Climate Climate & Energy

Competitive Whining, er, Enterprise Institute bashes Gore with all they’ve got

A short while ago, Sir Oolius received a fundraising email from the Competitive Enterprise Institute asking for donations to help them with their new raison d'etre: yelling "FU, Al Gore!" as loudly and as often as possible. The fruits of this effort are now upon us in the form of a national ad whining campaign:

If carbon = life, then Al Gore ...

Manhattan Declaration disses IPCC, Gore, any attempts to reduce CO2

Okay, so at the recent Heartless Heartland skeptic/denier/disinformer/climate-destroyer conference (I promise to propose a better term this week!), one of the few attendees who was a non-non-believer in science emailed me the following:

Marc Morano, Sen. Inhofe's press secretary, just cited your post on the dangers of consensus as an example of how deniers are forcing climate action proponents to retreat. "We're making them afraid of using the term 'consensus'!"

Now, that is humor! After all, my article is titled "The cold truth about climate change: Deniers say there's no consensus about global warming. Well, there's not. There's well-tested science and real-world observations [that are much more worrisome]," and it explains that:

1. "Consensus" is far too weak a word to describe the collective scientific understanding of the dangers of human-caused global warming.
2. The reality of climate change is almost certainly going to be much worse than the "consensus" as that term is normally used (to describe the IPCC reports).
3. The deniers are peddling pseudoscience.

No special revelation

Southern Baptist Convention to back off from outright denialism tomorrow?

Skeptics and ressentiment

Most of what needs to be said about the substance of the just-concluded Heartland Institute Skepticpalooza Clown Show has been said (see, in particular, Miles and Joe). Just a couple of stray observations. The science of climate change has nothing to do with it. There are plenty of interesting questions in climate science, but the […]

On the International Conference on Climate Change

If only Congress would have signed on to the Manhattan Declaration years ago, we could have spent valuable resources wisely summarizing nonexistent reports, thereby avoiding the subprime crisis.

Rising electricity demand is a choice, not an inevitability

Discussions of public policy frequently take place inside frames that are difficult to discern clearly without effort. Which goals are fixed and which are negotiable? Which changes are acceptable and which are not? Take, oh, homelessness. The brute fact is that we could solve homelessness in the U.S. tomorrow if we so chose. We could […]

Canadian federal court ruling could halt planned oil-sands project

A Canadian federal court has ruled in favor of environmental groups that sued in opposition to a massive planned oil-sands mine in Alberta. The 120-square-mile strip mine had recently been approved by a joint federal-provincial panel that found the project’s estimated annual greenhouse-gas emissions of 3.7 million tons to be insignificant. Yet no justification was […]

Solar thermal plants make a comeback

As part of the Back to the Future alternative energy series, The New York Times has an article today about the rising demand for solar thermal power plants, which use solar panels to heat water and operate a steam turbine.

Among the advantages cited:

On sunny afternoons, those 10 plants would produce as much electricity as three nuclear reactors, but they can be built in as little as two years, compared with a decade or longer for a nuclear plant. Some of the new plants will feature systems that allow them to store heat and generate electricity for hours after sunset.

In addition, solar thermal can provide energy more reliably than wind can, and it provides the most energy during mid-day, when energy usage peaks.

An honest, interesting statement from Piedmont Biofuels of North Carolina

I’m a fierce critic of biofuels, but I’ve always had a soft spot for small, region-based biodiesel projects that create fuel from local resources, providing jobs in the bargain. (I proudly ran Emily Gertz’s feature on the topic in our 2006 biofuels series.) The income from such projects remains within communities, rippling around and building […]

The Heartland conference recycles the usual climate change skeptics in its speakers list

The New York Times carried this interesting write-up of the Heartland Institute's 2008 International Conference on Climate Change. For those not familiar with this conference, it's like a scientific meeting on climate change -- without the science.

The NYT article concluded with this statement, which pretty much sums it up:

The meeting was largely framed around science, but after the luncheon, when an organizer made an announcement asking all of the scientists in the large hall to move to the front for a group picture, 19 men did so.

I wonder where the other 95 percent of the Inhofe 400 was. Perhaps they were at their unicorn farm. Or relaxing with the snuffalufagous.

This pretty much confirms what I've been saying for a while: While advocates against action on climate change claim that there are lots of legitimate climate scientist skeptics out there, it's simply not true. To further convince yourself of that, take a look at the speakers listed on the program. You'll see the same old tired skeptics have been recycled yet again: Michaels, Spencer, Singer, McKitrick, Balling, Carter, Gray, yada, yada, yada ...

I guess I shouldn't complain. Here at Grist, we firmly encourage recycling. And no one recycles more effectively than the climate denial machine. The problem is that this is one type of recycling that's not good for the environment.