You can contact the NY Times public editor, Clark Hoyt, at public@nytimes.com.

The NYT has published arguably its worst climate story ever, “U.N. Climate Panel and Chief Face Credibility Siege,” by Elisabeth Rosenthal.

Dr. Robert J. Brulle of Drexel University, whom the NYT itself quoted last year as “an expert on environmental communications,” emailed me that the piece is “the worst, one sided reporting I have ever seen.”  When I called him up, he went further saying:

In this article, the New York Times has become an echo-chamber for the climate disinformation movement.

You might think it impossible for any newspaper — let alone the one-time “paper of record” — to run a story raising “accusations of scientific sloppiness” about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that never quotes a single climate scientist.

You might think it inconceivable that the NYT would base its attack on the accusations and half-truths provided by “climate skeptics, right-leaning politicians and even some mainstream scientists” where

• The one climate skeptic quoted is the The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley (TVMOB) — who pushes outright lies such as “There hasn’t been any global warming for 15 years” and who labels young people who disagree with him “Hitler Youth.”
• The right-leaning politician is Sen. John Barrasso, who is so far out he tried to stop the gathering of intelligence on the national security threat posed by climate change.
• The “some mainstream scientists” is in fact only Roger Pielke, Jr. (!!), who has a Ph.D. in political science, who has said, “I am not a climate scientist,”  who — far from being mainstream on this subject — is a long-time critic of the IPCC who has been attacking scientists’ reputations for many years.

Rosenthal doesn’t actually quote a single mainstream scientist attacking the IPCC.

I’m going to go through this piece in a little detail because the NYT put it on the front page and because some folks thought I shouldn’t have put the NYT third on my list of nominees for the 2009 “Citizen Kane” award for non-excellence in climate journalism.

Since I don’t want to bury the lede as Rosenthal does, let me start with start with her ninth paragraph:

The panel, in reviewing complaints about possible errors in its report, has so far found that one was justified and another was “baseless.” The general consensus among mainstream scientists is that the errors are in any case minor and do not undermine the report’s conclusions.

But why let the fact the story is essentially trivial from a scientific perspective stop it from being a front-page rehash of mostly innuendo and unproven charges?

Rosenthal immediately continues:

Still, the escalating controversy has led even many of them to conclude that the Nobel-winning panel needs improved scientific standards as well as a policy about what kinds of other work its officers may pursue.

“When I look at Dr. Pachauri’s case I see obvious and egregious problems,” said Dr. Roger A. Pielke Jr., a political scientist and professor of environmental science at the University of Colorado….

Now when you read “many of them” — many “mainstream scientists,” that is — in a serious piece of journalism on climate science, you would expect the reporter to then quote at least, say, two, three or maybe four scientists, and not, say, zero, zilch, nada.

Rosenthal leaves the distinct impression that the one person she is quoting, Pielke, somehow represents a mainstream view, when in fact he is a long-time critic of the IPCC who has spent a great deal of time drowning the reputation of top scientists — including the coauthors of the recent NOAA-led climate impacts report and all three thousand attendees of an Al Gore talk at the American Association for the Advancement of Science — with no justification whatsoever (click here).

Computer scientist Tim Lambert (aka Deltoid) has a whole category just for Pielke, which I commend to any journalist who still takes the man as a serious representative of science or even climate analysis.  And here’s a RealClimate piece.

Now what’s interesting about Rosenthal’s piece is that she feels obliged to tell her readers where every other source is coming from — other than Pielke, that is:

Critics, writing in Britain’s Sunday Telegraph and elsewhere, have accused Dr. Pachauri of profiting from his work as an adviser to businesses, including Deutsche Bank and Pegasus Capital Advisors, a New York investment firm — a claim he denies….

The accusations of errors in the panel’s report — most originating from two right-leaning British papers, The Sunday Telegraph and The Times of London — have sullied the group’s reputation.

Okay, at least we’re told the Telegraph is a right-wing paper — though she should have mentioned just how unreliable they are (see DelingpoleGate: Monbiot slams anti-science columnist for leading “Telegraph into vicious climate over email”).

Of course, the NYT also basically eviscerates these charges:

Several of the recent accusations have proved to be half-truths: While Dr. Pachauri does act as a paid consultant and adviser to many companies, he makes no money from these activities, he said. The payments go to the Energy and Resources Institute, the prestigious nonprofit research center based in Delhi that he founded in 1982 and still leads, where the money finances charitable projects like Lighting a Billion Lives, which provides solar lanterns in rural India….

In response to the recent criticisms, Dr. Pachauri provided an accounting of some of his outside consulting fees paid to the Energy and Resources Institute. Those include about $140,000 from Deutsche Bank, $25,000 from Credit Suisse, $80,000 from Toyota and $48,750 from Yale. He has recently begun work as a strategic adviser for Pegasus, the investment firm, but has not yet attended a meeting, and no money has yet been paid to the Energy and Resources Institute. He has also provided advice free of charge to groups like the Chicago Climate Exchange.

And at least Rosenthal tells you some of what you need to know about TVMOB:

Christopher Monckton, a leading climate skeptic, called the panel corrupt, adding: “The chair is an Indian railroad engineer with very substantial direct and indirect financial vested interests in the matters covered in the climate panel’s report. What on earth is he doing there?”

A former adviser to Margaret Thatcher who also assailed Dr. Pachauri in a critique in Copenhagen that has since been widely circulated, Lord Monckton is now the chief policy adviser to the Science and Public Policy Institute, a Washington-based research and education institute that states on its Web site: “Proved: There is no climate crisis.”

Monckton pushes such extremist hate speech — see Lord Monckton repeats and expands on his charge that those cli who embrace climate science are “Hitler youth” and fascists — that he deserves widespread condemnation, not quotation in a serious newspaper.  Indeed, I can’t see why any person in the world needs to answer a single charge from TVMOB, let alone on the pages of the New York Times.  BUT at least the NYT let us know where he is coming from.

Rosenthal offers no such disclosure for Pielke.  Quite the reverse.  She pretends that somehow he is a representative of mainstream climate scientists.  Worse, she actually seems to go out of her way to shield her readers from a very crucial disclosure:

The panel was also criticized for citing a study about financial losses after extreme weather events that found an increase in such losses of 2 percent a year from 1970 to 2005. That study had not been peer reviewed at the time, although it was later on.

The panel has called the complaint “baseless,” noting that the study was cited appropriately and that other scientific data pointed to a recent rise in severe storms.

Now why doesn’t Rosenthal point out that this criticism was primarily leveled by Pielke himself?  Perhaps because, if she did, she’d have to point out that Pielke has been making this and similarly baseless criticisms of the IPCC for years now.  She’d have to explain that Pielke has been baselessly trashing the reputation of any scientist who even suggests that there is the tiniest link whatsoever between climate change and extreme weather (see here) — even though he himself has stated such a link exists (see Pielke in Nature: “Clearly, since 1970 climate change … has shaped the disaster loss record”) and even though he has praised a study that made such a link.  Indeed, she might have to report that he has baselesssly attacked the integrity of many hundreds of the country’s top scientists for merely sitting through a discussion of the issue that doesn’t meet his extreme form of political correctness (see here).

In short, if she correctly identified Pielke as a long-time IPCC critic, someone who has repeatedly attacked climate experts, she couldn’t use him as some sort of mainstream scientist who has suddenly seen the light about the IPCC and Pachauri.

