Author: Joe

As smartphones get more and more advanced, we’re seeing an increasing amount of sensitive information stored on them. RIM provides a secure platform for its BlackBerry devices, but they can’t protect everything. The files store locally on your device, for instance, are at risk if your BlackBerry is lost or stolen. Many developers have released applications to help with this issue, mblware among them. Their application, mblVault, allows you to encrypt your sensitive documents, including image files, so that they’re inaccessible to unwanted parties.

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I’m scheduled to be in the final segment, which is on the Pentagon, oil use, national security, and Earth Day — and hopefully a little bit about my new book, “Straight Up.”  Lawrence O’Donnell will be filling in for regular host Keith Olbermann.

Coal baron Don Blankenship’s Massey Energy has prevented miners from attending funerals of the 29 victims of the killer explosion at Massey’s Upper Big Branch mine in Montcoal, WV.   Brad Johnson has the story in this TP repost.

Massey has taken steps to keep up the mining in the grief-stricken community. The “threat of job loss” from Massey’s non-union mines, “be it spoken or simply understood — has created a culture of fear in some corners of Southern West Virginia, where coal is the only real industry, and Massey is king of the hill”:

Massey Energy, the Virginia-based coal giant that runs the Upper Big Branch Mine, has denied time off for miners to attend their friends’ funerals; has rejected makeshift memorials outside the mine site; and, in at least one case, required a worker to go on shift even though the fate of a relative — one of the victims of the April 5 disaster — remained unknown at the time, according to some family members and other sources familiar with those episodes. In short, the company might be taking heat for putting profits and efficiency above its workers, but it doesn’t appear to have changed its tune in the wake of the worst mining tragedy in 40 years.

“They told my husband, ‘You’ve got a job to do and you’re gonna do it,’” the wife of one Massey miner told the Washington Independent’s Mike Lillis, referring to the funerals he’s missed this month for friends who died in the blast. “What else are we gonna do?”

Kevin Grandia is broadcasting a bunch of Earth Day interviews on ClimateTV starting at noon EDT.  You can get the background on this at Desmogblog.  I will be on live at 1:30 if my Skype connection works — never done an interview this way before.  Here are all of the guests you can see:

Dr. Andrew Weaver, a climatologist at the University of Victoria and author of Keeping our Cool: Canada in a Warming World.

Josh Dorfman, author of The Lazy Environmentalist: Your Guide to Easy, Stylish, Green Living and star of Sundance Channel’s TV series The Lazy Environmentalist.

Maggie Fox, CEO and President of Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection

Erin Carlson, Director of Yahoo! Green

Kate Sheppard, Environmental Reporter for Mother Jones Magazine

JW Randolph, Legislative Associate for Appalachian Voices, a West Virginia grassroots organization fighting to end the practice of mountain top removal

Phil Radford, Executive Director of Greenpeace USA

Cliff Schecter, political columnist and author of The Real McCain: Why Conservatives Don’t Trust Him—And Why Independents Shouldn’t

Katharine Hayhoe, climate scientist at Texas Tech University and author of A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions

Nate Byer, Earth Day Network’s 2010 Earth Day Campaign Director

Nick Miller, Founder, President and CEO of Xool Labs, Executive Producer of ClimateTV
ClimateTV will also be airing an online broadcast premiere of the award-winning documentary No Impact Man starting at 3:30pm pacific, 6:30pm eastern. The screening will be followed by a live interactive panel discussion with special guests Jennifer Prediger, also known as “Ask Umbra” on Grist.org, David Beers, founding editor of The Tyee.ca, Kim Thee, ClimateTV host and Kevin Grandia, yours truly

The dangers of the fossil fuel industry have sadly come into focus again, after an “explosion and fire on an offshore drilling platform” off the coast of Louisiana left “least 12 people missing and seven critically injured.”  Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson has the story in this repost.

The explosion on the rig Deepwater Horizon occurred at about 10 PM Tuesday, about 52 miles southeast of Venice on Louisiana’s tip. The rig is still “burning pretty good and there’s no estimate on when the fire will be put out,” a Coast Guard official said. The rig is leased by BP Exploration & Production from Transocean, a Houston-based company.

Offshore drilling advocates from Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) to state Sen. Frank Wagner (R-VA) have repeatedly promoted the false notion that the practice is safe — for its workers and for the environment. The 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, was a particular booster:

This disaster comes on the heels of the Massey Energy coal mine explosion that took 29 miners’ lives on April 5, and the Tesoro oil refinery explosion in Anacortes, WA, that killed six workers on April 2. It is a tragic fact that fossil fuel extraction in America is not “safe.”

When it comes to speech to text, Vlingo has BlackBerry covered. I’ve been using the app since it was released, and it has certainly served me well. The price tag — free — helps matters, too. Yet they’re not the only game in town. While Dragon doesn’t cover all the features that Vlingo does — it’s limited to your email — it does present an alternative. It uses Nuance’s technology, which has been available in other formats. Now that it’s on BlackBerry, it’s worth giving a try.

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In 2008, I wrote a piece for Salon about renaming ‘Earth’ Day. It was supposed to be mostly humorous. Or mostly serious. Anyway, the subject of renaming Earth Day seems more relevant than ever because this is the 40th anniversary.

In a 2009 interview last year, our Nobel-prize winning Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, said:

I would say that from here on in, every day has to be Earth Day.

Well, duh! Heck, we have a whole day just for the trees — and we haven’t finished them off … yet. So if every day is Earth Day, than April 22 definitely needs a new name. So I’m updating the column, with yet another idea at the end, at least for climate science advocates:

I don’t worry about the earth. I’m pretty certain the earth will survive the worst we can do to it. I’m very certain the earth doesn’t worry about us. I’m not alone. People got more riled up when scientists removed Pluto from the list of planets than they do when scientists warn that our greenhouse gas emissions are poised to turn the earth into a barely habitable planet.

Arguably, concern over the earth is elitist, something people can afford to spend their time on when every other need is met. But elitism is out these days. We need a new way to make people care about the nasty things we’re doing with our cars and power plants. At the very least, we need a new name.

