ClimateScienceWatch

Promoting integrity in the use of climate science in government

Climate Science Watch is a nonprofit public interest education and advocacy project dedicated to holding public officials accountable for the integrity and effectiveness with which they use climate science and related research in government policymaking, toward the goal of enabling society to respond effectively to the challenges posed by global warming and climate change. See Details

Andy Revkin’s Last Day at The New York Times: December 21

Posted on Monday, December 14, 2009

“Science writer Andrew C. Revkin, the individual journalist most identified with reporting on climate change, is leaving The New York Times,” the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media reports. “His last day will be December 21.”

David Michaels, author of Doubt Is Their Product on anti-regulatory assault on science, to head OSHA

Posted on Sunday, December 13, 2009

David Michaels, the author of Doubt Is Their Product: How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health, was confirmed December 3 to head the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Michaels has contributed to framing our understanding of the elected officials, corporate funders, “free market” groups, and contrarian scientists whose machinations drive the global warming disinformation campaign.

California’s Adaptation Strategy shows leadership that Senate climate bill should follow

Posted on Friday, December 11, 2009

The final version of the 2009 California Climate Adaptation Strategy released last week puts forth a set of wide-ranging recommendations for managing and adapting to a set of difficult climate change impacts throughout the state. Meanwhile, a recent framework for climate legislation put forth by Sens. John Kerry, Lindsey Graham, and Joe Lieberman does not address dealing with impacts at all. The US will put itself in a perilous position if California’s advice is not heeded: “To effectively address the challenges that a changing climate will bring, climate adaptation and mitigation…policies must complement each other, and efforts within and across sectors must be coordinated.”

“Climate Scoreboard” - new widget simulates warming consequences of Copenhagen proposals

Posted on Friday, December 11, 2009

A new “widget” uses a sophisticated simulation called C-ROADS to calculate how much the Earth’s average temperature is expected to rise given the current suite of proposals under consideration in Copenhagen. The Climate Scoreboard is automatically updated each day as the overall terms—country by country commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions—for a potential global climate treaty evolve at COP15. Click on details to view the Climate Scoreboard and to learn more.

Sensenbrenner IPCC witch-hunt: Attempt to blacklist climate scientists must be rejected

Posted on Wednesday, December 09, 2009

Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin), ranking Republican on the House global warming committee, has sent a letter to Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, calling for scientists whose names appear in the e-mails stolen from the U.K. Climatic Research Unit to be blacklisted from participating as contributors or reviewers of the forthcoming IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. Sensenbrenner is engaged in an outrageous McCarthyist jihad against the climate science community, making it abundantly clear that this controversy is not really about stolen e-mails, which have been misused and misinterpreted. Rather it is part of an aggressive campaign by the global warming denial machine to bully and intimidate the science community. Sensenbrenner shows no real interest in meaningful dialogue, nor in an honest examination of climate science findings. Denialists are throwing up a smokescreen of propaganda in an attempt to legitimize their refusal to come to grips with scientific evidence on global climatic disruption and its implications. This is a power play. Climate Science Watch calls on the IPCC to rebuff this attack. We call on the Obama Administration and in particular the President’s science adviser John Holdren to fully support the U.S. climate science community in this matter. We call on Sensenbrenner’s colleagues in Congress to chastise him for this censorious anti-scientist behavior. And we call on members of the science community to understand what the denial machine is up to and not allow themselves to be divided by innuendo about and attacks on scientists who have been singled out as immediate targets of a larger predatory attack on the community as a whole. Seeking an IPCC purge is just the next step. This attack, using guilt-by-association and demagogy, will go as far as it can to delegitimize the entire climate science and assessment enterprise if it is not exposed and thwarted. (See Details for the Sensenbrenner letter and press release.)

FBI investigating death threats against two scientists whose emails were stolen in CRU hacking

Posted on Tuesday, December 08, 2009

The FBI is investigating death threats against two climate scientists since their stolen e-mails were leaked in the U.K. Climatic Research Unit hacking incident, the U.K. Guardian reports. Tom Wigley, former Director of CRU and now at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, told the Guardian the abusive and threatening messages he and other scientists have received “are truly stomach-turning and show what sort of venomous monsters we are up against.”

Rep. Sensenbrenner projects “fascism” and “fraud” onto scientists, is rebutted at hearing

Posted on Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin) channeled the reckless spirit of the late Sen. Joe McCarthy in an effort to lead a December 3 House global warming committee hearing toward a witchhunt based on e-mails stolen from the Climatic Research Unit in the U.K. Sensenbrenner essentially accused the climate scientists of “fascism” and suggested that a scientific assessment that included the CRU global temperature record among its many sources is part of “a massive international scientific fraud.” Witnesses John Holdren and Jane Lubchenco, leading Administration science representatives, countered with cool reason. Committee chairman Ed Markey and Rep. Jay Inslee hit back harder.

