The story of a sitting governor of a state with a history of presidential election shenanigans knowingly purging his own, eligible constituents from the voter rolls is the definition of major news, and yet remarkably, in the first five months of the year, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today have published a total of zero articles about Scott’s actions. The New York Times did slightly better, printing one story on page 16 of the Friday, May 18th edition. The article ran under the credulous headline: “Florida Steps Up Effort Against Illegal Voters.”

Florida’s local newspapers, led by The Miami Herald, have been far more diligent in reporting the governor’s effort to disenfranchise eligible voters. While it may be easy to dismiss this as local fare, the implications of Scott’s purge could potentially swing the presidential election come November. Remember, months before anyone had ever heard of hanging chads, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris (R) conducted a similar cleansing of the voter rolls in 2000, which resulted in thousands of eligible voters being knocked off the rolls in time for the infamous Gore v. Bush election.

‘The Great Big Book of Horrible Things’: WWII and Climate Change

What our great failure in the 1930s may teach about facing the rapid assault of manmade global warming  (Or “Hell is the truth seen too late.”)

Dresden (Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

It is the continuation of an essay he wrote about last week, which I blogged about here: “ ‘Hug The Monster’: Why So Many Climate Scientists Have Stopped Downplaying the Climate Threat.”

Blakemore cites the great quote from 18th century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, “Hell is truth seen too late.” Since I wrote a book on climate a few years back, Hell and High Water, that quote seems particularly apt to me for climate.

Blakemore’s piece starts by looking at The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History’s 100 Worst Atrocities by Matthew White, noting:

The world’s climate scientists are in effect telling us that one part of the truth we must now try to see is humanity’s ability — or lack of it — for collective prevention of enormous manmade disaster, atrocity.

The record is worrisome.

He then examines humanity’s problematic track record of not preventing catastrophes even when many powerful people were aware of what was happening or about to happen, including the great atrocities of World War II. And no, there is no direct analogy being made (see “Climate Science Disinformers Are Nothing Like Holocaust Deniers“).

Blakemore cites a presentation by Harvard historian and social anthropologist Timothy Weiskel — a colleague of mine 20 years ago at the Rockefeller Foundation. Weiskel in turn cites John F. Kennedy’s 1940s book, Why England Slept (a title JFK ‘borrowed’ from Churchill’s 1938 book, though JFK’s book was originally his senior thesis at Harvard titled, Appeasement in Munich):

“To say that all the blame must rest on the shoulders of Neville Chamberlain or of Stanly Baldwin, is to overlook the obvious.  As the leaders, they are, of course, gravely and seriously responsible.  But, given the conditions of democratic government, a free press, public elections, and a cabinet responsible to Parliament and thus to the people, given rule by the majority, it is unreasonable to blame the entire situation on one man or group…”

Blakemore notes, “But this time, say today’s climate scientists, the rapidly approaching climate catastrophe threatens to kill far more people than all of White’s 100 Deadliest atrocities combined.”

There is little question that if we continue to listen to the disinformers and the do-little crowd, we are very likely headed toward global warming in excess of 10°F, as the International Energy Agency and many others have made clear. That will destroy a livable climate (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces“).

Indeed, that is “incompatible with organized global community, is likely to be beyond ‘adaptation’, is devastating to the majority of ecosystems & has a high probability of not being stable (i.e.  4°C [7F] would be an interim temperature on the way to a much higher equilibrium level),” according to Professor Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change in Britain (see here).

Blakemore points out that a great many scientists are worried that this would lead to a staggering amount of misery and starvation:

The Rapidly Approaching Climate Catastrophe

… Estimates heard in private conversations with scientists and economists reach even into the billions of people who could perish well within this century if the warming is not somehow controlled.

This reporter has heard figures in measured conversation, for example, such as this: If humanity does not now manage somehow to drastically cut carbon emissions so that the global temperature levels off at around 2 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial times, but reaches instead 4 degrees centigrade, it could mean some 4 billion people dying within this century because the world couldn’t grow enough food in such heat and the drought it will bring — rice harvests, for one, would be decimated.

And remember, we’re on track to blow past 4C (7F), possibly even this century:

Humanity’s Choice (via M.I.T.):  Inaction (“No Policy”) eliminates most of the uncertainty about whether or not future warming will be catastrophic.  Aggressive emissions reductions dramatically improves humanity’s chances.

Steve Easterbrook’s post “A first glimpse at model results for the next IPCC assessment” shows that for the scenario where there is 9°F warming by 2100, you get another 7°F warming by 2300.  Of course, folks that aren’t motivated to avoid the civilization-destroying 9°F by 2100 won’t be moved by whatever happens after that.

I do know some experts who think that a great many people will die if we are so self-destructive as to keep near the worst-case emissions scenario — even if the carbon cycle feedbacks and soil moisture projections are merely in the middle of their projected range (see “James Hansen Is Correct About Catastrophic Projections For U.S. Drought If We Don’t Act Now“).

But it’s not what I think is going to happen. I actually believe that even if we do let the disinformers sucker us into another decade of delay, we are still going to get WWII-scale serious about climate sometime in the 2020s and avert the worst-case scenarios — even if the feedbacks really start to kick in.

I also believe that if the bad-case scenarios kick in post-2040, the world is going to reorganize much of its activity to prevent billions of people from dying. Oh, yes, billions of people are going to needlessly suffer a great deal if the deniers triumph, but stopping billions from starving to death this century will be well within our capability even if we ruin a livable climate.

We waste over 1/3 of our food globally, and the U.S. burns 1/6 of the world’s corn crop in its vehicles. Oh, and then there is the use of staggering amounts of grain for meat. We could feed the world on under half the acreage we use today.

Now that doesn’t mean we will definitely do what is needed, of course, but I remain an optimist in this regard. Still, if we blow past 3C, and then 4C, then unimaginable catastrophe is unavoidable.

Blakemore ends:

What if we don’t try to report or explain the full scale and challenge of the climate problem?… just as a number of professionals in the 1930s apparently didn’t with the challenge they faced.

Knowing the general size of the problem, painful or frightening as it may be, would seem clearly necessary for any professional journalist or government leader trying to report on or assess the chances of any realistic hope we think we may glimpse amid all the bad news.

It would obviously help us get our minds around it, at least.

And that’s a beginning.

To be continued…

Hear! Hear!

It’s not too late for the truth, not too late to avoid Hell and High Water.

Related Posts:

• The Myth of ‘Constant Repetition of Doomsday Messages’ on Climate
• A Critique Of The Broken-Record Counterfactual Message of The New York Times On Environmentalists and Scientists
• Network News Coverage of Climate Change Collapsed in 2011

A ThinkProgress analysis of cable news coverage of the Biden story from Monday at 6:00 AM to 11:59 PM using TV Eyes shows that while MSNBC ran the most segments with the word “marriage,” conservative firebrand Fox News also devoted substantial airtime to the story. Almost without exception, the coverage criticized the administration for obfuscating on the issue without challenging Biden’s support for same-sex marriage or debating the policy merits of the issue.

