Congress Hears From Muzzled Scientists

BendingSpoons writes "More than 120 scientists across seven federal agencies have been pressured to remove the phrases 'global warming' and 'climate change' from various documents. The documents include press releases and, more importantly, communications with Congress. Evidence of this sort of political interference has been largely anecdotal to date, but is now detailed in a new report by the Union of Concerned Scientists. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee held hearings on this issue Tuesday; the hearing began by Committee members, including most Republicans, stating that global warming is happening and greenhouse gas emissions from human activity are largely to blame. The OGR hearings presage a landmark moment in climate change research: the release of the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC report, drafted by 1,250 scientists and reviewed by an additional 2,500 scientists, is expected to state that 'there is a 90% chance humans are responsible for climate change' — up from the 2001 report's 66% chance. It probably won't make for comfortable bedtime reading; 'The future is bleak', said scientists."

Comments

Is this the U-turn?

[Nuffsaid]

This moment could be remebered as "The day the biggest CO2 producer nation in the world acknowledged a reality it ignored for years". Let's hope it's not too late to prevent irreversible runaway effects. For what it's worth, one day or another I'd like to hear some contrite words from people who stubbornly denied the need for any action about Global Warming up to now. A bit late, a bit useless, but should be an obligation for someone who may have contributed to bring the world beyond a point of no return.

Please explain Republican attitudes toward this

[sdo1]

This isn't a judgement... more of a curiosity. I don't understand why "conservative Republicans" are so determined to deny that global warming is happening. It's fairly pervasive, or at least seems to to me. I can't tell if it's just people towing the party line and that line comes from the top, or if there's some aspect of religious doctrination that forces this attitude, or something else.

Case in point, I have relatives who are conservatives. I can't say all of them say this, but I'm surprised at the numbers who believe that global warming is a bunch of bull. I was listening to an NPR Technology podcast about this and a guy called in, identified himself as a conservative Republican, and proceded to state that he didn't believe global warming was happening.

I don't get why the skeptisism is drawn by party lines. What am I missing? Is it as simple as the top Republican leadership protecting oil interests and everyone else just follows along, or is there a deeper, more historical context that I'm unaware of?

-S

Re:Please explain Republican attitudes toward this

[gnurfed]

From conversations I've had with "conservative republicans", I've mostly gotten variations of the following non-exhaustive list of answers:

• "(a) Al Gore believes in global warming. (b) Al Gore is a liberal. Thus global warming is a liberal conspiracy"
• "Today it's cold where I live, hence global warming is a fraud"
• "There's a non-zero chance that humanity isn't causing global warming, so we shouldn't worry"
• "I like warm weather, so I don't care"
• "Climatologists are just fishing for more grants, which they want to steal out of my pockets"
• "They can't predict the weather next week, so they sure as hell can't predict how it will be 50 years from now"
• "The Apocalypse will happen before, or is related to global warming, so everything is alright"

The scary thing is that most of the conservatives I know are otherwise quite science-literate and often accept the science communities consensus views. I'd say it's very healthy to be sceptical, but on this issue there's much more to it. Something I can't explain.

Re:Please explain Republican attitudes toward this

[ThousandStars]

3.The alternatives are hardly tenable at this point:

a. Mass transport: Due to the size, shape, and demographic dispersion it is untenable for the majority of American metropolis'.

b. Buy everyone new electric cars. For one, manufacturing all those new cars just uses more energy and produces more emissions. So people proposing that are asinine at best.

[...etc...]

This is actually a relatively easy problem to solve, or at least improve, and many Republicans even agree with the solution: Pigou taxes. To explain simply, this means imposing a tax on gas or oil because the negative externality oil imposes in both environmental and foreign policy terms. When the price of something goes up, the consumption of it goes down; such a tax would certainly improve the situation WRT a-c, although d and e might require other solutions.

It's a fairly neat policy that requires no convoluted, mangled regulations; it could replace broken CAFE standards that drove people to SUVs in the first place; it also has the benefit of denying oil revenues to despotic regimes in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Russia.

Re:Please explain Republican attitudes toward this

[khallow]

Never been to NYC, I guess. Millions of people every day use mass transit. A large percentage of city dwellers have no car. Every American metropolis has some mass trasport. As roads become too crowded they are forced to provide more mass transit for immediately practical purposes. Your argument is simply false.

Note that the original poster qualified his statement with "most metropolises". New York City is unusual for a US city in its density of buildings and population. I have no doubt that he already knew of NYC when he posted.

Electric cars have less parts and are less complex. On a large scale and as technology progresses we will use far less energy to produce them. Your argument ignores progress over time.

Both you and the prior poster have unsubstantiated opinions on this. I don't see a reason that an electric car has to be either simpler or more complex than one with an internal combustion engine. And given the add-ons like power windows, computers, etc, it's not clear to me that the two will be simple to compare in complexity or that the difference between electric and gas powered is a significant difference in complexity compared to all the other stuff that gets put on a car.

See China. Not everyone needs to bike or walk, but easily half of the population can as they live in dense areas. You assume this argument is black and white. But if just the SUV drivers in metropolitan areas switched to bikes we'd have less traffic and save a lot of energy.

