“The Web's most influential climate-change blogger” — Time Magazine A Project of Center for American Progress Action Fund
The Yale Project on Climate Change just released a poll that found growing support for measures to reduce global warming pollution. It interviewed 1,024 people from May 14 to June 1, and compared the results to a similar poll it conducted in January 2010. CAP’s Daniel J. Weiss and intern Ariel Powell have the story.
There was more support or more intense support in the June survey for the following actions.
The U.S. Senate is poised to vote Thursday on the Murkowski Resolution (see “Clean air Lisa vs. dirty air Lisa“). EPA chief Jackson says passage would “increase our dependence on oil … by billions of barrels.” Environment America has a new state-by-state analysis, confirming that conclusion, which I repost below:
Last week, AP photographer Charlie Riedel published disturbing photographs of oil-soaked birds suffering in the wake of the BP disaster on the Gulf Coast.
A look at the culture of deregulation, self-regulation, and corruption ushered in by VP Dick Cheney underscores why the BP oil catastrophe should forever be remembered as Cheney’s Katrina, by CAP’s Joshua Dorner.
The best analyses available show comprehensive climate and clean energy jobs legislation is a very good investment. CAP’s Richard W. Caperton looks at several recent economic studies.
In one of the fastest wholesale flip-flops in Senate history, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) has rejected his own climate bill and embraced an energy-only bill — just months after declaring such an approach intellectually dishonest and worse than meaningless. The Politico reports this morning:
Sen. Lindsey Graham, who had earlier unsuccessfully negotiated to be part of the Kerry-Lieberman(-Graham) climate change bill, will join Sen. Dick Lugar at a presser at 2:15 p.m. in the Senate Radio-TV gallery today to announce his support of the “Lugar Practical Energy and Climate Plan.” Big mo? Following today’s introduction, more Republicans and Democrats are expected to join the growing momentum for Lugar’s bill.
This in spite of his repeated ridicule of exactly the kind of energy-only bill Lugar is pushing: Read the rest of this post »
The AP reports that well over half of the federal trial judges in states affected by the BP oil disaster have financial ties to that industry:
CAP’s Kate Gordon testifies before the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee on the liability and financial responsibility for oil spills under the OPA:
Ah, the Tea Party ‘hearts’ BP, as ThinkProgress explains in this repost.
Embattled BP CEO Tony Hayward asserted that his company has paid “every claim” for damages caused by the offshore-drilling disaster that is flooding the Gulf of Mexico with millions of gallons of toxic oil. TP explains why this is another lie.
10 Eastern States Join Wind Energy Consortium
The governors of 10 East Coast states have joined federal authorities to form a consortium that will promote the development of offshore wind energy.
As the BP oil disaster drags on, the public’s desire for clean energy investments and increased oversight of corporate polluters has greatly intensified. CAP’s Daniel J. Weiss and intern Ariel Powell have the important data and charts from a major new poll.
WordPress says this is the 5,000th post on Climate Progress.
The American nuclear industry, primed to begin new construction projects for the first time in 30 years, is about as eager for an operating problem at an old reactor as the oil industry was for a well blowout on the eve of opening the Atlantic coast to oil drilling.
Let’s file this under, “worst-case scenarios waiting to happen” — a file that has grown uncomfortably large in recent weeks (see BP calls blowout disaster ‘inconceivable,’ ‘unprecedented,’ and unforeseeable).
New York Times reporter Matt Wald has the story, “An Old Nuclear Problem Creeps Back“:
As oil from BP’s Deepwater Horizon well makes its way deep into the marshes of the Gulf Coast, and the wildlife toll mounts, the company announced today that cleanup costs have already reached $1.25 billion and are growing quickly. Given this devastation, it’s not surprising that a vast majority of Americans — 72 percent — now have a negative view of the company, a new Rasmussen poll found. However, 22 percent still have a somewhat or very favorable view of the foreign oil giant.
EnviroKnow examined the crosstabs from the poll and found that this group of BP supporters is made up disproportionately of conservatives. Guest blogger William Tomasko has the story in this TP repost.
