Yeah, please vote here.
Pointedly ignoring my plea for an end to online polls, CBS has come up with perhaps the dumbest idea yet.
Let’s use the least scientific, most easily manipulated choosing scheme invented since eeny-meeny-miny-moe to pick what major piece of legislation president Obama should pursue next.
Seriously. I can almost hear Walter Cronkite reading the results on the evening news….
The embattled head of the United Nations’ scientific panel on climate change has been cleared of allegations of financial irregularity by an independently conducted review.
So the Financial Times reported Sunday in its piece, “Climate chief cleared over payments” (reg. req’d). Here’s more:
Sure the American Enterprise Institute is still crazy with climate denial and delay after all these years. And sure it recently compared EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to Clint Eastwood and carbon polluters to criminals. But it always retained the semblance of a serious think tank.
Heck, back in October, Steven F. Hayward, “the F.K. Weyerhaeuser fellow at the American Enterprise Institute” wrote:
The brain waves of the American right continue to be erratic, when they are not flat-lining.
He’s still got a job at AEI. I guess that sort of truth is okay to utter.
But while AEI scholars can question the lack of ideas in the entire conservative “movement,” apparently they can’t question GOP tactics, as TP’s Faiz Shakir explains in Bartlett: Frum’s Dismissal Shows ‘All That Matters Now Is Absolute Subservient Adherence’ To The GOP:
Camelina blend powers Air Force test flight
The Air Force conducted the first-ever flight test yesterday of a military aircraft powered by a biofuel-jet fuel blend.
The A-10 Thunderbolt II jet flew from Eglin Air Force Base in Florida for a 90-minute test of a blend of 50 percent jet fuel and 50 percent biofuel made from camelina.
Today’s guest blogger is the best science writer in the country named Easterbrook. Steve is a professor of computer science at the University of Toronto. He wrote a much admired comment on RealClimate, which offers a rare look into the scientific mindset.
Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed its first Clean Water Act veto ever for a previously permitted mountaintop removal project, “the largest mountaintop-removal permit in West Virginia history.” Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson has the story in this repost.
If you want a hint, the very next sentence by this man known for his bluntness is, “Such an atmosphere is un-American.”
Oh, no? Try telling that to the people rewriting history, like the Texas Board of Education and Glenn Beck — explains Tom Tomorrow in another hilarious cartoon for Salon:
Last year, Obama laid out a sweeping vision for high-speed rail jump started by $8 billion in the stimulus bill (see “Make no little plans”). These rail corridors will decrease our dependence on foreign oil and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, as explained in this CAP repost.
[JR: Thanks to so many Climate Progress "lurkers" for providing comments below!]
One thing is very safe to say about any quantitative analysis you see from Anthony Watts: It is probably BS. See, for instance, Wattergate: Tamino debunks “just plain wrong” Anthony Watts.
ConocoPhillips, BP, and Shell Oil Company met with senators drafting energy reform legislation Thursday to request that their legislation block the federal government from regulating fracking pollution. Climate reform such as the legislation being drafted by Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), and Sen Lindsey Graham (R-SC) will spur natural gas development, as the fuel has a much smaller carbon footprint than dirty coal. The industry wants to ensure that health and environmental concerns do not impinge their use of the drilling technology of hydraulic fracturing, known colloquially as “fracking.” The oil companies shared a draft “Sense of the Senate” document with the senators, which opposes Environmental Protection Agency authority:
States with existing oil and gas regulatory programs have the authority to and are best situated to continue regulating hydraulic fracturing processes and procedures.
Fracking is used in most U.S. oil and gas wells and involves pumping a combination of water, sand, and chemicals under high pressure deep into rock formations that hold oil and gas. The process fractures the rock and holds open the fissures to allow oil and gas to flow to the surface. The natural gas industry claims the process is completely safe, and the only reason they don’t want federal oversight is to protect the “trade secrets” of the chemical cocktails they’re using.
Four years ago fracking was exempted from federal regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act, following a corrupt report from the Bush-era EPA that found that “there is no risk of contamination of drinking water from fracturing, despite the fact that compounds have been found to contain toxic chemicals like benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene.” Since then, citizens near gas drilling operations have begun to find contaminated drinking water and toxic spills. Reports are coming out of companies illegally using diesel fuel when fracking near drinking-water aquifers.
Under new leadership, the EPA is just beginning to clean up its fracking corruption, having announced the initiation of a study of the safety of fracking last week. Several members of Congress, led by Sen. Robert Casey Jr. (D-PA), Reps. Diana DeGette (D-CO), Jared Polis (D-CO), and Maurice Hinchey (D-NY), are working to close the 2005 toxic disclosure loophole with new legislation.
Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman are attempting the herculanean task of drafting climate legislation that can be accepted by both Democrats and Republicans, industry and environmentalists. Although numerous compromises are worth making to reform the disastrous energy status quo, giving free rein for industry to poison Americans is not one of them.
Check out GasLand, a documentary on “the deep consequences of the United States’ natural gas drilling boom”:
To dismiss the implications of climate change based on an error about the rate at which Himalayan glaciers are melting is an act of astonishing intellectual legerdemain. Yet this is what some doubters of climate change are claiming. But the reality is that our understanding of climate change is based on a vast and remarkably sound body of science – and is something we distort and trivialise at our peril.
So writes IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri in a blunt article published by the Guardian Friday.
