Climate Change: A planet in flux : Nature : Nature Publishing Group

Climate Change: A planet in flux : Nature : Nature Publishing Group

Feb. 29, 2012
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How is life on Earth reacting to climate change?

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Human activities have added billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide to Earth's atmosphere, causing global temperatures to rise. We are beginning to see how warmer temperatures are altering climates all over the planet and to understand the effects they are having on animals, agriculture and people. What will Earth look like in the year 2100? How will climate change have altered the planet's biology?

A changing world

Fly over the high Arctic in summer and you will see a landscape speckled with shallow ponds, some ringed by mossy wetlands. Frozen for most of the year, these ponds melt for a few months and become biodiversity hotspots teeming with plants, animals and microorganisms. The Arctic's isolation and extreme environment have made it difficult to gather observational data on the region's ecological changes, and existing records are sparse and incomplete. Fortunately, the ponds and lakes in this region can help scientists build a picture of the high Arctic's environmental conditions going back thousands of years.

 

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Part I of a chat with Dr. Robert Ballard, who's no longer "on a boat!" - The Big Mac Blog

Part I of a chat with Dr. Robert Ballard, who's no longer "on a boat!" - The Big Mac Blog

Part II of the chat with Dr. Robert Ballard; says both sides of global warming are right - The Big Mac Blog

Part II of the chat with Dr. Robert Ballard; says both sides of global warming are right - The Big Mac Blog

Climategate Backfires on Climate Science Denial Industry by Richard Komorowski – March 1, 2012 |

Climategate Backfires on Climate Science Denial Industry by Richard Komorowski – March 1, 2012

CFN – Climategate is back in the news again, but not in the way the climate science denial industry would like. It appears that one of the denial industry’s main companies, the Heartland Institute, has had some embarrassing email and document leaks, and is in heavy damage control mode.
When Climategate first broke the news in November, 2009, the Toronto Sun was one of many media voices to echo the allegations of wrong-doing by genuine scientists who were engaged in climate research. Lorrie Goldstein, one of the Sun’s wannabe Ezra Levants, wrote that he’d “been poring over one of many leaked computer files from the ‘climategate’ scandal.” He then goes on, quoting isolated fragments, all designed to promote the myth that man is not causing climate change.

The main “scandal” about Climategate, however, was not the leaked documents and emails, but the hacking of a University of East Anglia server. The truth is that none of these documents were leaked, they were *stolen.* Goldstein, with his allegation that the documents were “leaked” is just adding to the Climategate lie. The documents and emails, which have been massively edited for public consumption, received massive publicity thanks to the fossil fuel industry and Libertarian “think tanks.”

Joseph Bast, President of the Heartland Institute, an extreme-right Libertarian think tank, PR and Lobbying organisation, had this to say about the theft:

“Last week, someone (probably a whistle-blower at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, England) released e-mails and other documents written by Phil Jones, Michael Mann and other leading scientists who edit and control the content of the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“The e-mails appear to show a conspiracy to falsify data and suppress academic debate in order to exaggerate the possible threat of man-made global warming.

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Global warming's critical role in Snopocalypse Winters - reneweconomy.com.au : Renew Economy

Global warming's critical role in Snopocalypse Winters - reneweconomy.com.au : Renew Economy

March 1, 2012
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Scientists have tied the rapid decline of Arctic sea ice, caused by global warming pollution, to the recent extreme winters that hit the United States last year and Europe this year. In “Impact of declining Arctic sea ice on winter snowfall,” a new report published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers find that the loss of polar ice has changed atmospheric circulation and increased atmospheric water vapor, driving the popularly-dubbed “snowpocalypse” conditions:

“We conclude that the recent decline of Arctic sea ice has played a critical role in recent cold and snowy winters.”

Sea ice decline is contributing to catastrophic, deadly winters in two ways, the researchers find. The loss of ice changes wind patterns over the northern oceans, which in turn disrupts the jet stream, allowing cold polar air to plunge across the northern hemisphere. “If there is a dramatic loss of Arctic sea ice, the westerly winds that blow across the North Pacific and North Atlantic oceans are weakened,” lead author Jiping Liu, a senior research scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told Climatewire. “This means we will have a wavier jet stream.”

The loss of ice and warmer temperatures mean that there is much more evaporation from the Arctic Ocean, leading to a higher moisture content in the polar air that is pulled south. That means that intense snowfall is more likely, especially as the polar air collides with warm, moist air from the south.

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Global warming: Thick, multi-year Arctic ice melting faster « Summit County Citizens Voice

Global warming: Thick, multi-year Arctic ice melting faster « Summit County Citizens Voice

March 1, 2012
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SUMMIT COUNTY — Along with the steady decline (3.2 percent per decade) in overall Arctic sea ice extent, a new NASA study shows that the oldest and thickest multi-year ice is melting at a much faster pace — about 15 percent per decade — than the thin ice that forms anew each year.
The rapid decline of older ice makes the Arctic Ocean’s floating ice cap even more vulnerable to further decline in the summer, according to Joey Comiso, a senior scientist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

“The average thickness of the Arctic sea ice cover is declining because it is rapidly losing its thick component, the multi-year ice. At the same time, the surface temperature in the Arctic is going up, which results in a shorter ice-forming season,” Comiso said. “It would take a persistent cold spell for most multi-year sea ice and other ice types to grow thick enough in the winter to survive the summer melt season and reverse the trend.”

Scientists differentiate multi-year ice from both seasonal ice, which comes and goes each year, and “perennial” ice, defined as all ice that has survived at least one summer. In other words: all multi-year ice is perennial ice, but not all perennial ice is multi-year ice (it can also be second-year ice).
Comiso found that perennial ice extent is shrinking at a rate of -12.2 percent per decade, while its area is declining at a rate of -13.5 percent per decade. These numbers indicate that the thickest ice, multiyear-ice, is declining faster than the other perennial ice that surrounds it.

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Drought Information Statement for Austin & San Antonio

National Weather Service Watch Warning Advisory Summary

Feb. 23, 2012
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Click on the above link to read the statement.  Next update will be around March 8.

More Americans now believe in global warming - latimes.com

More Americans now believe in global warming - latimes.com

Feb. 29, 2012
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After several years of finding that fewer and fewer Americans believed in man-made climate change, pollsters are now finding that belief is on the uptick.

The newest study from the National Survey of American Public Opinion on Climate Change, which is a biannual survey taken since fall 2008 and organized by the Brookings Institute, shows that 62% of Americans now believe that man-made climate change is occurring, and 26% do not. The others are unsure.

That is a significant rise in believers since a low in spring 2010, when only about 50% of Americans said they believed in global warming, but still down from when the survey first began, when it was at around 75%. The pollsters talked to 887 people across the country.

What’s caused the sudden rise? Mostly the weather.

“People, for good or for bad, are making connections in what they see in terms of weather and what they believe in terms of climate change,” said Christopher Borick, co-author of the survey. He is an associate professor of Political Science and director of the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion in Pennsylvania. His co-author is Barry Rabe, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and a professor at the University of Michigan.

The years 2009 and 2010 saw cold, nasty winters across the country, and seemed to indicate to a lot of people – rightly or wrongly – that they weren’t feeling any increase of temperatures. That helped drive down belief in climate change. But 2011 was a super-hot year, bad drought, with record-breaking precipitation in the Northeast, lots of weird weather. Public opinion? Must be climate change.

This shows how fickle public opinion can be. For instance, when people who say they believe in climate change were asked if the idea of “drought” affected their decision, their answer depended on their own experience. If they lived in places like Texas, Oklahoma and the South, they were about 15 to 17 points more likely to say drought affected their beliefs than other believers in Pennsylvania or New Jersey.

The danger, of course, is that neither individual weather events nor even an entire season of strange weather are any indication of long-term trends. Those who believe that the planet is warming did say that factors beyond weather, such as polar bear decline, did affect their decisions. In general, however, scientific studies weren't high on the list of influences among people polled.

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Must-Hear Podcast: John Cook of Skeptical Science on How to Debunk Climate Myths | ThinkProgress

Must-Hear Podcast: John Cook of Skeptical Science on How to Debunk Climate Myths ThinkProgress

Feb. 27, 2012
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How exactly does one break a deeply embedded myth? We often believe that bombarding people with facts and figures is the best way to combat misinformation. But busting myths is not just about providing more data — it’s about presenting the data in a way that people will actually process it.

John Cook, founder of the popular climate website Skeptical Science, likes to think about the way people think.

As a climate communications fellow for the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland, Cook devotes his time to understanding how the booby traps and backfire effects within the human mind allow us to embrace myths, even when presented with overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
In this podcast, we’ll have a lengthy discussion with Cook about how to counter the backfire effects within the brain. He’ll discuss his recent “Debunking Handbook,” which he co-authored with the cognitive scientist Stephan Lewandowski, and apply his research to the manufactured “debate” over climate change:

Read more by clicking on the link above...

What ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ Really Mean on Climate Change (Hint: Nothing) | ThinkProgress

What ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ Really Mean on Climate Change (Hint: Nothing) ThinkProgress

Feb. 29, 2012
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Ezra Klein had an interesting post last week about the arbitrary nature of what gets coded “left” and “right” in today’s policy debates. He mentions cap-and-trade, which was the subject of bipartisan consensus from 2000 to 2008, at which point it abruptly became socialist.
Klein is right that the ideological coding of the climate debate is peculiar, but he’s barely scratching the surface. The left-right alignment on climate is completely scrambled, in part because the real battle, as we shall see, is not ideological.

On the same day, Brian Merchant had a post on Treehugger about “the right-wing case for a carbon tax.” Technically it should have been called “the right-wing case for carbon pricing,” since it cites a Washington Post op-ed from Reps. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and two of their former Republican colleagues that advocates either “a market mechanism such as the sale of carbon allowances or a fee on carbon pollution.” Merchant also notes that legendary conservative economist Arthur B. Laffer — father of the Laffer Curve — came out last week in favor of a carbon tax as part of a “tax switch” that would reduce income tax rates. (Laffer is “agnostic” on climate change but he really, really wants to reduce the income tax.) As Joe Romm notes, in 2011, the Peter G. Peterson Foundation funded the work of six groups across the ideological spectrum to develop deficit plans. Of the six, only one did not include [or consider] a price on carbon: the hacktastic Heritage Institute.

I’m not sure I would call carbon-pricing solutions right-wing, but I do think it’s fair to characterize them as conservative. Conservative economic thinking prefers a minimum of government intervention in the economy. Sending a carbon-pricing signal via a tax or cap is a minimalist intervention, as technology and industry agnostic as policy can be. If the revenue is used to reduce the deficit or other taxes (income or payroll), then the policy is even more solidly conservative, as both are conservative priorities.

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A Climate Warrior Puts It All on the Line — Including His Life - TIME

A Climate Warrior Puts It All on the Line — Including His Life - TIME

Feb. 28, 2012
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The climate war — the public opinion battle between skeptics of man-made global warming and those who believe in the scientific consensus — escalated to a new level of ferocity this past month. First a series of memos allegedly from the Heartland Institute — a libertarian think tank that has long supported climate skepticism — surfaced on the Internet, detailing the group's previously anonymous corporate funding and outlining its plan to fight action on global warming. Then came the news last week that the Heartland memos had been fraudulently acquired by the environmental advocate and scientist Peter Gleick, who — after allegedly being sent an initial memo by a person he identified as a Heartland insider — impersonated as a Heartland board member via email in order to obtain several additional internal documents. Worse, Heartland now claims one of the memos was doctored — while nonetheless confirming that it plans to push global warming skepticism in the nation's schools, opening up one more, very impressionable front in the seemingly endless climate war.

If there's anyone who knows how nasty the climate fight can be, it's Penn State climatologist Michael Mann. Mann, who has been involved with the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for over a decade, gets regular death threats at his office. He's been the target of a lengthy — and, critics say, politically motivated — investigation by the attorney general of Virginia.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2107747,00.html#ixzz1nnpPNhGW

