Palin jumps from birther to flat earther

It is no longer possible to hide the decline of a once great newspaper, no longer possible to hide the decline of the paper that broke the Watergate story, but is now hanging itself on the Climategate story (see James Fallows’ blog).

The newspaper that just editorialized, “Many “” including us “” find global warming deniers’ claims irresponsible,” has just published a grotesquely irresponsible and falsehood-filled piece on climate science and the hacked emails by that leading light of science, ex-Governor Sarah Palin.  This is a woman that recently embraced the fact-free birthers. 

Palin is so practiced at repeating falsehoods — even in her supposed area of expertise (energy) — that during last year’s presidential campaign, the Washington Post itself gave her its highest (which is to say lowest) rating of “Four Pinocchios” for continuing to “to peddle bogus [energy] statistics three days after the original error was pointed out by independent fact-checkers.”  And then in July, the WashPost let her publish a falsehood-filled piece attacking climate action and clean energy.

And now they publish this unmitigated tabloid nonsense:

Read more

It’s day two of the Wonk Room’s on-the-scene coverage of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. The skies are briefly blue, a reprieve from the darkness that engulfs this northern city for most of the day.

As the nations of the world gather in Copenhagen, the Wonk Room has prepared this alphabetical journey of the impacts of climate change around the globe.

A

East Antarctica, long stable, is now losing ice.

B

Bolivia needs $1 billion over the next seven years to build reservoirs, as the glaciers that hold the nation’s water supply are shrinking rapidly.

C

Leatherback sea turtles that spawn on the beaches of Costa Rica are threatened with extinction by warmer temperatures and rising seas.

D

Denmark joined United States, Norway, Canada, and Russia in identifying climate change as “the most important long-term threat” to future existence of polar bears.

E

The rapidly warming highlands of Ethiopia are becoming too hot for its elite athletes, such as local-born Haile Gebrselassie, to train there.

F

Noting the unprecedented floods this year in Fiji, Prime Minister Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama recently warned that rising sea levels affect not just the islands’ economies, but put into doubt the very existence of his nation.

G

Greece suffered through another storm of extreme wildfires this summer as heat waves and drier conditions increase.

H

Global warming-fueled hurricanes, intense poverty, and widespread deforestation combine to form a gathering storm of disasters for Haiti.

I

The deforested peatlands of Indonesia are drying, disintegrating, and burning.

J

The increasingly early arrival of cherry blossoms in Japan reflects rising global temperatures.

K

The more frequent and severe droughts that are killing off the elephants will likely trigger more conflicts in the arid lands of northeast Kenya.

L

The incidence of wildfires in the cedar forests of Lebanon has increased tremendously over recent years.

M

“If things go business-as-usual, we will not live, we will die,” Maldives President Mohammad Nasheed told the UN General Assembly. “Our country will not exist.”

N

The ministers of Nepal have held the world’s highest cabinet meeting on Mount Everest, as rapidly rising temperatures have reduced snowfall over the mountains and caused glaciers to melt.

O

More than 50 per cent of the population of Oman lives on coastlines vulnerable to rising seas, but its supplies of peridotite may help sequester carbon dioxide emissions.

P

The massive floods that killed hundreds in the Philippines this summer are becoming the norm.

Q

Petroleum-soaked Qatar emits 60 tons of carbon dioxide per person, the most of any nation on earth.

R

Increased floods and malaria outbreaks from global warming, deforestation, and unsanitary conditions have hit Rwanda hard in the past decade.

S

The inhabitants of the Alpine villages of Fieschertal and Fiesch in Switzerland have asked for the Pope to bless their prayers for the restoration of their nation’s glaciers, which shrank by 12 percent over the past decade.

T

Newly discovered, exotic species like the fanged frog of Thailand are especially vulnerable as climate change will further shrink their already restricted habitats.

U

Agriculture in the United States has been ravaged this year by catastrophic droughts in Texas and California, heat waves in Louisiana and Nebraska, storms across the High Plains and the Midwest, floods in North Dakota and Minnesota, and torrential rains in Illinois and Georgia.

V

Speaking from Vatican City on the eve of the Copenhagen conference, Pope Benedict XVI counseled “all people of good will to respect the laws laid down by God in nature and to rediscover the moral dimension of human life.”

W

Warming oceans and sea level rise threaten the coral reefs of the remote Polynesian islands of Wallis and Futuna.

