But who killed the Medieval Warm Period?

Before we begin the investigation into the usual suspects, some background for people who those who don’t follow climate science closely, which certainly includes most of the disinformers and  apparently at least two statisticians.

1. There is a high probability that the recent warming is unprecedented for 1000 years and probably much longer (see “Sorry disinformers, hockey stick gets longer, stronger: Earth hotter now than in past 2,000 years” and here and here).
2. This conclusion is based on an analysis of multiple proxies for temperature, which individually engender much uncertainty and collectively still engender a fair amount.  It is a canard of Curry-esque proportions to assert that scientists have not clearly explained the nature and extent of these uncertainties. They have bent over backwards to do so.
3. The temperature trend in the past millennium prior to about 1850 is well explained in the scientific literature as primarily due to changes in the solar forcing along with the effect of volcanoes, whereas the recent rise in temperature has been driven primarily — if not almost entirely — by human activity (see Scientist: “Our conclusions were misinterpreted” by Inhofe, CO2 — but not the sun — “is significantly correlated” with temperature since 1850 and Part 3 [to come]).
4. Absent human emissions, we’d probably be in a slow long-term cooling trend due primarily by changes in the Earth’s orbit — see Human-caused Arctic warming overtakes 2,000 years of natural cooling, “seminal” study finds.
5. Thus, the rate of human-driven warming in the last century has exceeded the rate of the underlying natural trend by more than a factor of 10, possibly much more.  And warming this century on our current path of unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions is projected to cause a rate of warming that is another factor of 5 or more greater than that of the last century.  We are punching the climate beast — and she ain’t happy about it!

Back to the investigation of attempted murder — and the ‘innocent victim’ who may have been killed in the attempt.  The folks who don’t follow climate science closely have been trumpeting a new paper “A Statistical Analysis of Multiple Temperature Proxies: Are Reconstructions of Surface Temperatures Over the Last 1000 Years Reliable?” by McShane and Wyner about to be published in Annals of Applied Statistics.   Supposedly it is fatal to the Hockey Stick.

Here is the police lineup.  Take a look at three independent reconstructions of the past one to two  millennia and the new one by the statisticians — and see if you can pick out which one allegedly killed the others (with apologies to Deltoid):

Read more

State Sen. Walt Helmick (D-WV)

At an exclusive coal industry retreat this month, a top West Virginia politician bemoaned the negative image of the state’s coal industry in the wake of this year’s Upper Big Branch disaster that killed 29 miners. Looking for a silver lining, Senate Finance Chairman Walt Helmick (D-WV) contrasted the death toll from mining coal to the deaths from drug overdoses in McDowell County, West Virginia’s poorest. In a stream-of-consciousness speech during the annual West Virginia Coal Association membership meeting in White Sulphur Springs, Helmick complained that “we” — the coal industry and its political allies — “don’t give the press signs” to put coal’s deadly toll into context:

If we lose [deep mining] because of some things that have happened in the last couple of years — the mine disaster is obviously connected to the increase — we don’t give the press signs. Well, we lost 29 miners. That’s terrible. We understand that. We got to deal with mine safety — we all understand that. You guys work together to do what you folks do to make sure that doesn’t happen. But, you know, for instance, in McDowell County there are about eight or nine deaths a month with drug overdoses and that’s nothing to do with this. Talking about the issue, talking about the negatives.

Helmick went on to describe the “positives of coal.” He noted that coal severance taxes provide most of the income for West Virginia’s infrastructure bond fund: “21 million for water and sewage in West Virginia”:

Talk about the positives of coal? 24 million dollars a year that goes into the infrastructure — 21 comes from coal. 21 million for water and sewage in West Virginia. Coal has no damage whatsoever to any of my district, to be honest about it. But yet we use that infrastructure money in Pocahontas, Pendleton, Grant, Hardy, Hampshire, Morgan, all of those counties to offset that.

Unfortunately, West Virginia’s dependence on the coal industry is linked to its deadly endemic poverty. Drug-scourged McDowell County is West Virginia’s coal capital, having produced more coal than any other county in the state. Coal millionaires like Massey Energy’s Don Blankenship are killing West Virginia while they take billions in profits — killing the people with mining disasters and toxic pollution, destroying the mountains and streams with mountaintop removal, and destroying the economy by slashing jobs and fighting modernization and economic diversity.

Fixing the coal industry’s dirty reputation will take something more than better press relations, or as others at the coal retreat suggested, new propaganda in classrooms. Instead, West Virginians need to take the late Sen. Robert C. Byrd’s advice and embrace a cleaner, safer future.

And could global brightening be causing global warming?

Physicist John Cook of Skeptical Science has two good pieces on global dimming and global brightening I’m combining and reposting here.

Read more

Wind Turbines Are Coming to New York, and Not Just Offshore

For years, New York officials have envisioned powering the region from a set of huge wind turbines in the Atlantic Ocean off Long Island. But well before an offshore wind farm would be up and running, giant turbines may soon be spinning much closer to the city.

Read more

Texas oil giants Valero Energy and Tesoro Corp have mounted a fear campaign to thwart AB 32, California’s Global Warming Law this November. Californians have always valued the environment first and foremost. It’s time to take a stand, once and for all, and allow innovation to deliver a made-in-America green technologies energy solution.

That’s Dr. Reese Halter, writing in Huffington Post piece, which I excerpt below. Halter is a Science Communicator and a conservation biologist at Cal Lutheran University.

Read more

Is progressive messaging a “massive botch”? Part 5

The president has also suffered from an inability to explain to the public why he sought such a large stimulus and what he thought it could accomplish. Obama’s New Foundation speech at Georgetown was soon forgotten. Afterward, Obama, to the dismay of Democrats in Congress and some of his White House aides, pretty much dropped the jobs issue. From then to Labor Day, he devoted a July visit to Buffalo and an August stopover in southern Indiana to the issue-at a time when the right wing was mobilizing against him. Obama didn’t just fail to develop a consistent narrative about the economy; he didn’t really try.

John B. Judis has a must read piece in The New Republic, “The Unnecessary Fall of Barack Obama: A Counter-History of a Presidency” (cover image at right).

Those in power right now do messaging poorly “” and that certainly extends to team Obama.  Since the administration as a whole lacks a compelling and consistent narrative, his speeches mostly become unechoed one-0ffs without an enduring power to move the nation (see Part 2: Drew Westen on how “The White House has squandered the greatest opportunity to change both the country and the political landscape since Ronald Reagan”).

Readers know that I am baffled about much of progressive messaging (see “Can Obama deliver health and energy security with a half (assed) message?“), where I discuss this issue of narrative at length.

Read more

Fareed Zakaria: Can I ask you what percentage of your work is funded by the petroleum industry?

Pat Michaels: I don’t know. 40 percent? I don’t know.

In a telling exchange with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria, long-time polluter apologist Pat Michaels conceded that the real challenge of solving manmade global warming is simply the “political acceptability” of reducing our dependence on fossil fuels as climate catastrophes grow. Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson has the story.

Michaels, aptly introduced as “a scientist who now works for the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank that strongly opposes caps to carbon dioxide,” has promoted global warming denial for decades, funded by a network of oil and coal companies and their ideological allies. With calm questioning, Zakaria exposed Michaels’ position as political “stand-pattism” as the world burns:

Read more