• Independent statisticians reject recent global cooling claims in blind analysis
• Melting glaciers releasing pollutants from decades ago
• IEA: climate treaty necessary to keep energy prices low
• Floating cities as a response to sea level rise
• American Physical Society rejects changes to climate change statement

Climate disruption deniers have been claiming for years now that the global temperature has been cooling down, even though the temperature data clearly shows that it isn’t. Scientists and statisticians have pointed out that, mathematically speaking, the recent reduced warming trend is well within the noise, or put another way, it’s weather, not climate.

A new report by the Associated Press reveals what many of us knew already – the denier’s claims don’t hold water, statistically speaking. The report is intriguing because the AP provided their data to four independent statisticians without telling them what it was, and all four found that the slower warming of the past decade was statistically insignificant with respect to the actual data. Full Story »

In the introduction to Last Chance – Preserving Life on Earth, author Larry J. Schweiger, the CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, comes right out and says that he’s not trying to change minds with this book. Instead, it’s his hope that the book will motivate millions of people to transform their concerns over global warming into activism.

There are three sections to the book that can be summarized as follows. First, the latest science says that disruptions due to climate change will be worse and happen faster than the best estimates of even a couple of years ago. Second, there are a few global ecosystems that are more sensitive than even average, and there are people who don’t want you to know that and who actively work to keep you ignorant of the facts. And third, there are a few things we can do to help ourselves and the Earth.

Full Story »

When you look at the ice core record, there’s a significant amount of correlation between sea level rise and the amount of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the air at the time. But the ice core record goes back less than a million years. A study published a couple of weeks ago in the journal Science measured proxy data for CO₂ concentration in the ocean and compared that data to other data on the stability of ice sheets. The authors discovered that there is strong correlation between the two going back at least 20 million years.

One of the challenges that the authors had was the fact that few available previous studies didn’t show correlation between the amount of CO₂ in the air and the global climate prior to the start of ice core data. The authors hypothesized that this was a problem with the other datasets and developed a set of tests to check their hypothesis. Full Story »

Every sperm and every egg, fertilized or not, is a living, breathing person, endowed by its Creator with certain inalienable rights. At least, that’s what the proposed 2010 personhood amendment to the Colorado state constitution implies. No, it doesn’t say that literally, but thanks to the vague wording of the amendment, that’s one possible interpretation.

It’s also clear from an article in The Colorado Independent that this is only half of what the amendment’s authors intended.

“It’s intended to account for human beings who may be created through asexual reproduction in laboratories and used as raw material for research, organs, or stem cells. Fertilization would not have properly applied to asexually reproduced humans, but even asexually reproduced human beings have a definite biological beginning,” [Gualberto Garcia] Jones explained. (Jones heads the organization that initiated this year’s amendment)

That this law could be interpreted to include sperm is an ironic example of the law of unintended consequences. Full Story »

Most people view climate disruption as a horror that we and the generations before us are about to visit upon our children and grandchildren. And there’s a great deal of truth to this view. The “civilization will end if we don’t stop global warming” approach is ultimately based on negativity, specifically on fear. But as bad as the future could be, fear isn’t the only way to approach talking about climate disruption. There are positive images and positive messages that can be pulled out of climate disruption as well. It is possible to make addressing climate disruption seem fun, even sexy.

Here are two very different, but simultaneously very effective, examples of climate messaging. First, the negative. Full Story »

When most of us think of Halloween movies, we tend to think of horror flicks, psychological thrillers, or bizarre mind-benders. The Nightmare on Elm Street, for example, or What Lies Beneath, or 12 Monkeys. But since 1993, a stop-motion animation musical has become as much a part of American Halloween culture as any horror franchise.

Boys and girls of every age
wouldn’t you like to see something strange
Come with us and you will see,
this our town of Halloween

So begins the opening song of what is perhaps the most misunderstood Christmas movie of all time, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Yes, I’m serious. For all the references to pumpkins, death, trick-or-treating, and the Boogie Man, The Nightmare Before Christmas is actually a Christmas movie. For those of you who have been living under a rock for the last 16 years and are unfamiliar with the plot, here’s the basics (spoiler warning). Full Story »

STS-1, the first space shuttle mission, launched on April 12, 1981. At that point, the shuttle was already several years old, and the original designs stretch back to the early 1970’s. The shuttle then was designed using the same basic technology that was used to go to the Moon, and while it’s been updated several times since, it wasn’t until 2007 that the shuttle’s computer software was updated to the point that the computers wouldn’t require a reboot if the shuttle was in orbit over the New Year.

So the first test launch of NASA’s first new rocket in three decades is a big deal. And today, the Ares 1-X rocket, carrying a dummy second stage and packed with 700 sensors to gather flight data, launched successfully from Kennedy.

Full Story »

Imagine that in a few years you wake up to news reports on the radio that your town is under a flash flood watch. The ground has been so baked by the recent drought that water can’t soak in, and so the pounding rain is just flowing off into streams and filling low-lying areas.

What’s worse is you’ve got a pediatrician appointment today for both of your kids – their asthma is acting up and the drugs aren’t working as well as they should be. Furthermore, your son is still recovering from a case of malaria he picked up, probably from a mosquito bite he got during the pee wee football game by the reservoir a couple of months ago. At least the rains will damp down on your environmental allergies some today. Better rain, even flooding, than the dust storm that blew through the area a couple of weeks ago. That caused several major pileups and fouled up ventilation so bad that some of the buildings downtown are still closed..

As you pull together breakfast for the family, there’s no milk because it’s too expensive. Full Story »

• Tipping points will be difficult to identify
• U.S. Chamber of Commerce President complains about environmentalists
• Barrels instead of bottles
• Ocean acidification to turn parts of the Arctic Ocean corrosive by 2018
• El Niño and its relationship to ocean heat content

Is the Earth’s climate approaching a critical transition, aka a “tipping point,” beyond which major and largely unpredictable climate changes are guaranteed to occur? At this point, scientists do not know the answer to that question. A study published in the journal Nature aims to explain the mathematics of critical transitions beyond just the Earth’s climate and in the process, determine if there are early-warning signals that indicate when a complex system is about to undergo a critical transition.

According to the paper, every complex system, whether it be climate, asthma attacks and epileptic seizures, or systemic crashes in financial markets, exhibits the same basic precursor signs of a tipping point, at least mathematically speaking. Full Story »

• Climate disruption will disrupt volcanism too
• EPA Office of Inspector General finds standard gases not so standard after all
• Driest years in Pacific Northwest drier than expected
• Northeast Passage opened this year for commercial shipping
• 12% of the merchant marine fleet is idled
• Recycling used plastic into fuel
• US Chamber of Commerce and car dealer industry group fight California emissions waiver
• Slowing population growth more effective than renewables at slowing GHG emissions

Nature News reported last week that vulcanologists have concluded that climate disruption will increase the number of volcanic eruptions. According to the article, the reason is that climate disruption is expected to reduce the amount of ice present atop volcanoes and thus reduce the amount of material keeping volcanoes from erupting. Full Story »

Scientists, mariners, and weather hobbyists started directly measuring temperature with thermometers globally in the late 1800s. When modern climatologists want temperature data farther back in time than those first global measurements, they have to use things called “proxies.” A proxy for temperature is something that, when calibrated properly, indirectly measures temperature. The most common proxies that are used as temperature stand-ins tend to be tree rings, the amount of an oxygen isotope in ice cores, and coral growth rings.

There are a couple of problems with proxies, however. The first problem is that scientists have to develop an appropriate and accurate calibration method to convert the width of a tree ring to an average annual or summer temperature. The second problem is that a given proxy may well be influenced by other factors beyond temperature, and so calibrating the proxy becomes a difficult and potentially error-prone process. For example, tree rings are a proxy for both temperature and moisture, and so any climatologist who wants to extract just the temperature information needs to discover a way to independently estimate the effect of moisture changes on the tree ring before the effect of temperature on the tree ring can be accurately determined.

