Denialist alarmism

The planet's future aside, it's amusing how the Competitive Enterprise Institute and other disinformationmongers oppose "alarmism," except when it's their own, and insist on "sound science," except when it produces results they don't like. Progress Report offers a quick rundown on their latest round of cynical lies about climate science, soon to be purveyed in TV ads. My own take on an earlier phase of the campaign here.

Dry country

"Although the West has gone through natural wet and dry cycles in the past, the current water flow trends differ significantly in length and in strength from natural variations in the past, the researchers conclude." That's from the a summary of an article in a recent issue of Science, "Human-Induced Changes in the Hydrology of the Western United States," (pdf) where Tim Barnett of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography at the University of California at San Diego and colleagues report that "up to 60 percent of the changes in river flow, snow pack and winter air temperatures in the region during this period can be attributed to human-caused climate change."

Biofuels: even worse than I thought

At first I thought this was just part of the noise, but it looks serious: biofuels may well cause more global warming than gasoline. Read the whole thing at the Reality-Based Community.

Any guesses how many decades it will take the bipartisan Illinois politicans from ADM to notice?

Don't cry for FutureGen

Joseph Romm at Gristmill has the scoop on the supposed clean-coal project that was to be in downstate Mattoon, Illinois:

"By the time this technology was ready to commercialize on a significant scale in the early 2020s, the world will have built or begun construction on more than a 1000 GW of coal plants, using traditional technology that is not designed for carbon capture and storage. The climate will have been destroyed irrevocably before Futuregen could have accomplished anything useful in the marketplace. Also, we will still need a mandatory cap on carbon emissions to make future FutureGen plants viable because they will be more expensive than traditional plants even in the 2020s. Since the Bush administration opposes a mandatory cap, the whole R&D effort looks like another delaying action."

Gore's job

At Grist, Mark Hertsgaard explains that Al Gore has a more important job than being president:

I spent two hours one-on-one with Gore just before An Inconvenient Truth was released. Much of our interview focused on an irony that seems to have escaped many of those who have urged him to run for president: the last time Gore served in the White House, he failed to deliver much progress against global warming. During its eight years in office, the Clinton-Gore administration did not pass a single major law against climate change. It did sign the Kyoto Protocol, but only after watering it down with crippling loopholes, and then it chose not to seek Senate ratification of the treaty.

In our interview, Gore acknowledged these failings. But he argued that the blame lay not with him or Clinton, who, he said, "was much more responsive than not." Rather, Gore said, "the resistance was tremendous" from the status quo. The two richest, most powerful industries in American history, oil and autos, were fiercely opposed to cutting emissions, as were coal and electricity companies. Kyoto was "blocked by pressure from the polluters," Gore told me, adding that ExxonMobil and other big companies "purposely confused people" with tens of millions of dollars of advertising and lobbying that misrepresented and disparaged the science behind global warming. This disinformation campaign encouraged "massive denial in the country as a whole" and "conditioned the battlefield" in Washington so that Congress ended up blocking reform.

The lesson Gore seems to have drawn from his defeats in the White House is that being president is not enough to create real change, especially if powerful interests are against you. The only way to defeat them is to recondition the battlefield -- to build such a pervasive wave of public pressure that no matter which politicians get elected, each will feel compelled to take action, even if it means disappointing ExxonMobil and friends.

No prize at the end of this road, just the gratitude of posterity.

Beyond Beyond Petroleum

It used to be "Beyond Petroleum," before that it used to be "British Petroleum." The green mask came off the other day when it changed its corporate mind and invested in Canadian tar sands, the excavation of which Greenpeace has characterized as "the biggest global warming crime ever seen." Part of the story here. (H/t Common Dreams.)

George Monbiot puts this fracas in perspective:

When you review the plans for fossil fuel extraction, the horrible truth dawns that every carbon-cutting programme [from CAFE standards to insulating houses] is a con. Without supply-side policies, runaway climate change is inevitable, however hard we try to cut demand. The talks in Bali will be meaningless unless they produce a programme for leaving fossil fuels in the ground.

The denialists you will always have with you

Reading up on the past I keep running into the present. In Indiana History: A Book of Readings, I came across the memoirs of Oliver H. Smith, including the story of the turning point in his run for Congress in 1826. His opponent, Judge John Test, inadvertently aroused the wrath of the same wingnut intelligentsia that takes pride in (a) debunking, and (b) not reading about climate change today:

We met in Allenville, Switzerland county, on one occasion. The whole country was there. The judge was speaking, and for the first time introduced the new subject of railroads. He avowed himself in favor of them, and said he had voted for the Buffalo and New Orleans road, and then rising to the top of his voice, 'I tell you, fellow-citizens, that in England they run the cars thirty miles an hour, and they will yet be run at a higher speed in America.' This was enough. The crowd set up a loud laugh at the expense of the judge. An old fellow, standing by me, bawled out, 'You are crazy, or do you think we are all fools; a man could not live a moment at that speed.' {103}

The disinformation machine

Joseph Romm at Gristmill immerses himself in the garbage heap that is the Wall Street Journal editorial page so that we don't have to. Besides pointing out the WSJ's failure to honestly characterize this year's Nobel Peace Prize winners (they are Al Gore and the multitude of scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), Romm does a good job of making the point I have made in earlier incarnations of this blog: the reasoning process of the denialist conservatives and libertarians is backward. Since they disapprove of many of the solutions proposed for global warming, they pretend it's not a problem rather than acknowledge the clear and present danger, using every trick in the book to spread disinformation about the established science.

I repeat: They are not honest disputants. I have personal knowledge of this from reading Fred Singer and Dennis Avery's abusive book (blogged here), which I chose because it was promoted by Chicago's local denialist outfit, the Heartland Institute. No one could cherry-pick the refereed scientific literature as Singer and Avery do without knowingly committing intellectual perjury.