Author: Joe

It seems like more and more businesses are offering free WiFi access as a draw for customers. Starbucks has been offering free WiFi for Starbucks card users since 2008, and McDonalds just freed the WiFi in their locations nationwide. Sometimes, though, you just don’t want to sit in a McDonalds or Starbucks — I know plenty of people who won’t go to either place on principle. There are alternatives, for sure, but it can be tough to find one unless you happen to walk by. If you ever thought someone should create a directory of free WiFi locations, well, you’re in luck. There are a few new applications in our store that seek out locations near you that will let you use their wireless Internet for free.

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Memo to NY Times:  TV weathermen are not climate experts.

In fact, Dr. Judith Curry, Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech explained to me a few years ago:

Meteorologists are not required to take a course in climate change, this is not part of the NOAA/NWS [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/National Weather Service] certification requirements, so university programs don’t require the course (even if they offer it). So we have been educating generations of meteorologists who know nothing at all about climate change.

The reason I am repeating this basic fact for the umpteenth time — see “Are meteorologists climate experts?” — is that the former paper of record has once again equated people who don’t know about climate science with people who do (see “NYT Faces Credibility Siege over Unbalanced Climate Coverage“).

In a new, uber-dreadful he-said, she-said piece, “Scientists and Weathercasters at Odds on Warming,” the NYT’s Leslie Kaufman gives a platform to some of the most uninformed, most widely debunked anti-science weathermen in the country, including Joe Bastardi and, yes, Anthony Watts!  Does anybody read Boykoff any more on (see  “Exaggerating Denialism: Media Representations of Outlier Views on Climate Change”)?

Wow!  I see that this is now a front page story for Tuesday and that the NYT changed the headline in the last hour to the much worse, “Among Weathercasters, Doubt on Warming.”  Great.  May I suggest instead, “Some non-scientists who don’t know much about how humans are changing the climate spout nonsense on the subject”?

Either way Andy Revkin’s blog hypes the whole damn piece:

“Meteorologists are far more likely than climatologists to question the science of climate change,” Leslie Kaufman reports in an article in The New York Times.

One reason, the article suggests, is that climate scientists study long-term weather patterns and meteorologists make short-term forecasts.

Ya think?

There are also suggestions that some meteorologists resent the primacy of climatologists with Ph.D.’s.

So there are “suggestions” that meteorologists (i.e. non-experts on climate) resent the primacy of climatologists with Ph.D.’s (i.e. experts on climate).  I can hardly wait for rumors that other people who don’t know what they’re talking about resent those people who do.

And here’s how the blog post ends:

Whom do you trust when it comes to climate science?

Seriously.

But Revkin is just a blogger these days with a modest, self-selected audience.  The NYT still reaches millions on unsuspecting people expecting to be informed on the key issues of the day.  And this is what passes for front-page journalism in the former paper of record:

Climatologists, who study weather patterns over time, almost universally endorse the view that the earth is warming and that humans have contributed to climate change. There is less of a consensus among meteorologists, who predict short-term weather patterns.

Huh.  People who don’t actually study the climate and aren’t actually scientists have less of a firm grasp of the overwhelming scientific evidence on human-caused climate change.  Stop the presses, clear page one, get me Clark Kent and Lois Lane on rewrite!

Note also that Kaufman uses the weakest possible attribution statement:

humans have contributed to climate change

I don’t think you could find one climate scientist in a thousand who disagrees with that statement.  I’m not sure you could find one scientist in a hundred who disagrees with that statement.   Our scientific understanding today is that humans are the primary cause of warming in recent decades.  One can simply assert that it is basic physics that “humans have contributed to climate change.”

Joe Bastardi, for example, a senior forecaster and meteorologist with AccuWeather, maintains that it is more likely that the planet is cooling, and he distrusts the data put forward by climate scientists as evidence for rising global temperatures.

“There is a great deal of consternation among a lot of us over the readjustment of data that is going on and some of the portrayals that we are seeing,” Mr. Bastardi said in a video segment posted recently on AccuWeather’s Web site.

Joe Bastardi knows absolutely nothing about climate science and has been consistently spinning illogical and self-contradictory tripe on the subject.  His beloved satellite data clearly shows we’re warming.  And, in any case, it’s far from clear how much he really knows about meteorology, based on recent statements:

• Joe Bastardi can’t read a temperature anomaly map and so spins another conspiracy theory: Says pre-1978 temperatures use “magic readjustment”
• Accuweather’s Joe Bastardi admits, “Earth continues warmest winter since satellite measurements started”: Then he invents a new, self-contradictory theory of warming.
• Meteorological Malpractice: Accuweather’s Joe Bastardi pushes the “70s Ice Age Scare” myth again
• O’Reilly’s weatherman, befuddled Bastardi: “Global cooling is actually a cause of drought in California”

In MSM-land, being consistently wrong or illogical never discredits you.

But if the media can present you as a contrarian, someone who is supposed to hold one view, but in fact holds a contrary view, then you are the dream “expert” (see “Contrarian Chic: Why can’t the media tell the difference between an attack on dubious ‘conventional’ wisdom and an attack on genuine scientific wisdom?“)

Such skepticism appears to be widespread among TV forecasters, about half of whom have a degree in meteorology. A study released on Monday by researchers at George Mason University and the University of Texas at Austin found that only about half of the 571 television weathercasters surveyed believed that global warming was occurring and fewer than a third believed that climate change was “caused mostly by human activities.”

More than a quarter of the weathercasters in the survey agreed with the statement “Global warming is a scam,” the researchers found.

The split between climate scientists and meteorologists is gaining attention in political and academic circles because polls show that public skepticism about global warming is increasing, and weather forecasters — especially those on television — dominate communications channels to the public. A study released this year by researchers at Yale and George Mason found that 56 percent of Americans trusted weathercasters to tell them about global warming far more than they trusted other news media or public figures like former Vice President Al Gore or Sarah Palin, the former vice-presidential candidate.

The George Mason-Texas survey found that about half of the weathercasters said they had discussed global warming on their broadcasts during chats with anchors, and nearly 90 percent said they had talked about climate change at live appearances at Kiwanis Club-type events.

Several well-known forecasters — including John Coleman in San Diego and Anthony Watts, a retired Chico, Calif., weatherman who now has a popular blog — have been vociferous in their critiques of global warming.

As an aside, the NYT article shares an awful lot in common with a January Columbia Journalism Review article, “Hot Air:  Why don’t TV weathermen believe in climate change?“  The CJR article notes:

In the fall of 2008, researchers from George Mason and Yale universities conducted the most fine-grained survey to date about what Americans know and think about climate change….

When asked whom they trusted for information about global warming, 66 percent of the respondents named television weather reporters. That was well above what the media as a whole got, and higher than the percentage who trusted Vice-President-turned-climate-activist Al Gore, either of the 2008 presidential nominees, religious leaders, or corporations….

There is one little problem with this: most weathercasters are not really scientists. When Wilson surveyed a broader pool of weathercasters in an earlier study, barely half of them had a college degree in meteorology or another atmospheric science.

Yes, in just 2 years, there has been a 10 point drop in the public’s trust in weather reporters on this subject, but only a two point drop in the public’s trust in Obama on this subject.

