Political Climate Articles
Ten reasons why examining climate change policy through an ethical lens is a practical imperative
If ethical and justice arguments about why climate change policies are necessary are taken off the table in the climate change debate, it is like a baseball pitcher unilaterally agreeing to not throw any fast balls or breaking balls during a World Series game.
Yet, as we will explain, there is almost a complete absence of ethical arguments for climate change policies in the US debate about proposed approaches to climate change. This failure to expressly examine the ethical issues entailed by arguments made by opponents of climate change action has important practical consequences.
Arguments against climate change policies are usually of two types. By far the most frequent arguments made in opposition to climate change policies are assertions of various kinds of adverse economic impacts that will flow if climate change policies are adopted. Examples of this are claims that proposed climate change legislation will destroy jobs, reduce GDP, damage US businesses such as the coal and petroleum industries, increase the cost of fuel, or will destroy the recovery from a recession. The second most frequent argument made by opponents of climate change policies are assertions that adverse climate change impacts have not been sufficiently scientifically proven.
Read More...
Who Hacked the CRU?
More evidence is being unearthed on the sophisticated cyber-burglary of more than 1,000 emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) that sheds light on who did the stealing and why.
An interesting post on IT-NETWORKS picks apart what is currently known about the hack job and what it can tell us about the identity of the hacker and their motivations.
Forensic data analysis reveals that the hacker was in a time zone somewhere in the eastern US or Canada. Rather than a single breach of security, the hacker was also able to access confidential CRU on four different occasions over a six-week period.
The IT-NETWORKS analysis also points out that only a small portion of the emails stolen was actually released. The hacker took the trouble of sifting out all the routine messages about holidays and fire alarms and possibly much more.
What was removed remains unknown but clearly the hacker was trying to discredit legitimate scientists and presumably discarded whatever would not help the contrived scandal of "climategate".
The hacker also focused specifically on four scientists who had long been the targets of US based climate deniers because their peer-reviewed scientific papers had been used to back the IPCC's reports on global warming.
Read More...
McIntyre and McKitrick Unmasked
Hockey stick bashers revealed as industry goons
In a painstakingly documented review of the disinformation campaign led by the retired mining promoter Stephen McIntyre and the Fraser Institute economist-for-hire Ross McKitrick, Deep Climate has shown how badly manipulated - and how badly overblown - the so-called "hockey stick controversy" has been in the last seven or eight years.
DC also shows the complicity of think tanks such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Fraser Institute and, perhaps especially, the Canadian journalistic centre of climate change denial, the National Post.
Read More...
Wegman's Report Highly Politicized - and Fatally Flawed
"Independent" Hockey Stick analysis revealed as Republican set-up
The purportedly independent report that Dr. Edward Wegman prepared in 2006 for the Congressional Committee on Energy and Commerce was actually a partisan set-up, according to information revealed today.
Wegman, who had presented himself as an impartial "referee" between two "teams" debating the quality of the so-called Hockey Stick graph was, in fact, coached throughout his review by Republican staffer Peter Spencer. Wegman and his colleagues also worked closely with one of the teams (and especially with retired mining stock promoter Stephen McIntyre) to try to replicate criticism of the Hockey Stick graph, while at the same time foregoing contact with the actual authors of the seminal climate reconstruction.
The Hockey Stick refers to a graph (by Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes) that became a defining image of the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It also became a target for Steve McIntyre and the Guelph University economist Ross McKitrick, who since 2002, at least, has been a paid spokesperson for ExxonMobil-backed think tanks such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and the Fraser Institute.
Read More...
Lobbyists Rush to Block EPA Action on Climate Change
Like a lot of industry groups, the farm lobby says it would prefer that Congress tackle climate change rather than leaving the job to the bureaucrats at the Environmental Protection Agency. But now, the prospect of EPA greenhouse gas regulation looms large - mostly because agriculture and so many other interests haven't liked any of the climate bills so far on Capitol Hill.
Not to worry. The same onslaught of lobbyists and lawyers that helped dim prospects for climate legislation in this Congress (representing about 1,170 businesses and interest groups by the fourth quarter of 2009 ) is now engaged in an energetic, multi-front offensive to delay or block any attempt by the Obama administration to enact an alternative through regulation. Overt and covert support for Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski's pending resolution to stop the EPA from regulation (and similar legislation introduced in the House) is but one prong of this assault. Opponents of federal curbs on fossil fuel emissions are also seeking allies in the states and in other federal agencies, while paving the way for court action to directly challenge EPA's initiative.
