My latest DeSmogblog post is a rundown of my little debate with Michael Shermer about global warming, which can be heard at roughly minutes 5:30-13:00 on the latest podcast. I doubt I’ll change Shermer’s mind, but I really am not satisfied with his “wait and see” position on this issue. Here are some of the reasons I give at DeSmog:

First, the excess CO2 that we put in the atmosphere lasts there for centuries—so if the warming isn’t on the low end, we’re stuck with it. This suggests that waiting around could be a pretty bad idea. Is that a risk worth taking?

Second, we know what the planet was like with vastly elevated levels of CO2 in the Earth’s past. Here’s the extreme, as described by Harvard’s Dan Schrag: “50 million years ago, we believe that carbon dioxide was between 4 and 10 times higher than present. At that time, sea level was 100 meters higher, the deep ocean was 12 degrees C (compared with 2 to 4 degrees today), crocodiles lived on Greenland, and palm trees lived in Canada.”

Shermer might reply that we’ll never let it get that far, and that may be true. But crucially, the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets happens somewhere along the way to the crocodiles-on-Greenland world, and while we don’t know exactly where that is, there are reasons to think it is much closer to where we are now than to the world Schrag describes.

Greenland alone contains enough water to raise sea levels globally by as much as 7 meters, and published evidence suggests that Greenland can be destabilized at somewhere between 400 and 560 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And we’re already pushing 400. And that’s just Greenland.

You can read the full post here. And you can listen to the podcast here.

We already know that Fox News viewers are much more likely to be misinformed about the science of climate change. Now, a new study from Media Matters (h/t Kate Sheppard) provides some numbers about the kind of biased coverage that produces this type of result.

Media Matters didn’t look directly at scientific statements–instead they looked at the number of guests, across TV news, who were either for or against EPA regulation of greenhouse gases. Still, presuming that the anti-regulation guests also made misleading scientific statements (no big assumption, given the way this debate tends to go), the result is closely related. And even if they did not, the strong bias with respect to policy vies hints at the likely bias with respect to science:

Media Matters analyzed television news guests who discussed the Environmental Protection Agency’s role in regulating greenhouse gas emissions from December 2009 through April 2011. Driven largely by Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network, results show that in 76 percent of those appearances, the guest was opposed to EPA regulations while 18 percent were in favor.

Drilling down on Fox in particular:

81% Of Fox Guests And 83% of Fox Business Guests Opposed GHG Regulation. Fox News hosted 52 guests who criticized the EPA’s decision to regulate greenhouse gases. In that same period they featured only 10 supporters and two guests who took a neutral stance. Fox Business hosted opponents 65 times, compared to seven appearances by supporters. MSNBC hosted four times more supporters of EPA’s action than opponents, but had far fewer guests commenting on the issue than did Fox.

Fox swayed the total so much because the other channels studied were less likely to feature opinionated guests.

Full study here.

The latest show is up, and I am confident it will be much discussed. Here is the write up:

Our guest this week is Michael Shermer, the publisher of Skeptic magazine and head of the Skeptics Society, and a longtime commentator on issues relating to science, critical thinking, and the paranormal.

Chris asked Michael on to discuss his new book, which is entitled The Believing Brain: From Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies, How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them As Truths.

Clearly, much of what Shermer has to say here will be of great relevance to skeptics and freethinkers—and along the way, Shermer also discusses his views on global warming (real, but not such a big deal) and how to promote evolution in a religious America.

In addition to publishing Skeptic, Michael Shermer is  a monthly columnist for Scientific American, the host of the Skeptics Distinguished Science Lecture Series at Caltech, and Adjunct Professor at Claremont Graduate University. His other books include Why People Believe in Weird Things andWhy Darwin Matters.

In a series of posts this week, I’m going to say more about at least 3 parts of the interview that I think will prompt discussion–our exchanges on global warming, “accommodationism,” and the differences between liberals and conservatives.

In the meantime, you can listen to the show here and order Shermer’s new book here.