She ends her piece:

But even some academics who accept that climate change is a problem are concerned about such activities.

“This is not about whether this is a good person or a good cause; it’s about the integrity of the scientific process,” Dr. Pielke said, adding: “This has become so polarized, it’s like you must be in cahoots with the bad guys if you are at all negative about Pachauri.”

First off, while Pielke says he accepts that climate change is a problem, and asserts that he supports a target of 450 to 500 ppm, he steadfastly refuses to identify a viable strategy for achieving that difficult target and attacks anyone who does propose a possible plan (see “Finally, Roger Pielke admits he supports policies that will take us to 5-7°C warming or more“).

Second, if you think Pielke is interested in preserving the integrity of the scientific process, I’d again suggest reading Deltoid’s multiple posts demonstrating otherwise.

Third, I can’t imagine why Rosenthal printed Pielke’s nonsensical reverse McCarthyism — his suggestion that anyone who criticizes him for being negative about Pachauri is lumping him in with “the bad guys.”  Ironically, it is Rosenthal who has put Pielke “in cahoots with” the big-time disinformers like Monckton and Barrasso, since from the perspective of this piece, it’s hard to distinguish their views.

I don’t think Pielke’s distinction between good guys and bad guys is useful — though it’d be interesting to hear from him the names of “the bad guys” he doesn’t want to be lumped in with.  I think the distinction is between those who try to present information based on science and those who present disinformation.

The bottom line:  The NYT has published a broad brush smear of climate scientists in this piece from a variety of biased and questionable sources — while demonstrating that the charges are half-truths and/or trivial from the overall perspective of climate science.  And it is unconscionable that the piece doesn’t actually quote a single climate scientist, while offering up Roger Pielke, Jr. as representative of how mainstream scientists view the IPCC and Pachauri.

I’ll end by repeating the comments sent me by Robert Brulle, professor of sociology and environmental science at Drexel University:

The worst, one sided reporting I have ever seen. In this article, the New York Times has become an echo-chamber for the climate disinformation movement.

Brulle ended our conversations by pointing out that the piece is just above an ad by ExxonMobil, the top funder of the climate disinformation movement, noting “The visual irony is just too much to bear.”

You can contact the NY Times public editor, Clark Hoyt, at public@nytimes.com.

UPDATE:  Climate scientist Ken Caldeira has just sent me an email titled, “I can’t believe the New York Times has done it again …” that reads in its entirety:

Joe,

Does Roger Pielke Jr really believe that Pachauri is exaggerating the climate change problem in order to obtain more funds for his nonprofit research center?

If Pielke is going to make insinuations in the New York Times about the ethics of Dr Pachauri, he owes it to us to make his beliefs clear. He should state clearly which of the following two statements he believes:

(a) Dr Rajendra Pachauri is exaggerating the climate change problem in order to obtain more funds for his nonprofit research center.

(b) Dr Rajendra Pachauri is not exaggerating the climate change problem in order to obtain more funds for his nonprofit research center.

A man with a $49,000 salary donating all of his consulting fees to nonprofit organizations would ordinarily be seen as a sign of professional integrity and dedication. It is outrageous that Pielke attempts to turn this around and use it to insinuate an ethical lapse. It makes one wonder about Pielke’s motives.

Best,
Ken
PS. You can quote this if you would like….

Related Posts:

• The New York Times sells its integrity to ExxonMobil with front-page ad that falsely asserts “Today’s car has 95% fewer emissions than a car from 1970″
• Shame on the New York Times for running ExxonMobil’s greenwashing ad once again — they can’t plead ignorance this time, only greed
• The NY Times starts 2010 pushing the same damn disinformation about climate science it did in 2009
• Is the New York Times coverage of global warming fatally flawed?
• Signs of global warming are everywhere, but if the New York Times can’t tell the story (twice!), how will the public hear it?
• MacCracken: The New York Times quote did not represent my views, and it did not even represent the reporter’s attempt to portray my comments
• Grist on the NYT’s “baseless hit job on Gore,” plus the story’s origin in a Fox News doctored video

This past December, 192 countries gathered for the 15th meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen, Denmark. Ambitions for the Copenhagen meeting were high. UNFCCC members had agreed at their 13th meeting in Bali, Indonesia in 2007 that December 2009 would be the deadline to determine a course of action forward on a plan for global reduction of carbon dioxide emissions following the end of the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol in 2012.

The UNFCCC’s midterm goal for climate safety is stabilizing temperature change increase caused by humans to no more than 2 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels. According to analysis from Project Catalyst hitting this goal requires a 17 gigaton decrease in annual greenhouse gas emissions to 44 gigatons per year from the projected increase of global emissions of 61 gigatons by 2020 if we continue polluting at current rates (Figure 1).

The tense two weeks of negotiations in Copenhagen—preceded by an intense year of international negotiations once the Obama administration came into office—resulted in the creation of the Copenhagen Accord. This is not yet a legally binding agreement, but it does fulfill President Barack Obama’s promise prior to the Copenhagen summit that the United States was committed to getting a political agreement out of the meeting that could be implemented immediately and serve as the first step in a process to eventually produce a new international accord setting us on a pathway to climate safety.

Among the accord’s virtues are its commitment to limiting humanly caused temperature increases to no more than 2 degrees Celsius with a promise to investigate the feasibility of holding temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius. It also includes a pledge of $30 billion in “quick start” financing from developed countries by 2012 to assist developing countries with adaptation to a warmer world and transition to a low-carbon economy. Progress was made in reconciling differing interpretations—primarily between the United States and China—on standards for measuring, reporting, and verifying reductions. But most importantly the accord provides for the first time an avenue for developing countries to make commitments for emission reductions, which is particularly important for moving beyond the Kyoto Protocol’s old divisions between expectations for reductions from developed and developing countries. Yet the accord is as of yet incomplete given the lack of emission reduction targets for different parties, the inconclusive determination about whether it will become a legally binding agreement, and a robust plan for how compliance with commitments for reductions will be enforced.

These gaps will be addressed over the next year of negotiations, but the accord has already provided us with the information needed to determine where we are on the path to achieving climate safety. The initial deadline for submitting commitments under the Copenhagen Accord was this past January 31. According to the UNFCCC, 92 countries, including the 27-member European Union, have now made commitments to the accord, representing over 80 percent of global emissions.

Submissions so far by parties signing on to the Copenhagen Accord show improvement compared to modeling from Project Catalyst and analysis by the Center for American Progress prior to the Copenhagen summit of existing commitments for reductions by the world’s largest emitters. The high end of proposals for reductions from all countries under the accord has gone from 8.7 gigatons of abatement by 2020 compared to a business-as-usual scenario up to 8.9 gigatons of reductions compared to a business-as-usual scenario. The low end of proposals has improved from 3.6 gigatons to 4.9 gigatons, contingent, for example, on whether the United States will meet its stated commitment to emission reductions and whether developed countries provide sufficient financial incentives for developing countries to meet their targets.

According to Project Catalyst, emission reductions on the low end have improved largely due to countries such as Brazil and Indonesia strengthening their own direct commitments for reductions, rather than, for example, only providing a less expensive offset market through deforestation projects for developed countries. These figures also still include the pre-Copenhagen commitments from major emitting countries in the developing world such as China and India to reduce their emissions by 13 percent and 19 percent respectively below a “business-as-usual” growth in emissions (Figure 2).

