David Schlom’s Climate Truth Blog

Did you see Linda Garrett’s two part special on Global Warming this week on local TV channels 12 and 24 (KHSL and KNVN)? I was fearing the worst when I saw that the local stations were going to do a series on climate change. When journalists and science meet, the results are not often pretty. I was more worried when I heard their “Question of the Day” which was something to the effect “Global Warming: is it real or just hot air?” Talk about a loaded question.

Ms. Garrett did an outstanding job, interviewing Jim Pushnik and Jeff Price of CSU Chico, two of the area’s leading academic voices on climate change. She showed a brief clip of Assemblyman Rick Keene (R-Chico) who blathered something about “the jury being out.” What jury is that Mr. Keene? Certainly not the scientific one! Perhaps you should listen to President Bush (yes, I actually said that) who at least pays lip service to this issue rather than taking the Inhoff (it’s a grand hoax) road to ignorance.

Garrett’s report focussed on what a warming world means to the Northstate. She brought up water and agricultural issues as well as fisheries and also highlighted business leaders who are leading the way on climate change using CSU Chico and Sierra Nevada Brewery as examples.

The two part report was accurate, brave and well presented. Predictably, Ms. Garrett received lots of negative feedback from people who seem to think that Global Warming was invented by Al Gore so that he could pick up an Oscar. If you saw the report, I encourage you to contact the station and give her some positive feedback. It is all too rare to find a reporter that actually does her homework and presents a story with an eye on accuracy rather than “fairness.”

One last thought. As I predicted in my previous posting, Al Gore is being predictably attacked after the Oscar ceremonies. Matt Drudge has published information (gleaned from a right wing political group in Tennessee) that Mr. Gore’s mansion uses massive amounts of energy. It is a large, old house and the Gore’s are doing all they can do make it more green. In fact, they pay much higher utility bills than required to use green energy. That fact is conveniently omitted from the attacks you may be hearing in most of the media. I’m sure Mr. Gore will do all he can to make his home more energy efficient but what exactly is the point? Oh, Al Gore uses lots of energy therefore Global Warming is a hoax? Hmmm.

Just a few thoughts on last night’s Academy Awards. Great to see An Incovenient Truth win the oscar for best documentary. It really is an excellent film aside from the content (which is also quite good!). Also glad to see the song win. Unfortunately, the blogosphere will now be filled with rantings about Hollywood and Gore. In fact, if there is one quibble I have with the film and Mr. Gore it is that it tends to politicize the topic. I suppose this is unavoidable and the film has done a great deal to put GW up front and center in the public mind.

My point however is this — as long as we view issues as “liberals” or “conservatives” or even as Americans first rather than citizens of a planet in peril — we are doomed to inaction — paralyzed by our entrenched positions.

I promised last week to address the issue of controversy. Every day it seems that one of my colleagues asks a “what about this?” question based on something they heard (James Inhoff is always providing them with these) in the media. The impression amongst the general public is that there is a lot of debate on the science of global warming when in reality — there is not.

Why is this? Hate do do this but let’s blame the media! They are mostly responsible for the way Americans in particular get their information. Put the topic of global warming aside and look at the way the mainstream media presents any issue. They want to be “balanced” and so they trot out a person on one side of an issue and one on the other (or perhaps a “panel”). This is followed by a few minutes of both sides arguing back and forth and the viewer is left with… What? The sense that there are two sides to an issue and that both sides believe in what they say. You will tend to side with the person(s) that were already closest to your belief system and that is human nature. We want what we think to be true and so we look for reinforcement of our beliefs.

On the subject of climate change. This presents a very distorted picture. On one side, there are literally thousands of scientists. On the other, a handful. They become quite familiar to us (Richard Lindzen of MIT is a good example because he seems to be everywhere) precisely because there are so few of them. Dr. Lindzen is in a distinct minority on this issue. He is an accomplished scientist. I’m not qualified to argue with his points. All I can say is that for every Richard Lindzen (one!) there are literally HUNDREDS of scientists with a very different view. They represent a powerful thing in science: consensus. Their work has stood up to rigorous peer review and it is the BEST science that we can hope to have. Any reasonable person would have to side with the consensus view on this and yet not every one does. Why? Because rather than reading about this issue in scientific publications — we tend to form our opinions based on what we see in a quick report on TV. Not the best way to go about formulating an opinion based on facts.

The media thrives on the two sided controversy. It is boring to report that there is only one side to an issue. And it seems unfair. But instead of seeking fairness shouldn’t the media seek the truth — no matter how inconvenient that might be?

Dave

Hello All!

This is my first posting so bear with me while I get this sorted out. I am a science journalist and educator — I specialize in space and earth science topics. In my work, I am fortunate to be able to talk directly to some of the world’s leading scientists in their fields. I also feel a tremendous responsibility toward them to get their scientific findings out to a wider audience and help that audience to understand what they are doing and why it is important work. For example, this past week I have interviewed a volcanologist and a paleontologist and lined up an interview with a very famous scientist (can’t divulge who it is just yet but hang in there). One of my favorite interview subjects is Annie Druyan, the widow of the late Carl Sagan, who warned us about the impending climate crisis back in the 70s and 80s when most folks just weren’t paying much attention. Al Gore certainly was and Dr. Sagan was one of his greatest influences.

So that’s what I do and why I have some creds in this field. I am NOT a climate scientist and I do not claim to be an expert. But I do have access to people who are. And I talk with them a lot to try and clear up obfuscations and misunderstandings that the general public has on this issue.

For my first blog — I’d like to play Al Gore for you and tell you about two teachers I had (hopefully you’ve seen An Inconvenient Truth). Unlike Mr. Gore, I had tremendous respect for both of these teachers. One, I’ll call Dr. R and the other I’ll call Dr. H. In Dr. R’s astronomy and Earth Science classes at CSU Chico, we learned about the greenhouse process. He went to Harvard and actually was there when Sagan was and like Sagan, became very interested in the runaway greenhouse effect on Venus. Venus is the world in our solar system most like hell. It’s surface temperatures are 900 degrees F and the surface pressure there would be the equivalent of being under a thousand feet of water! Dr. R then compared our modest greenhouse effect and explained to us (using mathematics — the language of science) how our climate balanced the incoming energy from the sun with the outgoing infrared energy that was radiated back out to space at night — cooling our planet. A little bit of a greenhouse effect is a good thing — it keeps our planet from turning to a frozen ball of ice. Without it — the Earth would be COLD beyond imagining. Look at the geological evidence all around you — ice has played an important part in Earth history and we oscillate between warmth and ice. I’ll discuss the reasons for this in a later post. Dr. R then posed a question to us: what happens if we continue to pump enough CO2 into the atmosphere to overcome the modest greenhouse effect and start down the road to becoming more like Venus? We did the calculations and I was astonished to see that we really receive about the same amount of energy from the Sun as Venus does (it is a bit less because of our distance from our star but not enough to account for the temperature extremes — Venus shouldn’t be that hot!). In that class, I first heard the words “Global Warming.” It was 1988.

Then I had a meteorology professor (Dr. H) a brilliant and kind man who spent lots of outside time with his students. He had a friend who was a state climatologist who had compiled massive amounts of temperature data for the state. His take on “warming” was that it was merely an illusion — that temperatures were being taken in the wrong locations — cities — and that the anomalous temperatures were due to the urban heat island effect.

So I’d bounce back and forth between these two learned professors. By the time I graduated, I wasn’t sure about this issue but I was informed and decided to pay close attention to it. Needless to say, I made up my mind on this quite a while ago when the data started to indicate planetwide warming and the melting of ice all over the world started to make a lot of noise with those drip…drip…drips…

Recently I saw both of my professors. Dr. R was right all along but never gloated or crusaded about it. He was just a brilliant man and a person that respected the scientific process. Dr. H is the one who really amazed me. Last I heard, he has changed his mind about climate change. That’s when science is at its best. When the data holds up to scrutiny, critical minds change their opinions and knowledge moves forward.

But not always. In my next post, I’ll examine why GW persists as a “controversy” rather than an accepted part of life in the 21st century and why intelligent, well educated, good hearted people can be dead wrong. We’ll leave the stupid, uneducated and mean spirited ones to themselves.

Dave Schlom