or…
“Why Climate Deniers Have No Scientific Credibility - In One Number”
Deniers of climate science are fond of the following wacky idea: That the scientific community does not agree on the cause of climate change. It’s time to bury that idea like a senile dog hiding a ham bone: Somewhere where we’ll forget about it forever.
According to some recent data-mining of the scientific literature, 0.17% is the percentage of peer-reviewed scientific papers in the past 21 years that offer a scientifically-viable alternative to human-caused global warming.
Only 24 of 13,950 articles (0.17%) try to make this case in a scientific manner. If any of them were right, they would have been cited hundreds of times, instead of forgotten forever.
Among the public, denying global warming is a very popular and very influential idea. Among scientists, it holds slightly less than no water.
“These weather events are not simply an example of what climate change could bring. They are caused by climate change.” ––James Hansen, NASA Climate Scientist
Long time truth sayer, James Hansen.
pretty much what I said earlier except from the mouth of an official NASA climate scientist.
(via kenobi-wan-obi)
A rather sad climate change lecture from 1980 by Dr. Roger Revelle, one of the first climate scientists in the world. His talk is nearly exactly what you’ll hear today. The temperature swings, sea level rise, crop issues, glacial and arctic melt - all uncannily familiar. The NYTimes’s Andrew Revkin blogged about Revelle this past week, here.
Governments are falling badly behind on low-carbon energy, putting carbon reduction targets out of reach and pushing the world to the brink of catastrophic climate change, the world’s leading independent energy authority will warn on Wednesday. The stark judgment is being given at a key meeting of energy ministers from the world’s biggest economies and emitters taking place in London on Wednesday – a meeting already overshadowed by David Cameron’s last-minute withdrawal from a keynote speech planned for Thursday. “The world’s energy system is being pushed to breaking point,” Maria van der Hoeven, executive director of the International Energy Agency, writes in today’s Guardian. “Our addiction to fossil fuels grows stronger each year. Many clean energy technologies are available but they are not being deployed quickly enough to avert potentially disastrous consequences.”
(Source: tartantambourine, via socialuprooting)
MA Governor Mitt Romney’s Official Stance on Climate Change, July 21, 2003
- Green Donors Bet Romney Is Faking His New Climate Change Views And Will Flip Flop Back If Elected (thinkprogress.org)
- Romney On Cap And Trade In 2003: ‘I Am Making Good On My Pledge’ To Clean Up Carbon Pollution ‘Harming Our Climate’ (thinkprogress.org)
- Green socialists backing Romney campaign with huge donations (winteryknight.wordpress.com)
- Does Romney secretly support ‘climate-change controls’? (grist.org)
nrdc:
Florida: Drowning in Climate Change Denial
- By 2070, nearly 5 million people and $3.5 trillion in assets could be flooded by a 100-year coastal flood in the Miami area alone.
- Sea level rise of a little more than 2 feet would place 9 percent of the state’s current land area underwater at high tide (over 99 percent of Monroe County and nearly 70 percent of Miami-Dade County)—an area with a population of 1.5 million.
- The bread-and-butter tourism industry could lose $40 billion annually by 2050 and $167 billion annually by 2100 if no action is taken.
- Greater evaporative losses from surface water reservoirs would affect water availability.
- Drought events could contribute to saltwater intrusion into coastal freshwater aquifers, contaminating drinking water supplies.
Given the enormous risks to the people, economy, and resources of Florida, you would think that state agencies would be busy developing plans and policies to reduce vulnerabilities. Think again.
According to a new NRDC report, Florida lags far behind other states in preparing for climate change impacts. Read more.
Photo: Alligator Creek near Punta Gorda, FL, by Seamoor (flickr)
![ecocides:
Climate Change Sends Beetles Into Overdrive
Call it the beetle baby boom. Climate change could be throwing common tree killers called mountain pine beetles into a reproductive frenzy. A new study suggests that some beetles living in Colorado, which normally reproduce just once annually, now churn out an extra generation of new bugs each year. And that could further devastate the region’s forests.
Pine beetles (Dendroctonus ponderosae), which scuttle from New Mexico north into Canada, are trouble for trees, says study co-author Jeffry Mitton, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Beginning in late summer along high altitude sites in the eastern Colorado Rocky Mountains, for instance, swarms of hundreds or even thousands of these small black bugs will single out individual lodgepole pines (Pinus contorta) or related trees, then advance on them en masse. Females dig deep burrows inside the pines’ trunks and drop down their eggs. They also deposit a special type of fungus that the insects carry with them that grow inside the trees, eventually helping to kill them. Beetle larvae feed on that same fungus throughout the winter, escaping their burrows the following August.
Recently, pine beetles have inexplicably exploded across their range. In British [Columbia] alone, the insects gutted and killed about 13 million hectares of trees in about a decade. Mitton says it’s possible to fly in a small plane over pine forests here for an hour or more and see almost no living pine trees.
[read the full article on science.com]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m20r9bPCgk1qdb2suo1_500.png)
Climate Change Sends Beetles Into Overdrive
Call it the beetle baby boom. Climate change could be throwing common tree killers called mountain pine beetles into a reproductive frenzy. A new study suggests that some beetles living in Colorado, which normally reproduce just once annually, now churn out an extra generation of new bugs each year. And that could further devastate the region’s forests.
Pine beetles (Dendroctonus ponderosae), which scuttle from New Mexico north into Canada, are trouble for trees, says study co-author Jeffry Mitton, an evolutionary geneticist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Beginning in late summer along high altitude sites in the eastern Colorado Rocky Mountains, for instance, swarms of hundreds or even thousands of these small black bugs will single out individual lodgepole pines (Pinus contorta) or related trees, then advance on them en masse. Females dig deep burrows inside the pines’ trunks and drop down their eggs. They also deposit a special type of fungus that the insects carry with them that grow inside the trees, eventually helping to kill them. Beetle larvae feed on that same fungus throughout the winter, escaping their burrows the following August.
Recently, pine beetles have inexplicably exploded across their range. In British [Columbia] alone, the insects gutted and killed about 13 million hectares of trees in about a decade. Mitton says it’s possible to fly in a small plane over pine forests here for an hour or more and see almost no living pine trees.
(Source: rorschachx, via reagan-was-a-horrible-president)
— What Insurance Companies Already Know About Climate Change (via azspot)
Dear friends,
Imagine one of the largest banners the world has ever seen, staked down on a California glacier with a simple message: ‘I’m Melting!’
Now imagine, at the same moment, activists in Ho Chi Minh City gathering along the Saigon River to mark the ever higher tides that are swamping…
