Richard Eskow - God's Stimulus? It'll Take More Than Just Money to Recover From Sandy

Hurricane Sandy was the stimulus nobody wanted. It took a terrible toll in lives, homes, and dreams. For the families who lost loved ones the tragedy will never end. And yet, in a bitter irony, this terrible storm will spur the kind of spending we should have been seeing all along. There will be jobs, at least for a while -- in construction, road work, repair, and other lines of work.

his "accidental stimulus" won't make up for the loss of life, treasure, and property. But it's a reminder that the things which nurture us as human beings - the bonds of community, a sense of social responsibility, caring for one another - are also surprisingly sound economic principles.

The economic history of our last century illustrates something important: Our nation's always prospered when we care for one another. We do best economically when we use our government as an expression of our best selves.

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/10/31-1

CATO INSTITUTE HELPFULLY MAKES ITS FAKE CLIMATE REPORT LOOK LIKE ACTUAL GOVERNMENT CLIMATE REPORT, EXCEPT FAKE

Remember a few months ago when hilariously titled fake ripoffs of bestsellers were all over Amazon’s e-book store — 35 Shades of Grey, or I am the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, that sort of thing? The playful jokesters of the Cato Institute are using their Koch Industries Megabux to top that! They will soon release a delightful “spoof” of a 2009 US Government report on climate change, except that where the real report looks at real science, the fake “Addendum” contains the reassuring news that climate change is no big deal, hooray!

The shrill Marxists at Scientific American have the story:

The addendum matches the layout and design of the original, published by the U.S. Global Change Research Program: Cover art, “key message” sections, table of contents are all virtually identical, down to the chapter heads, fonts and footnotes….

“It’s not an addendum. It’s a counterfeit,” said John Abraham, an associate professor at the University of Saint Thomas in Minnesota who studies clean power sources. “It’s a continued effort to kick the can down the road: A steady drip, drip, drip of fake reports by false scientists to create a false sense of debate.”

The 2009 report, available online, was prepared for Congress as “the most comprehensive and authoritative report of its kind” by scientists at the U.S. Global Change Research Program, and its findings are regularly updated by that group (spoiler alert: They have not decided they were wrong).

Cato claims its “Addendum” was driven by “the recognition that the original document was lacking in scope and relevant scientific detail.” For instance, the original report suggested that climate change was already having significant effects, and that we should maybe consider doing something about that, because c’mon, that can’t be right. And they’ve had a fair degree of success getting that message out, as PBS’s Frontline recently explored.

The unflattering imitations start right on the cover of the Cato version, which has the same font, color, and general design, including even a very scientific looking bar graph with global mean temperatures.

Of course, where the real report has a graph covering 108 years of data, showing a sharp rise over time, the Cato graph covers only the last 19 years, and reassuringly shows a random pattern, and not an upward trend. Stop worrying your little heads, you nervous nellies!

Climate Science Watch (the source of the illustration above, before our single improvement) details other subtle adjustments in the Cato presentation of climate science. Notably, not even the Cato Institute seems to feel it can get away with outright denial of global warming; now, it admits “Climate change is unequivocal and human activity plays some part in it,” so instead they mostly just downplay the extent and significance of climate change:

• Where the 2009 report says “Global temperature has increased over the past 50 years,” the Cato version says there were two periods of warming in the last century. One was absolutely not due to human activity, and OK, maybe the other “has characteristics that are consistent in part with a changed greenhouse effect.”
• Where the original says, “Climate changes are already affecting water, energy, transportation, agriculture, ecosystems, and health,” the Cato version insists “There is no significant long-term change in US economic output that can be attributed to climate change.”
• The government scientists say that human health will be affected by “heat stress, waterborne diseases, poor air quality, extreme weather events, and diseases transmitted by insects and rodents,” while Cato’s relentless optimists are quite certain that “There is little relationship between life expectancy, wealth and climate. Even under the most dire scenarios, people will be much wealthier and healthier than they are today in the year 2100.”
• The capitalism-hating government report thinks compliance with the Kyoto treaty might slow or reduce global warming. The Libertarians at Cato are certain that cheating by China and India means that nothing the developed world does will have any global effect, so let’s not bother.

So, sure, maybe the Cato version deliberately apes the design, layout, and overall feel of a government report, but is anyone likely to be snowed by these deliberate similarities? One climate change denial blogger is quite certain that’s impossible, because if readers “can’t read ‘Cato Institute’ clearly printed on the front and back cover, then they probably aren’t capable of reading and interpreting the original report either.” We guess that settles it!