A new study published September 17^th as a letter in the journal Nature describes a new method to compensate for proxy changes due to elevation in the Greenland ice sheet (GIS) during the Holocene (the present geologic epoch, starting about 12,000 years ago). Full Story »

Back in August, the UK government administration (collectively known as Whitehall) was criticized by Members of Parliament for failing to meet their own carbon emission targets. On September 15, UK Cabinet Office minister Angela Smith claimed in a BBC article that Whitehall had “saved enough carbon dioxide to fill almost 2,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools.”

2,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools sounds like a lot. Swimming pools are big, after all, and 2,500 of them would hold lots of water. But when I dug a little further, I found that Whitehall’s carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions were actually reduced by only 12,000 tonnes, a nearly negligible amount.

To put this into perspective, in 2006, the Energy Information Administration estimated that the total emissions for the United Kingdom was 585.71 million metric tons (aka tonnes). 12,000 tonnes is only 2 thousandths of one percent of the UK’s total emissions three years ago.

So how did we get from 12,000 tonnes to “2,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools?” It’s called the ideal gas equation. Full Story »

According to Fortune Magazine, the largest American company in 2009 was Exxon Mobil Its total revenues were $442.85 billion. Second was Wal-Mart, with total revenues of $405.61 billion. Rounding out the top 10 were Chevron ($263.16 billion), ConocoPhillips ($230.76 billion), General Electric ($183.21 billion), General Motors ($148.98 billion), Ford Motor ($146.28 billion), AT&T ($124.03 billion), Hewlett-Packard ($118.36 billion), and Valero Energy ($118.30 billion).

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the 182 nations of the world had a combined GDP of nearly $60.9 trillion (or $60,900 billion) in 2008. But comparing the GDP data to the Fortune 500 data produces the table at right (click for the top 182 nations and corporations each, in order). If Exxon Mobil were a country, it would rank 25^th in the world, right between Norway and Austria. Wal-Mart would rank 27^th, sandwiched between Austria and Taiwan. Chevron would rank 28^th, ConocoPhillips 42^nd, GE 49^th, GM 59^th, Ford 60^th, and AT&T, H-P, and Valero would be ranked 64-66 respectively.

In fact, all of the Fortune 500 would rank above the 40 smallest national economies in the world. And the smallest company on Fortune’s list of the 1000 largest U.S. companies would be larger than the national economies of 28 entire countries. Exxon Mobil’s revenue is greater than the combined GDP of the 78 smallest countries (out of a total of 182) in the world. Full Story »

• EPA Office of the Inspector General recommends EPA enforce Clean Water Act
• Climate change lobbyists grow by 31% leading up to ACES vote
• New information suggests climate change accelerating glacial erosion
• Wind turbines mistaken for tornadoes
• First deep water tethered wind turbine now operational
• Rare earth metals and renewable energy

Last week, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that the EPA’s internal monitoring organization, the Office of the Inspector General, found that the EPA’s current approach to controlling excess nutrient deposition into the Gulf of Mexico by the Mississippi River was not working. Full Story »

Last week, the Yale Project on Climate Change and the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communications released their 2009 “Six America’s” study. The study finds that the U.S. population can be broadly broken up into six different categories that the study’s authors name as follows: Alarmed, Concerned, Cautious, Disengaged, Doubtful, and Dismissive. Here’s how the Executive Summary describes each of the six groups:

The Alarmed (18%) are fully convinced of the reality and seriousness of climate change and are already taking individual, consumer, and political action to address it. The Concerned (33%) – the largest of the six Americas – are also convinced that global warming is happening and a serious problem, but have not yet engaged the issue personally. Three other Americas – the Cautious (19%), the Disengaged (12%) and the Doubtful (11%) – represent different stages of understanding and acceptance of the problem, and none are actively involved. The final America – the Dismissive (7%) – are very sure it is not happening and are actively involved as opponents of a national effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Full Story »

On Wednesday, September 2, Duke Energy announced that they were withdrawing from membership in the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), an industry group composed of utilities, mining companies, and other companies involved in the mining, transportation, and combustion of coal.

