Category: Politics

Why Climategate doesn’t matter (III)

_46196541_gracenasa226The series explained.

For some time now, global-warming skeptics have found Antarctica to be a source of comfort and joy.

“Report: Antarctic Ice Growing, Not Shrinking” was the headline on a FoxNews.com story back in April. And when syndicated columnist George Will was writing a series of whoppers about global warming last winter and spring, he grounded his faulty data in part on the notion that ice loss in the Arctic was being offset by gains in the Antarctic — something he did not explain, and which experts say is bad science.

Well, it was fun while it lasted. According to a study published late last month in the scientific journal Nature Geoscience, the East Antarctic ice sheet has been shrinking since 2006. The finding is based on new data gathered by a NASA satellite that measured changes in the Antarctic gravity.

Dr. Joe Romm of Climate Progress calls it a “satellite data stunner.”

According to news reports by the BBC and in Time magazine, scientists are treating the new data with caution, and are uncertain about what it means. For one thing, Antarctica is so cold that, under some models, warming could actually result in more snow and ice. For another, it’s not clear whether the shrinkage in East Antarctica can be attributed to global warming.

Nevertheless, if the data are borne out, the implications are clear enough: current projections that sea levels worldwide will rise three feet by 2100 are based on the belief that the East Antarctica ice sheet would not experience any melting. Looks like that number will have to be revised upwards.

And if the data are not necessarily evidence of global warming, they nevertheless show that Antarctica can no longer be cited as evidence of its lack, either.

Liberals and Afghanistan

Not quite sure what to make of this. But at our extremely liberal suburban Unitarian Universalist church this morning, I heard more support (albeit reluctant) for President Obama’s build-up in Afghanistan than I hear from congressional Democrats. Or, for that matter, from the four Democrats running for Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat.

One possible meaning: Mainstream liberals are not as reflexively antiwar as the interest groups that lobby Democrats on our supposed behalf think we are. Indeed, according to a CNN poll taken after Obama’s speech last week, the build-up of troops is supported by a margin of 62 percent to 36 percent.

Why Climategate doesn’t matter (II)

House falling over in Shishmaref, Alaska
House falling over in Shishmaref

The series explained.

For hundreds of years, the small village of Shishmaref, an Alaskan village on the Arctic coast, has survived, if not exactly thrived, because it was frozen for much of the year. Now it is literally melting away, as the permafrost that had propped it up for generations turns to mud. Offshore, the nearly year-long ice has given way to water.

The fate of Shishmaref is told by Boston Globe reporter Charles Pierce (lately the scourge of Tiger Woods) in his book “Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free.” Pierce writes:

The formation of the ice allowed the people of Shishmaref to go out on the sea and hunt. The permafrost guaranteed they would have a place to which they could return. Nowadays, though, the ice is late and soft. The permafrost is thawing. And Shishmaref is falling, bit by bit, in the Chukchi Sea….

There is no question about the cause of Shishmaref’s whittling away. Global climate change — specifically, what has come to be called global warming — is gradually devastating the Arctic. Alaska’s mean temperature has risen five degrees in thirty years and the permafrost is receding everywhere. The Arctic Ocean’s ice pack … is shrinking about 10 percent a year, and the pace of that shrinkage is accelerating.

In February 2008, Tom Kizzia of the Anchorage Daily News reported on what global warming was doing to Shishmaref and other northern villages, writing, “Alaska has lagged behind some other states in targeting emissions, even though the effects of rising temperatures have been pronounced here.”

And at that time, Kizzia wrote, then-governor Sarah Palin was looking into ways of reducing the emission of greenhouse gases in Alaska. Things change.

Update: For more on Palin’s rightward journey on global warming, see the addendum to this post.

You can learn more about the issue from the Shishmaref Erosion and Relocation Coalition, whose Web site is the source of the above photo.

Coakley gets it wrong on shield law

Martha Coakley
Martha Coakley

Bill Densmore has posted a crowdsourced Q&A with Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley, a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate. (Disclosure: As you’ll see if you read it all the way through, I helped with one of the questions.)

I have not read the entire interview, but I did read her answer to a question about whether she would support a federal shield law to protect journalists who are ordered to reveal their confidential sources.

Coakley’s answer is troublesome, as she replies that she supports protection for “bona fide journalists.” I take that to mean card-carrying members of the mainstream media.

I am dubious of shield laws, and believe an absolute law would likely be ruled unconstitutional. At most, shield laws should require a judge to rule on whether a journalist’s testimony is necessary and if there might be some alternative way of getting the same information, as outlined by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart in the 1972 Branzburg v. Hayes decision. (Alas, Stewart was on the losing side, and his proposed balancing test has led a tortured existence.)

But whatever is protected, it ought to be journalism, not journalists. If an amateur blogger is engaging in journalism, then she should have just as much protection as a press-pass-wielding reporter. The test shouldn’t be who you are — it should be what you do.

Why Climategate doesn’t matter (I)

For the past several weeks, conservative commentators have been buzzing about “Climategate” — hacked e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit in Britain that show some scientists may have been cooking the books in an attempt to bolster the case for global warming.

