Tag: climate change

Crossposted at Daily Kos

    Call it “Pollution denying”, or “Reality Denying”, it’s all the same to the Professional Liars who are Senate Republicans.

    In a touchdown celebration of “told you so” that is the equivalent of blowing your ACL while dancing after a homerun that went foul, Inhofe proceeds to insult the esteemed Senator from California, Barbara Boxer, by saying “We Won, You Lost, Get a Life.”

    This is what a stupid dick does, he gloats. The fact that he is dead wrong and corrupt just makes it worse.

    Except climate change is FACT, you didn’t win and you’re a stupid towel, James InhoFAIL.

    A transcript and more below the fold.

Recently, world leaders announced some deeply disturbing news: they gave up on reaching a binding climate deal at the upcoming Copenhagen conference. [1]

A major impediment was the refusal of President Obama and Congress to enact tough cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

We've got to turn that around. Immediately.

Tell Obama and Congress to commit to a 40% reduction in greenhouse gases below 1990 levels by 2020.

Right now, the most ambitious target that Obama has endorsed is a 3.5% reduction in emissions by 2020. [2]

That's pathetic, compared to the 25-40% reduction that we need to have a 50:50 chance of avoiding disastrous runaway global heating, according to the International Panel on Climate Change. [3]

The United States ought to lead by example. We can do it with strong emission reductions.

Tell Obama and your Members of Congress to commit to tough emissions reductions today.

Earlier this year, columnist George Will sparked controversy with claims that global ice levels were the same as (if not greater than) 30 years earlier. This was part of George Will’s retread truthiness and deception in his widely syndicated columns falsely asserting that global warming is not happening.

Recent news from the Arctic makes me wonder whether George will revisit the topic from a somewhat different angle.

There are many, many serious problems out there.

And, there are real opportunities to be had from taking on those challenges in smart ways…

Sadly, too much attention is given to those who deceive about the challenges and distort the implications of the options before us.

Best-seller lists, the air waves, oped pages, and blog posts have been filled with Steven Levitt’s and Steven Dubner’s shallow, truthiness-laden Superfreakonomics.   The continued attention feeds on itself, as ignoring the deceptions and  the mediocre interviews booked due to the authors’ Super(freaky)star status has the problem of giving it credence due to non-truthful truthiness and misleading mediocrity on the critical issue of climate change science and other issues. There essentially innumerable works more worthy of our attention and engagement, even if we constrain ourselves simply to books also published in 2009.

Thus, after the fold, ten books published this year that are more worthy of your time and money that the shallow distortions from the Super Freaky Economists of Superfreakonomics.

Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd spoke at the Lowy Institute. Entitled Check Against Delivery, this is one of the strongest statements seen from a Head of Government of a ‘developed’ nation on climate change and, more specifically, contains very strong denunciation of those deniers and delayers and self-proclaimed “skeptics” who are obstructing movement to mitigate climate change in Australia … and, even more so, the United States.

The full speech is highly (HIGHLY) recommended reading.  This is one of those cases where each read drives one to differing ideas as to which part to quote, which item merits the most attention.

But, as is sometimes best, let us start with the end and what might be termed as a beginning toward strong governmental confrontation of those so ready to mislead and deceive:

My message to the climate change skeptics, to the big betters and the big risk takers is this:

You are betting our children’s future and the future of our grandchildren.

You are betting our jobs, our houses, our farms, our reefs, our economy and our future on an intuition – on a gut feeling; on a political prejudice you have about science.

That is too big a risk, too radical a departure from the basic conservative principles of public policy.

Malcolm, Barnaby, Andrew, Janet – stop gambling with our future.

You’ve got to know when to fold ’em – and for the skeptics, that time has come.

The Government I lead will act.

Rudd has chosen a quite direct challenge to those fighting against action, ready and willing to disseminate falsehoods and deception in their efforts to guard their current fiscal and other interests even at the cost of creating grave risks for all humanity.

Professor Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, Louis Block Professor in the Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago Geosciences, has published An Open Letter to Steven Levitt, the nation’s Super Freakiest Economist.  To put it simply, Pierrehumbert owns Levitt.

