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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 |
New Years Eve
Posted on Thursday, December 31, 2009
Climate Science Watch wishes our tens of thousands of “unique visitors” from all over the world a Happy New Year and best wishes for a better 2010.
A New Year’s resolution for Obama: Figure out how to talk to the public about climate change
Posted on Thursday, December 31, 2009
In the U.S., public understanding of and support for climate science and its findings about the likely consequences of global climatic disruption is seriously underdeveloped, and even appears to have slipped during 2009. This may be due in part to the decision by President Obama and some of his strongest supporters to focus their message narrowly on the mantras of clean energy and green jobs, and their tactics narrowly on cap and trade legislation….
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Stephen Schneider: Climate Denier Gate a case of Science as a Contact Sport
Posted on Wednesday, December 30, 2009
In Climate Denier Gate (Stephen Schneider’s term for what the deniers call “Climategate”), “the private frustrations of a few climate scientists was turned into an ostensible plot by the entire climate science community in dozens of countries, hundreds of institutions, and hammered out over 40 years of peer reviewed assessment studies—as some kind of fraud.” Schneider says, “The big untold story here is how broken the 2009 media is for investigating the wrong folks and giving credibility to a non-event that changes nothing in climate science.” One more episode in the decades-long tension between climate science and public debate, the subject of Schneider’s memoir, Science as a Contact Sport.
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Shameful treatment of whistleblower who exposed Pentagon failure to protect troops in Iraq
Posted on Thursday, December 24, 2009
Marine Corps whistleblower Franz Gayl says military officials are trying to force him from his job for exposing the Pentagon’s unconscionable delays in delivering lifesaving equipment to troops in Iraq. This shameful treatment suggests that the White House has yet to fulfill Obama’s campaign pledge to see to it that whistleblowers are treated as patriots instead of pariahs.
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Reps. Joe Barton and James Sensenbrenner carried global warming denier message to Copenhagen
Posted on Wednesday, December 23, 2009
“We don’t have an icecap in Texas,” Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas), the ranking minority member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, said at a December 18 press briefing in Copenhagen. The “theory [of anthropogenic climate change] has never been independently analyzed by any scientific group.” Mr. Barton and some of his colleagues, including Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wisconsin), showed the media in Copenhagen that the Congressional global warming denial machine may be scientifically clueless, but is still capable of waging a nasty political battle.
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Text of the Copenhagen Accord
Posted on Saturday, December 19, 2009
The United Nations climate conference of 193 nations in Copenhagen ended early this morning with particpants agreeing to “take note” of the Copenhagen Accord, an agreement brokered by the United States, China, India, Brazil, and South Africa. With the Copenhagen Accord, an initial group of more than 25 nations has agreed to adopt and report on national mitigation actions to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. Developed nations have agreed to mobilize resources to support mitigation, adaptation, technology development and transfer, and capacity-building in developing countries. The document is a 3-page, 12-paragraph political statement and conceptual framework, with Appendices to include listings of mitigation targets and actions of Annex I and Non-Annex I parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. All national actions under the agreement are voluntary. No date is specified for when, or whether, a more detailed and binding protocol will be negotiated. See Details for full text.
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Two whistleblowers who exposed misconduct further endangering Katrina victims are honored today
Posted on Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Two courageous individuals will each receive meritorious awards today for blowing the whistle on two separate instances of misconduct that put Hurricane Katrina victims in unnecessary jeopardy, reports Government Accountability Project colleague Jess Radack on the Daily Kos today. Maria Garzino, a mechanical/civil engineer and team leader with the US Army Corps of Engineers, will receive the Public Servant of the Year award from the U.S. Office of Special Counsel for exposing the intentional installation of faulty pumps in flood-prone areas of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. Dr. Ivor van Heerden will receive an award for civic courage for speaking out against systematic incompetence and negligence in planning and preparing for Gulf coast hurricanes, despite resistance from his former employer, Louisiana State University. Click on details for the crosspost.
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Setting the record straight on stolen e-mail: Associated Press, FactCheck.org, and other sources
Posted on Tuesday, December 15, 2009
A team of reporters at the Associated Press did an “exhaustive review” of the climate scientists’ e-mail stolen from the University of East Anglia in the UK and concluded that “the messages don’t support claims that the science of global warming was faked.” FactCheck.org at the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg Public Policy Center said: “Climate skeptics are claiming that they show scientific misconduct that amounts to the complete fabrication of man-made global warming. We find that to be unfounded….E-mails being cited as ‘smoking guns’ have been misrepresented.” Two videos by Climate Crock examine e-mails and take down some denier propaganda.
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Setting the record straight on stolen e-mail: Nature, AAAS, AMS, Union of Concerned Scientists
Posted on Tuesday, December 15, 2009
A strong editorial in the journal Nature, statements from the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Meteorological Society, and an analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists set the record straight in countering the effort by the global warming denial machine to spin up a scandal over the climate scientists’ e-mail stolen from the University of East Anglia.
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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“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.
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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.)
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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.”
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