How about Nature Day or Environment Day? Personally, I am not an environmentalist. I don’t think I’m ever going to see the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I wouldn’t drill for oil there. But that’s not out of concern for the caribou but for my daughter and the planet’s next several billion people, who will need to see oil use cut sharply to avoid the worst of climate change.

I used to worry about the polar bear. But then some naturalists told me that once human-caused global warming has completely eliminated their feeding habitat — the polar ice, probably by 2020, possibly sooner — polar bears will just go about the business of coming inland and attacking humans and eating our food and maybe even us. That seems only fair, no?

I am a cat lover, but you can’t really worry about them. Cats are survivors. Remember the movie “Alien”? For better or worse, cats have hitched their future to humans, and while we seem poised to wipe out half the species on the planet, cats will do just fine.

Apparently there are some plankton that thrive on an acidic environment, so it doesn’t look like we’re going to wipe out all life in the ocean, just most of it. Sure, losing Pacific salmon is going to be a bummer, but I eat Pacific salmon several times a week, so I don’t see how I’m in a position to march on the nation’s capital to protest their extinction. I won’t eat farm-raised salmon, though, since my doctor says I get enough antibiotics from the tap water.

If thousands of inedible species can’t adapt to our monomaniacal quest to return every last bit of fossil carbon back into the atmosphere, why should we care? Other species will do just fine, like kudzu, cactus, cockroaches, rats, scorpions, the bark beetle, Anopheles mosquitoes and the malaria parasites they harbor. Who are we to pick favorites?

I didn’t hear any complaining after the dinosaurs and many other species were wiped out when an asteroid hit the earth and made room for mammals and, eventually, us. If God hadn’t wanted us to dominate all living creatures on the earth, he wouldn’t have sent that asteroid in the first place, and he wouldn’t have turned the dead plants and animals into fossil carbon that could power our Industrial Revolution, destroy the climate, and ultimately kill more plants and animals.

All of these phrases create the misleading perception that the cause so many of us are fighting for — sharp cuts in greenhouse gases — is based on the desire to preserve something inhuman or abstract or far away. But I have to say that all the environmentalists I know — and I tend to hang out with the climate crowd — care about stopping global warming because of its impact on humans, even if they aren’t so good at articulating that perspective. I’m with them.

The reason that many environmentalists fight to save the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or the polar bears is not because they are sure that losing those things would cause the universe to become unhinged, but because they realize that humanity isn’t smart enough to know which things are linchpins for the entire ecosystem and which are not. What is the straw that breaks the camel’s back? The 100th species we wipe out? The 1,000th? For many, the safest and wisest thing to do is to try to avoid the risks entirely.

This is where I part company with many environmentalists. With 6.5 billion people going to 9 billion, much of the environment is unsavable. But if we warm significantly more than 3.5°F from pre-industrial levels — and especially if we warm more than 7°F, as would be all but inevitable if we keep on our current emissions path for much longer — then the environment and climate that made modern human civilization possible will be ruined, probably for hundreds of years (see NOAA stunner: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe). And that means misery for many if not most of the next 10 to 20 billion people to walk the planet.

So I think the world should be more into conserving the stuff that we can’t live without. In that regard I am a conservative person. Unfortunately, Conservative Day would, I think, draw the wrong crowds.

The problem with Earth Day is it asks us to save too much ground. We need to focus. The two parts of the planet worth fighting to preserve are the soils and the glaciers.

Two years ago, Science magazine published research that “predicted a permanent drought by 2050 throughout the Southwest” — levels of soil aridity comparable to the 1930s Dust Bowl would stretch from Kansas and Oklahoma to California. The Hadley Center, the U.K.’s official center for climate change research, found that “areas affected by severe drought could see a five-fold increase from 8% to 40%.” On our current emissions path, most of the South and Southwest ultimately experience twice as much loss of soil moisture as was seen during the Dust Bowl.

Also, locked away in the frozen soil of the tundra or permafrost is more carbon than the atmosphere contains today (see Tundra, Part 1). On our current path, most of the top 10 feet of the permafrost will be lost this century — so much for being “perma” — and that amplifying carbon-cycle feedback will all but ensure that today’s worst-case scenarios for global warming become the best-case scenarios (see Tundra, Part 2: The point of no return). We must save the tundra. Perhaps it should be small “e” earth Day, which is to say, Soil Day. On the other hand, most of the public enthusiasm in the 1980s for saving the rain forests fizzled, and they are almost as important as the soil, so maybe not Soil Day.

As for glaciers, when they disappear, sea levels rise, perhaps as much as two inches a year by century’s end (see “Sea levels may rise 3 times faster than IPCC estimated, could hit 6 feet by 2100” and here). If we warm even 3°C from pre-industrial levels, we will return the planet to a time when sea levels were ultimately 100 feet higher (see Science: CO2 levels haven’t been this high for 15 million years, when it was 5° to 10°F warmer and seas were 75 to 120 feet higher — “We have shown that this dramatic rise in sea level is associated with an increase in CO2 levels of about 100 ppm.”). The first five feet of sea level rise, which seems increasingly likely to occur this century on our current emissions path, would displace more than 100 million people. That would be the equivalent of 200 Katrinas. Since my brother lost his home in Katrina, I don’t consider this to be an abstract issue.

Equally important, the inland glaciers provide fresh water sources for more than a billion people. But on our current path, they will be gone by century’s end.

So where is everyone going to live? Hundreds of millions will flee the new deserts, but they can’t go to the coasts; indeed, hundreds of millions of other people will be moving inland. But many of the world’s great rivers will be drying up at the same time, forcing massive conflict among yet another group of hundreds of millions of people. The word rival, after all, comes from “people who share the same river.” Sure, desalination is possible, but that’s expensive and uses a lot of energy, which means we’ll need even more carbon-free power.

Perhaps Earth Day should be Water Day, since the worst global warming impacts are going to be about water — too much in some places, too little in other places, too acidified in the oceans for most life. But even soil and water are themselves only important because they sustain life. We could do Pro-Life Day, but that term is already taken, and again it would probably draw the wrong crowd.

