Climate Denial Crock of the Week

More from my chat this week with Dr. Richard Rood at the University of Michigan Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic, and Space Science – soon to be renamed the Department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering.
Dr. Rood has a large audience online owing to his blogs at Weather Underground, and recent posts to the “Conversation” series. He’s got a new one this week.

The Conversation:

If you’re younger than 30, you’ve never experienced a month in which the average surface temperature of the Earth was below average.

Each month, the US National Climatic Data Center calculates Earth’s average surface temperature using temperature measurements that cover the Earth’s surface. Then, another average is calculated for each month of the year for the twentieth century, 1901-2000. For each month, this gives one number representative of the entire century. Subtract this overall 1900s monthly average – which for February is 53.9F (12.1C) – from each individual month’s temperature and you’ve got the anomaly: that is, the difference from the average.

The last month that was at or below that 1900s average was February 1985. Ronald Reagan had just started his second presidential term and Foreigner had the number one single with “I want to know what love is.”

These temperature observations make it clear the new normal will be systematically rising temperatures, not the stability of the last 100 years. The traditional definition of climate is the 30-year average of weather. The fact that – once the official records are in for February 2015 – it will have been 30 years since a month was below average is an important measure that the climate has changed.
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In the last few weeks, we’ve seen 2 astonishing announcements, one from the CEO of Royal Dutch Shell (RDS), and one from the Chairman of British Petroleum, acknowledging the problem of climate change, the need for a transition to carbon free energy, and advocating a price on carbon.
I don’t believe these announcements were unrelated – and I expect more developments in this story soon.
A friend has sent a link to a January 12 lecture from the VP for Carbon of Shell, Angus Gillespie.  I posted a short clip of Gillespie on a panel the other day, but here he goes in depth.  Worth a listen as he describes how not just at Shell, but at several major oil companies, there is already an internal carbon  price rolled into plans for any new venture.

This is done to ensure that every part of the organization understands that carbon pricing is coming, is inevitable, and even desirable, as is a transition to non-carbon fuels.

Description:

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The stage is set for massive action on climate change –  a clear majority of Americans now see climate as a moral issue.

Below, a new poll by Reuters shows that two thirds of Americans believe their leaders are “morally obligated” to take action on climate.
Above, Climate Scientist Katharine Hayhoe states the case for  values-based communication when talking about climate – and I’ve interspersed here similar values based arguments from a variety of messengers.
Everything we’ve learned about science communication suggests that merely hearing the facts does not bring people around on the issue of climate change – what is most effective is connecting with people on an emotional level, a values level, as Dr. Hayhoe suggests, above.
Part of what is happening is that the planet itself is, for better or worse, now speaking clearly enough to amplify the message that scientists have been bringing.

Reuters:

A significant majority of Americans say combating climate change is a moral issue that obligates them – and world leaders – to reduce carbon emissions, a Reuters/IPSOS poll has found.

   The poll of 2,827 Americans was conducted in February to measure the impact of moral language, including interventions by Pope Francis, on the climate change debate. In recent months, the pope has warned about the moral consequences of failing to act on rising global temperatures, which are expected to disproportionately affect the lives of the world’s poor.

The result of the poll suggests that appeals based on ethics could be key to shifting the debate over climate change in the United States, where those demanding action to reduce carbon emissions and those who resist it are often at loggerheads.

Two-thirds of respondents (66 percent) said that world leaders are morally obligated to take action to reduce CO2 emissions. And 72 percent said they were “personally morally obligated” to do what they can in their daily lives to reduce emissions.

“When climate change is viewed through a moral lens it has broader appeal,” said Eric Sapp, executive director of the American Values Network, a grassroots organization that mobilizes faith-based communities on politics and policy issues.

“The climate debate can be very intellectual at times, all about economic systems and science we don’t understand. This makes it about us, our neighbors and about doing the right thing.”

 

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I was in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan interviewing Ricky Rood the other day – and that’s the question I asked him.

