2006-01-30

it's the climate, stupid

Tony Blair included a forward to a UK Met Office report on climate change [LINK]. It sounds like the report is the UK's own personal IPCC-style assessment, and it sounds like they aren't holding back, even invoking the holy of holies, the west Antarctic ice sheet. If that ice starts melting, which according to scenarios dreamed up by people like Jim Hansen could happen quickly once it starts, the southern ocean will be flooded with fresh water, heat uptake by the ocean would be shut down in a climatically important region, and sea-levels would immediately rise. It would be bad news.

The report is available: [LINK]

Lovelock has a new book

Thanks to Renee for pointing out Jame Lovelock's latest essay to promote his new book [LINK]. Apparently instead of angering the earth, only to be crushed as it rebels against it, humans have made earth sick enough that it might go into a coma. I'm not making this up, it is in the essay.

This will probably set the mark for the most extreme serious climate change scenarios for this decade, giving us a feel for what the upper limit is right now. Of course, if we don't seriously think about what is happening, this extreme scenario might actually come to pass. Maybe not in 100 years, but maybe 150 or 200 years.

THE REVENGE OF GAIA

( I can't wait for the movie. I hope it is better than The Day After Tomorrow.)

2006-01-29

slick willy v. chilly willy?

Bill Clinton is talking about climate change; he says it is the world's biggest problem [LINK]. Clinton's VP, and former (only former?) presidential candidate, Al Gore has a supercharged powerpoint (or is it keynote?) presentation that has been turned into a movie, An Inconvenient Truth. It even premiered at Sundance, and is now looking for distribution:

I got a little carried away with those links, but hey, I was practically part of the production!!

2006-01-28

Washington watches climate scientists...

I know I'm not supposed to post a whole article, but I didn't think it would be right to just link to it. It is from NYTimes.com, and I think you should read it. It is freely available for two weeks on the NYTimes.com website, and then goes into the archives. Read the article, and don't tell anybody I put it up!!

January 29, 2006
Climate Expert Says NASA Tried to Silence Him

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

The top climate scientist at NASA says the Bush administration has tried to stop him from speaking out since he gave a lecture last month calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

The scientist, James E. Hansen, longtime director of the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in an interview that officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists.

Dr. Hansen said he would ignore the restrictions. "They feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to the public," he said.

Dean Acosta, deputy assistant administrator for public affairs at the space agency, said there was no effort to silence Dr. Hansen. "That's not the way we operate here at NASA," Mr. Acosta said. "We promote openness and we speak with the facts."

He said the restrictions on Dr. Hansen applied to all National Aeronautics and Space Administration personnel. He added that government scientists were free to discuss scientific findings, but that policy statements should be left to policy makers and appointed spokesmen.

Mr. Acosta said other reasons for requiring press officers to review interview requests were to have an orderly flow of information out of a sprawling agency and to avoid surprises. "This is not about any individual or any issue like global warming," he said. "It's about coordination."

Dr. Hansen strongly disagreed with this characterization, saying such procedures had already prevented the public from fully grasping recent findings about climate change that point to risks ahead.

"Communicating with the public seems to be essential," he said, "because public concern is probably the only thing capable of overcoming the special interests that have obfuscated the topic."

Dr. Hansen, 63, a physicist who joined the space agency in 1967, directs efforts to simulate the global climate on computers at the Goddard Institute in Morningside Heights in Manhattan.

Since 1988, he has been issuing public warnings about the long-term threat from heat-trapping emissions, dominated by carbon dioxide, that are an unavoidable byproduct of burning coal, oil and other fossil fuels. He has had run-ins with politicians or their appointees in various administrations, including budget watchers in the first Bush administration and Vice President Al Gore.

In 2001, Dr. Hansen was invited twice to brief Vice President Dick Cheney and other cabinet members on climate change. White House officials were interested in his findings showing that cleaning up soot, which also warms the atmosphere, was an effective and far easier first step than curbing carbon dioxide.

He fell out of favor with the White House in 2004 after giving a speech at the University of Iowa before the presidential election, in which he complained that government climate scientists were being muzzled and said he planned to vote for Senator John Kerry.

