Pacific Island Nations Tell The World ‘Climate Change Has Arrived’

“Climate change has arrived,” and the world must act. That’s the message from fifteen nations in the southwestern Pacific, who signed a statement yesterday calling on other countries to join them in “the urgent reduction and phase down of greenhouse gas pollution.”

With Climate Journalism Like This, Who Needs Fiction?

(Just go read the post)

U.S. Navy Triples Clean Energy Startup Funding In Hawaii

A clean energy seed money startup program in Hawai’i will now have triple its existing budget courtesy of the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research.

Energy Excelerator provides between $30,000 to $100,000 in seed money to clean energy startups in Hawai’i. If a more advanced company wishes to create a pilot project on Hawai’i and can raise $500,000 in matching funds, the program will supply a $1 million grant. Every summer, the program selects 13 businesses that have ideas related to: grid integration of renewable energy; bioenergy and transportation; and energy efficiency for built environment and agriculture.

Hundreds of companies apply for grants, but…

Dominion Virginia wins right to lease ocean tract for wind farm

Plans for the first offshore wind farm in the region moved forward Wednesday when Dominion Virginia Power won the right to lease nearly 113,000 acres off the Virginia coast to generate power with wind turbines.

The utility outbid Apex Virginia Offshore Wind in a six-round auction held by the Interior Department, paying $1.6 million for the right to install wind turbines 27 miles off the state’s coast. When completed, the project could provide electricity to about 700,000 homes.

This video by Media Matters on the Zany Denialists on Fox News ………

….. is nicely augmented by this blog post by Phil Plait: Climate Change or Global Warming? Both.

Once again, the winged monkeys of climate change denialim are writing fake, stupid, made up an absurd reviews of Michael Man’s book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines on Amazon.com.

If you’ve read the book and like it and have not written a review of it on Amazon, please go do so! Help a scientist out.

Thank you very much.

National Center for Science Education climate change policy director Mark McCaffrey talks about the history of climate change–and of climate change denial, doubt, and dismay at the Climate and Energy Literacy Forum, Washington, DC.

So, I posted something at Daily Kos you might find interesting:

As we wrestle with hard science and hard policy and the interaction between the two, the real problem we face are made much harder to solve because of the seemingly incessant drumbeat of science denialism.

Climate change is real and is mainly caused by humans, but climate change science denialism is an industry, a cottage industry, or a hobby for many. Big oil pays for the production of anti climate science rhetoric and activism. Anti climate science activists exhibit bizarre non-scientific behavior that goes beyond denying anthropogenic climate change. It may be hard to tell if the denialist activism in this important area of science and policy is something people are driven to do by vocation, or if they make a living at it.

Read the rest here.

I already told you about this. In a BBC/David Attenborough special on Africa, this specific statement was made: That part of the African continent had warmed by 3.5 degrees. This was corrected by Leo Hickman. That datum is invalid. Africa has indeed been affected by climate change, but that specific factoid is incorrect. Now, the BBC is patting itself on the back for correcting the special, but they are doing it wrong.

From the BBC Story:

The presenter then commented on the additional challenges presented by climate change, adding that parts of Africa now face higher temperatures.

However, a BBC statement, said: “There is widespread acknowledgement within the scientific community that the climate of Africa has been changing.

“We accept the detail is disputable and the commentary should have reflected that, therefore the line of commentary has been edited out of Sunday’s repeat and iPlayer version removed.”

They continue to say that climate change is real and affects Africa, and they make reference to an error in the documentary. But the error in the documentary is a) very specific and b) not entirely unrelated to reality, though the datum itself is totally bogus.

Here’s my quote mined version of the BBC statement: “parts of Africa now face higher temperatures…[but] the detail is disputable… [and] has been edited out of Sunday’s repeat and iPlayer version removed”

They should have been more clear about this.

It has become increasingly difficult to understand the motivation behind climate science denialism. The Earth’s climate is changing, mainly in the form of increased temperatures of the oceans and the atmosphere, because of the release of copious amounts of previously trapped Carbon through the burning of fossil fuels. There is no longer a question that this is happening, and every year, the various details that one might like to see worked out, regarding the mechanisms or effects of climate change, are increasingly known. To state, with a straight face, that the jury is still out, or that we can’t separate natural variation from human caused changes, or that the earth has stopped warming for the last decade, or any of the other things we constantly hear from climate change denialists is exactly the same thing as standing there with a big sign that reads “I am a moron.” Politicians, who by and large remain ignorant of all sorts of science, have become aware of this over recent years and many now couch their phraseology in cautious terms, if they happen to be running there campaigns, as many are, on the Oil Teat. Even more amazing, principled Libertarians have stopped denying the reality of climate change, taking a different tact to avoid any responsibility or action: Yes, the climate change we’ve been busy denying the reality of for the last 30 years is real, they agree, but it is too late to do anything about it now so let’s just move inland as the sea level rises and buy lighter jackets.

So why is climate change denialism still a thing at all? And it is a thing. There are individuals on the lecture circuit, bloggers, and a handful of scientists who continue to peddle what can only be understood as willfully ignorant or evasive, incomplete or cherry picked, or in some cases, just plain dishonest ‘analyses’ or interpretations of data suggesting that climate change is not real, or is not human caused if it is real. There is so much of this out there that some of it even gets published now and then. For example, a recent paper in a mid-level general science journal made a very good argument that “natural variation” explains about 40% of the putative warming in recent decades on this planet, as opposed to the release of fossil Carbon Dioxide by burning of fuels. Unfortunately, the “good argument” in that paper systematically ignored a rather impressive literature that had already addressed the same issues, found problems with an entire methodological approach and interpretation, leaving the just-published interpretation not only impossible, but actually rather embarrassing to others in the climate science community that someone would still be saying it. (You’ve not heard about this yet, but I guarantee it will be in the news and on the blogs over the next few weeks.) Most times, though, the science-denialism comes from a handful of very active blogs, from those charismatic lecture circuit denizens such as “Lord” Christopher Monkton, and a very large number of commenters and their probable sock puppets who show up at every on line newspaper and blog to spew the same exact lines again and again even though every single remark they make … without exception … has long ago been discredited with science and reason.

Read the rest here.

How will climate change affect the flavor of wine? Are warming oceans responsible for the recent global jellyfish outbreak? Do we know how a rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide will affect poison ivy, tobacco, or even sea anemones? NCSE climate change project director talks about what the research shows and future questions to be answered. Sponsored by the Bay Area Skeptics.

I have two questions:

1) Which high power storms had zero extra energy from warming in the atmosphere and seas owing to the release of fossil carbon?

2) Which high powered members of the military, other government units, or industry and business had zero extramarital affairs or the equivalent?

Answer: Number 1 has been on the increase, number 2 on the decrease, on average, the former owing mainly to the burning of fossil fuels, the latter to the disestablishment of the hareem system.

Visit the Petraeus Affair Tumblr.