According to a fascinating article by Katherine Bagley prosaically titled "GOP Not Listening to its Own Climate Scientists on Climate Change," a group of prominent conservative scientists, many of them evangelicals, approached conservative politicians to educate them on climate change and predictably the pols have not "warmed," shall we say, to their efforts.
Although usually loath to announce their political leanings, these Republican-affiliated scientists thought conservatives may be receptive to scientists with conservative credentials. Who are these concerned scientists and how do they get conservative politicians to embrace climate change when many of them see the use of alternative energies as a step toward anarchy?
According to Ms. Bagley, the scientists undertaking this Sisyphean task include Prof. Kerry Emanuel of MIT who was inundated with hate mail after identifying himself in a video as a conservative and voicing concerns about the GOP denial of climate change. Prof. Barry Bickmore, a Mormon, is a geochemist at Brigham Young University and has represented the GOP in local politics. Prof. Richard Alley is the author of a plethora of peer-reviewed papers on climate change and has offered expert testimony to Congress on several occasions. Prof. Calvin DeWitt, is a co-signer of the Evangelical Climate Initiative, a statement from high-profile evangelicals calling for concerted action to battle global warming. Finally, Prof. Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist, is an evangelical married to a pastor. Newt Gingrich notoriously dropped a chapter she wrote from his latest book on the environment after Rush Limbaugh referred to her as a "climate babe."
According to the article, a 2010 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences stated "roughly 98 percent of U.S. climate researchers are convinced that rising emissions from human activities is hastening climate change." Despite this resolve, the right has evolved from a reluctance to accept the science to an outright dismissal bordering on hostility. For example, a few years ago former Speaker Gingrich famously made a commercial sitting on a couch with Rep. Nancy Pelosi in front of the White House saying the country must take "bold action" to address climate change. Backtracking, Newt now says it was the "dumbest thing he has done in the last four years."
Again, according to the article, the scientists are opposed by the usual climate change denial industry bad guys straight from central casting such as "oil industry donors and powerful advocacy groups who have the ear of the GOP, like Americans for Prosperity." These groups have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to bankroll conservative politicians,
Tim Phillips, president of the Americans for Prosperity, an organization founded and financed by the oil industry and some of the Republican party's wealthiest donors, admits the influence of his group. "The vast majority of people who are involved in the [Republican] nominating process -- the conventions and the primaries -- are suspect of the science. And that's our influence, groups like Americans for Prosperity have done it," he said.
There is a concerted campaign to smear the science, according to Prof. Emmanuel.
And let me say that I think that there is a campaign of disinformation going on about this, and there has been before. We saw it before with the attempts by the tobacco industry to throw cold water on the notion that there was a connection between cigarette smoking and cancer... if [conservatives] simply deny that there's any problem at all they have automatically opted out of the conversation about what the solutions to the problems are going to be.
So how do conservative politicians influence policy after they have "automatically opted out of the conversation about solutions"? It is certainly a good question and leaves the GOP in a bit of a dilemma. I mean if the party just denies modern problems, especially one of the greatest we confront as a civilization, then they may veer towards irrelevancy. Are they waiting for 100 percent of climate scientists to join the consensus that man is warming the environment through the burning of fossil fuels? I think not. They will still deny the problem by pointing to scientists outside the climate science field or perhaps even meteorologists who are notoriously reluctant as a group to accept climate change. Perhaps as alternative energies fall in price they may be harder and harder to ignore. Perhaps jobs in their district tied to alternative energies will be the key to changing their minds. In the meantime, it will be harder and harder to ignore the freakish weather patterns and impacts they are having like flooding, wild fires, and drought. After all, CO2 molecules do what they do and are not influenced by any skepticism on the right.
So, before we get conservative politicians to change their minds regarding climate change we must get them to listen, a rather Herculean task in itself. As of now, GOP leaders are thought to be listening to the perhaps five percent of climate scientists outside the consensus camp who are unsure of man's role in the warming of the planet, or worse yet, the fossil fuel industry. What is obvious is that the GOP is the party representing the top one percent of the income strata that listens to the minority five percent of climate scientists, really not a firm foundation on which to form a majority governing coalition!
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I’ve recently been involved with other scientists and scholars in Utah trying to stop the spread of outright lies, half-truths, abuses of data, and distortions about climate change. Much of this disinformation is coming from (or through) some Republican members of the Utah Legislature...
I'm a Republican myself, and it galls me that my own party has locally fallen for a bunch of conspiracy theories and scientifically incompetent trash. In my opinion, something has to be done to save the party from disaster in the long run...
Democracy depends on accurate information being readily available to the public, and I see people who propagate such disinformation campaigns as enemies of Democracy.
http://bbickmore.wordpress.com/about-this-blog/
Note that all of the following are immediately verifiable:
The surveys of climatologists and those in allied fields generally show increasing consensus regarding global warming and man-made cause.
