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More debunkery of everyone’s favorite fiction writer

While Planet Gore now has the market cornered on entertaining global warming disinformation, Michael Crichton perfected it. For those last two or three people who still think the technothriller writer has his facts straight, check out reasic's terrific post on Crichton's inane 2003 talk, "Aliens Cause Global Warming."

Yes, Crichton, a real medical doctor, actually said:

Nobody believes a weather prediction twelve hours ahead. Now we're asked to believe a prediction that goes out 100 years into the future? And make financial investments based on that prediction? Has everybody lost their minds?

Wow! Not knowing the difference between weather and climate is like not knowing the difference between a general practitioner and an epidemiologist. I don't know what's worse -- the possibility that Crichton is just spouting standard denier crap he knows is crap, or the possibility he actually believes what he is saying.

Kudos to Coby Beck for pointing this post out.

Taken by my parents at a Toronto Blue Jays game

Gristmill: We’re nuts and more!

That ain’t good

A stunning new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) finds that the growth rate of CO2 emissions has tripled in recent years:

CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel burning and industrial processes have been accelerating at a global scale, with their growth rate increasing from 1.1 percent/year for 1990-1999 to >3 percent/year for 2000-2004. The emissions growth rate since 2000 was greater than for the most fossil-fuel intensive of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change emissions scenarios developed in the late 1990s.

That's right. CO2 emissions are rising faster than in the most pessimistic U.N. scenario. So much for all those ostriches and global warming delayers who say that economic growth is the key to solving global warming or that the U.N. scenarios are too extreme.

I had one

It’s no Weather Channel … but look, I’m famous!

New Hansen paper

Today the Oil Drum linked to a James Hansen released paper analyzing the impact of peak oil, peak gas, and peak coal on the likely emissions of carbon. Hansen notes that most of our emissions scenarios have thus far failed to account for whether the carbon will even be there to burn.

Plenty of graphy goodness, but what I took away was this: There's just enough oil and gas left in the ground to take us up to, or maybe a bit over, the 450 parts per million of CO2 that climatologists worry about so much. This makes it imperative that we in the developed countries immediately phase out coal, the one supply of fossil carbon that can take us right over the cliff.

No more canaries in coal mines, please

While on a book tour recently, Bill McKibben made an interesting point in an appearance in Santa Barbara. McKibben -- a former New Yorker writer who wrote his first book on climate change back in 1989 -- told the crowd that to expect the Sierra Club and traditional conservationists to take on global warming with "the grammar of wildness" that John Muir drew from his life in the Yosemite Valley back in the 1860s was impractical and unfair.

He suggested that "we're all looking for the next metaphor" for global warming.

Yesterday Southwestern reporter John Fleck posted a good example of why: a list of stories published in recent months employing the "canary in a coal mine" metaphor. Many of these stories were terrific, including the very first one, from Corie Brown at the L.A. Times.

But it's clear: the canary metaphor is exhausted, perhaps dead. We need a new one. Suggestions, anyone?

Birth of a new feature

Technical note: The Topics features mentioned below no longer are supported on Grist. As Dave noted yesterday, we rolled out a new site feature last weekend, and although we simply call it “topics,” it’s something we’ve been working on for months. Eventually it will be integrated into the site just as profoundly as commenting. Like […]

Getting something done is the priority

The following is a guest essay from Tony Kreindler of Environmental Defense, in response to Charles Komanoff’s post from earlier today, "Strange bedfellows in climate politics." —– Charles Komanoff’s post is entertaining, but a lot of what he says is wrong. His main proposition is that unlike "devilishly complex" cap-and-trade, a carbon tax is straightforward […]

New energy rules could unleash an economic boom and help quash climate change

In 1997, as the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change was being negotiated, the U.S. Senate voted, 95-0, to reject any agreement that “would result in serious harm to the economy of the United States.” The senators were acting on the widespread fear that the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy would hurt American businesses […]

The former: Not good for the latter

How climate change will disproportionately affect the world's poor is a message making the rounds of late, after the publication of the second IPCC report earlier this year. How climate change policies, such as carbon taxes, will either help or hurt the poor is also a topic we've been discussing of late.

Now researchers at the University of Minnesota have assessed the impact of an increased dependence on biofuels on the developing world ... and the outlook isn't good.

In short, conflating food and energy lands us in a quagmire in which corn (and ethanol) prices are still tethered to oil: