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April 12, 2012, 12:00 pm

On Astronauts, NASA, and Climate Concerns

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

1:08 p.m. | Updated below with NASA statement |
The folks whose mission or job is to amplify doubt about the significance of greenhouse gases have made much of a recent letter from 49 former NASA astronauts, engineers, scientists and others to the agency’s administrator, Charles Bolden, Jr.

The letter, widely cast as signifying a “rebellion,” complains about the agency’s “unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change.” A clear focus is the research center run by the agency’s star climatologist, James E. Hansen, who has variously been hailed and attacked for becoming a prominent campaigner against coal and oil use.

So is this a rebellion? Read on for my views and those of a fine Houston-based science writer as well as Russell Schweickart, an Apollo-era astronaut who epitomizes the right stuff and offers what I consider a near-perfect view of this episode. Read more…

March 30, 2012, 3:23 pm

A Republican Meteorologist Tries to Remove Liberal Label from Climate Concern

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

March 31, 11:18 p.m. | Updated below |
I encourage you to pop over to Shawn Otto’s blog below and read “A Message from a Republican Meteorologist on Climate Change,” a guest post in which Paul Douglas, an experienced meteorologist, energy entrepreneur and founder of the Web site Weather Nation, explains that acknowledging evidence of a growing human influence on climate “doesn’t make you a liberal.” (Hat tip to Climate Progress.) Here’s the opening section and link: Read more…

January 5, 2012, 3:25 pm

Still Searching for Republicans With Climate Concerns

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

The Climate Desk, a collaborative journalism project of Mother Jones and several other publications, has produced a video searching in vain for a Republican presidential candidate willing to make any science-based statements on climate.

The punchy piece largely supports the conclusion of various analysts that global warming has matured as a litmus-test issue for conservatives, right up there with gun rights. In essence, you can’t be a Republican and be for action of any kind to stem greenhouse gases. (The inverse does not appear true for liberals. President Obama has certainly demonstrated of late that you can be a liberal, at least on social and fiscal issues, and be mute on what I last year called “the C word.”)

Toward the end of the video you hear from a truly rare species, a New Hampshire conservative who sees climate change as important.

Then comes Kerry Emanuel, a climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who’s been studying possible impacts of greenhouse warming on tropical storms for decades – and who has lately been vocal about his longtime affiliation with the Republican Party.

“Responsibility is a big Republican theme,” Emanuel says. “Why should they not take responsibility for what we collectively are doing to the climate system?”

Oddly, the marching orders for Republican presidential candidates appear to be out of sync with attitudes of most members of their party, outside a small fringe that is obstructionist on anything smacking of an energy policy. This makes the field of candidates deserving of the 2011 Climate B.S. Award (B.S. for “bad science”) that they received today from the environmental analyst and blogger Peter Gleick.

I’m sure Marc Morano of Climate Depot will be able to keep collating, and taking credit for, Republican statements of climate doubt at least through the end of the primary season.

Perhaps once the silly season is over, and the surviving candidate starts seeking broader support, climate-smart energy policies could be mentionable once more. Until then there remains a “fundamental Republican science problem.”

November 21, 2011, 2:32 pm

Kicking Cans, Budget Woes and Other Risks Down the Road

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

11:26 p.m. | Updated below |
The failure of Congress to take meaningful steps on debt and taxes, yet again, is reminiscent of society’s treatment of other looming risks.

The automatic budget cuts, which don’t take effect until 2013, are by no means guaranteed and, of course, the structural issues in the budget remain unaddressed.

[6:42 p.m. | Insert | Isabell Sawhill of the Brookings Institution has produced an excellent breakdown of what's at stake with non-defense spending if the automatic cuts play out (found via Brad Plumer on Ezra Klein's Wonkblog).]

