As sea level rise accelerates, buying shorefront property becomes a game of musical chairs

Ivy Main at the Energy Collective: Thank God for climate change deniers. They may eventually be the only buyers for shorefront real estate.

Sea level rise may not cause widespread flooding until later in this century or into the next one, but real estate deals involve long timelines: the useful life of a new house or a commercial building can be at least fifty years, while an infrastructure project might last a hundred years or more.

And of course, it’s one thing to lose your house, and another to lose the ground beneath it. Sea level rise means low-lying real estate now comes with an expiration date.

So smart buyers—and landowners—have to consider not just today’s flood maps, but also ones that haven’t been drawn yet. If a rising sea will threaten property some decades from now, it will depreciate over time, like a car. At some point only chumps and climate deniers will buy.

Head-in-the-sand posturing still dominates the headlines, like Florida Governor Rick Scott’s alleged ban on the use of the term “climate change,” or the North Carolina legislature’s silly (and costly) attempt to legislate sea level rise out of existence. Now the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) hopes to force states to get serious about climate change by requiring states to do a better job planning for natural disasters caused in part by global warming. FEMA’s goal is to save money through better planning, but conservatives have attacked the requirement as politically motivated....

FEMA photo of beach houses in Pensecola, Florida, damaged by Hurricane Ivan in 2004

Ignored by government, Canadian academics offer their own climate policy

Lesley Evans Ogden in Science: Under the conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Canada has become a tough and frustrating political environment for researchers trying to advance evidence-based policies to reduce emissions. The country has withdrawn from international climate pacts, muzzled government climate researchers, and put new regulatory efforts on the back burner. Now, one group of prominent Canadian academics is trying to change the dynamic by releasing its own set of climate policy recommendations for the nation.

“We believe that putting options on the table is long overdue in Canada,” write the 71 authors of the Sustainable Canada Dialogues report, released today. The authors, whose expertise ranges broadly across scientific, sociological, and political disciplines, were organized by Catherine Potvin, a climate and policy researcher at McGill University in Montreal. One goal, she says, is to encourage Canadians—and ultimately their government—to support “ambitious and thoughtful commitments to emission reductions” at a global negotiating conference set for Paris in December. The group is trying “to do whatever can be done to raise the level of ambition of Canada prior to the Paris conference,” Potvin tells ScienceInsider.

“Climate change is the most serious ‘symptom’ of non-sustainable development,” concludes the report, which offers a detailed policyroad map for Canada to achieve 100% reliance on low-carbon electricity by 2035. It calls for Canada to reduce greenhouse emissions by 26% to 28% below 2005 levels by 2025 and eliminate at least 80% of emissions by midcentury. Ten major recommendations include calls to impose a price on carbon emissions through a tax or pollution permit trading system, add more solar and wind power to Canada’s bountiful hydropower supplies, and eliminate subsidies for fossil fuels....

This is a picture of Syncrude's base mine in Athabasca. The yellow structures are the bases of pyramids made of sulphur - it is not economical for Syncrude to sell the sulphur so it stockpiles it instead. Behind that is the tailings pond, held in by what is recognized as the largest dam in the world. The extraction plant is just to the right of this photograph and most of the mine is to the left. Shot by Tasty Cakes, public domain

Work of prominent climate change denier was funded by energy industry

Suzanne Goldenberg in the Guardian (UK): A prominent academic and climate change denier’s work was funded almost entirely by the energy industry, receiving more than $1.2m from companies, lobby groups and oil billionaires over more than a decade, newly released documents show.

Over the last 14 years Willie Soon, a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, received a total of $1.25m from Exxon Mobil, Southern Company, the American Petroleum Institute (API) and a foundation run by the ultra-conservative Koch brothers, the documents obtained by Greenpeace through freedom of information filings show.

According to the documents, the biggest single funder was Southern Company, one of the country’s biggest electricity providers that relies heavily on coal. The documents draw new attention to the industry’s efforts to block action against climate change – including President Barack Obama’s power-plant rules.