We could call it Homo sapiens Day. Technically, we are the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens. Isn’t it great being the only species that gets to name all the species, so we can call ourselves “wise” twice! But given how we have been destroying the planet’s livability, I think at the very least we should drop one of the sapiens. And, perhaps provisionally, we should put the other one in quotes, so we are Homo “sapiens,” at least until we see whether we are smart enough to save ourselves from self-destruction.

What the day — indeed, the whole year — should be about is not creating misery upon misery for our children and their children and their children, and on and on for generations (see “Is the global economy a Ponzi scheme?“). Ultimately, stopping climate change is not about preserving the earth or creation but about preserving ourselves. Yes, we can’t preserve ourselves if we don’t preserve a livable climate, and we can’t preserve a livable climate if we don’t preserve the earth. But the focus needs to stay on the health and well-being of billions of humans because, ultimately, humans are the ones who will experience the most prolonged suffering. And if enough people come to see it that way, we have a chance of avoiding the worst.

We have fiddled like Nero for far too long to save the whole earth or all of its species. Now we need a World War II scale effort just to cut our losses and save what matters most. So let’s call it Triage Day. And if worse comes to worst — yes, if worse comes to worst — at least future generations won’t have to change the name again.

As a penultimate thought, I suspect that many environmentalists and climate science advocates will have their own, private name: “I told you so” Day. Not as a universal as “Triage Day,” I admit, but it has a Cassandra-like catchiness, no?

Finally, perhaps we should call it “science day.”  We don’t have a day dedicated to celebrating science, and don’t we deserve one whole day free from the non-stop disinformation of the anti-science crowd?

As always, I’m open to better ideas….

On Monday, Senators Graham (R-SC), Kerry (D-MA), and Lieberman (I-CT) will launch the bipartisan climate and clean energy jobs bill.  I’m quite certain there will be something in it to dissatisfy everyone.

On the other hand, has Congress ever passed a significant bill that didn’t dissatisfy everyone, particularly on the environment?  We haven’t had a major piece of clean air legislation for almost exactly two decades now.  The Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 (EPA history here), which ultimately passed by large margins, put in place a cap-and-trade system for acid rain pollution, but didn’t end the grandfathering of old coal plants.  And so they burn on.

No bill that could pass Congress right now or in the immediate future would be sufficient to put us on the path to stabilizing the world at 2°C. We simply aren’t sufficiently desperate to do what is needed, which is nonstop deployment of a staggering amount of low-carbon energy, including efficiency, for the rest of the century.

And so my criteria for judging the bill focuses on whether it will create the conditions that will allow more desperate policy makers in the not-too-distant future to have a realistic chance of getting on the necessary path.  My new book Straight Up includes one essay on the House’s astonishing yet dissatisfying achievement in passing the Waxman-Markey bill.  It explains that when we are that desperate, probably in the 2020s, we’ll want to already have:

• substantially dropped below the business-as-usual emissions path
• started every major business planning for much deeper reductions
• goosed the cleantech venture and financing community
• put in place the entire framework for U.S. climate regulations
• accelerated many tens of gigawatts of different types of low-carbon energy into the marketplace
• put billions into developing advanced low-carbon technology
• started building out the smart, green grid of the 21st century
• trained and created millions of clean energy jobs
• negotiated a working international climate regime
• brought China into the process

Waxman-Markey, had it become the law of the land, would have achieved all of those vital goals.  And that’s why I strongly supported it, even though its 2020 target and use of offsets meant that it was, from a purely scientific perspective, unsatisfactory.

The Senate bill will no doubt be weaker than the House bill, but my criteria remain the same.  There is one other criterion that many people, including me, feel is important:  Does the bill finally start shutting down the grandfathered coal plants — the dirtiest of the dirty? The answer to that question for the House bill was “Hell yes.”  But what about the Senate bill?  The answer to that question will be the focus of Part 2.

MSNBC has posted a bunch of Earth Day cartoons by top cartoonists (here).  Lots of focus on global warming.  Here’s “The Quack and the Faker”:

That’s Pat Bagley of the Salt Lake Tribune.

Here’s Olle Johansson, a Swedish freelancer:

And here’s Steve Greenberg of LA:

Here’s something you can do to help spread the word about the book and the blog:  Send out an email.  I have some text below that you can make use of, but ideally you’d explain in your own words why you read the blog and why someone should buy the book.

The review on the popular website Change.org says Straight Up is the “most scientifically well-informed book on the scope of and solutions to the problem of climate change there is.”

Christopher Mims writes the “two books that you must read” to be “culturally literate about climate change” are Mark Lynas’s Six Degrees and Straight Up.

I could use your help getting out the word on the book.  Here’s some material for an email:

“The Web’s most influential climate-change blogger” and “Hero of the Environment 2009” —Time Magazine

“I trust Joe Romm on climate.”   — Paul Krugman, New York Times

“America’s fiercest climate-change activist-blogger,” and one of “The 100 People Who Are Changing America”  — Rolling Stone

“One of the most influential energy and environmental policy makers in the Obama era” — U.S. News & World Report

“The indispensable blog” —Thomas Friedman, New York Times

It’s the 40^th anniversary of Earth Day.  With a bipartisan group of senators led by Lindsey Graham (R-SC) releasing their long-awaited climate and clean energy bill, the stage is set for the most important environmental debate of our time. Joe Romm, a climate expert, physicist, and former Department of Energy official, puts the core issues of this debate in perspective with his blog ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Now, he has compiled the best 1% of his more than 4,000 blog posts with his new book, Straight Up: America’s Fiercest Climate Blogger Takes on the Status Quo Media, Politicians, and Clean Energy Solutions .

Nature recently editorialized that: “Scientists must now emphasize the science, while acknowledging that they are in a street fight.”  Van Jones says, “Straight Up is the war fighters manual for this coming carbon battle. If you want to be equipped to fight, you need this book.”

Al Gore just tweeted:  “Joe Romm has an important new book out. I recommend it.”

