As if we needed any more evidence demonstrating that anthropogenic climate change is real, that it is occurring right now, and that it poses a major threat to the planet's environment, we now have it — in spades. Let;s begin with the assessment by a Penn State University investigation, which completely exonerated climate scientist Michael Mann from any wrongdoing in the ridiculous, trumped-up, never-any-truth-to-it, pseudo-“scandal” known as “climate-gate.” In reaction to this report, former House Science Committee Chairman Sherwood Boehlert (R-NY) — full disclosure, Boehlert's on the NRDC Action Fund board — issued a statement which read:
This exoneration should close the book on the absurd episode in which climate scientists were unjustly attacked when in fact they have been providing a great public service. The attacks on scientists were a manufactured distraction, and today's report is a welcome return to common sense. While scientists can now focus on their work, policy makers need to address the very real problem of climate change.
Well said, Congressman, and keep up the great work, Professor Mann!
Next, just to pound the final nails into the coffins of the climate change deniers, a major, independent review by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency was released on July 5. The report's main conclusions were crystal clear:
- “no errors that would undermine the main conclusions in the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on possible future regional impacts of climate change”
- “the summary conclusions are considered well founded, none have been found to contain any significant errors”
- “ample observational evidence of regional climate change impacts, which have been projected to pose substantial risks to most parts of the world, under increasing temperatures”
In fairness, the Dutch report leveled several criticisms of the IPCC report: 1) even the few, minor errors shouldn't have been allowed to slip by; 2) the report's summary statement should have been written to provide a higher amount of transparency regarding its sources and methods; and 3) the report tended to focus solely on the adverse consequences of climate change, not on potentially positive impacts. These are non-trivial issues that need to be addressed. Having said that, as Joe Romm points out, “the overwhelming majority of research since the IPCC has found that the IPCC has consistently underestimated many key current and future impacts, particularly sea level rise (and carbon-cycle feedbacks).”
In the end, the bottom line from these reports is clear: the science behind human-induced climate change has emerged from this entire, ridiculous, episode overwhelmingly intact — if not strengthened. The only real question now is, what are we going to do about it?
We need to start teaching people basic math and science about sampling and give people enough of a BS meter to know when the garbage they are being told is garbage.
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p>Seriously, you need a licence to practice law, but it drives me up the wall when any idiot can say (usually on right wing radio and Faux News) that a single snowstorm in DC in the winter disproves Global Warming and people believe them as though these idiots are experts. But if the very same idiot said that they disproved the 50/50 logic of a coin toss because they flipped a coin twice and it came up heads both times, people know it is BS.
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p>Why are two coin flips disproving 50/50 logic clearly BS but a single snow storm in DC in the winter still a logical mystery? Because we live in a country where Darwin is demonized and Intelligent Design is taken seriously. My understanding is that Math and Science teaching was decimated by religious fanatics in the 1900’s up to including the Scopes Monkey trials and it wasn’t until Sputnik and the fear of Russian dominance that a serious effort was made to correct the teaching of Math and Science. Now we are letting the same religious fanatics drag down the collective intelligence of the country and it has to stop.
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p>When Tea Party extremist, like Rand Paul and Susan Angle talk about abolishing the Department of Education, it is our collective ability to stand up to them and say, “You are wrong” that they want to destroy. They don’t want to be questioned, they want to blindly followed.
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p>The following words, which I love, were written by John Adams into the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (emphasis added), Chapter 5, Section 2 and is relevant today.
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D’Oh!
…even before you went and quoted my hands-down favorite paragraph from the MA Constitution!
People deny global warming because they have powerful incentives to do so. They wish to continue to live as they have lived, i.e. very profligately with respect to burning fossil fuels. They do not want to have prices for such fuels increased. They do not want consumption of those fuels to be cut. They have a strong aversion to the immediate costs of energy reform that is suggested by an acceptance of global warming.
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p>In contrast to the immediate costs of accepting global warming and dealing with it, we have the costs of denial of global warming.
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p>The costs of denying global warming and letting it continue unabated are supposed to be very high, but they are also (relatively) very remote, most happening several decades from now. Generally people don’t really care about distant costs, even horrific ones. The future is always discounted.
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p>It’s like a smoker denying that cigarettes cause cancer. It’s not because the smoker is unscientific. It is because he or she really likes smoking cigarettes and therefore chooses to deny the truth to avoid taking the action (quitting) that acknowledging the cigarette/cancer connection would require.
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p>Make people want to accept global warming out of self-interest and watch how scientific our population can get.
While no single weather event, cold or warm, proves long term climate change over and over again we see events consistent with accelerating climate change, yet this obvious point is almost never mentioned by major media sources.
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p>It’s also extraordinary that in the country that more than any other is responsible for the developing climate crisis it is socially acceptable to deny this responsible and to refuse to act.