Unlike the vast majority of scientists, Soon does not accept that rising greenhouse gas emissions since the industrial age are causing climate changes. He contends climate change is driven by the sun. In the relatively small universe of climate denial Soon, with his Harvard-Smithsonian credentials, was a sought after commodity. He was cited admiringly by Senator James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who famously called global warming a hoax. He was called to testify when Republicans in the Kansas state legislature tried to block measures promoting wind and solar power. The Heartland Institute, a hub of climate denial, gave Soon a courage award.

Soon did not enjoy such recognition from the scientific community. There were no grants from Nasa, the National Science Foundation or the other institutions which were funding his colleagues at the Center for Astrophysics. According to the documents, his work was funded almost entirely by the fossil fuel lobby....

Hogarth's "Chairing the Member"

Denying problems when we don’t like the solutions

A press release from Duke University: There may be a scientific answer for why conservatives and liberals disagree so vehemently over the existence of issues like climate change and specific types of crime. A new study from Duke University finds that people will evaluate scientific evidence based on whether they view its policy implications as politically desirable. If they don't, then they tend to deny the problem even exists.

“Logically, the proposed solution to a problem, such as an increase in government regulation or an extension of the free market, should not influence one’s belief in the problem. However, we find it does,” said co-author Troy Campbell, a Ph.D. candidate at Duke's Fuqua School of Business. “The cure can be more immediately threatening than the problem.”

...The researchers conducted three experiments (with samples ranging from 120 to 188 participants) on three different issues -- climate change, air pollution that harms lungs, and crime. “The goal was to test, in a scientifically controlled manner, the question: Does the desirability of a solution affect beliefs in the existence of the associated problem? In other words, does what we call 'solution aversion' exist?" Campbell said. "We found the answer is yes. And we found it occurs in response to some of the most common solutions for popularly discussed problems."

For climate change, the researchers conducted an experiment to examine why more Republicans than Democrats seem to deny its existence, despite strong scientific evidence that supports it. One explanation, they found, may have more to do with conservatives' general opposition to the most popular solution -- increasing government regulation -- than with any difference in fear of the climate change problem itself, as some have proposed.

Participants in the experiment, including both self-identified Republicans and Democrats, read a statement asserting that global temperatures will rise 3.2 degrees in the 21st century. They were then asked to evaluate a proposed policy solution to address the warming. When the policy solution emphasized a tax on carbon emissions or some other form of government regulation, which is generally opposed by Republican ideology, only 22 percent of Republicans said they believed the temperatures would rise at least as much as indicated by the scientific statement they read. But when the proposed policy solution emphasized the free market, such as with innovative green technology, 55 percent of Republicans agreed with the scientific statement.

...."Recognizing this effect is helpful because it allows researchers to predict not just what problems people will deny, but who will likely deny each problem,” said co-author Aaron Kay, an associate professor at Fuqua. “The more threatening a solution is to a person, the more likely that person is to deny the problem.”...

"Peter's Denial," by A.N. Mironov

Experts call for widening the debate on climate change

A press release from the University of Manchester (UK): Environmental scientists are being urged to broaden the advice they give on global climate change, say experts who are also frustrated that decision makers are not taking enough action. Writing in the journal Nature Climate Change, The University of Manchester researchers argue that scientists are expressing a strong desire to fix the problems highlighted by their studies into human-induced climate change.

The authors suggest there are problems with environmental scientists offering practical solutions that can help societies adapt to a fast-changing Earth - one where climatic zones will shift and sea levels will rise significantly. Professor Noel Castree, the lead author of the paper, said: “We are grateful that environmental scientists alert us to the impact that people are having on our planet like shifting climatic zones and rising sea levels. “But knowing how to respond to these impacts requires a broader skill-set than natural science alone provides.. It requires honest recognition of, and mature discussion about, the different values that can guide humans towards a different, better future.”

Today, say the authors, few people doubt that man-made climate change is real. And few of us doubt that climate scientists lack integrity. The problem, they believe, is the lack of action on the part of decision makers and the societies they represent.

