November 15, 2010

This week marks the one-year anniversary of what the anti-science crowd successfully labeled ‘Climategate’.  The media will be doing countless retrospectives, most of which will be wasted ink, like the Guardian’s piece — focusing on climate scientists at the expense of climate science, which is precisely the kind of miscoverage that has been going on for the whole year!

I’ll save that my media critiques for Part 2, since I think that Climategate’s biggest impact was probably on the media, continuing their downward trend of focusing on style over substance, of missing the story of the century, if not the millennia.

Continue reading here “A stunning year in climate science reveals that human civilization is on the precipice « Climate Progress.”

 

The scientists’ letter, published in the May 7th issue of the journal Science (subscription req’d), says:

“We are deeply disturbed by the recent escalation of political assaults on scientists in general and on climate scientists in particular.”

The scientists note that the fundamental science of climate change is sound, despite the extensive campaign by deniers and skeptics to confuse politicians and the general public:

“There is compelling, comprehensive, and consistent objective evidence that humans are changing the climate in ways that threaten our societies and the ecosystems on which we depend.”

Noting that denier attacks are “typically driven by special interests or dogma,” the scientists rail against the overblown attacks on the IPCC for its minor mistakes:

“Many recent assaults on climate science and, more disturbingly, on climate scientists by climate change deniers, are typically driven by special interests or dogma, not by an honest effort to provide an alternative theory that credibly satisfies the evidence. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other scientific assessments of climate change, which involve thousands of scientists producing massive and comprehensive reports, have, quite expectedly and normally, made some mistakes. When errors are pointed out, they are corrected.

But there is nothing remotely identified in the recent events that changes the fundamental conclusions about climate change…”

In a clear rebuke of the efforts of GOP climate deniers like Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK to deny reality), the scientists call for an end to the harassment of climate scientists:

“We also call for an end to McCarthy-like threats of criminal prosecution against our colleagues based on innuendo and guilt by association, the harassment of scientists by politicians seeking distractions to avoid taking action, and the outright lies being spread about them.”

As Peter Gleick, President of the Pacific Institute and one of the co-signers of the letter, notes:

“It is hard to get 255 members of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences to agree on pretty much anything, making the import of this letter even more substantial.”

The scientists conclude with an appeal for action to address climate change:

“Society has two choices: we can ignore the science and hide our heads in the sand and hope we are lucky, or we can act in the public interest to reduce the threat of global climate change quickly and substantively.”

The letter is available at Science (subscription required), and reprinted at The Guardian and Climate Progress for open access.

via Brendan Demelle | Esteemed Scientists Hit Back at Climate Denier Campaign In Science Letter.

 

In an exclusive interview with the Wonk Room, a team of scientists from the University of Southern Mississippi’s Gulf Coast Research Laboratory in Ocean Springs, MS, discussed the ecological impacts of a three-month blowout from the BP-Halliburton Deepwater Horizon exploratory rig, described as the expected timeline for “ultimate relief” of the leak by Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar. None of the scientists even wanted to attempt to imagine the coming devastation, because, as ichthyologist Jeff Hoffmayer said, “oil is bad for everything” that lives in the ocean. If the leak continues for three months, about 100 million gallons of oil will have flooded into the Gulf during the peak spawning season of the region and the start of the hurricane season. Dr. Bill Hawkins, director of the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory, summarized the scenario starkly:

All bets are off!

via Gulf coast scientists: ‘oil is bad for everything’ « Climate Progress.

 

Well worth reading here.

 

For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming.

“The role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood,” the coalition said in a scientific “backgrounder” provided to lawmakers and journalists through the early 1990s, adding that “scientists differ” on the issue.

But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.

“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.

The coalition was financed by fees from large corporations and trade groups representing the oil, coal and auto industries, among others. In 1997, the year an international climate agreement that came to be known as the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated, its budget totaled $1.68 million, according to tax records obtained by environmental groups.

Read more…

 

Global warming could rapidly accelerate as millions of tons of methane escape from beneath the Arctic seabed, scientists warned today.

Huge deposits of the greenhouse gas – 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide – are rising to the surface as the Arctic region heats up, according to preliminary findings.

 

“We’re toast if we don’t get on a very different path,” Mr. Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute of Space Sciences who is sometimes called the godfather of global warming science, told The Associated Press. “This is the last chance.”

Read the whole story…

 

http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/sap/sap3-3/final-report/default.htm

 

Now a survey of EPA scientists on this very subject just came out, and it isn’t pretty!

Political Manipulation of EPA Science, by the Numbers

Here’s the whole cynical breakdown of the sad report, in the words of the Union of Concerned Scientists. (Note that not all respondents answered all questions, so response percentages are derived from different total respondents.)

