CNN tonight (Dec 7)-"Is Global Warming Real?"

[HarpoSpoke]

Tonight at 8:00pm est on CNN, they are airing "Is Global Warming Real?" according to their website. A show hosted by Campbell Brown. Never seen it but I'll be sure to see how "balanced" this one is. (Anyone want to take bets?)

[Sunsettommy]

It will be part of the media propaganda effort in support of the cop out hagen climate orgasm festival that is well supported by free hookers.

[HarpoSpoke]

Just watched a few minutes of "The Situation Room" with Wolf Blitzer and they were pretty fair about it. Both sides got a good representation...and the skeptical side got to speak last. (Unusual)

Fox was talking about it at the same time while talking about Barbara Boxer and the people who are planning to run against her.

I was impressed with the coverage.

[HarpoSpoke]

Well, it could have been worse. Much more fair than I would have expected.

Steve Mcintyre and Chris Horner were there for the skeptics and Michael Oppenheimer was there for the believers. Michael Mann also was on in the beginning to defend himself but left before the others appeared. Phil Jones wasn't on (they said they couldn't find him) and it was hinted that he has been "ill" due to this scandal. I got the feeling we were supposed to have sympathy for him. Rajendra Pachauri was given time in a taped interview to explain why Climategate means nothing and how impossible it is for this scandal to be true.

Michael Oppenheimer was allowed to get away with saying that CO2 remains in the atmosphere for 1000 years or more. But he was throwing so much misinformation out there that Steve was hard pressed to address it all. Mcintyre speaks slowly and time is the thing on TV. That limited the points he was allowed to make. Chris Horner speaks better but didn't make any specific points on the science.

Toward the end it seemed the bias was creeping in. (Naturally you wait for the end to do that) The host asked what the possible motivation could be for this deception and then refused to accept it when told by Horner. ("Scientists are human...they are also motivated by greed and politics") She just acted like he never answered and maintained the same attitude of "I can't believe this could actually happen".

Then some reporter in Copenhagen claimed that the scandal was a big deal in the morning but had faded away by the evening. She predicted with confidence that it would be a non-factor from this point on. Doesn't sound like "reporting" to me...that was a bunch of opinions.

At the end they mentioned they are going to cover this more (today maybe?) and that Michael Mann would be a guest. They didn't say anything about the counter opinion being represented. So I guess that's it for the skeptics.

Not too bad, just a slight bias. But I get the feeling that was just the opening shot. I wonder if this was actually seen by anyone given CNN's horrible ratings.

[Sunsettommy]

Quote:Michael Oppenheimer was allowed to get away with saying that CO2 remains in the atmosphere for 1000 years or more.

That is far longer than the IPCC's own numbers between 50-200 years.

It seems that Mike is telling a tall tale.

While decades of published papers for the most part place it between 5-15 years.

[HarpoSpoke]

(12-08-2009 05:16 PM)Sunsettommy Wrote:  

Quote:Michael Oppenheimer was allowed to get away with saying that CO2 remains in the atmosphere for 1000 years or more.

That is far longer than the IPCC's own numbers between 50-200 years.

It seems that Mike is telling a tall tale.

While decades of published papers for the most part place it between 5-15 years.

I've noticed they (AGW proponents in general) keep pushing that number higher and higher (for effect I guess?). That alone should discredit them.

Last night's installment was again...not bad. Even more balanced than Monday actually. (The opposite of what I expected) They even had their staff meteorologist on and he was much more fair than I expected. (Openly admitting that there are huge gaps in knowledge of the climate)

I missed a little of a debate between two politicians arguing but I have almost zero interest in what they have to say anyway.

The interesting part was the two scientists. Bill Nye (the science guy) and Patrick Michaels. Both were very civil (respect to Bill Nye, he came off as nice even though I disagree with him) and made their points. I honestly think Michaels was more impressive despite my personal bias. He is well spoken, calm, and brought up several problems with altered data that do not get talked about in the media. Nye didn't have a counter point on those issues so it was a "win" for Michaels. Both agreed that the end result of this scandal is a positive (more transparency and better science).

