Weather? Climate? Confused?

Have you noticed the attention the weather has been getting in the media?  The cold blast for much of the U.S. & Canada, the trapped ship in the Antarctic, and the storms hitting Europe around Christmas are just a few examples.  Other news reports that you may not have been aware were the floods in southern Brazil and in the Caribbean, the heat wave in Argentina, the usually cold weather in the Middle East.  These are all weather events.

Some media outlets are reporting the cold events indicate that we have little to fear from global warming.  Yet global warming does not cancel the seasons.  In fact what we know about our changing climate is to expect more weather extremes worldwide.   Not just heat waves, but more floods, droughts, and even energized storm systems.  This is how a changing climate translates into daily weather.

Often many in the media confuse the difference between weather and climate.  Don’t worry, because some meteorologists do too.  The weather is basically composed the events that unfold in the present.  Meanwhile climate looks at the long term average of weather.  By definition this is a 30-year period.  We can look at shorter term trends to look at how changes are progressing, but we still have to look at the climate period of 30 years.

Bad Place For Science

Two recent editorials in Investor’s Business Daily (IBD) are examples of why you don’t want to get your science from the editorial page.  The paper touts its views as conservative, but these examples are either meant to mislead or are out of ignorance.  They deserve to be put to rest once and for all.  You can read them here and here.

The first editorial attacks the notion that there is no consensus on climate change.  It uses a study published in November and can be read here.  The first red flag in the editorial is that they never mention where the study is published.  However, it did not take long for me to track down the paper.

It seems that the editorial originated with James Taylor, managing editor of The Heartland Institute’s Environment and Climate News, with a post he wrote on the Forbes website.  The original post on Forbes and thus the editorial in IBD have been thoroughly debunked here, here, and here.

Brian Angliss of Scholars and Rogues writes:

“The reality is that, contrary to claims made by Taylor and others at Heartland, every serious attempt to measure the degree of consensus among scientists and climate experts has concluded that the overwhelming majority of experts agree that climate is changing rapidly, that humans are the dominant drivers of the changes, and that model projections indicate that the changes will be highly disruptive if they’re not planned for. And every attempt to disprove the reported consensus has been disproved or shown to be based on distortions. Just like this attempt by Taylor has been.”

Denial Amongst TV Weathercasters

I was surprised this past week by an article in Rolling Stone magazine.  The article covered the issue of the denial of human-caused climate change among the nation’s television weathercasters.  It is an issue that has puzzled me given the science and the consensus among climate scientists.  One has to question why so many TV weathercasters seem to know more than climate scientists.  The article highlights a rather vocal group of communicators and can be seen here.

Screen grab of the Rolling Stone website.  Image Credit: Rolling Stone

There is one statement that I disagree with in the article.  It states that “Yet the cause of much of the meteorological mayhem – global warming – was rarely mentioned on air.”  The author implies that Sandy was caused by global warming.  I do not believe that this is accurate.  Sandy and other “meteorological mayhem” was enhanced in it destructiveness by global warming and climate change as I have written previously.

Cherrypicking & Misleading

I am frequently disappointed when I read articles or editorials claiming that human-caused warming of the planet is not happening or that climate science is wrong.  Such disappointment occurred recently as I read an editorial from Investor’s Business Daily (IBD).

The national newspaper covers international business, finance, and the global economy.  Its editorials are by its own admission conservative.  I use the paper for the detailed information on companies and have used it for over two decades.  It is a good source for financial information, but a poor source for science information.

An online editorial entitled “Facts Get In The Way-Again-Of A Good Global Warming Story” can be viewed here.  The editorial is meant to criticize a recent trip by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  The editorial begins “Hillary Clinton made a well-publicized trip last week to the Arctic to see for herself the impact of global warming. Less well known, however, are two reports that contradict the climate-change alarmists.”

Image Credit: NASA Goddard's Scientific Visualization Studio.