Scientific American also notes that this isn’t the first attempt by deniers to pass off fake science by making it look like the real thing. In 1998, a petition questioning the science underlying the Kyoto treaty “copied the format and style of a peer-reviewed article” in the very real Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and in 2009 the Heartland Institute (recently notorious for those “Derp derp the Unabomber believed in global warming” murder billboards) published a fake-science report by the “Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change” (NIPCC), a denialist group which just happens to sound a hell of a lot like the UN’s real science comittee, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Considering how much wingnuts hate evolutionary theory, this is a remarkable use of the classic evolutionary strategy of adaptive mimicry.(Even creationist Ray Comfort has tried this, releasing an abridged editionof On the Origin of Species with a largely-plagiarized 50-page introduction explaining how evolution is fake.)

Rather than simply pointing out and correcting these shams, though, we think it might be more effective to just join in the fun. We look forward to advertising on conservative websites the newest release from Wonkette Books: Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, revised and extended by K. Marx and F. Engels.

http://wonkette.com/487796/cato-institute-helpfully-makes-its-fake-climate-report-look-like-actual-government-climate-report-except-fake

Koch Brothers Produce Counterfeit Climate Report to Deceive Congress

Similarly deceptive is an upcoming junk study from a Koch-funded think tank that has taken on the format and appearance of a truly scientific report from the US Government, but is loaded with lies and misrepresentation of actual climate change science. Thefalse report is a tentacle of the Kochtopus - with oil and industrial billionaires Charles and David Koch at the head.

The report’s disgraced author, Patrick Michaels, has made his largely undistinguished career shilling for fossil fuel interestes, including his stay at the Cato Institute, which published the counterfeit report. After admitting to CNN that  40% of his funding is from the oil industry alone, even Cato was embarrassed enough to clarify that "Pat works for Cato on a contract basis, not as a full-time employee. Fund that Pay received for work done outside the Cato Institute does not come through our organization."

Koch Industries Chairman and CEO Charles Koch co-founded the Cato Institute in 1977, and David Koch sits on Cato’s board of directors. Both brothers are Cato shareholders.

The Kochs’ combined $62 billion in wealth comes from Koch Industries operations in oil refining, pipelines, tar sands exploration, chemical production, deforestation and fossil fuel commodity trading, all of which contribute to global climate change and the types of extreme weather Americans are now starting to recognize as symptoms of global warming.

Wary of how public concern over climate change could drop demand for fossil fuel products, the Kochs have spent the last 15 years dumpingover $61 million to front groups

telling us that global warming doesn’t exist, or that it would destroy our economy to stop runaway climate change. Other billionaire families like the Scaifes and companies like ExxonMobil have funneled tens of millions more to the same groups to bury climate science in public relations schemes designed to delay solutions to global warming. While Cato got over $5.5 million from the Kochs since 1997, it received over $1 million from the Scaifes, $125,000 from ExxonMobiland tens of millions more from other fossil fuel interests and ideologues in the top 1%.

In a highly public battle earlier this year between the Koch brothers and libertarians at the Cato Institute, some Cato employees didn’t want their work to become what David Koch calls “intellectual ammunition” for other Koch fronts like Americans for Prosperity. Cato’s deceptive climate report is exactly the type of fake science that AFP needs in order to continue lying to the American public about the reality of global warming.

Cato’s counterfeit report is classic global warming denial that is clearly designed to be confused for actual science. Its author, its publisher and its billionaire supporters have all been key to the coordinated public relations effort that has blocked climate policy in this country by making climate science a partisan issue in this country and rallying the American public behind the very lies they themselves fabricated. The junk report has already beencirculated

by other climate science deniers and even cited in a Congressional presentation.

With climate change already contributing to 400,000 deaths each year and costing $1.2 trillion to economies worldwide, such dubious doubt-peddling should be considered criminal. If you are an elected official or a journalist and spot the Cato Institute’s bogus new report, call it for what it is: malarkey!

http://www.nationofchange.org/koch-brothers-produce-counterfeit-climate-report-deceive-congress-1350999952

Tom Philpott - Some GMO Cheerleaders Also Deny Climate Change

"GMO Opponents Are the Climate Skeptics of the Left," declares the headline of a recent piece by Keith Kloor in Slate. The argument goes like this: Just as certain conservative writers flout science by denying the urgency of climate change, there are progressive writers—he named me as a prominent example—who defy an alleged scientific consensus by criticizing the genetically modified crop industry. We're hypocrites, the charge goes, because we thunder against the denial of good science when it comes to climate, but indulge in denialism when it comes to GMOs.