The CJR article is far more straightforward on dismissing the uninformed weatherman:

Coleman had spent half a century in the trenches of TV weathercasting; he had once been an accredited meteorologist, and remained a virtuoso forecaster. But his work was more a highly technical art than a science. His degree, received fifty years earlier at the University of Illinois, was in journalism. And then there was the fact that the research that Coleman was rejecting wasn’t “the science of meteorology” at all—it was the science of climatology, a field in which Coleman had spent no time whatsoever.

Duh.

But the NYT simply quotes Bastardi’s disinformation, links to the inane video I debunked, gives the views of Coleman and Watts (with a link to his anti-science blog), but never debunks their views or mention how utterly outlandish they are:

• Wattergate: Tamino debunks “just plain wrong” Anthony Watts
• Must-read NOAA paper smacks down Anthony Watts — Q: “Is there any question that surface temperatures in the United States have been rising rapidly during the last 50 years?” A: “None at all.”
• Watts not to love: New study finds the poor weather stations tend to have a slight COOL bias, not a warm one“
• Dust Bowl-ification hits Eastern Australia — next stop the U.S. Southwest. Anti-scientific WattsUpWithThat says it has “nothing to do with the dreaded Climate Change” and “has an unappreciated benefit”!
• Diagnosing a victim of anti-science syndrome (ASS)

And yes, careful readers will notice that my headline is flawed.  You can’t keep calling it a “journalistic lapse” if the newspaper keeps doing it again and again.  At some point the individual pieces of data reporting simply become evidence of an overall anti-scientific approach to the subject:

• Science Times stunner: “… a majority of the section’s editorial staff doubts that human-induced global warming represents a serious threat to humanity.”
• And the 2009 “Citizen Kane” award for non-excellence in climate journalism goes to ….

Memo to rest of media:   Asking a meteorologist to opine on the climate is like asking your family doctor what the chances are for an avian flu pandemic in the next few years or asking a mid-West sheriff the prospects for nuclear terrorism. The answer might be interesting, but not one you should stake your family’s life on, let alone the lives of billions of people.

This story is so depressing that I’m going to end by reposting something I ran several weeks ago:

UPDATE:  This piece has been updated.  More to come!

The Hill’s blog has a post, “Why kill cap-and-trade? Because it’s there.”

The NYT’s John Broder had a piece, ” ‘Cap and Trade’ Loses Its Standing as Energy Policy of Choice.”

CBS reports of the forthcoming Graham, Kerry and Lieberman bill, “notably missing from it will likely be the cap-and-trade system that had not long ago been expected to be the centerpiece of any legislation.”

Peter Barnes comments on my blog, “If cap-and-trade is politically dead, why not try some version of cap-and-dividend?”

Two points.  First, the bipartisan bill will have a cap. And it appears almost certain it will have a trading system.  But such is the world we live in that this isn’t cap-and-trade.

I’ve said many times it is crazy from a communications perspective to build your core message around a process — “cap-and-trade” [or health care reform] — rather than an outcome, like clean air or clean energy jobs.  If it needs a name, let’s call it “puppy.”  We can call cap-and-dividend “baby seal,” since it has a cap and a trading system, too.

Second, conventional wisdom says we probably won’t get a climate bill this year, whatever it is called.  But that’s not because of “cap-and-trade.”  As Harvard economist Robert Stavins explains in “Who Killed Cap-and-Trade?“:

A Rapid Descent From Politically Correct to Politically Anathema

Among factors causing this change were:  the economic recession; the financial crisis (linked, in part, with real and perceived abuses in financial markets) which thereby caused great suspicion about markets in general and in particular about trading in intangible assets such as emission allowances; and the complex nature of the Waxman-Markey legislation (which is mainly not about cap-and-trade, but various regulatory approaches).

But the most important factor — by far — which led to the change from politically correct to politically anathema was the simple fact that cap-and-trade was the approach that was receiving the most serious consideration, indeed the approach that had been passed by one of the houses of Congress.  This brought not only great scrutiny of the approach, but — more important — it meant that all of the hostility to action on climate change, mainly but not exclusively from Republicans and coal-state Democrats, was targeted at the policy du jour — cap-and-trade.

The same fate would have befallen any front-running climate policy.

Does anyone really believe that if a carbon tax had been the major policy being considered in the House and Senate that it would have received a more favorable rating from climate-action skeptics on the right?  If there’s any doubt about that, take note that Republicans in the Congress were unified and successful in demonizing cap-and-trade as “cap-and-tax.”

Likewise, if a multi-faceted regulatory approach (that would have been vastly more costly for what would be achieved) had been the policy under consideration, would it have garnered greater political support?  Of course not.  If there is doubt about that, just observe the solid Republican Congressional hostility (and some announced Democratic opposition) to the CO₂ regulatory pathway that EPA has announced under its endangerment finding in response to the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Massachusetts vs. EPA….

In general, any climate policy approach — if it was meaningful in its objectives and had any chance of being enacted — would have become the prime target of political skepticism and scorn.  This has been the fate of cap-and-trade over the past nine months.

Precisely.

The notion that cap-and-dividend … I mean, baby seal … is somehow intrinsically more palatable to the opposition than, say, puppies is nonsense.  The point is they are both cute animals, and conservatives don’t like cute animals because they stand in the way of unrestricted pollution and our continued addiction to fossil fuels.  Why do you think they want to off the polar bears?  (see “Palin’s axis of evil animals: Beluga whales join polar bears and wolf cubs“).

I mean, look at the Tea Partiers, the source of the sign above.  Obama is being attack as an anarchist and/or socialist for supporting a market-based approach to reducing pollution first advanced and signed into law by President George W. Bush’s father!

What’s most pathetic — and, I think, missing from some of the analysis on the death of “cap-and-trade” — is that most everybody in the media and political establishment is quite convinced the issue is a political loser when the recent polls say otherwise:

• Memo to policymakers: Public STILL favors the transition to clean energy
• Swing state poll finds 60% “would be more likely to vote for their senator if he or she supported the bill” and Independents support the bill 2-to-1 (9/09)
• New CNN poll finds “nearly six in 10 independents” support cap-and-trade (10/09)
• Voters in Ohio, Michigan and Missouri overwhelmingly support action on clean energy and global warming (11/09)
• Overwhelming US Public Support for Global Warming Action (12/09)
• Public Opinion Stunner: WashPost-ABC Poll Finds Strong Support for Global Warming Reductions Despite Relentless Big Oil and Anti-Science Attacks (12/09)
• It’s all about Independents — and Independence (1/10)
• Yale:  When asked whether they “support or oppose regulation carbon dioxide…as pollutant,” 73 percent said yes, with only 27 percent opposed, including 61 percent of Republicans (2/10)

That’s true even if you ask them directly about the dreaded “cap-and-trade” (from January):

The public still supports strong action to regulate greenhouse gas pollutions and promote clean energy jobs.  They love puppies and kittens:

I’m not saying the messaging failure is the sole reason the conventional wisdom has declared a climate bill all but dead.  But when the high level messaging by leading politicians is so bad, it simply becomes impossible to disentangle the contribution of bad messaging from other factors, like the bad economy or, say, different policy choices.

Related Posts:

• Lindsey Graham: “Every day that we delay trying to find a price for carbon is a day that China uses to dominate the green economy”
• Graham: “The idea of not pricing carbon, in my view, means you’re not serious about energy independence. The odd thing is you’ll never have energy independence until you clean up the air, and you’ll never clean up the air until you price carbon.“

See also Kate Sheppard’s MJ post, “Cap and Trade is Dead. Long Live Cap and Trade!”