X

The nomadic descendents of Kublai Khan in Inner Mongolia, where Xanadu once stood, are being driven from the grasslands as the Chinese government attempts to fight the region’s desertification.

Y

Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, may be the first capital city in the world to run out of water, as drought and overuse diminish its supply.

Z

On the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe, the flow of Victoria Falls is far below average, as drought and high temperatures reduce the Zambezi.

The European Union has proposed cutting its carbon emissions 30 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 if other developed countries reduce their carbon emissions 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. But Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said in Copenhagen that the European Union should proceed with its 30 percent reductions targets regardless of what other developed countries are prepared to do right now.  This guest post is by CAP’s Andrew Light.

In January 2008 the European Union announced one of the most ambitious and promising policies on reducing carbon pollution by 2020 for the hoped-for post-Kyoto climate agreement. If other developed countries would agree to meet the European Union in cutting their emissions 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 with a comparable commitment, then the European Union would raise their promised reductions from 20 to 30 percent below 1990 levels by the same year.

Read more

This is a repost from Media Matters Action, by Chris Harris.  Note that the oil giant had said it would stop funding the anti-scientific disinformers, but that was one more lie (see “Another ExxonMobil deceit: They are still funding climate science disinformers despite public pledge“).

Over the past decade, oil giant Exxon Mobil has paid millions to organizations and “think tanks” in an attempt to deceive the public about the science behind global climate change.  It’s no surprise that those very same organizations are now doing everything in their power to please their benefactor by drawing attention to the so-called “Climategate” scandal involving hacked emails from the University of East Anglia in England.

American Enterprise Institute

Exxon Mobil Has Given The American Enterprise Institute Nearly $2 Million Since 2001. Since 2001, Exxon Mobil has donated $1,910,000 to the American Enterprise Institute. [Publicly Available IRS 990 Forms via Conservative Transparency, accessed 12/7/09]

• American Enterprise Institute Fellow Wrote Weekly Standard Cover Story On Hacked CRU Emails. The American Enterprise Institute F.K. Weyerhaeuser Fellow Steven F. Hayward wrote a Weekly Standard cover story on the hacked emails from the University of East Anglia:

Read more

Day 2 in Copenhagen [from Brad Johnson]. After breezing through registration “” avoiding the epic lines of Day 1 “” I entered the Bella Center housing the convention. The first item of business to attend was the daily Fossil Fool of the Day presentation, put on by Avaaz.org and the International Climate Action Network. After some lovely live bass viol music, the young presenters, garbed in gleefully formal attire, took the stage. They sang the Fossil Fool of the Day anthem to the Jurassic Park theme, then announced the winners to raucous boos. Although the ceremony itself was goofy, the awards were picked in all seriousness by the iCAN members to highlight the worst decisions made or the most indefensible positions taken by national delegations in the last 24 hours.

Read more

By Nick Anderson, Houston Chronicle
From the Cartoonist Group.

Here’s a way to keep track of Copenhagen on your iPhone — COP 15 Navigator:

This application is brought to you by the UN climate change secretariat (UNFCCC) to provide quick and easy access to essential information about COP 15 and to allow virtual participation in the event. COP 15 will be the biggest climate change conference ever held and is expected to deliver a fair, ambitious and effective international climate change deal. The Copenhagen agreed outcome is to follow on the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol, which expires at the end of 2012.

I welcome any ideas for apps, websites, or tools before I head out to Copenhagen this weekend with my MacBook, iPhone, and Flip Camcorder.

This is a re-posting from NWF’s blog, Wildlife Promise.

Global warming deniers have been feverishly pushing emails stolen by hackers from the accounts of climate scientists. Their argument? If any climate scientist ever discussed the best way to sort through mountains of climate data, then global warming isn’t happening. If that sounds like a bizarre conspiracy theory with no connection to fact or reality … well, welcome to the world of global warming denial.

There’s only one group of people more upset about the hacked emails than the deniers: The climate science community. The National Wildlife Federation’s Dr. Amanda Staudt just responded to the ginned-up controversy and didn’t mince words:

Read more

Our guest blogger is Benjamin Hale, a philosophy and environmental studies professor at the University of Colorado and an environmental ethics blogger. Dr. Hale is blogging live from Copenhagen.

Guys named Joe.