I think Kloor's critique is nonsense. Sure, there are wackos who campaign against GMOs, but not all GMO critique is wacko. In a 2009 roundtable in Seed Magazine, I debunked the idea that there's a scientific consensus around GMOs analogous to the one around climate. 

Read More:

http://www.motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2012/10/gmo-climate-change-science

Government adviser in fight to 'save Earth' against devastating solar storms expected to knock out National Grid in 2013

A space professor from Oxfordshire is battling ‘to save Earth’ from a solar storm that experts fear will wreak worldwide chaos next year.

Professor Mike Hapgood, who chairs the Space Environment Impacts Experts Group (SEIEG) and advises the Government on space weather, says solar storms, generated by an outburst from the sun, are set to knock out national power grids and Global Positioning Systems.

He believes magnetic rays from the storm will result in widespread blackouts which will plunge homes and businesses into darkness.

It could also lead to potentially deadly knock-on effects, for instance if hydro-electric dams holding back millions of gallons of water are knocked offline.

Early next year, the sun will reach the peak of its 11-year activity cycle, which puts the planet at greater risk of such storms.

And experts say with the planet now relying on the Internet and hi-tech gadgetry, the chaos caused by the 2013 solar storm will have a far greater impact than any in the past.

Prof Hapgood, who studied at Oxford, warned: ‘A big magnetic storm can permeate the Earth’s crust, which can drive electric currents through aluminium or copper wires in the National grid, which could cause a national blackout.

‘Interactions with Earth’s atmosphere can also affect any radio signals. If you had a big storm, GPS might be unavailable for a couple of days.

‘On July 21 this year there was a very large event on the far side of the sun, if it had intercepted Earth we would have had a very large magnetic storm.’

All manner of transport relies on GPS including aircraft and if the systems suddenly collapse, there could be lethal consequences.

He said ‘My main interest is to study the likely extremes in these scenarios. These are enormous events that could have a very significant effect on GDP.

‘The National Grid now relies on warnings from space craft carrying equipment built at Rutherford and they are developing plans on how to evolve.’

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2191936/Government-adviser-fight-save-Earth-devastating-solar-storms-expected-knock-National-Grid-2013.html#ixzz24TF5zQdz

Survey: Latin American and Asian cities lead way in planning for global warming

Quito, Ecuador, is not considered a global leader by most measures. But there is one way in which Quito is at the forefront of metropolises worldwide: in planning for climate change. For more than a decade, officials in Ecuador's mountainous capital have been studying the effects of global warming on nearby melting glaciers, developing ways of dealing with potential water shortages and even organizing conferences on climate change for leaders of other Latin American cities.

In so doing, Quito officials represent a global trend: The cities that are most active in preparing for climate change are not necessarily the biggest or wealthiest. Instead, they are often places buffeted by natural disasters and increasing changes in temperature or rainfall. In places where the climate seems to be a growing threat to human lives, resources and urban infrastructure, local officials have been working with scientists, conducting assessments and examining which new measures may best prepare them for the future.

Indeed, as an MIT survey released today shows, 95 percent of major cities in Latin America are planning for climate change, compared to only 59 percent of such cities in the United States.

Read More:

http://phys.org/news/2012-06-survey-latin-american-asian-cities.html

Stephen Leahy - 24 Policies to End the Earth Emergency

Ecologically ignorant policies are largely responsible for the interlinked crises that are unraveling the planet's life support system.

World Future Council will present an emergency policy agenda consisting of 24 tipping-point policies that need to be implemented globally to preserve a habitable planet. The unintended consequences of such policies are climate change, desertification, biodiversity decline, ocean pollution and the destruction of forests, according to the policy advocacy organisation World Future Council.

The solution is to eliminate "bad" policies and implement policies that ensure a healthy planet for future generations. On World Environment Day, Jun. 5, the World Future Council will present an emergency policy agenda consisting of 24 tipping-point policies that need to be implemented globally to preserve a habitable planet.