Yeah, please vote here.

Pointedly ignoring my plea for an end to online polls, CBS has come up with perhaps the dumbest idea yet.

Let’s use the least scientific, most easily manipulated choosing scheme invented since eeny-meeny-miny-moe to pick what major piece of legislation president Obama should pursue next.

Seriously.  I can almost hear Walter Cronkite reading the results on the evening news….

In a piece titled, “With Health Care Done, What’s Next For Obama?” CBS runs through the conventional wisdom on Obama’s agenda and then asks readers to vote on “What should be the Obama administration’s top priority for the rest of 2010?”  And then urges readers to share the poll using Face Book and Twitter.

The only news value I can see in this poll is that the onetime home of Edward R. Murrow is now trolling for page-views online.  Perhaps this isn’t such a surprise from the network that libeled Michael Mann based on a YouTube video — while reporting his exoneration! What’s next, CBS touting their web hits?

Until sanity returns to the major media outlets, all one can do is play along with their charade and vote here.

The embattled head of the United Nations’ scientific panel on climate change has been cleared of allegations of financial irregularity by an independently conducted review.

So the Financial Times reported Sunday in its piece, “Climate chief cleared over payments” (reg. req’d).  Here’s more:

KPMG, the professional services company, examined the personal finances of Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, after media suggested late last year that he received money for advising several private sector companies, including Toyota and Credit Suisse. The review found these were all paid to Mr Pachauri’s non-profit organisation TERI (The Energy and Resources Institute), which commissioned KPMG.

Mr Pachauri said he hoped another audit he had commissioned, to examine the practices of the IPCC and the science contained in its report, would put to rest allegations of flaws in climate science. That review will not be published until the autumn.

I somehow doubt this will get the same front-page coverage as the sensational articles attacking the IPCC head from last month (see “N.Y. Times and Elisabeth Rosenthal Face Credibility Siege over Unbalanced Climate Coverage“):

Related Posts:

• Pachauri: Don’t hound the climate scientists

Sure the American Enterprise Institute is still crazy with climate denial and delay after all these years.  And sure it recently compared EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson to Clint Eastwood and carbon polluters to criminals.  But it always retained the semblance of a serious think tank.

Heck, back in October, Steven F. Hayward, “the F.K. Weyerhaeuser fellow at the American Enterprise Institute” wrote:

The brain waves of the American right continue to be erratic, when they are not flat-lining.

He’s still got a job at AEI.  I guess that sort of truth is okay to utter.

But while AEI scholars can question the lack of ideas in the entire conservative “movement,” apparently they can’t question GOP tactics, as TP’s Faiz Shakir explains in Bartlett: Frum’s Dismissal Shows ‘All That Matters Now Is Absolute Subservient Adherence’ To The GOP:

Former Bush speechwriter David Frum — who famously authored the phrase “axis of evil” — has been unceremoniously forced out from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a right wing, neoconservative think tank. Frum’s dismissal resulted from criticism he directed at the Republican Party for staking a failed strategic posture of “no compromise” on health care. As a result, “it’s Waterloo all right: ours,” Frum wrote to his fellow conservatives.

Right-wing donors of AEI began raising concerns about Frum. So, AEI president Arthur Brooks took Frum out to lunch this week to tell him that, while he valued “a diversity of opinion,” he wanted to downgrade Frum to a nonsalaried position. Frum declined the offer and posted a letter of resignation on his personal website.

Bruce Bartlett, a former economic adviser to President Bush, suffered a similar fate as Frum. After leaving the Bush White House, Bartlett authored a book titled Imposter: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy. That book led to his dismissal in 2005 as a senior fellow at a conservative Texas-based think tank called the National Center for Policy Analysis

On his personal blog, Bartlett referred to Frum’s departure from AEI as “the closing of the conservative mind.” He elaborated further this morning on C-Span’s Washington Journal:

BARTLETT: [W]hat’s really going on here is that adherence to conservative principles has been – is out the window now. All that matters now is absolute subservient adherence to the Republican Party line of the day. And that’s what got David into trouble. He was critical, not even of Republican principles, but of Republican tactics on the health care debate. And now, even that is considered, you know, you can’t say that or you lose your job.

Watch it:

On his blog, Bartlett rips AEI: “The organization has lost an enormous amount of credibility by firing him and hiring Republican political hacks like Marc Thiessen. That’s a statement I will never need to retract.”

The Wall Street Journal criticized Frum earlier this week: “Mr. Frum now makes his living as the media’s go-to basher of fellow Republicans, which is a stock Beltway role. But he’s peddling bad revisionist history that would have been even worse politics.”

I think it has been obvious for a while that the conservative movement should be renamed the conservative stagnation:

• Gingrich sums up conservative ethos: “I am not a citizen of the world! I think the entire concept is intellectual nonsense and stunningly dangerous”
• Joe Klein on the GOP: “How can you sustain a democracy if one of the two major political parties has been overrun by nihilists?”
• Teabaggers try to “flush” Graham out of GOP, calling him “traitor” and “RINO” and “wussypants, girly-man, half-a-sissy”; Graham responds, “We’re not going to be the party of angry white guys”
• Honey, I shrunk the GOP, Part 4: Moderate GOP candidate yields to angry conservative.
• “Honey, I shrunk the GOP, Part 1: Conservatives vow to purge all members who support clean energy or science-based policy.”
• Part 2: Opposing clean energy hurts GOP — Mellman.

There are over a half dozen BlackBerry models spanning multiple carriers, but from what I’ve seen the Tour on Verizon remains one of the more popular choices. Released last July, it’s due for an update in the next month or so. In the meantime Tour users are still waiting for OS 5.0. It seems that every other eligible device has the upgrade. Even Sprint has released a version of 5.0 for its Tour. Verizon, though, has lagged behind. Will it be worth the wait? We’ll find out soon, as Verizon will release an update on Monday night. That’ll be 11:59 p.m., so once you plug your device into Desktop Manager after that you should be prompted to upgrade.

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In a minor but somewhat surprising move, RIM has acquired Viigo, the company that creates the No. 1 BlackBerry RSS feed reader. The details are short right now, so there’s not much to add. I’m not sure how this changes things, if it does at all. Except that now perhaps Viigo will come factory installed.

This post originated at BBGeeks.com – home to all things Blackberry! Also a great source of info about AT&T BlackBerry.

RIM buys Viigo

This post originated at BBGeeks.com – home to all things Blackberry! Also a great source of info about AT&T BlackBerry.

RIM buys Viigo

If you want a hint, the very next sentence by this man known for his bluntness is, “Such an atmosphere is un-American.”

It was President Truman in his Address to the Centennial Anniversary of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Today, unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions are among our gravest national security threats (see “NYT: Climate Change Seen as Threat to U.S. Security” and “Veterans Day, 2029“).  Yet scientists who are working to inform us of the threats to our national security are still under assault (see “Sen. Inhofe inquisition seeking ways to criminalize and prosecute 17 leading climate scientists“).

Here is a longer excerpt from Truman’s still-all-too-relevant remarks:

Continuous research by our best scientists is the key to American scientific leadership and true national security. This indispensable work may be made impossible by the creation of an atmosphere in which no man feels safe against the public airing of unfounded rumors, gossip, and vilification. Such an atmosphere is un-American….