Castree, a professor of Geography, and co-author Dan Brockington, a professor of Conservation and Development, ask whether climate change scientists risk over-stepping the mark and trying to shape the political agenda while pretending to r
emain non-political. They argue that the scientists often view the world as presenting problems that, like mechanics, they believe they can fix. They say that recent scientific discussions about 'geoengineering' technologies reflect this view.

“Global environmental change raises profound questions - such as whether humans lack humility and wisdom,” said Castree. “But we are concerned that environmental scientists risk using their authority to convince others that future Earth surface change is no more than a fiendishly complicated alteration to fairly well understood physical systems.”

Castree said: “What is needed is a deeper appreciation that such change will cause fundamental disagreements about responsibilities, rights and duties - among humans and towards nature. We think social scientists and humanists could significantly enrich public debates about how to respond to environmental change.”

Miami, the great world city, is drowning while the powers that be look away

Robin McKie in the Guardian (UK): ... "There has been a rise of about 10 inches in sea levels since the 19th century – brought about by humanity's heating of the planet through its industrial practices – and that is now bringing chaos to Miami Beach by regularly flooding places like Alton Road," says Harold Wanless, a geology professor at the University of Miami. "And it is going to get worse. By the end of this century we could easily have a rise of six feet, possibly 10 feet. Nothing much will survive that. Most of the land here is less than 10 feet above sea level."

What makes Miami exceptionally vulnerable to climate change is its unique geology. The city – and its satellite towns and resorts – is built on a dome of porous limestone which is soaking up the rising seawater, slowly filling up the city's foundations and then bubbling up through drains and pipes. Sewage is being forced upwards and fresh water polluted. Miami's low topography only adds to these problems. There is little land out here that rises more than six feet above sea level. Many condos and apartment blocks open straight on the edge of the sea. Of the total of 4.2 million US citizens who live at an elevation of four feet or less, 2.4 million of them live in south Florida.

...Miami and its surroundings are facing a calamity worthy of the Old Testament. It is an astonishing story. Despite its vast wealth, the city might soon be consumed by the waves, for even if all emissions of carbon dioxide were halted tomorrow – a very unlikely event given their consistent rise over the decades – there is probably enough of the gas in the atmosphere to continue to warm our planet, heat and expand our seas, and melt polar ice. In short, there seems there is nothing that can stop the waters washing over Miami completely.

It a devastating scenario. But what really surprises visitors and observers is the city's response, or to be more accurate, its almost total lack of reaction. The local population is steadily increasing; land prices continue to surge; and building is progressing at a generous pace. During my visit last month, signs of construction – new shopping malls, cranes towering over new condominiums and scaffolding enclosing freshly built apartment blocks – could be seen across the city, its backers apparently oblivious of scientists' warnings that the foundations of their buildings may be awash very soon....

An aerial photo of downtown Miami, shot by Averette, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons 3.0 license

Improved communication between experts and the public key in winning battle to curb climate change, claims expert

Tom Bawden  in the Independent (UK):
Scientists need to become more humble and to completely re-think the way they communicate if the battle to curb climate change is to be won, one of the world's leading climate experts has warned. Lamenting what he calls a “mismatch” between the state of climate science and the needs of society, Professor Chris Rapley called on his colleagues across the world to throw off the shackles of tradition and engage in a radically different approach to their discipline.

Climate scientists need to be more critical about their own research, more open to the work and views of other people and to communicate much more clearly with the public, said Professor Rapley, of the University College London. At the same time, they need to defend their work more robustly against climate sceptics and, in a recommendation many may find surprising, rely less on scientific fact and more on narrative techniques such as personal anecdotes, emotion and rhetoric to make their points, he added.

Professor Rapley led a big research project into climate science communication with his UCL colleagues and a number of other universities, including Oxford and King's College, London, which published its findings today.

“My experiences have convinced me that our training and development has left us insufficiently prepared to contribute as effectively as we should both to public policy, and to communicating our results and conclusions to society more generally,” Professor Rapley said.

“We are especially ill-equipped to deal with controversy in the media and to respond to public attacks on our motivations and behaviours,” he added, advocating the creation of a professional body for climate scientists that, among other things, would train scientists to engage more effectively with climate sceptics....