With Straight Up, Romm cuts through the crap, presenting the truth about clean energy, climate impacts, and global warming politics, written in a style everyone can understand.

While Romm “confronts the toughest of truths” at ClimateProgress.org, he provides insight, unparalleled science, and a definitive voice on the issue of climate change while offering concrete solutions. Straight Up offers a way forward for us all to save a livable climate.

Get your copy of Straight Up today at Amazon.

Thanks!

Instead of coming up with some kind of theme for this week’s crop of themes, I thought I’d go back through my huge file of BlackBerry themes I’ve run across. There are just so many in there that I could use them to write this feature for the next year. Clearly I won’t get to all of them — ‘dems the breaks. But I can take some time to look back on the ones I found remarkable enough to bookmark in the first place. So, without further ado…

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In recent months, climate change skeptics have ramped up their efforts in the media and Congress to misrepresent the scientific consensus on global warming….

In response, scientists must communicate their research methods and findings more broadly and more effectively. More than 2,000 economists and scientists recently called on “our nation’s leaders to swiftly establish and implement policies to bring about deep reductions in heat-trapping emissions.” That is a step in the right direction.

But scientists do not have a bully pulpit. President Obama does — and the public desperately needs him to use it.

That’s the opening from a must-read HuffPost piece, “It’s Time for President Obama to Set the Record Straight on Climate Change,” by Dr. James J. McCarthy and Timothy Wirth.  They focus on a crucial point I’ve made many times before — only Obama can move the needle on climate science messaging.

McCarthy is the Alexander Agassiz professor of biological oceanography at Harvard and immediate past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and board chair of the Union of Concerned Scientists.  Former Colorado Senator Wirth is president of the UN Foundation and has served as undersecretary of state for global affairs.

The president clearly understands the urgency to act on global warming. Shortly after the election in November 2008, he said his administration would chart a course to reducing U.S. emissions of heat-trapping gases 80 percent by 2050 — the amount that climate scientists say is necessary to avoid catastrophe. “The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear,” he stated. “Delay is no longer an option.”

Since taking office, the president has spoken frequently about the role of clean energy technologies in creating millions of new jobs and revitalizing the economy. His fiscal stimulus bill put tens of billions of dollars into strategic investments in these technologies, and his administration has taken other important steps, including a rule that will make the new car and light truck fleet 40 percent more fuel efficient by 2016. He has brought members of Congress, business leaders, and others to the White House to build support for comprehensive climate and energy legislation.

These are all important steps and represent a complete reversal from the policies of the previous administration. An increased commitment to energy efficiency, renewable energy and other clean energy technologies is essential to U.S. leadership in the clean energy economy of the 21st century. But there is one issue on which the president can, and should, say much more: the strong scientific evidence on human-induced climate change and its impacts on the United States, and the rapidly closing window for action.

Last year, on behalf of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, an expert team of scientists summarized the science of climate change and the impacts of climate change on the United States, now and in the future, and called the evidence of a warming climate “unequivocal,” primarily due to the use of fossil fuels – coal, oil, and gas – and the loss of forests. The report emphasized that “sizable early cuts in emissions would significantly reduce the pace and the overall amount of climate change. Earlier cuts in emissions would have a greater effect in reducing climate change than comparable reductions made later.”

As the president travels around the country, he should alert citizens to these mounting costs of inaction. As temperatures rise, so do their consequences, and so does the importance of reducing emissions. Midwestern farmers could face more frequent days of extreme heat, heavier spring rains, and wider-ranging crop-damaging pests. California faces temperature increases that will affect agriculture, worsen the risk of large wildfires, and reduce the winter snowpack that is so important to year-round water supply.

The president should bring together scientists and others with relevant expertise for a White House summit on climate science, the urgency of action, and the opportunity for timely solutions. The headliners of this event should include the president and the government’s own experts — people like White House science adviser John Holdren, Energy Secretary Steven Chu, and NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco — each of them superb scientists in their own right.

In addition, the president’s secretaries of defense and homeland security should communicate to the public that climate change has the potential to produce serious threats to national security. It could endanger global water and food supplies and flood coasts with rising seas; these impacts, in turn, could trigger mass migrations and violent conflicts. The bottom line: Climate change is likely to exacerbate the conditions that foster violent extremism, with weakened and failed states being especially vulnerable.

President Obama just brokered a new treaty limiting nuclear weapons with Russia, moving another step toward his long-term goal of ridding the world of nuclear weapons. Now it is time for him to step up his efforts on another major threat to the future of the planet. The president should deliver a major speech on climate change to the American public, using all the props and charts he can muster to bring the message home. The public interest requires it.

The scientific community has long known that emissions from burning fossil fuels are changing Earth’s climate. President Obama is uniquely qualified to cut through the fog created by misleading and manufactured controversies by telling the American public the truth. As he leads, our country will respond.

Hear!  Hear!

Related Posts:

• President Obama explains the science behind climate change and extreme weather
• Obama: “To create more of these clean energy jobs … means passing a comprehensive energy and climate bill with incentives that will finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy in America.”
• Obama at MIT: “From China to India, from Japan to Germany, nations everywhere are racing to develop new ways to producing and use energy. The nation that wins this competition will be the nation that leads the global economy. I am convinced of that. And I want America to be that nation…. There are going to be those who make cynical claims that contradict the overwhelming scientific evidence when it comes to climate change, claims whose only purpose is to defeat or delay the change that we know is necessary.”
• Nature editorial: “Scientists must now emphasize the science, while acknowledging that they are in a street fight.”

We’ve seen plenty of developers release call blocking applications lately. With an increasing number of unwanted calls from telemarketers — many of them claiming that you have “no problems with your credit card account,” but to hang on the line — having solid filter can be useful. You can find many of these application in our BlackBerry applications archives. For the most part these are premium applications, but yesterday I stumbled upon one that, for the rest of today at least, comes at no monetary cost. It takes a little extra effort, but I’m willing to bet that once you see what it entails you’ll be willing. You’ll probably also appreciate that Call Control is one of the better call blockers on the market.