Now and in the years ahead, we need, more than anything else, the honest and uncompromising common sense of science. Science means a method of thought. That method is characterized by open-mindedness, honesty, perseverance, and, above all, by an unflinching passion for knowledge and truth. When more of the peoples of the world have learned the ways of thought of the scientist, we shall have better reason to expect lasting peace and a fuller life for all.

I saw an abbreviated version of the quote in the Guardian piece that accompanied the article by IPCC head Pachauri, “Rajendra Pachauri: Climate scientists face ‘new form of persecution’; IPCC chair accuses politicians and sceptics of portraying scientists as ‘criminals’ through attacks on their credibility.”  Pachauri wrote;

Even more unfortunate is the effort of some in positions of power and responsibility to indict dedicated scientists as ‘climate criminals’. I sincerely hope the world is not witnessing a new form of persecution of those who defy conventional ignorance and pay a terrible price for their scientifically valid beliefs.

The Guardian notes:

This appears to be a reference to James Inhofe, a US senator and long-standing climate sceptic, who last month called for a criminal investigation of climate scientists….

The report named 17 US and British climate experts as “key players” in the affair and highlighted their roles in preparing IPCC reports. The list included Phil Jones and Keith Briffa of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, and Peter Stott, a leading expert at the Met Office.

Michael Mann, a US scientist at Penn State University, who is on the list, said: “I think the following quote characterises the situation best: ‘Continuous research by our best scientists … may be made impossible by the creation of an atmosphere in which no man feels safe against the public airing of unfounded rumours, gossip, and vilification.’ The quote wasn’t made during the last few months. It was made by US president Harry S Truman in 1948, in response to politically motivated attacks against scientists associated with the dark era of McCarthyism.”

Mann added: “I fear that is precisely the sort of atmosphere that is being created, and sure, it impacts research. The more time scientists have to spend fending off these sorts of attacks and dealing with this sort of nonsense, the less time is available to them to actually do science, and to push the forefront of our knowledge forward. Perhaps that is the intent?”

Precisely.

Obviously, when you have people like Marc “The Swift Boat smearer” Morano saying, climate scientists “deserve to be publicly flogged” (see “The rise of anti-science cyber bullying“) and Glenn Beck, saying “There aren’t enough knives” for ‘dishonored’ climate scientists to kill themselves, the goal is foster intimidation and harassment and make it harder for climate scientists to do their research that is so vital to the nation’s security.

The more less things change….

Related Posts:

• Inhofe trashes generals who advocate for bipartisan clean energy legislation: They crave “the limelight.”
• Nature editorial: “Scientists must now emphasize the science, while acknowledging that they are in a street fight.”

Oh, no? Try telling that to the people rewriting history, like the Texas Board of Education and Glenn Beck — explains Tom Tomorrow in another hilarious cartoon for Salon:

Related Posts:

• Why should we believe the earth is round, just because scientists say so?
• The Dark Ages return: Texas Board of Education rewrites the Enlightenment

[JR:  Thanks to so many Climate Progress “lurkers” for providing comments below!]

One thing is very safe to say about any quantitative analysis you see from Anthony Watts:  It is probably BS.  See, for instance, Wattergate: Tamino debunks “just plain wrong” Anthony Watts.

In his latest piece of misinformation, Watts braggs about his WattsUpWithThat webstats and disses his web competition (including Climate Progress) using dubious comparison metrics.  One of the two most revealing things about the post,  “WUWT Status report – 40 million,” is that Watts is bragging about “another milestone” — 40 million total hits.  Yes, hits.

Memo to Watts:  “Hits” are what people use when they want to hype or inflate their webstats.

I don’t know anybody who touts hits anymore, other than Watts.  They don’t really mean much.

A typical explanation of just what Hits are, “Hits, Page Views, Visitors and Visits Demystified,” concludes “It is evident it does not make a lot of sense to count Hits.”  So, of course, it is the perfect metric for the top anti-science website in the country.  It’s interesting that not one of his commenters have bothered to tell him this!

As long as Watts keeps a Hits counter on his sidebar, it’ll be a constant reminder that he embraces his senseless statistics.

Equally interesting, Watts, seems to have a very low hit count for a high-traffic website.

I’ve been told by some web folks that most web stats programs are not quantitatively precise enough to rely on, except perhaps to show change over time, which is why I have stopped reporting absolute webstats here.  But since Hits are so senseless, and Watts seems to love them, I will report that, according to both CAP’s webstats tracking program and Google Analytics, I’ve had 20 million hits just this year so far!  I had well over 40 million hits in 2009 alone.

Watts has a broader agenda in his hyping post.   He wants to show that he gets a lot more traffic than me and RealClimate and other climate websites, so he can claim –  “thank you all for making WUWT the most visited climate science blog in the world.”

Let’s set aside his laughable claim that he is a “climate science blog.”  He is the exact opposite of a climate science blog — see Diagnosing a victim of anti-science syndrome (ASS) or, frankly, any of the real climate science blogs who routinely debunk him, like, say, Tamino.

What is truly revealing about his entire “analysis” is that he has cited Alexa for webstats comparison.  How unreliable is Alexa?  Plug the exact phrase “Alexa is unreliable” [in quotes] into Google.  You get 5,000 hits!   Frankly, most webstats comparison sites  are considered unreliable, but Alexa probably most of all, so it is perfect for Watts.  Our IT folks recommend CAP bloggers not even cite Alexa for our internal reports.

Technorati, which is viewed with more credibility, ranks blogs on “Authority,” which “measures a site’s standing & influence in the blogosphere” on “a scale of 0-1000. 1000 is the highest possible authority.”  I am currently #1 among Green blogs (again), with a 998.  Watts is third with 917.  But even Technorati’s system is problemmatic, as they include websites that aren’t environmental in nature — the Foundry, which is Heritage’s general blog, and WattsUp, for that matter — and their science websites authority ranking has different Authority numbers for the same websites.  The comparison formula appears to be something like the secret recipe for Coke.

Anyway, Watts plots Alexa’s “Daily Reach” ranking, which is supposedly the percent of global Internet users who visit your website.  But who cares if somebody visits and immediately leaves?  [If I’m reading Watts’ sitemeter right, his “Average Visit Length” is 19 seconds.]

I write to be read, and so for me — and most bloggers I know — page views are what matters.  About.com notes, “Page views are the standard measurement of blog popularity and traffic in the blogosphere because that’s the statistic online advertisers look at.”  Ad revenues are typically based on pageviews.  The huge website Gawker pays incentives to its writers on the basis of page views.

Since Watts loves Alexa, I plotted the comparison above, which suggests our pageviews tracked online aren’t as disparate as Alexa suggests our traffic is.  Why?  Well, if you believe Alexa (and I don’t) here’s why:

My readers read more pages.  Indeed, Watts’ sitemeter actually says he gets 1.4 pageviews per visit.

But this isn’t the whole story.  Indeed, the main reason I’m doing this post is because it’s tiresome to listen to Watts make these apples and oranges comparisons between our two websites.

We have chosen two different readership strategies and that renders any webstats comparison meaningless.

Watts has chosen what I would call a traffic-driven strategy.  He has high direct traffic, probably higher than mine.  He has been very successful at his strategy.  He also lets his commenters repeat and expand upon the disinformation he posts, which runs up the number of comments he gets, and his visits and page views — though  lots of those page views are no doubt views of people reading the anti-scientific comments.  Indeed, his comments are stuff like  “I reckon that if you summed the total hits of Real Climate, Joe Romm, Tamino etc., etc…, all together you still wouldn’t get close to the kind of numbers you are achieving here. And that says a heck of a lot to me.” and “I will bet that WUWT has more unique hits a week then Time magazine.”  Not!  And not even close!

