Political Climate Articles
Inhofe's hoax: Senator distorts meteorological study to show support for his global warming denial
Appearing on CNN's American Morning today to discuss the Copenhagen climate change conference, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) attempted to defend his theory that the illegally-hacked emails of climate researchers prove that global warming is a "hoax." Inhofe, who will lead a "truth squad" of global warming deniers to the conference, told host Kiran Chetry that people "all over the world" agree with him about the "climategate" emails.
Inhofe cited two newspapers and a group of meteorologists who are "changing their position" on the science of global warming:
INHOFE: Hey, Kiran, if it was just me saying it'd be one thing, but all over the world they're talking about this. And just this morning the meteorologists - one of the groups - has said that they're changing their position. Listen, the UK Telegraph - this is worst scientific scandal of our generation. The Guardian, this is an activist paper, saying pretending this isn't a real scandal isn't going to make it go away.
Watch it:
Read More...
Obama, GOP (the party of No) Spar Over Employment Plan
White House Meeting Turns Unusually Testy, as Accusations From Both Sides Highlight Partisan Divide
WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama's push for new job-creation legislation got off to a rocky start at a closed-door White House meeting Wednesday, when he accused Republicans of rooting against recovery and Republicans shot back that his policies had frozen business hiring.
The president's pursuit of a jobs bill that could cost close to $200 billion was never likely to attract bipartisan support. But the contentiousness of a meeting that was called expressly to foster cooperation and on Mr. Obama's home turf was unusual because members of Congress and the president typically mute their disagreements in face-to-face meetings.
One heated exchange came at the beginning of the meeting between the president and congressional leaders from both parties. Mr. Obama said the GOP was fixated on the unemployment rate as Congress enters a midterm-election season, saying Republicans "seem to be almost rooting against recovery," according to two aides briefed on the exchange.
When it was his turn to speak, Rep. John Boehner (R., Ohio) bristled. "Mr. President, we do a lot of politics in this town," the Republican leader said, according to notes from the exchange, "but we are committed to working together in areas where we agree to get the American people back to work."
Watergate Redux: Break-ins Reported at Another Top Climate Research Center
Two weeks ago, thousands of illegally hacked emails from a British climate research center were dumped on a Russian webserver, timed to influence the politics of of the international climate negotiations commencing next week in Copenhagen, Denmark. Beginning Thanksgiving week, conservative media and Republican politicians have compared the climate scientists whose private emails were hacked to Hitler, Stalin, and eugenicists, saying they are involved in a global conspiracy to defraud and possibly take over the world. The Climategate "scandal" - a swiftboating intimidation and smear campaign against science - is the right-wing rage from Stephen Dubner to Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck to Lou Dobbs. Like the original Watergate scandal involving right-wing operatives who burglarized the offices of their political opponents, the real crime is the original break-in.
It has now been reported that the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Center is not the only victim of such a criminal invasion: burglars and hackers have also attacked the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis at the University of Victoria in British Columbia:
Andrew Weaver, a University of Victoria scientist and key contributor to the Nobel prize-winning work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says there have been a number of attempted breaches in recent months, including two successful break-ins at his campus office in which a dead computer was stolen and papers were rummaged through.
These attacks go beyond simple burglary. University of Victoria spokeswoman Patty Pitts told the National Post "there have also been attempts to hack into climate scientists' computers, as well as incidents in which people impersonated network technicians to try to gain access to campus offices and data."
For thirty years, defenders of a pollution-based economy have intimidated, smeared, and suppressed climate science, using a playbook perfected by the tobacco industry and Karl Rove. Now - as the United States, led by President Barack Obama, finally appears ready to join the world in the fight against global warming - the opponents of reform are resorting to criminal desperation, harkening back to the paranoia-fueled extremes of Richard Nixon.
Read More...
America's broad climate action effort
President Barack Obama and the United States' leadership in the upcoming U.N. climate change conference in Copenhagen will be instrumental to a successful outcome. The United States is the world's largest historical and per-capita emitter of greenhouse gases. We cannot hope to meet the goal of limiting increases in global temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius without U.S. participation in a new international convention to limit carbon pollution. Getting to that agreement will require an unprecedented level of international cooperation. Yet the United States' notable inaction on climate change for eight years under the Bush administration has left a legacy of mistrust.
Read More...
