Imagine if all the world’s corn, rice, and wheat crops began failing catastrophically. Lose those food staples, and global starvation isn’t far behind.
The views expressed in these articles are those of the individual authors.
The Yale Forum on Climate Change & The Media is grateful for the generous financial support of the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment and of individual Yale University alumni.
Imagine if all the world’s corn, rice, and wheat crops began failing catastrophically. Lose those food staples, and global starvation isn’t far behind.
The post mortems on culprits — or, depending on one’s perspective, heroes — in the demise of the U.S. Senate’s cap-and-trade bill began as they usually do, with finger-pointing.
“You don’t need a weather man to know which way the wind blows,” Bob Dylan taught us.
And those up and down much of the Atlantic Seaboard don’t need a thermometer to tell them how scorching hot much of July was. If misery loves company, they and others now can also turn to a new NOAA “State of the Climate” report telling them that the past decade has been the warmest on record worldwide. Reviewing a set of 10 key indicators, NOAA says they “all tell the same story: global warming is undeniable … the Earth is growing warmer and has been for more than three decades.”
As scientists across the world continue mourning the death of Stanford climatologist Stephen H. Schneider, and as plans ripen for a number of memorials to his climate research and communications skills, one scientist particularly skilled at putting his thoughts and ideas into words has started an initial list of “lessons learned” from Schneider.
A financial investment expert’s 5-minute guide to global warming advises his clients that global warming “will be the most important investment issue for the foreseeable future.”
It’s more than a little ironic that about the same time Senate Democrats abandoned a seven-year effort to pass a climate bill centered on a cap-and-trade system, the EPA backed off censoring two of its attorneys who had been highly critical of the approach.
Both climate science and scientists generally have taken a “significant” hit in the world of public opinion as a result of the fall of 2009 hacked e-mails controversy at the University of East Anglia.
But the full picture is more nuanced and subtle, and most Americans still believe global warming is happening (57 percent); a plurality (47 percent) think humans are primarily responsible; and scientists “remained by far the most trusted source of information on global warming (77 percent).”
Climate scientists sucked into the black holes of advocacy-driven allegations since last fall’s hacked e-mails controversy erupted may now be seeing some light at the end of the long tunnel they’ve been reluctantly traversing.
As a series of independent and seemingly authoritative reviews one-by-one exonerate them of any serious wrongdoing, the scientists are engaging each other with some heart-felt congratulations for what they insist they knew all along to be the case: Not guilty as charged, despite some knuckle-wraps calling for more openness and transparency in the way they conduct their science. Repeated findings along those lines have of course failed to stem the condemnations of persistent and highly vocal climate deniers and contrarians, whose drumbeat of unsubstantiated criticisms unquestionaby will continue.
Read More
A sampling of survey opinions from a small group of local broadcast news directors provides a first-time glimpse into attitudes toward climate change as they play out on local TV programming relied on by so many Americans for their science news.
Scientists’ engagement with the public, and lack thereof, is the focus of a new series of reports from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.