But Dr. Hansen said that nothing in 30 years equaled the push made since early December to keep him from publicly discussing what he says are clear-cut dangers from further delay in curbing carbon dioxide.

In several interviews with The New York Times in recent days, Dr. Hansen said it would be irresponsible not to speak out, particularly because NASA's mission statement includes the phrase "to understand and protect our home planet."

He said he was particularly incensed that the directives had come through telephone conversations and not through formal channels, leaving no significant trails of documents.

Dr. Hansen's supervisor, Franco Einaudi, said there had been no official "order or pressure to say shut Jim up." But Dr. Einaudi added, "That doesn't mean I like this kind of pressure being applied."

The fresh efforts to quiet him, Dr. Hansen said, began in a series of calls after a lecture he gave on Dec. 6 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. In the talk, he said that significant emission cuts could be achieved with existing technologies, particularly in the case of motor vehicles, and that without leadership by the United States, climate change would eventually leave the earth "a different planet."

The administration's policy is to use voluntary measures to slow, but not reverse, the growth of emissions.

After that speech and the release of data by Dr. Hansen on Dec. 15 showing that 2005 was probably the warmest year in at least a century, officials at the headquarters of the space agency repeatedly phoned public affairs officers, who relayed the warning to Dr. Hansen that there would be "dire consequences" if such statements continued, those officers and Dr. Hansen said in interviews.

Among the restrictions, according to Dr. Hansen and an internal draft memorandum he provided to The Times, was that his supervisors could stand in for him in any news media interviews.

Mr. Acosta said the calls and meetings with Goddard press officers were not to introduce restrictions, but to review existing rules. He said Dr. Hansen had continued to speak frequently with the news media.

But Dr. Hansen and some of his colleagues said interviews were canceled as a result.

In one call, George Deutsch, a recently appointed public affairs officer at NASA headquarters, rejected a request from a producer at National Public Radio to interview Dr. Hansen, said Leslie McCarthy, a public affairs officer responsible for the Goddard Institute.

Citing handwritten notes taken during the conversation, Ms. McCarthy said Mr. Deutsch called N.P.R. "the most liberal" media outlet in the country. She said that in that call and others, Mr. Deutsch said his job was "to make the president look good" and that as a White House appointee that might be Mr. Deutsch's priority.

But she added: "I'm a career civil servant and Jim Hansen is a scientist. That's not our job. That's not our mission. The inference was that Hansen was disloyal."

Normally, Ms. McCarthy would not be free to describe such conversations to the news media, but she agreed to an interview after Mr. Acosta, at NASA headquarters, told The Times that she would not face any retribution for doing so.

Mr. Acosta, Mr. Deutsch's supervisor, said that when Mr. Deutsch was asked about the conversations, he flatly denied saying anything of the sort. Mr. Deutsch referred all interview requests to Mr. Acosta.

Ms. McCarthy, when told of the response, said: "Why am I going to go out of my way to make this up and back up Jim Hansen? I don't have a dog in this race. And what does Hansen have to gain?"

Mr. Acosta said that for the moment he had no way of judging who was telling the truth. Several colleagues of both Ms. McCarthy and Dr. Hansen said Ms. McCarthy's statements were consistent with what she told them when the conversations occurred.

"He's not trying to create a war over this," said Larry D. Travis, an astronomer who is Dr. Hansen's deputy at Goddard, "but really feels very strongly that this is an obligation we have as federal scientists, to inform the public."

Dr. Travis said he walked into Ms. McCarthy's office in mid-December at the end of one of the calls from Mr. Deutsch demanding that Dr. Hansen be better controlled.

In an interview on Friday, Ralph J. Cicerone, an atmospheric chemist and the president of the National Academy of Sciences, the nation's leading independent scientific body, praised Dr. Hansen's scientific contributions and said he had always seemed to describe his public statements clearly as his personal views.

"He really is one of the most productive and creative scientists in the world," Dr. Cicerone said. "I've heard Hansen speak many times and I've read many of his papers, starting in the late 70's. Every single time, in writing or when I've heard him speak, he's always clear that he's speaking for himself, not for NASA or the administration, whichever administration it's been."

