Environmental funders reassess climate change tactics: First base starting to look pretty good now

Oops, wrong first base photo!

Shortly after joining the Michigan Environmental Council in 2006, I became aware of an obscure public notice in the Federal Register soliciting comments on a plan for the U.S. Coast Guard to begin live ammunition training exercises with .50 caliber machine guns in 34 areas of the Great Lakes.

I tipped some journalists to the story, lighting the fuse for a maelstrom of protest that forced the Coast Guard to re-evaluate its plans. For a couple months, I invested a fair amount of time into helping spread public awareness of a plan that heretofore had been very, VERY quietly pursued.

At one point, a longtime veteran of the environmental movement asked, “so, who’s funding you for this?” When I replied no one was, she appeared befuddled, and perhaps a little put off.  It had not occurred to me that my work priorities should be dictated by funders. The most important work should get the most attention, right? Not necessarily.

As  this interesting article from Politico points out, the donors who fund environmental work call the shots … to a certain extent. And they are not happy about the results they’ve gotten from the money they’ve poured into addressing climate change during the past several years.

Federal Cap and Trade legislation that would have begun to address the issue crashed and burned. Amid the wreckage, environmental groups are regrouping to try and accomplish change on a piece by piece basis – fighting for better building efficiency standards, and stopping new coal plants, and investing in public transportation.

If this seems like a half-assed way to deal with the planet’s most important issue, it is. But it’s what we have. As the aforementioned Politico article notes, the environmental community has neither sufficent power to punish do-nothing politicians, nor the clout to reward the good ones.

Without that power – or a groundswell of public demand for action – there is little hope of the sweeping change that many of us would like to see.

Does that mean we don’t need visionaries laying out idealistic plans? No. But it means most of us need to hunker down and work for incremental change if we’re going to have something to show for it at the end of the day.

As President Obama’s Advisor Rahm Emanuel told an environmental funder, “Your DNA and my DNA are so different. I’m about trying to get to first base. You’re about trying to hit it over the fence.”

First base might sound like a crappy place to be when you’re so far behind.

But it beats striking out. And it might get funded.

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D'OH!! Climate skeptic scientists' data inconvenient for billionaire oil magnates who helped fund it

So two oil magnate billionaire brothers walk into a bar scientific discussion. They spend a bunch of money to help fund a fresh analysis of climate change data conducted by a scientist who’s outspokenly critical of the consensus on global warming.

The brothers are enthused, since they have a lot to gain if the nation believes that burning up fossil fuel as quickly as we can pry it out of the earth is a good thing.

The skeptic community is enthused, since they believe this man is one of the only scientists not on the planet that is part of an evil conspiracy to perpetrate a massive hoax on the world’s people in order to, um .... get more grants or something.The scientist is the toast of anti-government hacks like Michigan's own Oakland University teacher who goes by the name The Blog Prof.

The ending of this story has not been written. But there was a pretty damn good foreshadowing of it the other day  when the scientist testified before Congress. The results so far, the scientist said to the chagrin of the billionaire brothers, are nearly identical to the results obtained by all the other leading scientific organizations on the planet and reported by the International Panel on Climate Change.

This has infuriated the skeptics who once vowed to accept the conclusions of this lone, honest scientist. Even if the conclusions challenged their theory. Now they say this man, clearly, is part of the evil conspiracy.

As Linda Ellerbee used to say, “…and so it goes.”

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A letter to WDIV Channel 4 Meteorologist Chuck Gadica

Chuck Gadica

Hello Chuck (Gadica)

Thank you very much for the piece you did tonight (Thursday, Feb. 24 on the 11 o’clock) about why a warming planet may result in more precipitation. Using the sponges with the demonstration made it easily understandable for a lay audience (I might steal the idea myself!)

It surely helped inform the shrill dialogue over whether more snowstorms and rainfall amounts disprove climate change theory. They don’t.

I was stunned, however that you referred to rising global temperatures twice as an uncertain proposition. (“…if we are warming…”) Even the most skeptical scientists now acknowledge that the climate has been warming for some time. Dr. Patrick Michaels – a leading skeptic and one of few climatologists who openly challenges the IPCC report  – told a panel discussion audience in Detroit two years ago that the planet was most assuredly warming, (although he believes mankind may not be a significant driver in that trend). He told the audience that making the argument that ‘the planet is not warming’ is a discredit to the skeptics’ cause because it is so easily and thoroughly disproved.

The data is unambiguous. NOAA reports that 2010 tied for the warmest year on global record, and that it was the 34^th consecutive year that global temperatures exceeded the 20^th Century average. (emphasis mine). 

The question of how significant a contribution mankind’s greenhouse gas emissions make to this warming climate; and the ranges of temperatures and changes we might see in the future are addressed most rigorously in the IPCC report, which concludes both the contribution and effects are/will be significant. Of course, there are no precise answers to these important questions.  

However, the simpler question of whether the planet is warming -- or not -- is abundantly clear through NOAA’s recorded data and that of other agencies throughout the world.

Your help in explaining science to your viewers is invaluable, and you do it very well….but I hope in the future you will make it clear to viewers that the data show unambiguously that the earth is getting warmer, and has been for many decades.

 Thank you very much for your time,

Hugh McDiarmid Jr.

Farmington Resident\15 year WDIV viewer

(Phone number)

Biblical stewardship of the earth and its creatures? Not in Rep. John Shimkus' truncated Bible

Rep. Shimkus: Don't worry

Not sure how I missed this, but Congressman John Shimkus of Illinois wants to be the next chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee. And Rep. Shimkus has a rather unique perspective

on climate change.

He believes that mankind is incapable of harming the planet because the Bible declares God, not man, will destroy the earth. “The earth will end only when God declares it’s time to be over. Man will not destroy this earth,” he said.