I will be speaking at an all-day climate forum Wednesday in Pasadena sponsored by Marketplace Public Radio. You can watch it live 8 am to 5:30 pm Pacific Time (click here). I’ll be on 11:30 am PT.
There is a great line up of speakers, including Kolbert, Mann, Santer, and Oreskes. Here are the details on my panel, “Finding the Policy Path”:
Report: Renewables Revolution To Provide 95 Per Cent of Global Electricity By 2050
The world could produce 95 per cent of the electricity it needs from renewable sources by 2050, cutting greenhouse emissions from the energy and transport sectors by 80 per cent without jeopardising economic growth.
It’s time to put America’s skilled and dedicated military in charge of responding to the BP oil disaster, argue Daniel J. Weiss, Rudy deLeon, and Susan Lyon in this CAP repost.
Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN) has released his “Practical Energy Plan.” It is practical only in the sense that it would do practically nothing to stop catastrophic global warming. Below is a statement by CAP’s Daniel J. Weiss followed by a Union Concerned Scientists repost.
This post will explain why some sort of massive government Apollo program or Manhattan project to develop new breakthrough technologies is not a priority component of the effort to stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm.
In honor of the Vancouver Olympics, I am reposting this humorous video from 2008:
Here is an update of my review of the best papers on climate science in the past year. If you want a broader overview of the literature in the past few years, focusing specifically on how unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gas emissions are projected to impact the United States, try “An introduction to global warming impacts: Hell and High Water.”
Methane release from the not-so-perma-frost is the most dangerous amplifying feedback in the entire carbon cycle. Research published in Friday’s journal Science finds a key “lid” on “the large sub-sea permafrost carbon reservoir” near Eastern Siberia “is clearly perforated, and sedimentary CH4 [methane] is escaping to the atmosphere.”
Read the rest of this post »
The serial misinformers and misrepresenters demand equal time for their misinformation and misrepresentations. What should climate science defenders and the media do?
Nature, the highly respected British scientific journal, has an excellent editorial and news story tomorrow on the recent assault on climate science (excerpted below).
Taking Nature’s advice, I urge the administration to send science advisor Holdren and NOAA Administrator Lubchenco and Energy Secretary Chu on a media blitz and national tour to explain and emphasize the science.
According to the IPCC 4th Assessment Report (2007):
Read the rest of this post »
I will be testifying in front of Congress this week. And my book, Straight Up, is coming out the following week (click here to buy it).
That means I’ll be doing a lot of media and trying to hone a simple, effective message for a far broader audience than Climate Progress readers. I have my own favorite phrases but I’d like to hear from you what you think works both in terms of sound-bites and overall framing.
Here is something you twitterers out there can retweet, from twitter.com/algore:
The Nobel prize-winner has posted a longer recommendation on his website:
The unfolding ecological disaster on the Gulf Coast reveals the stark contrast in the energy choices that the Senate — and the nation — are due to make in coming months.
Do we embrace the Senate energy and climate bill, to be debated this summer, which puts a penalty on pollution and propels the transition to the clean, safe energy of the 21st century?
Or do we let the forces of obstruction — led by Big Oil and special-interest polluters — win, ensuring America’s continued addiction to the dirty, unsafe energy of the 19th century?
CAP’s CEO and I have an op-ed in today’s Politico, “The need to beat our oil addiction.” Here’s the rest:
Joel Benenson, who “was Obama’s lead pollster” during the 2008 campaign,” has released a must-read strategy memo, “Support for energy bill.”
Based on polling of 650 registered voters May 4 and 5 — still the early days of BP’s Titanic oil disaster — Benenson finds, “not only do voters support a comprehensive clean energy bill by large double-digit margins, they also indicate their Senator’s vote could be an impactful re-election factor.” Here are the numbers:
When asked “What do you think is the most important problem facing the country today?” about 49 percent of respondents answered the economy or unemployment, while only 1 percent mentioned the environment or global warming.
But when asked, “What do you think will be the most serious problem facing the world in the future if nothing is done to stop it?” 25 percent said the environment or global warming, and only 10 percent picked the economy. In fact, environmental issues were cited more often than any other category, including terrorism, which was only mentioned by 10 percent of respondents.