Rick Krause, the American Farm Bureau Federation's senior director for congressional relations, says the EPA's Clean Air Act permitting system - the vehicle for its proposed climate change regulations - has "very little flexibility." Although he says the Farm Bureau would prefer a congressional climate bill, he admits the group hasn't backed any bills so far: "We don't feel that the threat of bad regulation is enough to warrant the enactment of bad legislation."
Read More...
"Independent" critique of Hockey Stick revealed as fatally flawed right-wing anti-science set up
No one can possibly undo all of the damage to climate science and individual scientists done by the diarrhea of disinformation spewing out of the anti-science crowd. In large part that's because of the reckless laziness of many in the status quo media, such as CBS, who prefer easy sensationalism to thoughtful journalism.
Few scientists have been more victimized than Michael Mann, Director of Pennsylvania State University's Earth System Science Center. Than again, few scientists have been more vindicated than Michael Mann (see "Penn State inquiry finds no evidence for allegations against Michael Mann" and below).
That's why I feel compelled to keep doing my small part in helping to set the record straight as often as possible - and to publicize the tremendous work of others doing the same, such as the blogger Deep Climate, who has uncovered previously unknown details of just how some of the most fraudulent charges against Mann and the Hockey Stick graph were trumped up by the anti-science crowd in the first place.
Read More...
Battle over climate data turned into war between scientists and sceptics
Whether it was democracy in action, or defence against malicious attempts to disrupt research, climate scientists were driven to siege mentality by persistence of sceptics
In a unique experiment, The Guardian has published online the full manuscript of its major investigation into the climate science emails stolen from the University of East Anglia, which revealed apparent attempts to cover up flawed data; moves to prevent access to climate data; and to keep research from climate sceptics out of the scientific literature.
As well as including new information about the emails, we will allow web users to annotate the manuscript to help us in our aim of creating the definitive account of the controversy. This is an attempt at a collaborative route to getting at the truth.
We hope to approach that complete account by harnessing the expertise of people with a special knowledge of, or information about, the emails. We would like the protagonists on all sides of the debate to be involved, as well as people with expertise about the events and the science being described or more generally about the ethics of science. The only conditions are the comments abide by our community guidelines and add to the total knowledge or understanding of the events.
Read More...
How the 'climategate' scandal is bogus and based on climate sceptics' lies
Claims based on email soundbites are demonstrably false - there is manifestly no evidence of clandestine data manipulation
Almost all the media and political discussion about the hacked climate emails has been based on soundbites publicised by professional sceptics and their blogs. In many cases, these have been taken out of -context and twisted to mean something they were never intended to.
Elizabeth May, veteran head of the Canadian Green party, claims to have read all the emails and declared: "How dare the world's media fall into the trap set by -contrarian propagandists without reading the whole set?"
If those journalists had read even a few words beyond the soundbites, they would have realised that they were often being fed lies. Here are a few examples.
The most quoted soundbite in the affair comes from an email from Prof Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, to Prof Mike Mann of the University of Virginia in 1999, in which he discussed using "Mike's Nature trick" to "hide the decline". The phrase has been widely spun as an effort to prevent the truth getting out that global temperatures had stopped rising.
The Alaska governor Sarah Palin, in the Washington Post on 9 December, attacked the emailers as a "highly politicised scientific circle" who "manipulated data to 'hide the decline' in global temperatures". She was joined by the Republican senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma – who has for years used his chairmanship of the Environment and Public Works Committee to campaign against climate scientists and to dismiss anthropogenic global warming as "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people". During the Copenhagen climate conference, which he attended on a Senate delegation, he referred to Jones's "hide the decline" quote and said: "Of course, he means hide the decline in temperatures."
Read More...
Palin likens global warming studies to 'snake oil'
REDDING, Calif. -- Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin called studies supporting global climate change a "bunch of snake oil science" Monday during a rare appearance in California, a state that has been at the forefront of environmental regulations.
Palin spoke before a logging conference in Redding, a town of 90,000 about 160 miles north of the state capital. The media were barred from the event, but The Associated Press bought a $74 ticket to attend.
Palin said California's heavy regulatory environment makes it difficult for businesses to succeed, a point that is shared by many business leaders in the state.
She criticized what she said were heavy-handed environmental laws. As Alaska governor, for example, she said she sued the federal government to overturn the listing of polar bears as a threatened species.
Read More...
Tea Party Fact-Checking
Palin makes a few errors in her convention speech -- and on Fox News Sunday.
Sarah Palin made a splash over the weekend as the keynote speaker at the first National Tea Party convention, and she followed up with an interview on Fox News Sunday. But she didn't always stick to the facts.
* Palin implied that the Nigerian would-be Christmas Day bomber stopped talking after he was read his Miranda rights. He did, but not for good. He began talking again extensively after counterterrorism agents enlisted the help of his family, and he has provided information on all the subjects Palin mentioned, authorities say.