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Few folks have been as wrong about climate science as Marc Morano and Dr. Roy Spencer.  So it’s no big surprise to see this laughable screaming headline on ClimateDepotted:

Morano apparently couldn’t spend 30 seconds on Google to find the link to Spencer’s post on his new memoir, The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the Climate Scientist who Wrote this Book.  [Okay, I may have changed the subtitle a little bit, but it’s Spencer who insists on using unintentionally ironic titles for his novels, like Climate Confusion.]

For those who don’t follow the professional disinformers closely, Spencer (and John Christy) famously made a bunch of analytical blunders and spent years pushing the now long-overturned notion that the satellite data didn’t show significant warming (see “Should you believe anything John Christy and Roy Spencer say?“).  Now Spencer is claiming that “When properly interpreted, our satellite observations actually reveal” that the climate system is insensitive to carbon dioxide.  Yes, well, he has the secret recipe for properly mis-interpreting satellite data.

But it’s the leeches stuff that shows he also can’t even be bothered to spend 30 seconds using Google to check his own analogies.  Here’s the screen capture before he edits it:

So many whoppers, so little time.  First, of course, it is simply basic physics that carbon dioxide traps heat — that’s why they call it a greenhouse gas (see, for instance, Exclusive new analysis by climatologist Ken Caldeira explains “the burning of organic carbon warms the Earth about 100,000 times more from climate effects than it does through the release of chemical energy in combustion”).

Second, that human activity is responsible for most (if not essentially all) recent warming is also pretty straightforward physics (see “What percentage of global warming is due to human causes vs. natural causes?“).  If you want to understand why scientists are so certain that CO2 is such a big driver of our climate, you should watch Richard Alley’s lively talk AGU video, explains “The Biggest Control Knob: Carbon Dioxide in Earth’s Climate History.”

Third, to falsify basic climate physics you can’t just float your own unproven idea — you would actually have to come up with a mechanism that would negate the well-understood warming from all that carbon dioxide.  Good luck.

Fourth, the analogy to leeches, of course, shows how little effort Spencer puts into checking what he writes.  I actually thought it was pretty well known that people are still using medicinal leeches.   Google will quickly lead you to a bunch of popular articles and peer-reviewed medical studies.  Here’s the “European medical leech” entry in Wikipedia:

Medicinal leeches are now making a comeback in microsurgery. They provide an effective means to reduce blood coagulation, relieve venous pressure from pooling blood (venous insufficiency), and in reconstructive surgery to stimulate circulation in reattachment operations for organs with critical blood flow, such as eye lids, fingers, and ears.

Doh!

It is downright bizarre that both Morano and Spencer are proud of an analogy that is so anti-scientific on both ends it actually makes the exact opposite point from the one they are trying to make.

Fifth, and this is a truly egregious whopper, Spencer argues that because “nature is gobbling up 50% of what humanity produces” it is somehow “logical” that “nature — that life on Earth — has actually been starved for carbon dioxide.”  Presumably by “nature” he means natural land and ocean sinks (as opposed to the atmosphere).  Yet he is way too clever a guy to be unaware of the fact that “The global oceanic sink removed 26% of all CO₂ emissions for the period 2000-2008.”  In short, of the CO2 which Spencer asserts “nature — that life on Earth” is “gobbling up,” half is going into the ocean and acidifying it, helping to render it inhospitable to marine life (see discussion at Nature Geoscience study: Oceans are acidifying 10 times faster today than 55 million years ago when a mass extinction of marine species occurred).

So Spencer is blatantly misrepresenting the most basic understanding we have of the “natural” CO2 sinks.  There is little doubt that the staggering amounts of CO2 we are pouring into the air aren’t our “friend” — especially if we listen to Spencer and his fellow disinformers and keep doing nothing to restrict emissions.

Caldeira has made exquisitely clear that “carbon dioxide is the right villain.”  He says, “I compare CO2 emissions to mugging little old ladies….  Carbon dioxide emissions represent a real threat to humans and natural systems.”

As for Spencer, he keeps getting debunked as fast as he can print his global warming blunders.  Back in 2008, I wrote about RealClimate’s multiple takedowns.  RC utterly skewered one Spencer dis-analysis — misanalysis doesn’t seem a strong enough word for what he did (see RC’s “How to cook a graph in three easy lessons“). RC calls it “shameless cookery.” If you like semi-technical discussions, then I strongly recommend the post.

Spencer of course was wrong — dead wrong — for a very long time, which created one of the most enduring denier myths, that the satellite data didn’t show the global warming that the surface temperature data did. As RealClimate explained:

We now know, of course, that the satellite data set confirms that the climate is warming , and indeed at very nearly the same rate as indicated by the surface temperature records. Now, there’s nothing wrong with making mistakes when pursuing an innovative observational method, but Spencer and Christy sat by for most of a decade allowing — indeed encouraging — the use of their data set as an icon for global warming skeptics. They committed serial errors in the data analysis, but insisted they were right and models and thermometers were wrong. They did little or nothing to root out possible sources of errors, and left it to others to clean up the mess, as has now been done.

So after that history, we’re supposed to savor all Roy’s new cookery?

That’s an awful lot to swallow.

Amazingly (or not), the “serial errors in the data analysis” all pushed the (mis)analysis in the same, wrong direction. Coincidence? You decide. But I find it hilarious that the deniers and delayers still quote Christy/Spencer/UAH analysis lovingly, but to this day dismiss the “hockey stick” and anything climatologist Michael Mann writes, when his analysis was in fact vindicated by the august National Academy of Sciences in 2006 and subsequent independent research.

Michael Mann himself recently wrote of Christy and Spencer:

A few years ago, independent teams of scientists got a hold of their satellite data and after repeated questioning of them about their methods found that there were two critical errors in their algorithm.  One of them was a sign error in the diurnal correction term, the other was an algebraic error. Once those errors were corrected by other scientists, the Christy and Spencer claim that satellite data contradict surface evidence of warming evaporated.

Once some serious climatologists look at Spencer’s latest work, it will no doubt turn out to be another great global warming blunder.

