In an article titled “Syngenta’s Paid Third Party Pundits Spin the “News” on Atrazine,” the Center for Media and Democracy’s (CMD) PR Watch revealed that Steve Milloy, editor of JunkScience.com, had been hired to PR outreach through both his “National Center for Public Policy Research” and his “Free Enterprise Education Institute.” CMD acquired sealed court documents from a lawsuit against herbicide manufacturer Syngenta that show Milloy asking for a $15,000 grant in 2004 and invoicing Syngenta for $25,000 in 2008.

Another sequence of emails shows two Syngenta employees talking about how Milloy was going to do his “weekly column” on the book “Poisoned Profits” and getting Milloy some talking points: Full story »

One of the many factual errors, misunderstandings, and misleading claims (I counted at least six) in a Wall Street Journal commentary denying human-caused climate disruption was that only four of the 16 co-signers had published on climate science, and only one has published anything significant on the topic recently. Many of the others were not even scientists (including celebrity aerospace engineer Burt Rutan), but rather engineers or physicians who were misidentified as scientists by the Journal‘s editorial page editor.

Today, the Journal published a response by 38 climate scientists to the commentary as a letter to the editor. This continues a pattern at the Journal of refusing to grant equal space and prominence to refutations of factually deficient commentaries. Full story »

On January 27, I wrote an “open letter” to Burt Rutan, aerospace engineer and former CEO of Scaled Composites, expressing my disappointment that he would co-sign a commentary in the Wall Street Journal that contains incorrect and misleading information on climate science and economics. On January 28th, Rutan responded in the comments. He also CCed his response to Anthony Watts, who published Rutan’s response on Wattsupwiththat.com. What transpired is a huge number of comments that essentially drowned Rutan’s and my exchanges.

This post extracts from the original comment thread just Rutan’s and my responses, ignoring all the other comments, good, bad, or ugly.

Comments on this post are closed, and any further exchanges between Rutan and I from the original post will be posted here for clarity. If you have something to say about what we’re talking about, please comment in the original post’s comment thread instead – everything here is also there. Full story »

Update: To read other articles in this series, click here.

Climate scientists who study the history of the Earth’s climate (also known as paleoclimatologists) know that modern carbon dioxide levels are at their highest level in the last 800,000 years. They tell us this because they’ve been able to measure the carbon dioxide in air that is actually 800,000 years old. So how do they do that?

Scientists know how much carbon dioxide was in the air hundreds of thousands of years ago because they actually have small samples of ancient air stored in glacial ice. To get a feel for how this works, consider the following examples. Full story »

[Update: My original post, Burt Rutan's comments, and my responses to his comments have been copied here. That post has closed comments and will be updated with any further discussion Burt and I have, either in the massive comment thread below or independently. If you're interested in just Burt's and my discussion to date, minus the mass of additional commentary, please feel free to read the new post.]

Dear Mr. Rutan,

Ever since you won the Ansari X-Prize in 2004 you’ve been a minor hero of mine. I’ve felt that the development of private human spaceflight was the critical next step toward moving humanity off our small blue marble since I was in high school, and SpaceShipOne was the first major step in that direction. The commercialization of space travel is a large part of why I work in aerospace myself designing satellite and space vehicle electronics.

This is why I was disappointed to find that you had co-signed a Wall Street Journal commentary regarding human-caused climate disruption along with 15 other scientists and engineers. The commentary was replete with incorrect and misleading information. So much so, in fact, that I was surprised that you, as an engineer, would attach your name to it. Full story »

In any functioning community there are three different levels of responsibility, namely legal, ethical, and moral. The least of these is our responsibilities as defined by local, state, and federal law. That former Penn State football coach Joe Paterno met this lowest of expectations is not in dispute – Sandusky’s prosecutors have explicitly stated that Paterno met the legal requirements of reporting child sexual abuse to his superiors at Penn State. But when the police were not notified, when Sandusky was not shut out of the athletic facilities, why did Paterno not rise to meet his ethical responsibility as an authority figure, or his moral responsibility to report the abuse to the police? I don’t know, and after Paterno’s interview, I’m not entirely sure that he knows either.

Regardless of Paterno’s reasons, it was his failure to meet his higher responsibilities that resulted in the Penn State Board of Trustees voting unanimously to fire Paterno as head coach of the Nittany Lions. The Trustees are charged with guaranteeing the reputation of the university, and as an alumnus (1995, BSEE), I applaud them for having the courage to fire a Penn State icon. Full story »

Marc Morano, former environmental communications director to Senator Jim Inhofe and the Republicans on the Senate Environment and Public Works committee, recently published on his Climate Depot website the email address of conservative MIT climate scientist and hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel. As a result, Emanuel was deluged with hate mail that not only threatened his life but also threatened his wife. (MotherJones has the full story.) Other climate scientists and their family members have been threatened with torture, rape, and murder in the past, so it’s likely that similar threats were involved here. Full story »

[*B.S. means “Bad Science.” What did you think it meant?]

by Peter H. Gleick
Crossposted at Forbes and Huffington Post. To see S&R’s climate-related posts, click here

[Correction: Katharine Hayhoe was misidentified as a Republican in the original post at Forbes and HuffPo. This has been corrected below.