Even Fox News — which ran the only segment in which a guest claimed that marriage equality would lead to a nation where “one person can marry 3 people” — focused on the politics of the debate and avoided labeling Biden or other Democrats who have embraced same-sex marriage as extremists. The network typically eschews LGBT-friendly stories altogether:

The tenor of the conversation is in sharp contrast to the hysterical and often times offensive remarks made about gay people during the 2004 election — when the Bush campaign sought to employ marriage is a way to rally its conservative electoral base — and may reflect the popular shift towards equality.

For instance, a recent survey from Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that support for marriage equality has increased substantially since 2004, with 47 percent of Americans now favoring same-sex marriage — up from 31 percent in 2004. Pew also found that for the first time, “there is as much strong support as strong opposition to gay marriage. In the current survey, 22 percent say they strongly support allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally; an identical percentage (22 percent) strongly opposes gay marriage. In 2008, there was about twice as much strong opposition to as strong support for gay marriage (30 percent vs. 14 percent).”

This growing public sentiment for the freedom to marry, the burgeoning political support for the issue, and the tepid tone of the media conversation all reinforce the notion that the freedom to marry has become a mainstream political position that — while still rife with political pitfalls among some constituents — is now treated as a legitimate establishment view.

‘Hug the Monster’ for Realistic Hope in Global Warming (or How to Transform Your Fearful Inner Climate).

He offers advice to journalists in covering climate change — and advice to the rest of us in a world captured by denial.

The piece helps dispel the myth that climate scientists have long been overhyping climate impacts — when everyone who actually follows climate science and talks to any significant number of climate scientists knows that the reverse is true. As Blakemore writes:

Established scientists, community and government leaders and journalists, as they describe the disruptions, suffering and destruction that manmade global warming is already producing, with far worse in the offing if humanity doesn’t somehow control it, are starting to allow themselves publicly to use terms like “calamity,” “catastrophe”, and “risk to the collective civilization”….

A few years ago, this reporter heard a prominent climate and environment scientist speaking at a large but off-the-record conference of experts and policy makers from around the world who had gathered at Harvard University’s Kennedy School….

He told us that he and most other climate scientists often simply didn’t want to speak openly about what they were learning about how disruptive and frightening the changes of manmade global warming were clearly going to be for “fear of paralyzing the public.”

That speaker now has an influential job in the Obama administration.

Climate scientists have been consistently downplaying and underestimating the risks for three main reasons. First, their models tended to ignore the  myriad amplifying carbon cycle feedbacks that we now know are kicking in (such as the defrosting tundra).

Second, they never imagined that the nations of the world would completely ignore their warnings, that we would knowingly choose catastrophe. So until recently they hardly ever seriously considered or modeled the do-nothing scenario, which is a tripling (820 ppm) or quadrupling (1100 ppm) of preindustrial levels of carbon dioxide over the next hundred years or so. In the last 2 or 3 years, however, the literature in this area has exploded and the picture it paints is not pretty (see “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces“).

Third, as Blakemore (and others) have noted, the overwhelming majority of climate scientists are generally reticent and cautious in stating results — all the more so in this case out of the mistaken fear that an accurate diagnosis would somehow make action less likely. Yes, it’d be like a doctor telling a two-pack-a-day patient with early-stage emphysema that their cough is really not that big a deal, but would they please quit smoking anyway. We live in a world, however, where anyone who tries to explain what the science suggests is likely to happen if we keep doing nothing is attacked as an alarmist by conservatives, disinformers, and their enablers in the media.

Back in 2005, the physicist Mark Bowen wrote about glaciologist Lonnie Thompson: “Scientists have an annoying habit of backing off when they’re asked to make a plain statement, and climatologists tend to be worse than most.”

The good news, if you can call it that, is that the climate situation has become so dire that even the most reticent climatologists are starting to speak more bluntly. By the end of 2010, Thompson was writing:

Climatologists, like other scientists, tend to be a stolid group. We are not given to theatrical rantings about falling skies. Most of us are far more comfortable in our laboratories or gathering data in the field than we are giving interviews to journalists or speaking before Congressional committees. Why then are climatologists speaking out about the dangers of global warming? The answer is that virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization.

Blakemore points out some other climate scientists who are starting to speak out:

A few days ago in the New York Times, a thoroughgoing front page article about global warming quoted a range of scientists on the overall effect of the global upheavals that can be expected from manmade global warming. Here are three excerpts — bolded highlights mine:

• “‘The big damages come if the climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases turns out to be high,’ said Raymond T. Pierre-humbert, a climate scientist at the University of Chicago. ‘Then it’s not a bullet headed at us, but a thermonuclear warhead.’” (Recent scientific studies report the climate’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases is proving to be higher than expected.)
• “Ultimately, as the climate continues warming and more data accumulate, it will become obvious how clouds are reacting. But that could take decades, scientists say, and if the answer turns out to be that catastrophe looms, it would most likely be too late.”
• “‘Even if there were no political implications, it just seems deeply unprofessional and irresponsible to look at this and say, “We’re sure it’s not a problem,” ‘ said Kerry A. Emanuel, another M.I.T. scientist. ‘It’s a special kind of risk, because it’s a risk to the collective civilization.’“

‘A Risk to the Collective (Global) Civilization’

Global warming’s “risk to the collective civilization” (meaning global civilization) has been continually spoken of in secret or unofficial or private conversations among engaged climate scientists and government and policy leaders around the world.

Such terms — catastrophe, threat to civilization itself — have been commonplace in carefully worded private discussions among peer-reviewed experts that this reporter and other journalists have often experienced and sometimes engaged in.

I heard that from many, many  climate scientists in private as far back as 2005 and 2006, which is why I titled my book, Hell and High Water. Other journalists heard the same, which is why, for instance, Elizabeth Kolbert wrote at the time:

“It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.”

So what does Blakemore mean by “Hug the Monster,” by his ”Metaphor to Change Fear Into Action and Extinguish the Panic and Despair so Deadly in a Great Crisis”? He explains:

“Hug the monster” is a metaphor taught by U.S. Air Force trainers to those headed into harm’s way.

The monster is your fear in a sudden crisis — as when you find yourself trapped in a downed plane or a burning house.

If you freeze or panic — if you go into merely reactive “brainlock” — you’re lost.

But if your mind has been prepared in advance to recognize the psychological grip of fear, focus on it, and then transform its intense energy into action — sometimes even by changing it into anger — and by also engaging the thinking part of your brain to work the problem, your chances of survival go way up.

Around the world, a growing number of people are showing signs of hugging the monster of what the world’s experts have plainly shown to be a great crisis facing us all….

Sooner or later, everyone who learns about the rapid advance of manmade global warming must deal with the question of fear.

What to do about this fear?

Blakemore quotes from “Hug the Monster: How Fear Can Save Your Life,” the title of a chapter in The Survivor’s Club: The Secrets and Science that Could Save Your Life, a book written by ABC’s Ben Sherwood before he became president of ABC News:

Nowhere in the book does Sherwood mention climate change, but here’s a passage from the end of that chapter that struck this reporter for its relevance to the increasingly public questions about how our global civilization will deal with the advance of global warming:

Fear as a Security System — When Properly Used (Air Force Mantra)

“Without a doubt, fear is the most ancient, efficient, and effective security system in the world. Over many thousands of years, our magnificently wired brains have sensed, reacted, and then acted upon every imaginable threat. Practically speaking, when you manage fear, your chances improve in almost every situation. But if your alarms go haywire, your odds plummet.”

