Noam Chomsky & Angela Davis – Full Conversation

Noam Chomsky Videos

 Published on Mar 2, 2013

Chomsky starts speaking at 12:35
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Dr. Jeff Masters’ WunderBlog : Record Cold in a Warming World | Weather Underground

By: Dr. Jeff Masters, 2:58 PM GMT on March 04, 2014

An impressive blast of Arctic air has toppled more records for all-time March cold over the Eastern U.S., in the wake of the major snowstorm that brought 4 – 8″ of snow from Missouri to Maryland. Fresh snow is very efficient at radiating heat to space, and the 3.8″ of snow that fell in Baltimore on Monday helped drive the temperature down to 5°F on Monday night, tying the city’s all-time March low temperature record set on March 4, 1873. The temperature eventually dipped down to 4°F Tuesday morning, breaking the March record. Atlantic City, NJ, which got 5.5″ of snow on Monday, also set a new all-time cold record for the month of March on Monday night, when the temperature fell to 2°F. The previous all-time low for the month of March was 3°F set on March 4, 2009. Official records for the Atlantic City area date back to 1874.

At least five other cities have set or tied all-time March cold temperature records during the current cold wave:

Charlottesville, Virginia set an all-time March low of 1°F Tuesday morning (previous record: 7°F on March 4, 1943.)

Billings, Montana set an all-time March low of -21° on March 2, 2014 (previous record: -19°.)

Pierre, South Dakota set an all-time March low on both March 1 and March 2, dipping to -20° (previous record: -19°F on March 11, 1998.)

Flint, Michigan set an all-time March low of -16° on March 3 (previous record: -12°.)

Rockford, Illinois tied its all-time March record low of -11° on March 3.

At least five U.S. cities have set records for their coldest winter on record, as detailed by wunderground’s weather historian Christopher C. Burt in his latest blog post. He has not yet compiled a list of cities that have set a record for their warmest winter on record during 2013 – 2014, but I know of at least two: Las Vegas, Nevada, and Tucson, Arizona.

Figure 1. Departure of surface temperature from average as diagnosed by the GFS model at 00 UTC March 4, 2014. A negative phase of the Arctic Oscillation (AO) allowed cold air to spill southwards out of the Arctic over the Eastern U.S., bringing temperatures up to 36°F (20°C) below average. Compensating warm air flowed northwards into the Arctic underneath a ridge of high pressure over Europe. Data/image obtained using Climate Reanalyzer™ (http://cci-reanalyzer.org), Climate Change Institute, University of Maine, Orono, Maine.

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How Money Changes Climate Debate – Scientific American

Why have conservative groups been so successful in casting doubt on global warming?

Mar 5, 2014 |By Daniel Lippman and ClimateWire

Supporters of climate change legislation gather outside of congress, March 2009.
Credit: Jake/Flickr

Searching for a reason major climate change legislation hasn’t passed Congress yet?

You could do worse than start looking around Washington, D.C., with its endless think tanks, lobbying firms and trade groups, many of which have swung into action in the past to block such bills and stand ready to do so in the future.

A recent study published in the journal Climatic Change finds that much of the millions of dollars that funds these groups comes from secret sources, and a good portion of the rest is from publicity-shy conservative foundations and wealthy donors.

The groups, such as the American Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation, and wealthy individual donors often espouse libertarian views that don’t jibe well with giving the government more power to combat climate change.

That there’s still a debate about whether climate change exists is not an accident. Conservative think tanks over the last two decades have consistently warned about the costs of addressing climate change and raised doubts in the minds of the public about the accuracy of the science behind it.

The study’s author, Robert Brulle, a sociology and environmental science professor at Drexel University, takes a systematic look at what he calls the climate change counter-movement (CCCM), made up of groups that Brulle says have an average annual income of just above $900 million, although much of that money is not even spent on climate change-related activities and is used for other issues.

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Warming report sees violent, sicker, poorer future

By SETH BORENSTEIN

— Nov. 2, 2013 5:37 PM EDT
Warming report sees violent, sicker, poorer future

WASHINGTON (AP) — Starvation, poverty, flooding, heat waves, droughts, war and disease already lead to human tragedies. They’re likely to worsen as the world warms from man-made climate change, a leaked draft of an international scientific report forecasts.

The Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will issue a report next March on how global warming is already affecting the way people live and what will happen in the future, including a worldwide drop in income. A leaked copy of a draft of the summary of the report appeared online Friday on a climate skeptic’s website. Governments will spend the next few months making comments about the draft.

“We’ve seen a lot of impacts and they’ve had consequences,” Carnegie Institution climate scientist Chris Field, who heads the report, told The Associated Press on Saturday. “And we will see more in the future.”

Cities, where most of the world now lives, have the highest vulnerability, as do the globe’s poorest people.

“Throughout the 21st century, climate change impacts will slow down economic growth and poverty reduction, further erode food security and trigger new poverty traps, the latter particularly in urban areas and emerging hotspots of hunger,” the report says. “Climate change will exacerbate poverty in low- and lower-middle income countries and create new poverty pockets in upper-middle to high-income countries with increasing inequality.”

