"No challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change." So said President Barack Obama in his State of the Union message last week. That he spent under 5% of the speech on the subject—about one-ninth as much as on the economy, one-fifth as much as on our need to overcome cynicism, and a little less even than on affordable college education—and tucked it away in a section about two-thirds of the way through suggests that the President doesn't really believe it … [Read more...]
Archives for January 2015
Castrate All Boys at Age Ten to Save the Planet?
A friend posted on Facebook responses she had received when she announced she was pregnant with her second child. “Already?!” “Was this pregnancy an accident?” Reading many of them made me sad. Some chided her for having her children so close together, others for having them when she’s so young. (But she’s in her mid-twenties and happily married). Reading Katie Herzog’s “Why I’ll never have kids, and why you shouldn’t either” later that day made me even sadder. She thinks neither she nor … [Read more...]
Climate Change and Evangelicals: Thou Shalt Not Fear Fossil Fuels
The fossil fuel industry should be dismantled because it is as bad as human slavery." That's exactly what Kathleen Henry, president of a non-profit environmental law firm argued in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She went on: Continuing to use fossil fuels will, in fact, lead to economic collapse from the consequences of climate change. But people continue to listen to the harmful rhetoric of the fossil fuel industry... ...They must rise above this and actively support the dismantling of the … [Read more...]
Why 2014 was, and was not, the ‘hottest year in recorded history’
Media all over America and around the world have trumpeted the news: “2014 Was Hottest Year on Earth in Recorded History,” to quote the New York Times headline. The Times’s lead paragraph touted this as “underscoring scientific warnings about the risks of runaway emissions and undermining claims by climate-change contrarians that global warming had somehow stopped.” But it’s time to look below the surface—or, as you’ll see in a moment, above it. Let’s dispense with the simplest error … [Read more...]
2014 as the Mildest Year: Why You Are Being Misled on Global Temperatures, OR: Why I Should Have Been an Engineer Rather than a Climate Scientist
I’ve been inundated with requests this past week to comment on the NOAA and NASA reports that 2014 was the “hottest” year on record. Since I was busy with a Japan space agency meeting in Tokyo, it has been difficult for me to formulate a quick response. Of course, I’ve addressed the “hottest year” claim before it ever came out, both here on October 21, and here on December 4. In the three decades I’ve been in the climate research business, it’s been clear that politics has been driving the … [Read more...]
Global Warming: Powerful New Evidence Surfaces That Contradicts Manmade Claims
On the heels of the Vatican's announcement that the Pope intends to urge support for an international agreement to fight global warming by reducing human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) from fossil-fuel energy use, a new peer-reviewed scientific paper reveals powerful evidence that CO2 emissions contribute far less to global warming than widely thought. The paper, "Why models run hot: results from an irreducibly simple climate model," appeared in the January 8 edition of Science Bulletin … [Read more...]
Interstellar: Why the Climate Controversy?
"Right Wing Attacks Media Climate for Saying Interstellar is About Climate Change" "Interstellar and the Climate-Culture War" "Interstellar's' Rejection of Climate Change Hysteria" These are a just a few of the headlines circulating the Internet about Christopher Nolan's latest blockbuster movie, Interstellar. But for a film having zero to say directly about global warming, it seems odd indeed that there's so much climate change controversy. So what's all the hubbub? For those who haven't … [Read more...]