I have chosen a subscriber-driven strategy.  I devote a lot of prime real estate at the top of CP to getting subscriptions.  I want people to read the content and I don’t care if they come here to do so (or go to other websites where I repost some content, such as Grist).  I have 28,000 subscribers, which is a large number for a website that focuses on a fairly narrow set of issues.  My subscribers have been rising steadily week in and week out.  It was closer to 2,800 at the start of 2009.

I don’t know how many of my subscribers actually read my posts each day, or how many posts they read.  The email subscribers and many if not most of the RSS feed subscribers can read any of the posts they want without ever coming here and registering in my webstats.  I will note that if, say, only 1/3 of my subscribers read half of my posts a day without coming to CP, that would mean my actual pageviews were roughly double what the webstats programs show.  There is, however, no good way of finding out.

Watts doesn’t seem to try for subscribers, which is understandable, because he wants traffic to drive ad revenues.  I work for a nonprofit and any revenues from the one ad I run are really just icing on the cake.

Watts claims:

Traffic has slowed from about half of what it was during the heady days of Climategate and Copenhagen in December, but I note that this is not unique to WUWT, as other climate blogs have also experienced similar drops since then.

Not.  My traffic is much higher now than in December.  I have had a 20% to 25% increase in both subscribers to my feed and direct traffic (including) pageviews, comparing this month to December.

So he can claim he is “the most visited climate science blog in the world” but it’s just a claim,  no different than any of his other dubious ones (see “Watts not to love: New study finds the poor weather stations tend to have a slight COOL bias, not a warm one“ and FoxNews, WattsUpWithThat push falsehood-filled Daily Mail article on global cooling that utterly misquotes, misrepresents work of Mojib Latif and NSIDC).

Watts certainly can’t truthfully claim that his original content is the most widely read content in the climate blogosphere, which is what really matters.  I won’t make that claim for Climate Progress, though I suspect it’s true, simply because there is no reliable way of knowing for sure.

And, of course, I have the best commenters.  But then you knew that, already, didn’t you!  This blog is only as successful as it is because of you, and the many other people who come to Climate Progress or subscribe to the content.  Thanks!

To dismiss the implications of climate change based on an error about the rate at which Himalayan glaciers are melting is an act of astonishing intellectual legerdemain. Yet this is what some doubters of climate change are claiming. But the reality is that our understanding of climate change is based on a vast and remarkably sound body of science – and is something we distort and trivialise at our peril.

So writes IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri in a blunt article published by the Guardian Friday.

Given how much the IPCC and climate scientists have been attacked, much of it based on falsehoods and half-truths from the anti-science disinformers, I think it only fair to reprint his entire comments:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has published four comprehensive assessments of climate change and several important special reports since its founding in 1988. The last such document, the fourth assessment report (AR4) from 2007, mobilised 450 scientists from all over the world to write the report. An additional 800 contributing authors gave specialised inputs and about 2,500 expert reviewers provided 90,000 comments.

In this mammoth task, which yielded a finished product of nearly 3,000 pages, there was a regrettable error indicating the Himalayan glaciers were likely to melt by the year 2035. This mistake has been acknowledged by the IPCC. Learning from this error, the IPCC has requested, in tandem with the United Nations’ secretary general, an independent review of its procedures and practices by the Inter-Academy Council (IAC). This review was requested in part so that the possibility of similar errors can be eliminated as much as is humanly possible.

It is important, however, to understand that irrespective of the error on Himalayan glaciers and a few other questions about some specific wording in AR4, the major thrust of the report’s findings provides overwhelming evidence that warming of the climate system is unequivocal. To quote the report: “Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG (greenhouse gas) concentrations.”

As inhabitants of planet Earth, our lives depend on a stable climate, and it is our responsibility to ensure that future generations do not suffer the consequences of climate change. We cannot ignore the fact that the impacts of climate change, which are based on actual observations, are leading to “increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global sea levels”, according to AR4.

An increasing number of researchers, and some official investigations by intelligence agencies, now point to the security implications of climate change. If we do not carry out adequate mitigation and adopt related sustainable development practices, global emissions of greenhouse gases will continue to increase, and their continuation at or above current rates will cause further warming and changes in the global climate system during the 21st century that will very likely be larger than those observed during the 20th century.

Altered frequencies and intensities of extreme weather, together with sea level rise, are expected to have mostly adverse effects on natural and human systems. Even more serious is the finding that human-induced warming could lead to some impacts that are abrupt or irreversible. For instance, partial loss of ice sheets on polar land could imply metres of sea level rise, major changes in coastlines and inundation of low-lying areas, with the greatest effects in river deltas and low-lying islands.

Human society has some critical choices. It is to be expected that some of these would pose challenges for some stakeholders and sectors of the economy. But to ignore the IPCC’s scientific findings would lead to impacts that impose larger costs than those required today to stabilise the Earth’s climate.

Thousands of scientists from across the world have worked diligently and in an objective and transparent manner to provide scientific evidence for action to meet the growing challenge of climate change. To obscure this reality through misplaced emphasis on an error in a nearly 3,000-page, rigorous document would be unfortunate.

Even more unfortunate is the effort of some in positions of power and responsibility to indict dedicated scientists as “climate criminals”. I sincerely hope the world is not witnessing a new form of persecution of those who defy conventional ignorance and pay a terrible price for their scientifically valid beliefs.

The IPCC will continue to learn from experience, including criticism of its work. Thankfully, with inputs from thousands of respected scientists, world governments and now the IAC, the panel is in a better position than ever to provide a robust and reliable scientific basis for tackling the growing challenge of climate change.

Related Posts:

• Sen. Inhofe inquisition seeking ways to criminalize and prosecute 17 leading climate scientists
• The IPCC lowballs likely impacts with its instantly out-of-date reports and is clearly clueless on messaging — should it be booted or just rebooted?

First, of course, please vote in yet another Economist online poll with biased wording, “This house believes that innovation works best when government does least.”

Two weeks ago it was another poorly worded Economist poll, “This house believes that creating green jobs is a sensible aspiration for governments” (see “You can support Van Jones and clean energy jobs“).

Then, of course, the US News pitted me vs. Big Oil on climate science with the triply biased, “Did Climategate Expose Global Warming Fears as Unfounded?” I guess you can keep voting on that one forever (click here)!

Of course, you can vote for Climate Progress  every day through April 2 at Treehugger (click here — you know you want to).

Oh, and let’s not forget that online voting made WattsUpWithThat the 2008 Weblog awards winner for “best science blog” (!) — see “Weblog Awards duped by anti-science disinformers — again!”

And, of course, Watts freeped the London Science Museum poll and claims he helped persuade them to consider dumbing down their Big-Oil-funded climate exhibit.  A commenter noted the voting on the question was bifurcated between those who attended the exhibit gallery and those who voted on the web.  The “question” was “I’ve seen the evidence. And I want the government to prove they’re serious about climate change by negotiating a strong effective fair deal at Copenhagen.”  And yes, that question also seems worded to get a certain outcome.  Here’s the voting on “Count me in” vs. “Count me Out”:

Gallery Counted in = 3408 Counted out = 626
Web Counted in = 2650 Counted out = 7612
Total Counted in = 6058 Counted out = 8238

I understand why the websites do it — they want to drive up traffic, which translates into ad revenues and maybe ongoing readers.