There are a lot of areas where it is black and white. In a pretty dense environment like NYC, public transportation makes sense and road travel does not due to the cost of finding a place to park. A spread out city like Sacramento, CA, for example, just doesn't have competitive public transportation and bikes are risky in the urban areas. Nothing beats the car there. There is a lot more population living in cities like Sacramento than NYC.

First, protecting the environment isn't about making your money back. It's about having a habitable planet for our kids. Second, you ignore technological progress over time. Every year solar is getting more efficient.

We have other goals than just "protecting the environment". Ending poverty, quality of life, progress come to mind. I see a lot of modern environmentalism undermining these other goals rather than supporting them. And the economic viability of a plan is relevant since economically inefficient plans take more resources from elsewhere and weaken our ability to accomplish these other goals.

Outside of a full-blown nuclear war, there will be a habitable planet for our kids. Global warming isn't moving that fast and no other global threat is that significant. I don't see any nearby tipping points either. Methyl clathrate deposits on the continental shelves, the most substantial bogeyman, have around an extra 100 meters of water on them from the end of the last ice age. The extra pressure from that will counter a lot of temperature increase IMHO before they become unstable and release methane into the atmosphere.

Your point about solar power increasing in efficiency is important. We have both solar cells that are getting very efficient at absorbing solar energy and solar cells that take relatively little energy to produce per KW of generating power. I still see some presence for fossil fuels in electricity generation for a while due to the need for stable power around the clock (energy/electricity storage isn't very good), but that can be replaced easily with nuclear power. But long term it won't make sense to burn fossil fuels for energy or transportation even if global warming turns out to be a minor issue.

By your logic we shouldn't have telephones because it's a lot of work to put up the wires. And we shouldn't have electricity because the up-front cost to build the initial generators is so high. All of your points are narrow. They ignore the big picture, ignore some very important details, assume everything i

The joke is...

[TransEurope]

that it's primary irrelevenat that humans are responsible for
global warming or not. Even when not, the politicians have to do something.
The reactions may be different in the two cases, but something has to be done do be
prepared. But have you ever heard that a politician said "hey, it's not us,
but we have to cut down CO2-emissions, reduce the pollution and restructure
the coasts to prevent the biggest desasters in the future"?

Run a NASA Climate Model on your laptop

[HoneyBeeSpace]

If you'd like to do some of the same experiments that these scientists do, the EdGCM project has wrapped a NASA global climate model (GCM) in a GUI (OS X and Win). You can add CO2 or turn the sun down by a few percent all with a checkbox and a slider. Supercomputers and advanced FORTRAN programmers are no longer necessary to run your own GCM.

For example, our model shows increased snowfall on Greenland (a common skeptic retaliation). This does not mean global warming is not happening, but rather what was predicted: Warmer air can hold more moisture, so there is increased snowfall. The melting on the edges is occurring faster, so overall we have mass loss of the ice cap.

Disclaimer: I'm the project developer.

As a signatory to this statement

[mdsolar]

http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/interfe rence/scientists-signon-statement.html Let me be the first to welcome our new congressional oversight overlords.
--
The future is NOT bleak, it's sunny: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Re:Is this a surprise to you, or are you just joki

[sponglish]

No, we haven't.

Take a look at this graph. There are two set of curves, one comparing the Mann hockey stick to curves showing sunspot activity. The other compares the Moberg 2005 curve to the same sunspot curves.

Here's what I find interesting:

- The Moberg curve (blue curve) follows the Antarctic curve (red) pretty closely, but it tracks almost exactly the same shape as the Greenland curve (green) when it sweeps up in a steep curve in the 20th century.

- The hockey stick curve (orange curve) doesn't do as good a job of tracking with the sunspot curves, in fact it looks like it averaged out the highs and lows (read "MWP" and "LIA") to come up with a relatively smooth shape, but even so, it's still a fair match to the sunspots, especially when it sweeps upward in the 20th Cent.

This can't be coincidental, can it? The obvious conclusion is that the global temps are heavily influenced by sunspot activity. If mankind's pouring of CO2 into the atmosphere was a major influence, the curves wouldn't track together so closely (i.e., the steep upswing would be much greater for the Moberg and Mann temp curves than the sunspots), but that's not the case.

FYI: The sunspot reconstructions I took from Usoskin's millennium-scale sunspot number reconstruction published in the November 2003 issue of Physical Review Letters. There's more current research that was just released, but I can't find the link I had to the PDF. The black GRL curve is from that more recent paper and you can see that it matches the others pretty well.

If the relationships I've drawn are correct, doesn't this strongly imply that the Sun is causing this warming trend?

If you don't think the sunspot curves match closely, it may help to see how poorly the various global temp curves match with each other. Take a look at this Wikipedia graphic combining the global temperature reconstructions from the major players. Looks pretty random to me. The only thing that's given them any credibility is that they all swoop up in the 20th century like they're heading for the moon. And so do the Greenland and GRL sunspot number curves.

Based on that, take another look at the SN curves and then at this one where the curves are overlaid on the Wikipedia graphic.

I'd say the SN curves track better with the global temp reconstructions than many of the wilder global temp curves do. Yet all those curves have been cited by "warmists" as being equally valid (because of that lovely swoop!).

Yup, it's the Sun causing the warming!