The underlying agenda on the Republican side, from the top down, is to frustrate and humiliate the president and the Democratic majority — and to ensure that no legislation passes. They typically begin with a memo from Frank Luntz, outlining rhetorical tricks that will be used to mislead and anger voters, while obscuring the true content of any proposal that Democrats might consider.

Next week, Graham, Kerry, and Lieberman will launch the bipartisan climate and clean energy jobs bill.  Every other Senate Republican but Graham will attempt to kill the bill because their entire strategy is predicated on convincing the public that Obama isn’t a different kind of politician, isn’t a pragmatist who can reach across the aisle.

McConnell told the NY Times last month, “It was absolutely critical that everybody be together because if the proponents of the bill were able to say it was bipartisan, it tended to convey to the public that this is O.K., they must have figured it out.”

And so the GOP is quite willing to destroy the Republic to advance their extremist agenda, as long as their shamelessly superior messaging (which is to say, disinforming) means they won’t be punished at the polls and indeed will actually make gains.  A (very) few journalists have woken up to this reality (see Joe Klein on the GOP: “How can you sustain a democracy if one of the two major political parties has been overrun by nihilists? … How can you maintain the illusion of journalistic impartiality when one of the political parties has jumped the shark?”).

Joe Conason at Salon spells out in detail how this applies to financial reform in his article (quoted above), “Republican senator hints ‘bailout’ charge is false:  The GOP says it opposes ‘perpetual taxpayer bailouts’ in financial reform bill. But then Bob Corker told the truth.”  The analysis is worth reading since it pretty much applies to every major piece of legislation now and for the foreseeable future, including energy and climate.  Conason continues:

Republicans on the relevant committees simulate bargaining over matters of substance with their Democratic counterparts, which is what the civics books tell us they are supposed to do, of course. But when a bill emerges and debate is scheduled to begin, McConnell stalls the process by threatening a filibuster, due to allegedly unacceptable features of the legislation or an alleged refusal by the Democrats to consult with Republicans. His false claims are aimed at a single objective: to justify the filibuster threat.

Now this strategy is easy to implement at almost no political cost, because the public is distracted, confused and distrusting of both political parties as well as the media. The outlines of reality are not as clear-cut as the crisp phrasing of Luntzian propaganda, which relies on tropes of three or four words to crystallize opposition framing.

• Continue reading

And old principles that once governed the behavior of Congress, and especially senators, have been discarded. In the Republican bloc, partisan maneuvering trumps personal independence and honor at the command of the leadership.

The latest example is Bob Corker, R-Tenn., a freshman member of the Senate Banking Committee who took over the task of “negotiating” a financial reform bill from the ranking Republican, Richard Shelby, R-Ala., who grew weary of the game. Corker’s conduct exemplifies the Republican strategy (which, in fairness, he may not have fully understood until last week). Having spent months working on the bill with committee chairman Chris Dodd, D-Conn., Corker suddenly found himself vowing to support a filibuster over provisions in the bill that he had helped to write.

Observing Corker’s plight, William Theobald, a political columnist for the Tennessean, described the situation with pithy accuracy:

The issue of how to shut down large financial firms without a taxpayer bailout and without damaging the nation’s economy was precisely the issue Corker had spent the most time negotiating with Dodd.

In the wake of McConnell’s withering attacks on the bill, a distressed Corker took to the Senate floor Wednesday to defend his efforts while trying not to offend GOP leaders.

Knowing that his leader’s complaints about perpetual taxpayer bailouts were wrong — and that McConnell knows it too — Corker tried to be careful. But he could not quite bring himself to endorse the leader’s falsehood. The $50 billion fund created by the Dodd bill to wind down failing firms would be drawn from the banks and financial companies, not from the Treasury. “That’s all industry money,” said the Tennessee senator. “To classify that as a bailout fund, in fairness, is not intellectually pure.”

But Corker did not appear terribly embarrassed by his own contortions. He told Gannett News that he feels “energized” and “liberated.” He can help to write a bill and then sign a letter threatening to filibuster that same bill, while acknowledging that the stated reasons for the filibuster are untrue. Nobody in the national press corps will call him to account for that glaring contradiction. And nobody in the press corps will ask McConnell to explain why the Republican senator with the most expertise on this bill has said, as diplomatically as possible, that McConnell is lying.

And so this is how a livable climate ends, not with a bang, not with a whimper, but trampled to death by a herd of elephants.

If you’re an American BlackBerry user, chances are you pay for, or don’t pay for, your BlackBerry in one of two ways. The first group comprises enterprise users who get devices from their companies. The second covers BIS users, the large majority of which sign two-year contracts when purchasing their devices. This allows customers to take advantage of subsidies which can reduce the price of a BlackBerry from $500 down to around $200 — or even less for older models. There exists one other group, though it represents a small fraction of American BlackBerry users: prepaid. This might make you wonder if a prepaid BlackBerry is right for you.

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Here is something you twitterers out there can retweet, from twitter.com/algore:

The Nobel prize-winner has posted a longer recommendation on his website:

An Important New Book

Joe Romm is one of the most important and influential voices fighting for an end to the climate crisis. His blog, Climate Progress, is a must read.

Romm just published an important new book, titled Straight Up: America’s Fiercest Climate Blogger Takes on the Status Quo Media, Politicians, and Clean Energy Solutions. In the book, Romm “cuts through the misinformation and presents the truth about humanity’s most dire threat. His analysis is based on sophisticated knowledge of renewable technologies, climate impacts, and government policy, written in a style everyone can understand.”

If you are interested in the fight to solve the climate crisis, I recommend you read this book.

Gore is an uber-busy uber-communicator, so this means a lot to me personally.  His recommendation helped dropped Straight Up below 1,000 on Amazon this morning, which is the first time that’s happened for any of my books.

Related Post:

• Is Al Gore a good science communicator?