The fight between Dr. Hansen and administration officials echoes other recent disputes. At climate laboratories of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, for example, many scientists who routinely took calls from reporters five years ago can now do so only if the interview is approved by administration officials in Washington, and then only if a public affairs officer is present or on the phone.

Where scientists' points of view on climate policy align with those of the administration, however, there are few signs of restrictions on extracurricular lectures or writing.

One example is Indur M. Goklany, assistant director of science and technology policy in the policy office of the Interior Department. For years, Dr. Goklany, an electrical engineer by training, has written in papers and books that it may be better not to force cuts in greenhouse gases because the added prosperity from unfettered economic activity would allow countries to exploit benefits of warming and adapt to problems.

In an e-mail exchange on Friday, Dr. Goklany said that in the Clinton administration he was shifted to nonclimate-related work, but added that he had never had to stop his outside writing, as long as he identified the views as his own.

"One reason why I still continue to do the extracurricular stuff," he wrote, "is because one doesn't have to get clearance for what I plan on saying or writing."

2006-01-23

deSmogBlog | Clearing the air on climate change

I don't know if I've had a chance to direct you to desmogblog.com [LINK], but if not, you should take a look. It is maintained by Jim Hoggan, a Canadian lawyer, and the posts are mostly about the treatment of climate science in the media and in public relations. It has some really good stuff, and is often much more on top of news stories than I can be. From now on, you can also link to it directly from this blog's links menu on the right side of the page.

2006-01-18

Let's raise gas prices

There's an old saying that if Americans used public transportation at the same rate as Europeans (roughly 10% of total daily travel needs) the US would reduce its need for imported oil by more than 40% (at the current level of domestic production). Okay, it isn't that old, it is what the American Public Transportation Association says [LINK]. Being interested in public transportation, they also monitor how many people use it, and apparently people use it more when gas prices are high:
"With high gas prices in the third quarter of 2005, national transit ridership grew by 3.3 % from the same period in 2004, according to a report released by the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) today." [LINK]

And the increase is even more in big cities (even LA!).

So with higher gas prices people take public transportation more. That decreases teh number of cars on the road which makes driving more efficient for those who do it, but decreases the petroleum products use by Americans. That decreases our oil needs, and also decreases the CO2 emissions.

Raising gas prices, through an at-the-pump tax, would then decrease traffic, decrease dependence on foreign oil, and decrease greenhouse gas emissions. The money raised by the tax could be used for better public transportation, providing a positive feedback, since better transport will attract more riders, further reducing traffic, oil dependency, and ghg emissions. Why aren't we doing this?

2006-01-09

need a larf? Check out APC.

Today I came across a link to the American Policy Center's statement on global warming [LINK]. Their statement is that there is no global warming, and the good scientists have proved it, and anybody who says different is part of a vast conspiracy to redistribute America's wealth to foreign powers. Yeah, because all of us on the left hate the USA. At first I was angry that such a statement, with such blantanly false assertions, could exist at all. After reading more, I decided that this statement was too funny to cause anger. In fact, I now see it as a classic work of satire. It is brilliant, on par with anything Swift could have written. I highly suggest reading it.

I haven't looked at them yet, but it looks like the APC article index is full of this kind of stuff. I think I have a new favorite site.

2006-01-06

grumble grumble...

Another dataset seems doomed to never be today. NASA has cut the funding for the Deep Space Climage Observatory, a satellite that was to sit between Earth and the sun and observe the entire dayside of Earth [LINK; DOI: 10.1126/science.311.5757.26b]. As a bonus, the satellite could stare back at the sun to observe solar activity like flares and CMEs.

Oh well, at least we have an infinite supply of Iraqi oil. Damn.

2006-01-04

A public service announcement... A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

Just a snippet I saw in wired.com today. Pete Townshend is trying to get the word out that headphones can lead to permanent loss of hearing [LINK]. This has been a common warning to people listening to loud music for many years, but I'm guessing the current generation of teenagers and 20-somethings should take heed. Ear buds and headphones are pervasive these days, and based on the amount of your music that I can hear from across a crowded bus, the volume is turned way up. We should all think about turning it down, to save our ears and also decrease the general noise (as I've blogged about before [LINK]).