With other smaller changes in global emissions projections—including a decrease due to the recent economic downturn and reduced emissions from deforestation and loss of peat lands—the high-end abatement path so far from the Copenhagen Accord commitments leaves us only 5 gigatons short of the 44 gigaton goal by 2020—two-thirds of the reductions needed to achieve climate safety (Figure 3).

The current submissions under the Copenhagen Accord are not yet sufficient to limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius according to this analysis, but they are by no means the end of the story. The January 31 deadline for submissions under the accord is soft and allows for submissions to come in during the year. There is also ample room for improvement in our global emissions profile as we move toward the next UNFCCC meeting, which begins at the end of November in Cancun, Mexico. Consider the following:

Many will complain that the Copenhagen meeting did not achieve its goal of delivering a new final climate agreement. But it avoided a much worse outcome, namely locking in a legally binding agreement that would not reach climate safety. If the current submissions under the Copenhagen Accord were final for a new climate agreement then it would be difficult if not impossible to improve the ambition for additional emission reductions as we move forward. Instead, as President Obama intended, the accord is only the beginning of a process to achieve the reductions in climate pollution that we need. Given that the accord commits parties to the 2 degree Celsius goal of achieving climate safety, the logical next step in the process—agreeing on emission reduction goals under the accord—will need to be tied to that temperature goal.

There is also reason for optimism because it is very likely that the United States can deliver the necessary reductions even if Congress fails to deliver on comprehensive climate and energy legislation this year. The low-case scenario in this analysis is primarily a function of whether the United States can achieve its goal of achieving a 17 percent cut below 2005 emission levels by 2020. This figure represents reductions from the economy-wide cap-and-trade mechanism in the Waxman-Markey legislation passed by the House of Representatives last summer. If the United States cannot meet this goal, as is modeled on the low-end scenario here, then other countries will likely only achieve the low end of their ambitions as well. But what these figures do not take into account is that if this happens the administration will still be required to begin the process of reducing carbon emissions under the auspices of the Clean Air Act, thus increasing the likelihood that we will reach the high-end scenario. Estimates now show that individual states alone will already deliver 7 percent of reductions commensurate with this 17 percent goal from their policies alone, leaving only 10 percent needed from executive action at the federal level.

If the Senate does pass legislation that mirrors some of the important provisions in the House climate legislation, then the United States can deliver additional reductions that could overcome the 5 gigaton gap between the high end of these reductions and climate safety. The high-end scenario here only models the 17 percent reduction from an economy-wide measure such as a cap-and-trade program as the extent of the U.S. contribution to global carbon abatement. It does not count additional reductions that will be achieved under the House legislation such as the 0.7 gigatons of reductions from direct assistance to international forestry programs. We previously calculated that this program would improve the U.S. reductions from 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 to a reduction of 11 percent below 1990 levels of emissions. This is all the more reason to press for successful action in the Senate, which, if similar steps are taken to preserve these measures, can achieve almost a full gigaton of the additional reductions needed by 2012 to close the 5 gigaton gap between the high end of the Copenhagen Accord submissions and the path to climate safety.

Many are determined to see the outcome of Copenhagen as a failure, but this analysis reveals a different picture: a good start in this new year to the reductions needed in climate pollution and a clearer pathway on how to meet our global goals.

Andrew Light is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress. He coordinates CAP’s international climate policy program.

h/t NewEnergyNews

See also Science bombshell explodes myth of clean coal: Mountaintop “mining permits are being issued despite the preponderance of scientific evidence that impacts are pervasive and irreversible and that mitigation cannot compensate for losses.”

Todd Stern, U.S. special envoy for climate change, will be speaking about the lessons of the COP-15 summit in Copenhagen last December, the significance of the Copenhagen Accord that was negotiated there, and the path forward over the coming year and beyond. This will be Stern’s first public speech since the January 31 deadline for inscribing mitigation targets and actions in the Copenhagen Accord.  An expert discussion panel follows the address.

Here are the full details:

After Copenhagen

An Update on International Climate Change Negotiations

February 9, 2010, 12:00pm – 1:00pm

Streaming Video

Click here to watch the event live.

About This Event

This event will take place as scheduled at CAP. If you are not able to attend due to weather, you can watch the event live here.

Todd Stern, U.S. special envoy for climate change, will be speaking about the lessons of the COP-15 summit in Copenhagen last December, the significance of the Copenhagen Accord that was negotiated there, and the path forward over the coming year and beyond. This will be Stern’s first public speech since the January 31 deadline for inscribing mitigation targets and actions in the Copenhagen Accord.  An expert discussion panel follows the address.

Introductory Remarks:
John Podesta, President and Chief Executive Officer, Center for American Progress

Featured Speaker:
Todd Stern, Special Envoy for Climate Change, United States Department of State

Featured Panelists:
Jennifer Haverkamp, Managing Director for International Policy and Negotiations, Environmental Defense Fund
Andrew Light, Senior Fellow and Coordinator for International Climate Policy, Center for American Progress

Our guest blogger today is Donald A. Brown, Associate Professor for environmental ethics, science, and law at Penn State.  He blogs at ClimateEthics (a Time magazine Top 15 pick).

If ethical and justice arguments about why climate change policies are necessary are taken off the table in the climate change debate, it is like a baseball pitcher unilaterally agreeing to not throw any fast balls or breaking balls during a World Series game.

Yet, as we will explain, there is almost a complete absence of ethical arguments for climate change policies in the US debate about proposed approaches to climate change. This failure to expressly examine the ethical issues entailed by arguments made by opponents of climate change action has important practical consequences.

Arguments against climate change policies are usually of two types. By far the most frequent arguments made in opposition to climate change policies are assertions of various kinds of adverse economic impacts that will flow if climate change policies are adopted. Examples of this are claims that proposed climate change legislation will destroy jobs, reduce GDP, damage US businesses such as the coal and petroleum industries, increase the cost of fuel, or will destroy the recovery from a recession. The second most frequent argument made by opponents of climate change policies are assertions that adverse climate change impacts have not been sufficiently scientifically proven.

The responses of advocates of US climate change policies to these arguments are almost always to take issue with the factual economic and scientific conclusions of these arguments by making counter economic and scientific claims.  For instance, in response to economic arguments opposing climate change legislation or policies, proponents of climate change action usually argue that climate change policies will create jobs or are necessary to develop new energy technologies that are vital to the health of the US economy in the future. In responses to the lack of scientific proof arguments, climate change advocates usually stress the harsh environmental impacts to people and ecosystems that climate change will cause if action is not taken or argue that climate change science is settled.  In other words, advocates of climate change action, respond to claims of opponents to climate change programs by denying the factual claims of the opponents.

Although these alternative economic and scientific arguments are relevant to whether climate change policies should be adopted, noticeably missing from the US debate are ethical and justice arguments for action on climate change. In fact, there is a hardly a murmur in US press coverage of climate change controversies about the ethical and justice reasons for adopting climate change policies when arguments against adopting climate change policies are made. This failure of the press to examine these issues is because advocates of climate change policies are rarely racing these issues.

What distinguishes ethical issues from economic and scientific arguments about climate change is that ethics is about duties, obligations, and responsibilities to others while economic and scientific arguments are usually understood to be about “value-neutral” “facts” which once established are often deployed in arguments about self-interest.

Climate change is a problem that clearly creates civilization challenging ethical issues.  This is so because several distinct features of climate change call for its recognition as creating ethical responsibilities that limit a nation’s ability to look at narrow economic self interest alone when developing responsive policies.

First, climate change creates duties because those most responsible for causing this problem are the richer developed countries, yet those who are most vulnerable to the problem’s harshest impacts are some of the world’s poorest people in developing countries. That is, climate change is an ethical problem because its biggest victims are people who can do little to reduce its threat.

Second, climate-change impacts are potentially catastrophic for many of the poorest people around the world. Climate change, for instance, directly threatens human life and health and resources to sustain life, as well as species of plants and animals and ecosystems around the world.

Climate change harms include deaths from disease, droughts, floods, heat, and intense storms and damage to homes and villages from rising oceans, adverse impacts on agriculture, social disputes caused by diminishing natural resources, the inability to rely upon traditional sources of food, and the destruction of water supplies. Climate change threatens the very existence of some small island nations. Clearly these impacts are catastrophic.

In fact, there is growing evidence that climate change is already causing great harm to many outside the United States while threatening hundreds of millions of others in the years ahead.

The third reason why climate change is a moral problem stems from its global scope. At the local, regional or national scale, citizens can petition their governments to protect them from serious harms. But at the global level, no government exists whose jurisdiction matches the scale of climate change. And so, although national, regional and local governments have the ability and responsibility to protect citizens within their boarders, they have no responsibility to foreigners in the absence of international law.

For this reason, ethical appeals are necessary to get governments to take steps to prevent their citizens from seriously harming foreigners.

Despite the fact that climate change creates obligations, the U.S. continues to debate this issue as if the only legitimate considerations are how our economy might be affected or whether adverse climate change impacts have been proven.

Because climate change raises civilization challenging ethical and justice issues, the failure to examine arguments opposing climate change policies trough an ethical lens guarantees that:

1. Those opposing climate change policies on ethically dubious grounds will not be challenged on the basis of their ethically weak positions.
2. Those making economic arguments based upon short-term narrow self interest will not be forced to admit that those causing climate change have duties, responsibilities, and obligations to others who can do little to reduce climate change’s threat but who are most vulnerable to climate change’s consequences.
3. The ethical dimensions of economic arguments will remain hidden in public debate in cases where economic arguments against climate change policies  appear to based upon “value-neutral” economic “facts” although the calculations of the “facts” contain ethically dubious calculation procedures such as: (a) discounting future benefits that make benefits to others experienced in the middle to long-term virtually worthless as a matter of present value. (b) economic arguments usually only calculate the value of things harmed by climate change on the basis of market-value thus translating all things including human life, plants, animals, and ecological systems into commodity value, or (c) the economic calculations often ignore distributive justice issues including the fact that some people and places will be much more harshly impacted by climate change than others.
4. Important ethical issues entailed by decision-making in the face of scientific uncertainty will remain hidden including: (a) Who should have the burden of proof?, (b) What quantity of proof should satisfy the burden of proof when decisions must be made in the face of scientific uncertainty? (c) Whether the victims of climate change have a right to participate in decisions that must be made in the face of uncertainty?, and (d) Whether those causing climate change have obligations to act now because if the world waits to act until all uncertainties are resolved it will likely be too late prevent catastrophic impacts to others and to stabilize greenhouse gas atmospheric concentrations at safe levels.
5. Because no national, regional, local, business, organization, or individual climate change strategy makes sense unless it is understood to be implicitly  a position on its duties and obligations to others to prevent climate change, whether the strategy is just or fair in relationship to the entity’s obligations to others will go unexamined.
6. Given that the world needs a global solution to climate change, and that only just solutions to climate change are likely to be embraced by most governments, barriers to finding an acceptable global solution will continue.
7. Unjust climate change policies will be pursued that exacerbate existing injustices in the world.
8. Because those who cause climate change are ethically responsible for damages caused by them, funding for adaptation projects needed by those most vulnerable to climate change will not be generated.
9. Because no nation may ethically use as an excuse for non-action on climate change that it need not reduce its greenhouse gases to its fair share of safe global emissions until other nations act, nations will continue to inappropriately refuse to act on the basis that other nations have not acted. .
10. Because the amount of reductions that nations should achieve should be based upon principles of distributive justice and not-self interest, nations will continue to make commitments to reduce their emissions based upon self-interest rather than what is their fair share of safe global emissions.

Related Post:

• Is the global economy a Ponzi scheme?
• The most crucial missing element in U.S. media coverage of climate change: The ethical duty to reduce GHG emissions

No one can possibly undo all of the damage to climate science and individual scientists done by the diarrhea of disinformation spewing out of the anti-science crowd.   In large part that’s because of the reckless laziness of many in the status quo media, such as CBS, who prefer easy sensationalism to thoughtful journalism.

Few scientists have been more victimized than Michael Mann, Director of Pennsylvania State University’s Earth System Science Center.  Than again, few scientists have been more vindicated than Michael Mann (see “Penn State inquiry finds no evidence for allegations against Michael Mann” and below).

That’s why I feel compelled to keep doing my small part in helping to set the record straight as often as possible — and to publicize the tremendous work of others doing the same, such as the blogger Deep Climate, who has uncovered previously unknown details of just how some of the most fraudulent charges against Mann and the Hockey Stick graph were trumped up by the anti-science crowd in the first place.

Remember the question scientists are trying to answer:  Is the planet now as hot (or hotter) than it has been in a millenium?  Try two millennia (see this 2008 PNAS study, which is the source of the figure above, and this “seminal” 2009 Science study).

In the interests of not spending my time rewriting the terrific work done by others, let me urge you all to read Deep Climate, while I excerpt a very good summary by DeSmogBlog:

The purportedly independent report that Dr. Edward Wegman prepared in 2006 for the Congressional Committee on Energy and Commerce was actually a partisan set-up, according to information revealed today.

Wegman, who had presented himself as an impartial “referee” between two “teams” debating the quality of the so-called Hockey Stick graph was, in fact, coached throughout his review by Republican staffer Peter Spencer. Wegman and his colleagues also worked closely with one of the teams (and especially with retired mining stock promoter Stephen McIntyre) to try to replicate criticism of the Hockey Stick graph, while at the same time foregoing contact with the actual authors of the seminal climate reconstruction.

The Hockey Stick refers to a graph (by Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes [MBH]) [used in] the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It also became a target for Steve McIntyre and the Guelph University economist Ross McKitrick, who since 2002, at least, has been a paid spokesperson for ExxonMobil-backed think tanks such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and the Fraser Institute.

According to a detailed analysis by the blogger Deep Climate, McIntyre and McKitrick’s criticism of the Hockey Stick graph was aggressively promoted and disseminated by an echo chamber of think tanks and blogs, all of which had financial or ideological associations with fossil fuel industry funders.

Then, in 2005 … Republican Rep. and Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Joe Barton began calling for an investigation into the graph. But Barton rejected an offer from National Academy of Sciences President Ralph Ciccerone to conduct a formal and independent review in the highly professional manner typical of the nation’s foremost scientific body. Barton chose, instead, to engage a statistician (Wegman) from one of the most conservative institutions in the country (George Mason University) and to task him with setting up a team to dissect Mann’s Hockey Stick.

