Jerry Brown's latest move about climate change

Jerry Brown chose the day of the G-20 Summit to announce a climate information event, both highlighting the issue and tweaking Trump's pro-pollution position.

Katy Murphy and Patrick May report Jerry Brown one-ups Trump on climate change with G20 announcement San Jose Mercury News 07/06/2017:

As President Donald Trump and other world leaders gathered in Hamburg, Germany, for the G20 summit, Gov. Jerry Brown on Thursday made waves by telling the world that Trump — who has decided to withdraw the United States from the 2015 Paris climate accord — does not speak for most Americans when it comes to dealing with environmental concerns.

Then Brown announced that California would host a global summit on climate change in San Francisco for September 2018.

“Yes, I know President Trump is trying to get out of the Paris Agreement, but he doesn’t speak for the rest of America,” Brown said in a video message shown to tens of thousands at the Global Citizen Festival in Hamburg. “We in California and in states all across America believe it’s time to act. It’s time to join together, and that’s why at this Climate Action Summit we’re going to get it done.”

In the video below, he says, "Look, it's up to you and it's up to me and tens of millions of other people to get it together to roll back the forces of carbonization and join together to combat the existential threat of climate change." As Governor of California, Jerry actually officially represents tens of millions of people. Global Climate Action Summit 07/06/2017:

Jerry has been very explicit in opposing Trump pro-climate-catastrophe policies:

Brown has waged a public campaign to counter Trump since the president declared in June that the U.S. would pull out of the 2015 Paris accord reached by nearly 200 nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Shortly after Trump’s announcement, Brown traveled to China, warning that “disaster still looms” unless governments around the world take urgent action. On that trip, Brown predicted that Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris accord would prove to be only a temporary setback, thanks to firm commitments by China, European countries and individual U.S. states to pick up the leadership role vacated by the president.

The article also quotes Jerry as saying, “President Trump, he’s going off the reservation hopefully for a month, a year, not much longer. ... If he stays on his present course, California will just redouble its efforts and the people of the world will have to rise up and take action. And I think in a very paradoxical way, that’s exactly what Trump is stimulating — the very opposite of climate denial is climate activism.”

Seventysomethings against Trump

Polls are currently showing that 75-year-old Bernie Sanders, an Independent who describes himself as a democratic socialist, is the most popular politician in the country.

Popularity, as we know, can be a fickle thing. But Bernie's is well-earned. He's an effective spokesman for progressive and New Deal Democratic politics. And his strong primary campaign has made him respectable enough for mainstream outlets to invite him on as Democratic spokesman, not as the exotic outlier they considered him up even a year ago. Morning Joe interviewed him this week on various topics, in this segment the MSNBC YouTube channel title, California wages climate war against Trump 03/29/2017:

Chuck Todd interviewed California Gov. Jerry Brown a week ago on immigration and other subjects, including climate change, Full Brown Interview: 'Don't Mess With California' 03/23/2017

During that interview, he even throws the Bible at Trump, CA Gov Brown: Not ‘Christian’ to Build Wall to Keep Out Illegal Immigrants 03/26/2017:

Aljazeera reports on California's position against Trump climate change policies, California wages climate war against Trump 03/29/2017:

Jerry turns 79 on April 9. He and Bernie are demonstrating very dramatically that leaders can be politically relevant, and in a very progressive way, at 75 and 79.

Many of the younger leaders in the Democratic Party show follow their examples!

Climate change and species migration

Scientific Reports 6, article #25697 (06/09/2016), is by Solomon Hsiang and Adam Sobel, Potentially Extreme Population Displacement and Concentration in the Tropics Under Non-Extreme Warming. The abstract says:

Evidence increasingly suggests that as climate warms, some plant, animal, and human populations may move to preserve their environmental temperature. The distances they must travel to do this depends on how much cooler nearby surfaces temperatures are. Because large-scale atmospheric dynamics constrain surface temperatures to be nearly uniform near the equator, these displacements can grow to extreme distances in the tropics, even under relatively mild warming scenarios. Here we show that in order to preserve their annual mean temperatures, tropical populations would have to travel distances greater than 1000 km over less than a century if global mean temperature rises by 2 °C over the same period. The disproportionately rapid evacuation of the tropics under such a scenario would cause migrants to concentrate in tropical margins and the subtropics, where population densities would increase 300% or more. These results may have critical consequences for ecosystem and human wellbeing in tropical contexts where alternatives to geographic displacement are limited.

Kathleen Maclay reports on the story in Climate change could trigger tropical evacuations, researchers advise Berkeley News 06/09/2016:

“We’re not making specific predictions about migration patterns of individual species, but the geophysical constraint is that, as the tropics get hotter, you’ll have to go far, essentially leaving the tropics, to cool off,” said Sobel.

Because the tropics are uniformly hot, when things get hotter by just a small amount, populations will have to move far to find relief.

Hsiang explains it with an analogy: “Imagine you have a fixed budget you can spend on your apartment and rents are the same throughout your entire neighborhood. If all the rents go up, even by just a little bit, you might have to move very far to find a new place you can afford.”

Hsiang and Sobel describe climate-related displacements in the tropics as “an almost complete evacuation of the equatorial band” that could impact ecosystems as well as human well-being.

Jerry Brown sends a letter to Donald Trump on climate change

I've was reading something today about how the Koch Brothers and other multi-billionaires are more-and-more privatizing the Republican Party. (Adele Stan, Why Jeb Bush's Pitch to the Koch Brothers Should Scare You The American Prospect 08/05/2015)

And it reminded me that lots of people thought Jerry Brown was over the top in 1992 in his last run for the Democratic Presidential nomination when he talked about campaign finance being bribery. But like a lot of things, he was talking about trends that were happening years before other politicians would talk about them that way. I looked up this video of him giving a campaign speech in 1992, where he made campaign finance a central issue. And I notice that just following 12:50 in the video, he even talks about the One Percent. And that was when a lot of Occupy Wall Street protesters weren't even in preschool yet. Gov. Jerry Brown at UCSC-1992:

He doesn't use Paul Krugman's current term of "zombie ideas" here. But he does complain about "these dead ideas that are so dominant." This was long before the re-animated corpses of Herbert Hoover and Heinrich Brüning were dictating economic policy in a new world depression. (Or Great Recession, if you prefer.)