Jose Orozco's 1946 painting, "The Demagogue"

IPCC reports 'diluted' under 'political pressure' to protect fossil fuel interests

Nafeez Ahmed in Earth Insight at the Guardian (UK): Increasing evidence is emerging that the policy summaries on climate impacts and mitigation by the UN Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were significantly 'diluted' under political pressure from some of the world's biggest greenhouse gas emitters, including Saudi Arabia, China, Brazil and the United States.

Several experts familiar with the IPCC government approval process for the 'Summary for Policymakers' (SPM) reports – documents summarising the thousands of pages of technical and scientific reports for government officials – have spoken out about their distortion due to political interests.

According to David Wasdell, who leads on feedback dynamics in coupled complex global systems for the European Commission's Global System Dynamics and Policy (GSDP) network, "Every word and line of the text previously submitted by the scientific community was examined and amended until it could be endorsed unanimously by the political representatives."

In a detailed paper critiquing the WG1 Summary for Policymakers, Wasdell revealed that: "Greatest pressure to establish grounds for the highest possible budget came from those countries whose national economy, political power and social stability depend on sustaining the asset value and production revenue derived from exploitation of their resources of fossil energy. Additional pressure was applied to the political agents by those vested interests whose sustained profitability was based on the extraction, refining, marketing and use of fossil energy as the ground of the global economy."

As an accredited reviewer for the IPCC's 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, Wasdell had previously criticised the political approval process for playing down amplifying feedbacks which could accelerate climate change. That charge was strongly denied by the IPCC's lead authors at the time, although political interference amounting to "scientific vandalism" was alleged by other sources….

Climate change: Don't wait until you can feel it

EurekAlert via the Carnegie Institution: Despite overwhelming scientific evidence for the impending dangers of human-made climate change, policy decisions leading to substantial emissions reduction have been slow. New work from Carnegie's Katharine Ricke and Ken Caldeira focuses on the intersection between personal and global impacts. They find that even as extreme weather events influence those who experience them to support policy to address climate change, waiting for the majority of people to live through such conditions firsthand could delay meaningful action by decades. Their findings are published by Nature Climate Change.

Nearly every year, extreme weather events such as heat waves and hurricanes spur the discussion of climate change in the media and among politicians. This can create a window of opportunity for those seeking to enact policy aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But this window of opportunity could be delayed by decades due to the vagaries of weather.

"When support for doing something about climate change is based on personal observations of local weather, policymaking may end up being dictated by the roulette wheel of natural climate variability," says Ricke.

Ricke and Calderia's modeling studies show that within 50 years nearly every country in the world will experience the kind of extreme weather that can be a policy trigger. However, local natural variability in weather means that majority of people in each nation, particularly large countries like China and the United States, could personally experience these extremes for themselves either tomorrow or many years from now. If citizens do not support emissions reductions and other efforts to fight climate change until they experience extreme events firsthand, naturally-driven variations in weather could delay action by decades, Ricke and Caldeira found. They find that sound science should guide policy rather than the vagaries of weather. "Local weather is anecdotal information, but climate change is sound science," Caldeira said. "Good politics can be based on a good anecdote, but good policy needs to be based on sound science."...

Caravaggio's "The Denial of Saint Peter"

How the US scuppered climate progress at Copenhagen

Oliver Tickell in the Ecologist: Today the IPCC launches its latest review of world climate. But how to translate its grim findings into action when US is deploying its full armoury of intelligence and diplomatic dirty tricks to sink any prospect of an effective global climate agreement? The climate talks were deliberately and highly effectively scuppered by a 'dirty tricks' operation carried out by the NSA and other US security agencies - including the pivotal leak to The Guardian of the Danish text.

Today the IPCC revealed its latest information on how human emissions of greenhouse gases are affecting planet Earth, and will continue to do so way into the future. The diagnosis, and the prognosis, both make terrifying reading. We can expect declining crop yields, increasing climate instability, more extreme weather events, rising sea levels, ocean acidification - and all the rest of it.