Ambitious Actions by the States Push U.S. Toward Climate Goals
Hampered by a slow-moving Congress, the Obama administration is offering only modest greenhouse gas reduction targets at the Copenhagen conference. But limited federal action does not mean the U.S. is standing still: More than half of the 50 states are already taking steps to reduce emissions on their own.
"Taken together the actions initiated by the states, coupled with the clean energy policies and programs implemented thus far by the Obama administration, rival the scope and ambition of the actions taken to address global warming anywhere in the world," says a report released last week by Environment America, a coalition of state environmental advocacy organizations.
Since more than half of the U.S.'s 50 states are actively on the path to reducing emissions on their own, state climate action is no small thing on a global scale. California, America's bellwether environmental state, has the world's eighth-largest economy, just behind that of Italy. California's energy use is among the most efficient in the nation; its leadership on improving automobile fuel efficiency forced Detroit to significantly boost gasoline mileage of U.S. vehicles; and its comprehensive climate law - AB32 - is as aggressive as any in the world.
Read More...
US Republicans vow to rain on Copenhagen parade
Republican lawmakers critical of efforts to battle climate change said they would fly next week to the Copenhagen summit to undercut President Barack Obama's promises of strong US action.
Members of Congress' minority party vowed to highlight a scandal over leaked emails from leading climate scientists which they said backed their suspicions that the global warming threat was overblown and too costly to act on.
"I will not be one of the sycophants that says climate change is the biggest problem facing the world and we need to do all these draconian things that cost jobs," Representative Joe Barton, the top Republican on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, told a news conference Tuesday.
Obama plans to head next week to the 192-nation summit in the Danish capital to pledge that the world's largest economy will cut carbon emissions blamed for global warming -- a plan he says will create jobs by building a new green economy.
Read More...
CHINA CHALLENGING THE UNITED STATES FOR WORLD WIND LEADERSHIP
Leadership of the global wind market is about to change hands. The United States-the birthplace of the modern wind industry-has held the top spot in new installations since 2005, growing at 50 percent a year and adding a record 8,540 megawatts of wind generating capacity in 2008. But if the credit-crunched U.S. industry adds only 8,000 megawatts in 2009, as anticipated, China's new installations of some 10,000 megawatts will make it the world leader in annual additions. Having doubled its installed capacity in each of the last five years, this relative newcomer is now poised to dominate the wind energy industry for years to come.
Read More...
Oil Producers Worry About Carbon Deal
With some of the world's fastest-growing oil consumers under pressure to cut carbon emissions, big petroleum-producing states are beginning to fret over a long-term drop in crude-oil revenue.
For years, oil-producing states have worried about rich nations such as the U.S. cutting back on energy consumption through conservation or turning to nonoil alternatives such as ethanol and other biofuels.
But Saudi Arabia and other big Gulf states now fear that emerging markets like China -- the biggest driver behind the growth in world oil consumption -- may also cut crude demand as dozens of countries converge in Copenhagen to try to hammer out a global pact to reduce carbon emissions.
Those fears and the potential impact on future government revenue could erode Gulf Arab states' support for any deal in Copenhagen, Gulf officials said.
Those fears and the potential impact on future government revenue could erode Gulf Arab states' support for any deal in Copenhagen, Gulf officials said.
Senior officials from the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, which includes a handful of Gulf states, are expected to attend the second half of the Copenhagen meeting next week. These officials include the oil cartel's secretary-general, Abdalla Salem El-Badri, who is expected to make a presentation, and some oil ministers from OPEC member states.
Read More...
Measuring Impact of Climate Change from Space: Gravity Measurements Shed Light on Key Questions
ScienceDaily (Dec. 10, 2009) - What is the impact of climate change on the ice-covered regions of Earth? How does deglaciation affect global sea level changes?
These questions are being addressed by scientists from the Institute of Geodesy at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, and the Department of Spatial Science at the Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Australia. For this purpose, the German-Australian team has been investigating space-borne gravity measurements provided by the GRACE satellite mission.
As a result, they have found out that the Greenland glaciers shrunk continuously in the last few years; above all, they estimated the changes not to be linear in time but accelerating. On average, recent Greenland ice-mass decline caused an annual sea-level rise of about 0.5 millimetres.
For the first time ever, the GRACE satellite mission has allowed the determination of global mass variations -- such as ice melting in the polar areas -- from changes in Earth's gravitational pull. The underlying measurement principle is simple: it is based on the fact that the redistribution of masses on the Earth surface can be mapped in terms of changes of the terrestrial gravity field. Hence, scientists can measure the spatio-temporal variations of Earth's gravitational attraction on a test mass in space, namely the GRACE spacecraft. From these observations they can derive surface mass-variation patterns.
