Month: February 2020

Calling Out a Denier-for-Hire

A small Idaho paper had hilarious editorial last week – calling out traveling climate-denier-for-hire from the Heartland Institute.

A small Idaho paper had hilarious editorial last week – calling out traveling climate-denier-for-hire from the Heartland Institute.

At bottom, video from my visit to the Heartland’s annual climate denial-palooka in 2012.

MagicValley.com (Twin Falls, ID):

A presentation by James Taylor of the Heartland Institute at the House Resources and Conservation Committee on Thursday should be an embarrassment to every lawmaker who takes his organization seriously.

Taylor’s two key messages were: Climate change isn’t happening in Idaho, and climate change is good for Idaho. While the two messages contradict one another, they both have the virtue of supporting inaction on climate change. Because for Taylor the science must fit the desired policy, not the other way around.

Taylor is living proof of Upton Sinclair’s saying: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Taylor’s salary depends on the donations to the Heartland Institute, whose bread and butter is raising confusion and doubt about climate science. He isn’t a climate scientist. He’s a lawyer. So, lacking scientific expertise, Taylor became a professional prevaricator.

You don’t have to dig deep into Taylor’s report to find errors. Quite literally, it’s lies from the start.

In the very first sentence, he writes that on March 6, 2019, the Legislature created an interim committee to study the effects of climate change in Idaho. There is no such committee.

The second sentence is equally bumbling and false: “Following the hearing, Idaho Gov. Brad Little asserted climate change ‘is real’ and ‘a big deal,’” he wrote, citing a Jan. 16, 2019, report. True, Gov. Little has had many accomplishments in office, but to our knowledge, he has not yet mastered time travel or altered the calendar to put March before January.

When the first two sentences of the executive summary are both laughable, it’s reasonable to assume there are more chuckles to follow. And Taylor’s presentation did not disappoint.

Taylor told the committee he had concrete data on topics like “measurable impacts in terms of Iowa agriculture” and “a breakdown of where electricity is generated in Iowa.”

He can be forgiven the slip-up. When grifting keeps you on the road all the time, it’s easy to forget where you are.

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How Scientists Deal with Ecological Grief

Sleeper issue of the century might be the overwhelming emotional shock as whole populations grasp the scale of changes that are already locked in as climate change gathers momentum.

The heart ripping images of scorched animals in the Australian bush fires are yet the latest reminder.

I have had several discussions with Jeffrey Kiehl on this topic. Dr. Keihl is a well known paleo-climatologist who, in his public outreach on climate, found himself at a loss to guide audiences who were having difficulty coping with the information presented to them.
More on this coming soon, but I did do a piece with Dr. Kiehl and Dr. Sarah Myhre reacting to this problem. (above)

Guardian:

Melting glaciers, coral reef death, wildlife disappearance, landscape alteration, climate change: our environment is transforming rapidly, and many of us are experiencing a sense of profound loss. Now, the scientists whose work it is to monitor and document this extraordinary change are beginning to articulate the emotional tsunami sweeping over the field, which they’re naming “ecological grief”. Researchers are starting to form support groups online and at institutions, looking for spaces to share their feelings. I talked to some of those affected.

Steve Simpson

Professor of marine biology and global change at the University of Exeter

What changes have you personally seen that have affected you?
I studied marine biology 20 years ago, when it was a celebration of natural history. In the period of my career, it’s changed in front of our eyes. Every year, we went to Lizard Island, Australia, to a protected marine reserve in the Great Barrier Reef, and that was our reference for what coral reefs should be like: dazzling places, full of life. A quarter of all marine species live on coral reefs, which only make up about 0.1% of the ocean surface. They’re rainforests of the sea.

When we went back to the Great Barrier Reef after a major bleaching event in 2006, it had turned into a graveyard. It looked weird, because the fish were still brightly coloured, like someone had gone in and painted them on an otherwise black-and-white photograph. It was completely devastating to see individual corals that we knew and loved and had spent so long studying, now dead.

