Articles by Joseph Romm

Rove believes that Bush’s policies will look good in hindsight

Karl Rove thinks history will be kinder to President Bush than the public and the pundits are today:

I believe history will provide a more clear-eyed verdict on this president's leadership than the anger of current critics would suggest. President Bush will be viewed as a far-sighted leader who confronted the key test of the 21st century.

Not!

On the path set by Bush's do-nothing climate policies, future generations -- including historians -- will be living in a ruined climate for centuries, with brutal summer-long heat waves, endless droughts, unstoppable sea-level rise, mass extinction, and on and on. If we do stop catastrophic global warming, it will only be because succeeding presidents completely reject Bush's approach. Either way, President Bush will be viewed as a short-sighted leader who ignored the key test of the 21st century.

Rove actually has the chutzpah to claim:

Lomborg’s a real Nowhere Man

In Cool It, Lomborg writes about global warming -- but the globe he is writing about certainly isn't Earth. We've already seen in Parts I and II that on Planet Lomborg, polar bears can evolve backwards and the ice sheets can't suffer rapid ice loss (as they are already doing on Earth).

On Planet Lomborg, the carbon cycle has no amplifying feedbacks -- even though these are central to why warming on Earth will be worse than the IPCC projects. I couldn't even find the word "feedback" or "permafrost" in the book [if anyone finds them, please let me know].

On Planet Lomborg, free from the restrictions of science, global warming is kind of delightful (p.12):

The reality of climate change isn't necessarily an unusually fierce summer heat wave. More likely, we may just notice people wearing fewer layers of clothes on a winter's evening.

On planet Earth, a major study in Nature found that if we fail to take strong action to reduce emissions soon, the brutal European heat wave that killed 35,000 people will become the typical summer within the next four decades. By the end of the century, "2003 would be classed as an anomalously cold summer relative to the new climate."

Lomborg's entire book takes place in a kind of fantasy land or Bizarro world. Aptly, on the last page is "A Note on the Type" that begins:

This book was set in Utopia ...

Irony can be so ironic. Utopia is from the Greek for "no place," or "place that does not exist." Lomborg is the nowhere man!

Second-warmest U.S. August ever

Let's look at some of the records for the month:, according to the National Climatic Data Center, a division of NOAA:

• For the contiguous U.S., the average temperature for August was 75.4°F (24.1°C), which was 2.7°F (1.5°C) above the 20th century mean and the second warmest August on record.
• More than 30 all-time high temperature records were tied or broken, and more than 2000 new daily high temperature records were established.
• Raleigh-Durham, N.C., equaled its all-time high of 105°F on August 21, and Columbia, S.C., had 14 days in August with temperatures over 100°F, which broke the 1900 record of 12 days. Cincinnati, OH, reached 100°F five days during August, a new record for the city.
• The warmest August in the 113-year record occurred in eight eastern states (West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and Florida) along with Utah.
• Texas had its wettest summer on record.
• This was the driest summer since records began in 1895 for North Carolina, and the second driest for Tennessee.
• At the end of August, drought affected approximately 83 percent of the Southeast and 46 percent of the contiguous U.S.

Coincidence? I think not!

This post was created for ClimateProgress.org, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Lomborg misrepresents possible sea-level rise

Lomborg is a champion cherry-picker when he isn’t just getting his facts wrong, as I argued in Part I. He has a deceptively misleading — and outright erroneous — discussion of sea-level-rise projections in Cool It. Let’s start with a few all-too-typical howlers: Antarctica is generally soaking up more water than Greenland is shedding, as […]