This post by physicist John Cook was first published in Skeptical Science.

The NOAA State of the Climate 2009 report is an excellent summary of the many lines of evidence that global warming is happening. Acknowledging the fact that the planet is warming leads to the all important question:  What’s causing global warming? To answer this, here is a summary of the empirical evidence that answer this question. Many different observations find a distinct human fingerprint on climate change:

To get a closer look, click on the pic above to get a high-rez 1024×768 version (you’re all welcome to use this graphic in your Powerpoint presentations). Or to dig even deeper, here’s more info on each indicator (including links to the original data or peer-reviewed research):
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Last year an industry front group that distributed a coloring book on the “advantages” of coal: “Let’s Learn About Coal.” TP has the latest industry plans to target American youth –  not counting their pollution, that is (See “If you want smarter kids, shut coal plants“). Read more

One of America’s most influential global warming skeptics, CNN meteorologist Chad Myers, has finally admitted that global warming is “caused by man.” During the hottest year ever recorded, following the hottest decade ever recorded, Russia is burning under heat not seen for at least 1000 years. Heat waves have set records throughout the United States and throughout the world. A monsoon season of unprecedented intensity has displaced tens of millions of people across Asia, threatening the nuclear states of China, Pakistan, India, and North Korea. The largest iceberg to calve from Greenland in fifty years has added to its precipitous decline of ice mass since 1980. Decades ago, scientists predicted these consequences of burning fossil fuels and heating the planet.

Yesterday, in what CNN anchor Rick Sanchez billed a “good, smart conversation,” Myers actually recognized the reality of a “consequential global warming caused by man,” when not repeating climate-denier talking points:

Is it caused by man? Yes. Is it 100% caused by man? No. There are other things involved. We are now in the sun spot cycle. We are now in a very hot sun cycle. there are many other things going on. But, yes, a significant portion of this is caused by greenhouse gases keeping heat on the shore, on the land, in the atmosphere that could have escaped without those greenhouse gases, so, yes, it’s warmer. . ..

There is absolutely something going on here for this summer being the hottest and some of the water that we have in the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico the hottest ever on record which could cause a pretty significant hurricane season still to come.

Watch it:

Unfortunately, “scientist expert” Chad Myers (actually a bachelor-degree meteorologist, not a climate scientist) also made the blatantly false claim that we are “now in a very hot sun cycle.” In fact, the sun is just emerging from an extremely low two-year minimum of activity, with years to go before it will reach another peak. Since 1980, average solar irradiance has been on the decline, even as global temperatures have risen.

Myers has long abused his role at the “Most Trusted Name in News” to misinform the American public about the science of climate change. In October, 2005, Myers promoted the debunked idea of negative cloud feedback overwhelming global warming. In January, 2006, Myers promoted the debunked idea that urban heat islands were distorting official temperature records. In December, 2008, Myers told Lou Dobbs “to think that we could affect weather all that much is pretty arrogant.” In April, 2010, Myers admitted the planet was warming, but accused climate scientists of corruption, questioned climate models, and implied that the sun is driving global warming.

Myers and Sanchez also promoted other denier canards, from petty jokes about Al Gore to a mention of winter in South America:

So it’s the coldest winter on record in Bolivia. Okay. So. Well does that counteract? Probably not. They’re having millions of fish killed because they’re freezing to death literally in Bolivia.

In fact, it is only the coldest winter in Bolivia in 47 years, not the “coldest winter on record.” In contrast, Russia, Myanmar, Pakistan, Kuwait, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Chad, Niger, Sudan, Belarus, Ukraine, Cyprus, Finland, Qatar, St Helena, Solomon Islands, and Columbia have all seen all-time record-high temperatures this year. The global average temperature is at or near record highs, far above the long-term average. Fortunately, global warming has not yet gotten so extreme that record lows are never set — but they are now greatly outpaced by record highs.

It’s an encouraging sign that Myers is now speaking more truth than misinformation during the killer summer of 2010, but the damage of his years of propaganda can never be undone.

Transcript: Read more

Guest blogger Rebecca Lefton is writing regularly to keep us up to date about Big Oil’s tricky proposition 23 initiative to kill California’s clean energy economy. Read more on Prop 23′s national repercussions and funding from Texas oil companies.

A group of California economists signed an open letter to Californians warning that gubernatorial nominee Meg Whitman’s economic policies would only leave the state’s already suffering budget worse off and raise unemployment.  The experts, including Stanford University economist and Nobel laureate Kenneth Arrow, probed Whitman’s economic proposals concluding that Meg 2010 is not based on facts or solid economic analysis.  They write, “If implemented, her policy proposals will deepen California’s budget crisis and are likely to reduce employment and economic growth.”

Michael Reich, University of California-Berkeley professor sums up the arguments in a new Center for American Progress Action Fund report.  Reich concludes:

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Debating science shouldn’t enable antiscience disinformation

Guest authors Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway share some research from their recent must-read book “Merchants of Doubt,” which is reviewed here. The book documents how the cast of characters peddling pseudo-science had been stunningly consistent over the years, from secondhand smoke skeptics to “Star Wars” missile defense proponents to modern climate science deniers. Naomi Oreskes is a professor of history of science and provost of Sixth College at UC San Diego, and Erik Conway is a historian of science and technology, living in Pasadena, California. This is cross-posted at Science Progress.

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This past weekend, coal company executives convened for the annual West Virginia Coal Association meeting in White Sulphur Springs, WV. The event, which was closed to the public, was held at the lavish Greenbrier Resort, where an overnight stay can cost upwards of $6,000 (plus tax). One panelist at the meeting, state Senate Finance Chairman Walt Helmick, pointed out the exclusivity of the resort hotel: “I used to drive by the Greenbrier often when I was young, but I never had the money to come in because I’m a former coal miner.”

During the event, over 100 attendees collaborated on issues from hiring industry lobbyists to fighting federal regulations. However, one of the biggest concerns on the minds of coal executives was how to ensure children would be given an industry-friendly approach to coal issues in the classroom.

During a membership meeting attended by ThinkProgress, attendees took the opportunity to vent about their poor public perception and accused teachers of turning their children against them. One coal executive, Jim Bunn, summed up the general sentiment:

BUNN: There’s so much negativity in the classroom, and I really don’t understand that. I can tell you that every industry has negatives throughout. I don’t care what it is. The education system has negatives. We need to get them to understand that we are not Darth Vader, we are good people. We’re just like you in that we come to work every morning.

West Virginia Senate President Earl Ray Tomblin concurred, saying that “I agree with you that those kind of programs could be expanded” because West Virginia children are being unduly influenced by “what they hear on the national news…on how bad coal is.” Coal executives and state legislators continued their mutual admiration for changing the state curriculum to be more pro-industry. A coal executive named Joe proposed the idea of a statewide “Coal Day”:

JOE: There’s a West Virginia labor day recognized in public schools. I think something like that could work in the coal context as well. Pick a day of the year that West Virginia public schools would discuss mining, its concept, its history, its contribution to the state of West Virginia. Food for thought.

STATE SENATE ENERGY, INDUSTRY & MINING CHAIRMAN MIKE GREEN: I remember in the 8th grade getting a lot of information about coal, about the history of coal. Is that still being done?

UNIDENTIFIED AUDIENCE MEMBER: Actually, it’s just the opposite. They get taught how bad coal is in our schools.

Some at the meeting weren’t satisfied with just a single day devoted to coal. A coal executive named Michael went further, proposing an entire week of coal-friendly lessons for kids:

MICHAEL: Is there a way for the legislature to have a course ‘natural resource week,’ where coal, natural gas, other topics can be taught? We have national history week in this country, everybody creates a national week of something. Is there a way to create a standards of learning that the legislature would passed that the activists could not keep out of the schools so we could get that education across?”

GREEN: I think we should. I think that’s a great idea. I think we need to check with our colleagues in Virginia and see if we can get that done. I don’t think my colleagues disagree with that, do you? [All shook their heads in agreement.]

The coal industry has indeed made headway in altering West Virginia’s classrooms. In October 2009, the Raleigh County school board approved “a pro-coal curriculum designed by retired teachers and the Friends of Coal Ladies Auxiliary.” As part of the curriculum, fourth-graders at Stratton Elementary were taken on a field trip to the Beckley Exhibition Coal Mine where each student was given “a coloring book, compliments of the auxiliary, illustrating how coal is mined and how it is burned for energy.”

One of the groups that has made significant progress enacting a pro-coal curriculum is Friends of Coal, the coal industry group that sponsored the Greenbrier retreat. It’s education affiliate, CEDAR (Coal Education Development and Resource of Southern West Virginia, Inc.), is a “partnership between the coal industry, business community and educators.” Its stated mission is “to facilitate the increase of knowledge and understanding of the many benefits the coal industry provides in daily lives by providing financial resources and coal education materials to implement its study in the school curriculum.”

With coal industry executives united in this effort, and state legislators working on their behalf to implement such changes, West Virginia’s revisionist education curriculum may soon put even Texas to shame.

Cross-posted on ThinkProgress.

Except when it is being used to defend the 6000-year age of the Earth or attack Copernicus.

The theory of relativity is a mathematical system that allows no exceptions. It is heavily promoted by liberals who like its encouragement of relativism and its tendency to mislead people in how they view the world.^[1] Here is a list of 24 counterexamples: any one of them shows that the theory is incorrect.

I would have filed this under Signs of the Apocalypse, but we are way past that.  This is more like, Signs that the Apocalypse happened a long time ago but we were all too busy watching American Idol to notice.

Yes, there is a Conservapedia and its main benefit to society is that it  apparently occupies the  time of the great many conservatives who  post  meticulously-footnoted articles like the one above, titled, “Counterexamples to Relativity.”

It is hard to know what is the most  mind-boggling thing  about this particular article.  Footnote 1 reads:

See, e.g., historian Paul Johnson’s book about the 20th century, and the article written by liberal law professor Laurence Tribe as allegedly assisted by Barack Obama. Virtually no one who is taught and believes relativity continues to read the Bible, a book that outsells New York Times bestsellers by a hundred-fold.

Really?  The Bible outsells The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by a hundred-fold?   Well then it must be literally true word-for-word.   That’s how we know, for instance, that the Sun moves around the Earth*.  But still,  I am puzzled how this is a counter example:

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Also, he says it’s part of a UN conspiracy

Last week Colorado Tea Party candidate Dan Maes said bike-sharing is a “well-disguised” effort aimed at “converting Denver into a United Nations community.” Yesterday, he went on MSNBC to explain his conspiracy theory.  Wonk Room has the story.

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Met Office: “The extremes of rainfall are getting heavier and are entirely consistent with climate change predictions.”

Floods and mudslides on three continents, as drought hits Africa

Regions across the world have been buffeted by extremes of weather, drought and floods. Sometimes an area is hit by one extreme, followed soon after by another, Niger being a case in point. In the case of floods in Pakistan, the Met Office says high pressure over Russia has forced the jet stream much further south than usual this year and this pattern has remained almost stationary over recent weeks. Therefore low pressure has been sitting over Pakistan longer than normal, intensifying the monsoon rains. “The extremes of rainfall are getting heavier and are entirely consistent with climate change predictions,” said Helen Chivers, a spokeswoman with the Met Office.

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“If we continue with business as usual on the climate front, it is only a matter of time before what we are seeing in Russia becomes commonplace.”

UPDATE:  Audio of press call is online here.

ON TUESDAY,  AUGUST 10,  2010,  at 11 a.m. EDT,   in advance of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s world grain harvest estimate on Thursday,  environmental analyst Lester Brown will discuss the heat and drought currently decimating Russia’s grain crops,  what Russia’s loss on grain exports means for world food prices and how this calamity foreshadows future climate-related crises.

Brown is one of the world’s foremost authorities on the connection between climate and agriculture (see Ponzi redux: Scientific American asks “Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization? excerpted below).

Details on the press  call below.   If a tape and transcript become available, I will post it.

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