Of course, times have changed in some ways. In this speech, Jerry was talking about the scandal of "thousand-dollar checks." These days, run-of-the-mill multimillionaires are grumping because they don't get the kind of attention from political fundraisers they used to because the fundraisers only want to talk to zillionaires.

He also talks at the end of the speech about reducing energy consumption by 50%. In a letter to Donald Trump (really!) he says (GOVERNOR BROWN TO GOP PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES ON CLIMATE CHANGE: WHAT IS YOUR PLAN? 08/05/2015):

Continuing to question the science and hurl insults at "global warming hoaxsters" and "apostles of this pseudo-religion" won't prevent severe damage to our health and economic well-being. Americans, their children and generations to come deserve - and demand - better.

From the lab to the boardroom and even to the pulpit, global leaders aren't waiting around. They understand there's no time for delay or denial.

In May, the Pope, issued a call to arms on climate change in his encyclical, Laudato Si' - a charge he echoed last month at a Vatican symposium of the world's mayors and governors organized by the Pontifical Academies of Sciences. Earlier this week, the President announced ambitious, yet achievable, nationwide limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. More than a dozen major companies - from Google to Walmart - representing more than $1.3 trillion in revenue in 2014, have pledged to act on climate change.

In the scientific community, there's overwhelming consensus that climate change is real and happening. This conclusion has been endorsed by nearly 200 national and international scientific bodies throughout the world, including those in Brazil, South Africa, India, China, Russia, Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Canada, Japan and the U.S.

Here in California, we plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels, increase from one-third to 50 percent the electricity derived from renewable sources and reduce today's petroleum use in cars and trucks by up to 50 percent all in the next 15 years, among many other efforts. For those that think we have to choose between fighting climate change and growing our economy, let's not forget that California outpaced the nation last year in job growth.

The climate-denial charge about a 1970s global cooling consensus

The title on this Guardian article is a little misleading, Brian Cox: scientists giving false sense of debate on climate change by Karl Mathiesen 09/03/2014. Because it's mainly about physicist Brian Cox talking about how bad climate denial is:

He [Cox] said the strategy of challenging the science of climate change was dangerous because it promoted the idea that science was political and up for debate. This weakens the position of science as a reliable basis for deciding how to respond to the world, he said.

"I always regret it when knowledge becomes controversial. It’s clearly a bad thing, for knowledge to be controversial. We can trace back through history the times when knowledge was considered to be controversial. And that’s what we are actually saying when we talk about climate change. We’re saying that there’s something inherently problematic with knowledge.

"Don’t undermine the science just because you don’t like the economics. That’s a dangerous slope, because the problem of course is you’re not undermining just that, you’re undermining the basis of rational decision-making in society."

He does have some advice for scientists talking about this, trying to work around the limitations of average science literacy among popular audiences.

On of the climate deniers' zombie talking points that keeps lurching around is that idea that them smarty-pants scientists a few years ago were saying that the world was getting colder, not warmer.

Thomas C. Peterson, William M. Connolley and John Fleck address this piece of propaganda in "The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus" Bulletin of the American Meterological Society Sept 2008.

As they report, in the 1970s when the climate science as we know it today was in its formative stage, there was an broad assumption that a a longterm cooling trend was underway (end note references omitted):

Efforts to accumulate and organize global temperature records began in the 1870s. The first analysis to show long-term warming trends was published in 1938. However, such analyses were not updated very often. Indeed, the Earth appeared to have been cooling for more than 2 decades when scientists first took note of the change in trend in the 1960s. The seminal work was done by J. Murray Mitchell, who, in 1963, presented the first up-to-date temperature reconstruction showing that a global cooling trend had begun in the 1940s. Mitchell used data from nearly 200 weather stations, collected by the World Weather Records project under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organization, to calculate latitudinal average temperature. His analysis showed that global temperatures had increased fairly steadily from the 1880s, the start of his record, until about 1940, before the start of a steady multidecade cooling.

By the early 1970s, when Mitchell updated his work, the notion of a global cooling trend was widely accepted, albeit poorly understood. The first satellite records showed increasing snow and ice cover across the Northern Hemisphere from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. This trend was capped by unusually severe winters in Asia and parts of North America in 1972 and 1973 which pushed the issue into the public consciousness. The new data about global temperatures came amid growing concerns about world food supplies, triggering fears that a planetary cooling trend might threaten humanity's ability to feed itself. It was not long, however, before scientists teasing apart the details of Mitchell’s trend found that it was not necessarily a global phenomenon. Yes, globally averaged temperatures were cooling, but this was largely due to changes in the Northern Hemisphere. A closer examination of Southern Hemisphere data revealed thermometers heading in the opposite direction. [my emphasis]

Here's where some minimal scientific literacy is needed to make any kind of reasonable judgment on this.

At that time, there were indications of significant and previously unrecongized shifts in global temperatures. Those shifts could have major implications for human life and civilization, e.g., how they affect food supplies. So scientists and policy makers recognized they needed more study.

As Peterson et al also report (end note references omitted):

In 1965, when U.S. President Lyndon Johnson asked the members of his President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) to report on the potential problems of environmental pollution, climate change was not on the national agenda. The polluting effects of detergents and municipal sewage, the chronic problems associated with urban air pollution, and the risks associated with pesticides dominated public discourse about humanity’s impact on the environment. However, in a 23-page appendix, which today appears prescient, the committee’s Environmental Pollution Panel laid out the following stark scenario: emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels could rapidly reshape Earth's climate. [my emphasis]

It was a new problem in 1965, in the sense that the available instruments and actual studies were showing it to be a matter of concern.

And they explain that work was also being done at that time on historical studies of longterm climate variations in the past. An engineer and geophysicist named Milutin Milankovitch had speculated as early as 1930 "that that highly regular changes in the tilt of Earth's axis and the eccentricity of its orbit around the sun would change the distribution of sunlight hitting the Earth' surface, leading to the waxing and waning of ice ages." (Peterson et al's summary)

Further research over the following decades had shown the validity of the notion "by the late 1970s."

Because Milankovitch's astronomical metronome was predictable over thousands of years, climate scientists could now begin talking about predicting the onset of the next ice age. And they did. Members of the Climate: Long-range Investigation, Mapping and Prediction (CLIMAP) project lived up to their project’s name with a "prediction" of sorts; in the absence of possible anthropogenic warming, "the long-term trend over the next several thousand years is toward extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation." (Peterson et al, end note references omitted) [my emphasis]

Research also showed that some kinds of particulates generated by human activity had a cooling effect at the same time that fossil fuel burning tended to raise temperatures.

These studies made great strides in the 1970s. As Peterson et al report (end note references omitted):

In July 1979 in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Jule Charney, one of the pioneers of climate modeling, brought together a panel of experts under the U.S. National Research Council to sort out the state of the science. The panel's work has become iconic as a foundation for the enterprise of climate change study that followed. Such reports are a traditional approach within the United States for eliciting expert views on scientific questions of political and public policy importance. In this case, the panel concluded that the potential damage from greenhouse gases was real and should not be ignored. The potential for cooling, the threat of aerosols, or the possibility of an ice age shows up nowhere in the report. Warming from doubled CO2 of 1.5°–4.5°C was possible, the panel reported. While there were huge uncertainties, Verner Suomi, chairman of the National Research Council’s Climate Research Board, wrote in the report's foreword that he believed there was enough evidence to support action: "A wait-and-see policy may mean waiting until it is too late". Clearly, if a national report in the 1970s advocates urgent action to address global warming, then the scientific consensus of the 1970s was not global cooling.

In the sound-bite, fact-free culture of FOX News and Republican hate radio, though, this history gets boiled down to, "Aw, them scientists don't know what they're talkin' about. They used to say the earth was coolin' off, now they say it's gittin' hotter."

That way, you don't have to learn to pronounce words like "Milankovitch."

Of course, the people who grind out climate denial papers for the Koch Brothers or other fossil fuel industry sugar-daddies can come up with highfalutin language to nitpick the findings of actual climate scientists. The science denial is science denial.

To quote Brian Cox again, "Don't undermine the science just because you don't like the economics. That’s a dangerous slope, because the problem of course is you’re not undermining just that, you’re undermining the basis of rational decision-making in society."

Tags: global climate change, pseudoscience, science denial

Gosh, the world's climate is heating up? Who knew?

Not the folks at FOX News, apparently. The Republicans have developed a position on global climate change that says: It's not happening. And if it is happening, people don't have anything to do with it! And if people do have something to do with it, there's nothing we can do to remedy the problem!!

Meanwhile, in the real existing atmosphere:

In May 2013, the average daily level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere passed 400 parts per million, an increase of more than 40 percent since the beginning of the industrial revolution and the highest level on Earth in several million years.1 That same month, scientists reported that Arctic sea ice, one of the most visible and important indicators of global climate change, was melting faster than most climate models have predicted, raising the possibility that the summer Arctic will be nearly ice-free by as early as 2020 (Overland and Wang, 2013). Around the world, air pollution in mega-cities routinely exceeds international air quality standards set to protect human health. Globally, the use of oil for transportation grows unabated, exposing the world economy to price and supply volatility, and exacerbating political and environmental problems in countries where oil is produced and consumed. [my emphasis]

That's from Mark Delucchi and Mark Jacobson, Meeting the world’s energy needs entirely with wind, water, and solar power Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 69:4 (July/Aug 2013).

But some people make lots of money off oil. Because the product itself doesn't bear all the real costs of using it:

In the search for alternatives to fossil fuels, scientists and policy makers have focused their attention on three replacements that are widely believed to have lower emissions of greenhouse gases, the air pollutants responsible for climate change, than do fossil fuels: nuclear power; energy from biomass; and a combination of wind, water, and solar power. The third option—which includes wind turbines, photovoltaic power plants and rooftop systems, concentrated solar thermal power plants, small-scale hydroelectric plants, geothermal plants, tidal turbines, and wave energy converters—has several advantages over nuclear energy and bioenergy, including lower (near zero) emissions of greenhouse gases and air pollutants, no problems of long-term waste disposal, and no risks of catastrophic accidents. Despite the natural variability of wind, water, and solar power, they can deliver energy as reliably as, and more economically than, the current fossil-fuel-based system when all costs to society are considered. Indeed, energy systems worldwide can be run entirely on wind, water, and solar power, making it unnecessary to pursue the less desirable alternatives of nuclear power and bioenergy. [my emphasis]

They point out that, despite the claims of nuclear power's boosters, it has serious problems: security and safety issues, production of greenhouse gases and massive amounts of nuclear waste that has to be securely stored for thousands of years.

Even fusion power would have known problems: "fusion still would produce short-lived waste that must be removed from the reactor core to avoid interference with operations, and in any case fusion is unlikely to be commercially available for at least another 50 years."

Tags: global climate change, global warming

Jerry Brown: the Archimedes of green energy?

Tom Hayden "gets" what Jerry Brown is about when it comes to green energy. In Jerry Brown, Archimedes and the search for an energy tipping point Peace and Justice Resource Center 03/08/2013, he writes:

Gov. Jerry Brown, an early pioneer of solar energy and conservation, once again might become a global leader in the battle against extreme climate change. Fresh from an impressive election triumph last November, and freed at last from a Republican legislative veto, Brown ventured forth to a national governor’s meeting this month and will travel to China in April.

It is possible that Brown might become a modern Archimedes, searching to create the leverage necessary to reach the tipping point in global energy policy ...