I have written about the work of Stanford’s Jon Krosnick before (see “USA Today: Some scientists misread poll data on global warming controversy” and “Large majority of Americans continue to believe global warming is real and trust scientists“).
It was the hottest April on record in the NASA dataset. More significantly, following fast on the heels of the hottest March and hottest Jan-Feb-March on record, it’s also the hottest Jan-Feb-March-April on record [click on figure to enlarge].
In my post last night, I noted that many people are expecting the President to pivot from the BP oil disaster to the climate and clean energy bill. But how exactly should he do that rhetorically? I’m writing a piece on that subject and would love to hear your thoughts.
Also, I have been mostly calling the unfolding disaster in the Gulf the “BP oil disaster,” which certainly beats the President’s “BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill.” Guest blogger Dominique Browning has some thoughts about the name and messaging below. Again, I’d love to hear your ideas.
Harvard economist Robert Stavins analyzes the American Power Act’s allowance distribution in this repost. Here are his main conclusions:
A strong, credible body of scientific evidence shows that climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems….
Some scientific conclusions or theories have been so thoroughly examined and tested, and supported by so many independent observations and results, that their likelihood of subsequently being found to be wrong is vanishingly small. Such conclusions and theories are then regarded as settled facts. This is the case for the conclusions that the Earth system is warming and that much of this warming is very likely due to human activities.
The National Academy released three reports today on “America’s Climate Choices.”
The main subjects of my recent analysis — The non-hype about climate change (and malaria) — have chosen either to support my key conclusions or not refute them.
The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley (TVMOB) is a shameless purveyor of hate speech and anti-science disinformation (see links below).
Nonetheless, you rarely see such a thorough debunking of an anti-science disinformer as this astonishing point-by-point evisceration put together by John Abraham, an engineering professor at St. Thomas University in St. Paul, MN.
Energy economics expert Craig Severance has written a sequel to “Peak oil production coming sooner than expected.”
It’s time we moved on to something else, or this is going to kill us.
Not only are world oil supplies running out, but what oil is still left is proving very dirty to obtain. We need to kick our oil addiction now if we expect to preserve any hopes of economic prosperity, or unspoiled habitats.
“This is What the End of the Oil Age Looks Like.”
Another week, another staggering journalistic lapse in climate science reporting at a once-great media outlet.
How bad is “Uncertain Science,” by Stefan Theil, European economics editor for the near-dead newsweekly? I asked Dr. Robert J. Brulle for a comment, and the Drexel University “expert on environmental communications,” wrote me back:
This article is basically a condensed version of the climate denier viewpoint. Mr. Theil significantly distorts the situation, and grossly fails to ground his story in the actual facts, all to support his biased position. Obviously, Newsweek doesn’t have any fact-checking capability. How this counts as journalism is beyond me.
So how is the president doing on
Grade on a scale of 1 to 10 (with 1 being the worst). Feel free to provide a score on how hard this is going to hit his Presidency. My scores below.
NYT columnist Frank Rich opines:
UPDATE: Brutal heatwave in India and Asia discussed at the end.
Sure it was easily the hottest April — and hottest Jan-April — in NASA’s temperature record. And we set a new record 12-month global temperature, as predicted.
But you can’t expect Americans to believe in global warming if America isn’t setting records, can you? (see “One more reason that recent U.S. polling on global warming is down slightly“).
Well, we are setting records — as Steve Scolnik of CapitalClimate explains in his post, “All-Time May Monthly Heat Records Set in Massachusetts, Rhode Island.” The figure above, by Scolnik based on National Climatic Data Center data, might remind you of this must-have figure from a 2009 National Center for Atmospheric Research study:
The votes may not be there right now, but I intend to find them in the coming months. I will make the case for a clean energy future wherever I can, and I will work with anyone from either party to get this done. But we will get this done. The next generation will not be held hostage to energy sources from the last century.
Insiders had said the President would begin the pivot from the BP oil disaster to the need for comprehensive climate and clean energy jobs legislation this month (see “write Obama’s ‘pivot’ speech to the climate and clean energy jobs bill“).
