(Orginally posted Jan 15)
Just as your correspondent here was trying to figure out whether it's worth posting on the brace of news stories about the US government's latest biannual quadrennial National Climate Assessment released in draft form late last week, along comes up on the screen a top ten list to my rescue. It has just enough hook to hang the report's coverage. I failed to spot this two or three weeks ago while assembling a New Year's list of lists of notable science news stories for the year. Now it has better use:
- Media Matters – Shauna Theel: 10 Dumbest Things Fox Said About Climate Change In 2012 ;
This list is mostly for laughs. To dig deeply into the manner in which Fox covers climate would take investigation and a strong stomach. The list's humor is mainly on the same level as lib-green jokes about "Faux News." However, as that is also about the level where my mind tends to set its cruise control, I read it through and perked up at number 8: "Fox Reporter: Global Warming Advocates 'Never' Cite A 'Consensus of Scientists'". The reporter said they always just quote one scientist, never a collection of them. And when another talking head on the program tried to correct the statement, she fired back "Just so you know, the consensus has not been met among scientists on this issue. Or that CO2 actually plays a part in this global warming phenomenon as they've come up with somehow."
This is like shooting fish in a barrel, a barrel that has no water in it so the fish are just flopping there while you take aim with a two barreled shotgun just to make sure you can mostly miss and still hit a fish. Onward: the new National Climate Assessment got lots of coverage. It represents the work of about 250 scientists. That's a collection for sure. So there, Faux News!
The news from the climate assessment, produced collectively by 13 agencies including NOAA, Dept. of Defense, NASA, the State Dept. and now out in a 400-page target for public comment, is that weather is getting more extreme, seas are rising, the Arctic ice pack is melting more and more with nearly every summer that goes by, natural ecosystems are faltering, agriculture faces immense longterm challenges, and that the evidence is unambiguous. This is the third such report. They are supposed to come out every two four years. (apology for error). Clinton's team did one. Obama's now has done two. The 2d Bush Administration – despite a supposed Congressional mandate – skipped it.
The challenge for reporters, as with most such reports from huge collections of scientists that tend to say the same thing about the dreadful course along which greenhouse gases are sending us careening and arguing, is how to relay the news without just saying the same things as last time. The public is generally, surveys say, in favor of doing something. But political minefields prevent BIG things from being tried. Why? Reporters cannot just review Chris Mooney's book The Republican Brain again and again. Some say that the definition of idiocy is to keep doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result. Not necessarily so. Hit someone on the jaw enough times, eventually they go down. In the meantime, the carousel continues…
*Chris Mooney UPDATE (or, sheesh, how'd I miss this first time through?) :
- Mother Jones – Chris Mooney: Could This Scary Report Get Americans to Care About Climate? / Yes, it's only a draft, but here's why the National Climate Assessment is a BFD ; Last in that I've seen but best of the reports so far, with those already caught two days ago coming up below. Mooney, being deeply embedded in the topic with a contact list ready to go, gets off the mark smartly with background, specific scenarios how this report might change things, and of course a reference to his TRB book.
Stories:
- AP – Seth Borensetin: Report Says Warming Is Changing US Daily Life ; It's pretty clear that the weather that people experience, more than any media reports, is pushing US opinion toward acceptance of climate change science as legit and worth acting upon. Perhaps that is why the headline emphasizes that the warming is no long anything abstract – it's right outside the door (or inside it, in the case of storm surges).
- USA Today – Wendy Koch: Climate change report: Seas rising, heat waves ahead ;
- Guardian (UK) Suzanne Goldenberg: Climate change set to make America hotter, drier and more disaster-prone ;
- Reuters – Deborah Zabarenko: Impact of climate change hitting home, U.S. report finds;
- NYTimes: Green Blog – Justin Gillis: An alarm in the Offing on Climate Change ; and Dot EArth blog – Andrew C. Revkin: Draft Federal Report Sees Big U.S. Impacts from Global Warming ;
- Grist – Philip Bump: The 32 most alarming charts from the government's climate change report ;
Grist for the Mill: Nat'l Climate Assessment Development Advisory Committee: Draft Climate Assessment Report Released; Or, just go to the Executive Summary.
CAN'T HELP BUT NOTICE Dept:
In a recent analysis feisty climate campaigner and bona fide climatologist Jim Hansen and two colleagues just, partly, conceded a minor and meaningless point that the doubters have been insisting upon for some time – that global warming has stopped for the last fifteen years or so. It does look pretty flattish for a while. Hansen et al's remark is that "The 5-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade, which we interpret as a combination of natural variability and a slowdown in the growth rate of the net climate forcing." If one follows that link looks at the accompanying plot, such levelish or even declining interludes have been common on the plot (early 70s, mid 80s, early 90s…). This one comes on the tail end of one of the longer, relentlessly upward parts of the slope over the last century.
And by the way, astronomer Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy has a fervid debunking of the notion that the pause in GW goes back 16 years. Line of the day: "..a level of chutzpah so high that even Yiddish can't do it justice."
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