Climate Climate & Energy

NASA inspector general: NASA suppressed climate science

Remember when James Hansen made a big fuss, saying NASA has been distorting, downplaying, and outright censoring climate science? And conservatives launched a wave of personal attacks against him? Well according to NASA’s inspector general, Hansen was right.

Yet another international climate meeting gets rollin’

Yet another round of international climate talks has kicked off, this time in Bonn, Germany. More than 2,000 delegates from 162 countries will chit-chat over the next two weeks about the details of an agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol. But no significant steps forward are expected out of Bonn; most major decisions on the […]

The real reason conservatives don’t believe in climate science

Part I discussed the odd anti-science part of Krauthammer's screed, "Carbon Chastity: The First Commandment of the Church of the Environment." I ended by asking, Why does he break faith with so many conservatives and worship at the altar of evolution science, but stick with them on climate denial? My book discusses this general question at length, and offers the answer:

Let’s shoot a little higher

Charles Blow says “we need to declare a coordinated war on climate change akin to the wars on drugs and terror.” Surely we can do better than that.

Ocean acidification to weaken coral reefs, make islands more vulnerable to storms

Acidification of the ocean could make low-lying island nations like the Maldives and Kiribati more vulnerable to storms since it can significantly weaken coral reefs, according to a new report. When the oceans absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, carbonic acid forms, which makes it more difficult for sea critters like coral and starfish to […]

The latest sorties in the war over nuclear power

There have been several good entries in the never-ending nuclear debate lately. I’m pulling several together into one post, so all the vicious arguing can center in one comment thread. Fun! In a long, detailed, and devastating cover story in The Nation, Christian Parenti asks, “What Nuclear Renaissance?” Peeling away the hype and PR, he […]

Global warming is no Mickey Mouse

“Really, who cares about Mickey Mouse … But if we can’t get global warming right? An easy question as fundamental as global warming? Then we’re really fucked.” — Creative Commons founder, intellectual property rights theorist, and political reform advocate Laurence Lessig

Bizarre talking points of WaPo columnist Krauthammer

Sir Isaac Newton is one of the towering geniuses in all human history. Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer? Not so much.

Krauthammer has written a classic anti-science screed, "Carbon Chastity: The First Commandment of the Church of the Environment," that recasts many favorite anti-scientific denier memes in odd terms. You still hear and see all of these today, so let me touch on a few of them. And as I will discuss in Part 2, the article is most useful because it is a very clear statement of the real reason conservatives don't believe in climate science: They hate the solution.

As a physicist, my favorite denier talking point is his strange version of the old claim that "scientists are flip floppers, constantly changing their theories." He writes:

Nice way of life. Shame if something happened to it.

According to ACCCE, if we don’t use coal, we’ll have to wave goodbye to the American way of life:

Science: Geo-engineering scheme damages the ozone layer

Science has published a major new study, "The Sensitivity of Polar Ozone Depletion to Proposed Geoengineering Schemes" ($ub. req'd). The study finds:

The large burden of sulfate aerosols injected into the stratosphere by the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 cooled Earth and enhanced the destruction of polar ozone in the subsequent few years. The continuous injection of sulfur into the stratosphere has been suggested as a "geoengineering" scheme to counteract global warming. We use an empirical relationship between ozone depletion and chlorine activation to estimate how this approach might influence polar ozone. An injection of sulfur large enough to compensate for surface warming caused by the doubling of atmospheric CO2 would strongly increase the extent of Arctic ozone depletion during the present century for cold winters and would cause a considerable delay, between 30 and 70 years, in the expected recovery of the Antarctic ozone hole.

Of course, this geo-engineering scheme has lots of other problems. An earlier study noted: