Climate Climate & Energy

The pop-punkers team up with NRDC on a new campaign

Pop-punk trio Green Day has partnered up with NRDC to help with a new campaign to Move America Beyond Oil. Via the website, visitors can send personal messages directly to political leaders, asking them to get behind solutions like improving fuel efficiency standards and setting more stringent CO2 regs for power plants.

And recognizing, perhaps, that "kids these days" are big fans of "the texting," NRDC has also added a new tool allowing messages to be sent to lawmakers and corporate leaders via cell phone by sending "GD" to 30644. (Standard text messaging rates probably apply.)

Below the fold, a video of Green Day talking about the issues and urging you to act. So get on your GD phone and do it already, if only for the I-just-texted-G-Dub coolness factor.

It’s more complicated than you might think

Most people interested in climate change have seen the plots showing strong correlations between CO2 and temperature going back several hundred thousand years:

FIGURE: Data from the Vostok ice core in Antarctica, from 410,000 years ago to the present. The top curve shows abundance of CO2 (in parts per million) from air bubbles in the ice core. The bottom curve shows the temperature anomaly in the Antarctic region, relative to the present, from isotopic measurements of the ice. After Fig. 3-6 of my book.

‘We can’t even predict the weather next week’–But weather is not climate

(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide)

Objection: Scientists can't even predict the weather next week, so why should we believe what some climate model tells us about 100 years from now?

Answer: Climate and weather are very different things, and the level of predictability is comparably different.

A cool new ad campaign from Victoria, Australia

This article, in which Al Gore lays out his basic position on nukes, contains nothing much new. He's said it all before in, among other places, our interview.

Thanks to Gristmill reader LA, however, for drawing my attention to this intriguing final bit:

Mr Gore ... yesterday met with [Victoria, Australia] Premier Steve Bracks and his deputy John Thwaites. He described Victoria as forward thinking on climate change and said he would take a number of local initiatives back to the United States.

He was particularly impressed with the Bracks Government's "black balloons" advertising campaign, which links household energy usage with the amount of carbon dioxide it releases into the air.

"I'm going to take that ad back and show it to some folks there, maybe put it on YouTube," he said.

Well, I don't know if Gore put it there, but the ad's on YouTube now. Here it is:

The End Is Sigh

U.N. conference ends with little progress on climate action In a monstrous anticlimax, the U.N. climate summit in Nairobi, Kenya, ended with a decision to … review the Kyoto Protocol in 2008. “From Christian Aid’s point of view that’s simply not good enough, and we need some heads to be knocked together by somebody,” said […]

‘Aerosols should mean more warming in the south’–More North. Hemisphere warming is well-understood

(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide)

Objection: Scientists claim that global warming from greenhouse gases is being countered somewhat by global dimming from aerosol pollution. They even claim that aerosol pollution caused the cooling in the mid-century. But GHGs are evenly mixed around the globe, while aerosols are disproportionately concentrated in the Northern Hemisphere. It follows that warming should be greater in the Southern Hemisphere -- but that's the opposite of what is happening. Clearly climate scientists do not know what is really going on.

‘Climate models are unproven’–Actually, GCM’s have many confirmed successes under their belts

(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide)

Objection: Why should we trust a bunch of contrived computer models that have never had a prediction confirmed? Talk to me in 100 years.

Answer: Given the absence of a few duplicate planets and some large time machines, we can't test a 100-year temperature projection. Does that mean the models can't be validated without waiting 100 years? No.

‘Models don’t account for clouds’–Clouds are complex and uncertain, but unlikely to stop warming

(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide)

Objection: Clouds are a large negative feedback that will stop any drastic warming. The climate models don't even take cloud effects into account.

Answer: All of the atmospheric global climate models used for the kind of climate projections synthesized by the IPCC take the effects of clouds into account. You can read a discussion about cloud processes and feedbacks in the IPCC TAR.

The Royal Whee

U.K. greens grin as climate bill unveiled in annual “queen’s speech” We thought wigs and rowdiness were the most delightful customs in the British Parliament, but it turns out there’s another: the annual “queen’s speech.” This opening-day tradition offers a chance to boast about the things Parliament will accomplish in the coming session. And this […]

‘Peiser refuted Oreskes’–In a poor piece of work that has been retracted by its author

(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide)

Objection: Sure, Oreskes found no one bucking the consensus, but her paper was refuted by Benny Peiser, who did the exact same survey and found very different results.

Answer: True, Benny Peiser did attempt a similar study and submitted it as a letter to Science responding to the Oreskes study. But for very good reasons, it was not published.

Peiser claimed to find 34 articles in his "reject or doubt the consensus view" category. That's 3 percent of the total, so even taken at face value it doesn't cast much doubt on the consensus. But it is greater than the 0 percent Oreskes found, and serves as ammunition for the "there is no consensus" crowd.