The problem of course is that these polls are meaningless and unscientific, wholly gamable by whichever group decides to put the biggest effort into online voting.  Yet, since the results are visible for millions to see, and have the imprimatur of credible organizations like The Economist and USNews and the London science Museum, the parties involved have little choice but to participate in the charade.

I am, however, relatively confident that frogs — even slowly boiling brainless frogs — do not subject themselves to online polls.  Maybe they aren’t so dumb after all.

There was an outside chance, very outside, that RIM would announce one of its three upcoming devices at CTIA. That has come and gone, though, and we did not see such an announcement. There’s still WES, though, about a month away, and hopefully we’ll hear something at that point. Over the next month, these devices will get plenty of airplay.

So click on over here to hear the BBGeekcast (9 min, 21 sec)

And don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast so you won’t miss future episodes!

You can also subscribe to the BBGeekcast in iTunes.

Highlights include:
(more…)

Most carriers offer three-way, or conference, calling on their phone plans. But do you ever use it? Until yesterday I had never used the three-way calling feature on my BlackBerry. I’ve called into conferences — we all have I’m sure — and I’ve had people call me as a third party in a conversation, but I never had to do it myself. Thankfully, it’s fairly easy on the BlackBerry. It takes just a few clicks while you’re on the phone, and you can easily reach anyone as a third party to your conversation.

(more…)

One of the single greatest concerns of climate scientists is that human-caused warming will cause amplifying feedbacks in the carbon-cycle.  Such positive feedbacks, whereby an initial warming releases carbon into the air that causes more warming, would increase both the speed and scale of climate change, greatly complicating both mitigation and adaptation.

The most worrisome amplifying feedback is the defrosting of the tundra (see “Science stunner: Vast East Siberian Arctic Shelf methane stores destabilizing and venting).  Another major, related feedback now appears to be soil respiration, whereby plants and microbes in the soil give off more carbon dioxide as the planet warms.

As Nature reports (article here, study here, subs. req’d), a review of 439 studies around the world — including 306 performed from 1989 to 2008 — found “soil respiration had increased by about 0.1% per year between 1989 and 2008, the span when soil measurement techniques had become standardized.”  Physorg.com interviewed the lead author, who said bluntly:

“There’s a big pulse of carbon dioxide coming off of the surface of the soil everywhere in the world,” said ecologist Ben Bond-Lamberty of the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “We weren’t sure if we’d be able to measure it going into this analysis, but we did find a response to temperature.”

The increase in carbon dioxide given off by soils — about 0.1 petagram (100 million metric tons) per year since 1989 — won’t contribute to the greenhouse effect unless it comes from carbon that had been locked away out of the system for a long time, such as in Arctic tundra. This analysis could not distinguish whether the carbon was coming from old stores or from vegetation growing faster due to a warmer climate. But other lines of evidence suggest warming is unlocking old carbon, said Bond-Lamberty, so it will be important to determine the sources of extra carbon.

Indeed the study itself concludes:

The available data are, however, consistent with an acceleration of the terrestrial carbon cycle in response to global climate change.

Moreover, a major study in the February issue of the journal Ecology by Finnish researchers, “Temperature sensitivity of soil carbon fractions in boreal forest soil,” has a similar conclusion.  The Finnish Environment Institute, which led the study, explained the results in a release, “Soil contributes to climate warming more than expected – Finnish research shows a flaw in climate models“:

According to the results, the climatic warming will inevitably lead to smaller carbon storage in soil and to higher carbon dioxide emissions from forests. These emissions will further warm up the climate, and as a consequence the emissions will again increase.  This interaction between the carbon dioxide emissions from soil and the warming of climate will accelerate the climate change.

The present climate models underestimate the increase of carbon dioxide emissions from soil in a warmer climate. Thereby they also underestimate the accelerating impact of the largest carbon storage in forests on the climate change. This result is also essential with respect to the climate policy measures concerning forests. The carbon storage of forests is, more than previously assumed, sensitive to climatic warming, and the carbon sink capacity of forests is endangered. To maintain the carbon storage, the accumulation of organic material in forests should increase. However, this is not compatible with the present bioenergy goals for forests and with the more and more intensive harvesting of biomass in forests.

Returning to the Nature study, the review was quite comprehensive:

They compiled data about how much carbon dioxide has leaked from plants and microbes in soil in an openly available database. To maintain consistency, they selected only data that scientists collected via the now-standard methods of gas chromatography and infrared gas analysis. The duo compared 1,434 soil carbon data points from the studies with temperature and precipitation data in the geographic regions from other climate research databases.

After subjecting their comparisons to statistical analysis, the researchers found that the total amount of carbon dioxide being emitted from soil in 2008 was more than in 1989. In addition, the rise in global temperatures correlated with the rise in global carbon flux.

And the study also confirmed worries about the unlocking of carbon in the permafrost:

Previous climate change research shows that Arctic zones have a lot more carbon locked away than other regions. Using the complete set of data collected from the studies, the team estimated that the carbon released in northern — also called boreal — and Arctic regions rose by about 7 percent; in temperate regions by about 2 percent; and in tropical regions by about 3 percent, showing a trend consistent with other work.

The researchers made clear that more research needs to be done to make definitive conclusions about exactly what is happening to soils around the world.  Yet as the Nature story notes:

“There are a few plausible explanations for this trend, but the most tempting, and perhaps most likely explanation is that increasing temperatures have increased rates of decomposition of soil organic matter, which has increased the flow of CO₂,” says Eric Davidson, a biogeochemist at the Woods Hole Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts. “If true, this is an important finding: that a positive feedback to climate change is already occurring at a detectable level in soils.”

As I noted in the methane post, the National Science Foundation press release (click here), warned “Release of even a fraction of the methane stored in the shelf could trigger abrupt climate warming.”  The NSF is normally a very staid organization.  If they are worried, everybody should be.

We are simply playing with nitroglycerin to risk crossing tipping points that could accelerate multiple amplifying feedbacks:

• The drying of the Northern peatlands (bogs, moors, and mires).
• The destruction of the tropical wetlands
• Decelerating growth in tropical forest trees — thanks to accelerating carbon dioxide
• Wildfires and Climate-Driven forest destruction by pests
• The desertification-global warming feedback
• The saturation of the ocean carbon sink

UPDATE:  I would note that we’ve only warmed about 1°F over the past half-century (and indeed, far less than that over the time span of the 306 recent studies the form the basis of the primary conclusion).  We are headed to 9°F warming on our current emissions path.  The few studies that look at such emissions paths and attempt to model carbon cycle feedbacks including soil find they can add as much as 250 ppm and 2.7°F warming this century (see “Acceleration of global warming due to carbon-cycle feedbacks in a coupled climate model,” subs. req’d).  Indeed, one very recent analysis of a high emissions, high feedback scenario finds impacts that are almost unimaginable by mid-century (see UK Met Office: Catastrophic climate change, 13-18°F over most of U.S. and 27°F in the Arctic, could happen in 50 years, but “we do have time to stop it if we cut greenhouse gas emissions soon”).

It is increasingly clear that if the world strays significantly above 450 ppm atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide for any length of time, we will find it unimaginably difficult to stop short of 800 to 1000 ppm, which would inflict on countless future generations Hell and High Water .