Continue reading “How Scientists Deal with Ecological Grief”

Australian Climate Denier: “I’m Not Relying on Evidence”

Less than cogent argument from Australian climate denier on stage with Penn State’s Michael Mann.

Basically, “I don’t believe the science, but I can’t tell you why.”

UPDATE:

Entering the Age of H2?

Better technology for creating renewable hydrogen is yet another nail in fossil gas’s coffin.

Cleantechnica:

Just a few years ago, a chorus of hee-haws would be expected to erupt whenever the topic turned to the hydrogen economy of the sparkling green future. Well, money talks. The US Department of Energy has been plowing research dollars into hydrogen and fuel cell technology, and the latest development is all about leveraging wind and solar energy to bring the cost of renewable hydrogen down, down, down.

The primary source of hydrogen today is natural gas, and the market is huge. The US produces 10 million tons of hydrogen annually under the current scheme of things. New applications — including transportation and energy storage among others — could bump up demand even more in the coming years.

With that in mind, check out the Energy Department’s new $64 million round of funding for projects related to the H2@Scale initiative of the Fuel Cell Technologies Office.

The funding is devoted to a soup-to-nuts effort to reduce the cost of hydrogen all through the supply chain. It also involves shifting the hydrogen field out of its near-total dependence on natural gas.

“While much of the hydrogen used in the United States today comes from low‐cost natural gas, adding other production sources can make industries more resilient to potential price volatility,” explains FCTO.

That statement may sound somewhat mild, but it amounts to a stab in the heart of the US fossil gas industry.

Gas stakeholders are already reeling under threat from the building electrification movement along with signs that their grip on the power generation sector is loosening. The ground is beginning to shake under the market for fossil-sourced plastics and other chemicals as well.

With that in mind, the new round of funding puts a priority on slashing the cost of electrolyzers, the devices that deploy an electrical current to “split” hydrogen from water.

The use of water as a source doesn’t necessarily lead to renewable hydrogen. Electrolyzers are source neutral, so the electricity could come from fossil fuels or nuclear energy.

Now that the cost of renewable energy has fallen off a cliff, FCTO gives the edge to wind and solar over other fuels — but only if the cost of electrolyzers can also come down.

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Republican Message on Climate: “Let’s Let People Think we have a Message on Climate”

Daily Kos:

“One of the grim realities of climate politics today is that the elites bankrolling climate-denier politicians have made a simple calculation,” Karpf explains. “They aren’t betting that the scientific consensus is wrong. They are betting that the impacts of climate change won’t fall directly on them. They’ll either die before the [collapse] begins or their wealth will help shield them from its impacts.”

Fortunately, there are no more climate-denier politicians, right? Republicans are now, according to some credulous reporting, all on board with climate change and preparing to roll out solutions, right?

Perhaps not, according to…other Republicans. Forgive our harping on this topic again, but yesterday the Washington Examiner’s Josh Seigel ran a story about how “Republicans have convinced their most conservative members to support a forthcoming plan for the federal government to address climate change.”

They’ve done so, Seigl reports, by crafting a plan that doesn’t actually address climate change by reducing fossil fuel use, but merely sounds like it would while in fact promoting fossil fuels. And it’s not us saying that, it’s them. As Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) said, “you can call it political calculus or representing the people you represent,” but whatever you call it, “we do need a message for them” – referring to those who are concerned about climate change.

Note that he did not say we need a plan, or policy, or actual course of action for them. No, they only need a message.

Similarly, Garret Graves (R-LA) said that what they are “asking members to do is to double down… so it’s not like we’ve gone out there to the Freedom Caucus to say, ‘We are asking you to take a hard left turn.’” Straight from the source, it’s not actually a change at all, but a doubling down on the GOP’s pro-fossil-fuel stance.

After all, Graves said, “Fossil fuels aren’t the enemy. It’s emissions.” That’s like arguing the Civil War was about states rights, as opposed to slavery. (And if you think natural gas should be used as a bridge to clean energy, bear in mind what MIT’s Jessika Trancik recently told InsideClimateNews about her study on the coal-to-gas switch: “we’re kind of nearing the end of the bridge.”)  

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