By now there have been many detailed dissections of everything that is wrong with the treatment of climate in Superfreakonomics , but what has been lost amidst all that extensive discussion is how really simple it would have been to get this stuff right. The problem wasn’t necessarily that you talked to the wrong experts or talked to too few of them. The problem was that you failed to do the most elementary thinking needed to see if what they were saying (or what you thought they were saying) in fact made any sense. If you were stupid, it wouldn’t be so bad to have messed up such elementary reasoning, but I don’t by any means think you are stupid. That makes the failure to do the thinking all the more disappointing.

Pierrehumbert then takes one specific point from the chapter to highlight this “failure to do the thinking”.  Pierrehumbert’s examination of the issue of whether solar cells’ low albedo (high absorption of solar energy & thus heat) makes it senseless to pursue solar power provides a tour de force examination of the basics of research (using the web) and how Levitt seems to have totally flubbed.

The point here is that really simple arithmetic, which you could not be bothered to do, would have been enough to tell you that the claim that the blackness of solar cells makes solar energy pointless is complete and utter nonsense. I don’t think you would have accepted such laziness and sloppiness in a term paper from one of your students, so why do you accept it from yourself? What does the failure to do such basic thinking with numbers say about the extent to which anything you write can be trusted? How do you think it reflects on the profession of economics when a member of that profession – somebody who that profession seems to esteem highly – publicly and noisily shows that he cannot be bothered to do simple arithmetic and elementary background reading. Not even for a subject of such paramount importance as global warming.

Rather than seeking to summarize or crib his work, let me simply emphasize that Pierrehumbert’s discussion is highly recommended reading — for the substance and style.

Gary Ruskin | Green Change | 11.05.2009

It's easy to lie with statistics. Politicians do it every day. Climate change is the latest example.

Look at the leading climate change bills in Congress. The main Senate bill — approved today by the Environment and Public Works Committee — proposes a 20% target for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions over 2005 levels by 2020. The bill passed by the House of Representatives sets a 17% target for greenhouse gas emissions cuts over 2005 levels by 2020.

Sounds good. Except it's not.

Here's the trick the Democrats are playing on you. They're moving the goalposts.

Most of the world — 184 nations — have ratified the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. Those nations follow the Protocol's use of 1990 as a base year for calculating emissions reductions. The United States didn't ratify the treaty, so our politicians use whatever base year makes them look good. Let's see how this works in practice.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has called for a 25-40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, over 1990 levels – not 2005 levels.

When you use the standard baseline — 1990, not 2005 — to evaluate congressional emissions reductions targets, suddenly they look very small. Which they are.

That's the key fact that President Obama and the Democrats are trying to hide.

The House bill would only cut 3.5%, and the Senate bill only 7%, over 1990 levels, by 2020.

That's not even close to the 25-40% that the world's leading climate scientists think we need to cut by 2020.

Last week, Europe offered a 30% cut.

It's time for the United States to lead by example on climate change.

Tell your Members of Congress to play it safe with our climate. Tell them to support a 40% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, compared to 1990 levels.

Just over the weekend, my inbox was filled with a discussion attacking climate science with assertions that “none of the models predicted the current cooling period” and, therefore, the entire concept of Global Warming rests on very shaky grounds.

Sigh …

Those involved in that discussion have now received links to an excellent article by AP science reporter Seth Borenstein.  That article, Impact: Statisticians reject global cooling, merits praise because it is an excellent of inventive investigative journalism on a very public issue.

Freaknomics was a great read. Interesting and provoking writing, underlining the value of taking commonly understood items, shaking the data, and seeing whether the common understandings could hold up to the light of day.  Even with its problems, you didn’t need to agree with it to gain from reading and thinking about it.

As an ‘analyst’ who values that sort of provocative challenge and who values windows to thinking in different ways, it came as welcome news that a follow-on book would come out this fall.

Sadly, however, this is one of those cases where the sequel isn’t just a disappointment but does a serious disservice to its predecessor.

As Stephen Levitt summarized his and Stephen Dubner’s follow-on book, “SuperFreakonomics, available this October, includes brand new research on topics from terrorism to prostitution to global warming.”

Superfreakonomics came out today and we’d all be better off if it just hadn’t …