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Debunking Climate Change Denial Myths

Climate change denial is shifting from denying that it’s real, to saying why the fixes can’t work. Four common denial myths are debunked here. I was reading an interesting article on the Discovery Magazine website about the almost non-existent snowpack in the Pacific Northwest this spring after a really warm winter.  I was surprised by the ignorance of the comments left there by readers who are supposedly drawn to a magazine website about science. Among the steady stream of ridiculous rants, one caught my eye.  A gentleman there had managed to string together one false statement after another.  He seems pretty… Read More »Debunking Climate Change Denial Myths

How to Save a LOT of Money While Saving the Environment (Hint: Use LED lights!)

  I remember responding to a reader comment left in an article about the phasing out of compact fluorescent lights (CFL) due to their mercury content.  The commenter was saying how the government shouldn’t regulate the market and tell him that he can’t use CFL bulbs.  He likes the light from his CFLs and thinks they’re just fine. I don’t entirely disagree, but I think the irony was lost on him because incandescent bulb production was phased out in 2014 by — you guessed it — “the government”.  Maybe he was a youngster, not old and grizzled  like the Doc.  Anyhow, it struck me as… Read More »How to Save a LOT of Money While Saving the Environment (Hint: Use LED lights!)

Oklahoma farmer's son, Dust Bowl era, 1930s

Climate change, drought and the future of America

Climate change will likely lead to drought in the Southwest that make the historic Dust Bowl of the 1930’s look like good times.  A bunch of scientific studies assessing the risk of drought were recently covered in various media outlets, including Forbes, National Geographic, Scientific American and elsewhere. Several of these media reports are based on an excellent paper, published in Science Advances, called “Unprecedented 21st century drought risk in the American Southwest and Central Plains.”  Their findings were not encouraging. In this paper, scientists from NASA, Columbia and Cornell Universities used historical tree ring data and something called the Palmer Drought Severity Index… Read More »Climate change, drought and the future of America

Deniergate! Ohh the irony, Willie Soon!

The New York Times published a very interesting article on Saturday…  Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher By JUSTIN GILLIS and JOHN SCHWARTZ The NY Times article describes evidence uncovered by Greenpeace and the Climate Investigations Center, that Dr Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon, a prominent climate change denying researcher, failed to disclose that much of his work is funded by corporate interests. Apparently, Willie Soon is almost entirely funded by various coal and oil interests, including the Koch Brothers.  This is richly ironic considering the phony “climategate” scandal, likely orchestrated by the same coal and oil interests, to discredit climate scientists.  On second thought, maybe… Read More »Deniergate! Ohh the irony, Willie Soon!

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Carbon Budgets Explored

As you may recall from a recent post about fossil fuel divestment, fossil fuels will soon become a stranded asset, meaning we can not afford to pull it out of the ground and burn it. The concept of carbon budgets was explored in depth in a report by the Carbon Tracker Initiative and the Grantham Research Institute, called “Unburnable Carbon 2013:  Wasted capital and stranded assets,” which we went over in detail in a earlier post. As discussed before, a carbon budget is not hard to figure out, because the relationship between how much carbon is burned and the increase in temperature is relatively well know. ( Data from Carbon… Read More »Carbon Budgets Explored