Environmentalists, human rights advocates and progressives in search of strategic direction might consider California (or New York, or any communities of concentrated environmental strength) as battlefields vast enough in combination to generate leverage towards a tipping point. Justice Louis Brandeis aptly described states as the "laboratories of reform." Deeper in history is the story of Archimedes, the Greek scientist-philosopher, who lived two centuries BC. Archimedes might have been labeled the "Dr. Moonbeam" of his era. He invented levers and solar heat rays, among other breakthroughs, before being killed by the Roman Empire in one of its Punic Wars. Archimedes is quoted as saying, "Give me a place to stand, and I will rule the world," which remains good advice in politics and strategy two thousand years later. One might say that the Brown Green Plan for California is an Archimedean leverage point in the energy wars ahead.

The future Archimedes of green energy?

Hayden has hopes for Jerry's scheduled April trip to China, which is a key player in the global warming issue:

Global energy politics, from Europe to Latin America, will have a major influence on US policies, too, but none so much as China. Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry need to "cut a deal" with China, says former US senator Tim Wirth, for example by reducing methane leaks and phasing out HFCs, which trap more heat than carbon dioxide. (Rolling Stone, January 31, 2013) According to Wirth, "Kerry understands that the best way to unlock the stalemate in Washington is through Beijing," because "that kills the whole argument that cutting carbon in the US would give China an economic advantage."

Brown could be an ideal partner with China on energy efficiency and anti-pollution strategies. Brown is not burdened with the Cold War-like tensions rising between the US and China, but can focus instead on mutually beneficial energy and environmental initiatives, which later might evolve to become US national policy.

Hayden recalls Jerry's historic environmental initiatives of his first governorship, in which Hayden himself played a formal role. And:

California has launched a green energy revolution once before, also under Brown. I was Brown’s solar energy representative in the Seventies, a time when renewables were considered the quaint interest of organic communards living in the redwoods, which they were. But back to the land became forward to the future. Brown in those days opposed the utility plans for some 65 nuclear plants along the California coast, and he personally killed a liquefied-natural-gas terminal on native lands at Point Conception. He was slandered as "Governor Moonbeam" in the national media, and threatened by business and labor with a future of unemployment, lights-out energy shortages, and political defeat.

It was a bum rap. By promoting strict energy standards in transportation fuels, land use planning, architecture and many other fields, the first Brown administration fostered 1.5 million clean energy jobs, saved California consumers $65 billion, and secured California as the center for two-thirds of clean energy venture capital in the US. Jimmy Carter then adopted Brown’s policies and vision, even installing solar collectors on the White House roof. In April 1978, Carter's Council on Environmental Quality concluded it was “now possible to speak realistically of the United States becoming a solar society.”

Then came the Reagan counter-offensive and the Bush energy wars, but those disasters could only frustrate and delay the inevitable. [my emphasis]

Hayden also emphasizes the need to focus on "environmental justice":

Because of California’s emerging communities of color – just 39 percent of Californians are white – the battle against climate disaster will increasingly engage blacks, Latinos, Asians and poor people as well as traditional (white) environmentalists, or be lost in the political lust over privilege and power. The question of “environmental justice” will become central to the future, not simply a box to be checked off on organizational charts or a special earmark for environmental funding.

The issues of justice, pollution, health, and community empowerment are being welded together as California evolves. The process may involve a somewhat wrenching transition in priorities for environmental advocates who have enjoyed great success in recent California politics. For example, a 2010 ballot initiative for state parks funding (Prop. 21) fell short because the traditional environmental sponsors chose to hike automobile license fees by $18. The margin of voter support for Prop. 21 in communities of color fell short of the level needed. The physical separation of state park facilities from communities of color is a stark one.

Tags:
california politics, global climate change, global warming, jerry brown, tom hayden

Golfing while the world burns?

Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks was pretty caustic about the mainstream press pearl-clutching over President Obama's golf game with Tiger Woods. Media Obsessed with Obama Golf Game -What About Drones?! 02/20/2013:

But there actually was one of Obama's golf outings that was a more substantive matter for public concern, and should have been for any media that cared about providing news more than entertaining photos of celebrities golfing together. Also from Cenk, Tiger Who? Obama Golfs with Oil CEOs 02/20/2013:

Tags: establishment press, mainstream media, global climate change, mainstream press

Climate Change and Frankenstorm Sandy: "Dirty energy makes dirty weather"

I heard Cenk Uygur explain on Tuesday's The Young Turks (10/30/2012) that CNN had instructed its reporters not to use the term "Frankenstorm" which was in the press for a few days to describe the weather event associated with Hurricane Sandy. Because, you see, "Frankenstorm" is a reference to a human-created monster, and brave CNN was afraid that they would get criticism from conservatives if they suggested in any way that human activity could be any part of the cause of the Frankenstorm or its intensity.

Yet another reminder that the quality of our mainstream media is a wreck. And our badly wounded media compound the problem that our democratic system has coming to grips with the very real problem of climate change.

It's also a reminder about why a good science education for everyone who goes through the basic school system is also an important condition for a healthy democracy, an increasingly important one.

Jeff Tollefson (Hurricane Sandy spins up climate discussion Nature News 10/30/2012) gives an example of one of the practical difficulties honest scientists and commentators face on communication the real-world effects of climate change. Because climate science can say with a high degree of assurance how much the world is warming, what some of the basic results of that are, what effects can be expected in the future, and what contributes to the warming.

On the other hand, a dramatic event like Frankenstorm Sandy is more likely to convince people that climate change needs to be a higher political priority. But climate scientists can't say that this storm or the intensity of this storm, is definitely related to global warning. Tollefson:

What is the link to global warming?