The Political History of Cap and Trade | Science & Nature | Smithsonian Magazine

The Political History of Cap and Trade Science & Nature Smithsonian Magazine

Aug. 2009
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John B. Henry was hiking in Maine's Acadia National Park one August in the 1980s when he first heard his friend C. Boyden Gray talk about cleaning up the environment by letting people buy and sell the right to pollute. Gray, a tall, lanky heir to a tobacco fortune, was then working as a lawyer in the Reagan White House, where environmental ideas were only slightly more popular than godless Communism. "I thought he was smoking dope," recalls Henry, a Washington, D.C. entrepreneur. But if the system Gray had in mind now looks like a politically acceptable way to slow climate change—an approach being hotly debated in Congress—you could say that it got its start on the global stage on that hike up Acadia's Cadillac Mountain.
People now call that system "cap-and-trade." But back then the term of art was "emissions trading," though some people called it "morally bankrupt" or even "a license to kill." For a strange alliance of free-market Republicans and renegade environmentalists, it represented a novel approach to cleaning up the world—by working with human nature instead of against it.
Despite powerful resistance, these allies got the system adopted as national law in 1990, to control the power-plant pollutants that cause acid rain. With the help of federal bureaucrats willing to violate the cardinal rule of bureaucracy—by surrendering regulatory power to the marketplace—emissions trading would become one of the most spectacular success stories in the history of the green movement. Congress is now considering whether to expand the system to cover the carbon dioxide emissions implicated in climate change—a move that would touch the lives of almost every American. So it's worth looking back at how such a radical idea first got translated into action, and what made it work.
The problem in the 1980s was that American power plants were sending up vast clouds of sulfur dioxide, which was falling back to earth in the form of acid rain, damaging lakes, forests and buildings across eastern Canada and the United States. The squabble about how to fix this problem had dragged on for years. Most environmentalists were pushing a "command-and-control" approach, with federal officials requiring utilities to install scrubbers capable of removing the sulfur dioxide from power-plant exhausts. The utility companies countered that the cost of such an approach would send them back to the Dark Ages. By the end of the Reagan administration, Congress had put forward and slapped down 70 different acid rain bills, and frustration ran so deep that Canada's prime minister bleakly joked about declaring war on the United States.


Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Presence-of-Mind-Blue-Sky-Thinking.html#ixzz1nnkNqspv

Heartland Institute's Climate Contrarians Enjoy Media Platform | Media Matters for America

Heartland Institute's Climate Contrarians Enjoy Media Platform Media Matters for America

July 7, 2011
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Last week the libertarian Heartland Institute held its 6^th "International Conference on Climate Change" in Washington, DC, bringing together a varied batch of vocal climate contrarians to rail against the scientific consensus that human-induced climate change is a serious problem.
The speakers seemed to be more united by political ideology and a common enemy than by their grievances about the science. Among their assertions:

• "CO2 was found guilty in contradiction to the evidence because as we are now all aware, the temperature changes before the CO2, it is not the other way around, as is the fundamental assumption that is made for the AGW." --Tim Ball
• "I agree with the IPCC that adding CO2 to the atmosphere should cause some warming. Where we differ is the degree of warming." -- Roy Spencer
• "I believe that this warming shown here [after 1979] is not real, does not exist." -- Fred Singer
• "From the mid-1970s," the earth warmed ".17 degrees C per decade in the surface record, .14 degrees in the satellite record." -- Pat Michaels
• "I do not agree" that "the recent rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide is due to man." -- Steve Goreham
• "There's no question that CO2 is increasing in the atmosphere and that the primary cause is human." -- Fred Singer

Heartland senior fellow James Taylor claimedthat the event is about "getting the science out to people," but several of the speakers indicated that this is by no means your typical scientific conference (if the repeated Atlas Shrugged references didn't give that away):

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Media Advisory: Climate Change Denial in Carleton University Course Exposed by National Science Team - MarketWatch

Media Advisory: Climate Change Denial in Carleton University Course Exposed by National Science Team - MarketWatch

Feb. 29, 2012
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OTTAWA, ONTARIO, Feb 29, 2012 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) -- A science watchdog has released a report slamming a course taught at a leading Canadian university over what they call "biased and inaccurate" claims concerning climate change.

The course "Climate Change: An Earth Sciences Perspective", taught by Tom Harris for two years, is the subject of a 98-page report written by the Committee for the Advancement of Scientific Skepticism (CASS).

The report constitutes a blow-by-blow response citing extensively from the scientific literature to rebut 142 erroneous and fully-quoted claims.

On auditing the course, CASS discovered that key messages for students contradict accepted scientific opinion. These messages include:

denying that current climate change has an anthropogenic cause; dismissing the problems that carbon dioxide emissions cause because CO2 is plant food; denying the existence of the scientific consensus on the causes of climate change; and claiming that we should prepare instead for global cooling.

A copy of the report can be downloaded at www.scientificskepticism.ca .

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