Found a transcript:

Quote:Joining me right now is educator Bill Nye, "The Science Guy," and also Patrick Jay Michaels, who is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian research institute. And his book, "Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don't Want You to Know," he has a very different take on this from Bill.

So let's get into this with you first, Patrick, because you were singled out in some of these e-mails and the scientists in question, not at all fans of your work. One wrote, quote, "Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I'll be tempted to beat the crap out of him." Why are they targeting you?

PATRICK J. MICHAELS, CATO INSTITUTE: Maybe they need some anger management treatment, I don't know. They did not like the fact that I had written an op-ed in October that was called "The Dog Ate Global Warming," which had to do with the fact that East Anglia had said that they lost the original data on global warming in the mid-1980s. I took exception with that because we used to have these things called nine-inch tape drives.

You know, I want to tell you something. We hear a lot of noise, a lot of heat about this thing. There's going to be some good news come out of this, and I bet you Bill is going to agree with me that scientific data is going to become much more open on climate change. The journal editors are going to do everything they can to act to show that they're not being intimidated, so we're going to see more diversity. This is going to turn out to be a very good thing if we just wait for the storm to, you know, to settle itself.

BROWN: And, Bill, to that point, I mean, these e-mails did make it seem like scientists aren't willing to have an open debate on this. Do you believe that there is room for debate?

NYE: Room for debate about what?

BROWN: About the specifics of global warming.

NYE: Well, sure. You talk about the specifics. But this -- I complete agree. You're right, Dr. Michaels, way to go.

MICHAELS: Thank you.

NYE: It will -- it will make --

MICHAELS: It's going to be a good thing.

NYE: It will make -- ultimately, yes. But in the meantime, like, for example, Ms. Brown, you guys are running the scroll across the bottom of the screen that goes, I've been watching it, it goes about evenly people who support the idea what we're doing in Copenhagen is very important and people are opposed to it for political reasons. And what makes it look like the debate is even, like there's as many people on one side as the other. But in the scientific community, we strongly emphasize that that's not the case at all and this is why, I think is why, you find people who want to sock Patrick Michaels in the chops, as he's very well credentialed and he's on the other side of this thing. So, OK, all this aside.

BROWN: But hold -- let me stop you there, though, Bill, because you're right. I mean, here's the problem you have. The scientific community is not evenly divided on this. There are a few people who disagree with the vast majority of the scientific community. But the fact is --

NYE: Nobel Prize.

BROWN: The fact is, though, and you can't deny this, is that these e-mails, the way they were written, it was very troubling to a lot of people and that was damaging to the credibility of that majority of scientists who may have been doing work properly and following all the right regulations. And so what's happened is you see this division among the general public. And that is that little crawl (ph) you see under your screen.

And that's a problem. That's a problem for scientists who believe global warming is a problem. You've got to get people on board.

NYE: Well, sure. Yes, I think the analogy that Congressman Inslee brought up earlier in the show about smoking is -- it's a very common analogy, but it's pretty good, where people deny it for a long time and after a while people get worn out. And as Dr. Michaels pointed out, after a while, after these data are public, it will blow over and this thing will become common knowledge. But, in the meantime, I'll just remind you, that the few phrases that are in there show you the power of the Internet and that, ultimately, these things will, I think, sort themselves out.

MICHAELS: Let me tell you the way they're sorting out.

NYE: There's a lot of e-mails. There's a lot of -- say again?

MICHAEL: Let me tell you the way they're sorting out. Something very interesting has happened in the last two days.

We hear that the East Anglia e-mails were not important because there are other climate records. Well, now, it's been found out that the National Climatic Data Center, a global historical climate network, has data in Australia that has a six-degree per century trend in it that was put in the data when the real data don't have the trend. And we're seeing in Alaska, in central Alaska, where every climate scientist knows there was a jump in temperature in the mid- 1970s, and they haven't done much after that. We e see another trend superimposed upon the data there. So the result of "climate-gate," people are looking very carefully.

NYE: This is specific stuff.

MICHAELS: They're looking very carefully at the data. It's going to be good, Bill, just hang on. We'll get better science.

NYE: These are very specific things, especially when you talk about surface temperatures in one part of the world, especially a part of the world where we have very good sensors.