Peter Gleick updated the original posts at HuffPo and Forbes and removed Ben Webster from the Second Place text. S&R has updated this post to bring it in line with Gleick's update.]

The Earth’s climate continued to change during 2011 – a year in which unprecedented combinations of extreme weather events killed people and damaged property around the world. The scientific evidence for the accelerating human influence on climate further strengthened, as it has for decades now. Yet on the policy front, once again, national leaders did little to stem the growing emissions of greenhouse gases or to help societies prepare for increasingly severe consequences of climate changes, including rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, rising sea-levels, loss of snowpack and glaciers, disappearance of Arctic sea ice, and much more.

Why the failure to act? In part because climate change is a truly difficult challenge. But in part because of a concerted, well-funded, and aggressive anti-science campaign by climate change deniers and contrarians. Full story »

Atmospheric CO₂ concentration data from ice core (blue, 1750-1975)
and direct atmospheric measurements (red, 1960-2010) vs. “compounding
interest” model described in post (purple). Click for a larger version.

In many ways, climate science is difficult. There’s a reason that the best climate models require some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world in order to run. But the most important concepts are easily understood by a non-expert with either a little mathematical skill or the ability to use some simple online tools. This is the inaugural post of a new series that seeks to illustrate how anyone and everyone can understand the most important concepts underlying climate science and the reality that is human-caused climate disruption.

Update: To read other articles in this series, click here.

Are people adding a lot of carbon dioxide (CO₂) to the atmosphere? It’s such an easy question to ask, but the answer depends on what you mean by “a lot.” And it depends on what you’re referring to. Full story »

You know, sometimes you get your Christmas gift early, like when someone you despise gets their karmic comeuppance. Which is why I’m pleased to report that yesterday, the Colorado anti-tax extremist and term limit hypocrite Douglas Bruce was convicted on multiple counts of tax evasion, filing false tax returns, and attempting to influence a public figure for the years 2005 through 2010. The Colorado Springs Gazette has more detail here.

I realize that this might not really fit with the spirit of the season – forgiveness and all that. But I’m OK with it.

When you’ve been following, analyzing, and reporting on climate science and politics for as long as I have, a few things become apparent. First, most climate disruption deniers have no real clue about actual climate science and are instead simply regurgitating talking points they heard from their favorite denial-peddling think-tank, politician, commentator, or news source. Second, the arguments against human-caused climate disruption almost never change, so you’ll be rebutting the same thing over and over again. And third, most arguments you hear are incompatible or self-contradictory, although not always obviously so.

Today, John Cook of the denial-debunking uber-site Skeptical Science published a detailed examination of some of the many self-contradictory claims by Ian Plimer, the Australian author of the thoroughly and widely debunked book Heaven and Earth – global warming: the missing science. Full story »

From Michelle Goldberg at Newsweek:

Like many evangelicals in Iowa, Steve Deace, an influential conservative radio host, is wrestling with the possibility that Newt Gingrich may be the most viable standard bearer for family-values voters in the next election. It’s a conundrum, he says, that many others are also grappling with. “Maybe the guy in the race that would make the best president is on his third marriage,” he says. “How do we reconcile that?”
…
“Under normal circumstances, Gingrich would have some real problems with the social-conservative community,” says Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council. “But these aren’t normal circumstances.” Full story »

Given the release of a second batch of hacked emails yesterday, S&R decided to pull this analysis from 2010 back to the front. The conclusions reached in this analysis are as applicable to the emails published in 2011 just as much as they are to the original emails from 2009.

It is impossible to draw firm conclusions from the hacked documents and emails. They do not represent the complete record, and they are not a random selection from the complete record.
- Dr. Timothy Osborn, Climatic Research Unit (source)

After several hundred hours of studying the emails and looking at their references, I have no hesitation in stating that, to my satisfaction, the system is rotten to the core and has been from the start.
- Geoff Sherrington, former corporate geologist, (source)

According to Osborn, there is not sufficient context to understand the “true” story behind the published Climatic Research Unit emails and documents. However, according to Sherrington, the emails and references contained therein provide all the context needed in order to conclude that climate change research is complete hogwash. Reality lies somewhere on a continuum between these two extremes – the question is where.