Some scientists point out that we might expect to see more of these types of severe weather events in a warmer world — even if any one storm cannot be directly attributed to global warming. Earlier this month, a team at the Beijing Normal University in China found that big storm surges have increased in frequency since 1923, and that large-scale events are roughly twice as likely in warmer years than in colder ones. Others have talked about the potential that summer sea ice melt and increasingly open waters in the Arctic Ocean might be altering the flow of the jet stream that circles the Northern Hemisphere, leading to both hurricanes and the large winter storms that have hammered the northeast in recent years.

But the issue is far from settled, and climate change is not the only factor. For example, although sea surface temperatures are currently about 3 °C above average along the Atlantic coast, the expected increase due to global warming is just 0.6 °C, according to Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. So while the changing climate certainly plays a part, Trenberth says, there is plenty of space for natural variability.

Going forward, higher sea levels due to global warming are expected to compound the threat of more intense hurricanes. According to a modelling study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and Princeton University in New Jersey, published in February in Nature Climate Change, the combined effects of climatology and a 1-metre increase in sea levels could mean that 100-year surge events occur every 3–20 years by the end of the century.

On the other hand, people who want to be suckered will find a way to allow that to happen. If tribal allegiance to the Republican Party is a high priority to a person, they pretty much have to find a way to deny or minimize the problem of climate change. Demagogues like Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck will seize on a sentence like "the issue is far from settled, and climate change is not the only factor" to say aw, look, these here scientists ain't even sure themselves about this climate change nonsense.

People who want to be convinced by that mostly will be, and for reasons having nothing to do with science or intellectual integrity.

This does not mean, though, that we'll have to wait until four or five generations have much better science education before people can be comfortable with the current level of information. Because we make decision all the time based on less than 100% certain information. For all practical purposes, I can be 100% certain that there is a mug in front of me partially full of water. If I leave the mug in another room for a moment, I can be nearly certain that it's where I left it, although the thought might flicker through my head that somebody might have walked in and picked it up in the few seconds since I left it there because it's such a cool cup, or whatever.

And a great deal of public policy, especially the Big Issues, have to be approached with uncertain information. Getting a building permit from the city government may be fairly routine and uncertainties relevant to the decision to seek it or grant it can be minimized.

But when we're talking war, the chronic level of uncertainty is reflected in the famous saying that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. Or at least not 100% of it. However much dogmatic conservatives may abuse the concept of "unanticipated consequences" to oppose any program that might held some poor person somewhere, new policies on economics, budget management, business regulation, forestry management and many others have some level of uncertainty about them.

Then there are areas like foreign policy and economics in which multiple factors or at work, which can make diagnosing a problem ("Why do they hate us?") difficult and subject to various reasonable interpretations.

Weather is obviously the same way. If it weren't, the nightly weather forecasts would enjoy much higher prestige.

But if the climate is warming in a given county to a point that certain crops no longer grow there and old species of animals migrate out and new ones migrate in, farmers and hunters are certainly going to notice. And if that is happening all over the world in similar patterns, we can draw conclusions from that with a higher level of certainty than we ever could based on a single field or a single county.

Did climate change cause Frankenstorm Sandy to be more powerful than it would have been if the world climate had been in the state it was 20 years ago? Almost certainly, but it's impossible to know how much. Does the current trend of climate change mean that there will be more high-intensity storms? Yes, and we can say that with a much higher degree of certainty.

Oil corporations are investing some serious money based on the reality that Arctic ice is receding. They even want the American public to pony up funds for more icebreakers to help them do it. Rugged individualism and not needing the gubment only goes so far even for them, it seems. (Carol Wolf and Kasia Klimasinska, As the Arctic Opens for Oil, the Coast Guard Scrambles Bloomberg Businessweek 07/26/2012)

Al Gore's comments on the Frankenstorm and climate change in Statement on Hurricane Sandy 10/30/2012 are entirely sensible:

While the storm that drenched Nashville [in 2010] was not a tropical cyclone like Hurricane Sandy, both storms were strengthened by the climate crisis. Scientists tell us that by continually dumping 90 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every single day, we are altering the environment in which all storms develop. As the oceans and atmosphere continue to warm, storms are becoming more energetic and powerful. Hurricane Sandy, and the Nashville flood, were reminders of just that. Other climate-related catastrophes around the world have carried the same message to hundreds of millions.

Sandy was also affected by other symptoms of the climate crisis. As the hurricane approached the East Coast, it gathered strength from abnormally warm coastal waters. At the same time, Sandy's storm surge was worsened by a century of sea level rise. Scientists tell us that if we do not reduce our emissions, these problems will only grow worse.

Hurricane Sandy is a disturbing sign of things to come. We must heed this warning and act quickly to solve the climate crisis. Dirty energy makes dirty weather.

Tags: global climate change, hurricane sandy

About that melting Arctic ice

Current TV recently had a couple of disturbing reports on the melting of Arctic ice.

Melting Arctic ice cap is like an open door on the earth's freezer, warns climate activist 09/21/2012 features the editor of Climateprogress.org, Joe Romm:

This is from Cenk Uygur's The Young Turks, With Arctic ice melting faster than expected, should US take the lead in stopping global warming? 09/20/2012:

I love how "conservative political strategist" Jack Burkman in that segment tells us that Mr. Technology will save us. Cara Santa Maria's retort is right. If you don't acknowledge the problem or even science itself, it's hard to see how Mr. Technology will come up with an answer.

Tags: global climate change, global warming

Climate change denial

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has been running a number of articles recently dealing with science denial. Steven Cohen and Alison Miller, both of the Columbia Earth Institute, write in Climate change 2011: A status report on US policy Jan/Feb 2012 about the partisan divide on climate change science:

It is impossible to deny or ignore the growing partisan divide that has profoundly influenced the US climate debate, making it more polarized even as climate science has become more definitive. Last year, a Gallup poll found that in 2010, only 30 percent of self-identified Republicans believed the effects of global warming were already beginning, a drop from almost 50 percent in 2007. The percentage of convinced Democrats, however, remained at 70 percent or higher during the same period, according to Gallup. A Pew Research Center poll in October 2010 found similar results highlighting the partisan divide, reporting a 40 percentage point difference between Republicans and Democrats believing evidence that the Earth is warming (Marshall, 2010).

