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Australian climate scientists face death threats, cyberbullying

By Joe Romm on Jun 4, 2011 at 4:38 pm

I hope readers will help draw attention to this stunning news in today’s Canberra Times:

Australia’s leading climate change scientists are being targeted by a vicious, unrelenting email campaign that has resulted in police investigations of death threats.

The Australian National University has confirmed it moved several high-profile climate scientists, economists and policy researchers into more secure buildings, following explicit threats to their personal safety….

More than 30 researchers across Australia ranging from ecologists and environmental policy experts to meteorologists and atmospheric physicists told The Canberra Times they are receiving a stream of abusive emails threatening violence, sexual assault, public smear campaigns and attacks on family members.

I hope you will also voice support in the comments section for the scientists and the important work they are doing to warn humanity of the gravest danger facing the planet.  I have many readers and colleagues in Australia and we will make sure that as many of the scientists see these comments as possible.

UPDATE:  See the featured comment below from Stephen Spencer, an Australian reader with insight into what’s happening down under.

Only in a very perverse world are such tireless, underpaid heroes the subject of relentless attacks to muzzle their vital message, as if they were the title character in Henrik Ibsen’s classic, An Enemy of the People.  Sadly, such cyber bullying and threats of violence are not exclusive to Australia (see “UK Guardian slams Morano for cyber-bullying and for urging violence against climate scientists“).

Here is more from this important Australia news story:

Read more

GOP Rep. McClintock Predicts “We’re Going To See A Strong Movement” Among Republicans Towards Ending Oil Subsidies

By Scott Keyes on Jun 4, 2011 at 4:22 pm

ThinkProgress filed this report from the Faith and Freedom Conference in Washington, DC.

Three times this year, House Republicans voted unanimously to protect subsidies for oil companies.

But as the GOP faced a major voter backlash, especially during times of immense profits for oil companies, one conservative Republican spoke out in March against continuing oil subsidies: Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA).

ThinkProgress spoke with McClintock after his speech today at the Faith and Freedom Conference to elaborate on his call to end oil subsidies. McClintock said such subsidies are “distorting” the price of oil and called for getting “rid of all the subsidies.” When asked why other fiscal conservatives weren’t standing with him in this cause, McClintock was optimistic, predicting that more Republicans would soon be joining him. “We have to reach out to folks from time to time, but when you do, they get it,” said McClintock. “I think we’re going to see a strong movement in that direction.”:

KEYES: Back in March, you came out in favor of ending oil subsidies. Can you just walk us through that decision a little bit.

McCLINTOCK: Sure. Prices include a tremendous volume of information. Oil prices include transportation costs, alternative fuel costs, bribery rates in Venezuela, demand in China. Whenever we subsidize any product, we are distorting that information which is absolutely critical for consumers to make rational decisions. So we ought to get rid of all the subsidies and allow those prices to convey accurate information to consumers so that they can make accurate decisions about where they are putting their dollars.

KEYES: Are you worries at all that there aren’t more fiscal conservatives on the right who are joining you in this?

McCLINTOCK: I’m not worried. They didn’t call them self-evident truths for nothing. We have to reach out to folks from time to time, but when you do, they get it. I think we’re going to see a strong movement in that direction.

KEYES: Do you think that more Republicans might be joining you soon on this?

McCLINTOCK: Yes, I do.

Watch it:

Still, despite McClintock’s harsh words, he was one of many Republican congressmen who criticized oil subsidies but then voted to protect them.

Check out ThinkProgress’s video compilation of GOP hypocrisy on oil subsidies.

Yglesias

Mapping DC’s Bicycle Socialism

By Matthew Yglesias posted from ThinkProgress Yglesias on Jun 4, 2011 at 2:35 pm

David Alpert brings us DDOT’s presentation (PDF) of Capital Bikeshare station success:

This isn’t a simple map of which stations get empty and full. Rather, as DDOT’s Ralph Burns explained at the recent meeting, DDOT weighed the amount of time it’s empty and full, the total traffic, and an estimate of the revenue from that station. Blue stations have high usage and/or revenue and more time empty and full, while red stations are the opposite. Yellow is the “sweet spot” where revenues are good but the station isn’t too popular that it’s often unavailable.

There’s a dominant pattern here, but also some interesting idiosyncratic elements. The station just south of Union Station, for example, is oversubscribed while the one just east of it is underused. I think the problem here is specifically that the underutilized station is quite hard to see; when I needed to dock there for the first time I had to get an Amtrak cop to direct me.

The politics of the thing would seem to point toward building more stations in the sparsely-stationed periphery, but the actual demand patterns suggests that there’s plenty of room to build more stations in the core. I think it’s not unrealistic to hope that building more system capacity in the high-demand arc will at least marginally increase utilization of those peripheral stations to the point where it makes sense to build more of them.

New Feature: Featured Comments

By Joe Romm on Jun 4, 2011 at 2:16 pm

I am painfully aware of the limitations of Facebook commenting.  If you’re still having trouble commenting, read “You don’t need Facebook to comment.”  A comment FAQ is coming.

Climate Progress will immediately take four steps to make better use of the talents of our amazing commenters.

