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from The Great Debate:
The State of the Union’s history of empty green promises
An aura of excitement and predictability surrounds the president’s annual State of the Union speech: A few days of hyped drama and TV punditry build to a political Woodstock featuring generals, justices, senators, Cabinet secretaries and House members, all under one roof. Up in the balcony, the First Lady plays host to a few iconic citizens who recently shared a heroic moment of fame with America.
Environmentalists are on higher-than-normal alert this year, after President Barack Obama made a sweeping inaugural promise to tackle climate change, an issue he had largely avoided during his first term.
If the president reprises that theme in Tuesday’s speech, he'll join a long list of predecessors warning that we’re leaving a mess for future generations. And if past is prologue, the green talk and pageantry may be the only things delivered on the president's lofty words.
In 1993, Bill Clinton assailed the failure of the federal Superfund toxic waste cleanup program. For more than a decade, he complained, attorneys and consultants siphoned off Superfund dollars while few toxic sites got cleaned. “I’d like to use that Superfund to clean up pollution for a change and not just pay lawyers,” Clinton told Congress and the nation.
from Davos Notebook:
How did Davos do on climate change?
One sometimes hears that the World Economic Forum is all talk and no action. I don’t buy it — talk matters. Social currency is a powerful driver of change, even at the highest reaches of business and government. And last week climate change was on center stage at the famous Davos summit. So as I moved through the WEF Annual Meeting, the question on my mind was simple: How many of the conversations here will lead to real-world outcomes?
President Barack Obama had helped point the spotlight with his second inaugural address two days earlier, but the real reason for renewed focus, after several years of near silence, is the increasingly destructive and incredibly costly wave of unprecedented weather events that have occurred around the globe. There were more than 30 official sessions on climate change, environmental resilience and food security this year at the Annual Meeting, and even more related side events.
from The Edgy Optimist:
Climate change doesn’t have to be all bad
This week the National Climate Data Center confirmed what most had long believed: 2012 was the warmest year on record for the United States. Ever. And not just a bit warmer: a full Fahrenheit degree warmer than in 1998, the previous high. In the land of climatology statistics, that is immense. In the understatement of one climate scientist, these findings are “a big deal.”
Almost every news story reporting on this juxtaposed the record with a series of disruptive climate events, ranging from the drought that covered much of the United States farmland and punctuated by Hurricane Sandy in its tens of billions of dollars of devastation. Many also pointed out that eight of the 10 warmest years have occurred since 1990 (though it should be noted that official records only extend to 1895). Not surprisingly, these observations were almost always followed by warnings of more warming and substantially worse consequences to come.
from The Great Debate:
The best solution for climate change is a carbon tax
With Lisa Jackson, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, stepping down, President Barack Obama is losing one of the few people left in Washington who was willing to speak up about global warming and to push for significant measures to curb its impact. During her tenure, Ms. Jackson was frequently denounced by GOP members of Congress and all too often reined in by Obama. Despite his and Congress’ failure to pass legislation addressing global warming, Ms. Jackson advanced a regulatory agenda to pick up some of the slack.
She managed to see that fuel efficiency standards will increase by 2025, enact stricter pollution controls that must be met before any construction of new coal-fired power plants, and established EPA’s “endangerment finding,” bringing carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases (GHGs) under the Clean Air Act. Her departure, however, highlights the failings of the Obama administration to address global warming in a significant way. In his second term, the president can change that by pushing to enact a carbon tax.
from The Great Debate:
Obama’s climate change quandary
After a campaign in which climate change did not come up, and after the East Coast weathered a storm that, if it was not brought on by climate change, felt an awful lot like the storms that will be, the president of the United States finally nodded in its direction. It was not much. It was not even a whole sentence. But it felt like the first rain after a long drought. From Barack Obama’s victory speech:
“We want our children to live in an America that isn't burdened by debt, that isn't weakened by inequality, that isn't threatened by the destructive power of a warming planet.”
from The Observatory:
Muller’s media circus
UC Berkeley physicist Richard Muller was all over the media last week talking about his “total turnaround” from global-warming skeptic to adherent of the longstanding scientific consensus that the planet is heating up.
The question is: Did he deserve the attention?
The frenzy started with an op-ed published in The New York Times, in which Muller explained why he now believes that “humans are almost entirely the cause” of rising temperatures. At the same time, his team at the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project, which he founded three years ago, published five papers on its website laying out the research that caused his conversion. According to the analysis, average world land temperature has climbed 1.5 degrees Celsius in the past 250 years, and about 0.9 degrees in the past 50 years.
from Breakingviews:
Global warming adds to food inflation risk
By Ian Campbell
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.
The United States has just had its hottest first half-year ever. The corn crop is suffering, corn prices are soaring. Extreme weather is also hitting Russian wheat. Is global warming threatening a repeat of the destabilising 2011 global food price shock? Probably not this year. But the longer-term threat is troubling.
from The Great Debate:
Waffling on climate change? Consult friends, not science
Ever since climate scientist James Hansen first testified before Congress about global warming in 1988, the scientists, advocates, academics and former vice-presidents who work to stop climate change have presumed that the science matters. Hansen began his testimony by telling the assembled senators: “The earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements,” in full confidence that instrumental measurements would matter more than the weather outside the politicians’ front doors. Like Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth, Hansen depended on graphs (he called them “viewgraphs”) and numbers to help make his case. Almost two decades later, when Gore first raised the alarm about climate change with his documentary, his strategy rested on that same science: I dare you to look at this PowerPoint and tell me climate change isn’t a problem! It is an expectedly rational assumption to make, that a rational science like science should be a trump card. Inconveniently, it’s not true.
A study published last week in Nature Climate Change, a leading, meticulously vetted journal of climate research, showed that the more scientifically literate people are, the less worried they are about climate change. “As respondents’ science-literacy scores increased, concern with climate change decreased,” wrote the study’s authors, a group that includes researchers from Ohio State, George Washington University and Yale University.
from Edward Hadas:
Casting the runes on climate change
Something has gone wrong with global warming. It’s not that the world has stopped heating up. It’s that the anti-warming political movement, which seemed almost unstoppable when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, has stalled.
Last week’s United Nations climate change conference in Durban ended with little more than an agreement to talk some more about what to do next. Even that was too much for Canada, which has just said no to emission-reduction targets. The activists blame recalcitrant governments and many commentators blame economic distractions. They are probably both right, but I think the activists’ own approach bears much of the responsibility.
from Gregg Easterbrook:
Rick Perry + Al Gore ≠ global warming logic
When Al Gore was in the White House, global warming was a disaster of the first order. Republican presidential candidates are now saying it is anything from a fraud to trivial.
Both sides claim sound science, and both are wrong. In politics, “sound science” means whatever supports your preconceived positions.