But what really matters is what, if anything, we do about it. And despite the increasing certainty that the world is already experiencing the impacts of climate change, there is precious little chance that the world's governments will suddenly do anything effective. Last time it seriously tried, at Copenhagen in 2009, that attempt was spectacularly blown out of the water. Today we ask - how, why, and who did it?

The 2009 Climate Summit in Copenhagen was promoted as being the world's 'great hope' to secure an international agreement to tackle climate
change. Most countries entered into the negotiations with immense goodwill - even though there were always going to be thorny, complex issues to tackle, such as: how emissions cuts were to be divided up among countries; and how much money rich countries would pay over to poor countries suffering the impacts of climate change to help them adapt and move to low carbon development pathways.

But the hope did not last long. As The Guardian's Environment Editor John Vidal commented on Democracy Now: "Copenhagen was just a complete nightmare, a diplomatic meltdown, I think is the fairest way to say it, where you had countries accusing each other of genocide. You had a total failure of the diplomatic process, that text which was meant to enhance everybody and bring them together in fact did the absolute opposite, and it shattered the confidence and the trust between different countries."...

Global warming slowdown 'does not invalidate climate change'

Adam Vaughan in the Guardian (UK): The slowdown in rising global surface temperatures is not a sign that climate change is no longer happening, the national science academies of the US and the UK have said. Publishing a guide on the state of climate change science, the National Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society said the short-term slowdown this century did not "invalidate" the long-term trend of rising temperatures caused by man-made climate change.

"Despite the decadal slowdown in the rise of average surface temperature, a longer-term warming trend is still evident. Each of the last three decades was warmer than any other decade since widespread thermometer measurements were introduced in the 1850s," the publication, Climate Change Evidence and Causes, said.

Scientists have been investigating reasons for the slowdown in temperature rises. Peer-reviewed papers over the last year have suggested 17 sun-dimming volcanic eruptions since 2000, "unusual" trade winds in the Pacific Ocean burying surface heat deep underwater and the world's oceans absorbing greater amounts of heat in recent years may have contributed.

Thomas Stocker, the co-chair of working group one of the UN's climate science panel, said at the launch of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's landmark report last September that the recent slowdown in surface temperature rises was not significant because it was over too short a period of time. "Climate relevant trends should not be calculated for periods of less than 30 years," he said.....

A painting by Lazlo Mednyanszky (1852-1919), "Snow Landscape with Boats"

Climate scepticism blamed as Owen Paterson slashes spending on global warming

Tom Bawden in the Independent: Owen Paterson has been accused of “incredible complacency” over climate change after new figures showed his department has slashed spending on helping Britain cope with global warming.

The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) will spend just £17.2m on domestic “climate change initiatives” this financial year, a 41 per cent decline on the previous 12 months, according to its response to a freedom of information request. The figures will fuel fears that the Environment Secretary’s personal climate-change scepticism could be exposing the UK to a higher risk of flooding and other global warming consequences.

Bob Ward, policy director at the London School of Economics’ Grantham Research Institute, said: “These shocking figures should worry everyone in the UK. Defra is the lead government department for climate change adaptation and is primarily responsible for making the UK resilient to the impacts of global warming, such as increased flood risk,”

Maria Eagle, shadow Environment Secretary, said such a steep drop in domestic climate change initiatives “reveals an incredible level of complacency about the threat to the UK from climate change”. She added:“This is further evidence that Owen Paterson’s unwillingness to accept the science on climate change is leading him to make the wrong choices on spending cuts within his department,.”

...The dramatic cut in domestic climate change spending comes in Mr Paterson’s first full-year as Environment Secretary – he took up the post in September 2012 . The spending now represents just 0.7 per cent of the department’s total budget for the year, down from 1.2 per cent last year....

Ostriches with their heads almost in the sand, shot by Fwaaldijk, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication 

Cold weather snap fuels misinformation over climate change

Peter Moskowitz in Al Jazeera America: Meteorologists predict record-low temperatures for large swaths of the United States on Sunday and Monday. The cold snap, which comes after snow blanketed much of the northeastern United States last week, has also led to confusion surrounding how weather relates to global warming.

