Over the course of my work I have come to the realization that it is very difficult to endanger or kill large numbers of people except with a claim to virtue.
-- Robert Jay Lipton
The piece from which I swiped that is ... I dunno. Either meh, or too much of a 101-level course when I'm looking for 102. It's about shifting attitudes regarding climate change, if you're interested.
But I did like that line.
If we are going to decide big issues, like eating genetically modified food, fracking for natural gas, responding to the prospect of drastic climate change, exploring space or engaging in ambitious science research, we are going to have to start from some common experience.
As Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the longtime senator from New York, once said, everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts. So where are we going to get them?
In science, as in other areas of our culture, there is no dearth of voices, but are we paying attention? In the new New Age, it’s all about which cable channels you watch or whom you follow on Twitter.
We could use a national conversation that is not about scandal or sports. If everybody watches the new “Cosmos,” we can talk about it the way we once argued about “The Sopranos” every Monday morning.
And perhaps that will happen. The early reviews of the series are glowing, and an adoring profile of Dr. Tyson recently appeared in The New Yorker. And we are not talking about tweedy PBS here; the show will be on Fox, home of “24” and “American Idol.”
It’s hard to imagine a better man to reboot the cosmos than Neil deGrasse Tyson.
-- Dennis Overbye
From the Dec 2013 issue of the journal Climatic Change:
Institutionalizing delay: foundation funding and the creation of U.S. climate change counter-movement organizations
Abstract
This paper conducts an analysis of the financial resource mobilization of the organizations that make up the climate change counter-movement (CCCM) in the United States. Utilizing IRS data, total annual income is compiled for a sample of CCCM organizations (including advocacy organizations, think tanks, and trade associations). These data are coupled with IRS data on philanthropic foundation funding of these CCCM organizations contained in the Foundation Center’s data base. This results in a data sample that contains financial information for the time period 2003 to 2010 on the annual income of 91 CCCM organizations funded by 140 different foundations. An examination of these data shows that these 91 CCCM organizations have an annual income of just over 900million,withanannualaverageof64 million in identifiable foundation support. The overwhelming majority of the philanthropic support comes from conservative foundations. Additionally, there is evidence of a trend toward concealing the sources of CCCM funding through the use of donor directed philanthropies.
The journal is peer-reviewed, I believe.
The full paper, sadly, costs a lot of money to see, but there is a bunch of supplementary online material (PDF) available for free.
The Guardian has a good article about the paper. Here's how it begins.
Conservative groups may have spent up to $1bn a year on the effort to deny science and oppose action on climate change, according to the first extensive study into the anatomy of the anti-climate effort.
The anti-climate effort has been largely underwritten by conservative billionaires, often working through secretive funding networks. They have displaced corporations as the prime supporters of 91 think tanks, advocacy groups and industry associations which have worked to block action on climate change. Such financial support has hardened conservative opposition to climate policy, ultimately dooming any chances of action from Congress to cut greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet, the study found.
News of the unsurprising, and mighty discouraging news at that, but a shoutout to Prof. Brulle for making the effort to document the atrocities, and a vote of sympathy to him for the character assassination he will doubtless be suffering in the next few weeks.
(h/t: Wired UK, via Ars Technica)
Compare and contrast this, from the NYT's Business section, ...
More than two dozen of the nation’s biggest corporations, including the five major oil companies, are planning their future growth on the expectation that the government will force them to pay a price for carbon pollution as a way to control global warming.
The development is a striking departure from conservative orthodoxy and a reflection of growing divisions between the Republican Party and its business supporters.
A new report by the environmental data company CDP has found that at least 29 companies, some with close ties to Republicans, including ExxonMobil, Walmart and American Electric Power, are incorporating a price on carbon into their long-term financial plans.
... with this ...
During the 2012 election, every Republican presidential candidate but one, Jon Huntsman, questioned or denied the science of climate change and rejected policies to deal with global warming.
Better sit down for this part:
But unlike the five big oil companies — ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, BP and Shell, all major contributors to the Republican party — Koch Industries, a conglomerate that has played a major role in pushing Republicans away from action on climate change, is ramping up an already-aggressive campaign against climate policy — specifically against any tax or price on carbon. Owned by the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, the company includes oil refiners and the paper-goods company Georgia-Pacific.
[Added] Oops. Earlier noted by Ocean.
The Audubon Society estimates that nearly 60 percent of 305 bird species found in North America in winter are shifting northward and to higher elevations in response to ...
Of course THEY will never admit it.
liberal media denialist wolverines.
Document the atrocities.
Despite the report noted yesterday, about 2012 being the hottest year on record, by a lot, for the continental US, there is still no shortage of denialism.
We wish it were solely the Stupidest Man on the Internet, ...
... but he's only an example.
[Added] See?
(pic. source: some Breitbart fan site, which means they think the above is a flattering picture)
It’s Official: 2012 Was Hottest Year Ever in U.S.
The numbers are in: 2012, the year of a surreal March heat wave, a severe drought in the corn belt and a massive storm that caused broad devastation in the mid-Atlantic states, turns out to have been the hottest year ever recorded in the contiguous United States.
How hot was it? The temperature differences between years are usually measured in fractions of a degree, but last year blew away the previous record, set in 1998, by a full degree Fahrenheit.
Who denies the reality of anthropogenic global warming, at least.
The National Climatic Data Center has just reported that October was the 332nd month in a row of above-average global temperatures. As the environmental Web site Grist reported, that means that nobody younger than 27 has lived for a single month with colder-than-average global temperatures …
Eight days ago, we met Paul Broun (R-Obvs). And wasn't that a treat!
Here's a related note.
Aside from their political affiliations, what do Akin and Broun have in common? Membership on the House's Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. And they're in good company there. Take the Committee's chair, Texas' Ralph Hall. When asked about the evidence that humans were altering the climate, Hall replied, "I don't think we can control what God controls." When it was pointed out to him that the National Academies of Science disagreed with his position, Hall basically accused them of being in it for the money. "They each get $5,000 for every report like that they give out."
His evidence? "That's just my guess. I don't have any proof of that."
It's a hell of a thing to have science policy for the Greatest Nation On Earth™ being decided by a bunch of clowns in thrall to religious wingnuts and the oil industry, isn't it?
(pic. sources: Republican ass | Republican asses)
... wingnuts are getting email.
Although Obama promised the planet would begin to heal the moment he took office, he and the Al Gore crowd continue to maintain that we are all destined for a hot, fiery death if we don’t change our ways and address our warming planet.
Apparently he didn’t possess the magic powers he thought he did—because Obama continues to claim that global warming is real and must be addressed immediately, and as usual, without the input of Congress. What happened? Wasn’t the threat supposed to end the moment he was inaugurated?
Man, that's some real crazyhate being catered to there. Or preyed upon. One of those.
I'll give them this: at least their spamming and tracking service is honest, as a hover over this indicates.
(h/t: KK, via email)
CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.
My total turnaround, in such a short time, is the result of careful and objective analysis by the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which I founded with my daughter Elizabeth. Our results show that the average temperature of the earth’s land has risen by two and a half degrees Fahrenheit over the past 250 years, including an increase of one and a half degrees over the most recent 50 years. Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases.
These findings are stronger than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group that defines the scientific and diplomatic consensus on global warming.
That is the beginning of an op-ed by Richard A. Muller which is well worth reading in its entirety.
If you don't know Muller, the short version is that he was for some time the darling of the denialists, being the most credible critic of climate change research, a rare person who could legitimately be called a skeptic in the best scientific sense. In April of 2011, he became dead to the denialists. The op-ed is a distillation of the findings he first reported then, and of follow-up work since.
Those bent on denialism may try to cherry-pick some fragments from the end of the op-ed. If so, maybe I can save them some typing by stating that I don't dispute anything from the end, any more than I do from the lede. What I would really like is not to blunder into some wild set of programs pushed by the most zealous alarmists, but to get to a rational starting point, where everyone agrees on Muller's fundamental conclusion.
Finally, to the so-called agnostics: Yes, you could still make the case that this is yet another argument from authority, that you will insist that you remain unpersuaded because you haven't had the time to study the problem yourself. If so, so be it. But I do wish you would ask yourself how many other aspects of life you accept, entirely because the experts in those fields have converged.
(h/t: Jack, via email)
__________
[Added] You'll be shocked, shocked to see that Andrew Revkin has rushed about gathering up brickbats for Muller, but you might find some worthwhile bits, if you're the sort who follows this Debate© closely. (h/t: John Horgan)
[Added2] Also via Jack, a delightful catch from Roy. Connoisseurs of homo wingnuttia are encouraged to follow the links Roy offers to the Power Tool blog posts, but this bit from the second one is just too good not to quote:
Hmm, maybe the Kochs are actually interested in good science after all, and perhaps their critics might want to give some benefit of the doubt to other Koch-supported research projects?
