Climate Climate & Energy

A gaggle of URLs

I’ve been off work since Wed., so a ton of stuff has accumulated in my browser. As I would prefer to start Autumn ’07 blogging with a clean slate, I hereby give you a Gargantuan Post-Labor Day Linkapalooza. Here we go! Illustration by Victor Juhasz for Rolling Stone A while back, the indispensable Jeff Goodell […]

Coal insider reveals the truth about carbon sequestration

Does the coal industry really believe that carbon sequestration can make coal-fired power plants climate friendly? It’s got legislators and even some green campaigners believing so. Given the coal industry’s troubled relationship with the truth, perhaps some skepticism is warranted. The inimitable Sir Oolius points me to this post from M.J. Murphy. Murphy, obviously a […]

‘Clean coal’ is an oxymoron

This post is by ClimateProgress guest blogger Bill Becker, Executive Director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.

Should we, the nation's beleaguered taxpayers, be required to spend billions of dollars on an oxymoron?

The oxymoron in question is "clean coal," and in my view, the answer is "no." If coal is to have a future, the coal industry and its partners in the rail and electric power industries should pay for it themselves. Here are the reasons.

First, while climate science is complicated, climate policy is simple. We need far lower levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which means we must start decreasing emissions immediately. Our highest priority for taxpayer dollars should be the deployment of market-ready energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies and the rapid development of those that are still in gestation.

The "DOE and industry have not demonstrated the technological feasibility of the long-term storage of carbon dioxide captured by a large-scale, coal-based power plant," according to a December 2006 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report (PDF). And the U.S. Department of Energy doesn't expect to have demonstrated the feasibility for at least a decade. Meantime, solving the climate problem gets more expensive and complicated every year.

Second, the rationale for large public subsidization of clean coal is specious. The argument goes like this: We have one hundred or more years worth of coal supplies and the stuff is cheap -- it exists, therefore we must consume it. But if ample supplies and low prices are the criteria, we should be investing all of our money in solar. We have a 4.5 billion year supply of sunlight, and it's free.

Because voluntary offsets are never, ever like indulgences

In a prime example of how voluntary offsets fail to resemble indulgences:

Flawed new analysis purports to show that there’s no scientific consensus on climate change

If those opposed to action on climate change are like Ahab, the scientific consensus is their white whale. The reason is simple: as Frank Luntz's famous memo pointed out, if they can convince the general public that the science of climate change is uncertain, they can drag the debate over policy to a grinding halt.

Thus, every so often, another argument emerges that purports to prove that scientific consensus on climate change does not exist.

This week, it's a blast from the past: an analysis of the "Web of Science" that shows that no consensus exists and only a minority of scientists support the views of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

First, some background. For those who aren't familiar, the Web of Science (WoS) is a massive database that includes the title and abstract of essentially every scientific paper published since the early '90s. There's also a ton of ancillary information in the database, such as how many times a paper has been cited. It's an invaluable tool to the scientific community, one I use on an almost daily basis to find papers in the peer-reviewed literature.

Naomi Oreskes, a Professor of History and Science Studies at UC-San Diego, searched WoS for papers that include the phrase "global climate change" in the title or abstract and found that basically none of these papers explicitly reject the consensus position (i.e., the earth is warming, humans are very likely responsible for most of the recent warming, etc.). See Coby Beck's writeup for more details.

A medical researcher, Dr. Klaus-Martin Schulte, has revisited Oreskes' analysis. Oreskes looked at papers published between the mid-1990s and 2003, while Schulte looked at papers published after 2004. I have not actually seen a copy of this new paper, but I've reconstructed its salient points from a description of the analysis found here (PDF). The abstract of Dr. Schulte's paper:

Fear of anthropogenic 'global warming' can adversely affect patients' well-being. Accordingly, the state of the scientific consensus about climate change was studied by a review of the 539 papers on "global climate change" found on the Web of Science database from January 2004 to mid-February 2007, updating research by Oreskes (2004), who had reported that between 1993 and 2003 none of 928 scientific papers on "global climate change" had rejected the consensus that more than half of the warming of the past 50 years was likely to have been anthropogenic. In the present review, 32 papers (6% of the sample) explicitly or implicitly reject the consensus. Though Oreskes said that 75% of the papers in her sample endorsed the consensus, fewer than half now endorse it. Only 7% do so explicitly. Only one paper refers to "catastrophic" climate change, but without offering evidence. There appears to be little evidence in the learned journals to justify the climate-change alarm that now harms patients.

This analysis is rubbish. First, consider the following abstract, from a paper entitled, "An analysis of the regulation of tropical tropospheric water vapor":

W. Va. editorial says mining coal should be easier

This editorial is from 2007, not 1877: " First Things First: Let's Mine the Coal." Maybe there's something to the inbreeding jokes ...

We can talk about windmills, solar panels and biomass, and they undoubtedly are in our future. But those energy sources cannot meet the nation's growing energy demands now or in the foreseeable future. Nuclear energy may take on an expanded role, but not everyone will welcome it.

Our leaders must step up and tell the nation the truth: We need coal. It must remain a major source for electricity, and it certainly could and should be a source for motor fuels.

Global warming will spawn severe storms and tornados, reports NASA

We have known for a while that global warming is making our weather more extreme, especially extreme heat, drought, heavy rainfall, and flooding. Now we have more predictions:

NASA scientists have developed a new climate model that indicates that the most violent severe storms and tornadoes may become more common as Earth's climate warms.

Perhaps that is why we have been setting records for tornados lately. This is especially bad news for this country because, as the study notes: "The central/east U.S. experiences the most severe thunderstorms and tornadoes on Earth."

U.N. climate meeting ends with a whole lotta nothin’

We are psychic, if we do say so ourselves. As leaders from 158 countries gathered this week at a U.N.-convened meeting to discuss post-Kyoto Protocol climate targets, we claimed doubt that anything of substance would come out of it. And voila! Deadlock and vagueness abounded. The E.U. and developing nations pushed for an indication that […]

Is climate change an artifact of computer models?

Electric Politics has an audio interview on measuring climate change that might be of interest to many here.

Thoughts on Chris Mooney’s Storm World

I recently finished Chris Mooney's great new book Storm World. There have been lots of reviews (see Chris's blog for a pretty complete list), so I won't write another one here. Instead, I thought I would highlight the part I particularly appreciated, and what I think needed more emphasis in the book.

First, the high point: The book does a great job of detailing the turbulent interface between knowledge and ignorance where science operates. Science is a contact sport, and it is not for the faint of heart. New ideas, especially bold ones, have to survive in the crucible of science -- where they are subject to bombardment by every imaginable criticism. Good ideas survive this test and help us push back the frontiers of knowledge. Bad ideas crumble.

On the other hand, one of the points that I thought could have been better explained was the unique role that Bill Gray played in the debate. All scientists, regardless of their true motivation, want to be seen dispassionately pursuing truth. And in order to do that, it is generally accepted practice that scientists never personally attack other scientists. At least, not in public. You might believe that a scientific competitor of yours is a dishonest scumbag and a hack, and you might even tell a close colleague in private, but you would never, ever stand up at a scientific meeting and say that. It is simply not done.