Since the winter weather began, some Americans have taken to blogs, television stations and comment threads, asking (often rhetorically) how the weather can be so cold if the world is supposed to be getting warmer.

...But those who think cold weather disproves climate change may be ignoring a solid and ever-increasing body of evidence. Cold weather is just that -- weather, which is defined by NASA as “conditions of the atmosphere...over a short period of time.”

According to most climate scientists, no weather condition can be linked to climate change. Just as the cold snap can’t necessarily be linked to climate by itself, neither can the unprecedented heat wave currently hitting Australia. (It’s so hot, meteorologists have been forced to add new colors to their heat maps.)

...Scientists warn that as every country in the world starts to grapple with the effects of climate change, the current confusion surrounding the science could have dire consequences. As world leaders attempt to craft climate policy, experts say, it’s important everyone be on the same page, or else the confusion could cause gridlock, and humans could continue to warm the globe at record levels....

Finnish soldiers during the Winter War, 1939-1940, shot by Finnish Army personnel

Solution to cloud riddle reveals hotter future

The Newsroom at the University of New South Wales: Global average temperatures will rise at least 4°C by 2100 and potentially more than 8°C by 2200 if carbon dioxide emissions are not reduced, according to new research published in Nature that shows our climate is more sensitive to carbon dioxide than most previous estimates.  The research could solve one of the great unknowns of climate sensitivity, the role of cloud formation and whether this will have a positive or negative effect on global warming.

“Our research has shown climate models indicating a low temperature response to a doubling of carbon dioxide from preindustrial times are not reproducing the correct processes that lead to cloud formation," said lead author from UNSW's Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, Professor Steven Sherwood.

“When the processes are correct in the climate models the level of climate sensitivity is far higher. Previously estimates of the sensitivity of global temperature to a doubling of carbon dioxide ranged from 1.5°C to 5°C. This new research takes away the lower end of climate sensitivity estimates, meaning that global average temperatures will increase by 3°C to 5°C with a doubling of carbon dioxide."

...When the processes are correct in the climate model, this produces cycles that take water vapour to a wider range of heights in the atmosphere, causing fewer clouds to form in a warmer climate. This increases the amount of sunlight and heat entering the atmosphere and increases the sensitivity of our climate to carbon dioxide or any other perturbation.

When water vapour processes are correctly represented, the sensitivity of the climate to a doubling of carbon dioxide - which will occur in the next 50 years – means we can expect a temperature increase of at least 3°C and more likely 4°C by 2100.

“Climate sceptics like to criticise climate models for getting things wrong, and we are the first to admit they are not perfect, but what we are finding is that the mistakes are being made by those models which predict less warming, not those that predict more,” said Professor Sherwood. “Rises in global average temperatures of this magnitude will have profound impacts on the world and the economies of many countries if we don’t urgently start to curb our emissions."...

A lenticular cloud above Hawaii, shot by Rootmeansquare, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Solar activity not a key cause of climate change

EurekAlert via the University of Edinburgh: Climate change has not been strongly influenced by variations in heat from the sun, a new scientific study shows. The findings overturn a widely held scientific view that lengthy periods of warm and cold weather in the past might have been caused by periodic fluctuations in solar activity.

Research examining the causes of climate change in the northern hemisphere over the past 1000 years has shown that until the year 1800, the key driver of periodic changes in climate was volcanic eruptions. These tend to prevent sunlight reaching the Earth, causing cool, drier weather. Since 1900, greenhouse gases have been the primary cause of climate change.

The findings show that periods of low sun activity should not be expected to have a large impact on temperatures on Earth, and are expected to improve scientists' understanding and help climate forecasting.

Scientists at the University of Edinburgh carried out the study using records of past temperatures constructed with data from tree rings and other historical sources. They compared this data record with computer-based models of past climate, featuring both significant and minor changes in the sun.

They found that their model of weak changes in the sun gave the best correlation with temperature records, indicating that solar activity has had a minimal impact on temperature in the past millennium....