What other looming risks are being largely unaddressed? Read more…

November 11, 2011, 3:28 pm

Dot Connection: From Palestinian Politics to Tsunami Warnings

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

You may have followed developments as the United States pulled its funding for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, known as Unesco, after the organization voted to make Palestine its 195th full member on Oct. 31. United States laws dating from the 1990s require an automatic cutoff of American funds under such a circumstance. On Thursday, the organization announced big budget cuts. Why is this relevant to Dot Earth?

Whatever your view of the situation (mine is below), the vote and resulting funding cuts will have substantial ramifications for important programs aimed at limiting risks to vulnerable populations in hazard zones. Oakley Brooks, a journalist whose focus is the Pacific Rim and who wrote “Tsunami Alert: Beating Asia’s Next Big One,” told me about one long-distance link between Palestinian geopolitics and Asian geophysical threats. I invited him to send a “Your Dot” contribution describing the connections: Read more…

October 18, 2011, 12:23 pm

More On Climate and Energy Procrastination

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Here are three reactions to my post about Machiavelli’s view of the impediments to making big changes in societies — as in the asymmetrical nature of the battle to take the carbon out of energy systems in the face of both societal inertia and intensive efforts by entrenched interests to maintain the status quo. The first two remarks came in a group e-mail exchange and so relate to each other.

Eugene Linden, a seasoned explorer of environmental change and author, most recently, of “The Ragged Edge of the World” :

A long departed cousin, a neurologist, coined the term “ignostic” to describe the mindset that ignores the evidence of disaster until calamity is unavoidable. Dating back to Hammurabi (who reportedly instituted the death penalty for cutting cedars when the impact of deforestation had become irreversible), societies have been slamming shut barn doors long after the cows have fled.

You’d think we’d be different, but we’re not. Targeted vested interests have sway over the levers of power, and, demonstrably, an emotionally powerful message that taps into American resentments and fears.

Riley Dunlap, whose sociological analysis of environmental policy disputes was recently explored here: Read more…

October 16, 2011, 11:12 am

Machiavelli and Humanity’s Lukewarm Response to Warming

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

After I wrote on the hidden factor behind the lopsidedness of the climate-energy policy fight (the inertia in a society and economy deeply reliant on fossil fuels), Paul Birkeland of Seattle posted an apt quotation from Niccolo Machiavelli:

It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order, this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favor; and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it. ["The Prince"]

What makes the climate predicament even tougher is the uneven nature of human development, and the reality that nearly all of the growth in emissions of greenhouse gases is coming from a near-inevitable burst of fossil fuel combustion in fast-growing developing countries. Machiavelli’s view of the sources of inertia was framed around a single society at a particular stage of economic evolution. “Beyond super wicked,” indeed.

This is why I focus on boosting societies’ innovative and adaptive capacity and building a “knowosphere” so ideas can be shaped and shared worldwide. I don’t begrudge others taking different approaches (although a fresh round of name-calling seems less than productive).

Still, this challenge is big enough that it’ll require all kinds of experimentation.

As I said in my Bloggingheads.tv chat with David Roberts of Grist, when he asked what I say to young people:

The key thing is to get engaged. We live at the most exciting moment I can think of in the history of the human species. And if you’re a communitarian and you go sit down in the street in Wall Street or you’re a libertarian and you want to invent the next great gadget beyond Steve Jobs that makes the world a better place…get out there.

September 19, 2011, 12:18 pm

Cosmic Breitbart Climate Blunder

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Sept. 22, 6:45 p.m. | Updated below |
Earlier this month, I noticed a glaring error in an astonishingly distorted Sept. 6 piece on climate, clouds and cosmic rays on Andrew Breitbart‘s Big Government blog. There’s been plenty of overheated gushing on this subject by climate naysayers in recent weeks, triggered by an important, but heavily over-interpreted, experiment. But this piece stands out.

The author, Chriss W. Street, a self-described “nationally recognized financial writer,” led the piece with this breathless pair of sentences:

Nature Journal of Science, ranked as the world’s most cited scientific periodical, has just published the definitive study on Global Warming that proves the dominant controller of temperatures in the Earth’s atmosphere is due to galactic cosmic rays and the sun, rather than by man. One of the report’s authors, Professor Jyrki Kauppinen, summed up his conclusions regarding the potential for man-made Global Warming: “I think it is such a blatant falsification.”