Read More...
Sensenbrenner IPCC witch-hunt: Attempt to blacklist climate scientists must be rejected
Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin), ranking Republican on the House global warming committee, has sent a letter to Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, calling for scientists whose names appear in the e-mails stolen from the U.K. Climatic Research Unit to be blacklisted from participating as contributors or reviewers of the forthcoming IPCC Fifth Assessment Report.
Sensenbrenner is engaged in an outrageous McCarthyist jihad against the climate science community, making it abundantly clear that this controversy is not really about stolen e-mails, which have been misused and misinterpreted. Rather it is part of an aggressive campaign by the global warming denial machine to bully and intimidate the science community. Sensenbrenner shows no real interest in meaningful dialogue, nor in an honest examination of climate science findings. Denialists are throwing up a smokescreen of propaganda in an attempt to legitimize their refusal to come to grips with scientific evidence on global climatic disruption and its implications. This is a power play.
Read More...
Huge Alaska Oil Spill Blamed on Ice Plugs
ANCHORAGE, Alaska, December 9, 2009 (ENS) - Ice plugged an inactive pipeline, causing it to burst, officials said Tuesday in an attempt to explain how 46,000 gallons of crude oil spewed onto the tundra near a BP Exploration processing center at Prudhoe Bay on Alaska's North Slope.
The oil leak near BP's Lisburne Processing Center was discovered during a routine inspection by a company worker on November 29, say state and company officials, but the ice in the ruptured pipe was not visible until Monday.
The spill is one of the North Slope's largest by volume, officials believe. Separate investigations by BP and the State of Alaska into the cause of the leak are ongoing.
The 18-inch above-ground pipeline transports a mixture of produced water, oil, and natural gas, but it was not in operation at the time of the incident. The pipe is no longer leaking, and cleanup of the spilled oil is underway.
According to cleanup officials, the rupture is approximately 24 inches long, located on the bottom of the pipe. Joint Information Center press officer Steve Rinehart said, "The rupture is consistent with an overpressure scenario, linked to ice plugs forming inside the pipe."
At least three-quarters of an acre of tundra was fouled and officials say that more than half of that area is oil-misted snow and the rest is covered with an oil and water mix.
Read More...
Are Large Dams Altering Extreme Weather Patterns?
Large dams may cause shifting regional weather extremes.
This finding is causing scientists to wonder if aging dams around the world can withstand the extreme weather events they may inadvertently generate.
It was nearly 75 years ago that scientists first speculated that large dams could vastly transform local climate. Weather results from the interaction of warm and cool air, and dams can hold vast reservoirs of water that can influence the heat and moisture of the air above them. Dams also can radically alter irrigation patterns in the surrounding land, impacting their climate patterns as well.
A number of recent studies and computer models suggest that dams can indeed boost rainfall by increasing atmospheric moisture.
"The findings are still preliminary, but we do see a trend," said researcher Faisal Hossain, a hydrologist at Tennessee Technological University in Cookeville.
Read More...
Snow at Highest Elevations No Longer Pure
The pure white snow atop the Andes Mountains may not be so pure after all. Scientists have found traces of toxic pollutants called PCBs in snow samples taken from Aconcagua Mountain, the highest peak in the Americas.
While the overall PCB levels were quite low, the results show that these long-lasting contaminants, notorious for causing myriad health problems, can end up at altitudes as high as 20,340 feet (6,200 meters), making their way through the atmosphere to these remote areas.
PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, break down slowly, and as a result, can last for many years in the environment. They can be transported through the air long distances, and have been found in mountain ranges in Europe and Canada, as well as the Arctic.
Read More...
New Approach to Emissions Makes Climate and Air Quality Models More Accurate
It's no secret that the emissions leaving a car tailpipe or factory smokestack affect climate and air quality. Even trees release chemicals that influence the atmosphere. But until now, scientists have struggled to know where these organic molecules go and what happens to them once they leave their source, leading to models for predicting climate and air quality that are incomplete or less than accurate.
A major collaborative effort of more than 60 scientists led by Jose-Luis Jimenez, an associate professor of chemistry at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has discovered common ground in the jumble of organic material floating through the skies. The finding presents a workable solution that will improve the speed and accuracy of prediction models used to understand how these aerosols affect climate and human health, said Jimenez, also a fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, or CIRES.
Read More...