MICHAELS: That's true. Bill, I agree with you. And let me just tell you something about stratospheric temperatures. As you know, greenhouse theory predicts stratospheric temperatures will decline. Well, oddly enough, if you look at the satellite-base stratospheric temperatures for the last 10 or 12 years, they don't show a decline. Something very, very funny is going on in the atmosphere.

I'm not going to tell you that I know and anybody who tells you that they know, I'm going to be rather skeptical of it at this point in time, because that stratosphere is a global behavior, that's not a local behavior, and it's not doing the right thing.

NYE: Well, everybody presupposes that it's a global behavior.

MICHAELS: The satellites measure the temperature globally. They go round and round the planet.

BROWN: All right.

NYE: OK, all right.

MICHAELS: You're the science guy.

NYE: Well, I was of the opinion -- well, I was of the opinion that hurricanes would get stronger.

BROWN: Let me --

NYE: Well, somehow, there's something going on where they're getting decapitated.

MICHAELS: Well --

NYE: So if you have a theory that disagrees with what goes on in nature, the problem is almost certainly with the theory, not with nature. So I am open-minded there with you on that.

MICHAELS: Hurricanes are real complicated beasts.

NYE: But the claim --

BROWN: All right.

NYE: The claim -- yes, exactly. The claim that the scientists in Copenhagen have a conspiracy to defeat conservative elements, especially in the United States, is not a very reasonable theory to me.

MICHAELS: No, no, but they did certainly try and pressure journal editors to keep (INAUDIBLE) out of the journals.

NYE: Well, let me ask you about this one.

BROWN: All right, guys, we --

NYE: Oh, we got to go?

BROWN: Well, I would love it if I could get a little common ground between the two of you to end on.

MICHAELS: We had it. We said it's going to be good in the end. Trust us, Campbell.

NYE: Ultimately, it's going to be good.

MICHAELS: We agree. It's going to be great.

NYE: On that one thing, do you agree that we'd be better off if we were less inefficient in our energy production?

MICHAELS: Of course.

NYE: The future belongs, do you agree, that we could save --

BROWN: And on that note --

NYE: Do you agree that we could save about 30 percent? OK?

MICHAELS: I believe Campbell says I've got to say goodbye, Bill. Have a good night.

Also props to CNN for actually covering the furor over the leaked "Danish leak". I think every other network is ignoring it/doesn't even know about it. They had the same reporter there as Monday and she didn't soft-pedal its impact. I was impressed.

[Sunsettommy]

From that shorty transcript,I was surprised at Bill Nye's restraint because he is a known wild eyed alarmist.

Hopefully he is being sobered up by the climate gate expose,and get more rational in the future.

[HarpoSpoke]

(12-09-2009 06:56 AM)Sunsettommy Wrote:  From that shorty transcript,I was surprised at Bill Nye's restraint because he is a known wild eyed alarmist.

Hopefully he is being sobered up by the climate gate expose,and get more rational in the future.

He did appear to be headed in that direction in the beginning the "NYE: Room for debate about what?" was said with a fairly aggressive tone. He then started in on the "consensus" talking point followed by the comparison to "tobacco deniers".

But then Michaels hit him with some sobering facts and he seemed to change quickly. He even pointed out some problems himself after that. (hurricanes aren't getting stronger)

I'll see what tonight brings. I could have sworn they said Mann was going to get another appearance.

[HarpoSpoke]

Last night's installment contained some comedy (Al Gore) and zero skeptics.

Not sure, but CNN appeared to have "moved on" from talking about the scientific debate and have retreated back to "the science is settled".

First Al "the profit" Gore was on in a taped interview. A nice safe setting with nary a skeptic in sight to challenge him on facts. In other words, the normal Al Gore interview. (May not be CNN's fault, you can imagine that Gore stipulated just that situation as a condition for the interview.)

You already know what he said. "The emails mean nothing". The best part was him again asserting that the emails were "10 years old". One of the interviewers did point out that mistake...barely...and quickly moved on. Al was in safe hands.

I need to make a list of Al'isms.

• Polar bears are dying
• Sea level will rise 20 feet
• I invented the internet
• The temperature 2 km down is millions of degrees
• The emails are 10 years old
  

Did I miss any?