The glaring problem, amid many broader problems, was that Jyrki Kauppinen is not one of the paper’s 63 authors, as I noted in an item I submitted to Mediabugs, a Web site devoted to correcting errors in media reports of all kinds.

This Big Government glitch is particularly notable given that on August 29, the main Breitbart news blog ran a wire story in which one of the paper’s actual authors explained the tentative nature of the results this way:

“Anyone who believes that we see an enhancement of clouds through cosmic rays is moving too fast,” Urs Baltensperger, head of atmospheric chemistry at the Paul Scherrer Institut in Villigen, Switzerland, said.

Mark Follman, one of the founders of Mediabugs, wrote a piece for Mother Jones this morning with more background on the cosmic ray post, noting that repeated attempts to correct the error, so far, have been met by silence.

Follman asked me to offer my deconstruction of this kind of distorting opportunism. Here’s the relevant section of his post:

According to Revkin, the Big Government piece is a classic example of what could be called “single-study syndrome,” which tends to turn up whenever a political agenda is threatened or supported by a specific line of scientific inquiry. “Some new finding, however tentative, gets highlighted while the broader suite of research on a tough subject is downplayed or ignored,” Revkin told me in an email. “And few questions are tougher than clarifying the role of clouds in climate change.” The appetite for headline-grabbing conclusions, he said, gives rise to fast-and-loose science coverage that torques public discourse until it’s mainly hyperbole.

I also noted that the media more generally, through the eternal quest for the “front-page thought,” amplify this process.

It’s no wonder that, despite occasional shifts in polls and deeply polarized small factions at the edges of climate discourse (nourished by this kind of material), the public largely remains disengaged on the issue.

Sept. 22, 6:34 p.m. | Updates |

Big Government finally responded to Mediabug with an amusing note added to its piece acknowledging what it termed a “minor citation error.”

Single-study syndrome, which I’ve criticized when it afflicts the green end of the climate spectrum, is in fine form on the fossil side, as well. Note the celebratory cosmic certainty of Larry Bell, James “It’s the Sun, Stupid” Delingpole and Lawrence Solomon.

September 14, 2011, 11:17 pm

Scientists With Different Politics Speak With One Voice on Climate

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

I encourage you to read a Miami Herald Op-Ed article written by Kerry Emanuel, a veteran climate and hurricane researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Peter C. Frumhoff, an ecologist who directs science and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The core theme is simple enough:

One of us is a Republican [Emanuel], the other a Democrat. We hold different views on many issues. But as scientists, we share a deep conviction that leaders of both parties must speak to the reality and risks of human-caused climate change, and commit themselves to finding bipartisan solutions.

The piece takes several Republican presidential candidates to task for rejecting science pointing to a growing risk from unabated greenhouse-gas emissions but also criticizes President Obama for ducking and covering on climate. Give it a read and weigh in.

Emanuel weighed in on his conservatism and climate concerns on Science Friday awhile back, as well.

Richard Alley, a masterful climate scientist and communicator and author at Pennsylvania State University, is also a Republican with climate concerns.

September 14, 2011, 1:16 pm

Separating Issues from Myths in Obama’s Solyndra Situation

By ANDREW C. REVKIN

Brad Plumer of the Washington Post has filed a really nice, tight deconstruction of five myths being propagated in the wake of the failure of Solyndra, a solar company that received more than $500 million in fast-tracked loan guarantees from the Department of Energy and became a photo opp for President Obama last year. (A House committee held a hearing on the company and the administration this morning.)

Here are the myths inspected by Plumer. I’m not a fan of purloining page views, so I’ll only include Plumer’s assessment of the first one and encourage you to read the rest on his blog, then return here to consider next steps:

1) This scandal is no big deal. Read more…