He concludes:

“For survival then, here’s the bottom line. If you’re scared out of your mind, try to remember this Air Force mantra: Hug The monster. Wrap your arms around fear, wrestle it under control, and turn it into a driving force in your plan of attack. ‘Survival is not about bravery and heroics,’ award-winning journalist Laurence Gonzales writes in his superb book Deep Survival. ‘Survivors aren’t fearless. They use fear: They turn it into anger and focus.’ The good news is that you can learn to subdue the monster and extinguish some of the clanging bells. The more you practice, the easier it becomes. Indeed, with enough hugs, you can even tame the beast and turn him into your best friend and most dependable ally.”

And here is Blakemore’s advice for journalists covering this most important of stories:

As a growing number of professional journalists around the world are finding, the story of manmade global warming (and the other evil twin of excess carbon emissions, the rapid acidification of the oceans) is unprecedented in its scale, almost “too big to cover,” and frightening.

But there are now signs that, little by little, voices and personalities are beginning to emerge around the world who are starting to hug this monster, manage the fear, and turning the emotions it causes into action.

For us journalists, the core responsibilities of our profession include knowing how to report unpleasant but important facts — and to do so in ways that nonetheless engage groups small and large, even in a sense “entertain” them, as in entertaining the mind, and to try to win their tacit appreciation for doing so.

Obviously, when the news is horrendous, such as, say, a looming world war or the rapid climb in global temperature and ocean acidification, our job includes the very essence of what it means to hug the monster.

But as this reporter and a growing number of others now working the story can report, once we do so, manmade global warming transforms into “a great story” (in our profession’s term of art) — and even one in which it is possible to glimpse a number of reasons for “realistic hope.”

To be continued….

I look forward to Blakemore’s further writing on climate change, a subject that — considering its likely impact on humanit – has been woefully neglected by most of his fellow journalists.

Note:  Michael Tobis (and Stephen Ban) gave us the top figure. It is probably time to update that chart, since our inaction has shifted “most informed opinion” to overlap almost exactly with “Considered Unreasonable: Not reported.”

Related Posts:

• The Myth of ‘Constant Repetition of Doomsday Messages’ on Climate
• IEA: World on Pace for 11°F Warming, “Even School Children Know This Will Have Catastrophic Implications for All of Us“
• Network News Coverage of Climate Change Collapsed in 2011

Now, I get that the list is supposed to be funny. The article has a subhead that signals that intent loud and clear: “By use of deductive reasoning, I have concluded that Asians are the superior race. This is scientific proof.” But as with the awful Ashton Kutcher PopChips ad we discussed earlier today, in which the actor appears in brownface to play a stereotypical Indian single man, this is an attempt at humor that has nothing to say about race, or about racists, and elicits nary a chuckle.

It might be one thing if the list was full of stereotypes or things that were so blatantly untrue that the article was an attempt to parody ridiculous things racist people believe about Asians. Instead, it’s a recitation of common-to-the-point of boring statements: everything is cuter! they’re weird in ways that white folks find laughable but not contemptible! they’re a source of memes for Western audiences! This isn’t a parody of a mindset: it’s an investment in it. (Also, the piece seems to believe that, a single banh mi reference aside, “Asian” mostly means Chinese and Japanese.) This isn’t actually a list about the superiority of any given Asian country or any given Asian culture. It’s not a Tiger Mother argument. It’s about the fact that white people find some cultural practices that originate in Asian countries more entertaining to consume than, say, the sight of middle-aged dudes in Lederhosen. It’s a joke about superiority that ends up reinforcing a sense that people from Asian countries are inferior, that these cultural practices are worthy objects only of amusement rather than actual interaction.

What worked about BuzzFeed’s lists of Tweets and comments is that they were intended to spotlight the ridiculousness of racist and homphobic statements. Somewhere along BuzzFeed’s edit chain, that purpose seems to have gotten lost, while the form and subject matter stayed on. Style and subject tend to drive traffic. But purpose ought to determine what’s worth publishing, and which pitches are worth rejecting as fast as possible. Especially when the evidence is clear that you can garner as many clicks and as much attention for doing something worthwhile as for ginning up controversy.

by Brad Johnson

When the Discovery Channel aired “On Thin Ice,” its Frozen Planet episode documenting changes in the Arctic, it conveniently left out human causes. The show’s producer told the New York Times she didn’t want people saying “don’t watch this show because it has a slant on climate change” – illustrating everything wrong with the conversation around climate change in America. This afternoon, I and other members of Forecast the Facts delivered a petition to the Discovery offices with 10,000 signatures demanding the organization correct this unscientific self-censorship:

We are deeply disappointed by your decision not to explain the science, and human causes, of global warming in the “On Thin Ice” episode of the Frozen Planet series. As the world’s leader in environmental programming, your decision sends a dangerous message to media companies around the world — that it is better to censor yourself than risk criticism by global warming deniers. We call on you to immediately acknowledge this error and to conduct a review of all Discovery programming decisions to ensure no such self-censorship happens again.

As I and other members of Forecast the Facts, scientists Steve Scolnik and Clarence Maloney, entered the Discovery headquarters in Silver Spring, MD, we were greeted by a security officer in the vestibule. Corporate Security Manager David Sterner told us that no-one in communications, production, or viewer relations was or would be available to accept the petition, nor were we welcome even into the main lobby. However, he did personally guarantee that the 10,000 signatures and the letter addressed to Discovery chairman John Hendricks would be delivered on our behalf.

It is an essential fact that burning fossil fuels is the cause of the melting poles. As Bill McKibben noted, “On Thin Ice” is no different than a documentary on the ravages of lung cancer that censored mention of cigarettes. The pursuit of profit is not a valid excuse for the censorship of science. Neither is the fear of reprisal from well funded polluters.

Faced with a gross failure of leadership on climate pollution by those in power, average citizens are mobilizing to demand honesty and action. But they’re not the only ones. Today also marks the start of the inaugural science policy conference of the American Geophysical Union, a response by the leading organization of earth scientists to the increasing disconnect between the facts of science and the decisions made by politicians and corporations. The central topic of today’s sessions? The rapidly changing Arctic.

Brad Johnson is campaign manager for Forecast the Facts.

To add your voice to the petition calling on Discovery Communications to stop the self-censorship of climate science, click here.

The New York Times keeps running opinion pieces and analyses that misstate the positions of the major environmental groups and even leading scientists.

A classic example is the Dot Earth post from Friday headlined, “A Critique of the Broken-Record Message of ‘Green Traditionalists’.” I will show that this critique is pure bunk. Indeed, this critique isn’t merely untrue, it is the exact opposite of the truth.

Amazingly, we will even see that the critique contains an utterly false attack on “a bunch of scientists” who just published a major report. But people just don’t click on links, I guess.

The New York Times post begins by stating that Keith Kloor “has an essay posted on Discover, titled ‘The Limits to Environmentalism,’ that is well worth reading.” The NY Times then reposts this introduction with a link to the rest:

If you were cryogenically frozen in the early 1970s, like Woody Allen was in Sleeper, and brought back to life today, you would obviously find much changed about the world.

Except environmentalism and its underlying precepts. That would be a familiar and quaint relic. You would wake up from your Rip Van Winkle period and everything around you would be different, except the green movement. It’s still anti-nuclear, anti-technology, anti-industrial civilization. It still talks in mushy metaphors from the Aquarius age, cooing over Mother Earth and the Balance of Nature. And most of all, environmentalists are still acting like Old Testament prophets, warning of a plague of environmental ills about to rain down on humanity.

For example, you may have heard that a bunch of scientists produced a landmark report that concludes the earth is destined for ecological collapse, unless global population and consumption rates are restrained. No, I’m not talking about the UK’s just-published Royal Society report, which, among other things, recommends that developed countries put a brake on economic growth. I’m talking about that other landmark report from 1972, the one that became a totem of the environmental movement. [Read the rest.]

No and no.

This analysis, which would have been relevant 20 years ago, is simply the opposite of the truth today.

Indeed, anyone who follows the history of the environmental movement knows that the most serious complaint offered against it these days is that it has become too corporatist and too focused on the techno-fix. I’m not saying I agree with that critique 100%, but it has far more truth to it than this critique.

If you look at the major environmental groups — the ones with the power and money that this analysis purports to be about — they all work closely with industrial corporations, generally take lots of industry money, and they aggressively supported a climate bill that was absurdly pro-technology and pro-industry, that was business friendly and market oriented.

The climate bill was entirely about pushing any low carbon technology into the marketplace — including nuclear power. The bill had staggeringly generous subsidies for pretty much every industry, including many billions for the coal industry to help it develop technology to save its ass.

And the broken-record New York Times simply seems unable to acknowledge that the tens of millions of dollars spent to promote the climate bill was done by focusing on the pro-technology message and utterly downplaying the threat of climate change. The primary focus of the messaging was on clean energy jobs, along with energy security and the threat of international competition — industrial competition.

While the NY Times is oblivious to this, it did not escape the attention of the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, who wrote about it in his 2010 article, “Can you solve global warming without talking about global warming?”

This notion that the environmental movement — or any other major play in the media landscape — is pushing non-stop apocalyptic messages like a broken record is one I debunked in this post “Apocalypse Not: The Oscars, The Media And The Myth of ‘Constant Repetition of Doomsday Messages’ on Climate” (excerpted at the end).

To see what message they are pushing, please visit the front page of the websites of The Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council — and of the enviro groups with the really big revenues — the World Wildlife Fund, and National Wildlife Federation, National Audobon Society, the Nature Conservancy. Apocalypse not!

UPDATE: Dr. Robert J. Brulle of Drexel University, author of two books and some 20 refereed articles on the U.S. environmental movement – whom the NY Times has called “an expert on environmental communications” — emailed me after reading my post:

This opinion piece by Mr. Kloor and Mr. Revkin is, generously speaking, highly problematic. It ignores a vast amount of scholarship on the environmental movement. It seems very difficult to me to understand how Mr. Revkin can maintain his argument that his opinion blog is “science based”and run something like this. There is apparently a double standard in operation, where the physical sciences are taken into account, but the social sciences are not. I would expect more fidelity to the empirical research on this topic from the NY Times. Perhaps a good start on becoming conversant with this material might be the books of two previous NY Times environmental reporters –Mark Dowie’s Losing Ground and Philip Shabecoff’s A Fierce Green Fire.

As an aside, the notion that being anti-nuclear is somehow a litmus test for proving environmental groups are “Green Traditionalists” stuck in the 1970s is particularly absurd.  The Economist just published a 14-page report, “Nuclear energy: The dream that failed, A year after Fukushima, the future for nuclear power is not bright—for reasons of cost as much as safety.” Is there a more pro-corporation, pro-technology mainstream global publication than The Economist?

And then we come to the utter misrepresentation of the “just-published Royal Society report,” People and the Planet. Reading the NY Times, you’d get the impression that this is somehow a doom and gloom report about how “the earth is destined for ecological collapse” if we don’t reverse course. And you’d also believe that a “bunch of scientists” have written a jeremiad that “recommends that developed countries put a brake on economic growth.”

Not. And not.

Anyone who knows the Royal Society – the UK’s national academy of science, founded in 1660 — knows that like most big scientific bodies, it tends to be pretty staid and conservative. The Royal Society’s motto is apt:  Nullius in verba — Latin for “On the words of no one” or “take nobody’s word for it.”  It is “an expression of its enduring commitment to empirical evidence as the basis of knowledge about the natural world.”

So when someone attacks the Royal Society scientists, it’s a pretty good idea not to take their word for it. And in fact the report is pretty darn mild given the dire nature of our situation. More important, it most certainly does not recommend developed countries put a brake on economic growth.

If you go to the link the New York Times provided, here’s what the Royal Society has to say about our situation:

This project was a major study investigating the links between global population and consumption, and the implications for a finite planet.

The final report People and the Planet was published on 26 April 2012.

Rapid and widespread changes in the world’s human population, coupled with unprecedented levels of consumption present profound challenges to human health and wellbeing, and the natural environment.

The combination of these factors is likely to have far reaching and long-lasting consequences for our finite planet and will impact on future generations as well as our own. These impacts raise serious concerns and challenge us to consider the relationship between people and the planet. It is not surprising then, that debates about population have tended to inspire controversy.

This report is offered, not as a definitive statement on these complex topics, but as an overview of the impacts of human population and consumption on the planet. It raises questions about how best to seize the opportunities that changes in population could bring – and how to avoid the most harmful impacts.

This is about as alarmist as a clock radio set to Muzak.

“Profound challenges” and “far reaching and long-lasting consequences.” Yeah, that is stuff right out of Old Testament prophets.

You can go to the overview page, still no Apocalypse. Go to the Executive Summary, still no Apocalypse. Read the full report — but only if you want a relatively straightforward discussion of the demographic challenge we face discussed in non-apocalyptic terms.

But what about the claim the report demands the developed countries stop growth?

Here are the key recommendations:

1. The international community must bring the 1.3 billion people living on less than $1.25 per day out of absolute poverty, and reduce the inequality that persists in the world today. This will require focused efforts in key policy areas including economic development, education, family planning and health.
2. The most developed and the emerging economies must stabilise and then reduce material consumption levels through: dramatic improvements in resource use efficiency, including: reducing waste; investment in sustainable resources, technologies and infrastructures; and systematically decoupling economic activity from environmental impact.
3. Reproductive health and voluntary family planning programmes urgently require political leadership and financial commitment, both nationally and internationally. This is needed to continue the downward trajectory of fertility rates, especially in countries where the unmet need for contraception is high.
4. Population and the environment should not be considered as two separate issues. Demographic changes, and the influences on them, should be factored into economic and environmental debate and planning at international meetings, such as the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development and subsequent meetings.

