I haven’t read the book — who has time? Oh, but TV or a YouTube video — well, that’s another matter:

This Sunday, February 10th at 8pm EST on the National Geographic Channel, “Six Degrees Could Change The World,” which offers a hypothetical look at how the world might change, degree by degree, if we don’t curtail our emissions:

At One Degree, the world will experience a new American desert, massive coral bleaching, and lost Australian rainforests.

At Two Degrees, oceanic acidity will rise drastically, India will begin to face extreme Monsoon seasons, and water shortages will spell trouble in China and South America.

At Three Degrees, the Arctic will face 80% ice loss, New York City suffers from flooding, and Southern California will be constantly at risk for fires.

[Actually, the Arctic is already toast unless we reduce temperatures from current levels. And what the heck does he think has been going Southern California in recent years already. As for NYC flooding, that is of a much longer timescale than the other two, so it is confusing to lump them together.]

Read more

ClimateScienceWatch posted a brief item with a pointer to a one hour lecture titled The American Denial of Global Warming (on youtube). It is well worth watching.

Naomi Oreskes, PhD. is a Historian of Science at UC San Diego. Her recent research has been on the global warming disinformation campaign, and her lecture explains what happened and why.

Professor Oreskes has a B.S. in mining geology and a PhD in the History of Science from Stanford. She is the author of The Rejection of Continental Drift: Theory and Method in American Earth Science and other books. By researching, writing, and lecturing on the global warming disinformation campaign she is making a valuable contribution to the history of science. She will become the Provost of Sixth College at UC San Diego in July.

The first part of her lecture oulines the history of climate science research (going back to 1850), and the unpoliticized acceptance thereof that lasted until the 1990s. The second part describes the George C. Marshall Institute’s role in creating confusion and politicizing the issue, using tactics from the cigarette wars.

John Mashey has created a guide to the Oreskes lecture to help find specific sections:

Read more

McCain’s astonishing doubletalk on climate in the Florida GOP debate — denying that a cap and trade system is a mandate — made me start rethinking what a McCain presidency would mean for the fight to prevent catastrophic global warming. The more I researched McCain’s views, the more I talked to others, the more I felt forced to change my previous view.

Salon has just published my long analysis, which concludes that while he would be vastly superior to Bush on climate,

… a President McCain would not be the climate leader that America and the world requires. He is a conservative who happens to be on the only intellectually defensible side of the climate change debate. But he is still a conservative, and the vast majority of the solutions to global warming are progressive in nature — they require strong government action, including major federal efforts to spur clean technology.

Of course, as I argue in my book, it is precisely because they know that the solutions to global warming are mostly progressive in nature that most conservatives are so close-minded on the subject. My basic argument is:

As increasingly desperate climate scientists have been telling us, the effects of global warming are occurring faster than anyone had thought possible.

The next president must make reducing GHG emissions a central focus of his or her administration if we want to avoid the worst impacts of global warming: catastrophic sea level rise, widespread drought and desertification, and loss of up to 70 percent of all species.

While McCain may understand the scale of the climate problem, he does not appear to understand the scale of the solution. He understands the country needs to put in place a mandatory cap on GHG emissions and a trading system to energize American innovation. But in a recent Republican debate, he denied that a cap and trade system is a mandate, even though it would arguably be the most far-reaching government mandate ever legislated.

Moreover, like most conservatives, he doesn’t understand or accept the critical role government must play to make that system succeed. Besides initiating a cap-and-trade system, the next president must:

1. Appoint judges who won’t gut climate change efforts.

2. Appoint leaders and staff of key federal agencies who take climate change seriously and believe in the necessary solutions.

3. Embrace an aggressive and broad-based technology deployment strategy to keep the cost of the cap and trade system as low as possible.

4. Lead a change in utility regulations to encourage, rather than discourage, energy efficiency and clean energy.

5. Offer strong public advocacy to reverse the years of muzzling and misinformation of the Bush administration.

As I explain in the piece, McCain is unlikely to do any one of those things, let alone all of them.