First, rest assured, the 120,000 (!) comments on Climate Progress from before the merger with Think Progress still exist.   I apologize that they were taken down  temporarily without warning.  That was as big a shock to me as it was to anyone.  We are figuring out the best way to make them available and, equally important, to draw attention to the best comment streams (more on that soon).

Second, here’s a new feature we are implementing as of today:  If a post gets a comment that is worthy of drawing attention to, we will put it  in the body of the post.

I just did that for a comment (in the great Heidi Cullen post) from one of our long-time readers, Richard Brenne, a leading climate communicator.

UPDATE:  I just added a featured comment for this post from Ted Gleichman.

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Weekend Open Thread

By Joe Romm on Jun 4, 2011 at 1:51 pm

A cyber-penny for your thoughts.

I would prefer to keep this thread for climate and clean energy  news and comments.  I have  a separate post where you can make complaints and recommendations about the new site design.

 

Yglesias

False Fear Of A U.S. Grain Shortage

By Matthew Yglesias posted from ThinkProgress Yglesias on Jun 4, 2011 at 11:05 am

By Matthew Cameron

Leslie Kaufman’s piece in yesterday’s New York Times added a new dimension to the catastrophic flooding in the Midwest by pointing out that huge quantities of agricultural runoff likely will cause the largest dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico’s history.

There are a number of frustrating aspects to the story, but one that stands out is the absurd utilitarian calculus that major figures in the agricultural sector use to justify the situation. For example, Don Parish of the American Farm Bureau Federation noted, “When you get to the point where you are taking more from the soil than you are putting in, then you have to worry about productivity.” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack put it even more bluntly:

“A lot of folks are basing criticism and concerns on the way agriculture was, not the way it is now,” Mr. Vilsack said in a phone interview. “We as a nation have an expansive appetite for inexpensive food. To produce more, you have to turn to strategies like chemicals and pesticides.”

Both Parish and Vilsack are absolutely correct that if the U.S. wants to continue scaling up its food production then it needs to use large amounts of fertilizer and pesticides. But their implicit assumption here is that somehow the nation’s citizens are at risk of not having enough food – particularly grain – and that a necessary trade-off to ensure adequate nutrition is environmental degradation caused by farmers’ chemical use. What’s funny, though, is that there has been a lot of talk in recent years about how the most urgent nutritional issue facing the U.S. is not undernourishment but rather obesity.

In fact, more than 34 percent of adults and 17 percent of children are obese. This is not surprising given that between 1970 and 2008 the nation’s per capita daily caloric intake rose from 2,168 to 2,673 calories. Moreover, among the major drivers behind this trend were – here it comes – grains and added sugars, many of which are grain byproducts such as high-fructose corn syrup. As this helpful graphic shows, Americans upped their daily intake of the former food group from 432 calories in 1970 to 625 in 2008; they increased their consumption of the latter from 402 to 459 calories per day.

You do not have to be a nutrition expert to figure out that this means Americans are consuming too much, not too little, food. And although the U.S. is one of the world’s major grain exporters, the fact is that the nation could reduce the amount of food it grows by roughly the equivalent of 673 calories per American per day and still maintain its current level of exports as well as a healthy nutritional level for its citizens. This would mean fewer chemicals flowing into the Gulf of Mexico, and as an added bonus it would lead to reduced rates of obesity in the U.S. But it also would result in lower profits for major food and chemical corporations, so don’t expect Parish and Vilsack to jump on board any time soon.

Heidi Cullen on tornadoes, extreme weather and ‘The C-Word’

By Joe Romm on Jun 4, 2011 at 9:16 am

Heidi CullenOur guest blogger is climate scientist Heidi Cullen.  This was first published at HuffPost.  My comments are inserted in brackets.

UPDATE:   See the featured comment from Richard Brenne at the end.  And Cullen herself has posted in the comments section.

My phone tends to ring a lot more when the weather is bad. I often get calls from reporters and producers who usually ask me the same question a bunch of different ways. “Is this global warming?” “Is climate change to blame?” “Is the weather getting worse?”

These are big — almost existential — questions. I suspect they are a polite way of asking, “Is this our fault?”

Climate scientists approach the question a little differently. We want to test how global warming shifts the odds of a severe weather event. Just like medical researchers do with cigarette smoking and lung cancer. In fact, this line of climate research comes straight out of epidemiology. In essence, we’re doing autopsies on extreme weather events to find out what made them so bad-ass.

Depending on the type of extreme weather event, my answer can be short or long, straightforward or complicated. Keep in mind, all weather is now born into an environment that is warmer and moister because of man-made greenhouse gas pollution. But we don’t always know what influences (man-made or natural) will win out on any given day.

Events like droughts, wildfires, heat waves and heavy downpours get my short answer. We know they are going to become more frequent, more intense, and last longer. In fact, we can already see this playing out in historical data. (For a complete overview, check out the “Global Climate Change Impacts in the US” as well as some newly published research summarized here.)

[Joe Romm:  For a review of the recent scientific literature, see "Two seminal Nature papers join growing body of evidence that human emissions fuel extreme weather, flooding that harm humans and the environment."]

Tornadoes get the long answer. Will they become more frequent, more intense? Will Tornado Alley get bigger? Will the season last longer?

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