S&R set out to determine whether the published CRU emails provided enough context for the public to condemn or vindicate the scientists involved. After investigating three primary options and reading a key study, S&R has concluded that the emails do not themselves contain sufficient context to understand what really happened in climate science over the last 13 years. Full story »

See update at the end

If you follow climate news, you’re probably already aware that someone has illegally published another 5000 climate emails, probably from the original “Climategate” hack from two years ago. S&R is following the story and will publish a more in-depth analysis as we learn more. However, we feel it’s important to point out the following key facts about the original emails and their subsequent investigations:

• Three separate investigations in the UK, one by Parliament, one by a group associated with the world’s oldest scientific body, the Royal Society, and a third convened by the University of East Anglia, found no evidence of fraud or scientific misconduct.
• Two separate inquiries into alleged misconduct by climate scientist Michael Mann found no evidence of misconduct, and a third investigation by the National Science Foundation also found no evidence of misconduct.
• S&R investigated a number of conspiracy claims against climate scientists in general, and Michael Mann in particular, and found them all lacking any factual basis.
• S&R also looked at whether it was possible to extract reliable enough information from cherrypicked email records to support conspiracy charges and found that both research and common sense argued against some form of climate science conspiracy.

Full story »

Penn State students at a candlelight vigil in support of the victims.
Credit: Lawrence Weathers

When I was in grad school at the University of Colorado, there was a riot in a part of Boulder known as The Hill. It’s just off campus and filled with houses that are rented to college students or have been converted to apartments. The riot was over the dumbest reason I could think of to riot over at the time – the supposed right of underage students to break the law and drink alcohol while underage. It was booze fueled, and before it was over the rioters got within a block of my apartment building, several miles from where they started. The result? No changes in police policy toward underage drinking (duh), but a ban on sofas on porches because sofas had been torched during the riots to make toxic bonfires. Brilliant, the rioters were not.

But compared to the Penn State rioters who went apeshit over Paterno’s firing, the CU rioters were brainiacs. Full story »

See update at the end

I’ve been keeping my head down ever since the news broke that Jerry Sandusky, former defensive coordinator for the Penn State Nittany Lions football team, was arrested and charged with multiple accounts of child sexual abuse. I needed time to process how I felt about everything, and yet every time I seemed to get close to grasping onto something, events would send my thoughts and emotions careening beyond my reach again. The Penn State mess has made a stressful period of my life harder for a simple reason: between August of 1991 and May of 1995, I attended the Pennsylvania State University, aka Penn State. And when you spend the four most formative years of your life at a university that is under assault from all sides, it hits you in places and in ways that you’re not prepared for.

What follows is my attempt to make sense of a small part of what I’m feeling right now. Full story »

I have no idea whether Herman Cain did or did not assault the four women who have accused him of sexual assault. But something he said during his press conference last Tuesday has me very suspicious. According to news reports, Cain said the following at least twice:

I have never acted inappropriately with anyone. Period.

Why does this statement make me suspicious, you ask? Simply put, any man who makes this claim and isn’t the second coming of Jesus is a liar.

I don’t know a single man who hasn’t acted inappropriately with regard to a woman (or another man, if gay) at some point in his adult life. Some men brag about their sexual conquests to their buddies or on social media. Some mime sexual acts to make their boorish buddies laugh. Some quote inappropriate comedians at socially awkward times. Some reveal personal secrets they were told by a woman in confidence. Full story »

I had my editorial all planned out in my head. First, Mississippi was going to be the first state to approve the thoroughly idiotic state constitutional amendment defining a fertilized egg (a zygote) as a person. Second, I… well, I never got past that first step, because Mississippi voters did the smart thing and voted down an amendment that would have made pregnant women second-class citizens at best, and livestock at worst. Full story »

OK, what’s wrong with the following paragraph (from this story):

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says it will take steps to remove 20 rodent control products from the marketplace because they contain toxic chemicals.

Last I checked, the entire point of rat poison was that you were trying to kill rats with “toxic chemicals.”

Reading the rest of the article it becomes clear that the EPA is removing the rat poisons from the market because they’re deemed unsafe to people in comparison to other products that are safe(r). In other words, the issue isn’t that the rat poisons contain toxic chemicals, but rather that the toxic chemicals are too easily accessed by people, especially children.

I don’t know who was responsible for that lede, whether it was the piece’s author or the editor, but that individual either didn’t know the necessary science or was in way too constrained, in terms of time or words, to write an accurate lede.

The Heartland Institute has a history of distorting peer-reviewed papers, lying in newspaper editorials and Institute blogs, and claiming extensive scientific expertise where little actually exists with respect to climate science and the reality of human-driven climate disruption. Given this history, the distortions in the Heartland Institute’s latest media advisory regarding the results of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project are only to be expected.

BEST analyzed more surface temperature data than any other study had previously and concluded that the established global temperature records were accurate. In this way, BEST confirmed what every climate realist already knew from three surface datasets and two satellite datasets – that the globe is warming and that the best available science indicates that the urban heat island effect has a minimal impact upon the measurements. However, the Heartland Institute’s media advisory claims that “the paper is seriously flawed,” attributing that statement to James M. Taylor, senior fellow for environment policy at the Heartland Institute.

It’s at this point, the second sentence of the media advisory, that the distortions start. Full story »