One sometimes wonders how the scientists most reviled by the denial industry are bearing up under the onslaught. Michael Mann is one of them, so I was interested to listen to him being interviewed by Chris Mooney on a recent Point of Inquirypodcast. Here is a summary of some of Mann’s responses (not an accurate transcript, though mostly in his words):
On the science:
The bottom line is the basic physics and chemistry of the greenhouse effect. Observation that the globe is warming and that the warming is unusual in the long term context fits what the basic physics and chemistry says. After decades of work by thousands of scientists round the world pursuing every lead – thinking of all the possible different explanations of the phenomena they observe – there is literally no evidence that calls into question the basic radiative properties of greenhouse gases. You increase greenhouse gas concentrations, you will warm the atmosphere. Questioning that basic reality is almost like questioning the spherical nature of the Earth.
What scientists actually spend time debating and pursuing are issues like feedbacks – the processes that might amplify or diminish that warming. There are open questions relating to such matters as clouds, El Ninos, hurricanes, and so on, which are being actively pursued. But on the basic issue – the scientific community moved on from that question decades ago.
The crank web is all atwitter with the news that Bob Carter’s been censored by Australia’s public broadcaster, the ABC. But an exclusive Hot Topic investigation reveals that the supposed “censorship” looks a lot more like prudent quality control. Carter’s submission plagiarises his own writings, misquotes and misrepresents James Hansen, and joins the recent baseless attacks on the NZ temperature record.
When the ABC’s Unleashed site turned down Carter’s offering — supposedly a reply or counterbalance to their recent five part series on climate denial by Clive Hamilton — it was quickly picked up by his frequent publisher, Aussie website QuadrantOnline. Titled Lysenkoism and James Hansen – Is Hansenism more dangerous than Lysenkoism?, it’s a crude attack on Hansen, currently visiting Australia. But it’s not only crude, it’s unoriginal.
“The response to the [email] vandals is to bury them with the data and experience of a century of scholarly research and analysis. The information that is important in making the decisions as to how to manage our world is unequivocal and must be advanced, not as questions at the edge of scientific knowledge where scientist like to dwell, but as the facts that they are, facts as immutable as the law of gravity. The climatic disruption is not a theory open to a belief system any more than the solar system is a theory, or gravity, or the oceanic tides, or evolution.”
Strong words from a scientist, but I felt an involuntary cheer as I read them on Joe Romm’s Climate Progress. They are from Dr. George Woodwell in an email to Romm. Woodwell is the founder, Director Emeritus, and Senior Scientist at the Woods Hole Research Centre.
Is it worth spending a whole book dissecting the writing of Bjørn Lomborg, the “skeptical environmentalist”? Certainly not in terms of the quality of Lomborg’s argument, which simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. But Lomborg’s writing has been permitted to exercise a widespread and harmful influence. For that reason Howard Friel’s painstaking book The Lomborg Deception: Setting the Record Straight About Global Warming represents time well and usefully spent.
Dennis Meadows was one of the authors of the influential 1972 book The Limits To Growth. In this short video, recorded in Davos at the World Economic Forum last year, he discusses the problems we face in living within our planetary means. Worth ten minutes out of anyone’s day…
Science historian Naomi Oreskes, well known for her work on consensus in science (and climate science in particular) has a new book, Merchants of Doubt, due out in a couple of months. Helpfully sub-titled How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, it digs deep into the historical roots of the campaign to create doubt abut the need for action on a host of environmental issues. The video above is of a talk she gave at Brown University recently, outlining the material in the book. If you’re interested in the roots of the campaign against action on climate, this is an excellent overview. We’ll have a review of the book soon after it’s available.
Fifth contribution to the Imagining 2020 series of essays comes from Phillip Mills, executive director of Les Mills International, who describes his vision for a low carbon future based on ‘clean technology’. Phillip, with a group of leading members of the NZ business community, has been urging the NZ government to work on cleantech/greentech initiatives. [...]
Blenheim company Aquaflow which works on the production of bio-fuel from algae, and whose progress Hot Topic has reported on several times (follow the Aquaflow tag) has announced a new venture, this time in the US. They will be working with a Honeywell company at an industrial site in Hopewell, Virginia. The aim of the [...]
The latest estimate of methane release from the shallow seas off the north coast of Russia — the East Siberian Arctic Shelf (ESAS) — suggests that around 8 teragrams per year (1Tg = 1 million tonnes) of the gas are reaching the atmosphere. This is equivalent to previous estimates of total methane release from all [...]
The name of Bill Bryson attracted me and I obtained through the library a copy of his new book Seeing Further: The Story of Science & the Royal Society, only to find that he is the editor, not the author. But he has done a splendid job as editor, collecting contributions from 21 authors, in [...]
Hot Topic, the first popular science book to examine global warming from a New Zealand perspective, was shortlisted for the Royal Society of NZ's first ever Science Book Prize. The judges described it as "timely, lucid, and very readable".
"If I had the money I would send one to every local and national politician and to all congregation clergy. I got mine from the local library."Rev Bob Scott.
One sometimes wonders how the scientists most reviled by the denial industry are bearing up under the onslaught. Michael Mann is one of them, so I was interested to listen to him being interviewed by Chris Mooney on a recent Point of Inquiry podcast. Here is a summary of some of Mann’s responses (not an accurate transcript, though mostly in his words):
The crank web is all atwitter with the news that 