"We are in an Earth Emergency. It's an unbelievable crisis. Policies are the most important tool we have to change this," Jakob von Uexkull, founder and chair of the World Future Council (WFC)."We are in an Earth Emergency. It's an unbelievable crisis. Policies are the most important tool we have to change this." --Jakob von Uexkull, founder and chair of the World Future Council (WFC).

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/06/05?print

Nuclear and coal-fired electrical plants vulnerable to climate change

Warmer water and reduced river flows in the United States and Europe in recent years have led to reduced production, or temporary shutdown, of several thermoelectric power plants. For instance, the Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant in Alabama had to shut down more than once last summer because the Tennessee River's water was too warm to use it for cooling.

A study by European and University of Washington scientists published today in Nature Climate Change projects that in the next 50 years warmer water and lower flows will lead to more such power disruptions. The authors predict that thermoelectric power generating capacity from 2031 to 2060 will decrease by between 4 and 16 percent in the U.S. and 6 to 19 percent in Europe due to lack of cooling water. The likelihood of extreme drops in power generation—complete or almost-total shutdowns—is projected to almost triple.

"This study suggests that our reliance on thermal cooling is something that we're going to have to revisit," said co-author Dennis Lettenmaier, a UW professor of civil and environmental engineering.

Thermoelectric plants, which use nuclear or fossil fuels to heat water into steam that turns a turbine, supply more than 90 percent of U.S. electricity and account for 40 percent of the nation's freshwater usage. In Europe, these plants supply three-quarters of the electricity and account for about half of the freshwater use.

While much of this water is "recycled," the power plants rely on consistent volumes of water, at a particular temperature, to prevent the turbines from overheating.

Reduced water availability and warmer water, caused by increasing air temperatures associated with climate change, mean higher electricity costs and less reliability.

While plants with cooling towers will be affected, results show older plants that rely on "once-through cooling" are the most vulnerable. These plants pump water directly from rivers or lakes to cool the turbines before returning the water to its source, and require high flow volumes.

Read More:

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-06/uow-nac053112.php

Joe Romm - Global CO2 Emissions Hit New Record in 2011, Keeping World on Track for 'Devastating' 11°F Warming

First the bad news from the International Energy Agency (IEA). Thanks to a huge jump in Chinese emissions, “global carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil-fuel combustion reached a record high of 31.6 gigatonnes (Gt) in 2011.”

The worse news is that, “The new data provide further evidence that the door to a 2°C trajectory is about to close,” according to IEA Chief Economist Fatih Birol. Why does that matter? As Reuters reported:

Scientists say ensuring global average temperatures this century do not rise more than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels is needed to limit devastating climate effects like crop failure and melting glaciers.

Darn you truth-telling scientists, always ruining the party (see “James Hansen Is Correct About Catastrophic Projections For U.S. Drought If We Don’t Act Now“).

And the worst news, as Birol told Reuters, is that:

“When I look at this data, the trend is perfectly in line with a temperature increase of 6 degrees Celsius [11°F], which would have devastating consequences for the planet.”

Read More:

http://www.alternet.org/story/155641/global_co2_emissions_hit_new_record_in_2011%2C_keeping_world_on_track_for_%27devastating%27_11%C2%B0f_warming

Report: 'Leading' Companies Mislead Public on Climate Change Policies

Today, the Union of Concerned Scientists released an analysis of 28 'leading' US companies who publicly express concern about climate change but, behind closed doors, support thinktanks and other groups that misrepresent climate science, exposing major differences between what they say and what they actually do regarding climate change.

Looking at 28 Standard & Poor 500 publicly traded companies, the report examines the companies' public commitments to sustainable and green values, in contrast to those same companies' recent lobbying and funding choices, which in most cases favored organizations devoted to discrediting climate science such as the Heartland Institute.

“Corporations' increased ability to influence policy should come with an increased responsibility to let the public know how they are doing so,” said Francesca Grifo, director of UCS's Scientific Integrity Program and a contributor to the report. “Companies may play a role in policy discussions, but right now, it’s simply far too easy for them to get away with misrepresenting science to achieve their goals.”

“The actions of many of these companies come right from the tobacco industry playbook, where the end goal is delaying sensible regulations that protect our health and safety,” said Grifo. “Companies generally find that complying with new rules is not as burdensome as they first imagined. But that doesn’t prevent them from obfuscating the science to create confusion and delay.”

Read More:

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2012/05/30-7