My latest DeSmogBlog post is about recent GOP attempts to prevent the CIA and Department of Homeland Security from studying climate change risks. Clearly, this is not very smart politics for the GOP:

I cannot believe that Republicans will continue to be successful if they go down this road. For in doing so, they are putting two of their core values into opposition to one another.

Republicans believe strongly in “national security,” and thus are chief supporters of the military and intelligence agencies, and their big federal budgets. At the same time, the party also supports “individualism”—keeping the government from interfering with the free market, which is the lens through which Republicans generally justify their resistance to climate action.

On the national security implications of climate change, however, these values are in obvious conflict–and not in a way that will look good to average Americans who are wondering about the role of global warming in various weather-related disasters.

You can read the full post here.

Sometimes, it is important to critique one’s allies. A case in point is this piece, by Sharon Begley, which I understand was both at Newsweek and The Daily Beast.

On the latter site it starts off like this:

In a world of climate change, freak storms are the new normal. Newsweek’s Sharon Begley on why we’re unprepared for the harrowing future, and how adapting to the inevitable might be our only option.

Joplin, Missouri, was prepared. The tornado warning system gave residents 24 minutes’ notice that a twister was bearing down on them. Doctors and nurses at St. John’s Regional Medical Center, who had practiced tornado drills for years, moved fast, getting patients away from windows, closing blinds, and activating emergency generators. And yet more than 130 people died in Joplin, including four people at St. John’s, where the tornado sucked up the roof and left the building in ruins, like much of the shattered city.

Even those who deny the existence of global climate change are having trouble dismissing the evidence of the last year. In the U.S. alone, nearly 1,000 tornadoes have ripped across the heartland, killing more than 500 people and inflicting $9 billion in damage. The Midwest suffered the wettest April in 116 years, forcing the Mississippi to flood thousands of square miles, even as drought-plagued Texas suffered the driest month in a century. Worldwide, the litany of weather’s extremes has reached biblical proportions. The 2010 heat wave in Russia killed an estimated 15,000 people. Floods in Australia and Pakistan killed 2,000 and left large swaths of each country under water. A months-long drought in China has devastated millions of acres of farmland. And the temperature keeps rising: 2010 was the hottest year on earth since weather records began.

And yet further down in the story, we read this: (more…)

This theme is coming up a lot lately. I am noticing more and more that some very thoughtful people, like Michael Shermer, are willing to accept that global warming is real and human caused, but neverthless don’t think we have to worry about it because it won’t be that bad. And now here’s Michael Lind of the centrist New America Foundation, writing in Salon.com:

The scenarios with the most catastrophic outcomes of global warming are low probability outcomes — a fact that explains why the world’s governments in practice treat reducing CO2 emissions as a low priority, despite paying lip service to it….

In one sense, this is obviously true. In another sense, it’s completely off base.

First, uncertainty cuts both ways, so it makes no sense to be confident that change will be on the low end. This is something about which Kerry Emanuel recently testified:

In soliciting advice, we should be highly skeptical of any expert who claims to be certain of the outcome. I include especially those scientists who express great confidence that the outcome will be benign; the evidence before us simply does not warrant such confidence. (more…)

Please excuse the lack of posting yesterday; I was entombed by work and not feeling particularly insightful. In a “new directions” post coming up soon, I’ll explain how we are going to have some new voices here at “the Intersection” that should increase total content volume in the future, and prevent many post-free days from occurring on weekdays.

In the meantime, though, I want to call attention to my latest DeSmogBlog post, which is about the IPCC and communication. It builds on Andy Revkin’s recent writings, and starts like this:

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the world authority on the science of climate. But at the same time, it has been increasingly beset by controversies that call into question its approach, and its preparedness, when it comes to communication.

Essentially, the IPCC releases highly technical reports, fairly infrequently, that get an initial flurry of mainstream media attention and then get attacked viciously until the next report comes out. And when attacked, IPCC has opted for an ill advised strategy of “hunkering down,” as Andrew Revkin puts it. Indeed, following “GlacierGate”—when a very real error was found in one of IPCC’s reports—IPCC came off as defensive and was very slow to admit the mistake.