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AP: Big Story on latest IPCC super gloomy report / ScienceWriters Meeting: Economist tells science writers to get off the ball | Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT

AP: Big Story on latest IPCC super gloomy report / ScienceWriters Meeting: Economist tells science writers to get off the ball

Another report inthe works from the IPCC, another leak of its draft, and so what else is new? It’s news is what it is, even if the underlying message has been reported so many times everybody from world leaders to the folks in line at the supermarket knows the gist of what scientists are saying: It’s getting warm, it’s our fault, things are changing fast, and we’d better do something soon or we’ll fry the future. Some of them don’t not believe it. But most know the story.

The topic has unavoidably come up during the CASW New Horizons in Science Writing half of the ScienceWriters13 meeting, hosted by the U. of Florida in Gainesville, that followed the Nat’l Assoc. of Science Writers workshops Saturday. New Horizons speakers are mostly academics providing insight and tips on hot fields in science. Some of the remarks here contrast sharply with the real world of science reporting that continues far outside this exceedingly pleasant gathering of at the Hilton Conference Center planted right at the edge of the campus.Which brings us back to the science and politics, and media coverage, of climate change.

Because the writer called this to our attention, we’ll start with real-world reporting from one of the trade’s stalwarts:

AP – Seth Borenstein: Warming Report Sees Violent, Sicker, Poorer Future ; The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which earlier this year had its scientific assessment of climate change’s causes and forecast scope, now has had the final draft of its report on human impacts leak. Officially, it is due out in March.

The report draft was leaked to a Canadian climate-skeptical blogger, Donna LaFramboise, who posted it. That was a few days ago. A small roundup of other ensuing coverage follows well below. The thing to keep in mind is that Borenstein covers such stuff diligently. He gets a lot of hate mail and related nonsense because he consistently reports sanely on global climate change science. He has not collapsed in exhaustion over the paralysis in the US Congress of other world legislative bodies when it comes to putting their money where there mouths have been for years, offering pledges to do something but seldom doing a whole lot. He just keeps covering the science as reported by scientists and not so much as it is reported by contrarian crackpots or by the myriad activists on the green side. I must add that the greenies generally have things straight, but they are not proper prime sources for journalists seeking to report what the bulk of scientists, technical literature, or national academies say.

This seems from Borenstein to me a pretty straight-shooting and emphatic bit of reporting on breaking news.

Here in Gainesville I listened however to a Canadian economist, a good guy and well-informed inhis field, on the size and difficulty of climate change. He is Mark Jaccard of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. It was a good talk with plenty of useful information and insight into the sheer intractability of a problem so vast that a modern-day vesion of Garrett Hardin’s old (largely discredited) Tragedy of the Commons is unfolding. Nobody wants to stop their sheep from grazing the pasture down to dirt, not unless everybody else stops first. And nobody is in charge. Ditto for climate change and stopping carbon emissions. That was a good part of his message, well composed.

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Cyprus International Institute (CII) (Harvard School of Public Health) http://Cyprus-Institute.us
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IPCC – Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (AR5)

Fifth Assessment Report (AR5)
The Working Group Reports and Synthesis Report will be completed in 2013/2014. The Fifth Assessment Report will be considered by the Panel according to the following timetable:

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IPCC WGII

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1988 to assess the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant for the understanding of human induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for mitigation and adaptation. The IPCC has completed four full assessment reports, guidelines and methodologies, special reports and technical papers. For more information on the IPCC, its activities and publications please see the IPCC homepage.

The IPCC has three working groups:

• Working Group I: The Science of Climate Change

• Working Group II: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability

• Working Group III: Mitigation of Climate Change

• and a Task Force on Greenhouse Gas Inventories

This is the Working Group II website. In its reports, Working Group II assesses the scientific, technical, environmental, economic and social aspects of the vulnerability (sensitivity and adaptability) to climate change of, and the negative and positive consequences for, ecological systems, socio-economic sectors and human health, with an emphasis on regional sectoral and cross-sectoral issues. At the 29th Session of the IPCC (31 August – 4 September 2008 • Geneva, Switzerland), new Working Group II co-chairs were elected to oversee development of the Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability volume of the Fifth Assessment Report: Dr. Chris Field of the United States and Dr. Vicente Barros of Argentina.

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Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability – IPCC WGII – AR5

The IPCC has started the Fifth Assessment cycle, which will include the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), Special Reports, Expert Meetings, and Workshops agreed by the Plenary. The outline of the Working Group II contribution to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) was approved at the 9th Session of Working Group II and accepted by the 31st Session of the IPCC meeting in Bali, Indonesia, 26-29 October 2009. According to the timetable agreed by the IPCC, the Working Group II contribution to the AR5, “Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability“, will be released in March 2014.

Writing team membership for the Working Group II contribution to the AR5 was released on 23 June 2010, and consisted of 302 Coordinating Lead Authors, Lead Authors, and Review Editors. The WGII Bureau since addressed gaps in expertise and unexpected withdrawals in augmenting teams (see accompanying box). You can check the Working Group II press release associated with the initial launch.

Refer to the AR5 provisional schedule for key WGII AR5 development milestones, and the AR5 writing teams for the current author listing.

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Thom Hartmann: Best of the rest of Science & Green News

thomhartmann

Published on Mar 4, 2014

Jim Javinsky fills in for Thom Hartmann on the Best of the rest of Science & Green News for the week of March 3, 2014

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Introduction To Mythopedia

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Published on Mar 5, 2014

Media Matters is excited to announce Mythopedia, the dictionary of conservative lies. Check out the video, and then check out Mythopedia at mythopedia.mediamatters.org

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