When elected officials like Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) cry “scientific fascism” about the scientists at the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit — and then define the fascism as “intimidation in the scientific community of people who wish to be contrary what the convention wisdom is” — this as much demonstrates how laughably weak Sensenbrenner’s understanding of basic political concepts is as it impugns his credibility as an interpreter of what the scientists were actually discussing.

Oh, sure, the East Anglia scientists were irredeemably engaged in the deplorable practice of weeding out bad science. They threatened to do so by disregarding weak articles, by rejecting journals which, in their estimation, were publishing pieces driven more by political considerations than by scientific considerations. That’s downright fascistic. How dare they!

It is by now an expectable comedy to hear shouting heads like Glenn Beck, Fox Business Network anchor David Asman, and others cry “fascist” and compare environmental progressives and climate scientists with Hitler and Stalin, but it is somewhat more surprising to see similar such claims coming from the otherwise more sedate halls of Congress. Of course, we’ve seen it all before. In this hyperbolic age, the chorus accompanies virtually all political matters, reaching its illogical extreme in screeds such as this one on Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com:

The Progressive movement owns the Klan.

The Progressive Movement owns Nazi Eugenics.

The Neo-Progressive Movement owns Global Warming.

Sensenbrenner’s comments on the CRU hack cannot be understood independently of this political context. This is particularly true in the climate arena, where one’s political affiliations more or less signal where one stands on the science. An attack on climate science is an attack on progressivism, or so the story goes.

As a philosopher, I am at pains to understand how cries of fascism ever gain any traction when coupled with references to the political left. The thesis that progressives are somehow fascist has all the complexity of the “Guys Named Joe” hypothesis: the specious observation that because some very bad people in world history have been named Joe, that therefore most other guys named Joe are also bad.

At heart progressivism is a left-leaning political orientation, privileging equality over inequality, seeking to give voice to the weak by recognizing personhood, and aiming to advance autonomy by reducing vulnerability, among other things. These are core progressive principles, rooted in the writings of theorists as diverse as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, and Immanuel Kant, among many others.

If progressivism is embodied by sensitivities to injustice, fascism is the very opposite of this. It is almost unilaterally agreed that fascism is a phenomenon of the right wing. It stresses rule by the few, encourages force over diplomacy, draws strength by belittling the weak, and in the end is an ideology of control. Truth is, political theory is remarkably ill-equipped to offer a clear definition of fascism, but these are its widely-recognized contours.

Fascism, Communism, Liberalism, Conservativism, Progressivism — these are conceptual categories, distinguished by what they accept and reject. They’re not pejorative name-tags to be affixed on an offending party. If Hitler calls himself a socialist, this does not make him a socialist. If Stalin called himself a progressive, this does not make him a progressive. If Glenn Beck finds a bath of communist red in the collected artwork adorning buildings commissioned by the 20th century’s most renowned capitalist, this does not make Rockefeller a communist, and it does not make it the case that capitalism is communism.

Politicians, apparently, need little be bothered by political theory, just as they need little be bothered by science. There’s nothing fascistic about rejecting bad arguments. There’s nothing particularly progressive about it either. That’s just how science works, sometimes with all of the nooks and wrinkles revealed in the e-mails. To hurl epithets at the climate scientists as if they are part of a conceptually-confused political cabal is a distortion of the highest order. It certainly doesn’t add clarity to an already muddy political discourse.

2009 among 5 warmest years: “Only North America (United States and Canada) experienced conditions that were cooler than average.”

Global Warming Is Not Slowing, New Analysis Says

Good NYT headline, though this isn’t really “new analysis.”  I pointed last December that the climate story of the decade is that the 2000s are on track to be some 0.2°C warmer than the 1990s based on NASA’s data (see “Very warm 2008 makes this the hottest decade in recorded history by far“).  And that was quickly followed one week later by Met Office and WMO say 2000s are easily the hottest decade in recorded history.

Now, however, it is official from the World Meteorological Organization, in their news release today “2000-2009, The Warmest Decade“:

The decade of the 2000s (2000-2009) was warmer than the decade spanning the 1990s (1990-1999), which in turn was warmer than the 1980s (1980-1989).

The NYT story was based on the WMO release early today, but NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center also reports today:

The 2000 – 2009 decade will be the warmest on record, with its average global surface temperature about 0.96 degree F above the 20th century average. This will easily surpass the 1990s value of 0.65 degree F.

Read more

The Efficiency Fix For Climate Change by Joe Hogan, CEO of ABB.