I love applications that have a simple premise, because they tend to be the most useful. So when I got an email announcing the release of Tungle for BlackBerry, it took me only a few seconds to realize the utility of the application. The premise: it’s tough to schedule meetings because you just never know when the other party is free. Even if you do manage to schedule something, the possibility of a double-booking still looms. Tungle helps avoid these conflicts by creating a system of invitations and shared calendars, which makes scheduling meetings and appointments a bit easier.

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Periods of exceptional climate change in Earth history are associated with a dynamic response from the solid Earth, involving enhanced levels of potentially hazardous geological and geomorphological activity. This response is expressed through the adjustment, modulation or triggering of a wide range of surface and crustal phenomena, including volcanic and seismic activity, submarine and sub-aerial landslides, tsunamis and landslide ’splash’ waves glacial outburst and rock-dam failure floods, debris flows and gas-hydrate destabilisation. Looking ahead, modelling studies and projection of current trends point towards increased risk in relation to a spectrum of geological and geomorphological hazards in a world warmed by anthropogenic climate change, while observations suggest that the ongoing rise in global average temperatures may already be eliciting a hazardous response from the geosphere.

Lots of people have asked me whether there has been any connection between global warming and the recent earthquakes and other geological activity.  Today, the UK’s Royal Society published an amazingly timely special series of scientific papers on the topic.  Seven leading experts co-authored the editors’ introduction (quoted above).

Reuters reported on Friday, “A thaw of Iceland’s ice caps in coming decades caused by climate change may trigger more volcanic eruptions by removing a vast weight and freeing magma from deep below ground, scientists said.”  Last week, FoxNews reported, “A huge glacier has broken off and plunged into a lake in Peru sparking a 23-meter high tsunami wave that destroyed a nearby town.”  Local governor Cesar Alvarez said: “Because of global warming the glaciers are going to detach and fall on these overflowing lakes. This is what happened.”

We already knew that methane hydrates were at risk of destabilizing and becoming a positive or amplifying feedback to global warming (see “Science stunner: Vast East Siberian Arctic Shelf methane stores destabilizing and venting“).  Two articles in this issue go further:

Maslin et al. review the current state of the science as it relates to gas hydrates as a potential hazard. The authors note that gas hydrates may present a serious threat as the world warms, primarily through the release of large quantities of methane into the atmosphere, thus forcing accelerated warming, but also as a consequence of their possible role in promoting submarine slope failure and consequent tsunami generation….

In a second paper, Dunkley Jones et al. look back to the PETM [Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum], the most prominent, transient, global warming event during the Cenozoic, in order to evaluate the effects of the rapid release of thousands of gigatonnes of greenhouse gases on the planet’s climate, ocean–atmosphere chemistry and biota, for which the PETM perhaps provides the best available analogue. Dunkley Jones et al. support the view that, while gas-hydrate release was probably not responsible for an initial, rapid, CO₂-driven warming, the as yet unknown event responsible for this subsequently triggered the large-scale dissociation of gas hydrates, which contributed to further warming as a positive feedback mechanism.

That’s from the Preface by the Director of the Benfield UCL Hazard Research Centre, Dr. Bill McGuire, an expert on the geological consequences of climate change.  The article by Maslin et al. concludes:

Models of the global inventory of hydrates and trapped methane bubbles suggest that a global 3^°C warming could release between 35 and 940 GtC, which could add up to an additional 0.5^°C to global warming. The destabilization of gas hydrate reserves in permafrost areas is more certain as climate models predict that high-latitude regions will be disproportionately affected by global warming with temperature increases of over 12^°C predicted for much of North America and Northern Asia.

Yes, in the scenario where we blow past 3°C warming, the Arctic gets uber-warm and a staggering amount of methane seems all but certain to be released (see “M.I.T. doubles its 2095 warming projection to 10°F — with 866 ppm and Arctic warming of 20°F“):

The shrinking of both the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets in response to regional warming may also lead to destabilization of gas hydrates. As ice sheets shrink, the weight removed allows the coastal region and adjacent continental slope to rise through isostacy. This removal of hydrostatic pressure could destabilize gas hydrates, leading to massive slope failure, and may increase the risk of tsunamis.

Dunkley Jones et al find, “Palaeotemperature proxy data from across the PETM indicate a coincident increase in global surface temperatures of approximately 5–6°C.”  They find the methane hydrate were accompanied by lots of other carbon, which wouldn’t be a big surprise given how many other amplifying carbon-cycle feedbacks there are (see “Stunner: Nature review of 20 years of field studies finds soils emitting more CO2 as planet warms“).

The paper “Recent and future warm extreme events and high-mountain slope stability,” notes that “Warm extremes can trigger large landslides in temperature-sensitive high mountains by enhancing the production of water by melt of snow and ice, and by rapid thaw.”  Not surprisingly, the paper finds:

The number of large slope failures in some high-mountain regions such as the European Alps has increased during the past two to three decades. There is concern that recent climate change is driving this increase in slope failures, thus possibly further exacerbating the hazard in the future….

We describe several large slope failures in rock and ice in recent years in Alaska, New Zealand and the European Alps, and analyse weather patterns in the days and weeks before the failures. Although we did not find one general temperature pattern, all the failures were preceded by unusually warm periods; some happened immediately after temperatures suddenly dropped to freezing.

We assessed the frequency of warm extremes in the future by analysing eight regional climate models from the recently completed European Union programme ENSEMBLES for the central Swiss Alps. The models show an increase in the higher frequency of high-temperature events for the period 2001–2050 compared with a 1951–2000 reference period. Warm events lasting 5, 10 and 30 days are projected to increase by about 1.5–4 times by 2050 and in some models by up to 10 times.

Duh?

Here’s more on European impacts:

The slope failure hazard in mountainous terrain is also addressed by Keiler et al. in a paper that examines the influence of contemporary climate change on a broad spectrum of geomorphological hazards in the eastern European Alps, including landslides, rock falls, debris flows, avalanches and floods. In the context of the pan-continental 2003 heat wave and the 2005 central European floods, the authors demonstrate how physical processes and human activity are linked in climatically sensitive alpine regions that are prone to the effects of anthropogenic climate change…. The authors conclude that future climate changes are likely to drive rises in the incidence of mountain hazards and, consequently, increase their impact on Alpine communities.