Yes, the developed countries must stabilize and then reduce material consumption — through investments in technologies that allow us to “systematically decouple economic activity from environmental impact.”

Not exactly a hair shirt.

To be clear, the Royal Society is arguing for policies that allow the economy to keep growing but without environmentally damaging consumption — using a technology-based strategy.

Seriously, who could possibly object to these recommendations — except perhaps someone who doesn’t think we have to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at levels that would avoid, say,  4°C or higher warming? Of course, the New York Times opinion writer steadfastly refuses to explain where he thinks we need to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions, but even so, what is the objection to these recommendations?

Ironically, this NYT opinion writer is rather famous for arguing that population ought to  be part of the discussion of how we respond to climate change. But now he is praising a critique that dismisses a report that advances a rather sensible, science-based approach to thinking about the issue (not that this report focuses on climate — it does not).

The report itself is quite pro-technology and in the full report it states again as a main finding:

A priority for the most developed and the emerging economies must be to stabilise, and eventually reduce, material consumption and to adopt sustainable technologies.

The entire dichotomy put forward by the New York Times and the critique it cites is simply an oversimplistic conterfactual. The critique puts it this way:

The way I see it, [Gus] Speth is a green traditionalist, the kind who demonizes economic growth based on faulty reasoning and perhaps an ideology that associates growth with environmental plunder. [Robert] Reich is a green modernist (though I’m not sure he’d call himself a green), the kind who recognizes that irresponsible resource extraction “isn’t an indictment of growth itself. Growth doesn’t depend on plunder. Rich nations have the capacity to extract resources responsibly.”

The thing is, the scientific and economic literature says we can avert catastrophic climate change while continuing to grow. Now, not everyone buys that, for sure, and you certainly will find pockets of anti-technology people in the environmental community (and elsewhere). But in its definitive 2007 synthesis report of the scientific and economic literature, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded:

In 2050, global average macro-economic costs for mitigation towards stabilisation between 710 and 445ppm CO2-eq are between a 1% gain and 5.5% decrease of global GDP. This corresponds to slowing average annual global GDP growth by less than 0.12 percentage points.

Not exactly a braking of growth — more like the regenerative braking you experience in a good hybrid vehicle. Overall GDP would continue its steady march year after year.

I myself probably have written as much as anybody on the dangers of  unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions, which would supposedly make me a “green traditionalist” (see An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces).  But I have also written as much as anyone on how a technology-based strategy (including nuclear) can avert the worst case (see The full global warming solution: How the world can stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm), which would supposedly make me a “green modernist.”

But that supposes these distinctions have any reality in this world. They don’t.

As but one example, a major source of this phony distinction is, of course, The Breakthrough Institute, which you can tell by reading the links in the original critique. But BTI opposed the climate bill! Why? It supposedly had too many industry-friendly components. So the alleged green traditionalists supported a technology- and industry-friendly bill (without pushing a climate message) while the alleged green modernists opposed it!

Finally, this notion that there is a broken-record message from “green traditionalists” at a national level has become, well, a broken record.  It simply isn’t true.

To repeat what I wrote in February on Oscar night, Here are the key points about what repeated messages the American public is exposed to:

1. The broad American public is exposed to virtually no doomsday messages, let alone constant ones, on climate change in popular culture (TV and the movies and even online). There is not one single TV show on any network devoted to this subject, which is, arguably, more consequential than any other preventable issue we face.
2. The same goes for the news media, whose coverage of climate change has collapsed (see “Network News Coverage of Climate Change Collapsed in 2011“). When the media do cover climate change in recent years, the overwhelming majority of coverage is devoid of any doomsday messages — and many outlets still feature hard-core deniers. Just imagine what the public’s view of climate would be if it got the same coverage as, say, unemployment, the housing crisis or even the deficit? When was the last time you saw an “employment denier” quoted on TV or in a newspaper?
3. The public is exposed to constant messages promoting business as usual and indeed idolizing conspicuous consumption. See, for instance, “Breaking: The earth is breaking … but how about that Royal Wedding?
4. Our political elite and intelligentsia, including MSM pundits and the supposedly “liberal media” like, say, MSNBC, hardly even talk about climate change and when they do, it isn’t doomsday. Indeed, there isn’t even a single national columnist for a major media outlet who writes primarily on climate. Most “liberal” columnists rarely mention it.
5. At least a quarter of the public chooses media that devote a vast amount of time to the notion that global warming is a hoax and that environmentalists are extremists and that clean energy is a joke. In the MSM, conservative pundits routinely trash climate science and mock clean energy. Just listen to, say, Joe Scarborough on MSNBC’s Morning Joe mock clean energy sometime.
6. The major energy companies bombard the airwaves with millions and millions of dollars of repetitious pro-fossil-fuel ads. The environmentalists spend far, far less money. As noted above, the one time they did run a major campaign to push a climate bill, they and their political allies including the president explicitly did NOT talk much about climate change, particularly doomsday messaging
7. Environmentalists when they do appear in popular culture, especially TV, are routinely mocked.
8. There is very little mass communication of doomsday messages online. Check out the most popular websites. General silence on the subject, and again, what coverage there is ain’t doomsday messaging. Go to the front page of the (moderately trafficked) environmental websites. Where is the doomsday?

The New York Times should stop pushing this myth.

Derbyshire got himself in trouble first after he wrote an astonishingly racist column for Taki Magazine (about which more in a moment) about telling his children to avoid black people as if that was some sort of sensible safety guide. He presented the piece as if he was speaking difficult truths that others dare not speak, a common framing tactic of racists who like to believe that their biases are grounded in scientific evidence and want to use that delusion to attach legitimacy and a claim of the moral high ground to their bigotry. After several days of controversy, National Review, which had previously tended to turn a blind eye to or to edit down Derbyshire’s more appalling proclivities, fired him.

Lesley Arfin seems to have been less commonly-understood to be a racist until, in response to charges that the show for which she works, Girls, is strangely white for a story set in Brooklyn, she tweeted “What really bothered me most about Precious was that there was no representation of ME.” She subsequently added and scrubbed an apology. And evidence has quickly emerged that the tweet was hardly an isolated, insensitive mistake. Arfin is apparently the kind of person who thinks it’s clever to compare President Obama’s skin color to shit, or to say in an interview that the word “nigger” is the one that makes her feel proud to be a writer. Elspeth Reeve, in an elegant piece at The Atlantic Wire, suggested that Arfin’s comments spring from a common well, that this is “where this vein of hipster racism starts. It tests the idea that anything wrapped with enough irony can be transformed into something else. The more uncool the raw materials are—trucker hats, ugly T-shirts, mustaches, smoking crack—the better the trick.”