After that CNN may have considered the matter of science closed (Al has spoken) and decided it was time to talk about "what should be done". That means no need to invite a skeptic on. So the guests were Alan Robock and Bjorn Lomborg. It went as follows:

Quote:Well, this week, as part of our special series "Global Warming: Trick or Truth," we have brought you those who believe and those who doubt the threat. Well, now we're moving the discussion forward. Both my guests agree that global warming is real. But the question now is what do we do about it?

And here to walk us through some of the ideas, some of the potential solutions are Bjorn Lomborg, who is the author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist." He is in Copenhagen for us tonight. And here in New York, Alan Robock, who's director of meteorology at Rutgers University with us as well.

First, the solution everybody is talking about, Bjorn, at the Copenhagen conference is cutting carbon emissions. You're not a climate scientist, you're a political scientist, and you think that's the wrong focus. Explain to people why.

BJORN LOMBORG, "THE SKEPTICAL ENVIRONMENTALIST": Well, basically, everybody here are going to promise grand cuts in carbon emissions but we're not actually going to follow through on them. And how do we know? Because we've tried this strategy for 18 years. We tried in 1992 in Rio. We promised to cut carbon emissions, and we did no such thing.

Then we got together in Kyoto in 1997 and promised even grander carbon cuts. And we didn't do them either. So the point here is not that we shouldn't cut carbon emissions, but it's how we should do it. It's really putting the cart in front of the horse when you're just trying to say we should have these limits but don't actually have the technology.

What we do need is the technology. That's about investing and research and development to get much better green technologies so everyone will buy them, including the Chinese and the Indians.

BROWN: All right. Let me get Alan's take on that. Alan, as a climate scientist, cutting emissions is, you know, on the agenda. It's sort of item number one. What's your response to what Bjorn just said?

ALAN ROBOCK, RUTGERS UNIVERSITY: Well, I don't think the past behavior is necessarily what's going to happen in the future. I agree with him that we need to develop the technology, green technology, that will produce jobs and that will help us cut emissions.

BROWN: But you're just saying everyone is finally sort of woken up and after 18 years of doing things one way we're going to change?

ROBOCK: Well, we need pressure from the government to do it. For the last eight years, the fossil fuel industry has been very strong in the United States and the United States has done nothing to reduce greenhouse gas missions.

Everything has changed now with Obama as president. And John Holder as his science adviser, they've committed to reducing emissions from the U.S. But we need -- carbon is too cheap, so we need some sort of push from the government, a carbon tax or a cap and trade system that makes it economically viable to reduce emissions.

BROWN: So -- so that the incentives are there.

ROBOCK: Another potential solution here that's getting a lot of tension, geoengineering. Bjorn, explain for us what that is, why you advocate that as a short-term solution.

LOMBORG: Well, basically, geoengineering is about changing the earth's climate and making it cooler. One of the things we asked some of the world's top economists to look at some of the best solutions in the world from cap and trade to carbon capture to green energy research and to geoengineering. What they found was if you invest in things like marine cloud whitening, essentially making clouds a little whiter by putting up salt in the atmosphere, which is an entirely natural process but amplifying it, you make the clouds a little whiter. They reflect sunlight off the earth, and it becomes a little cooler. And actually for just $9 billion, the estimates show that you can actually avoid all of global warming for the 21st century. Now that's about a thousand to 10,000 times cheaper than anything else we're talking about.

Now, let me just point out. We still need to do research to make sure that this is safe.

BROWN: Right.

LOMBORG: But it's certainly something that we should be looking into.

BROWN: Alan, I know this is a specialty of yours and you think there are a lot of downsides to this.

ROBOCK: First of all, there is no technology to make clouds brighter or to put a cloud of particles in the stratosphere to block out the sun. The technology just doesn't exist, so we need to do research to see even if it's possible.

Also, we've done climate model stimulation to see what would be the effects of emulating a volcano or blocking out sunlight for a while. We can learn from the 1991 Pinatubo eruption that indeed a volcanic eruption can cool the climate. But it also produced drought. It destroyed ozone, and it reduced solar power. Our climate models show that if we did permanent geoengineering, there might be a huge threat to the food supply for people in India and China because we will reduce the strength of the summer monsoon. BROWN: All right. So clearly not an immediate solution if anything. And I want to move on to another point, Bjorn, so we don't run out of time. You say that if you could run the Copenhagen conference, you'd have everyone pledge not to cut emissions but to spend money on green technology, but that's going to give us a lot more bang for our buck. Explain.