The paper “How will melting of ice affect volcanic hazards in the twenty-first century?” concludes

Glaciers and ice sheets on many active volcanoes are rapidly receding. There is compelling evidence that melting of ice during the last deglaciation triggered a dramatic acceleration in volcanic activity….  A greater frequency of collapse events at glaciated stratovolcanoes can be expected in the near future, and there is strong potential for positive feedbacks between melting of ice and enhanced volcanism. Nonetheless, much further research is required to remove current uncertainties about the implications of climate change for volcanic hazards in the twenty-first century.

Finally, scientists find a modest negative feedback, albeit an unpleasant one!

And, coincidentally enough, there’s a paper “Climate effects on volcanism: influence on magmatic systems of loading and unloading from ice mass variations, with examples from Iceland”

Pressure influences both magma production and the failure of magma chambers. Changes in pressure interact with the local tectonic settings and can affect magmatic activity. Present-day reduction in ice load on subglacial volcanoes due to global warming is modifying pressure conditions in magmatic systems. The large pulse in volcanic production at the end of the last glaciation in Iceland suggests a link between unloading and volcanism, and models of that process can help to evaluate future scenarios. A viscoelastic model of glacio-isostatic adjustment that considers melt generation demonstrates how surface unloading may lead to a pulse in magmatic activity. Iceland’s ice caps have been thinning since 1890 and glacial rebound at rates exceeding 20 mm yr⁻¹ is ongoing. Modelling predicts a significant amount of ‘additional’ magma generation under Iceland due to ice retreat.

Finally, we have “Response of faults to climate-driven changes in ice and water volumes on Earth’s surface,” which finds:

Numerical models including one or more faults in a rheologically stratified lithosphere show that climate-induced variations in ice and water volumes on Earth’s surface considerably affect the slip evolution of both thrust and normal faults. In general, the slip rate and hence the seismicity of a fault decreases during loading and increases during unloading. Here, we present several case studies to show that a postglacial slip rate increase occurred on faults worldwide in regions where ice caps and lakes decayed at the end of the last glaciation. Of note is that the postglacial amplification of seismicity was not restricted to the areas beneath the large Laurentide and Fennoscandian ice sheets but also occurred in regions affected by smaller ice caps or lakes, e.g. the Basin-and-Range Province. Our results do not only have important consequences for the interpretation of palaeoseismological records from faults in these regions but also for the evaluation of the future seismicity in regions currently affected by deglaciation like Greenland and Antarctica: shrinkage of the modern ice sheets owing to global warming may ultimately lead to an increase in earthquake frequency in these regions.

Just to be clear about what these papers are and aren’t saying, the Guardian reports:

Richard Betts, a climate modeller at the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter, said: “This is a new area of academic research with potentially interesting implications. It was previously assumed there was no link at all between climate change and these events, but it is possible to speculate that climate change might make some more likely. If we do get large amounts of climate change in the long term then we might see some impacts.”

He said there was no evidence that current levels of global warming were influencing events such as last week’s earthquake in China that killed hundreds of people and the volcanic eruption in Iceland that grounded flights across Europe.

Experts say global warming could affect geological hazards such as earthquakes because of the way it can move large amounts of mass around on the Earth’s surface. Melting glaciers and rising sea levels shift the distribution of huge amounts of water, which release and increase pressures through the ground.

These pressure changes could make ruptures and seismic shifts more likely. Research from Germany suggests that the Earth’s crust can sometimes be so close to failure that tiny changes in surface pressure brought on my heavy rain can trigger quakes.

One should be cautious in linking individual geological events directly to climate change.  We’ll have to wait for more study and more detailed statistical analysis.  Though obviously for certain events, such as a glacier collapse leading to a tsunami or large slope failures in ice, they are inevitably going to be seen as driven by warming.  And the destabilization of gas hydrate reserves in permafrost areas remains a core prediction of climate science.

Anyway, more things to worry about from unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions, as if there weren’t enough already:

• An introduction to global warming impacts: Hell and High Water

My new book is now In Stock at Amazon.com, so you can buy it today (click here).  You know you want to after getting all these Climate Progress posts for free for so long.

And if you have already bought a copy (thank you very much), buy one for a friend.  Or a frenemy!

The journal Nature editorialized in March: “Scientists must now emphasize the science, while acknowledging that they are in a street fight.”  Say what you will about Climate Progress, I figured that out a few years before Nature.

The timing couldn’t be better for Straight Up:  America’s Fiercest Climate Blogger Takes on the Status Quo Media, Politicians, and Clean Energy Solutions.  It’s the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, and Graham, Kerry, and Lieberman are going to introduce their bipartisan climate and clean energy jobs bill a week from today.

The bill will tee off the most important environmental and energy debate of our time.  In the book, I put the core issues of the debate — climate science, clean energy solutions, and environmental politics — in perspective.  Here’s the back jacket:

The book is the best 1% of my more than 4000 blog posts — arranged thematically. And I did take many of your suggestions (see “What is your favorite Climate Progress post?“).  Here’s the table of contents:

Table of Contents:

INTRODUCTION
Why I Blog
CHAPTER 1
The Status Quo Media
CHAPTER 2
Uncharacteristically Blunt Scientists
CHAPTER 3
The Clean Energy Solution
CHAPTER 4
Peak Oil? Consider It Solved
CHAPTER 5
The Clean Energy New Deal
CHAPTER 6
The Bush-Cheney Reign of Error
CHAPTER 7
The Right-Wing Disinformation Machine
CHAPTER 8
Diagnosing Someone with Anti-Scientific Syndrome (ASS)
CHAPTER 9
Why Are Progressives So Lousy at Messaging?
CONCLUSION
Is the Global Economy a Ponzi Scheme?

Plus there’s an Afterword that discusses Copenhagen and frames the forthcoming Senate debate.

So do order it on Amazon.com (click here).

This post is meant to be the “medium sell.”  In a day or two, I’ll have one more favor to ask of readers.

Related Post:

• The first book review of “Straight Up”