That’s true to a certain extent. But while there’s no inherent cultural capital in trucker hats or mustaches, there is a strong, if narrow thread of thought that is interested in making sure that racism stays nominally acceptable, and not because it demonstrates the ability of those thinkers to turn something ridiculous into a trend. Much in the same way that John Derbyshire peppered spectacularly illogical racist advice to his children with links to anecdotal stories meant to gloss his nonsense with a scientific veneer, Gavin McInnes, the co-founder of Vice (and Taki Magazine columnist, it’s worth noting), responded to the criticism of Arfin’s behavior by suggesting that the people who were uncomfortable with Girls’ whiteness were deluded race-mongers desperate to turn a buck. “You can’t continue a mythical Cold War forever and it’s likely the days of randomly tarring and feathering people for ‘racism,’ real or imagined, are coming to a close,” he wrote in a post defending Arfin. “Not because it’s morally wrong, but because people are no longer buying it. And when people aren’t buying something, you can’t make money.” These two strains of thinking are complimentary and mutually reinforcing: people who see racism are deluded and have impure motives, while people who seek to assert racial difference are acting out of a disinterested commitment to scientific truth in the face of terrible opposition.

But there’s nothing brave or bold about clinging to racist ideas, to your supposed right to wound other people by being nasty and childishness. It’s the reverse, a desperate clinging to modes of thought that protected your own privilege and save you the inconvenience of having to engage with people in a way that might require compromise and growth. The immature and fearful people who huddle around the campfire of racism aren’t keeping a flame of secret knowledge alive. They’re hiding from a world they’re unable to cope with.

Headlines from across the country — like the following from the Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, and New York Times — were quick to paint a grim picture of the program’s future finances, noting that “painful” changes would need to be made to ensure its solvency beyond 2033:

The headlines and stories that follow create the illusion that Social Security is fast going broke, even though it is fully funded for another two decades and could pay 75 percent of its benefits thereafter (imagine the shock the media would display, meanwhile, if transportation, food stamps, or other programs had two decades of guaranteed funding).

They also ignore an easy way to ensure the program’s long-term solvency without large changes or cuts to benefits. Payroll taxes that finance Social Security are only collected on income up to a certain level ($110,100 in 2012), creating a regressive system that puts an undue burden on low- and middle-income workers. Eliminating that cap would allow Social Security to pay full benefits for the next 75 years, according to a Congressional Research Service report.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) introduced legislation that would raise the cap last year, but it has been ignored by Republicans and the media, who instead continue to feed the narrative that Social Security needs vast changes — including potential benefit cuts — to shore up its future. Americans of all political stripes oppose cuts to Social Security benefits, but as the Columbia Journalism Review noted earlier this month, media coverage has perpetuated the belief — particularly among young Americans — that Social Security is broken.

“The elite press repeatedly quotes the commentary of the devoted opponents of social insurance retirement programs,” Yale professor emeritus Theodore Marmor told CJR. “But they appear unaware of how they are supporting a strategic attack on social insurance that has been going on for years.”

Between June 2011 and February of this year, 70 percent of all one-on-one interviewees on the four biggest political talk shows — NBC’s Meet the Press, ABC’s This Week, CBS’s Face the Nation and Fox News Sunday — were Republicans. The numbers were even more lopsided in favor of men and white guests:

As FAIR notes, the bias in favor of Republicans is not entirely attributable to the presidential elections. While the lean towards the right is more pronounced than in years past thanks to the contentious Republican nomination contest, the heavy favor that Sunday show bookers have towards Republicans is not new. In 2004, a mirror image of 2012 in that Democrats were looking to unseat a Republican incumbent in the White House, Republicans still held a 57-43 percent edge in 2003, and a 56-44 percent advantage in 2004.

Compared to other metrics though, the imbalance of political ideology seems almost insignificant. Across all four shows over the eight month period, there were just 36 appearances by women during one-on-one interviews compared to 228 men. And of those 36, 17 were Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN). Meanwhile, there 242 appearances by white guests, compared to just 15 by African-Americans (seven of those being Hermain Cain), four by Arab-Americans, and three by Latinos.

Indeed, as the report notes, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has said that it would take about three years for Iran to have a deliverable nuclear weapon should it make the decision to embark on a nuclear weapons program (the IAEA and U.S. and Israeli intelligence all agree that Iran has not made this decision). Moreover, Ahmadinejad is irrelevant to that decision. As the Associated Press noted in a report on an Iran intelligence assessment, it is Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei “whose word is final on nuclear and other issues.”

Media Matters charted the results of the study:

Indeed, it seems that American media outlets haven’t learned much from the collective reporting failure (with a few exceptions) on Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction program in the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

But at least some news organizations are taking notice. The ombudsmen of four major news organizations have criticized their own reporting for conflating Iran’s nuclear program and an alleged Iranian nuclear weapons program.

Moreover, the New York Times — which contributed its fair share of factually inaccurate reporting in the pre-Iraq war days — recently observed of the current media landscape surrounding Iran’s nuclear program: “Echoes of the period leading up to the Iraq war in 2003 are unmistakable, igniting a familiar debate over whether journalists are overstating Iran’s progress toward a bomb.”

A USA Today editorial last month made the case very plainly. “What’s remarkable,” USA Today wrote on March 5, “is that war [with Iran] is drawing so close with so little public discussion of the consequences.”

A potential Iranian nuclear weapon is widely considered a threat to both the security of the U.S. and its allies in the region, and the nuclear non-proliferation regime — though, as noted above, U.S. and Israeli intelligence have not concluded that Iran has made a decision to pursue a weapon. The Obama administration vows to keep “all options on the table” to deal with the possibility, but the efficacy and consequences of a strike raise serious questions, leading the U.S. to pursue, for the meantime, a pressure track aimed at a negotiated resolution of the Iranian nuclear crisis.

by Joceyln Fong and Jill Fitzsimmons, via Media Matters

A Media Matters analysis finds that news coverage of climate change on ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX has dropped significantly since 2009. In 2011, these networks spent more than twice as much time discussing Donald Trump as climate change.

The New York Post ran one photo on its front page under the banner headline “Swillary,” apparently upset that she imbibes the same liquid as much of the rest of humanity.

But perhaps the best reaction to the shocking news that Hillary Clinton can have a good time goes to Nile Gardiner from the Heritage Foundation, who appeared on the Fox News show Your World with Neil Cavuto to attack Clinton for “embarrassing” herself:

Hillary Clinton is a public servant, she’s out to serve the American people, to advance US interests. And I think that conducting herself in this way, as a senior US official on the world stage, doesn’t advance American interests in any way. In fact its downright embarrassing. It’s as though she’s auditioning for the sixth series of Jersey Shore rather than representing America on the world stage as the Secretary of State.

Watch it:

Gardiner’s remarks stunned even guest host Stuart Varney, who was filling in for Cavuto. Varney asked Gardiner if he would support a rule stating that no senior public official must ever be seen in a bar with a drink and/or dancing, to which Gardiner responded that he thought it was “a pretty good idea.”

Fortunately, Varney promised to give his viewers “both sides” of Hillary Clinton drinking a beer, so he invited on GOP strategist Dee Dee Benkie. To her credit, she defended Clinton, saying that “she deserves a few beers.”

But if you’re Hillary Clinton, you can be attacked by conservatives for both being too uptight and for having too much fun.