Now careful readers will note that the previous link was to the left-wing, Soros funded, Huffington Post which is part of the failed Pelosi-Huffington agenda and a tool of Statists, ecoterrorists and Communists. But Shimkus’ views were also chronicled in the New York Times, which is simply part of the liberal drive-by media and therefore more trustworthy. I guess.

Anyway, Rep. Shimkus declared that the conservative and Tea Party victories in the 2010 means that “The climate debate has, at least for two years, has ended with this election.”

In open defiance of Rep. Shimkus’ decree, climatologists across the nation apparently plan to continue to do research for the next two years. Some of these climatologists have never even slept with Al Gore. So, you see, technically the debate really isn’t over.

It also may be news to Rep. Shimkus that religious leaders across the nation and the world have called for action on climate change, through organizations like the Evangelical Climate Initiative.

Even within the modest environmental coalitions in Michigan, there are faith-based groups working toward sensible responses to climate change. Groups like the IHM Sisters in Monroe; the Michigan chapter of the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life out of Oakland County and  Michigan Interfaith Power and Light in Royal Oak.

These groups have bizarre ideas about the Bible teaching us that we must be stewards of the earth and the creatures that inhabit it. Stuff like: Lev. 25:23-24. The land is mine and you are but aliens and my tenants. Throughout the country that you hold as a possession, you must provide for the redemption of the land.

 I don’t know where Rep. Shimkus’ gets his laissez faire Biblical interpretation. But I sure as hell hope he does not inflict such dangerous nonsense on our nation from the pulpit of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

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Detroit News lets Frank Beckmann spew more unhinged nonsense; so is Stephen Hawking part of the climate change conspiracy?

Stephen Hawking enjoying the spoils of the climate conspiracy

Conservative radio talk show host and football announcer Frank Beckmann has penned another  wild, flailing assault on climate change science in today’s Detroit News. He’s strung together unrelated threads of  factually tortured conspiracy theory sandwiched around words like “bogus” “hoax” and “grant seeking environmental alarmists.”

Frank’s columns must be increasingly embarrassing for those at the News who still believe that even the most opinionated opinion columnists should be held to certain standards of intellectual honesty. But it may be par for the course for an editorial page that continues to promote as fact climate contentions that even the most celebrated climate change skeptic-climatologists have denounced.

It would take a huge word count to address each of Frank’s scattershot accusations and pseudo-facts that sail around untethered by accuracy or context. So I leave you with two links:

First, this link from NOAA where you can see lower on the page the “climate dashboard” that shows actual recorded observations for global temperatures, carbon dioxide, sun energy, Arctic sea ice and sea level.

Secondly, this video with Stephen Hawking and Carl Sagan talking about the greenhouse effect.

Hawking says “…one of the most serious consequences of our actions is global warming brought about by rising levels of CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels. The danger is that the temperature increase may become self-sustaining, if it hasn’t done so already.”

Hawking, of course, is a literal genius the world’s most celebrated cosmologist and physicist. But Beckmann might well categorize him as just another “environmental alarmist” who has “fouled the air with their fraud.”

"An awesome Earth Day warning" from 40 years ago!

I don't think the word "awesome" had quite the same connotation in 1970. Nonetheless:

At the end of his Earth Day broadcast on NBC News, April 22, 1970, anchorman Frank Blair reported an “awesome Earth Day warning” from climatologist Dr. J. Murray Mitchell who reported that manmade pollution “….could so warm the earth in 200 years as to create a greenhouse effect, melting the Arctic ice cap and flooding vast areas of the world.” See the warning at the end of the clip, here: http://bit.ly/bjWyA7
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I CAN'T HEAR YOU: Climate skeptics find their own scientist too inconvenient to acknowledge

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Conservative columnist George Will and a horde of climate change skeptics in the blogosphere have weighed in gleefully in recent days regarding climate scientist Phil Jones’ “admission” that there has been no statistically significant global warming since 1995. The argument popped up last week on the RightMichigan blog. It’s a variation on a common argument that typically uses 1998 as the year that global temperatures supposedly stopped going up.

So I did something a little outrageous, and actually read the interview where Jones made the statement.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8511670.stm

There, we learn that “statistically significant” for scientists means at a “95 percent confidence level.” We also learn that the global temperature rise during the period in question was very close to that 95 percent confidence level, with a trend of 0.12C temperature rise per decade. That’s LOT different from saying there was no temperature rise.

But wait, there’s more!

Dr. Patrick Michaels is a climatologist in the employ of the free-market-is-the-answer-to-everything Cato Institute. He is one of the climate skeptics’ poster boys. A credentialed climatologist who is regularly trotted out to defend the status quo.

I talked with Dr. Michaels in January at a Detroit News-sponsored climate debate during the Auto Show in Detroit. He wore lime green tennis shoes with his coat and tie. But I digress.

At the Detroit debate, Dr. Michaels agreed that the planet is warming, and that manmade emissions have something to do with it. He also said the old argument that global warming stopped in 1998 is scientifically invalid and should be tossed on the scrap heap of discredited arguments. 

It was a fascinating statement that, not surprisingly, the Detroit News did not see fit to include in the edited video clips of the debate they posted online.

But it turns out that Michaels said essentially the same thing to a gathering of right-wing Heritage Foundation folks in 2008. He said the data do not back up the “no warming since 1998” contention, and warned the audience that using the argument erodes their credibility. “Make an argument that you can get killed on, and you can kill us all,” he lectured them. 

You can listen to his explanation and admonishment here, starting at about the 1:20 mark

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwnrpwctIh4

It is a bizarre and pathetic commentary when climate skeptics begin finding that even the truths of their own heroes are too inconvenient to acknowledge.

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