Given how much the IPCC and climate scientists have been attacked, much of it based on falsehoods and half-truths from the anti-science disinformers, I think it only fair to reprint his entire comments:
Per Matt Yglesias’s note that the “male-dominated nature of Wall Street is a source of dysfunction,” meet the Alliance for Energy and Economic Growth:
These fourteen men are the representatives of the Alliance for Energy and Economic Growth (AEEG) who are meeting with Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), and Sen. Lindsey Graham to negotiate the terms of comprehensive climate and clean energy legislation. The AEEG is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce-managed working group of the trade associations representing America’s carbon-pollution industries, founded in 2001. Five of these AEEG representatives sit on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Association Committee of 100, helping shape the organization’s policy.
Five of the groups are suing to block the Environmental Protection Agency’s scientific finding that greenhouse gases are harmful pollutants — the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Petroleum Institute, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Portland Cement Association, and the American Farm Bureau Federation. The American Petroleum Institute ran an astroturf campaign against the House climate legislation last year, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce called for a “Scopes monkey trial” on the science of climate change.
The least conservative of the industry lobbyists are Dave McCurdy of the Alliance of Auto Manufacturers, a former New Democrat congressman from Oklahoma (and Wonk Room guest blogger), and former general Evan Gaddis of the National Electric Manufacturers Association. Seven of the lobbyists were George W. Bush contributors, and two others — Erik Heilman and Rich Nolan — were Republican staffers. The overall political contributions of these fourteen men is whoppingly Republican, either as a direct contribution or funneled through conservative industry political action committees. They’ve donated $326,497 to Republican candidates compared to $100,346 to Democrats, more than a three-to-one ratio:
The Alliance for Energy and Economic Growth representatives meeting with Sen. Kerry, Graham, and Lieberman: Read more
First, of course, please vote in yet another Economist online poll with biased wording, “This house believes that innovation works best when government does least.”
Laser Guidance Adds Power to Wind Turbines
The wind industry may soon be dependent on a different kind of environmental awareness that has more to do with lasers than ecology.
A new laser system that can be mounted on wind turbines allows them to prepare for the wind rushing toward their blades.
In a new video, the University of Minnesota Institute on the Environment asks a critical question: “Have we pushed Earth past the tipping point?” Humanity developed civilization within a small zone of environmental conditions, but in the last century we have begun reshaping our planet, accelerating the process in recent years:
One of the single greatest concerns of climate scientists is that human-caused warming will cause amplifying feedbacks in the carbon-cycle. Such positive feedbacks, whereby an initial warming releases carbon into the air that causes more warming, would increase both the speed and scale of climate change, greatly complicating both mitigation and adaptation.
The most worrisome amplifying feedback is the defrosting of the tundra (see “Science stunner: Vast East Siberian Arctic Shelf methane stores destabilizing and venting). Another major, related feedback now appears to be soil respiration, whereby plants and microbes in the soil give off more carbon dioxide as the planet warms.
As Nature reports (article here, study here, subs. req’d), a review of 439 studies around the world — including 306 performed from 1989 to 2008 — found “soil respiration had increased by about 0.1% per year between 1989 and 2008, the span when soil measurement techniques had become standardized.” Physorg.com interviewed the lead author, who said bluntly:
In a new video, the University of Minnesota Institute on the Environment asks a critical question: “Have we pushed Earth past the tipping point?” Humanity developed civilization within a small zone of environmental conditions, but in the last century we have begun reshaping our planet, accelerating the process in recent years:
We’ve cleared, consumed and polluted our way across the globe. The planet is shrinking. Have we pushed Earth past the tipping point?
Watch the video:
Last September, a team of 28 scientists identified “10 separate biophysical systems crucial to humanity’s flourishing” and then determined “safe operating boundaries” for those systems within which humanity must remain if we wish to maintain the conditions in which it developed civilization. Unfortunately, anthropogenic interference with the climate system, the nitrogen cycle, and biodiversity is already past safe thresholds, with ocean acidification, ozone depletion, and other resource consumption at the door.
Watch a live broadcast of What We Know About Climate Change with Climate Crock of the Week’s Peter Sinclair at the new ClimateTV tonight at 9 PM EDT / 6 PM PDT.
The media stories have been sensational:
The anti-science crowd has been trumpeting the news, and Anthony Watts even claims credit for duping the Museum into thinking most of the viewers voting on its website were skeptics.
Sadly, the story turns out to be mostly true — and the fact that the exhibit is being funded by one of the biggest oil companies — Royal Dutch Shell — puts the credibility of the entire museum and its science staff on the line.
This cautionary tale story deserves to be told in full because scientists aren’t great at communicating to the public, and the media is doing an increasingly bad job, so science museums are — or were — one of the last vestiges where unadulterated science could be delivered to an interested public.
Let’s start with the “good news.” In a statement emailed to Climate Progress in response to a series of questions, the London Science Museum director, Dr. Chris Rapley, pushes back (somewhat) against recent media stories:
Yesterday I reported that tropical forest researcher Simon Lewis had filed a 31-page official complaint against the UK’s Sunday Times. He made a compelling case that Jonathan Leake’s January 31 story “UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim” was “inaccurate, misleading and distorted.”
Now he has sent me an audio file taken from a message left on his answering machine by the Sunday Times. He also sent a statement explaining why that message is “odd,” and why he rejects their offer to finally publish his letter.
Edited by Joe Romm, we cover climate science, solutions and politics. Columnist Tom Friedman calls us "the indispensable blog" and Time magazine named us one of the 25 "Best Blogs of 2010." Newcomers, start here.
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga.
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