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This week about 200 science writers gathered in my hometown of Madison, Wisconsin for a conference on Science Writing in the Age of Denial, hosted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with support from the National Association of Science Writers.
"Lovelock, who introduced the Gaia Hypothesis describing life on Earth as a vast self-regulating organism some 40 years ago, also stated that since 2000, warming had not happened as expected.
"The climate is doing its usual tricks. There's nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now," Lovelock told MSNBC.com in an interview.
While warming may not have reached Lovelock's expectations, it is clearly happening"
"Most people think climate change and sustainability are
important problems, but too few global citizens engaged in
high-greenhouse-gas-emitting behavior are engaged in
enough mitigating behavior to stem the increasing flow of
greenhouse gases and other environmental problems. Why
is that? Structural barriers such as a climate-averse infrastructure
are part of the answer, but psychological barriers
also impede behavioral choices that would facilitate mitigation,
adaptation, and environmental sustainability. Although
many individuals are engaged in some ameliorative
action, most could do more, but they are hindered by seven
categories of psychological barriers, or “dragons of inaction”:
limited cognition about the problem, ideological
worldviews that tend to preclude pro-environmental attitudes
and behavior, comparisons with key other people,
sunk costs and behavioral momentum, discredence toward
experts and authorities, perceived risks of change, and
positive but inadequate behavior change. Structural barriers
must be removed wherever possible, but this is unlikely
to be sufficient. Psychologists must work with other scientists,
technical experts, and policymakers to help citizens
overcome these psychological barriers."
"Wiley-Blackwell is pleased to announce a special issue of the Journal of Public Economic Theory on Managing Climate Change. This issue is edited by two internationally renowned economists who combine the expertise of economic theory - with its application to issues at the forefront of climate change - and its economic consequences. Editors Roger Guesnerie and (Lord) Nicholas Stern are passionate about their subject and have sought out leading researchers in the area of climate change to contribute to the issue. The contributors include, among others, Professors William Nordhaus of Yale University, Martin Weitzman of Harvard University, Ujjayant Chakravorty, and Thomas Sterner.
The articles in the issue address the timely and undeniably important question of how to evaluate the potential consequences of current economic decisions. Intertemporal values will have a profound effect on any assessment of the issues and on the shaping of policy and must be examined directly. A central issue is the probability of catastrophic future events and how these should be taken into account. Innovation and radical technological change must be at the heart of emissions reductions, but policy to foster the change must be carefully crafted - the pace and time path of emissions reductions are crucial, not just the eventual flow."
"This is the fourth and last entry in a series that has examined the climate change disinformation campaign as an ethical matter. The purpose of this series has been to distinguish between responsible scientific skepticism, an approach to climate change science that should be encouraged, and the tactics of the climate change disinformation campaign, strategies deployed to undermine mainstream climate change science that are often deeply ethically offensive. "
"I came to utopia by accident, having painted myself into a corner with an idea for a trilogy: three science fiction novels consisting of an after-the-fall novel, a dystopia and a utopia, all set in the same place, and about the same distance into the future. The idea came to me in 1972, and I didn’t know how to write a novel then, so the plan needed brooding on. Some sixteen years later, the time came for the utopia. I had written the after-the-fall novel, The Wild Shore, and the dystopia, The Gold Coast. The utopia was the only one left."
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I had also come to feel that many people, and especially many of my leftist colleagues, thought of science as merely the instrument of power — as the most active and effective wing of capitalism. This now struck me as wrong. To me it seemed that we actually exist in a situation that can better be described as ‘science versus capitalism’: a world in which smaller progressive concepts such as environmentalism, environmental justice, social justice, democracy itself — all these were going to be defeated together, unless they were aligned with the one great power that might yet still successfully oppose a completely capitalist future, which was science. I was thinking with a very broad brush at this point, almost mythologically you might say, but it struck me as an interesting story to tell, a new story with some possible analytic value. So I wrote the Science in the Capital trilogy with these thoughts in mind.
