"There are hundreds and hundreds of scientists, many of them holding Nobel Prizes, who believe in intelligent design," she said.
There was the time in 2011 when Bachmann interpreted Hurricane Irene and an earthquake felt along the East Coast as God's warnings to politicians. A year later, as Florida braced for Tropical Storm Isaac, she said, "We are looking at a spiritual hurricane in our land."
“I will tell you that I had a mother last night come up to me here in Tampa, Florida, after the debate. She told me that her little daughter took that vaccine that injection and she suffered from mental retardation thereafter.”
“Carbon dioxide is portrayed as harmful. But there isn’t even one study that can be produced that shows that carbon dioxide is a harmful gas.”
"The time is coming when the struggle for dominion over the earth will be carried on. It will be carried on in the name of fundamental philosophical doctrines."(From the frontispiece to Clive Hamilton's new book Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, 1882
(recommended))
"On October 25, Sandy hit Cuba as a Category 3 hurricane, then weakened to a Category 1 hurricane. Early on October 26, Sandy moved through the Bahamas. On October 27, Sandy briefly weakened to a tropical storm and then restrengthened to a Category 1 hurricane. Early on October 29, Sandy curved north-northwest and then moved ashore near Brigantine, New Jersey, just to the northeast of Atlantic City, as a post-tropical cyclone with hurricane-force winds."Technically it didn't count as a "major hurricane," a term which the National Hurricane Center reserves for hurricanes that reach maximum sustained 1-minute surface winds of at least 50 m/s (111 mph) -- equivalent of category 3, 4 and 5 on the Saffir-Simpson scale.
According to Misra, Hurricane Sandy had a higher TIKE value than any other tropical storm or hurricane in the North Atlantic Ocean Basin since 1990. Hurricane Lily, which occurred in 1996, was the runner-up, followed by 2010’s Igor, 1995’s Luis, 1997’s Erica, and Hurricane Olga, which occurred in 2001.They obtain results since 1990:
“This is climate change. We were warned about extreme weather. Not just hot weather. But extreme weather."That's not a scientifically justifiable statement. But the fact remains that no one really knows the extent to which these storms are affected by climate change -- it's not something science can yet determine, which is very different from saying there is no influence.
Every weather event is substantially changed now by climate change. There is more heat in the atmosphere. There is more moisture. And something I've been seeing the last three years is the jet stream patterns have been getting very extreme. I've never seen, in my 30 years as a meteorologist, the sort of unusual sorts of jet stream patterns where we get these large loops, where they tend to get stuck in place, contributing to extreme weather. Whether we're going to be seeing more tornadoes because of that, I don't really know, because when you do change a jet stream like that, you are actually going to slow the winds down of the jet stream. And when you have slower winds, you get less of a twisting motion to get tornadoes spinning. So, in theory, that should decrease tornadoes. But on the other hand, when you have a warmer atmosphere, the air is more unstable, and that's the other key ingredient we need to make tornadoes. How those two factors are going to interplay in the future, we don't know. But I think Dr. Trenberth is right: We have to look at the changed environment that all these sorts of weather systems are in now to look forward to what we're going to see in coming decades.
Arguably most importantly, Healthy Kids and fluoridation have the endorsement of the massed forces of rationality and medical authority. Almost every credible national, state, and local health and science organization—private and public—gives its blessing to optimal levels of water fluoridation: The American Medical Association, the American Dental Association, the Environmental Protection Agency, the World Health Organization, American Academy of Family Physicians, and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, which named the measure one of the 10 greatest public health achievements of the 20th century. They all agree that fluoridated water is perfectly safe and extremely effective at preventing tooth decay.The city likes to tout a motto of "Keep Portland Weird." To that let's add "Also, Toothless" -- almost one-fifth of Oregon's children 6-9 year olds had untreated decay. (Yes, this anti-fluoride sentiment reaches statewide.) A survey last year found "Oregon ranked 25th – or 7th from the bottom – in percentage of children with untreated decay compared to 32 other states with similar data."
In Grants Pass last month, officials locked down an elementary school while police searched for a burglar with a stolen rifle. Officers found the suspect with the loaded rifle hiding in a nearby shed, but cited and released him because the Josephine County jail didn't have room.How niggardly are these counties? The Oregonian wrote: "Josephine County residents pay 58 cents per $1,000 of assessed value for county operations, the lowest rate in the state. Curry County follows just behind at 60 cents and Lane County's rate is $1.28, the seventh lowest."
globe: 3.6°F
global land: 4.5°F
northern hemisphere land: 5.9°F
continental US: 6.0°F
north pole: 12°F
Well, none really. The 2°C limit which has become the fallback position isn't something to take lightly -- after all it's about 1/4th-1/3th of an inverse ice age, which is hardly something to scoff at, and with the warming and melting it will ultimately raise sea level by 25-50 A government analysis on Thursday showed that electricity generated by highly polluting coal-fired power plants had fallen 14 per cent since the introduction of the tax, while renewable power had soared.Here's a graph from the Australian government's latest quarterly report (issued April 15th); the year-over-year reductions are 4.7%:
The most contentious feature of the Coalition's climate policy is its reliance on using soils to store carbon for about 60 per cent of emissions reductions. It is mocked as ''soil magic'' by some. Members of the independent Climate Commission have warned that soil sequestration will not solve the climate change problem.