LOMBORG: Yes, that's exactly what the climate economists including three Nobel laureates judged. When they looked at all the different options, they basically pointed out if we try to cut carbon emissions dramatically, for every dollar we spend, we probably avoid about two cents of climate damage. Whereas for every dollar we spend on investing in research and development in green energy technology, we do 500 times better or avoid about $11 of climate damage.

So clearly, if we want to do good for climate, let's spend our money where we'll end up doing a lot of good essentially by making sure that the Chinese and the Indians can afford green energy very, very soon.

BROWN: Alan, what do you think?

ROBOCK: I certainly agree that we have to invest in green technologies, but that is reducing emissions. I don't understand why he thinks that these two things are different. We have to use energy more efficiently and put less CO2 in the atmosphere, and that's the solution. They aren't different. They're the same thing.

BROWN: Bjorn?

LOMBORG: Well, fundamentally, asking to cut carbon emissions mainly mean you use the technologies that are already on the shelf. We've looked at the countries that abided to the Kyoto protocol and actually it turns out they did not increase their research and development and actually went down slightly. Why? Because you go for technology that's on the shelf. You don't try to get technological breakthroughs for 10, 20 or 30 years ahead. So we do need to focus much more on the long term solution that's not just going to make well-meaning Westerners cut a little bit but make everybody cut a lot.

BROWN: In the interest of ending on common ground --

ROBOCK: I agree we need new technology. We can't use current technology, but government incentives will make us produce technology much faster and it is possible to do quite easily if that's the focus of our policy.

BROWN: Well, let me thank you both. We got to end it there. But Alan Robock here with me in New York and Bjorn Lomborg, who is in Copenhagen tonight. A great conversation. Appreciate it, guys. Thank you.

I noticed a few things. First Robock was allowed to blame the world's failure to reduce CO2 emissions on Bush. Too bad that soundbite TV didn't allow Lomborg to press that point. He rightly pointed out that two "agreements" have thus-far had zero effect on emissions. That's not "Bush's fault". That statement by Robock demonstrates clearly how political this is. The game of "gotcha" continues even with "the fate of the planet at stake". We continue to see alternatives to CO2 controls brushed aside even in the face of knowing how little benefit those controls will be. Robock even seems able to pinpoint any conceivable downside to non-CO2 control measures....but is apparently blind to the downsides of things like Cap and Trade, forced switches to inefficient energy sources, and carbon taxes. He is so blind to it that he wondered how Lomborg's proposals were any different despite the fact that Lomborg had clearly stated the difference 2 seconds earlier. (Um Alan, Bjorn's proposal is 500 times more beneficial....did you not hear that?)

Lomborg continues to be the most logical AGW believer you'll ever see. Although...his proposed solution to the fact that we don't have the technology to reduce CO2 emissions was one for which no technology exists either. But he, unlike most on that side of the argument, keeps his head about him regarding cost vs benefit. If it makes no sense, he notices and says so. His cloud proposal is at least a more efficient. It also says something about the AGW "solutions" when something as crazy-sounding as "cloud whitening" still sounds more sane than what they want to do.

I could have sworn Robock carefully avoided saying "carbon taxes" but it is in the transcript. I think that may be a mistake. I thought he even hesitated as he was about to say it. You can see how important it is to him to raise energy prices despite the devastating effect that would have on the world (poor people mostly...the ones the left claims to care most about).

[HarpoSpoke]

I think they may be done with the "series". Last night was about some guy that won a Nobel Peace Prize. (He made a pretty good speech at least)

Ah well...CNN's ratings can back to where they were minus one viewer.

It's too bad their ratings are so poor, some of the stuff this week was ok. (How often does Steve Mcintyre get on TV?)

[Sunsettommy]

McIntire is not on TV much..... until recently:

McIntyre to be on CNN’s American Morning Friday

LINK

[HarpoSpoke]

Well I'll have to try to find that video.