Obama’s speech at Carnegie Mellon University today has garnered a lot of press attention for doing just that. Here are the key excerpts:
Note: Hansen wants comments on this draft, so keep ‘em coming.
NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) has released a revised draft of “Global Surface Temperature Change,” by James Hansen et al. It is a must read for warming junkies. There’s also a a summary discussion of the paper (reprinted below), and two PowerPoint posters of key figures like this one:
Blue curve: 12-month running-mean global temperature. Note correlation with Nino index (red = El Nino, blue = La Nina). Large volcanoes (green) have a cooling effect for ~2 years.
NASA makes it official: We have set the 12-month record, just as CP pointed a few weeks ago (see “NASA: Easily the hottest April — and hottest Jan-April — in temperature record“) — and that is all the more powerful evidence of human-caused warming “because it occurs when the recent minimum of solar irradiance is having its maximum cooling effect,” as the paper notes. This didn’t make a lot of news — see this tiny Bloomberg story — nothing compared to all the nonsensical stories about global cooling.
But will 2010 actually set the record for the hottest calendar year? NASA explains:
Yesterday, AP photographer Charles Riedel filed these disturbing images of the effect the BP oil disaster is having on Gulf Coast birds (via Amanda Terkel at Think Progress):
The condition of the Gulf region today is the result of hundreds of business and economic development decisions made by the states, the federal government, and the oil and gas industries over many decades. It calls for a long-term solution that involves all those players alongside the communities that have been most affected by generations of compromises made in favor of short-term economic gain over long-term sustainable growth. It is time to face and address our addiction to oil.
In this repost, CAP’s Kate Gordon and Richard Caperton propose a Gulf Recovery Fund.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney’s National Energy Policy Task Force concluded in May 2001 that “advanced, more energy efficient drilling and production methods: reduce emissions; practically eliminate spills from offshore platforms; and enhance worker safety, lower risk of blowouts, and provide better protection of groundwater resources.” At that time, with two oilmen in the White House and two more Texans leading an emboldened Republican majority in the House of Representatives, Big Oil had an unprecedented opportunity to set U.S. energy policy.
Big Oil did not miss the opportunity. A deeper look at the energy legislation based on Cheney’s secret energy task force underscores how the unabashedly pro-oil policies and permissive regulatory environment created during the Bush administration set the stage for Cheney’s Katrina—the BP oil disaster. CAP’s Joshua Dorner has the story in this repost
UPDATE: PolitiFact rates this ad “Pants on Fire!”
Perhaps the most embarrassingly anti-scientific ad you’ll ever see for a statewide race in a ‘blue state’ comes from a woman who once ran one of the top science-based companies in the world:
As David Corn writes, “It only took half a minute for Fiorina to demonstrate she is not a responsible adult.” My Salon piece on this inane ad, “The dumbing down of Carly Fiorina,” is below.
BP is to hive off its Gulf of Mexico oil spill operation to a separate in-house business to be run by an American in a bid to isolate the “toxic” side of the company and dilute some of the anti-British feeling aimed at chief executive Tony Hayward, the company said today.
The surprise announcement was made during a teleconference with City and Wall Street analysts….
Ah, but the UK’s Guardian says cut-and-run Hayward thinks he is a tough guy – assuming tough guys actually talk like six-year-olds:
When we last left Bobby Jindal, oil-addicted governor of BP-ravaged Louisiana, he was demanding more deepwater drilling ASAP. Former dirty energy lobbyist Gov. Haley Barbour (R-MI) also demanded renewed drilling before the cause of disaster was found.
The White House has now responded, as HuffPost reports:
One of the country’s leading experts on the Arctic projects it will be essentially ice-free (in the fall) decades ahead of the projections of the climate models used in the 2007 IPCC report. And that has quite dire implications and consequences for the likely future rate of climate change compared to those models.