Real Clear Politics was granted access to the event, and flagged Gingrich’s remarks:

“I think FOX has been for Romney all the way through,” Gingrich said during the private meeting — to which RealClearPolitics was granted access — at Wesley College. “In our experience, Callista and I both believe CNN is less biased than FOX this year. We are more likely to get neutral coverage out of CNN than we are of FOX, and we’re more likely to get distortion out of FOX. That’s just a fact.” [...]

“I assume it’s because Murdoch at some point [who] said, ‘I want Romney,’ and so ‘fair and balanced’ became ‘Romney,’ ” Gingrich said. “And there’s no question that Fox had a lot to do with stopping my campaign because such a high percentage of our base watches FOX.”

Fox News ended its contract with Gingrich last spring as it became clear that the former Speaker intended to launch a presidential campaign.

The decision to admonish Fox News is a departure from other recent unsuccessful Republican presidential candidates, several of whom have converted their elevated prominence on the national stage into lucrative contracts with the network. Former Alaska Governor and Vice Presidential nominee Sarah Palin signed a deal with the network, and 2008 candidate Mike Huckabee now has his own weekend show.

An overarching theme of the discussions, as explicitly stated by both Rick Warren on ABC and Cardinal Timothy Dolan on CBS, was the suggestion that “a separation of church and state does not mean a separation of faith and politics.” This elides the issue and cause of the current controversy, which is that they and the other guests are advocating for policy positions based on sectarian religious viewpoints which are not held by many members of the same faiths, members of other faiths, or individuals of no faith at all. The issue is also the impact these policies would have on women’s ability to access contraception, and on the civil rights of LGBT Americans. For example, individuals like Warren, Dolan, Baltimore Archbishop William Lori, Anne Graham Lotz, and Newt Gingrich all strongly oppose offering same-sex couples the freedom to marry, but none offer consideration for the many churches that do support marriage equality.

Watch a compilation of yesterday’s one-sided discussions on State of the Union, This Week, Meet The Press, Face The Nation, and Fox News Sunday:

Religion is not under attack in the United States. In fact, it enjoys as much influence in schools, government, and the media as it ever has. To limit the discussion of its influence to the narrow self-serving objections of one handful of loudmouth conservatives is poor journalism and a disservice to the broad diversity of worldviews that truly defines the American experience.

AP Photo

Monday’s news that yet another solar company that received Energy Department backing is filing for bankruptcy protection at first looked like the Obama administration had funded another expensive loser.

But unlike Solyndra’s high-profile and costly flameout, this time the news came with a twist that tripped up wire services, talking heads and members of Congress.

The company, Solar Trust, never took the money….

Even The Associated Press and Reuters got it wrong.

When the media latches on to a narrative, mistakes happen. Why? Confirmation bias sets in, so reporters and editors don’t do the same amount of due diligence as they would on a story that strikes their intuition — their nose for news — as incorrect.

The media mistakenly believes unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases are unlikely to have a catastrophic impact, so they downplay the story and play up the 1 in 20 articles that doesn’t show  the situation is more dire than scientists thought.

Now, the media erroneously thinks solar power is flaming out and that government support for solar isn’t a good idea. They have wildly overhyped Solyndra, ignoring anything that would undermine the narrative, such as the December Bloomberg report that concluded: “The focus on Solyndra is not proportional to its impact.”

So I suppose it’s no surprise that leading news outlets got the Solar Trust story wrong. Politico notes in its story, “A $2 billion solar mistake — from the media“ that the error underscores “the eagerness of many in the media to discover the next Solyndra.”

Precisely. In this case, their error was abetted by the right-wing disinformation machine:

Right-leaning blogs and websites seized on the news with headlines blaring about $2 billion of taxpayers’ money lost — even if the accompanying story correctly noted that Solar Trust never got a dime.

“One year ago this outfit got $2.1 billion in taxpayer loans,” Rush Limbaugh said on his radio program Tuesday. “So down the tubes. Solyndra was solar panels, and now Solar Trust of America has filed bankruptcy.”

Rep. David Schweikert (R-Ariz.) took to Twitter on Tuesday to lament the failure: “This costs us $2.1 bill. Equal to all ‘Big Oil’ tax breaks last yr.”

But we expect those folks to get stories wrong —  that’s what they do for a living. The mainstream media is supposed to be better than that:

The AP had to correct a Tuesday story in which it said the project had ultimately received the DOE guarantee. The AP issued a correction on Wednesday.

Reuters’s original story Monday did not make it clear Solar Trust never got the money. It put out an updated story on Wednesday specifying that fact.

Solar Trust’s project in Blythe, Calif.— which would have been one of the largest solar farms in the world — received a conditional commitment for a $2.1 billion loan guarantee from DOE in April 2011.

The deal, almost four times as large as Solyndra’s, got star treatment from administration officials. Energy Secretary Steven Chu lauded it in a White House blog post, and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar attended the project’s groundbreaking ceremony in June. (It’s located on federally controlled land).

But in August, Solar Trust essentially walked away from the deal.

Reporters and editors need to double check all stories —  particularly the ones that strike them as obviously true. That’s why they have the old journalistic shibboleth: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.”

How hot is it? Seasoned meteorologists have said of the current super-charged heat wave, “it’s surreal” and “this is not the atmosphere I grew up with” and it’s “not just breaking but obliterating records” and “OFF THE SCALE WEIRD; even for Minnesota.”

How hot is it? ABC ran a story on extreme weather that linked it to global warming for the second time in 12 days — see “ABC News (3/7/12) Explains Warm Winter, ‘Wild Swings In Weather’, Driven by Global Warming, Only Going to Get Worse.” Here is last night’s story, which quotes Masters and NOAA on global warming:

Like a baseball player on steroids, our climate system is breaking records at an unnatural pace. As Weather Channel meteorologist Stu Ostro says of the current heat wave, “there is a high probability that global warming is having an influence upon its extremity.”

Of all the kinds of extreme weather linked to global warming, the most obvious — the extreme events that climate scientists and the scientific literature have said for decades is the most inevitable — are longer and stronger and geographically bigger heat waves.

But somehow this is lost on NBC.  Brian William opened the evening news with a 3:48-long story, noting this is ”the strangest season many folks can remember,” which has set “thousands of new records.”

Williams says “it has confused plants and animals and a good many humans.” That apparently includes the folks at NBC, whose meteorologist asks “has the weather lost its cool?” and then asks “what is causing these extremes?” and answers, “it’s the jet stream”:

The really worrisome part is what ABC News hints at in its story. We’ve warmed only about a degree and a half Fahrenheit in the past century.  We are on track to warm five times times that or more this century (see M.I.T. doubles its 2095 warming projection to 10°F — with 866 ppm and Arctic warming of 20°F ).

In short, we ain’t seen nothing yet!

