By any other name, it’s still Hell and High Water

Last week Fox News and other conservative media outlets tried once again to fabricate controversy over climate science when they pounced on a presentation made by the President’s science adviser Dr. John Holdren in Oslo. In it, Holdren makes the case (for the umpteenth time) that it’s time to move past the oversimplified term “global warming” and start facing the painful reality that without sharply reducing our carbon pollution, we face something more akin to a “global climate disruption.”

Sadly, even the Atlantic monthly (which is seen as center-left but is center-right on climate) repeated the right-wing narrative that the White House was somehow pushing new rhetoric in place of real science with its stenographic post, “Right Has Field Day With New ‘Global Warming’ Term.”  Ironically, the Atlantic criticized Holdren’s phrase  “global climate disruption” while its own construction “the scientifically supported but nevertheless controversial theory of global warming” is risible.  Yes, well, it is only “controversial” if one buys into and keeps repeating right-wing anti-science talking points.

I’ve been writing about efforts to come up with a better term than “global warming” for a long time (see “Is ‘Global Weirding’ here? Humans are warming the globe and changing the climate. But what should we call it?”).  I myself tried to coin the term “Hell and High Water” a few years ago, since that is a more accurate description of what is to come if we stay on or near our current emissions path.  It didn’t take — even though Time magazine used the phrase for its Pakistan flooding story, which didn’t mention global warming and which wasn’t shared with U.S. readers anyway!

It was GOP strategist and wordmeister Frank Luntz who counseled in a confidential 2003 memo that the Administration and conservatives should stop using the term “global warming” because it was too frightening:

It’s time for us to start talking about “climate change” instead of global warming and “conservation” instead of preservation.

1) “Climate change” is less frightening than “global warming”. As one focus group participant noted, climate change “sounds like you’re going from Pittsburgh to Fort Lauderdale.” While global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge.

So let’s set the record straight on two points.  Holdren’s speech focused on laying out the rock-solid and increasingly dire science (must-see PPTs here).  And the term he was recommending is essentially identical to one that he and many other scientists suggested 13 years ago:

Scientists’ Statement
Global Climatic Disruption

June 18, 1997

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For the second year in a row, the Wonk Room is covering the Clinton Global Initiative in New York City.

President Bill Clinton believes the “number one thing” to restore the American economy is clean, efficient energy. In a blogger roundtable at the beginning of his Clinton Global Initiative in New York City, Clinton told us his “favorite ideas” for making the green economy a political and economic reality:

One: Federal loan guarantees for building energy efficiency retrofits

Two: Renewable energy initiatives in economically depressed cities

Three: Green jobs programs for poor Americans

Clinton, relaxed and slim, held court with a dazzling mastery of policy details, wit, and storytelling. Citing a Center for American Progress report on the promise of energy efficiency, Clinton described his desire for the federal government to kickstart private financing of energy retrofits, much as the Clinton Foundation had done for the Empire State Building:

The Center for American Progress says we can get half the way home to an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2010 by efficiency alone. Unemployment in construction is 25 percent. We can’t go out and build new houses. And there are very few office buildings that need to be built. So what I think we should do is to have a lot more Empire State Buildings. We should retrofit every public school, every college and university building every hospital, every auditorium in this country, and every office building unencumbered by debt.

Clinton believes the reason that this investment hasn’t already happened is that “spooked” banks don’t want to make loans that could collapse. His solution is to establish a federal loan guarantee program, which he believes could create one million jobs with only $15 billion in federal investment:

Give them a federal guarantee like the SBA guarantee, and you only have to set aside $1 for every $10 you loan. Still very conservative, because we know the historic failure rate is one percent, not ten percent. It might not cost the taxpayers anything.

Here’s the multiple: every billion-dollar investment in retrofits gives you 7000 jobs. Homes 8000. Wind energy 3300 if you build and assemble the windmills where you put them up. Solar 1900, coal 870, nuclear a little over 900. This is not close. If you want to put America back to work, give a loan guarantee, get banks start making loans.

Set aside $15 billion for guarantees, you get $150 billion in bank lending, you get a million jobs.

His other policy ideas are about making the clean energy economy real for the American people, rich and poor:

My second candidate: pick places that are both distressed and full of potential for energy independence. My number one candidate is Nevada, where the sun shine and the wind blows. And you’ve got all those real expensive hotels there with roofs that could be filled with solar panels. And you have all the hills around that could be filled with windmills.

I would say take a few places like that and go straight out and make them energy independent and document how many jobs have been created, and then everybody will want to do that.

My third candidate is prove it works for poor people. One of our best commitments is designed to provide after school jobs and summer jobs for poor kids in Harlem, upper Manhattan Washington heights by paying them to go in and retrofit a lot of these old buildings, whitewashing the black roofs.

If you did those three things so that every day you were proving over and over again to all the naysayers that it was good economics to build a clean energy future, you can build a consensus necessary to do what has to be done. You could beat the special interest groups.