Man. Lipstick on a pig doesn't even come close.
Ah, yes. The Heartland Institute. A monument to budding astroturfers everywhere.
Heard about their latest billboard campaign?
In opening the campaign, Heartland had said that Mr. Kaczynski would not be the only persona gazing down on Chicago’s commuters. Among his brethren would be Charles Manson, Fidel Castro, Osama bin Laden and James J. Lee, the institute said.
[...]
The institute chose to feature “some of the world’s most notorious killers” on the billboards “because what these murderers and madmen have said differs very little from what spokespersons for the United Nations, journalists for the ‘mainstream’ media and liberal politicians say about global warming,” Heartland said at its Web site.
The institute’s site did acknowledge that “not all global warming alarmists are murderers and tyrants.”
So we got that going for us.
Which is nice.
(h/t: KK, via email)
I don't see a permalink for it (yet?) but at the moment, it's the first item shown on the Toles WaPo home page.
[Added] Outtake here.
And one of them, for sure, is the precision with which we can measure things, even remotely.
The tandem satellites, which are usually 137 miles apart, are sensitive to regional changes in the Earth’s mass and gravitational pull caused by the distribution of water and ice on the planet.
When the lead satellite flies over an area of increased mass, it will sense the increase in gravity and pull slightly away from the trailing satellite. Researchers can detect changes of just one micron between the two satellites …
How much is a micron? A millionth of a meter. Or put another way, the thickness of a human hair is about 100 microns.
So, we're detecting a difference of one one-hundredth the width of a human hair, on a scale of 137 miles, between two things whizzing 500 km overhead at 27,000 km/hr. (300 miles overhead at 17,000 mph, in American.)
Whoof.
You know what Randall would say.
In conclusion, this proves that global warming is a hoax.
(pic. source: NASA/the GRACE mission)
Go to the Google and type in let it snow.
Or just click here.
In either case, let that new tab or window be for a while.
Okay, I'll stop helping now.
(h/t: MK, via email)
P.S. It was about 60° here in the northeast US today. Oddly enough, I did not hear James Inhofe or any other Republican member of Congress use that as a reason to hold a photo op.
I just was outside, enjoying a cigarette.
At a quarter to two in the am.
On the 30th of November.
In NY, USA. In bare feet and shorts.
Enjoying, I say. Enjoying.
So, Sen. Inhofe ... WHERE IS MY TESTIMONIAL IGLOO?
(?)
(pic. source: GOVERNMENT IS NOT GOD)
The former Massachusetts governor had been one of the few Republican presidential candidates to embrace the scientific consensus that human activity contributes to climate change. But in a speech in Pittsburgh on Thursday, he sounded like more of a skeptic.
“My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet,” Romney said in the speech, a clip of which was posted by the liberal blog Think Progress.
Here's the Think Progress post.
(h/t: Kombiz Lavasany via Brad DeLong RT)
What, another hour-long video? Yes. Sorry, can't help it. Been stumbling across some good ones lately.
This talk, by David Keith, delivered at the Equinox Summit: Energy 2030 in June 2011, is about the most thought-provoking one I've ever heard on global warming, related resource issues, AGW mitigation, and our options and responsibilities. Denialists will no doubt be overjoyed at the cherry-picking they can do, but that doesn't mean it doesn't deserve the attention of the reality-based community.
Or maybe Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) is just taking one for the team -- dumbing things down even further to smooth the way for Sarah Palin's threatened entrance into the presidential race. In any case, he …
... needs to hit the science books, forestry experts suggest.
They reached that conclusion after hearing Mr. Rohrabacher declare during a Congressional hearing on Wednesday that clear-cutting the world’s rain forests might eliminate the production of greenhouse gases responsible for climate change.
(h/t: Wonkette Jr. | x-posted)
[Added] New information to me:
Rohrabacher served as assistant press secretary to the 1976 and 1980 presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan.[1] From 1981 to 1988, he was one of President Reagan's senior speech writers. During his tenure at the White House, Rohrabacher played a leading role in the formulation of the Reagan Doctrine. He also helped formulate President Reagan's Economic Bill of Rights …
Plenty of time to talk about the terrorist trees.
