Climate Denial Crock of the Week

The Conversation:

Changes in solar radiation, known as solar forcing, have had only a very small effect on climate change, a member of the UN’s top panel of climate scientists said today.

The comment, made by a member of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), followed the leak of a draft IPCC report late last year, which included comments on the effect of solar forcing on climate change.

At the time of the leak, the climate change skeptics blog, Watts Up With That drew attention to what it described as a “game-changing admission of enhanced solar forcing” but co-chair of the IPCC’s Working Group 1, Professor Thomas Stocker said that solar forcing actually did not play a major role.

“As the scientific publications indicate, the assessment is not yet completed. We are looking at an extremely small effect here, that’s what one can say from the publications but I should stress the experts are still performing their assessment,” he said a press conference in Hobart today.

The person who leaked the report, blogger Alec Rawls, obtained the draft by signing up as an expert reviewer of the draft.

Professor Stocker said the IPCC was “interested to have a very wide range of experts” reviewing their draft reports.

“We don’t want to have quantitative bars on the reviewers, for example requesting a certain number of publications in peer reviewed journals. We rely on an honest self-declaration on why he or she is an expert,” he said.

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I interviewed Jeff Masters near his home in southeast Michigan on saturday, for an upcoming video. It just happened to be a day of record warmth, so we spent the time on the shore of a small lake a short walk away, where in former decades a ice would have been thick and safe for walking – we hugged the shore and kicked holes in the slushy surface.

48 hours later, we are in a hard, white freeze. Not enough snow for January, but, it’s cold. We’ll take it.

Above, Paul Douglas gives us another “Live at Five” look at how extremes are reshaping our weather.

Having recently booted a couple of particularly obnoxious and obviously increasingly psychotic posters from my youtube channel, I get this.  I try to have an open comments policy, but I do have limits.

Chris Mooney in Mother Jones:

Everybody who’s written or blogged about climate change on a prominent website (or, even worse, spoken about it on YouTube) knows the drill. Shortly after you post, the menagerie of trolls arrives. They’re predominantly climate deniers, and they start in immediately arguing over the content and attacking the science—sometimes by slinging insults and even occasional obscenities.

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In a recent study, a team of researchers from the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication and several other institutions employed a survey of 1,183 Americans to get at the negative consequences of vituperative online comments for the public understanding of science. Participants were asked to read a blog post containing a balanced discussion of the risks and benefits of nanotechnology (which is already all around us and supports a$91 billion US industry). The text of the post was the same for all participants, but the tone of the comments varied. Sometimes, they were “civil”—e.g., no name calling or flaming. But sometimes they were more like this: “If you don’t see the benefits of using nanotechnology in these products, you’re an idiot.”

The researchers were trying to find out what effect exposure to such rudeness had on public perceptions of nanotech risks. They found that it wasn’t a good one. Rather, it polarized the audience: Those who already thought nanorisks were low tended to become more sure of themselves when exposed to name-calling, while those who thought nanorisks are high were more likely to move in their own favored direction. In other words, it appeared that pushing people’s emotional buttons, through derogatory comments, made them double down on their preexisting beliefs.

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With the noteable, glowing exception of the bright, brilliant and essential UP with Chris Hayes, coverage of climate issues, even in this year of searing heat and falling records, continues to be abysmal. Apparently, coverage of the biggest issue of the millennium is not yet considered essential enough to bump Honey BooBoo and Kim Kardashian off the mainstream media.

Could that be changing?

Media Matters:

Even In Record-Breaking Year, Broadcast Climate Coverage Remained Minimal. In 2012, the U.S. experienced record-breaking heat, a historic drought, massive wildfires in the West, and Hurricane Sandy. Meanwhile, Arctic sea ice extent shattered the previous record low and the Greenland ice sheet saw thegreatest melt in recorded history. According to the National Climatic Data Center, 2012 was the warmest year in recorded history for the contiguous U.S. Yet despite these illustrations of climate change, the broadcast news outlets devoted very little time to climate change in 2012, following a downward trend since 2009:

In Four Years, Sunday Shows Have Not Quoted A Single Scientist On Climate Change. Of those who were asked about climate change on the Sunday shows, 54 percent were media figures, 31 percent were politicians and not one was a scientist or climate expert. This is consistent with a previous Media Matters analysis which found that none of the Sunday shows quoted any scientists on climate change between 2009 and 2011. By contrast, two-thirds of those interviewed or quoted on the nightly news programs in 2012 were scientists. [Media Matters, 4/16/12]

Sunday Shows Obscured Scientific Consensus On Climate Change. Not only did the Sunday shows shut out those who accept the science of climate change, but they also failed to inform their audiences that the vast majority of climate scientists agree that climate change is occurring and is driven by human activity. Only 11 percent of coverage implied that scientists agree on global warming, while 44 percent failed to correct a guest who questioned the science. By contrast, 60 percent of nightly news coverage alluded to the scientific consensus.

Marin Independent Journal:

THE FISCAL conservatives in Congress may be right when they say the $60 billion for Hurricane Sandy relief and reconstruction should be paid for without adding to our national deficit. Fortunately, there’s a way to do so that could unite green-leaning climate realists (such as Marin’s Jared Huffman) and red-ink deficit hawks in both parties.

But first, to get a sense of the magnitude of disaster funding that needs to be addressed, add to the Sandy expense the mounting public tally for last year’s other record-breaking storms, droughts, wildfires and floods. And the $114 billion deficit-funded cost of Hurricane Katrina that’s still rolling forward on the federal books, wrecking hopes for more balanced budgets and more useful public investments.