A solar flare shot by NASA, Valentine's Day, 2011

Media failure on Iraq War repeated in climate change coverage

Stephen Lewandowsky in Skeptical Science: "Iraq is developing a long-range ballistic missile system that could carry weapons of mass destruction up to 700 miles." Iraq is progressing towards "dirty bombs that spew radioactivity, mobile bio-weapons facilities, and a new long-range ballistic missile." An Iraqi defector "tells of work on at least 20 hidden weapons sites...

Those claims appeared in mainstream newspapers during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. All those claims were false. ... A decade later, those media failures are relevant not only because of the war's six-figure death toll and because the Iraqi per capita GDP has so far failed to return to prewar levels, but also because they remind us that the media, including highly reputable newspapers, can sometimes get things quite wrong.

A similar media failure is arguably under way this very moment with regard to climate change. The most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded with near certainty that human economic activity is responsible for ongoing global warming, and some of the largest insurance companies on the planet have blamed the increase in losses from extreme weather events to climate-related disasters.

...One notable difference between pre-invasion reporting on Iraqi WMD and climate change is that, in contrast to the near-hegemony of war-supporting reporting (at least in the U.S.), the public has a broader choice now when it comes to climate change: While there is a large supply of disinformation that threatens the public's right to being adequately informed, there is also no shortage of actual scientific information, both in the mainstream media and beyond.

The diversity of sources empowers the public to select their information wisely, but it also provides a playing field for the dominant influence of people's cultural worldviews or "ideology", which can override even education. People whose core personal values are threatened by possible responses to climate change, such as a price on carbon or regulatory measures, are known to rely on media sources that are more likely to create confusion about climate change than disseminate scientifically accurate information....

Orwell plaque shot by Simon Harriyott, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Inland states most likely to ignore climate hazards

Bobby Magill in the Journal Star via Climate Central: Inland states and some along the southeast coast are doing less than most other states to prepare for natural disasters influenced by human-caused climate change, a Columbia Law School report says.

The report, which ranks the states based on how their federally mandated hazard mitigation plans address climate change, shows that land-locked states are doing the least to prepare for climate change, while many coastal states vulnerable to sea level rise and storm surges are doing the most to prepare. The plans are required by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in order for states to receive federal disaster mitigation funding.

Coastal states have been the quickest to develop plans for dealing with climate change-related disasters and hazards because of increasing awareness of the relationship between sea level rise and climate change, the report concludes. The results showing that inland states' hazard plans do not discuss climate change suggest that there is a need to better communicate the connection between climate change and drought, extreme heat and flooding, the report says.

...Eighteen states, including Delaware, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Wyoming and others, were ranked as Category 1, meaning that their plans either mention nothing about climate change or discuss climate change with confusing, dismissive or inaccurate information. Colorado, California, New York and eight others that included the most thorough and accurate discussion of climate change were ranked as Category 4, while the remaining states fell between the two categories.

“By identifying the most thorough plans that have been prepared, we hope to provide planners in other states with models that can serve as a place to start in upgrading their own plans,” said Michael B. Gerrard, director of Columbia University’s Center for Climate Change Law, which conducted the survey....

A willet at the beach, head in the sand, shot by Korall, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

After the storms, a different opinion on climate change

A press release from the Association for Psychological Science: Extreme weather may lead people to think more seriously about climate change, according to new research. In the wake of Hurricanes Irene and Sandy, New Jersey residents were more likely to show support for a politician running on a “green” platform, and expressed a greater belief that climate change is caused by human activity.

This research, published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that traumatic weather events may have the power to shift people’s automatic attitudes — their first instincts — in favor of environmentally sustainable policies.

Though scientists are in near-unilateral agreement that human activity contributes to climate change, the relationship isn’t as clear to many politicians and citizens. This translates into lackluster support for environmental policies, especially when the short-term consequences amount to higher taxes.

“Americans tend to vote more from a self-interested perspective rather than demand that their government affect change,” says lead researcher Laurie Rudman of Rutgers University.

In 2010, Rudman and her colleagues Meghan McLean and Martin Bunzl surveyed over 250 Rutgers undergraduate students, measuring their attitudes toward two politicians, one who favored and another who opposed environmental policies that involve tax increases. The researchers asked the students whether they believed that humans are causing climate change, and they also had the students complete a test intended to reveal their automatic, instinctual preferences toward the politicians.