“Assuming the e-mails are genuine, they are nothing short of scandalous,” writes Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby, a prominent global-warming skeptic. And, inevitably, Climategate enthusiasts are demanding to know why the big, bad mainstream media are ignoring the e-mails.

I am not going to deal with the e-mails. As I recall a prosecutor once telling a jury, I don’t have to prove that Mr. Doe is the sort of person who’s capable of murdering his wife if I can prove that he, in fact, murdered his wife.

In the same vein, I don’t have to defend scientists who may have been mucking with the data to boost the case for global warming if I can show that the earth is actually warming. So today I present the first of 10 stories, some of which you’ve probably seen before, that are grounded not in data or computer simulations, but in the reality of global warming.

If you have any nominations, please pass them along. I’ll probably stop when I get to 10.

And if you really want to know more about Climategate, I recommend the excellent Climateprogress.org blog, written by Dr. Joe Romm. And so we begin:

On Sept. 10 of this year, the New York Times reported on a quest by two German ships to become the first to traverse the Arctic Ocean — a journey that would not have been possible were it not for the thinning of the Arctic ice cap.

“It is global warming that enables us to think about using that route,” Verena Beckhusen, a spokeswoman for the German shipping company, told the Times.

As the story makes clear, mariners have dreamed of using that passage for hundreds of years, as it would save a considerable amount of time, and, thus money. But it was only recently that the ice became thin enough to make it a reality.

Brownanomics

Assuming that state Sen. Scott Brown wins the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate on Dec. 8 (first he has to get by perennial candidate Jack E. Robinson), he’s going to have to show greater economic literacy than he has to date.

On Saturday, the New York Times quoted Mark Zandi — an economic adviser to Republican president candidate John McCain in 2008 — as saying that the $787 billion stimulus has created or saved 1.1 million jobs. If anything, Zandi added, the stimulus should have been bigger.

And Martin Feldstein, a top economic adviser to President Ronald Reagan — who, you may have heard, was also a Republican — told the Times that the main problem with the stimulus was that it relied too much on tax cuts and too little on federal spending. Feldstein said:

There should have been more direct federal spending that would have added to aggregate demand. Temporary tax cuts and one-time transfers to seniors were largely saved and didn’t stimulate spending.

Now here’s what Brown told the Boston Globe when asked if he would support a second stimulus (he would not): “It hasn’t created one job that I’m aware of.”

It gets worse: “It created government jobs certainly, and government is doing well.” Brown does not explain what government jobs were created, but perhaps he’s referring to government jobs that were saved — those of teachers, police officers and firefighters. Would he rather they be unemployed?

Right complaint, wrong picture

palin_doll_20091119A number of critics, including Sarah Palin herself, are going after Newsweek for running a cover shot of her in a sexy running outfit. Palin calls it “sexist.”

I can’t get too worked up about it. Palin, after all, posed for the shot, which was originally intended for Runner’s World. (At Beat the Press, Ralph Ranalli writes that Newsweek may have violated Runner’s World’s exclusivity deal with the freelance photographer.)

But Palin and other critics have a legitimate complaint about Newsweek’s inside photos. I haven’t picked up a Newsweek in many months, but Media Matters has the pictures — a back-to image of Palin’s shapely legs, something she most definitely did not pose for; and a photo of what Media Matters accurately describes as a “Sarah Palin-as-a-slutty-schoolgirl doll.” The latter was used to illustrate a piece by Christopher Hitchens, who is almost as overexposed as Palin herself.

The treatment is further evidence of Newsweek’s plunge into irrelevance. The New York Times this week described the magazine as repositioning itself for a smaller, more intelligent news audience.

But with garbage like this, and with recent cover headlines like “Is Your Baby Racist?”, the only thing editor Jon Meacham seems to be repositioning his magazine for is rack space next to People and Us.

Deval Patrick’s misplaced priorities

I am trying to conserve electrons this morning. So instead of engaging in lengthy bloviation, let me refer you to two excellent posts by the Outraged Liberal on Gov. Deval Patrick’s misplaced priorities.

One is on the Patrick administration’s desire to use our tax dollars to build a bridge connecting two of Patriots owner Bob Kraft’s wildly profitable enterprises while simultaneously cutting funds for the homeless. The other is on the sickening hackorama Patrick has been fostering at his transportation department.

I will only disagree with Mr. O.L. to this extent: Patrick has now been governor for nearly three years. Yet Mr. O.L. still refers to the governor’s actions as “screw-ups” and questions “whether anyone in the Corner Office is paying attention.”

No. At this late date, the only reasonable conclusion is that this is who Patrick is.

And don’t miss the original Boston Globe stories, to which Mr. O.L. helpfully links.

All politics is (still) local (III)

It’s not every day that I can claim to have inspired a nationally known media commentator through my Twitter feed. But Rachel Sklar begins her analysis of the election results by calling one of my tweets the “smartest thing I read last night on Twitter.” Rachel, your analysis is very smart (and amusing) as well. Oh, the joys of mutual back-scratching.