The result was predictable. Collaborating with McIntyre, Wegman’s team recreated and then endorsed the critical view of Michael Mann’s work. According to earlier revelations from Deep Climate, Wegman also cribbed … work from Raymond Bradley, lifting whole sections of his 1999 textbook, but periodically changing material or inserting information calculated to cast doubt on the reliability of tree-ring data (the source of the MBH  climate reconstruction). In the most outrageous example, suspiciously unattributed, Wegman’s report actually suggested that tree rings might be affected positively by automobile pollution. (”… oxides of nitrogen are formed in internal combustion engines that can be deposited as nitrates also contributing to fertilization of plant materials.”)

All this could be dismissed as typical politicking except for two things. First, because this was presented as an independent and impartial review, it is reasonable to ask whether Barton, Wegman, et al, are guilty of misleading Congress, a felony offense.

Second, the same echo chamber that promoted Steve McIntyre’s criticism of the Hockey Stick is now fully engaged accusing scientists of manipulating data to increase global concern about climate change. The manipulation of both data and public opinion are certainly evident in this story. Science has most certainly been politicized. But (thanks to Deep Climate’s careful research) the record shows that the manipulation and politicization has been bought and paid for by the energy industry and executed by a sprawling network of think tanks and blogs – and by leading Republicans and their staffers.

This is, at the very least, fodder for a Congressional investigation as to whether the Energy and Commerce Committee was, indeed, intentionally and perhaps disastrously misled.

Not really a big surprise, I suppose (see Rep. Barton: Climate change is ‘natural,’ humans should just ‘get shade’ — invites ‘expert’ TVMOB (!) to testify and ‘Smokey Joe’ Barton: Global Warming ‘Is A Net Benefit To Mankind’).

Yes, a Congressional investigation would be valuable to help set the record straight (see also this DeSmogBlog post).

Of course, the Hockey Stick graph was itself vindicated years ago in a thorough examination by a panel of the prestigious (and uber-mainstream) National Academy of Sciences (see NAS Report and here).  Indeed, the news story in the journal Nature (subs. req’d) on the NAS panel was headlined:

Academy affirms hockey-stick graph

Even more important than the fact that the original analysis was defensibly correct, is that the conclusions were correct [which could be true even if the analysis had flaws in it].  Is the planet now as hot (or hotter) than it has been in a millenium?  Try two millennia (see “Sorry deniers, hockey stick gets longer, stronger: Earth hotter now than in past 2,000 years,“ which discusses the PNAS study that is the source of the figure above ).  See also “Human-caused Arctic warming overtakes 2,000 years of natural cooling, ’seminal’ study finds,” the source of the figure below).

That’s why climatologist and one-time darling of the contrarians Ken Caldeira said last year, “To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous.”

Sadly, the ridiculous is what passes for serious analysis by the anti-science crowd and the media echo chamber — and that means long nights for those in the science blogosphere trying to set the record straight.

Another massive mid-Atlantic precipitation event, another piece of nonsense from the anti-science crowd.   Kevin Mooney of the American Spectator actually wrote an article titled, “Snowmageddon” Versus “Overwhelming Scientific Evidence,” which asserts:

This is the first time since record keeping started that two storms of such magnitude have hit the region during one winter. Already some localities are reporting the largest snowfall ever recorded.

To be sure, these events do not prove or disprove human caused global warming. But the momentum is now very much on the side of skeptical scientists who question these theories and President Obama should at least pull back from his awkward juxtapositions.

Yes, for the anti-science crowd, the kind of extreme precipitation event the mid-Atlantic states just experienced somehow weighs against the overwhelming scientific evidence for human-caused climate change — even though it is entirely consistent with the predictions of climate science (see Was the “Blizzard of 2009″ a “global warming type” of record snowfall — or an opportunity for the media to blow the extreme weather story (again)? and analysis by uber-meteorologist, Dr. Jeff Masters below).

Memo to anti-science crowd:  Precipitation isn’t temperature!

What’s particularly laughable about Mooney’s article is that according to the UAH satellite data so beloved of the anti-science crowd, the storm occurred on the warmest February 6 — and indeed, during the warmest winter — in the temperature record (data here — the orange line ending in the white box in the figure above tracks temperatures in 2010).

Capital Climate has an excellent analysis on Super Storm 2010, which finds:

The conclusion I would draw from all of this is that the 2010 storm was distinct from other similar events in the past by having moisture be the dominant element over temperature in producing the extreme snow amounts.

Hmm.  If only there were a theory to explain why we might be seeing massive amounts of moisture and extreme precipitation events….

The rest of this post is “Heavy snowfall in a warming world,” a reprint from the website of one of the best meteorologists around, Dr. Jeff Masters, former Hurricane Hunter and now Director of Meteorology for the Weather Underground:

A major new winter storm is headed east over the U.S. today, and threatens to dump a foot or more of snow on Philadelphia, New York City, and surrounding regions Tuesday and Wednesday. Philadelphia is still digging out from its second top-ten snowstorm of recorded history to hit the city this winter, and the streets are going to begin looking like canyons if this week’s snowstorm adds a significant amount of snow to the incredible 28.5″ that fell during “Snowmageddon” last Friday and Saturday. Philadelphia has had two snowstorms exceeding 23″ this winter. According to the National Climatic Data Center, the return period for a 22+ inch snow storm is once every 100 years–and we’ve had two 100-year snow storms in Philadelphia this winter. It is true that if the winter pattern of jet stream location, sea surface temperatures, etc, are suitable for a 100-year storm to form, that will increase the chances for a second such storm to occur that same year, and thus the odds have having two 100-year storms the same year are not 1 in 10,000. Still, the two huge snowstorms this winter in the Mid-Atlantic are definitely a very rare event one should see only once every few hundred years, and is something that has not occurred since modern records began in 1870. The situation is similar for Baltimore and Washington D.C. According to the National Climatic Data Center, the expected return period in the Washington D.C./Baltimore region for snowstorms with more than 16 inches of snow is about once every 25 years. This one-two punch of two major Nor’easters in one winter with 16+ inches of snow is unprecedented in the historical record for the region, which goes back to the late 1800s.

Figure 1. Cars buried in Philadelphia by “Snowmageddon”. Image credit: wunderphotographer TragicHipster.

Top 9 snowstorms on record for Philadelphia:

1. 30.7″, Jan 7-8, 1996
2. 28.5″, Feb 5-6, 2010 (Snowmageddon)
3. 23.2″, Dec 19-20, 2009 (Snowpocalypse)
4. 21.3″, Feb 11-12, 1983
5. 21.0″, Dec 25-26, 1909
6. 19.4″, Apr 3-4, 1915
7. 18.9″, Feb 12-14, 1899
8. 16.7″, Jan 22-24, 1935
9. 15.1″, Feb 28-Mar 1, 1941

The top 10 snowstorms on record for Baltimore:

1. 28.2″, Feb 15-18, 2003
2. 26.5″, Jan 27-29, 1922
3. 24.8″, Feb 5-6, 2010 (Snowmageddon)
4. 22.8″, Feb 11-12, 1983
5. 22.5″, Jan 7-8, 1996
6. 22.0″, Mar 29-30, 1942
7. 21.4″, Feb 11-14, 1899
8. 21.0″, Dec 19-20, 2009 (Snowpocalypse)
9. 20.0″, Feb 18-19, 1979
10. 16.0″, Mar 15-18, 1892

The top 10 snowstorms on record for Washington, D.C.:

