Collide-a-scape

Earlier this month, the Center for American Progress (CAP) moderated an interesting panel discussion on the relationship between migration and climate change. Based upon this CAP paper on the subject, issued in December, it would seem that the liberal think tank is not above overplaying the scary climate migrant card.

So, via The New Security Beat, which has posted excerpts of the recent CAP event, I see that one migration expert who participated in the panel injected some scholarly rigor into the debate. Here’s what Susan Martin, a professor of International Migration at Georgetown University, said at one point:

Environmentalists have tended to see the issue of migration as a way of getting attention to mitigation and have often talked about migration in very alarmist terms. Migration experts, on the other hand, have been very skeptical about the interconnection.

Unfortunately, the New Security Beat did not capture any response to that comment. Now I may be comparing apples & oranges here, but an observation like that from a migration expert strikes me as awfully similar to the kinds of things that a well known political scientist has been saying for some time about the dubious link between disasters and climate change.

Yet this disaster (and climate policy) expert, perhaps because he has the temerity to air his views on a blog (his credentials and published papers are not in question), is often denounced by some of the loudest climate advocates, one who happens to be a well known CAP blogger.

Since this particular blogger refuses to debate the disaster and climate policy expert one on one, perhaps they could instead participate in another CAP panel, which I would call, “Reconciling Climate Science, Politics, and Policy.” In my dream panel, they would be joined by Gavin Schmidt, Judith Curry, Todd Stern, and Andy Revkin.

Given how polarized and rancorous the climate debate has become, and given how far we are from a global agreement on reducing greenhouse gases, maybe it’s time for an institution to bring some representation of these varied and influential players together, on the same public stage, so they can hash out their disparate perspectives. Who knows, maybe in that dust up they could even find some common ground that would point to a new path forward.

So climate skeptics of all stripes have an opportunity to demonstrate just how highly they value sound science. As the NY Times reports today, religious conservatives are hitching their anti-evolution agenda to the anti-AGW bandwagon.

Now, as the readers of Climate Depot, Planet Gore, Watts Up With That, Reason’s Hit & Run, and Tom Nelson well know, the evidence for evolution is indisputable.  As the Times puts it, “there is no credible challenge” to Darwin’s theory. Yet there persists this movement among Christian conservatives to teach Intelligent Design alongside evolution in public schools. Recent court rulings have blunted those efforts, so creationists are trying a new tack by linking up with climate skeptics.

Since climate skeptics often talk about the need for sound science in the climate debate, I’m looking forward to reading in the aforementioned blogs about their distress at being co-opted by religious, anti-science ideologues.

UPDATE: Randy Olson, in a recent interview with Marc Morano, elicits this:

RO: Are you an anti-evolutionist?

MM: Haha, not at all.  In fact, you know it’s not an issue.  The implication of your question is that somehow the skeptics are aligned with creationists.  In all my years of dealing with Senator Inhofe the subject of creationism and evolution never even came up.  Someone even did an analysis of it in our scientists report, and I think they may have only found one or two creationists out of 700-some names.

Is Marc Morano a Darwinian evolutionist? If so, that would certainly put him at odds with his former employer, Senator Inhofe.

UPDATE: Kate Sheppard at the Blue Marble has a little fun with the emerging union between climate skeptics and anti-evolutionists:

Why stop at joining climate and evolution? Surely gravity and western medicine can’t be far behind in the firing line for the “teach the controversy” crowd.

Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger do a deep dive into the Romm/Pielke Jr. affair. Some trenchant observations made by the Breakthrough boys, such as this one:

Romm knows that a debate with a non-skeptical liberal like Pielke would disrupt the Manichean fairy tale that global warming is an epic struggle by scientists and climate realists against global warming deniers and ignorant reporters. That’s because publicly debating Pielke will inevitably require Romm to acknowledge that Pielke is not a global warming skeptic nor an opponent of action to address global warming.

By contrast, Romm relishes debating skeptics like Morano and relishes offering them a platform precisely because doing so reduces the climate debate to an argument between skeptics, who oppose carbon pollution limits of any kind, and advocates like Romm, who demand emissions reductions in the name of climate science.

Here’s something else they write, which I wonder if establishment greens will take note of:

In the end, Romm’s bullying does not serve efforts to effectively address global warming; it serves the political interests of the self-proclaimed progressive wing of the Democratic Party. As the chief spokesman for climate legislation in Washington and the pointman on climate for the Center for American Progress, Romm is no rogue actor. On the contrary. In framing global warming as apocalypse, polarizing the debate, attacking alternatives to cap and trade, and using character assassination against working journalists and academics, the green and liberal establishment in Washington has, in Romm, precisely the spokesperson it deserves.

It’ll be interesting to see if Romm retains that position of authority going forward. He’s been fierce about the Waxman/Markey bill and utterly scornful of alternative proposals on the table. If a new climate bill is introduced in Congress, especially one that eliminates cap and trade as the major policy mechanism, where does Romm go from there?

Unlike Democrats, Republicans are renowned for their ability to stay on message. As I suggested here, Marc Morano has cunningly exploited recent events to help craft a narrative that will have short-term staying power. So unless he’s getting cocky, this foot stomping imagery probably isn’t what he intended. Yet here he is, going in for the kill:

I seriously believe we should kick them while they’re down. They deserve to be publicly flogged.

Marc, very unsportsmanlike of you.

Yeah, why would one prominent guy who writes about climate policy want to debate another prominent guy who also writes about climate policy? Here’s Joe Romm, in a response to a reader, explaining why he has no interest in debating Roger Pielke, Jr:

The question is why waste any time on him at all? He isn’t a climate scientist and doesn’t dispute the science and asserted on this blog we must stabilize at 400 to 450 ppm CO2. So not much to debate there. And he certainly isn’t an expert on climate solutions. He simply isn’t relevant to the debate anymore.

So if he’s not relevant to the debate, then why waste a precious Sunday writing over 4,000 words about him?  How many posts have you done on Roger in the last year alone, Joe? How many tens of thousands of words have you wasted on someone who “simply isn’t relevant to the debate” anymore?

In that same response, here’s a chestnut Romm pulls out everytime he tries to de-legitimize a voice in the climate debate:

The fact that he is so widely debunked should tell you that he puts out a lot of misinformation and disinformation. As I’ve said many times, it is a waste of my time to give him a platform to spread mis- and dis-information and then have to use all my time debunking it.

Joe, it is clearly not a waste of your time, or why would you keep at it? Oh, and as for that “widely debunked” assertion, has anybody informed William Connolley of this yet, because here’s what he wrote last summer, in a post on another Rommian screed against Roger:

RP is pointing out, yet again, that evidence for increased cost of GW in disaster related losses is thin at the very best, and that people seem very happy to quote outdated reports if they support their pov. Unfortunately, this is a message that many people don’t want to hear.

I happen to think Joe Romm is an important voice in the climate debate–both for better and worse. He has the ear of media elites. I just wish he thought his opinions weren’t the only ones that mattered.

UPDATE: Foreign Policy magazine has agreed to host a debate between Roger Pielke, Jr. and Joe Romm. Here’s hoping that Romm accepts.

UPDATE 2: Hilarious comment from a reader at Roger’s blog:

My prediction is that he will say he will not dignify your ideas and your “legitimacy” by agreeing to a debate. Only he’ll say it in 2000 words.

I know that Roger Pielke, Jr.’s loudest critics view him as a stalking horse for climate skeptics and deniers, so I’m sure they will find it useful that he’s been included in this absurdly titled and absurdly packaged Field Guide to Skeptics.

Surely the authors of this Foreign Policy article are aware that climate skeptic is a loaded term, commonly used to categorize people who either doubt the science behind anthropogenic climate change, or argue that mitigation of carbon emissions is not necessary at this point in time.