The demographics within the Republican Party on climate science denial are particularly interesting:

The division remains even after factoring in education. A 2011 study found that, among Democrats and liberals, levels of education had a strong correlation with not only a belief in climate science, but with individual concern about global warming; however, that same study found the opposite effect in the case of Republicans and conservatives (Hoffman, 2011). This persistent gap suggests that climate change has become an ideological issue - much like gun control, taxes, or regulation - that defines what it means to be a Republican or Democrat (Nisbet, 2009). The US divide over climate change involves more than just an understanding of climate science. [my emphasis]

It's become a "tribal" issue, in other words, a psychological identifier.

But "education" in such surveys can be misleading. Because education also correlates with higher income on the average. This could also suggest that the more affluent Republicans are more willing than working class voters in the Republican base to disregard the dangers of climate change, which wouldn't be surprising. Because money talks, and the climate science denial position is virtually all money talking:

The fossil fuel industry has caused much of the political division on climate change through aggressive action to promote skepticism among the public; the industry, typically through conservative think tanks, has funded opposing scientific opinions, economic reports, and public relations campaigns. For example, in 2005 Chris Mooney of Mother Jones found 40 ExxonMobil-funded organizations that either sought to undermine mainstream scientific findings on climate change or maintained affiliations with a small group of skeptic scientists (Mooney, 2005). Furthermore, some climate scientists may have contributed to the political divide by moving past their knowledge of climate change to predict socioeconomic impacts and propose policy solutions that go beyond the scope of climate data and models. This combination of science, policy, and advocacy can undermine non-expert confidence in climate science.

And, in typical authoritarian projection, climate science deniers argue that scientists who do study climate change are mostly corrupted by the pursuit of grant money, which they apparently supposed flows from the fount of what they call Political Correctness, by which they mean stuff they think is politically incorrect. (No wonder they get confused!)

Conservatives opposing anti-pollution regulations have always argued that they represented more gubment regulation that allegedly hurts the economy. Climate science denial is their tool for working concern over global climate change into that long-established partisan and ideological framework:

But it seems climate skeptics are concerned about the validity of climate change mostly because of its implications for regulation of business. The effort to regulate greenhouse gases would eventually entail some level of government regulation of many aspects of daily life, from the cars Americans drive to the electricity that powers their homes and businesses. Those who are wary of big government dislike this potential intrusion.

Critics of climate regulation argue that it will pose an impossible burden on businesses and stifle a weak economy through higher energy prices. At least in the Republican Party, political dialogue throughout 2011 was dominated by the message that government wastes money and takes on duties that should be left to the private sector. Emboldened by electoral gains in 2010, conservatives and Tea Partiers continue to emphasize that government is the problem and an unregulated free market is the solution.

Since more affluent/better educated Republicans tend to give more emphasis to such economic concerns than to the "values issues" like abortion and general hostility to women's rights, that's consistent with the poll findings that better educated Republican are hotter for climate science denial. (Bad pun, I know ...)

Tags: global climate change, science denial

Climate denial marches on

Gene Lyons takes on Republican climate denial in his 12/14/2011 column, Why do people still deny climate change? Salon. He summarizes the sad state of the politics of climate change in the US:

In GOP circles, it’s considered sensible to warn against the grave threat of Shariah law being imposed in Oklahoma, but weeks on end of rainless 110 degree afternoons, not so much. Democrats like President Obama appear to have concluded that global warming is like gun control, where reasoned self-interest has little chance against well-organized fanaticism. So why bother?

He links to an October 2010 paper by Clive Hamilton, Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change, which discusses the mass basis for climate denialism. Climate denialism hasn't spontaneously arisen from some general conceptual bias, of course. It has been heavily promoted by the energy industry, including the Koch brothers, following on the model used by the tobacco industry for years to constantly dispute the established science and medical knowledge on smoking.

Hamilton notes that the concept of peer review of scientific papers goes back to the British Royal Society: "Since the founding of modern science, matters of fact have been established through the common assent of those qualified to judge under rules laid down in the 17th century by the Royal Society."

He also ends by noting that the global climate change crisis dramatically emphasizes how problematic the sharp distinction people have traditionally drawn between Humanity and Nature is:

Developments in climate science have revealed a natural world so influenced by human activity that the epistemological division between nature and society can no longer be maintained. When global warming triggers feedback effects, such as melting permafrost and declining albedo from ice-melt, will we be seeing nature at work or human intervention? The mingling of the natural and the human has philosophical as well as practical significance, because the “object” has been contaminated by the “subject”.

Climate denial can be understood as a last-ditch attempt to re-impose the Enlightenment’s allocation of humans and Nature to two distinct realms, as if the purification of climate science could render Nature once again natural, as if taking politics out of science can take humans out of Nature. The irony is that it was Enlightenment science itself, in the rules laid down by the Royal Society, that objectified the natural world, putting it on the rack, in Bacon’s grisly metaphor, in order to extract its secrets. We came to believe we could keep Nature at arms-length, but have now discovered, through the exertions of climate science, something pre-moderns took for granted, that Nature is always too close for comfort.

Or, as The X-Files' Fox Mulder put it more colloquially, you should always respect Nature, because Nature has no respect for you!

Tags: gene lyons, global climate change

Can't we deal with anything anymore without designating it a "national security threat"? Climate change edition

Francesco Femia et al write about The inadequate US response to a major security threat: Climate change Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists n/d, accessed 08/24/2011. The publications bullet-point summary:

• The United States has expended enormous resources in response to the security threats posed by WMDs, terrorism, and the economic crisis.

• The Defense Department and CIA consider climate change a significant national security threat.

• Other American policymakers have not matched the security establishment's assessment with the appropriate resources or political will, leaving the United States with a relatively feeble response to an enormous security threat.