2011: Stephen J. Farnsworth, S. Robert Lichter (October 27, 2011). "The Structure of Scientific Opinion on Climate Change". International Journal of Public Opinion Research.
http://ijpor.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/10/27/ijpor.edr033.short
Either American Meteorological Society or American Geophysical Union members and listed in American Men and Women in Science. “97% of the 489 scientists surveyed agreed that that global temperatures have risen over the past century. Moreover, 84% agreed that “human-induced greenhouse warming” is now occurring.” Only 5% disagreed with the idea that human activity is a significant cause of global warming.”
2010: William R. L. Anderegg, James W. Prall, Jacob Harold, and Stephen H. Schneider (April 9, 2010). "Expert credibility in climate change". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.
“97–98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC (Anthropogenic Climate Change) outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and (ii) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.“
http://ijpor.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2011/10/27/ijpor.edr033.short
“from 3,146 of the 10,257 polled Earth scientists. Results were analyzed globally and by specialization. 76 out of 79 climatologists who "listed climate science as their area of expertise and who also have published more than 50% of their recent peer-reviewed papers on the subject of climate change" believe that mean global temperatures have risen compared to pre-1800s levels, and 75 out of 77 believe that human activity is a significant factor in changing mean global temperatures. Among all respondents, 90% agreed that temperatures have risen compared to pre-1800 levels, and 82% agreed that humans significantly influence the global temperature.”
http://tigger.uic.edu/~pdoran/012009_Doran_final.pdf
2008: Bray, D; vonStorch, H. "A Survey of the Perspectives of Climate Scientists Concerning Climate Science and Climate Change".
Question 20 "How convinced are you that climate change, whether natural or anthropogenic, is occurring now?" got 67.1% very much agree, 26.7% to some large extent (5–6), 6.2% said to some small extent (2–4), none said not at all. Question 21 "How convinced are you that most of recent or near future climate change is, or will be, a result of anthropogenic causes?"
received 34.6% very much agree, 48.9% agreeing to a large extent (5–6), 15.1% to a small extent (2–4), and 1.35% not agreeing at all.
http://coast.gkss.de/staff/storch/pdf/CliSci2008.pdf
http://www.skepticalscience.com/Skeptical-Science-hacked-private-user-details-publicly-posted-online.html
SkepticalScience is one of the best resources for simple scientific explanations to counter skeptic website misinformation. The fact that the Russians, or fossil interests, find them worthy of being hacked, aka Climategate, says a lot about how effective this website has been in informing the public.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2012/03/data-presentation-a-trend-lesson/
Bernard Lewis? Do you mean Harold Lewis, the 90-year-old physicist who quit the APS in a pique? He's never studied climate science and knows little about it.
Can you spot the pattern?
By the way, how many scientists did NOT quit the APS? About 50,000. Why is the one who did more interesting to you than the 50,000 who didn't? Ideology, that's why. You like his position, therefore he must be right, and the other 50,000 must be wrong. Of course.
Conclusions
We can continue to debate the validity of climate science, but waiting for decades or longer for final “proof” would be foolhardy at best. Fifty or 100 years from now the impact of increasing emissions of GHGs will be firmly established. If the projections of today’s climate scientists are correct and we have failed to take both mitigating and adaptive actions, then much damage will already have been done.
The potential impacts of climate change on the built environment and the implications for transportation infrastructure are sufficiently well defined for us to take action now. If this generation of engineers fails to act, coastal highways and railroads will be under water, bridges will be unusable, tunnels will be periodically flooded, communities in the Midwest, Northeast, and Southeast will be threatened by river flooding, people in the Southwest will face increasing water shortages, and entire villages along the North Slope of Alaska will be swallowed by the sea.
However, if we incorporate climate change into the regular planning processes for transportation and other infrastructure, the marginal costs of building more robust, resilient systems can be readily accommodated. And we will have met our obligations to future generations.
"The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a corporation in the United States whose members serve pro bono as "advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine."..."
"The Act of Incorporation, signed by [Republican] President Abraham Lincoln on March 3, 1863, created the National Academy of Sciences and named 50 charter members."
"The Act states:
[T]he Academy shall, whenever called upon by any department of the Government, investigate, examine, experiment, and report upon any subject of science or art, the actual expense of such investigations, examinations, experiments, and reports to be paid from appropriations which may be made for the purpose, but the Academy shall receive no compensation whatever for any services to the Government of the United States.
—An Act to Incorporate the National Academy of Sciences"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Academy_of_Sciences
Two main publications:
"Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America" (PNAS)
http://www.pnas.org/
"National Academies Press" (NAP)
http://www.nap.edu/
Their whole mandate is to report science to members of the Federal Government. It particularly concerns me when Federal employees like Sen. Inhofe (R-OK) and many others fail to get their mandated science from their mandated organization, as they are supposed to, by mandate. They fail their mandate as a Federal Government employee when they fail to get their science from the NAS.