Related Post:

• Hansen et al: “Extreme Heat Waves … in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 Were ‘Caused’ by Global Warming”
• PBS Covers Link Between 2011′s “Mind-Boggling” Extreme Weather and Global Warming: It’s Like “Being on Steroids”

Def Jam Rcordings founder Russell Simmons is one of the few who’s spoken out directly, tweeting “Trayvon Martin didn’t die so we can create a race war he died so we can promote better understanding. We must start honest dialogue…pls join our facebook page as we seek justice for Trayvon Martin.” Singer Janelle Monae joined in, saying “Trayvon was murdered in his own father’s gated community,” and tweeting a link to the Change.org petition calling on Zimmerman to be prosecuted. So far, local authorities have declined to arrest Zimmerman.

Other celebrities have taken to Twitter to amplify the messages being sent by others. Spike Lee has taken time in between sending birthday wishes and discussing his NCAA tournament bracket to lend his account to the effort to get “I am Trayvon Martin” trending as a phrase and to promote others’ tweets about the Change.org petition. Taraji P. Henson also promoted the effort to get signatures, and to retweet followers telling her how disturbed they were by the case. Talib Kweli is also on board. Efforts to get celebrities like Lady Gaga, who has more followers than any other account on Twitter, Oprah, whose star may be diminished by the failures of her stand-alone network OWN but is still influential, and Rihanna to add their voices to the campaign were, as of Sunday night, unsuccessful.

But it was clear that news organizations were beginning to respond. Dan Abrams, the legal analyst for ABC told followers that “I’m @gma tmrw on the shooting of Trayvon Martin. I’ll talk FL law and specific facts that make the case controversial,” and GMA co-host Robin Roberts rebroadcast the promise to her followers. Star Jones tweeted that “The @todayshow is doing a feature on the #TrayvonMartin killing. Please sign this petition http://chn.ge/xc4oze #Justice.” And CNN analyst Roland S. Martin alerted his followers that “#Trayvon Martin rallies: Monday, 4 pm., prior to the Sanford City Council meeting. See @jamalhbryant for details.”

With any luck, their attention will help propel the story of Trayvon Martin’s death to the front pages and the top-rated television news programs where it belongs. And maybe some measure of justice will follow.

One of the country’s best climate reporters proves once again that false balance is alive and well at even the best papers.

The article in question is “Rising Sea Levels Seen as Threat to Coastal U.S.” by Justin Gillis. It’s on the new Climate Central report whose news release we reposted earlier today. As Gillis explains:

About 3.7 million Americans live within a few feet of high tide and risk being hit by more frequent coastal flooding in coming decades because of the sea level rise caused by global warming, according to new research.

If the pace of the rise accelerates as much as expected, researchers found, coastal flooding at levels that were once exceedingly rare could become an every-few-years occurrence by the middle of this century.

This isn’t terribly controversial among climatologists I talk to, though this report appears to be the first to add storm surges to warming-driven sea rise, spell out the danger in every U.S. coastal region and ”estimate the proportion of the national population at risk from the rising sea.”

Gillis quotes the author, of course:

“Sea level rise is like an invisible tsunami, building force while we do almost nothing,” said Benjamin H. Strauss, an author, with other scientists, of two new papers outlining the research. “We have a closing window of time to prevent the worst by preparing for higher seas.”

But Strauss is the only scientist quoted in the article. To ‘balance’ Strauss, the Times quotes one of the top anti-scientist disinformers in the country, Myron Ebell, of the could-not-be-more debunked Competitive Enterprise Institute (see, for instance, “Santer, Jones, and Schneider respond to CEI’s phony attack on the temperature record“).

I’m assuming it’s the New York Times editors who are the ones who are still demanding this nonsensical balance — see Science Times stunner: “… a majority of the section’s editorial staff doubts that human-induced global warming represents a serious threat to humanity”).

Even so, that’s no excuse for this misleading paragraph:

The rise appears to have accelerated lately, to a rate of about a foot per century, and many scientists expect a further acceleration as the warming of the planet continues. One estimate that communities are starting to use for planning purposes suggests the ocean could rise a foot over the next 40 years, though that calculation is not universally accepted among climate scientists.

The handful of climate researchers who question the scientific consensus about global warming do not deny that the ocean is rising. But they often assert that the rise is a result of natural climate variability, they dispute that the pace is likely to accelerate, and they say that society will be able to adjust to a continuing slow rise.

Myron Ebell, a climate change skeptic at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington research group, said that “as a society, we could waste a fair amount of money on preparing for sea level rise if we put our faith in models that have no forecasting ability.”

First off, the way this is written, it suggests Ebell is one of “the handful of climate researchers,” which he most certainly is not. He’s just a spokesperson for anti-science disinformation promoted and partially funded by polluters.

Second, why does the New York Times have to publish a full paragraph of the erroneous and questionable beliefs of the tiny fraction of actual climate researchers who don’t accept the broad scientific understanding?

Third, again, why cite only one actual scientist and put him up against a non-scientist disinformer? When Gillis wrote about sea leavel rise in November 2010, he quoted a dozen actual climate and cryo-scientists with only John Christy for ‘balance.’ (see Coastal studies experts: “For coastal management purposes, a [sea level] rise of 7 feet (2 meters) should be utilized for planning major infrastructure”). At least that was closer to the right ratio.

For the record, the one-foot rise over the next 40 years is a projection from a major scientific study by five leading experts, including lead author Eric Rignot of the Jet Propulsion Lab (see “JPL bombshell: Polar ice sheet mass loss is speeding up, on pace for 1 foot sea level rise by 2050“).

Most of the leading experts on sea level rise who have published or spoken about this are now expecting one meter (39 inches) of SLR by 2100 or more if we keep listening to folks like Ebell and do nothing to reduce emissions. Indeed, as Gillis notes in his earlier piece, the two most widely used means of projecting future sea level rise, “yield approximately the same answer: that sea level could rise by 2 1/2 to 6 1/2 feet between now and 2100. A developing consensus among climate scientists holds that the best estimate is a little over three feet.”

Well, if seas are projected to rise 39 inches in the next 90 years (with much more upside risk than downside), it’s certainly not very controversial that they would rise around 12 inches in the next 40 years. So again, there’s no particular need to counterbalance any of these projections. Indeed, it would have made more sense to talk to an expert who thinks the projection is too low, because if we are headed for 6 1/2 feet by 2100, then one foot by 2050 could be on the low side:

Boykoff on “Exaggerating Denialism: Media Representations of Outlier Views on Climate Change”:  Freudenburg: “Reporters need to learn that, if they wish to discuss ‘both sides’ of the climate issue, the scientifically legitimate “other side” is that, if anything, global climate disruption is likely to be significantly worse than has been suggested in scientific consensus estimates to date.”

New York Times coverage of climate change has been improving, but they keep falling into the trap of false balance:

• NYTimes.com Strikes False Balance On Climate Change (9/11)
• In yet another front-page journalistic lapse, the NY Times once again equates non-scientists — Bastardi, Coleman, and Watts (!) — with climate scientists (3/10)
• N.Y. Times and Elisabeth Rosenthal Face Credibility Siege over Unbalanced Climate Coverage; Brulle: “the worst, one sided reporting I have ever seen” (2/10)

They would do well to adopt the NPR ethics handbook, which explicitly targets and rejects false balance

Note:  Michael Tobis (and Stephen Ban) gave us the top figure.