong  John Christy, and William Happer, who, in his spare time supports the tobacco industry in selling addictive poison to children.

Check Happer’s epic pre-hearing freak out below.

Continue reading “Most Hated Senator Shows Why in Denial Circus Hearing”