Expensive as they are, these disasters represent only small down payments on the ballooning costs of climate disruption brought on by our unbridled burning of oil, coal and gas. By blanketing the planet with carbon pollution, fossil fuels have ushered in a state of perpetual climate emergency.

But if carbon is the core cause of climate disruption, it can also be the core solution. Carefully ratcheting up existing fees on the use of fossil fuels could offset the public expense triggered by these storms, droughts, fires and floods. It could also help fund clean-energy innovations and climate-ready infrastructure.

Washington Post:

The smartest hedge would be a national carbon tax. It would marshal the market’s power to wring carbon out of the economy, putting decisions about the direction of energy and manufacturing in the hands of consumers and businesses that meet their demands, not Congress and interest groups that lobby lawmakers. When people must pay something for their pollution, they pollute less and invest in cleaner alternatives. A carbon tax would provide more certainty to industry and investors who currently can only guess at what climate policy will look like year to year.

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Standing in a quiet gallery in Washington DC some time ago, I listened in on a chilling conversation with some well informed players in the politics of climate.

What if climate change begins to slip out of control? What if some misguided group, or even wealthy individual decides climate is out of control, and sets out to do something about it? Some names were bandied about.

The technology exists for a nation, or subnational group, or even an individual, to begin unilateral geo-engineering efforts, in an attempt, misguided or otherwise, to hack the climate system.  I’m not talking about conspiracy theories of chem-trails or other fantasies. There have already been serious attempts at this.

Theoretically the technology has long existed to affect, if not control, global energy balance. The problem is, tinkering unconsciously with that balance is kind of what got us into this mess in the first place.
As the consequences of global change have become more real for policy makers in recent years, the issue is coming into focus.
Let’s say, 20 years  down the road, leadership in China is looking at some dire situations related to climate change – desertification, water shortages, extreme weather, crop failures – and decided, in the absence of a global agreement, to do something about it unilaterally. They initiate one of the  several possible schemes.

And it works. Deserts recede. Temps cool. Crops grow.
But, oops – it stops raining in the US grain belt.
What then?

A new report details the emerging debate.

Climate Progress:

The World Economic Forum has put out a new reporton global risks for 2013, and the report’s chapter on “X factors” — concerns more remote than the report’s primary risks, but still worthy of note — includes a section on rogue “geoengineering” experiments.

Geoengineering involves large-scale efforts to either remove carbon from the atmosphere, or to remake the atmosphere’s chemical or physical make-up to offset the effects of climate change. The most plausible scenario mentioned by the report uses aircraft to inject particles into the atmosphere to mimic the way eruptions of volcanic ash block sunlight, and thus cool the climate. More far-fetched scenarios go so far as deploying mirrors into orbit to reflect sunlight.

Such projects involve a host of funding and deployment problems, as well as the serious risk of unintended consequences for both the climate and the billions of humans who rely on it. For instance, a project at the UK-based Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering project, or “SPICE,” working on the idea to mimic volcanic ash, was delayed in October over environmental concerns. Unfortunately, this leaves an opening for smaller nations or even commercial interests to begin experimenting with geoengineering unilaterally, say researchers at the World Economic Forum:

The Guardian:

“The global climate could, in effect, be hijacked. For example, an island state threatened with rising sea levels may decide they have nothing to lose, or a well-funded individual with good intentions may take matters into their own hands,” the report notes. It said there are “signs that this is already starting to occur”, highlighting the case of a story broken by the Guardian involving the dumping of 100 tonnes of iron sulphate off the Canadian coast in 2012, in a bid to spawn plankton and capture carbon.

Leave to those Aussies to be a bunch of Debbie DownUnder crybabies. I sure can’t complain. We’re having a beautiful, balmy and warm january here in the upper Midwest…

For best effect, play the music above while looking at the pictures..

Tammy Holmes shelters her grandchildren Charlotte Walker, 2, Esther Walker, 4, Liam Walker, 9, Matilda, 11, and Caleb Walker, 6, under a jetty as a wildfire rages nearby in Dunalley, Australia, Jan. 4, 2013. This photo was taken by Tammy Holme’s husband Tim Holmes.Photo by Tim Holmes, via: Time

The Verge:

Last Monday was the hottest day on record, with an average nationwide temperature of 104.5 degrees. The Bureau’s climate services manager, Aaron Coutts-Smith says the current heatwave is “quite exceptional” because of its widespread intensity; records have been broken across all states and territories.

NASA Earth Observatory:

Since the end of December 2012, hundreds of bushfires have raged throughout Australia, fueled by a record-breaking heatwave. Some of the most damaging fires struck Tasmania, a large island off the coast of Victoria. Blazes that raced through the town of Dunalley on January 4 destroyed more than 100 homes.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this image (top) showing numerous fires across the island on January 6, 2013. Red outlines indicate hot spots where MODIS detected the unusually warm surface temperatures associated with fires.

NASA 12/07/12:

Careful observers of the new “Black Marble” images of Earth at night released this week by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have noticed bright areas in the western part of Australia that are largely uninhabited. Why is this area so lit up, many have asked?

Away from the cities, much of the night light observed by the NASA-NOAA Suomi NPP satellite in these images comes from wildfires. In the bright areas of western Australia, there are no nearby cities or industrial sites but, scientists have confirmed, there were fires in the area when Suomi NPP made passes over the region. This has been confirmed by other data collected by the satellite.

Metaphor for climate deniers.
A severely burnt sheep stands in a paddock near Bookham outside of Yass, in New South Wales, Australia, Jan. 9 2013. An estimated 10,000 sheep have died in the New South Wales bushfires.