Michael MacCracken: The Achievable Path to Climate Protection

Posted on Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Dr. Michael MacCracken spoke on December 3 in Washington, DC, outlining his proposal for building a bridge between developed and developing countries to forge an international climate agreement. He emphasized that without emissions reduction commitments from both developed and developing countries, the 2 degrees Celsius benchmark cannot be achieved.

Open Letter to Congress from U.S. Scientists on Climate Change and Recently Stolen Emails

Posted on Monday, December 07, 2009

“In the last few weeks, opponents of taking action on climate change have misrepresented both the content and the significance of stolen emails to obscure public understanding of climate science and the scientific process,” said 25 U.S. scientists, including eight members of the National Academy of Sciences, in a December 4 Open Letter to Congress. “We would like to set the record straight. The body of evidence that human activity is the dominant cause of global warming is overwhelming. The content of the stolen emails has no impact whatsoever on our overall understanding that human activity is driving dangerous levels of global warming.” See Details for full text of the Open Letter and list of signers.

History is made as US EPA finds heat-trapping gases endanger human health and welfare

Posted on Monday, December 07, 2009

Lisa Jackson, head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, today issued the following Endangerment finding: “The Administrator finds that six greenhouse gases taken in combination endanger both the public health and the public welfare of current and future generations.” The conclusion, based on sound science carefully developed under both Democratic and Republican leadership, clears the path for US regulation of CO2 emissions, regardless of what is negotiated in Copenhagen.

Former Bush officials playing roles on behalf of oil, gas, mining and other energy interests

Posted on Monday, December 07, 2009

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) today released a report, Smoke Screen: How Bush Insiders Distorted – And Still Influence – America’s Debate Over Climate Change, profiling former Bush officials and the roles they are now playing on behalf of oil, gas, mining and other energy interests.

On Obama, Copenhagen, and 9 Senate Democrats’ conditions for supporting a climate treaty and bill

Posted on Monday, December 07, 2009

Climate Science Watch director Rick Piltz talked with KPFK-FM in Los Angeles about a letter to President Obama from nine Senate Democrats setting out conditions for supporting a US climate policy, and with Al Jazeera English TV in Washington, DC, about Obama’s participation in the Copenhagen climate conference.

Holdren and Lubchenco warn Congress of climate disruption, call for emissions cuts and preparedness

Posted on Saturday, December 05, 2009

Presidential science adviser John Holdren and NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco warned of the growing impacts of climate change and the emphasized the urgency of curbing emissions and preparing for the impacts at a December 2 Congressional hearing on The State of Climate Science. “Notwithstanding the claims of some climate-change ‘skeptics’ that climate change came to a halt over the past decade, the reality is that both the drivers and the symptoms of climate change have been growing more rapidly since 1997 than before,” Holdren told the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. And: “The current state of knowledge about it (even though incomplete, as science always is) is sufficient to make clear that failure to act promptly to reduce global emissions to the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping substances is overwhelmingly likely to lead to changes in climate too extreme and too damaging to be adequately addressed by any adaptation measures that can be foreseen.”

IPCC statement on stolen emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia

Posted on Friday, December 04, 2009

“Working Group I of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) firmly stands behind the conclusions of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, the community of researchers and its individuals providing the scientific basis, and the procedures of IPCC Assessments …The body of evidence is the result of the careful and painstaking work of hundreds of scientists worldwide. The internal consistency from multiple lines of evidence strongly supports the work of the scientific community, including those individuals singled out in these email exchanges…” See Details for full text of the statement.

Obama will go to last day of Copenhagen conference; emerging accord on aid to developing countries

Posted on Friday, December 04, 2009

The White House announced that President Obama will participate at the end of the Copenhagen climate conference on December 18, seeking to conclude a productive accord on issues under negotiation. The December 4 announcement emphasized emissions reduction targets set by China and India and an emerging multilateral consensus on mobilizing $10 billion a year by 2012 “to support adaptation and mitigation in developing countries, particularly the most vulnerable and least developed countries that could be destabilized by the impacts of climate change. The United States will pay its fair share of that amount” and work to address the need for longer-term financing as “an investment in our common security, as no climate change accord can succeed if it does not help all countries reduce their emissions.”

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