Related Posts:

• Science stunner: “Clouds Appear to Be Big, Bad Player in Global Warming” — an amplifying feedback (sorry Lindzen and fellow disinformers)
• Study: Water-vapor feedback is “strong and positive,” so we face “warming of several degrees Celsius”

The media stories have been sensational:

1. Public scepticism prompts Science Museum to rename climate exhibition:  The Science Museum is revising the contents of its new climate science gallery to reflect the wave of scepticism that has engulfed the issue in recent months.”

1. London Science Museum goes climate science neutral:  “A new climate gallery at London’s Science Museum, sponsored byRoyal Dutch Shell will step back from pushing evidence of man-made climate change to adopt a more neutral position.”

The anti-science crowd has been trumpeting the news, and Anthony Watts even claims credit for duping the Museum into thinking most of the viewers voting on its website were skeptics.

Sadly, the story turns out to be mostly true — and the fact that the exhibit is being funded by one of the biggest oil companies — Royal Dutch Shell — puts the credibility of the entire museum and its science staff on the line.

This cautionary tale story deserves to be told in full because scientists aren’t great at communicating to the public, and the media is doing an increasingly bad job, so science museums are — or were — one of the last vestiges where unadulterated science could be delivered to an interested public.

Let’s start with the “good news.”  In a statement emailed to Climate Progress in response to a series of questions, the London Science Museum director, Dr. Chris Rapley, pushes back (somewhat) against recent media stories:

Dear Joe,

Please see original press release (attached) and statement below which I hope will clarify.

Best regards,

Chris

After laying out our intentions for the new climate science gallery, the term ‘neutral’ has been adopted in some articles in the press, which is not an accurate description of our approach. The role of the Science Museum is to provide an enjoyable, informative experience which is representative of the state of the science. Our aim is to increase interest and deepen understanding. This will include the fact that majority of the climate science community has concluded that current climate change is real and mainly human-induced.  There are always areas of uncertainty in any scientific topic, and climate science is no exception. We respect people’s right to disagree, and we will address the issues raised, but we always return to the fact that the weight of evidence supports the anthropogenic conclusion.  The climate debate has become very polarised in recent months, and this has made even more important the need for a public space where people who agree, who are unsure, and who disagree that humans are affecting the climate system are able to explore the science and make up their own minds.

Okay, that doesn’t seem uber-lame.  As we’ll see, however, there are three key scientific issues — climate change is real, it is mainly human-induced, and if we don’t take strong action, we risk serious consequences — and the museum appears to have punted on the third one, which, of course, is really the whole point of the scientific effort to understand human-caused global warming.

Now let’s run this story chronologically.  As the Times Online’s Ben Webster reported Wednesday (story #1 above):

Last October the museum launched a temporary exhibition called “Prove It! All the evidence you need to believe in climate change”. The museum said at the time that the exhibition had been designed to demonstrate “through scientific evidence that climate change is real and requires an urgent solution”.

Indeed, thanks to Anthony Watts (who freeped the poll), we actually have a screen capture of what the museum posted online:

Note the the museum said unequivocally:

The Science Museum has examined the evidence.  We’re convinced climate change is caused by humans and requires urgent action.

In the new statement, the “urgent action” part of the sign of a message has vanished.

The current ruckus broke out because of a paragraph in the original March 22 press release announcing the new gallery (part of what Rapley sent to “clarify” where the museum stood):

Prof. Chris Rapley CBE, Director of the Science Museum, said:

“The Science Museum aims to provide the answers to people’s questions about the science of climate change, becoming a trusted destination for public engagement with climate science. The scientific community has, with some exceptions, concluded that climate change is real, largely driven by humans and requires a response. Our exhibition will deliver an immersive, enjoyable and memorable experience that explains their work and results and shows how science and technology can contribute to a low-carbon future. Our objective is to minimise the shrill tone and emotion that bedevils discussion of this subject, satisfying the interests and needs of those who accept that human-induced climate change is real, those who are unsure, and those who do not.“

As CP readers know, the only way to satisfy the interests and needs of those who do not accept that human-induced climate change is real is to stop explaining the science to them, stop advancing any serious policies to reduce emissions, and pretend their disinformed worldviews is accurate.

This press release seem to be walking back what the Science Museum has said in its temporary exhibit, so is no surprise that a reporter like Webster would ask Rapley what the heck he meant.  And Rapley said stuff like:

Chris Rapley, the museum’s director, told The Times that it was taking a different approach after observing how the climate debate had been affected by leaked e-mails and overstatements of the dangers of global warming. He said: “We have come to realise, given the way this subject has become so polarised over the past three to four months, that we need to be respectful and welcoming of all views on it.”

Professor Rapley, a climate scientist and former director of the British Antarctic Survey [BAS} research centre, said that the museum needed to remain neutral in order to be trusted: “The Science Museum will not state a position on whether or not climate change is real, driven by humans or threatening.”

“The climate science community, by and large, has concluded that humans have intervened in the system in a way that will lead to climate change. But that is their story. It’s not our story, so that can’t be our conclusion. If we take sides we will alienate some of the people who want to be part of the discussion.

“Although there is an extreme faction who very much disagree, there is a much bigger contingent who are not convinced. We want to welcome them into the debate by being as neutral and fairhanded as we can be.”

Inane stuff.  In the statement he sent me, Rapley walked back some of it, but he has so far not answered my questions as to whether these quotes were accurate in the first place and if so, he is repudiating them all.  The story continues:

Professor Rapley said that the gallery, which is to open in November before the climate summit in Cancun, Mexico, would refrain from scaring visitors with apocalyptic predictions of rising sea levels and would be honest about the conflicting views on the scale of possible changes to the climate.

“You can argue about how much effect the carbon in the atmosphere will have on the system and what we should do about it,” he said. “The role of the museum should be to lay out honestly and fairly what the climate science community has found out about the science.

“There are areas of uncertainty which are perfectly reasonable to raise and we will present those. For example, the extent to which the climate is as sensitive to the CO2-loading that humans have put in or not.”

Yeah, well, as I have discussed many times, most of the uncertainty on the climate’s sensitivity to CO2 is on the high side.  That is, the uncertainty is over whether doubling CO2 concentrations would be bad or catastrophic, which may in any case be moot since we are headed towards tripling or quadrupling CO2, whose likely impact is somewhere between catastrophic and unimaginable.

What is especially disappointing to me is that Rapley is a leading authority on the Antarctic, not just through the BAS but as President of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (until 2010).  Indeed, in a 2006 paper that I cited in my book, “The Antarctic ice sheets and Sea Level Rise,” Rapley explains that scientists had come to the view that “the possibility of a substantial sea level rise due to instability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) was consider to be very unlikely during the 21st century.”  But then he explains that “a variety of evidence suggest that the issue of the stability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet” should be revisited. He said back then

Only five years ago, Antarctica was characterised as a slumbering giant in terms of climate change. I would argue that this is now an awakened giant and we should take notice.

Shrill alarmist!