1. 28.0″, Jan 27-28, 1922
2. 20.5″, Feb 11-13, 1899
3. 18.7″, Feb 18-19, 1979
4. 17.8″ Feb 5-6, 2010 (Snowmageddon)
5. 17.1″, Jan 6-8, 1996
6. 16.7″, Feb 15-18, 2003
7. 16.6″, Feb 11-12, 1983
8. 16.4″, Dec 19-20, 2009 (Snowpocalypse)
9. 14.4″, Feb 15-16, 1958
10. 14.4″, Feb 7, 1936

Heavy snow events–a contradiction to global warming theory?
Global warming skeptics regularly have a field day whenever a record snow storm pounds the U.S., claiming that such events are inconsistent with a globe that is warming. If the globe is warming, there should, on average, be fewer days when it snows, and thus fewer snow storms. However, it is possible that if climate change is simultaneously causing an increase in ratio of snowstorms with very heavy snow to storms with ordinary amounts of snow, we could actually see an increase in very heavy snowstorms in some portions of the world. There is evidence that this is happening for winter storms in the Northeast U.S.–the mighty Nor’easters like the “Snowmageddon” storm of February 5-6 and “Snowpocalypse” of December 19, 2009. Let’s take a look at the evidence. There are two requirements for a record snow storm:

1) A near-record amount of moisture in the air (or a very slow moving storm).
2) Temperatures cold enough for snow.

It’s not hard at all to get temperatures cold enough for snow in a world experiencing global warming. According to the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, the globe warmed 0.74°C (1.4°F) over the past 100 years. There will still be colder than average winters in a world that is experiencing warming, with plenty of opportunities for snow. The more difficult ingredient for producing a record snowstorm is the requirement of near-record levels of moisture. Global warming theory predicts that global precipitation will increase, and that heavy precipitation events–the ones most likely to cause flash flooding–will also increase. This occurs because as the climate warms, evaporation of moisture from the oceans increases, resulting in more water vapor in the air. According to the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, water vapor in the global atmosphere has increased by about 5% over the 20th century, and 4% since 1970. This extra moisture in the air will tend to produce heavier snowstorms, assuming it is cold enough to snow. Groisman et al. (2004) found a 14% increase in heavy (top 5%) and 20% increase in very heavy (top 1%) precipitation events in the U.S. over the past 100 years, though mainly in spring and summer. However, the authors did find a significant increase in winter heavy precipitation events have occurred in the Northeast U.S. This was echoed by Changnon et al. (2006), who found, “The temporal distribution of snowstorms exhibited wide fluctuations during 1901-2000, with downward 100-yr trends in the lower Midwest, South, and West Coast. Upward trends occurred in the upper Midwest, East, and Northeast, and the national trend for 1901-2000 was upward, corresponding to trends in strong cyclonic activity.”

The strongest cold-season storms are likely to become stronger and more frequent for the U.S.
The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) began as a presidential initiative in 1989 and was mandated by Congress in the Global Change Research Act of 1990 (P.L. 101-606), which called for “a comprehensive and integrated United States research program which will assist the Nation and the world to understand, assess, predict, and respond to human-induced and natural processes of global change.” This program has put out some excellent peer-reviewed science on climate change that, in my view, is as authoritative as the U.N.-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. In 2009, the USGCRP put out its excellent U.S. Climate Impacts Report, summarizing the observed and forecast impacts of climate change on the U.S. The report’s main conclusion about cold season storms was “ Cold-season storm tracks are shifting northward and the strongest storms are likely to become stronger and more frequent”.

The report’s more detailed analysis: “Large-scale storm systems are the dominant weather phenomenon during the cold season in the United States. Although the analysis of these storms is complicated by a relatively short length of most observational records and by the highly variable nature of strong storms, some clear patterns have emerged (Kunkel et al., 2008).

Storm tracks have shifted northward over the last 50 years as evidenced by a decrease in the frequency of storms in mid-latitude areas of the Northern Hemisphere, while high-latitude activity has increased. There is also evidence of an increase in the intensity of storms in both the mid- and high-latitude areas of the Northern Hemisphere, with greater confidence in the increases occurring in high latitudes (Kunkel et al., 2008). The northward shift is projected to continue, and strong cold season storms are likely to become stronger and more frequent, with greater wind speeds and more extreme wave heights”. The study also noted that we should expect an increase in lake-effect snowstorms over the next few decades. Lake-effect snow is produced by the strong flow of cold air across large areas of relatively warmer ice-free water. The report says, “As the climate has warmed, ice coverage on the Great Lakes has fallen. The maximum seasonal coverage of Great Lakes ice decreased at a rate of 8.4 percent per decade from 1973 through 2008, amounting to a roughly 30 percent decrease in ice coverage. This has created conditions conducive to greater evaporation of moisture and thus heavier snowstorms. Among recent extreme lake-effect snow events was a February 2007 10-day storm total of over 10 feet of snow in western New York state. Climate models suggest that lake-effect snowfalls are likely to increase over the next few decades. In the longer term, lake-effect snows are likely to decrease as temperatures continue to rise, with the precipitation then falling as rain”.

Commentary
Of course, both climate change contrarians and climate change scientists agree that no single weather event can be blamed on climate change. However, one can “load the dice” in favor of events that used to be rare–or unheard of–if the climate is changing to a new state. It is quite possible that the dice have been loaded in favor of more intense Nor’easters for the U.S. Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, thanks to the higher levels of moisture present in the air due to warmer global temperatures. It’s worth mentioning that heavy snow storms should be getting increasingly rare for the extreme southern portion of the U.S. in coming decades. There’s almost always high amounts of moisture available for a potential heavy snow in the South–just not enough cold air. With freezing temperatures expected to decrease and the jet stream and associated storm track expected to move northward, the extreme southern portion of the U.S. should see a reduction in both heavy and ordinary snow storms in the coming decades.

The CapitalClimate blog has a nice perspective on “Snowmageddon”, and Joe Romm of climateprogress.org has some interesting things to say about snowstorms in a warming climate.

References
Changnon, S.A., D. Changnon, and T.R. Karl, 2006, , “Temporal and Spatial Characteristics of Snowstorms in the Contiguous United States”, J. Appl. Meteor. Climatol., 45, 1141.1155.

Groisman, P.Y., R.W. Knight, T.R. Karl, D.R. Easterling, B. Sun, and J.H. Lawrimore, 2004, “Contemporary Changes of the Hydrological Cycle over the Contiguous United States: Trends Derived from In Situ Observations,” J. Hydrometeor., 5, 64-85.

Kunkel, K.E., P.D. Bromirski, H.E. Brooks, T. Cavazos, A.V. Douglas, D.R. Easterling, K.A. Emanuel, P.Ya. Groisman, G.J. Holland, T.R. Knutson, J.P. Kossin, P.D. Komar, D.H. Levinson, and R.L. Smith, 2008: Observed changes in weather and climate extremes. In: Weather and Climate Extremes in a Changing Climate: Regions of Focus: North America, Hawaii, Caribbean, and U.S. Pacific Islands [Karl, T.R., G.A. Meehl, C.D. Miller, S.J. Hassol, A.M. Waple, and W.L. Murray (eds.)]. Synthesis and Assessment Product 3.3. U.S. Climate Change Science Program, Washington, DC, pp. 35-80.

Jeff Masters

Defying conventional wisdom that a hardened partisan divide and looming midterm elections will prevent the type of compromises necessary for big reforms, business leaders and environmentalists are redoubling their efforts to advance an energy and climate bill in the Senate.