Dr. Richard Rood is a former NASA Atmospheric Scientist now teaching at the University of Michigan Department of Oceanic, Atmospheric, and Space Sciences.
Simple, short, direct, shareable.

Errata, when Dr. Rood says “..the coldest place on the planet”, he is of course referring to “colder than normal”, not absolute temperature.

If you happen to be out this weekend looking to turn off for a couple hours, you could probably do worse.
Something here to offend everyone, and make you kind of hate yourself for laughing out loud.
Very meta and self conscious send-up of every James Bond trope, married with some of the most outrageous, over the top senseless violence you’re likely to see anytime soon.

The villain, it turns out, is concerned about climate change. Not sure what that means.

Yes, Dr Soon, its come to this.

5 years ago, climate deniers staged a fake “scandal” by hacking in to the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, and selectively quoting stolen emails to a compliant and cooperative media.

We know that deniers will be trying all this year to disrupt the science and policy messaging leading up to the important November COP meeting in Paris.
This time, the media has been deviating  from the script, and instead, a leading climate denier, Dr  Willie Soon, has found himself under withering examination for accepting more than a million dollars from fossil fuel funders.  Of course, when real scientists get examined, as happened in the email affair, their case comes away strengthened.
Problem for Willie is, this “science” and pretend Harvard connections, don’t stand up.

Chronicle of Higher Education:

Years of using a Harvard nameplate to flog his insistence that polar bears are doing fine, and that sunspots might explain planetary warming better than the Industrial Revolution does, may finally have caught up with Wei-Hock Soon.

Mr. Soon, an astrophysicist at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, has endured a barrage of news reports this week detailing his acceptance of $1.2-million in support from energy companies and others hostile to government limits on fossil-fuel use. In response, the Smithsonian Institution announced plans to investigate whether he had properly acknowledged his political alliances.

“We’re very concerned to get to the bottom of this, and make sure we have all the facts,” W. John Kress, the Smithsonian’s interim under secretary for science, said in an interview on Tuesday.

The investigation threatens serious repercussions for Mr. Soon, commonly known as Willie. But it may raise an equally tough question for Harvard University, the Smithsonian, and arrangements for their shared astrophysics observatory: How did the scientist trade on Harvard’s name to gain a leading role in climate politics?

In a series of scientific-journal articles over the past decade, Mr. Soon has routinely listed himself as representing “the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.” In turn, various reports describing his activities and beliefs—often published by organizations dedicated to opposing government regulations—have short-handed his identification to “Harvard scientist.” Even The Harvard Crimson, the university’student-run newspaper, has referred to him that way.

The problem, according to Charles R. Alcock, a Harvard professor of astronomy who also serves as director of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, is that the “center” refers primarily to a shared set of physical facilities. Almost everyone working at those facilities, Mr. Alcock said, is either an employee of Harvard or an employee of the Smithsonian, a federally administered collection of museums and research centers.

“From a legal point of view,” he said, “there is no such entity as the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.” And Mr. Soon is employed only by the Smithsonian, Mr. Alcock said. “It’s always been that way. He has never had any Harvard appointment.”

There is an important point to understand about Dr Soon – according to the New York Times:

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Naomi Oreskes, author of Merchants of Doubt, on finding out that she was being attacked on the floor of the Senate by James Inhofe, the Strom Thurmond of climate denial.

The movie based on Oreskes book comes out next week.

Andrew Freedman in Mashable:

The eastern U.S., as well as parts of Canada, sticks out for having the most unusually cold conditions on the planet.

In fact, much of the rest of North America — including the western U.S., northwest Canada and Alaska — along with most areas of the world, are milder than average. It’s as if the North Pole temporarily relocated to Boston, while leaving the door open for the Southern Hemisphere’s summer to sneak in and evaporate California’s snow pack, while also setting high temperature records all the way into inland Alaska.
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During just the past seven days, nearly 1,300 cold temperature records have been set or tied across the lower 48 states, most of them east of the Rocky Mountains.