Following the various “-Gates” of 2009 and 2010, a cry went out in many circles that we need to improve climate science communication. As a result, all kinds of communication innovations are now going forward, many of which are ably summarized by Revkin in a recent article in the Bulletin of the World Meteorological Organization (which was central to creating the IPCC itself in 1988).

But where does IPCC fit in the context of this innovation wave?

Read here for my at-best-mixed answer.

Andrew Revkin has a good article in the current Bulletin of the World Meteorological Organization about science communication, climate science communication, and the expanding array of options for scientists to use in engaging with the public. Much of it sounds like what we teach at the NSF trainings–you’ve got to be on the web, you’ve got to learn video, and so on. And you’ve got to be creative and tell a story–your story.

All of this is right, uncontestably. But I noticed this in particular from Revkin’s piece:

Diving into this arena requires time, some level of culture change and even courage, particularly given how the Web can be an amplifier for unfounded attacks and disinformation as much as knowledge. But hunkering down, as some institutions – including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – tried to do after recent controversies, is probably not a sustainable approach in the long haul. As the IPCC prepares its Fifth Assessment Report, it does so with what, to my eye, appears to be an utterly inadequate budget for communicating its findings and responding in an agile way to nonstop public scrutiny facilitated by the Internet. I would love to think that the countries that created the climate panel could also contribute to boosting the panel’s capacity for transparency, responsiveness and outreach.

I made this point recently in an e-mail exchange with three leaders of the climate panel’s next assessment – the chairman, Rajendra K. Pachauri, and Thomas Stocker and Christopher Field, scientists respectively co-leading the reports on climate science and impacts.

They all agreed that more resources and a clear communications strategy are badly needed. “Despite several years of highlighting the need for effective communications and outreach, we have really made very little headway, and I know that we cannot delay action in this area much longer,” Dr Pachauri wrote. “If we do, it would be at our own peril.”

Well, at least Pachauri is right to be worried. But why on Earth is nothing happening? After all the pseudo-scandals of the past few years and all the attacks on climate research, what more prodding do you need?

Continuing to read up on this situation I just blogged about, the following stands out:

In a separate order filed in court Tuesday, a judge ordered that the university make available any records it exempts from release for review, under seal, by a judge and lawyers for ATI.

That way, they can attempt to challenge exemptions if they believe the university has failed to release some records required by law.

In a statement, ATI said the university was only agreeing to comply because the group had filed a petition in court to compel its action. “It took a petition to force U.-Va. to agree to produce the documents that by statute they should already have produced,” the group says in a statement.

Here’s the thing: Doesn’t this mean that the American Tradition Institute gets to see emails that it doesn’t get to see? And then what is to prevent those from being leaked or talked about, allowing scandal mongering? Will the judge prevent that?

More details here.

This is a guest post by Jamie L. Vernon, Ph.D., an HIV research scientist and aspiring policy wonk, who recently moved to D.C. to get a taste of the action

Just a few months ago, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie proclaimed his doubt that climate change is occurring due to human activities.  At a town hall meeting held in Tom’s River, NJ, Christie made these comments:

“Mankind, is it responsible for global warming? Well I’ll tell you something. I have seen evidence on both sides of it. I’m skeptical — I’m skeptical. And you know, I think at the at the end of this, I think we’re going to need more science to prove something one way or the other.”

Yesterday, he announced that he has changed his position. I’m not sure what science has been done in the last 6 months to convince Governor Christie to make this change.  As far as I know, the science today is exactly the same as the science then.  Regardless, Christie recently met with two expert scientists, Ken Miller, a geologist with long experience documenting sea level changes, and atmospheric science Anthony Broccoli, both from Rutgers University.  I guess all politics (and now science) is local.  After holding these meetings, the Governor has apparently seen the light and has decided to defer to the experts on this controversial issue.

Here is a clip from the press conference at the NJ State House in which he explains  how he came to appreciate the role humans play in climate change:

Christie has been touted time and again for his leadership on conservative issues. So, the news of his conversion will surely send shock waves through the Republican Party, many of whom have been carrying the climate skeptics’ flag for some time now.

Is this a sign that the Republican Party may soon be “coming to Jesus” on the climate issue?  (more…)