It’s a seemingly improbable goal, but upending that way of thinking is one of the objectives of a Capitol Hill lobbying blitz launched last week by executives from nearly 200 large and small companies. A dozen CEOs — including Shell Oil’s Marvin Odum, Duke Energy’s Jim Rogers and NRG Energy’s David Crane — are scheduled to meet with lawmakers and administration officials Tuesday.

“Comprehensive climate change legislation is not part of the liberal agenda,” said Crane, whose company operates a wide range of energy facilities that run from wind to coal to nuclear. “It’s a decidedly centrist thing. We reduce carbon emissions, and we reduce our dependence on Middle Eastern oil. Both parts of the political spectrum should come together on that.”

“Any capitalist with a pulse knows China is moving forward,” said Tad Segal, a spokesman for U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of business and environmental groups that favor reform. “We can solve a crisis at the same time we grow jobs.”

Another business coalition, called We Can Lead, which includes a mix of pro-reform businesses, is taking the campaign to the public by running television and print ads urging Congress to “move swiftly and boldly” and pass legislation.

Chu takes R&D budget request to House Science panel

Energy Secretary Steven Chu will defend his department’s hefty research and development budget request this week to House lawmakers.

The White House’s $28.4 billion fiscal 2011 budget request for the Energy Department includes an $8.75 billion nod to nondefense energy-related R&D efforts, including $5.1 billion for the Office of Science, $2.4 billion for the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, and $300 million for the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E.

Total R&D spending throughout the department would increase by 3.5 percent over fiscal 2010 appropriated levels under the White House proposal.

The administration’s spending proposal is up from $8.45 billion appropriated by Congress in fiscal 2010 and $8.47 billion in fiscal 2009. DOE research and development spending also got a $5.5 billion leg up from the stimulus bill.

President Obama said investments in clean energy and scientific research would help boost the economy.

“That’s why we build on the largest investment in clean energy in history, as well as increase investment in scientific research, so that we are fostering the industries and jobs of the future right here in America,” Obama said last week.

The House Science and Technology Committee meets Thursday to discuss the R&D budget request with Chu. The committee has jurisdiction over research and development efforts at most federal agencies.

The committee was responsible for crafting and pushing through a broad 2007 research and education bill that first authorized ARPA-E. Committee Chairman Bart Gordon (D-Tenn.) is an avid proponent of the program and is currently working to push a bill reauthorizing the agency through his committee. He will likely praise Chu for his department’s proposal to boost funding for that program, which is designed to foster high-risk, high-reward research into new energy technologies.

The fledgling program got its first funding — $15 million — in a fiscal 2009 omnibus spending bill and a $400 million boost in last year’s stimulus package. But Congress failed to appropriate any more funds in fiscal 2010, and if accepted, the funding for fiscal 2011 would be the first regular funding for the agency, which has so far awarded 37 grants of about $4 million each.

The administration’s proposal to establish another energy “innovation hub” for batteries and energy storage is another topic that lawmakers will likely broach with Chu. In the administration’s fiscal 2010 spending request, Chu laid plans for establishing eight hubs at about $30 million each that would bring together scientists from universities, national laboratories and the private sector to focus on advancing specific energy technology problems.

But Congress appropriated funds for only three of the hubs — fuels from sunlight, energy efficiency in buildings, and nuclear simulation and modeling — at $22 million each.

In its 2011 proposal, the administration is requesting a total of $107 million for the hubs: $34 million for the new batteries and energy storage hub and additional funding for each of the previously existing hubs.

“Of all the R&D programs, I personally feel very strongly about ARPA-E and the innovation hubs,” Chu said last week (E&ENews PM, Feb. 1).

But while the administration has proposed a boost for renewable and clean energy research efforts within DOE, it would cut funding for fossil energy research programs. The administration would spend $587 million on fossil energy research and development, a 13 percent decrease from the level appropriated by Congress in fiscal 2010.

Most of the proposed fossil research funding for 2011 would focus on carbon capture and sequestration for coal-fired power plants. In fact, the administration’s budget request cuts funding entirely for oil and natural gas R&D programs, including funding for a program researching the potential to extract natural gas from methane hydrates and about $50 million for an ultra-deepwater exploration program.

“We feel the oil and gas companies can take that on,” Chu said (E&E Daily, Feb. 2).

But he could face questions from lawmakers about the wisdom behind cutting funding for traditional energy research.

Last week, senators on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee raised eyebrows at the move, as well as others within the department that would hinder oil and gas companies (Greenwire, Feb. 4).

David Axelrod on cap and trade

‘If a consensus can be reached, we want to support that.’

U.N. climate panel reviews Dutch sea level glitch

The U.N.’s panel of climate experts said on Friday it was reviewing whether it wrongly said that more than half of the Netherlands is below sea level in a new glitch after exaggerating the thaw of Himalayan glaciers

We are looking into it,” said Brenda Abrar-Milani, a spokeswoman for the Geneva-based Secretariat of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

A 2007 report stretching to about 3,000 pages includes the sentence that “the Netherlands is an example of a country highly susceptible to both sea-level rise and river flooding because 55 percent of its territory is below sea level.”

Water at core of climate change impacts

The main impact of climate change will be on water supplies and the world needs to learn from past cooperation such as over the Indus or Mekong Rivers to help avert future conflicts, experts said on Sunday.

Desertification, flash floods, melting glaciers, heatwaves, cyclones or water-borne diseases such as cholera are among the impacts of global warming inextricably tied to water. And competition for supplies might cause conflicts.

“The main manifestations of rising temperatures…are about water,” said Zafar Adeel, chair of UN-Water which coordinates work on water among 26 U.N. agencies.

“It has an impact on all parts of our life as a society, on natural systems, habitats,” he told Reuters in a telephone interview. Disruptions may threaten farming or fresh water supplies from Africa to the Middle East.

Ice core research could back climate change claims

A 750-year-old core of ice showing a link between increased snow over Antarctica and drought in south-west Western Australia could provide evidence that the climate is changing because of human activity.

Dr Tas van Ommen, from the Australian Antarctic Division, has studied the ice core taken from from Law Dome in eastern Antarctica.

His research shows that rainfall over south-west Western Australia has decreased between 15 and 20 per cent since the 1960s, while snowfall at Law Dome has increased 10 per cent over the same period.

Dr van Ommen says this suggests there’s been a change in atmospheric circulation patterns off southern Australia.

In a statement, he says that change doesn’t appear to be a natural event, and may in fact be caused by human activities that have reduced ozone and increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The research is published today in the international scientific journal Nature Geoscience.

“Historians will puzzle over the fact that Barack Obama, the best communicator of his generation, totally lost control of the narrative in his first year in office and allowed people to view something they had voted for as something they suddenly didn’t want,” says Jim Morone, America’s leading political scientist on healthcare reform. “Communication was the one thing everyone thought Obama would be able to master.”

So writes Financial Times Washington Bureau Chief Edward Luce.

I’m doing a multipart series on progressive messaging, since the failure of that messaging is the second-most important reason we are not going to get a strong enough climate bill this year (assuming the conventional wisdom is wrong and we get one at all).  Of course, the most important reason, by far, remains the self-destructive demagoguing and obstinacy of anti-science, pro-polluter ideologues.