And by the way, why hasn't Obama gotten any credit at all for the amazing bull market in stocks that has occurred during his administrations?"David, you should explain for everyone how it should be done. It is easy to criticize, but what's the solution for the communication?"I don't think it's really a problem of communication....
1. Everyone is expected to be on one side of the other.Let's take the second point first: Unless you agree to accept and respect embargoed materials, you are not held to an embargo.
2. People are very confused about embargoes.
It's hard to say which is the more fundamental fail here: that Kloor doesn't understand that replicating results is critical to science, or that he thinks that he has somehow become a scientist, whose responsibility it is to follow and critique the bleeding edge of climate science, rather than his actual role as a science journalist helping the public grasp the critical core of the field, a job that evidently has to be done by scientists, who have pulled off a massive coup of science communication, only to be sneered at by the people who are paid to perform that function themselves.
"Do you think that your opinion of this paper is supported by experts on communication science who work on the issue of climate?"Frankly, I don't care what experts on communication science think. To be honest I don't even think what they do is a "science," let alone that they have valuable insights into the process of communicating science. I'm the one communicating science, not them.
“The world has been running into fossil fuels, not away from them.”
-- Vaclav Smil, University of Manitoba environmental scientist, quoted in a Time article about the death of Peak Oil
"That. Is. The. Stumbling. Block.None of the latter come from putting forward a single number like "97%."
"Getting past that is going to require a frank debate about future uncertainties, risks, and scenarios, and the reconciliation of competing values."
A new survey of over 12,000 peer-reviewed climate science papers by our citizen science team at Skeptical Science has found a 97% consensus in the peer-reviewed literature that humans are causing global warming.That's all well and good (and not surprising), and you can examine their methodology if you want to.
"Terminal developer Kinder Morgan on Wednesday dropped its proposal to export coal to Asia from a Columbia River port near Clatskanie.The company blamed it on logistics, not the protests, but of course they would say that, so who really knows.
"The company's decision means three of the six coal export terminals originally proposed in Oregon and Washington have gone by the wayside. It also significantly reduces the potential for coal train traffic through Portland."
“One of the things emerging from several lines is that the IPCC has not paid enough attention to natural variability, on several time scales,” he says, especially El Niños and La Niñas, the Pacific Ocean phenomena that are not yet captured by climate models, and the longer term Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) which have cycle lengths of about 60 years.Ben Santer:
From about 1975, when global warming resumed sharply, until the 1997-98 El Niño, the PDO was in its positive, warm phase, and heat did not penetrate as deeply into the ocean. The PDO has since changed to its negative, cooler phase.
“It was a time when natural variability and global warming were going in the same direction, so it was much easier to find global warming,” Trenberth says. “Now the PDO has gone in the other direction, so some counter-effects are masking some of the global warming manifestations right at the surface.”
The bottom line, Santer says, is “there are multiple, not mutually exclusive interpretations of modeled versus observed differences, and claiming that there is only one explanation is not scientifically accurate.”Ray Pierrehumbert:
“We study the signal. If others want to study the noise, let them.”
“There’s really nothing in this that changes our estimates of climate sensitivity.” Calculation of that all-important number from the 20th century record is not possible, because the aerosol forcing is not well known, nor are the data for ocean warming up to the task.The complete article is here.
“Any estimate of sensitivity requires all of the record and not just the last 20 years of it,” Pierrehumbert says. “The smaller the piece of it you take, the less certainty you have in your result.” Nonetheless, he agrees that earlier warming may have been deceiving.
“I think it’s true that some rather sloppy discussion of the rapid warming from the 20th century has given people unrealistic expectations about the future course of warming.”
"It's disheartening that he has to [now] remove himself from a federal position to advocate on climate change. Government exists, in theory at least, to serve the public's best interests," says Emmy Burns, a student activist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.I recently found these letters (below) from Science of 20 years ago, written by Carl Sagan and E.O. Wilson, about being "blacklisted" by a science journalist named Christopher Anderson because of their "advocacy" on the threat of nuclear winter and species extinction, respectively.
"Suppose you had found that the global consequences of nuclear war were much worse than had been generally understood and that military establishments worldwide had overlooked those consequences, especially in a time of a swiftly proliferating strategic arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union and when allegedly responsible officials were talking about nuclear war being "survivable" and "winnable." Wouldn't you be concerned? Would you think it your responsibility to keep quiet about this because the results were not absolutely certain, or because the full-scale experimental verification had not yet been obtained?Or, as E.O. Wilson put it succinctly:
"Or would you consider it your obligation to your children and the children of everyone else to speak up? Keeping quiet under such circumstances seems bizarre and reprehensible to me.
"Because our technology has achieved formidable powers, and because we sometimes can be careless in its application, this issue is of broad importance. If scientists will not speak out when they see such a danger to the human species, who will?
"It is reasonable then to ask what scientists are expected to do when they hit upon a serious environmental problem. Whisper in the ear of a journalist? Entirely and chastely refrain from publishing outside technical journals, hoping the results will be discovered by nonscientists?"