And that was 2006.  I think it’s safe to say that Antarctica is a giant on the move today:

• “Q: How much can West Antarctica plausibly contribute to sea level rise by 2100?” [A:  3 to 5 feet].
• Large Antarctic glacier thinning 4 times faster than it was 10 years ago: “Nothing in the natural world is lost at an accelerating exponential rate like this glacier.”
• Satellite data stunner: “Our data suggest that EAST Antarctica is losing mass…. Antarctica may soon be contributing significantly more to global sea-level rise.”
• Nature: “Dynamic thinning of Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheet ocean margins is more sensitive, pervasive, enduring and important than previously realized”
• Major Antarctic glacier is ‘past its tipping point’ [New Scientist]

Indeed, back in 2009 when Rapley was President, SCAR — a perfect acronymn if ever there was one — explained in their news release here:

Loss of ice from the West Antarctic ice sheet is likely to contribute some tens of centimetres to global sea level by 2100. This will contribute to a projected total sea level rise of up to 1.4 metres (and possibly higher) by 2100.

Shrill alarmists!

I wonder what all those people who don’t believe in human-induced climate change would say if the London Science Museum actually presented all of the latest science on Antarctica and sea level rise (see “Sea levels may rise 3 times faster than IPCC estimated, could hit 6 feet by 2100“).  They’d probably want their money back.

Perhaps Royal Dutch Shell would want its money back, too.  And that’s the other big problem with the new wishy-washy statements by Rapley and the museum.

Talking about the reality of climate change and the fact that it is mainly human caused, well, that’s not going to upset anybody too much — if you dumb down the part about how the scientific “evidence” makes clear that climate change “requires urgent action” or you dumb down the part about the scientific evidence that we are risking catastrophic sea-level rise, science that Rapley himself contributed to.

For the London Science Museum to backtrack on the “requires urgent action” message while taking money from a Big Oil company that stands to lose revenue if we actually did take urgent action — well, that creates an appearance of the museum and its scientists having compromised their integrity for money.  As Left Foot Forward notes, Shell is “one of the biggest oil companies in the world and one of the most controversial multinationals in large part due to its climate wrecking practises and disinformation campaigns about climate science”:

In the United States, Shell is part of the American Petroleum Institute, the organisation leading the campaign to peddle anti-science propaganda, and to orchestrate “astroturfing” “fake grassroots” campaigns against Obama’s clean energy reforms and the regulation of greenhouse gases.

In Canada, Shell is producing tar sands – the dirtiest oil there is, whilst here it is pulling out of renewable schemes. You have to ask: Is the Science Museum really representing the real scientific community, or pandering to the wishes of their corporate sponsors?

Dr. Rapley and the Museum should give Shell back its money so as not to taint this exhibit at all.  And they need to issue a much stronger statement, one that reaffirms what they had initially put on their website:

The Science Museum has examined the evidence.  We’re convinced climate change is caused by humans and requires urgent action.

Related Posts:

• Shell shocker: Once ‘green’ oil company guts renewables effort
• Investors warn Shell and BP over tar sands greenwashing
• Shell spanked for greenwashing ad

Yesterday I reported that tropical forest researcher Simon Lewis had filed a 31-page official complaint against the UK’s Sunday Times.   He made a compelling case that Jonathan Leake’s January 31 story “UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim” was “inaccurate, misleading and distorted.”

Now he has sent me an audio file taken from a message left on his answering machine by the Sunday Times.  He also sent a statement explaining why that message is “odd,” and why he rejects their offer to finally publish his letter.

UPDATE:  A reader (!) cleaned the audio up, so you can hear that it is from the Sunday Times letters editor who, following talks  with “the associate editor,” offered to print the letter Lewis wrote immediately after the article was published nearly two months (!) ago.  Then she says “… it has been recognised that the story was flawed.”  Here is Lewis’s statement:

Yesterday evening someone from the Sunday Times left an answerphone message at work. Out of the blue they asked if I will agree that the letter I wrote to them seven weeks ago can now be published. More importantly they now accept that the story they published is “flawed”.

This is odd for two reasons. First, following a previous communication this week with Jonathan Leake, I had already told the Sunday Times by email that, now that the Press Complaints Commission investigation is underway, all communication about this matter should be done through the PCC. Second, I won’t accept this new offer of a letter being published, as then there would be a “flawed” article that I am associated with on their website.   It’s the fact that it creates the appearance that I told one thing to the Sunday Times and another to the BBC that is one of my major concerns, as it looks like I told two different versions of what scientists know about the Amazon and climate change to two different news outlets, which is not true.

It seems to me that the “flawed” article ought to now be taken down from their website and a public apology issued in its place (or let the PCC investigation run its course).

I agree that this is no time for yet another uber-lame, after-the-fact correction/letter on a dreadful piece of disinformation that has ricocheted through the media and blogosphere, disinformation that has probably been seen by well over 10 times as many people as would ever see the correction or letter.

The Sunday Times should simply take the piece down and issue a retraction and apology.  At the very least, now that they have admitted the story is “flawed,” they should take the piece down until the PCC issues its ruling.

How exactly can a newspaper criticize the IPCC for unintentionally making a slightly flawed statement — if it is unwilling to own up to its own far more deeply flawed statements — statements that Lewis has shown the newspaper knew were extremely misleading when they made them?

Related Posts:

• Nature editorial: “Scientists must now emphasize the science, while acknowledging that they are in a street fight.”
• Scientists: “There are multiple, consistent lines of evidence from ground-based studies published in the peer-reviewed literature that Amazon forests are, indeed, very susceptible to drought stress.”

Click here to vote.

I’m updating this post because I now see you can vote every day (!) for Climate Progress in TreeHugger’s Best of Green Awards.

You’ve got a whole ‘nother week (through April 2) to vote for CP in the category of Best Political Website.

Sure, you like the insider’s view of climate science, solution, and politics delivered every day to you for free.   But the other nominees are pretty darn good, too.

Why should you vote for CP?  Well, set aside all issues of merit, look at the competition, and vote strategically:

• Mother Jones’ Blue Marble.  Great website.  Mostly the work of the impeccable Kate Sheppard.  But you can — and should — vote for her for Best Twitter Feed.  She’s like the Meryl Streep of climate blogging with these two nominations.  And everybody knows that Best Twitter Feed is the more sought after award, the one that brings in the big endorsement contracts.
• NRDC’s On Earth. Another must-read website, from the distinguished Natural Resources Defense Council, home to many great environmental champions.  But you can — and should — vote for NRDC for Best Watchdog Organization.  Who barks louder than NRDC?  And everybody knows that Best Watchdog Organization is the more sought after award, the one that brings in the big donor contributions!
• NYT’s Dot Earth.  I know what your thinking, but here’s the thing.  If Revkin wins, people at the New York Times might start to ask themselves why is he nominated for Best Political Website.  Is he getting all political, now?  You see, it wouldn’t do his career any good at all.  Plus — and here’s where we cue the music — these blogs really aren’t about the writers.   Blog writers are a dime a dozen.  There are 100 to 200 millions blogs worldwide.  It’s the commenters who make the blog — you!  You don’t want to vote for Dot Earth’s commenters, do you?  ‘Nuff said.

Click here to vote.

[NOTE:  This was originally posted March 10th, 2010 at 8:08 pm.]

Last week we got a treat. Normally we’re lucky to get an update on one unreleased BlackBerry device per week. There are only so many models in pre-production, and only so much we can learn from each one. Still, I was a bit disappointed. I wanted to see more from the Pearl 9100. It’s been a long, long time since we saw a Pearl model released, and even though I hate the SureType keyboard, I still want to see more from this model. This week we got some more. No, not a new development or anything. The device basically is what it is at this point. But we did see some high res images.

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