Category Archives: climate

For all the Internet’s flaws–including its ability to keep people like myself inside the house, when they should be outside, tending to their spring gardens–I adore its ability to bring forward pure ideas. Here’s a question that’s been bothering me for years. Why it is that so-called conservatives are resistant to the idea that humansContinue reading ““It Can’t Be Our Fault. We’re the Good Guys.””

David Roberts at Gristmill catches a great letter to the NYTimes from James Speth, a dean at Yale in Forestry and Environmental Studies: The world we have known is history. A mere 1 degree Fahrenheit global average warming is already raising sea levels, strengthening hurricanes, disrupting ecosystems, threatening parks and protected areas, causing droughts andContinue reading “The World We Have Known”

Chris Mooney highlights the hypocrisy of the White House regarding global warming, forcing the conflict between the President’s private and public views into the open. In private, George Bush is a denialist: According to "Rebel-in-Chief," admirer Fred Barnes’ just-published inside look at the President, "…Bush is a dissenter on global warming. To the extent it’sContinue reading “The White House Bothers to Mislead on Global Warming: Will the White House Press Corps Care?”

Something surpising’s happening with the meandering climate change discussion; quite a number of the players are getting hard to predict. We’ve almost reached the stage of requiring a scorecard to distinguish the players. A contrarian has to wonder: Could a real debate break out soon?

On the left, at Gristmill, David Roberts puts together an "index-card manifesto" for the environment that deliberately leaves out global warming, because:

"It’s vague, and large, and slow-moving, and the enemy is structural and pervasive, and we’re all complicit. That kind of shit is just no fun to think about. It does not stir the blood."

On the right, at the Weekly Standard, Steven Hayward takes on the issue for the first time in this thought-leading conservative publication (to my knowledge). Unsurprisingly, he goes out of his way to deride "alarmists," the IPCC climatological consensus, and the Kyoto Protocol…but he doesn’t resort to infamous Exxon/FOXNews hack Stephen Milloy’s-style eye-rolling or derision, beginning his discussion with:

Very few people who follow closely the subject of climate change argue that there’s nothing to it. There is unanimity that the planet has warmed by about 1 degree over the last century. Just about everyone agrees that the growth of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels cannot continue forever. That’s where the agreement ends. The range of possible temperature increase over the next century is fairly wide in the official forecasts, from 1.4 degrees Celsius on the low side, which might not be difficult to cope with, to 5.8 degrees Celsius on the high side, which would mean major environmental problems for the planet.

(Such as might be experienced in Greenland, where, according to a story on National Public Radio yesterday, Greenland’s ice is melting at twice the rate expected, probably because the climate has warned 3 degrees Celsius…just in the last few years.)

But most surprising of all, a close associate of the new chairman of the Federal Reserve, an economist named Robert Frank, wrote in "The New York Times" on Thursday to propose a major tax increase on gasoline, linked to a tax rebate. The idea sounds brilliant; surprisingly workable for taxpayers, a money-maker for the Treasury, and exactly the sort of measure likely to reduce CO2 emissions. Frank admits that politicians won’t like it, but eloquently suggests (see below the fold for the full story) why they should:

In the warmer weather they will have inherited from us a century from now, perspiring historians will struggle to explain why this proposal was once considered politically unthinkable.

From the preface of a book published this week by science writer Eugene Linden, called Winds of Change: In the late l970’s, climate specialists first started worrying about the possibility [of climate change]…but with the Iranian hostage crisis and stagflation dominating public concerns, the warning got little notice. The possibility that humans might be alteringContinue reading “What We Have Here is a Failure to Imagine”

From the crucial RealClimate site, here’s a well-written post that puts the finger on what is wrong with the NASA website page discussing last year’s climate, the warmest in history. Not only does it strangely avoid discussing what might cause such warming, but then it actually goes on to make a weak attempt to mislead.Continue reading “Official NASA Webpage Misleading”

From the Oak Ridge National Laboratory:(via a great post by Stuart Staniford at The Oil Drum)

According to Gidon Echel and Pam Martin, at the University of Chicago, when it comes to global warming, reducing the amount of meat in your diet could be as meaningful as the car you drive. Here’s their paper (Download diet_energy_and_global_warming.pdf). Echel and Martin argue that "there is an order of magnitude parity in fossil energyContinue reading “Cool Eating: or, How a Vegetarian Diet Could Help Save the World”

A flood of news on climate change this week. Here’s a short list, with a few brief comments: This week in Washington a conference was held to celebrate the once-proud Environmental Protection Agency’s thirty-fifth birthday. Six former EPA chiefs–five of them Republicans–lambasted the Bush administration for failing to lead against the threat of global warming.Continue reading ““A Flickering Climate” is No Joke”

Two-thirds of 110 species of the colorful harlequin frogs of South America have vanished since the 1980’s. The article in Nature quotes the lead researcher: "Disease is the bullet killing frogs, but climate change is pulling the trigger," says Alan Pounds, an ecologist at the Monteverde Cloud Forest Preserve and Tropical Science Center in CostaContinue reading “Two-Thirds of Mountain Frog Species in Two Decades Extinct: Global Warming Blamed”