The following chart is from Wieslaw Maslowski of the Naval Postgraduate School in a presentation at the March State of the Arctic Meeting (click to enlarge):
*This projection is based on a combined model and data trendline focusing on ice volume. By “ice-free,” Maslowski tells me he means more than an 80% drop from the 1979-2000 summer volume baseline of ~200,00 km^3. Some sea ice above Greenland and Eastern Canada may survive into the 2020s (as the inset in his figure shows), but the Arctic as it has been for apparently a million years will be gone.
Note also that the Polar Science Center asserts “September Ice Volume was lowest in 2009 at 5,800 km^3 or 67% below its 1979 maximum.” If that figure is correct, then we may be on one of Maslowski’s faster-declining trend lines. And yes, after apparently hundreds of thousands of years, this relatively rapid decline can, I think, safely be called a “death spiral” (especially if the Polar Science Center’s work discussed below is correct).
Long-time readers may remember that Maslowski’s work on ice volume is one of the main reasons I entered into my big $1000 bet with James Annan, William Connolley, and Brian Schmidt (see “Another big climate bet — Of Ice and Men“). I just interviewed Maslowski by email and asked him about his work (since it is often misquoted) — and my bet. But first let’s go back to what he said four years ago.
In the ongoing saga of The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley vs. reality, TVMOB tosses up an air ball in response to Prof. John Abraham’s evisceration of his standard talk. Maybe the better analogy is one of bad sportsmanship, a basketball thrown directly at the head of Abraham.
TVMOB is, of course, a shameless purveyor of hate speech and anti-science disinformation (see TVMOB hate speech shocker: Lord Monckton repeats and expands on his charge that those who embrace climate science are “Hitler youth” and fascists and links below). [Please note that the picture on the right is not TVMOB nor do I think he would ever participate in this.]
So it is no surprise his ‘response’ devolves into a nasty threat:
As BP’s oil disaster continues to ravage the Gulf Coast, the company is ramping up its public relations and legal operations to try to salvage its reputation and protect itself from lawsuits. Now, ABC News is reporting that one such tactic BP is using is purchasing search items that have the word “oil” in them on various search engines to ensure that the first results that appear link directly to BP’s official website:
Bill McKibben — counder of 350.org, long-time guest blogger, and the author most recently of the must-read book Eaarth — has an op-ed in the LA Times on the spill-to-bill pivot:
It looks like the Senate is going to vote this week on the pro-pollution amendment of the ‘dirty air’ Lisa — see Polluters work with Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) on amendment to thwart EPA GHG regulations that might help save her state.
The dirty air Lisa most certainly knows that unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions could devastate Alaska (see “Lisa Murkowski proposes to fiddle while Nome burns“). As she said in a 2006 speech:
Warmer, drier air, has allowed the voracious spruce bark beetle to migrate north, moving through our forests in the south-central part of the state. At last count, over three million acres of forest land has been devastated by the beetle, providing dry fuel for outbreaks of enormous wild fires. To give you some perspective, that is almost the size of Connecticut.
But the fact she has been working closely with lobbyists for polluters suggest that her Arctic policy is is to do nothing and let the whole damn thing melt and burn (see “M.I.T. doubles its 2095 warming projection to 10°F — with 866 ppm and Arctic warming of 20°F“).
EPA Administrator Jackson, aka ‘clean air’ Lisa, has a response in HuffPost:
Mother Jones has a good interview with Chris Lehane, an expert in crisis communication.
They lead with the BP communications screw up, but I actually think what he has to say about what team Obama is doing wrong is much more important:
LONDON—As the crisis in the Gulf of Mexico entered its eighth week Wednesday, fears continued to grow that the massive flow of bullshit still gushing from the headquarters of oil giant BP could prove catastrophic if nothing is done to contain it.
The toxic bullshit, which began to spew from the mouths of BP executives shortly after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in April, has completely devastated the Gulf region, delaying cleanup efforts, affecting thousands of jobs, and endangering the lives of all nearby wildlife.
Dense streams of shit are expected to continue spreading throughout the region and the entire United States.
America’s Finest News Source has more on this fast-breaking story:
TP’s Amanda Terkel reports, “As BP tries to shirk responsibility for the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, people around the country are spotting some ironic signs at BP gas stations”:
If you can snap similar pics in your neighborhood, send ‘em in.
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