Over the longer-term, the world — and even the U.S. — is still running much milder than average. After the warmest year on record in 2014, January 2015 was the second-warmest January on record for the globe, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

And since Jan. 1, warm temperature records are outpacing cold temperature records in the U.S. by a margin of about four to one.

Senator Strom..ahem..James Inhofe was in fine form yesterday, tossing a snowball on the Senate floor as a supposed rebuttal to climate science and scientists all over the world.

The reason I sometimes get Senator Inhofe confused with Strom Thurmond, is, of course, because they both occupy a similar niche in history – as defenders of destructive, paranoid, and hate filled ignorance. As I wrote a few weeks ago, and have pasted below.

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Above, my newest “This is Not Cool” video focuses on the backstory behind “Merchants of Doubt”, the new documentary inspired by Naomi Oreskes’ and Eric Conway’s book of the same name.  The centerpiece of the book is the story of how techniques of science denial perfected in the tobacco industry have been adapted to the broader war on inconvenient science.

This week’s media firestorm centering on Dr. Willie Soon, a high profile prop at many a gathering of climate deniers, was kicked off by Justin Gillis’ piece in the New York Times on Sunday:

It’s not insignificant that Gillis put the affair in a larger context, something that happens rarely in media coverage of the climate issue.
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The documents shed light on the role of scientists like Dr. Soon in fostering public debate over whether human activity is causing global warming. The vast majority of experts have concluded that it is and that greenhouse emissions pose long-term risks to civilization.

Historians and sociologists of science say that since the tobacco wars of the 1960s, corporations trying to block legislation that hurts their interests have employed a strategy of creating the appearance of scientific doubt, usually with the help of ostensibly independent researchers who accept industry funding.

Fossil-fuel interests have followed this approach for years, but the mechanics of their activities remained largely hidden.

“The whole doubt-mongering strategy relies on creating the impression of scientific debate,” said Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at Harvard University and the co-author of “Merchants of Doubt,” a book about such campaigns. “Willie Soon is playing a role in a certain kind of political theater.”
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I was able to include parts of detailed interviews from scientists who were very much a part of the story, including Dr. Oreskes’, who was the target of a massive climate denier attack after she published a key paper on the scientific consensus around Climate Change, in 2004.  In addition, I include part of our interview with Dr. Ben Santer, who sheds light on the role of Tobacco and Climate Science denier Fred Singer – and Stanton Glantz, who appears in the film and was an early, and combative, critic of the tobacco industry’s war on reality, and connects the tactics, and even the combatants,  to the climate issue.

The movie adaptation of Dr. Oreskes’ book is due in theaters next week. I’ve seen it, and I think, especially in light of the recent revelations, it will become a starting point for a lot of conversations.  I’m sure that editors and reporters at the New York Times would have seen the movie and been aware of it too, so it causes one to wonder if there is a bit of calculation behind the recent story.

Merchants of Doubt trailer below. Read the rest of this entry »

Readers are aware of two recent high profile announements from Shell and BP, calling for a price on carbon and an enlarged discussion of climate change globally.

I recently watched a long lecture by Angus Gillespie, VP of CO2 for Shell Oil, explaining the need for a price on carbon, and how Shell, and the other major oil companies, are pricing carbon internally in the complete assurance that carbon pricing will inevitably be imposed, and is desirable.
I will be posting that here soon.
For the short version, here’s a 2 minute clip from a recent appearance by Gillespie at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club.

Money Quote:
“You will struggle now to find climate deniers inside the Oil Industry. It’s just become unacceptable.”

One way to read this is that it is a much smoother, cleverer attempt to “manage” climate politics, and the burgeoning popular uprising against the fossil fuel industry.
Another way to look at it is, this is what an ongoing paradigm shift looks like.

Key slide from Gillespie’s long form lecture:

Below, Lou Allstadt, former Executive Vice President of Mobil Oil Corporation, now a member of the Citizen’s Climate Lobby, on the same podium.

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