Now, global climate change is a threat to our national well-being and does involve national security concerns of the this-could-cause-a-war kind. But it's also a sign of how much of a national security state the US has developed that even a broad problem like this one winds up being first addressed in its long-range national security dimension.

And it also raises the problem that national security establishment gets another field in which to expand its authority with the problem framed in national-security terms:

The US military and much of the broader national security community have actually recognized the seriousness of the threat posed by global climate change. The US Defense Department, for example, included the climate threat as a key pillar of its most recent Quadrennial Defense Review, conducted wargames to plan for climate impacts, and, in its most recent Unified Command Plan, designated Northern Command to lead activities in the Arctic region. Even the CIA has established a Center for the Study of Climate Change.

Great. The Arctic may not have any "weapons of mass destruction" or oil tyrants to overthrow. But maybe we can bomb the glaciers into not melting so fast!

But the Femia et al article is good at showing how the US national investment of resources to counter the risks of nuclear attack and terrorism compare to the response to date to the more precisely predictable consequences of global climate change. They describe the latter this way:

There is a comparatively high degree of certainty about the likelihood, global scale, and severity of climate change impacts (see "Degrees of Risk" by the sustainable development nonprofit E3G). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, established by the UN and the World Meteorological Organization and including some of the world's top scientists, places the likelihood that the global climate is warming because of human activities -- chiefly the burning of fossil fuels that release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere -- at 90 percent or greater, an incredibly rare degree of certainty on any subject in the scientific world. There is also great certainty about the severe impacts those changes will have, should they go unaddressed.

The IPCC is very certain, for example, that sea-levels will rise -- by a meter or more -- just as experts expect the current 50 percent of the Earth's population living in coastal areas to climb to 75 percent by 2025. Various impacts will infringe on state boundaries (and in some cases, state existence) as land is lost to the sea. Global agriculture production will be decreased by floods and droughts, severely diminishing the world's ability to feed a population expected to reach 9 billion by 2050. Authoritative scientific reports project that climate change will also affect the availability of resources, including fresh water, compelling people to migrate within and across national boundaries to survive. The past has shown that such dynamics can often result in conflict and violence.

How aggressive has the Obama Administration, which the Republicans regard as a socialist Kenyan Marxist Islamunist one, been in addressing global climate change? "In fiscal 2010, the US spent just $1.7 billion on international climate change financing, a figure that pales in comparison to the financial responses to the aforementioned threats."

Tags: establishment+press

Climate change denial and "free-market" ideology

Darrel Moellendorf writes in Conservatives, John Locke, and Climate Change Dissent 07/07/2011:

Among American conservatives, there is now a standard anti-government line that would incline them to approach regulatory policies with hostility. But that has nothing to do with climate science. You would think that one could have a free-market economic and philosophical bent and still be perfectly sane about the science of climate change. Shouldn’t we expect the majority of free-market advocates to endorse the position of the overwhelming majority of climate scientists, at least at similar rates to the rest of the public? And yet Republicans have only become more skeptical regarding anthropogenic climate change in the last decade, even as the consensus among climate scientists remains overwhelming. It starts to look like an admirable—but deeply wrong—political philosophy has been twisted by a political ideology or corrupted by industry funding, or both.

Tags: global climate change, science denial

A climate change "hot spot"

From Mark Leon Goldberg, A Chilling Warning from a “Hot Spot” in Climate Change UN Dispatch 06/29/2011:

Scientists including Jan-Gunnar explained to us this week that evidence of climate change is a trend that has been playing out over years. There are fluctuations that take place from year to year, in temperature and sea ice extent. It is not as if every year is a record year…but the overall change is a global change. He said that "sometimes the media wants to see records every year.” He expressed frustration that many people in the world today only view climate information in very brief snapshots, either over short time periods or taking into account very limited areas. Many people get their information about climate from snippets of discussion on the news related to weather. But this does not paint a complete picture of climate change, its causes or its impacts. In Svalbard, a full range of issues and these questions come into view.

“Signals of climate change are visible in this region,” said Kim Holmén, Research Director of the Norwegian Polar Institute. This internationally acclaimed atmospheric scientist and expert in the Arctic region challenged us to think about what the ocean is telling us about the state of our planet. Acidification of the oceans worries Kim, and it should be worrying us. He explained that changes produced by human beings are having an alarming impact on levels of carbon dioxide in the polar regions. He said that by 2018, 10% of Arctic surface waters will be unable to sustain important organisms that are necessary to maintain the current balance in this delicate ecosystem. This will affect coral reefs, species like shrimp, lobster and plankton.

Tags: global climate change, global warming

Gee, you think global climate change might have something to do with this?

This PBS Newshour video is titled "Meteorologist on Severe Weather: 'We Have Never Seen a Year Like This Before'":



This report actually provides a good illustration of how science denial complicates the understanding of issues like global climate change. Both the guests on this program are very good at describing scientific considerations on whether the current round of tornados and other extreme weather events are related to global climate change. Honest and professional scientists speak in trends, patterns, indications, probablilities.

But on the climate deniers side, you have people like Rush Limbaugh saying things along the lines of "Goll-lee, it shore was cold this past winter, how can Al Gore explain that?" And, "Look, these here scientists cain't say anything definite about whut's causin' this." If you're clueless about real science and inclined to find tribal affinities with the FOXists, that sounds a lot more definite that developing patterns and indications.