Today, like every other day the past few years, mankind will release more than 116 million metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Emissions are rising faster now than in any other decade, in spite of our concerns about climate change and without new policies our daily emissions will reach 140 million metric tons by 2020.

As governments struggle to finalize a new, globally acceptable climate treaty, the difficulties are clear.

Yet there are still grounds for optimism, mainly because we already have solutions we can use to build a low-carbon energy supply.

As technological advances have made wind and solar power increasingly competitive, they have become the fastest growing segment of the energy market. There is great interest in offshore wind power, in the Desertec project that involves tapping solar power generated in the Sahara desert, and in similar initiatives in the Gobi and Mojave deserts. This is an encouraging sign that we are moving toward large-scale renewable power production.

But if we’re serious about developing low-carbon power sources, we also need to develop a power system that can deliver them: a flexible and efficient smart grid that will effectively balance our energy consumption with the availability of wind and solar power. The technology is available now, but it needs to be implemented.

We also need to put renewables into perspective. Our only major source of renewable power today is hydro, which supplies 19% of the world’s electricity–less than 3% comes from other renewable sources. Clearly they should be just one part of our overall strategy to combat climate change.
Surprisingly, our best prospect of reducing emissions is one that gets little attention: energy efficiency. Projections by the International Energy Agency show that using energy more efficiently has a greater potential to curb carbon dioxide emissions over the next 20 years than all the other options put together.

Yet out of $112 billion invested in clean energy around the world in 2008, just $1.8 billion was spent on improving energy efficiency, according to a study by the U.N. Environment Programme and New Energy Finance.

The reluctance to invest in energy efficiency is surprising. Investments can usually be recouped through lower energy costs in less than two years and businesses normally leap at such rapid returns. There is clearly something else going on.

A major obstacle is a lack of knowledge about energy-efficient equipment in private households, companies and public authorities, which is further complicated by the variety of available options….

U.S. Patent Office to Speed Clean-Energy Technologies

Read more

The Wonk Room continues coverage of the United Nations Climate Change Conference from Copenhagen.

Reading more like a transcript of Glenn Beck episodes than a business broadsheet, Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal has jumped on the crazed right-wing bandwagon of comparing climate scientists to fascists. In The Totalities of Copenhagen, deputy editorial page editor Bret Stephens claims that the “intellectual methods” of “global warming true believers” and “closet Stalinists” are “instructively similar,” citing “revolutionary fervor,” “a disgust with democratic practices,” “utopianism,” “anti-humanism,” “intolerance,” “grandiosity,” “indifference to evidence,” and “monocausalism”:

Monocausalism: For the anti-Semite, the problems of the world can invariably be ascribed to the Jews; for the Communist, to the capitalists. And as the list above suggests, global warming has become the fill-in-the-blank explanation for whatever happens to be the problem.

I don’t doubt that among the tens of thousands of climate activists in Copenhagen right now — nearly all of whom are working together to find common cause in the global community, and overcome hatred, fear, and complacency with a message of empowerment and hope — there is an anti-Semite, an anti-Communist, even a few anti-capitalists. And climate campaigners often do compress the very real and interlocked issues that comprise the broad question of sustainability — resource extraction, greenhouse gas emission, deforestation, etc. — under the rubric of “global warming.” (Though I can’t say I’ve ever met someone who believes the increase in global warming pollution is the only cause of all the world’s problems, the way some feel about President Obama.)

That said, Stephens’ conflation of concern about climate change with totalitarian anti-Semitism is a disgusting assault on reason, with no place in civil society.

He is doing nothing more than projecting his own grandiosity, intolerance, and indifference to evidence onto others, all for the needless defense of continued oil profits.

“The pace of change and the evidence of harm have increased markedly over the last five years. The time to control greenhouse gas emissions is now.”

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has reaffirmed the position of its Board of Directors and the leaders of 18 respected organizations, who concluded based on multiple lines of scientific evidence that global climate change caused by human activities is now underway, and it is a growing threat to society.

“The vast preponderance of evidence, based on years of research conducted by a wide array of different investigators at many institutions, clearly indicates that global climate change is real, it is caused largely by human activities, and the need to take action is urgent,” said Alan I. Leshner, chief executive officer of AAAS and executive publisher of the journal Science.

That’s from the AAAS press release.  The headline quotes come from the reaffirmed December 2006 statement (here).