* Palin stretched the truth when she said that $6 million in stimulus funds went to a Democratic pollster. In fact, only $4.36 million was spent on the contract, which was with the giant public relations firm Burson-Marsteller, where the pollster is CEO.
* Palin repeated her oft-stated, greatly exaggerated claim that Alaska produces 20 percent of the U.S. domestic energy supply. The actual figure is just under 2.9 percent.
* Her claim that the state spent "millions" dealing with ethics complaints against her is one that has been disputed. Her own tally is less than $2 million, and an Anchorage newspaper said most of that was salaries of state workers who would have been paid whether or not Palin was being investigated.
Read More...
Global warming "more dangerous" than terrorism
Global warming and climate change affects all countries, rich and poor alike, and are more dangerous than even terrorism, which targets only specific countries, according to D.R. Karthikeyan, former Director of the Central Bureau of Investigation.
In the last century, forests had been indiscriminately targeted for narrow gains and this had also contributed greatly to this global problem.
Mr. Karthikeyan was addressing a sapling planting campaign, organised by the M.S. Chellamuthu Trust and Research Foundation, at Alagarkoil near here on Tuesday.
The campaign launched by Union Minister for Chemicals and Fertilizers M.K. Alagiri recently aims at planting one lakh saplings in the district.
Avoiding the use of petroleum products, taking to bio-fuel and planting more saplings are the need of the hour, said Mr. Karthikeyan.
Read More...
GOP candidate for MA governor says, "I absolutely am not smart enough to believe I know the answer to that question."
The argument about whether conservatives are condescending to liberals or vice versa is now officially over. Thanks to the emerging litmus test of the right wing on climate science, conservatives are now questioning their own intellectual capabilities - they are self-condescending!
The Boston Globe buried this nugget last week:
GOP gubernatorial candidate Charles Baker has a reputation as a smart guy, but he said last week he wasn't smart enough to form an opinion on the hottest environmental topic of the day. Climate change: Does he believe in it, or doesn't he?
"I'm not saying I believe in it. I'm not saying I don't," he told the Globe on Friday, a day after dodging the question at a public forum on Thursday. "You're asking me to take a position on something I don't know enough know enough about."
He added, "I absolutely am not smart enough to believe I know the answer to that question." Sad.
That should be his bumpersticker: "I absolutely am not smart enough."
Read More...
'Snowmaggedon' in Washington spurs climate change doubters
Mark Twain had it right: Climate is what we expect; weather is what we get.
So, is the massive dumping of snow from the Mid-Atlantic to New England proof positive that climate change is untrue, as doubters such as Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) have taken the opportunity to trumpet? (His family built an igloo, declared it Al Gore's new home and put up signs asking people to honk if they liked global warming).
Not if you read the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report carefully.
First, the cold weather spells in the East have been linked with an "El Nino" year and a shift in the arctic oscillation that sent a jet of cold air down into the Eastern United States and elsewhere, all cyclically occurring events regardless of the overall trend in average planetary temperature, as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration pointed out recently.
Lost in the hype over the East Coast cold snap around the Christmas holidays was the fact that at the same time, parts of Alaska were unseasonably warm. And the record cold that descended as far south as Florida in January? Globally, January 2010 was the warmest January on record, based on satellite data that date to 1979, according to AccuWeather.com.
Read More...
'Snowpocalypses'
MSNBC's Ratigan: "These 'snowpocalypses' that have been going through DC and other extreme weather events are precisely what climate scientists have been predicting, fearing and anticipating because of global warming."
Idealogues in the Senate keep pushing the anti-scientific disinformation that big snow storms are evidence against human-caused global warming. That's a tweet Tuesday by Sen. DeMint (R-SC).
Think Progress reported yesterday, Inhofe's Grandchildren Build Igloo To Mock Killer Snow Storm: 'Al Gore's New Home', which noted "the Virginia GOP launched a web ad mocking "12 inches of global warming," attacking Democrats who had voted in favor of climate and clean energy legislation."
But MSNBC's Dylan Ratigan "busted" this nonsense:
Read More...
Arizona quits Western climate endeavor
Cutting greenhouse gases too expensive, Brewer says
Arizona will no longer participate in a groundbreaking attempt to limit greenhouse-gas emissions across the West, a change in policy by Gov. Jan Brewer that will include a review of all the state's efforts to combat climate change.
Brewer stopped short of pulling Arizona out of the multistate coalition that plans to regulate greenhouse gases starting in 2012. But she made it clear in an executive order that Arizona will not endorse the emission-control plan or any program that could raise costs for consumers and businesses.