“First, polar ice is now the heaviest "in more than a decade," reports the Los Angeles Times.” Later it refers to another report “Second, photos taken in the 1930s by Danish explorers "show glaciers in Greenland retreating faster than they are today, according to researchers," tech publication The Register reported.

I long ago learned to be highly skeptical of any claim by IBD.  The first red flag is that they are quoting other media sources and not the science research itself.  Fortunately I was able to track down both reports.  It turns out that the information is cherrypicked and misleading.

Living on a Planet with a Fever

You may have missed this over the weekend.  It was a commentary on CBS News by science and environment contributor M. Sanjayan.  If you don't want to read about climate change, this sums up the situation well.  This is a must see video:



Note: Those on IPads and IPhone may have to go to the following link to see the video .

M. Sanjayan is the lead scientist for The Nature Conservancy, where he specializes in human well-being and conservation, Africa, wildlife ecology and media outreach and public speaking on conservation issues.  In addition to being the Conservancy’s lead scientist, Sanjayan holds a doctorate from the University of California, Santa Cruz and has a research faculty appointment with the Wildlife Program at the University of Montana.  His scientific work has been published in journals including Science, Nature, and Conservation Biology, and he co-edited the book Connectivity Conservation (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Dr. Sanjayan is correct in saying that this is our sink or swim moment.  The next 25 years are already baked into the cake.  If we want to affect the rate of climate change beyond that, we have to start now.  Many of the projections you see are for 2100, but the change will not stop there.  Change is already occurring and the changes will likely accelerate in the near future.

Recently the Heartland Institute in Chicago aroused the anger of many with a billboard trying to tie belief in climate change to the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.  It was a poor attempt to associate such belief with murderers, tyrants, and madmen.


Peter Sinclair, the originator of the Climate Crock of the Week series, has put together an interesting rebuttal entitled "This is not Cool: Murderers, Tyrants, and Madmen.  It is part of the Yale forum on Climate Change and the Media series "This is not Cool".  I highly recommend watching the video.

Irresponsible Skepticism

This past week has seen a buzz in the blogosphere about documents concerning The Heartland Institute.  DeSmogBlog was the first to report on the documents and you can see their posts here, here, here, here, and here.  Further commentary can be found on other websites here, here, here, and here.

See full image at Skeptical Science

The contents of the email from Heartland are now being refered to as Denialgate.  The released brought a response the those victimized by Climategate.  Their response was published in The Guardian and can be found here.

In a previous post I discussed a series on climate ethics that Dr. Donald Brown has been posting on his blog by the same name.  The timing of this series seems ironic in that the Heartland documents go to the point of his discussion about the climate change disinformation campaign.

The Heartland Institute is just one of many "think" tanks that is really an advocacy group, not a scientific organization.  It is not involved in research and publication in any peer-reviewed journal.  It has been criticized in the science journals Nature and Science.  The documents indicate that they have received funding from the fossil-fuel and tobacco industry amongst others.

Climate Change & Ethics

I have been thinking about this post since Donald Brown, Associate Professor of Environmental Ethics, Science, and Law at Penn State University, wrote a blogpost entitled "An Ethical Analysis of the Climate Change Disinformation Campaign: Is This A New Kind of Assault on Humanity?"  He outlined the campaign against climate science and went on to write "We are not trying to limit free speech but encourage people to see that lying or misinformation is deeply ethically problematic particularly in cases when deception can lead to immense harm."

I will be the first to admit that I have not consider the ethical implications of man-made climate change or the tactics used to attack the science.   I have been more concerned about the science and challenging those spreading science myths and disinformation.  Considering ethics seemed more of an academic exercise and one that most would find hard to understand.

Granted, I am taking a risk in exploring this issue.  Therefore, I started with an easy question; what is ethics?  I looked at several dictionary responses, but I didn't get much information from them on ethics.  Turned out that the answer was not easy or succinct.