Though most students said they preferred the green politician, their automatic preferences suggested otherwise. The automatic-attitudes test indicated that the students tended to prefer the politician who did not want to raise taxes to fund environment-friendly policy initiatives...

Aftermath of 2005's Hurricane Wilma in Cancun, Mexico, shot by Alejandro Aleph, public domain

Climate change deniers using dirty tricks from 'Tobacco Wars'

EurekAlert via Sage Publications: Fossil fuel companies have been funding smear campaigns that raise doubts about climate change, writes John Sauven in the latest issue of Index on Censorship magazine.

Environmental campaigner Sauven argues: "Some of the characters involved have previously worked to deny the reality of the hole in the ozone layer, acid rain and the link between tobacco and lung cancer. And the tactics they are applying are largely the same as those they used in the tobacco wars. Doubt is still their product."

Governments around the world have also attempted to silence scientists who have raised concerns about climate change. Tactics used have included: the UK government spending millions infiltrating peaceful environmental organisations; Canadian government scientists barred from communicating with journalists without media officers; and US federal scientists pressured to remove words 'global warming' and 'climate change' from reports under the Bush administration.

Writing about government corruption in the Indian mining industry, Sauven says: "It will be in these expanding economies that the battle over the Earth's future will be won or lost. And as in the tobacco wars, the fight over clean energy is likely to be a dirty one."...

Photo by Assef elweter, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Matt Ridley has joined the real climate debate

A trenchant response by Myles Allen to his study, now being cited by gung-ho denialists everywhere. From the Environment blog in the Guardian (UK): It isn't often, as a climate scientist, that you find your research being enthusiastically endorsed by climate sceptic Matt Ridley in the Times. We published a paper in the journal Nature Geoscience on Sunday giving a new best estimate of 1.3C for the warming expected at the time in the future when carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reaches double the level it did before the industrial revolution (known as Transient Climate Response, or TCR).

Ridley is excited about this, because he feels it means that until his teenage children reach retirement age, they won't have to worry about global warming. And he is worried that government policies are misguided because they place their faith in climate models, like one of the Met Office models that puts the warming instead at 2.5C, almost twice our estimate.

But no one places their faith in any single climate model, and no one has done so for 20 years. Climate scienitsts are all well aware the Met's model (HadGEM2) is at the top end of the current range. The Met Office's advice to government is based on the range of results from current climate models, not just their own.

The relevant comparison is not with the 2.5C response of one model, but with the average of climate models used by the UN's climate science panel in its upcoming major report, which is 1.8C. Now 1.3C is 30% less than 1.8C, but this is hardly a game changer: at face value, our new findings mean that the changes we had previously expected between now and 2050 might take until 2065 to materialise instead. Then again, they might not: 1.8C is within our range of uncertainty; and natural variability will affect what happens in the 2050s anyway.

Despite this, our study seems to be being enthusiastically cited by Ridley and climate sceptics the world over as final endorsement of their position. If this means their position is that the most likely response is 30% lower than the average of our current models, then perhaps the debate on global temperature is indeed over: 30% is well within the range of uncertainty anyway. But that doesn't mean all debate about climate is over.

Is Ridley right that there is no actual evidence of harm as long as droughts, floods and storms are within historic variability? Try explaining to a casino bouncer that it doesn't matter you are using loaded dice because a triple-six is within historic variability – but that is a different story.

Where Ridley may well be right is that if you are confident that citizens of 2065 will be rich enough and smart enough to cope with whatever we bequeath to them; or if you really don't care about unborn generations anyway (what have unborn generations ever done for me?); or if, like Bjorn Lomborg, you discount future damages to give very little weight to anything that happens after 2065; or if you firmly believe that the "second coming" will occur before 2065 anyway – then there probably isn't much point in trying to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. These are perfectly coherent ethical positions: they don't happen to be positions that I subscribe to, but if that is what Ridley thinks, so be it....

Iceberg west of Ilulissat inlet, Greenland, shot by Uta Wollf, Rodebay, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license