• 889 (60%) scientists said they had personally experienced at least one instance of political interference in their work over the last five years.
• 783 (51%) said EPA policies do not let scientists speak freely to the news media about their findings. Scientists also shared anecdotes about being barred from presenting their research at conferences and their difficulties clearing research publication articles with EPA managers.
• 492 (31%) felt they could not speak candidly within the agency about concerns about the EPA’s work without fear of retribution, and 382 (24 percent) felt they could not do so outside the agency.
• 409 (43%) of the 969 agency veterans with more than 10 years of EPA experience, said interference has occurred more often in the past five years than in the previous five-year period. Only 43 scientists (4%) said interference occurred less often.
• 394 (31%) scientists personally experienced frequent or occasional “statements by EPA officials that misrepresent scientists’ findings.”
• 285 (22%) scientists said they frequently or occasionally personally experienced “selective or incomplete use of data to justify a specific regulatory outcome.”
• 224 (17%) scientists said they had been “directed to inappropriately exclude or alter technical information from an EPA scientific document.”
• Nearly 100 scientists identified the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) as the primary culprit. In scientists’ responses to an essay question, “How could the integrity of scientific work produced by the EPA best be improved?,” OMB took center stage.

(Source: The Daily Green)

 

It is really upsetting to see a bunch of religious freaks and industry puppets constantly muzzling scientists to suit their political agenda.

 

Naomi Oreskes has now responded strongly to these misrepresentations of her work.

 

Six scientists from some of the leading scientific institutions in the United States have issued what amounts to an unambiguous warning to the world: civilisation itself is threatened by global warming.

They also implicitly criticise the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for underestimating the scale of sea-level rises this century as a result of melting glaciers and polar ice sheets.

Instead of sea levels rising by about 40 centimetres, as the IPCC predicts in one of its computer forecasts, the true rise might be as great as several metres by 2100. That is why, they say, planet Earth today is in “imminent peril”.

In a densely referenced scientific paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A some of the world’s leading climate researchers describe in detail why they believe that humanity can no longer afford to ignore the “gravest threat” of climate change.

“Recent greenhouse gas emissions place the Earth perilously close to dramatic climate change that could run out of control, with great dangers for humans and other creatures,” the scientists say. Only intense efforts to curb man-made emissions of carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases can keep the climate within or near the range of the past one million years, they add.

The researchers were led by James Hansen, the director of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who was the first scientist to warn the US Congress about global warming.

The other scientists were Makiko Sato, Pushker Kharecha and Gary Russell, also of the Goddard Institute, David Lea of the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Mark Siddall of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York.

In their 29-page paper, “Climate Change and trace gases”, the scientists frequently stray from the non-emotional language of science to emphasise the scale of the problems and dangers posed by climate change.

In an email to The Independent, Dr Hansen said: “In my opinion, among our papers this one probably does the best job of making clear that the Earth is getting perilously close to climate changes that could run out of our control.”

The unnatural “forcing” of the climate as a result of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases threatens to generate a “flip” in the climate that could “spark a cataclysm” in the massive ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, the scientists write.

Dramatic flips in the climate have occurred in the past but none has happened since the development of complex human societies and civilisation, which are unlikely to survive the same sort of environmental changes if they occurred now.

“Civilisation developed, and constructed extensive infrastructure, during a period of unusual climate stability, the Holocene, now almost 12,000 years in duration. That period is about to end,” the scientists warn. Humanity cannot afford to burn the Earth’s remaining underground reserves of fossil fuel. “To do so would guarantee dramatic climate change, yielding a different planet from the one on which civilisation developed and for which extensive physical infrastructure has been built,” they say.

Dr Hansen said we have about 10 years to put into effect the draconian measures needed to curb CO2 emissions quickly enough to avert a dangerous rise in global temperature. Otherwise, the extra heat could trigger the rapid melting of polar ice sheets, made far worse by the “albedo flip” – when the sunlight reflected by white ice is suddenly absorbed as ice melts to become the dark surface of open water.

The glaciers and ice sheets of Greenland in the northern hemisphere, and the western Antarctic ice sheet in the south, both show signs of the rapid changes predicted with rising temperatures. ”

The albedo flip property of ice/water provides a trigger mechanism. If the trigger mechanism is engaged long enough, multiple dynamical feedbacks will cause ice sheet collapse,” the scientists say. “We argue that the required persistence for this trigger mechanism is at most a century, probably less.”

The latest assessment of the IPCC published earlier this year predicts little or no contribution to 21st century sea level from Greenland or Antarctica, but the six scientists dispute this interpretation. “The IPCC analyses and projections do not well account for the nonlinear physics of wet ice sheet disintegration, ice streams and eroding ice shelves, nor are they consistent with the palaeoclimate evidence we have presented for the absence of discernible lag between ice sheet forcing and sea-level rise,” the scientists say.

Their study looked back over more than 400,000 years of climate records from deep ice cores and found evidence to suggest that rapid climate change over a period of centuries, or even decades, have in the past occurred once the world began to heat up and ice sheets started melting. It is not possible to assess the dangerous level of man-made greenhouse gases.

“However, it is much lower than has commonly been assumed. If we have not already passed the dangerous level, the energy infrastructure in place ensures that we will pass it within several decades,” the scientists say in their findings.

“We conclude that a feasible strategy for planetary rescue almost surely requires a means of extracting [greenhouse gases] from the air.”

 

Here he is speaking about global warming.

[YouTube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUohLJ8bMxc]

[YouTube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0hHlxaYNb0]

And here he is speaking about how the White House has been censoring the science, and his reports and lectures.

[YouTube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jc4OzpgTOhk]

Isn’t it amazing that Bush would appoint an energy industry lobbyist and lawyer as his head scientific advisor on the environment? Says a lot about the dishonesty and anti-science bias of this Administration. They will do anything to help their oil buddies, including putting their country and the whole planet at risk.