The failure to advance a narrative (frame or extended metaphor) has been a disaster (see Part 1 and Part 2).  It’s worth understanding why that happened.

According to Steve Clemons writing in TPM, “Core Chicago Team Sinking Obama Presidencym,” this Luce piece is the definitive analysis of what went wrong in the WH:

It’s a vital article — a brave one — that includes “dozens of interviews with his closest allies and friends in Washington.”

Most are unnamed because the consequences of retribution from this powerful foursome can be severe in an access-dependent town. John Podesta, president of the powerful, administration-tilting Center for American Progress, had the temerity and self-confidence to put his thoughts publicly on the record.

Note to Clemons/TPM:  CAP isn’t “administration-tilting.”  CAP is progressive-tilting and if other folks start tilting in CAP’s direction, well, I suppose, that makes it doubly look like we’re tilting toward them.  Most of the media, however, typically call CAP “left-leaning” or something like that.

John Podesta, a former chief of staff to Bill Clinton and founder of the Center for American Progress, the most influential think-tank in Mr Obama’s Washington, says that while he believes Mr Obama does hear a range of views, including dissenting advice, problems can arise from the narrow composition of the group itself….

“Clearly this kind of core management approach worked for the election campaign and President Obama has extended it to the White House,” says Mr Podesta, who managed Mr Obama’s widely praised post-election transition. “It is a very tight inner circle and that has its advantages. But I would like to see the president make more use of other people in his administration, particularly his cabinet.”

I can’t imagine a successful organization or messaging operation that is so insular as the WH appears to be.

Winning efforts need a lot of feedback as quickly as possible since the world and especially the political world simply change too fast and are too complex to operate successfully as a closed system.  I thought that was well understood, but apparently not, so I may do a blog post on it later, since I have written about that a great deal in earlier books of mine.

For now, if you want some of the best analysis of how the WH has mismanaged itself into this mess, start with Clemons and Luce.

Related Post:

• Is progressive messaging a “massive botch”?  Part 3: How bad messaging creates a self-fulfillling failure of will.

Radioactive tritium, a carcinogen discovered in potentially dangerous levels in groundwater at the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant, now taints at least 27 of the nation’s 104 nuclear reactors — raising concerns about how it is escaping from the aging nuclear plants.

Just something to add to all of the “benefits” of going nuke (see “Intro to nuclear power“).  At the very least, this should put up yet another warning flag on the rush to build dozens of new nukes.

The AP story suggests that the original plant designs were inadequate from the perspective of public safety:

The leaks — many from deteriorating underground pipes — come as the nuclear industry is seeking and obtaining federal license renewals, casting itself as a clean-green alternative to power plants that burn fossil fuels.

Tritium, found in nature in tiny amounts and a product of nuclear fusion, has been linked to cancer if ingested, inhaled or absorbed through the skin in large amounts.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Monday that new tests at a monitoring well on Vermont Yankee’s site in Vernon registered 70,500 picocuries per liter, more than three times the federal safety standard of 20,000 picocuries per liter.

That is the highest reading yet at the Vermont Yankee plant, where the original discovery last month drew sharp criticism by Gov. Jim Douglas and others….

Vermont Yankee is just the latest of dozens of U.S. nuclear plants, many built in the 1960s and ’70s, to be found with leaking tritium.

The Braidwood nuclear station in Illinois was found in the 1990s to be leaking millions of gallons of tritium-laced water, some of which contaminated residential water wells. Plant owner Exelon Corp. ended up paying for a new municipal water system.

After Braidwood, the nuclear industry stepped up voluntary checking for tritium in groundwater at plants around the country, testing that revealed the Vermont Yankee problem, plant officials said.

In New Jersey last year, tritium was reported leaking a second time from the Oyster Creek plant in Ocean County, just days after Exelon won NRC approval for a 20-year license extension there. The Pilgrim plant in Plymouth, Mass., like Vermont Yankee, owned by Entergy, reported low levels of tritium on the ground in 2007. The Vermont leak has prompted a Plymouth-area citizens group to demand more test wells at the Massachusetts plant.

NRC spokesman Neil Sheehan says leaks have occurred at least 27 of the nation’s 104 commercial reactors at 65 plant sites. He said the list likely does not include every plant where tritium has leaked.

The leaks have several causes; underground pipes corroding and the leaking of spent fuel storage pools are the most common. The source of the leak or leaks at Vermont Yankee has not been found; at Oyster Creek, corroded underground pipes were implicated.

This is certainly not a fatal flaw in the prospects for new nukes, but does make clear that nuclear plants have not been adequatly designed for their entire projected lifetime.  And that means new nukes are probably going to cost even more than currently projected, which is already a staggering high:

• Nuclear Bombshell: $26 Billion cost — $10,800 per kilowatt! — killed Ontario nuclear bid
• Turkey’s only bidder for first nuclear plant offers a price of 21 cents per kilowatt-hour
• Areva has acknowledged that the cost of a new reactor today would be as much as 6 billion euros, or $8 billion, double the price offered to the Finns.
• What do you get when you buy a nuke? You get a lot of delays and rate increases….

It also means we need more oversight — not further expedited licensing — since this incident clearly shows the industry cannot be trusted to be fully honest with the public

Officials of the New Orleans-based Entergy Corp., which owns the plant in Vernon in Vermont’s southeast corner, have admitted misleading state regulators and lawmakers by saying the plant did not have the kind of underground pipes that could leak tritium into groundwater.

“What has happened at Vermont Yankee is a breach of trust that cannot be tolerated,” said Republican Gov. Jim Douglas, who until now has been a strong supporter of the state’s lone nuclear plant.

Q:  Should people worry about tritium in their water?

Tritium, found in nature in tiny amounts and a product of nuclear fusion, has been linked to cancer if ingested, inhaled or absorbed through the skin in large amounts….

Many radiological health scientists agree with the Environmental Protection Agency that tritium, like other radioactive isotopes, can cause cancer…..

There’s disagreement on the severity of the risk.

“Somebody would have to be drinking a lot of water and it would have to be really concentrated in there for it to do any harm at all,” said Jacqueline Williams, a radiation biologist at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York state.

But in 2005, the National Academy of Sciences concluded after an exhaustive study that even the tiniest amount of ionizing radiation increases the risk of cancer.

“The scientific research base shows that there is no threshold of exposure below which low levels of ionizing radiation can be demonstrated to be harmless or beneficial,” Richard R. Monson, associate dean for professional education and professor of epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health, said when the NAS released its study.

A:  People should worry about it enough to make sure that their nuclear plants aren’t leaking!  And this goes double for any plant that is trying to extend its life, as most are:

Vermont, with a strong anti-nuclear movement, is the only state in the country where the Legislature decides whether to relicense a nuclear plant. Vermont Yankee’s current 40-year license is up in 2012, and Entergy is asking for 20 more years.

We do have better, cheaper, faster, safer options for low-carbon power (see “An introduction to the core climate solutions“).

Related Posts:

• Exclusive analysis, Part 1: The staggering cost of new nuclear power
• The Self-Limiting Future of Nuclear Power
• Nuclear Pork — Enough is Enough
• Nuclear power, Part 2: The price is not right
• Nukes, Part 1.5: Nuclear Bomb
• How much of a subsidy is the Price-Anderson Nuclear Industry Indemnity Act?
• Nuclear storage at Yucca jumps 38% — to $96B
• Power plants costs double since 2000 — Efficiency anyone?