State officials said the policy shift was rooted in concerns that the controversial emissions plan would slow the state's economic recovery.
Brewer says the state should focus less on regulations and more on renewable energy and investments by businesses that can create green jobs.
Read More...
Saudi Arabia preparing for oil demand to peak
A top Saudi energy official expressed serious concern Monday that world oil demand could peak in the next decade and said his country was preparing for that eventuality by diversifying its economic base.
Mohammed al-Sabban, lead climate talks negotiator, said the country with the world's largest proven reserves of conventional crude is working to become the top exporter of energy, including alternative forms such as solar power.
Saudi Arabia was among the most vocal opponents of proposals during the climate change talks in Copenhagen. And al-Sabban criticized what he described as efforts by developed nations to adopt policies biased against oil producers through the imposition of taxes on refined petroleum products while offering huge subsidies for coal - a key industry for the United States.
Al-Sabban said the potential that world oil demand had peaked, or would peak soon, was an "alarm that we need to take more seriously" as Saudi charts a course for greater economic diversification.
"We cannot stay put and say 'well, this is something that will happen anyway," al-Sabban said at the Jeddah Economic Forum. The "world cannot wait for us before we are forced to adapt to the reality of lower and lower oil revenues," he added later.
Some experts have argued that demand for oil, the chief export for Saudi Arabia and the vast majority of other Gulf Arab nations, has already peaked. Others say consumption will plateau soon, particularly in developed nations that are pushing for greater reliance on renewable energy sources.
Read More...
ACCCE Hires New PR Firm With Bush Ties To Push Coal
The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE) has hired two new public relations firms to hock its message in the wake of the disastrous job done by Bonner & Associates.
ACCCE has retained HDMK, a PR firm with very strong ties to former President George W. Bush and the Republican Party, to manage its national media efforts, while Dan Ronayne, a managing director of the Howard Consulting Group, was retained to work with regional reporters.
HDMK is run by Terry Holt, the national campaign spokesperson for George W. Bush in the 2004 election and the former spokesman for House Minority Leader John Boehner. Other HDMK partners include Trent Duffy, a former deputy press secretary to President George W. Bush, Jim Morrell, former deputy chief of staff to the House Republican Conference and a speechwriter for former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-IL), and Chad Kolton, another long-time Republican communications operative who served in the Bush administration as press secretary at the OMB and FEMA.
HDMK's other clients include the Republic of Panama, America's Health Insurance Plans, the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association and the Real Estate Roundtable.
Read More...
Republicans mine coal-country anxieties
Republicans believe there are three words so powerful that they might reshape the political order in an economically beleaguered corner of the country: War on coal.
With Democrats holding total control of the federal government and a cap-and-trade bill still looming, the GOP is fanning widespread coal country fears that the national Democratic Party is hostile to the coal mining industry, if not outright committed to its demise.
Those efforts are putting a group of coal state Democrats at risk as Republicans leverage the tremendous economic anxieties surrounding the future of an industry that is a vital part of their states' economies.
In West Virginia and Kentucky, longtime Democratic House incumbents with solid records on the issue are taking heavy flak. Across the border in Virginia, a veteran Democrat could face his most serious challenge yet in part because of his support of cap and trade. Two junior lawmakers from Ohio are facing threats for the same reason.
The issue may loom largest in West Virginia, where coal mining is an integral part of the culture and makes up a full quarter of the state's revenues.
A well-known former state supreme court judge switched his party registration to run against 17-term incumbent Rep. Nick Rahall in the state's coal-heavy south and wasted little time in raising the issue.
Read More...
The Story of Coal's Dirty, Deadly Legacy
High Unemployment and Powerful Industry Make New Mining Limits Unlikely
Most of us take it for granted that when we flip the switch, the lights will go on. Sure, we write the electric company a monthly check, but otherwise lend no thought to the source of the power - like urban kids clueless that chicken originates someplace other than the freezer aisle of chain groceries.
But this month, an energetic author from the rugged, coal-laden hills of southern Illinois hopes to relay the message - utterly apropos in a country where coal generates nearly half the electricity - that a consequence of that national dependence is the outright decimation of the communities surrounding the mines.
Jeff Biggers, a civil rights activist and cultural historian, watched helplessly a dozen years ago as the hollers of Eagle Creek, Illinois - a corner of the Shawnee National Forest and his family's home for roughly 200 years - were blasted away, the forested hills bulldozed under by companies intent on harvesting the lucrative coal seams beneath - a scene from Avatar playing out in real time.
"They've strip-mined your heritage," Biggers' uncle told him at the time.
Read More...