He admitted that the key problem with this vision is that it requires a change from how the energy sector traditionally makes money:

If you make a deal for a nuclear power plant or a coal-fired power plant and you knowingly deprive all these jobs increase greenhouse gas emissions or you increase other risk or you increase huge costs — with nuclear, it’s always more expensive — the only real reason they do it is because they’ve always done it that way, and it is so much simpler. If you’re running the utility, there’s one contractor that’s going to build that plant, there’s one supplier of the fuel, and then you go to one PUC and they give you permission to make the ratepayers pay for it at a profit. It’s simple because it’s centralized.

The new energy economy is more decentralized, but it’s less expensive, more job intensive, and parenthetically will save the planet.

“That’s what I think we have to do,” Clinton concluded. “You’ve got to prove this is good economics. And it is! The number one thing we could do for America is change the way we produce and consume energy.”

“Here, a number of top climate scientists have thoroughly refuted all of Mr. Monckton’s major assertions, clearly demonstrating a number of obvious and elementary errors.”

A group of five scientists solicited responses from more than twenty world-class climate scientists to the May 6th testimony by Christopher Monckton to the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. These climate scientists “”¦ have thoroughly refuted all of Mr. Monckton’s major assertions, clearly demonstrating a number of obvious and elementary errors,” the report says. “We encourage the U.S. Congress to give careful consideration to the implications this document has for the care that should be exercised in choosing expert witnesses to inform the legislative process.”

The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley (TVMOB) has now become the most scientifically debunked of all the professional disinformers.  A team of 21 top climate scientists have eviscerated his Congressional testimony — news release here, full report here.  See also the Guardian piece, “‘Chemical nonsense’: Leading scientists refute Lord Monckton’s attack on climate science.”

Lord Monckton should no longer be viewed as a credible source by the media or Congressional committees, given that he has been thoroughly discredited scientifically and that he is a well-known hate-speech promoter (see Monckton repeats and expands on his charge that those who embrace climate science are “Hitler youth” and fascists). TVMOB has relegated himself to the extreme fringe (see Irony-gate 2: Modern day Tea Partiers outsource denial to Lord Monckton “” a British peer!)

The full report is a marvelous science lesson from leading climatologists and well worth reading in its entirety.  The news release notes that “The report examines claims from Monckton’s testimony in nine major areas and corrects and refutes each of them.”  Here is a summary of “the authoritative scientific statements in each of these nine areas”:

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EPA’s Jackson: “Total benefits of the clean air act amount to 40 times the cost of regulation.”

Our guest bloggers are CAP’s Van Jones and Jorge Madrid work for CAP’s Green Opportunity Initiative.

The Clean Air Act turns 40 this month. But if dirty energy proponents and climate change deniers have their way, it won’t survive intact for another 40 weeks.

Ever since the US Supreme Court agreed that the EPA has the right to regulate greenhouse gasses under the Act, lobbyists for dirty energy have been trying to gut the law.

Americans can’t let that happen.

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There are now more studies that show recent warming is unprecedented –  in magnitude and speed and cause — than you can shake a stick at!

As with a pride of lions, and a conspiracy of disinformers [or is that a delusion of disinformers?], perhaps the grouping should get its own name, like “a team of hockey sticks” (see “The Curious Case of the Hockey Stick that Didn’t Disappear“).

1. GRL:  “We conclude that the 20th century warming of the incoming intermediate North Atlantic water has had no equivalent during the last thousand years.“
2. JGR:  “The last decades of the past millennium are characterized again by warm temperatures that seem to be unprecedented in the context of the last 1600 years.” [figure below]

Reconstructed tropical South American temperature anomalies (normalized to the 1961-1990AD average) for the last ˆ¼1600 years (red curve, smoothed with a 39″year Gaussian filter). The shaded region envelops the ±2s uncertainty as derived from the validation period. Poor core quality precluded any chemical analysis for the time interval between 1580 and 1640 AD.

Yes, the 39″year Gaussian filter appears to wipe out over half of the warming since 1950 as this NASA chart makes clear:

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The Wonk Room has previously identified seven key U.S. Senate races and eight U.S. House races between a vote for climate action and a global warming denier.  Today, WR highlights six House races of the most vulnerable champions for climate action. They include three freshman representatives, two elected in 2006, and one veteran congressman, Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-PA-11), who together represented the swing votes in favor of the American Clean Energy and Security Act in 2009. Their opponents are right-wing ideologues who parrot the party line that cap-and-trade legislation is a job-killing “energy tax”:

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“And the losers? The people of California, surely. But the biggest loser will be the planet.”

The Koch brothers are leading the effort to destroy a livable climate and thwart efforts to restore US leadership in what will be the biggest job-creating industry of this century, low-carbon cleantech (see “The dirty oil coalition behind the Proposition 23 effort to stop clean energy just got a lot dirtier“).

The New York Times has a terrific lead editorial on the subject, “The Brothers Koch and AB 32,” which deserves to be widely read:

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India floods leave two million homeless, destroy crops

At least two million people in northern India have been left homeless as the Ganges and other rivers, swollen by heavy monsoon rains, broke embankments and submerged villages, fields and religious sites. State officials said 500,000 hectares of agriculture land in top cane growing state Uttar Pradesh were flooded and the heavy rains could affect cotton output from Punjab and Haryana.

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