In response, the ACCCE issued a bland statement that didn’t even mention Duke by name. It says, in part:

ACCCE is a broad and diverse coalition, composed of more than 40 members, who are working to advance the public policy dialogue on critical issues relating to energy, environmental, and economic policies. From time to time, individual coalition members may have different perspectives with regard to important policy positions.

Full Story »

• U.S. Chamber of Commerce files for EPA climate disruption trial
• GRACE satellites show water use in India is unsustainable
• Biofuel crops may become next invasive species
• Is GM’s 230 MPG Volt claim real?
• Tubular Rail aims to invert train and rail
• July global ocean temperature sets two records

Earlier this week, the LATimes reported that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (hereafter “the Chamber”) has petitioned the EPA to hold a trial-like hearing on the science of climate disruption. According to the article, officials for the Chamber want to make it “‘the Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century.’”

EPA officials interviewed for the LATimes article are dismissive of the Chamber’s petition, referring to it in the article as “frivolous” and a “waste of time.” However, given that the Chamber has threatened to take the EPA to federal court to force them to hold this trial-like hearing, it’s unlikely that the Chamber considers their petition “frivolous.” Full Story »

• ACCCE hired Bonner, but didn’t notify Congress of forgeries when they were discovered
• Cash for Clunkers doesn’t do much for climate
• National Academy of Sciences: we need independent GHG emission confirmation
• Climate disruption may, or may not, make disease worse

Before the House voted on the American Climate and Energy Security Act (ACES) earlier this year, someone hired Bonner & Associates (hereafter Bonner) to manufacture some grassroots opposition against ACES. At least one employee did so by forging letters from non-existent people to Representative Tom Perriello of Virginia. These letters were discovered, Bonner claims to have fired the employee, and a partner at Bonner apologized to the two minority groups from which the letters were supposedly sent. The apologies were, it’s fair to say, emphatically not accepted.

Since the Bonner story broke last Friday, there have been a lot of new information about who hired them, whether there were other Congresspeople who received forged letters, the legality or lack thereof, and an official response from a House committee with subpoena powers. Full Story »

In early 2008, the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (OISM) published their Petition Project, a list of names from people who all claimed to be scientists and who rejected the science behind the theory of anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming (AGW). This was an attempt to by the OISM to claim that there were far more scientists opposing AGW theory than there are supporting it. This so-called petition took on special importance coming after the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report, and specifically the Working Group 1 (WG1) report on the science and attribution of climate change to human civilization.

The WG1 report was authored and reviewed by approximately 2000 scientists with varying expertise in climate and related fields, and so having a list of over 30,000 scientists that rejected the WG1’s conclusions was a powerful meme that AGW skeptics and deniers could use to cast doubt on the IPCC’s conclusions and, indirectly, on the entire theory of climate disruption. And in fact, this meme has become widespread in both legacy and new media today.

It is also completely false. Full Story »

• NE Pacific clouds observed to amplify warming
• Skeptical Inquirer publisher calls Inhofe’s list uncredible
• The ozone hole has reduced ocean CO₂ absorption
• Clinton Climate Initiative and Microsoft partner on Project 2°
• We might as well drive Model-Ts

The question of whether clouds are a positive or a negative feedback is one of the biggest remaining questions in climate modeling. A new paper in the journal Science is another piece of evidence that clouds will amplify the effects of climate disruption instead of dampen it.

The authors of the study analyzed two unrelated observational methods and found that both showed a decrease in cloud cover over the Northeast (NE) Pacific as a result of climate changes in sea surface temperature (SST), sea level pressure (SLP), and two measurements of the troposphere (the lower atmosphere). Full Story »