The AAAS was one of the 18 leading scientific organizations that sent a letter to Senators affirming the climate is changing, “human activities are the primary driver,” impacts are projected to worsen “substantially” and “If we are to avoid the most severe impacts of climate change, emissions of greenhouse gases must be dramatically reduced.”

Read more

A group of Yale University grad students, led by Angel Hsu, are following the Chinese negotiations team over the two weeks. CAP’s Julian L. Wong has their posts on his blog, which I’ll repost, hopefully simultaneously.

Angel Hsu is a Doctoral Student at Yale University, focusing on Chinese environmental performance measurement, policy and governance.  Prior to Yale, she worked in the Climate Change and Energy Program at the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based environmental think-tank.  There, she managed the GHG Protocol’s projects in China, which focused on capacity-building on greenhouse gas accounting and reporting standards for Chinese government and businesses.

Greetings from Copenhagen! I, along with seventy Yale students, have descended upon Denmark’s capital to participate in the Fifteenth Conference of Parties (COP-15) climate talks that will hopefully result in a clearer picture of what a post-Kyoto agreement would be.  This “China in Copenhagen” series of blog posts featured on The Green Leap Forward will follow China’s negotiating position during the next few weeks.  We’ll shadow China’s negotiating team, speak with key experts, and report back to GLF on a daily basis.

Read more

This introductory post was written by Julian L. Wong, CAP’s senior policy analyst focusing on Chinese climate and energy issues, and author of the greeleapforward.com.

Yesterday marked the first day of the event the world has been waiting for.  Sort of.

It has now been known for months that the UN climate conference in Copenhagen, also known as the Conference of the Parties 15, or COP-15, will not deliver a full legally binding international agreement on climate change action that we’ve all hoped for.  But COP15 is now viewed as the first step fo a two-step process on the way to a legally binding agreement, that is expected to be concluded in the next six to 12 months.  In the fine tradition of Chinese phraseology, this has been dubbed as the “One Agreement, Two Steps” approach.

The U.S. Climate Action Network has put together a great 90-page Copenhagen briefing book.

Read more

Here’s some flavor of Copenhagen — a repost from Tommaso Boggia of Campus Progress.

(sorry for my bad performance in this first video, I’m still getting used to being in front of a camera!)

I got to Copenhagen on December 4th and will be hanging out here at the United Nations international climate negotiation until the 20th. In this time, delegates from all nations in the world and many world leaders will swing by to either try to move the process forward or put roadblocks to climate action.

Read more

Plus “Climategate: The phony scandal”

Bad news for the flat-earth society: This alleged scandal of criminally stolen e-mails is one of the phoniest productions of all time, because it changes nothing about the scientific facts believed by the overwhelming majority of scientists….

But at the end of the day, all of this is as relevant to climate change as Tiger Woods’s ladies. There is a major crisis. Urgent action is needed. The overwhelming majority of scientists agree. The flat-earth society is wrong. It is time to act.

That sanity comes from Brent Budowsky of The Hill‘s Pundit Blog with his piece, “Climategate: The phony scandal.“  At the same time, The Hill’s Ben Geman reports:

Centrist Republican Sen. Susan Collins (Maine) argues that the “climategate” e-mails should be probed on Capitol Hill, but the e-mails haven’t changed her views on global warming.

Why haven’t her views changed?  Because she talked to actual climate scientists from her state [Hint, hint climate scientists in other states!]:

Read more

Most “have taken the unusual step of featuring the editorial on their front page,” warning of a “profound emergency.”

Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year’s inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world’s response has been feeble and half-hearted.

Today, “56 newspapers in 45 countries take the perhaps unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial,” warning of a “profound emergency,” as Editor and Publisher explained.  “The text was drafted by a Guardian team during more than a month of consultations with editors from more than 20 of the papers involved. Like the Guardian most of the newspapers have taken the unusual step of featuring the editorial on their front page.”

Here is the rest of this powerful global warning:

Read more

From Green Energy Reporter:

The New York Times‘ Dot Earth blogger/science reporter/lightning rod Andrew Revkin’s name has appeared on a list of potential buyout takers on the media Web site Gawker.

The uber-popular Gawker writes of the list Revkin is on:  “We received this additional list of NYT buyout-takers. This list is unconfirmed, but the source is generally reliable.”  That’s good enough to blog on, isn’t it?  Heck it’s probably good enough for a front-page story in the NYT since someone first sent me the story in an email this morning.  Let’s ask their public editor….