Tags: global climate change, science denial

Mark Hertsgaard: climate change deniers are cranks, not skeptics

Tags: global climate change, global warming, mark hertsgaard

Obama admininstration intervenes on polluters' side in Connecticut v. AEP case

The Obama administration takes another step to show its lack of seriousness about environmental problems. The administration is intervening on the side of the coal industry to oppose an environmental lawsuit aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The case in question is Connecticut v. American Electric Power Company, also called the AEP case. The federal circuit court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs. Nancy Milburn explains the significane of the decision in Connecticut v. AEP Decision Columbia Journal of Environmental Law 04/12/2010:

The AEP decision represents a significant departure for climate-change-related tort litigation. Courts have traditionally dismissed at the pleadings stage suits by private or governmental litigants alleging nuisance or other common law claims based on global climate change. Courts have held that these suits present national and international policy issues that are more properly addressed by the legislative or executive branch and that courts are therefore foreclosed from exercising jurisdiction. Courts have also held that plaintiffs are not constitutionally entitled to sue when they allege generalized injuries from global warming where the conduct at issue-emission of carbon dioxide - is not limited to the named defendants but is engaged in by every emitting entity in the world. The AEP Court, however, took a fundamentally different view. It found that the issues presented, including what level of emissions was allegedly "unreasonable" and whether contributions to a worldwide phenomenon satisfy causation, did not present obstacles to the adjudication of plaintiffs' claims. It found that the case presented "discrete domestic nuisance issues" that courts were well equipped to decide. [my emphasis]

David Dayen writes about the administration's intervention in the case on behalf of the polluters in Obama Solicitor General Argument in Environmental Case a Sharp Reversal from Past Presidents FDL News Desk 08/27/2010:

Environmental groups reacted with alarm at the decision by the Obama Administration to side with the polluters (more reaction here and here). Matthew Pawa, the co-lead counsel in the case, said the argument basically boiled down to "Trust us, we'l get to it, if we happen to get re-elected .... Talk is cheap, it’s enough. Enough hot air."

Tags: global climate change, obama administration>

Hot year

While BP destroys the Gulf of Mexico, the planet is still getting hotter, as reported by Lulu Liu in Heat breaking records across the globe -- but not in Sacramento 07/27/2010:

Scientists at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies reported recently that the average global temperature was higher over the past 12 months than during any other 12-month period in history. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has released corroborating data, adding that the past four months, including June, have each individually been the hottest on record as well.

But there is at least one exception somewhere in the world:

The global trend, however, has eluded the Central Valley, where abnormally low temperatures through May have stunted agriculture but granted a few pleasant extra weeks of spring.

So, by today's Republican/climate-change-denier reasoning, global warming must be a lie made up by Al Gore.

Tags: global climate change, global warming

Climate debate

Scientific illiteracy may not destroy the world. Scientific literary in nuclear physics is more likely to do that. But if we dumb down our world to the point that no one knows how to use nuclear weapons any more, the planet could still fry.

The British Royal Society last week put out this Climate science statement 11/24/09 emphasizing the urgency of addressing climate change:

As three of the UK’s leading scientific organisations involving most of the UK scientists working on climate change, we cannot emphasise enough the body of scientific evidence that underpins the call for action now, and we reinforce our commitment to ensuring that world leaders continue to have access to the best possible science. ...

The 2007 Assessment Report of the UN’s climate change panel (the IPCC) – made up of the world’s foremost climate scientists – provided unequivocal evidence for a warming climate, and a high degree of certainty that human activities are largely responsible for global warming since the middle of the 20th century. However, the IPCC process is based only on information already published and even since the last Assessment Report the scientific evidence for dangerous, long-term and potentially irreversible climate change has strengthened significantly:

• Global carbon dioxide concentrations continue to rise, and methane concentrations have started to increase again after a decade of near stability;

• The decade 2000-2009 has been warmer, on average, than any other decade in the previous 150 years;

• Observed changes in precipitation (decreases in the subtropics and increases in high latitudes) have been at the upper limit of model projections;

• Arctic summer sea ice cover declined suddenly in 2007 and 2008, prompting the realisation that this environment may be far more vulnerable to change than previously thought;

• There is increasing evidence of continued and accelerating sea-level rises around the world. [my emphasis]

Meanwhile, crackpot eccentrics that we still generously call conservatives and cynical industry flaks are promoting the notion that, "Aw, these here scientists don't know what they're talkin' about. Heck, it don't say nothing about global warning in the Bible unless it's one of them thar strange things in Revelations so it must be part of a plot to turn America over to Kenya."

Unfortunately, the flat-earthers seem to be gaining some advantage in the American political debate. Their latest hobby-horse is a pseudo-scandal about scientists e-mailing each other, as explained by Bradford Plummer in How Important Are Those Stolen Climate E-mails? The New Republic 11/25/09.

The late astrophysicist Carl Sagan in Demon-Haunted World - Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995) was already concerned about the dangers of insufficiently widely-spread knowledge of science. With particular reference to the US, he wrote:

... the consequences of scientific illiteracy are far more dangerous in our time than in any that has come before. It's perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponential population growth. Jobs and wages depend on science and technology. If our nation can't manufacture, at high quality and low price, products people want to buy, then industries will continue to drift away and transfer a little more prosperity to other parts of the world. Consider the social ramifications of fission and fusion power, supercomputers, data "highways," abortion, radon, massive reductions in strategic weapons, addiction, government eavesdropping on the lives of its citizens, high-resolution TV, airline and airport safety, fetal tissue transplants, health costs, food additives, drugs to ameliorate mania or depression or schizophrenia, animal rights, superconductivity, morning-after pills, alleged hereditary antisocial predispositions, space stations, going to Mars, finding cures for AIDS and cancer.

Without some basic scientific literacy, industry lobbyists and superstitious fanatics can point to a phrase like that in the Royal Society report above, "a high degree of certainty that human activities are largely responsible for global warming", and say, look: these scientists can't say for sure that this is true, they just say they think that's the way it is. And then arguing for taking another 50 years to "study the issue" have greater plausibility than they should.

As Sagan went on to explain, pseudoscience is easier to make arguments with than science is, because it's not so constrained by having to deal with discomfirming reality. In addition, "The standards of argument, what passes for evidence, are much more relaxed." This makes it "much easier to present pseudoscience to the general public than science."

He also notes that wishful thinking is part of the appeal of pseudoscience. And that goes as well for the global warming denial. It would be more pleasant to believe that is was all a big goof, or a scam by a cabal of scheming evil scientists, that we are melting the polar icecaps. And that tremendous consequences ensue from that.

Tags: global climate change, global warming