Political Climate Articles
After Inhofe's endorsement, Carly Fiorina challenges climate science - unlike the company she once ran!
Following the endorsement of Senator Jim "the last flat-earther" Inhofe (R-OK) last Wednesday for her campaign to unseat Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), ex-Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina questioned the science of climate change. Boxer, as the chair of the Senate environment committee, is the chamber's leading advocate for action to create jobs, make America more energy independent, and cut global warming pollution. Ranking environment committee member Inhofe - "Senator Climate Change Denier" - led a failed boycott of Boxer's Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act (S. 1733). After news of Inhofe's endorsement of Fiorina came out, a reporter asked whether she believes in global warming. Fiorina admitted she is skeptical about climate science:
I think we should have the courage to examine the science on an ongoing basis.
Fiorina's refusal to recognize the science of climate change and her belief that cap and trade legislation "will kill jobs" puts her in opposition to California's business and political leadership - and even the company she once ran!
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA), the leader of the California Republican Party, recently noted that California is "already experiencing" the devastating impacts of global warming:
In California, we are already experiencing rising sea levels eroding our coastal infrastructure, reduced snow pack in the Sierra leading to prolonged droughts and more conflict over water, drier forests suffering more frequent and ferocious forest fires, and worsening smog-related public health threats and crop damage. The implications for our state if these trends continue are simply staggering.
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Superstition still reigns
I had an appointment on the top floor of a 14-story building in NY City Thursday. The elevator buttons read:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 12M, 14.
I'd thought that sort of thing was getting rarer since I don't see it much in Washington DC office buildings. But this article claims it is very common:
Based on records of buildings with Otis brand elevators, as many as 85 percent of the high rises in the world don't have a 13th floor, says Dilip Rangnekar, spokesman for the Farmington, CT-based elevator maker.
Interestingly, I first thought the M was for Mezzanine, but Wikipedia points out M is used in elevators in that situation because it is the 13th letter of the alphabet. OK, but if the number 13 really were unlucky, then wouldn't the 13th letter of the alphabet be unlucky too? And, of course, the 13th floor, by any other name, is still the 13th floor. Such is the logic of the illogical.
The bottom line is that non-science still holds sway with a great many people, as the big story of the weekend makes all too clear.
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Unsettled Science
Unusually, I'm in complete agreement with a recent headline on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page:
"The Climate Science Isn't Settled"
The article below is the same mix of innuendo and misrepresentation that it's author normally writes, but the headline is correct. The WSJ seems to think that the headline is some terribly important pronouncement that in some way undercuts the scientific consensus on climate change but they are simply using an old rhetorical 'trick'.
The phrase "the science is settled" is associated almost 100% with contrarian comments on climate and is usually a paraphrase of what 'some scientists' are supposed to have said. The reality is that it depends very much on what you are talking about and I have never heard any scientist say this in any general context - at a recent meeting I was at, someone claimed that this had been said by the participants and he was roundly shouted down by the assembled experts.
The reason why no scientist has said this is because they know full well that knowledge about science is not binary - science isn't either settled or not settled. This is a false and misleading dichotomy. Instead, we know things with varying degrees of confidence - for instance, conservation of energy is pretty well accepted, as is the theory of gravity (despite continuing interest in what happens at very small scales or very high energies) , while the exact nature of dark matter is still unclear. The forced binary distinction implicit in the phrase is designed to misleadingly relegate anything about which there is still uncertainty to the category of completely unknown. i.e. that since we don't know everything, we know nothing.
In the climate field, there are a number of issues which are no longer subject to fundamental debate in the community. The existence of the greenhouse effect, the increase in CO2 (and other GHGs) over the last hundred years and its human cause, and the fact the planet warmed significantly over the 20th Century are not much in doubt. IPCC described these factors as 'virtually certain' or 'unequivocal'. The attribution of the warming over the last 50 years to human activity is also pretty well established - that is 'highly likely' and the anticipation that further warming will continue as CO2 levels continue to rise is a well supported conclusion. To the extent that anyone has said that the scientific debate is over, this is what they are referring to. In answer to colloquial questions like "Is anthropogenic warming real?", the answer is yes with high confidence.
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POLL: Fewer Republicans and Conservatives Believe Global Warming Is Happening
The number of Americans who believe global warming is occurring has declined to its lowest since 1997, though at 72 percent, it's still a broad majority. The drop has steepened in the last year-and-a-half - almost exclusively among conservatives and Republicans.
This ABC News/Washington Post poll also finds that support for government action to address the issue, while still a majority, likewise is down from its levels in summer 2008.
Belief that Earth is warming peaked at 85 percent in 2006, then flattened before turning back. Even with the decline, Americans who think global warming probably is occurring outnumber those who think not by nearly 3-1, 72 percent to 26 percent.
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Something Is X in the State of Denmark
We received a letter with the title 'Climate Change: The Role of Flawed Science' which may be of interest to the wider readership. The author, Peter Laut, is Professor (emeritus) of physics at The Technical University of Denmark and former scientific advisor on climate change for The Danish Energy Agency. He has long been a critic of the hypothesis that solar activity dominates the global warming trend, and has been involved in a series of heated public debates in Denmark. Even though most of his arguments concern scientific issues, such as data handling, and arithmetic errors, he also has much to say about the way that the debate about climate change has been conducted. It's worth noting that he sent us this letter before the "CRU email" controversy broke out, so his criticism of the IPCC for being too even handed, is ironic and timely.
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Copenhagen conference: The view from America
Barack Obama may be judged harshly by history if the US does not show its hand at the talks
This month, South Korea pledged to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions 30% below "business as usual" levels by 2020. Russia, too, announced a new target: 20% below 1990 levels. The European Union, of course, has already committed to cutting emissions 20% by 2020 - 30% if the rest of the developed world joins in.
"We now have offers of targets from all industrialised countries except the United States," Yvo de Boer, the UN's chief climate negotiator, recently told The New York Times. Clearly, he was trying to embarrass the US ahead of the upcoming negotiations in Copenhagen. But the US, as de Boer must surely know by now, doesn't embarrass easily.
A year after Barack Obama's victory, the US is, if not exactly where it was before, then not too far along, either. True, the new administration no longer denies that global warming is a problem. It doesn't edit reports on climate science to make them sound less dire, or take down data from government websites. But these are negative achievements. In terms of positive actions, the administration doesn't have much to show.
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