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Now the future is a kind of attenuating peninsula; as we move out on it, one side drops off to catastrophe; the other side, nowhere near as steep, moves down into various kinds of utopian futures. In other words, we have come to a moment of utopia or catastrophe; there is no middle ground, mediocrity will no longer succeed. So utopia is no longer a nice idea, but a survival necessity. This is a big change. We need to take action to start history on a path onto the side of the peninsula representing one kind of better future or another; the details of it don’t matter, survival without catastrophe is what matters. In essence the seven billion people we have, and the nine to ten billion people we’re likely to have, exist at the tip of an entire improvised complex of prostheses, which is our technology considered as one big system. We live out at the end of this towering complex, and it has to work successfully for us to survive; we are far past the natural carrying capacity of the planet in terms of our numbers. There is something amazing about the human capacity to walk this tightrope over the abyss without paralysing fear. We’re good at ignoring dangers; but now, on the attenuating peninsula, on the crazy tower of prostheses — however you envision it, it is a real historical moment of great danger, and we need to push hard for utopia as survival, because failure now is simply unacceptable to our descendants, if we have any.
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"This paper conducts an empirical analysis of the factors affecting U.S. public concern about the threat of climate change between January 2002 and December 2010. Utilizing Stimson’s method of constructing aggregate opinion measures, data from 74 separate surveys over a 9-year period are used to construct quarterly measures of public concern over global climate change. We examine five factors that should account for changes in levels of concern: 1) extreme weather events, 2) public access to accurate scientific information, 3) media coverage, 4) elite cues, and 5) movement/countermovement advocacy. A time-series analysis indicates that elite cues and structural economic factors have the largest effect on the level of public concern about climate change. While media coverage exerts an important influence, this coverage is itself largely a function of elite cues and economic factors. Weather extremes have no effect on aggregate public opinion. Promulgation of scientific information to the public on climate change has a minimal effect. The implication would seem to be that information-based science advocacy has had only a minor effect on public concern, while political mobilization by elites and advocacy groups is critical in influencing climate change concern. "
"Following stable, tepid concern from 2002 to 2005, apprehension began to climb in 2006, peaked in late 2007, and then fell back to where it was in 2002. But the team of three sociologists, led by Drexel University’s Robert Brulle, wanted to know why, so they gathered data on five likely influences: extreme weather events, scientific information, media coverage, congressional attention, and advocacy groups on both sides of issue. They also looked at four control variables: unemployment, gross domestic product, war deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the price of oil. The team then compared that data to changes in the Climate Change Threat Index.
They found the most important factors that influenced public concern were public statements by Democrats in support of addressing climate change; anti-environmental votes by Republicans; unemployment; GDP; and the number of times The New York Times mentioned the film, An Inconvenient Truth."
"Nearly 40 percent of American adults are in the two groups most concerned about climate change – the Alarmed and the Concerned – while 25 percent of Americans are in the two groups least concerned about the issue – the Dismissive and Doubtful. "
"To conclude, a projection from 1981 for rising temperatures in a major science journal, at a time that the temperature rise was not yet obvious in the observations, has been found to agree well with the observations since then, underestimating the observed trend by about 30%, and easily beating naive predictions of no-change or a linear continuation of trends. It is also a nice example of a statement based on theory that could be falsified and up to now has withstood the test. The “global warming hypothesis” has been developed according to the principles of sound science."
"Despite the uncertainty in future climate-change impacts, it is often assumed that humans would be able to adapt to any possible warming. Here we argue that heat stress imposes a robust upper limit to such adaptation. Peak heat stress, quantified by the wet-bulb temperature TW, is surprisingly similar across diverse climates today. TW never exceeds 31 °C. Any exceedence of 35 °C for extended periods should induce hyperthermia in humans and other mammals, as dissipation of metabolic heat becomes impossible. While this never happens now, it would begin to occur with global-mean warming of about 7 °C, calling the habitability of some regions into question. With 11–12 °C warming, such regions would spread to encompass the majority of the human population as currently distributed. Eventual warmings of 12 °C are possible from fossil fuel burning. One implication is that recent estimates of the costs of unmitigated climate change are too low unless the range of possible warming can somehow be narrowed. Heat stress also may help explain trends in the mammalian fossil record. "
All of this got Huber and Steven Sherwood, his colleague at Australia's University of New South Wales, to thinking: Economic considerations aside, they asked, how much warming can we physiologically tolerate? At what point does it get so bad that our bodies can no longer keep cool, so bad that we can no longer work or play sports or even survive for long out of doors? Will we flee for colder climes? Live underground like hobbits, surviving on cold fungus?
"Some states have introduced education standards requiring teachers to defend the denial of man-made global warming. A national watchdog group says it will start monitoring classrooms."
"In any case, while I agree that everybody has biases, I’m not sure that means I must also agree that everybody is equally biased. To butcher George Orwell, why couldn’t it be the case that all humans are biased, but are some humans are more biased than others?"
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