Roger is not one of those people. I know because I’ve read enough of his body of work to know where he stands. Hell, even the Foreign Policy writers seem to know this, because they end their profile of him with this quote:

For his part, he thinks, “Climate change is a huge problem, and it’s a problem linked to human activity. Greenhouse gases are an important part of that, but it’s not only greenhouse gases. And we need to respond accordingly.”

So I think Roger is justifiably perplexed at being labeled a climate skeptic by a major magazine, when he wonders aloud:

Am I the only one who finds this a bit incongruous?

No.

UPDATE: An editor’s note added to the Pielke portion of the FP article tries to explain:

The aim of the list was, as the introduction states, to separate “the noise from the serious concerns” with regards to those offering critiques of either climate science or institutions charged with presenting climate science to the public or policy-makers; the article was explicitly not intended to equate the viewpoints of all people contained on the list.

If they wanted to separate “the noise from the serious concerns,” then they were doomed from the outset when they highlighted the article on the website’s roving homepage, with an illustration of a polar bear on a melting iceberg, above this header:

Deny! Deny! Deny! FP’s Guide to Climate Skeptics

UPDATE 2: Predictably, Joe Romm is happy to note the FP designation during one of his patented rants against Roger. I do hope Romm has the courage to take up Roger’s invitation to a debate. Don’t bet on it, though. Deep down Romm knows that William Connolley is right about this.

One year ago, Pepe Escobar, a keen observer of global energy politics, wrote this:

Forget the mainstream media’s obsession with al-Qaeda, Osama “dead or alive” bin Laden, the Taliban — neo, light or classic — or that “war on terror,” whatever name it goes by. These are diversions compared to the high-stakes, hardcore geopolitical game that follows what flows along the pipelines of the planet.

Specifically, Escobar was referring to what has become known as the The New Great Game, an international power struggle over oil and gas reserves in Eurasia.

But after reading Global Warring, Cleo Paskal’s excellent new book on geopolitics in the era of climate change, I’m convinced that someone should amend the Wikipedia entry so that in addition to Eurasia, Africa and the Arctic are included as geopolitical battlegrounds for control over the world’s energy resources.

I’ll have more to say about Paskal’s book in upcoming posts. Meanwhile, here’s my review of Global Warring in Nature’s Climate Feedback.

In reviewing a new book that fisks Lomborg, Sharon Begley at Newsweek goes the extra mile.

So on the one hand, we see the U.S. military accepting of climate change and coexisting peaceably with endangered species.

On the other hand, there’s Utah: a bastion of inanity, where that ol timey sagebrush mentality never dies.

I have no problem with a leading climate scientist taking issue with how the media portrays his profession. And if Gavin Schmidt would have kept his criticism of recent press coverage limited to the UK, he’d be on semi-solid ground. (He’d also be vulnerable to charges of mischaracterizing this coverage as one big “fact-free” monolith.) But Schmidt leaves reality behind when he goes after two American journalists in this manner:

Two relatively prominent and respected US commentators – Curtis Brainard at CJR and Tom Yulsman in Colorado – have both bemoaned the fact that the US media (unusually perhaps) has not followed pell-mell into the fact-free abyss of their UK counterparts.

No doubt Schmidt is being sarcastic here, for surely he doesn’t mean that two “prominent and respected US commentators” would be advocating for “fact-free” journalism. No, what Schmidt is really saying is that all this stuff about the IPCC and its chairman, and those stolen emails from a few months ago warrants little legitimate media coverage.

Michael Tobis, nodding his head, writes:

Just because there are lunatics willing to spin a sort of tale doesn’t make it,  you know, actual news.

Yulsman’s rejoinder over there is worth noting, especially this:

Just because I and many other science journalists believe this story should be covered doesn’t mean that we are advocating for shoddy journalism. All I called for was for journalists here to follow the story wherever it leads. If it leads to a conclusion that the accusations have been blown up all out of proportion, then that is the story.

But right now, all Americans are getting is Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and other bloviators of their ilk who are filling the vacuum left by the absence of responsible journalism. Are you actually saying that you would like to cede the playing field to them? Or that if the press ignores the story it will just go away. If you believe that you are more naive than I thought.