Because you, Engineer and Libertarian, say so.
Meanwhile, the actual scientists who have devoted decades to studying the matter in detail, say it's very, very clear.
Solar electricity now costs double that from coal. The price gap has been closing at ~17% per year, but new tech will hasten the closure. E.g.,
"The secret to Twin Creeks’ new solar cells is thinness.
Most crystalline solar panels use sheets of silicon that are around 200 micons thick".
"The process of cutting the silicon down to 200 microns results in massive waste. But Twin Creeks uses a hydrogen ion particle accelerator to create silicon solar wafers that measure a mere 20 microns thick, and are at least as efficient at turning sun rays into electricity as their 200-micron counterparts. The innovative production process creates almost no waste, and cuts the cost of solar cell production from about
80 cents per watt down to 40 cents per watt."
http://tinyurl.com/6rj74b8
And for vehicles:
"We report a novel catalyst that uses CO2 and hydrogen to store energy in formic acid. Using a homogeneous iridium catalyst with a proton-responsive ligand, we show the first reversible and recyclable hydrogen storage system that operates under mild conditions using CO2, formate and formic acid. This system is energy-efficient and green because it operates near ambient conditions, uses water as a solvent, produces high-pressure CO-free hydrogen, and uses pH to control hydrogen production or consumption."
http://tinyurl.com/7amkxsr
I don't know why GOP followers revel in their own ignorance, voting against their best interests makes no sense.
I heard an interview with one of them who said that voting for a christian was so important that even if it made him go into bankruptcy, he would still do it. We need to address the authority figures that these people look up to. For example, until this person's priest tells him Obama is not a Muslim, nothing you or I can say will make him believe it and he will not vote to improve his own life.
There is a new clean energy technology that is one tenth the cost of coal. LENR using nickel. Incredibly: Ni+H(heated under pressure)=Cu+lots of heat.
This phenomenon (LENR) has been confirmed in hundreds of published scientific papers: http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJtallyofcol.pdf
"Over 2 decades with over 100 experiments worldwide indicate LENR is real, much greater than chemical..." --Dennis M. Bushnell, Chief Scientist, NASA Langley Research Center
"Energy density many orders of magnitude over chemical." Michael A. Nelson, NASA
"Total replacement of fossil fuels for everything but synthetic organic chemistry." --Dr. Joseph M. Zawodny, NASA
By the way, here is a survey of all the companies that are bringing LENR to commercialization: http://www.cleantechblog.com/2011/08/the-new-breed-of-energy-catalyzers-ready-for-commercialization.html
Sorry, but it's true.
Someone who still thinks this is a Democracy.
The problem for Republicans is that, from here on out, as big and loud as they are, Mother Nature is bigger and louder. On the other hand, 2011 was the 35th consecutive year (since 1976) that the yearly global temperature was above the 20th century average. Hence, if you're less than 35, you've never experienced normal temperatures (on average). The Republican effort to get people to disbelieve in Global Warming thus relies on asking people to forget their own history. Something Republicans are pretty good at. They risk losing the 'old folks' vote, on this issue, however. 'Who are you going to believe? Me or your lying eyes?'
Prominent MIT researcher -- and conservative -- Kerry Emanuel receives “frenzy of hate” after a video featuring an interview with him was published...
Emails contained “veiled threats against my wife,” and other “tangible threats,” Emanuel... director of MIT’s Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate program, said... “They were vile, these emails. They were the kind of emails nobody would like to receive.”
“What was a little bit new about it was dragging family members into it and feeling that my family might be under threat, so naturally I didn’t feel very good about that at all,” Emanuel said...
The video... documented a climate change conference run by a group of Republican voters upset by their party’s anti-science rhetoric...
In one clip, Emanuel says, “It makes me feel to some extent disgusted with politics and to some extent ashamed to be an American.”...
ClimateDepot [blog] posted Emanuel’s email address.
Emanuel notes that in the full video, he went on to explain that the Republican candidates “have either been misled, in which case it’s not great to be part of the political system where candidates for the president of the United States could be so misled on such an important issue, or they were dishonest, which [is] equally bad in my view: How could we live in a country where candidates are being dishonest about an issue of such importance?”
http://tinyurl.com/74larxf
No matter who they were from, it was wrong and against everything Americans are supposed to hold dear.
MONEY
Incidentally, taking someone who hates government and putting them in charge of the government is a recipe for really, really crappy goverment. The recent past provides at least one striking example.
That is Bill Gates' strategy and a good one. That is, create a cheaper alternative to fossil fuel. As oil prices increase, it may be easier to do.