ClimateScienceWatch

Exxon disavows global warming denial, endorses emissions cap and trade

Posted on Tuesday, June 19, 2007

"Exxon says it never doubted climate change threat,” Reuters reported. “Oil company Exxon Mobil Corp. never in the past decade doubted the risk from climate change, its global spokesman Kenneth Cohen said on Thursday, in a latest attempt to improve its green credentials. Exxon had simply firmed up, or ‘evolved,’ its understanding of the threat, said Cohen...The world’s most profitable company now accepted that a U.S. climate policy was inevitable....’We’re very much not a denier, very much at the table with our sleeves rolled up,’ Cohen told reporters...,’We lean more towards an upstream cap and trade with a price protector, or a carbon tax.’” Thus, Exxon spins its way to a seat at the table.

GAO report questions policies on dissemination of federal scientists’ research

Posted on Monday, June 18, 2007

On June 18 the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report supporting recent criticisms that federal agency media policies hinder government scientists from publicizing their research results. Based on a large survey study, the report estimates that 102 scientists at NASA and 76 at NOAA have been denied approval to disseminate their results for reasons other than those stemming from standard technical review. The report says: “At NOAA, researchers who had requests denied represented a diverse cadre of research areas, including climate, environment, or atmosphere; oceans and coasts; and fisheries and ecosystems. Among the most common reasons that researchers reported for the denial of their requests were that the topic or results were sensitive...” We have noted many times that the gatekeepers interfere selectively, when communication of research findings and interpretations of their significance to a wider public audience might call into question current policies. 

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Senate committee advances whistleblower protection bill but leaves out protection for scientists

Posted on Wednesday, June 13, 2007

On June 13 the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee advanced legislation that would restore the mandate of the Whistleblower Protection Act (WPA), which has been gutted by judicial activism since 1994. However, while the legislation would strengthen protections for federal whistleblowers who expose waste, fraud and abuse of power, it fails to address scientists who expose the manipulation, distortion, or suppression of their work.

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Upcoming screenings of “Everything’s Cool” global warming film in New York City and elsewhere

Posted on Wednesday, June 13, 2007

“Everything’s Cool,”, a new documentary billed as “The story of a handful of global warming messengers speaking out in a time of disinformation,“ is scheduled to be screened during the next week at the Provincetown Film Festival (June 15), the Maui Film Festival (June 16), the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival in New York City (June 17), and at Harvard University (June 20).

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Griffin’s NASA vision: Colonize outer space with American cultural values

Posted on Monday, June 11, 2007

On May 30 we noted NASA Administrator Michael Griffin’s dubious comments on global warming, which were aptly characterized by Jim Hansen as “incredibly ignorant and arrogant,” and by Jerry Mahlman at the National Center for Atmospheric Research as showing that Griffin is either “totally clueless” or “a deep antiglobal warming ideologue.” We were a bit surprised that, at the time, none of the media coverage recollected Griffin’s far stranger statements about the purpose of human space flight, in an interview with the Washington Post a few months after he assumed his position as the head of the space agency.

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Climate Science Watch interview on Los Angeles radio

Posted on Monday, June 11, 2007

On June 10 Climate Science Watch Director Rick Piltz was interviewed on the “Background Briefing” program on radio station KPFK-FM in Los Angeles.

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Key points in NASA-NOAA report to White House science office on NPOESS de-scoping

Posted on Monday, June 04, 2007

The Associated Press reported on June 4: “A confidential report to the White House, obtained by The Associated Press, warns that U.S. scientists will soon lose much of their ability to monitor warming from space using a costly and problem-plagued satellite initiative begun more than a decade ago....’We’re going to start being blinded in our ability to observe the planet,’ said [Rick] Piltz, whose group provided the AP with the previously undisclosed report.” We have prepared a 7-page briefing paper NPOESS-Summary.pdf that summarizes key points that lead to this conclusion, drawn from the text of the 76-page internal report NPOESS-OSTPdec-06.pdf to the White House Office of Science Technology Policy by a team of senior science managers at NASA and NOAA. 

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Internal report to White House on implications of NPOESS climate observations crisis

Posted on Monday, June 04, 2007

On June 4 the Associated Press reported on the looming crisis in the U.S. satellite-based global climate observing system. An internal “pre-decisional” report to the White House by NASA and NOAA, which Climate Science Watch provided to AP, explains how the decision by the Pentagon and NOAA to drop key climate-monitoring sensors from the National Polar-orbiting Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS)—the core of the next generation of Earth-orbiting climate-monitoring instruments—places in grave jeopardy scientists’ future ability to monitor key variables necessary for understanding climate change and its consequences. We are making the report available here NPOESS-OSTPdec-06.pdf, to encourage wider attention to this problem and to increase pressure on the President and Congress to deal with it. 

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Hansen shoots back on NASA head Griffin’s “incredibly ignorant and arrogant statement”

Posted on Thursday, May 31, 2007

In response to NASA Administrator Michael Griffin’s incredible statement on NPR’s Morning Edition today questioning whether global warming is a problem or long-term concern needing to be dealt with, NASA’s James Hansen fired back with a straightforward and welcome example of speaking truth to power. “It’s an incredibly arrogant and ignorant statement,” Hansen told ABC News. “It indicates a complete ignorance of understanding the implications of climate change.” Now it would be good to hear from other NASA scientists, the U.S. Climate Change Science Program leadership, and the scientific research community.  Jim Hansen should not be alone in calling Griffin down for misrepresenting the intelligence on climate science.

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NASA Administrator Griffin “not sure” global warming is a problem or long-term concern

Posted on Wednesday, May 30, 2007

In an interview to be aired tomorrow morning, May 31, on NPR Morning Edition, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin says: “I’m aware that global warming exists....Whether that is a long term concern or not, I can’t say....To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth’s climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had....I think that’s a rather arrogant position for people to take.” Now there’s a framing that’s worthy of Phil Cooney. 

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Congressional investigation into science editing of Smithsonian Arctic climate exhibit

Posted on Thursday, May 24, 2007

The chair of the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming has announced he is investigating the handling by Smithsonian Institution officials of science text for the Smithsonian’s exhibit on Arctic climate change. Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-MA) has asked the acting head of the Smithsonian Institution to turn over relevant information about just about everything except what we called for on May 22: the actual text as it was drafted by scientists, and the specific changes made by Smithsonian officials prior to the exhibit.

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Rachel Carson, the Bush administration, and “the ant wars all over again”

Posted on Tuesday, May 22, 2007

In a piece on Rachel Carson (whose centennial is this year), Elizabeth Kolbert in the May 28 issue of The New Yorker likens Carson’s horror at the USDA’s ill-conceived, environmentally damaging, pro-special interest, seemingly impervious to evidence, failed pesticide war on imported fire ants in the 1950s to the horror of the current administration’s handling of global warming and other environmental science-meets-policy issues. 

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Smithsonian officials altered Arctic climate change exhibit to cut link with human-induced warming

Posted on Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Smithsonian Institution executives ordered a politically motivated rewrite of science in a 2006 exhibit on climate change in the Arctic, says Robert Sullivan, who was associate director in charge of exhibitions at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. The Associated Press reported that Sullivan, who resigned, says that, among other things, the text of the exhibit was edited to minimize the relationship between global warming and humans. Our own review of the exhibit finds that, in fact, it discusses climate change and its impacts on the Arctic but, with evident evasiveness, avoids ANY mention of human-induced global warming as a driver. 

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House Science investigations chairman calls on Exxon to account for global warming denial funding

Posted on Monday, May 21, 2007

On May 17 the Chairman of the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Technology sent a letter to ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson calling for a full accounting of ExxonMobil’s financial support of the global warming denial and disinformation political campaign. Denialist operatives and their allies will no doubt launch their usual bogus complaint that raising this issue this is somehow an effort to suppress honest scientific discussion and analysis. The opposite is the case, as AAAS President-elect Prof. James McCarthy’s March 28 testimony before the subcommittee clarified.

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Critical public review comments on the administration’s Fourth Climate Action Report

Posted on Sunday, May 20, 2007

Critical comments by guest contributor Lynne Carter (Co-Director, Adaptation Network) on the draft U.S. Fourth Climate Action Report, submitted to the State Department as part of the public review process, offer one good example of the kind of input that we would like to see more of from individuals and organizations.

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