Meteor Blades and I are pleased to announce a very special blogathon of Climate Change Reality this weekend that will focus on making the case to the public that global warming is real and climate science is valid. An excellent group of Daily Kos environmental diarists will be participating. And, we are fortunate to have an outstanding selection of lawmakers, environmental advocates and climate scientists joining this blogathon, some will be blogging from Copenhagen. Some have posted before at DK, some have not. We hope you will enjoy this very special forum.
The organization for the blogathon started before "climategate" because we believed that some response should be made to the continuing misinformation, lies and deception used by ideologically shaped skeptics who deny that anthropogenic climate change is occurring, often because they are paid to do so to decrease public support for climate change legislation and treaty. If deniers can convince the public that climate science is bogus, then there is no need for legal reforms. During the past 18 months alone, deniers have sufficiently confused the public resulting in decreased support for the belief in global warming, as shown by two recent polls in October and November. Perhaps it was just a coincidence, but perhaps the first poll results emboldened the failed boycott of Senator Boxer's climate legislation markup meetings. Senator Rockefeller mentioned how the prospect of the midterms was scary due to potential GOP attacks on climate legislation, and now, climate change legislation is delayed until next year, which also delays a global treaty. Whether events are related or not, public debate should be on what effective measures can address the grave impacts of climate change happening now that will worsen in the future, not backtracking to the existence of climate change which has been recognized since the 1800s.
Immediately after a UK poll showed decreased belief in global warming, the government organized a billboard campaign to set the record straight. There has been silence from the U.S. government. However, the issues of intentional deception by global warming deniers to confuse and mislead the public about the existence of global warming and liability for damages are now before the courts in the 5th and 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
"Climategate" shows the insanity of the deniers. The GOP climate deniers actually think that their "climategate" lies are a smoking gun that will derail climate change legislation in the U.S. and a global treaty in Copenhagen by decreasing public support in the belief in global warming. The deniers believe that their lies, disinformation and fallacious claims will cause public opinion polls to "drop through the floor" by early next year. It is reported that climate change legislation is the GOP candidate litmus test for 2010 with "virtually no major Republican Senate candidates running for office in 2010 that are in favor of the cap-and-trade climate bill." Anti-cap-and-trade campaigns are no surprise for "solidly conservative states," but the " current crop of GOP candidates is primarily running in states that voted for President Obama last year and those states are seen as being somewhere between swing and solidly Democratic."
Today, it is reported that two of the scientists whose emails were hacked have received death threats that the FBI is investigating.
The weekend of December 12th and 13th was selected because Saturday is the global day of action for international demonstrations on climate change. Bill McKibben of 350.org is also organizing candlelight vigils around the world for that weekend. Historically, the Saturday in the middle of UN climate negotiations has been an important time of mobilization for cities around the world.
Special guest bloggers this weekend include Senators John Kerry and Jeff Merkley. National/International environmental groups have been key NGO participants and advocates of climate change reform. Our blogathon will include Daniel Kessler of Greenpeace, Carl Pope of Sierra Club, Pete Altman of NRDC and Keith Schneider from CAN (U.S. Climate Action Network). Climate scientists have worked hard for years to inform and educate the public about global warming and grave climate change impacts. We are very fortunate that our blogathon will include the best scientists, such as Prof. Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, the IPCC Vice-chair and Michael MacCracken, chief scientist for climate programs at the Climate Institute in Washington, D.C.
Dr. Jean-Pascal van Ypersele is Vice-chair of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. His distinguished career includes scientific advisor in a number of United Nations conferences on climate issues:
He has specialized in climate change modelling and the study of the impact of human activities on climate. He has authored papers on the modelling of sea ice, of paleoclimates, of the climate of the 20th and 21st century, and of regional climate in Europe, Greenland, and Africa. His more recent work is related to integrated assessment modelling of climate stabilisation, and is done with economists in an interdisciplinary perspective. He has also published on the relations between climate and desertification, and the impacts of climate change on human activities and ecosystems. In 2008, he published a report on the mainstreaming of climate change adaptation and mitigation policies in the Belgian development cooperation... . He is the author of numerous scientific articles and popular works regarding climate change and sustainable development. He was a Lead Author for the WGII contribution to the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC and was elected in 2002 Vice-Chair of its Working Group II. For the IPCC Fourth assessment, in addition to his responsibilities as member of the IPCC Bureau, he was also active in the Steering Group of the Task Group on New Emission Scenarios. He has participated to dozens of outreach events related to the IPCC work, in Belgium and abroad (including, e.g., Brazil,
Canada, France, Italy, Peru, Poland, Russia, Spain, The Netherlands, and United States), and is regularly interviewed by the media (Belgian and international) on climate, environment,
and sustainable development issues.
Dr. Michael MacCracken has been Chief Scientist for Climate Change Programs with the Climate Institute in Washington DC since 2002. Here is some of his very impressive and distinguished biography:
Dr. MacCracken received his B.S. in Engineering degree from Princeton University in 1964 and his Ph.D. degree in Applied Science from the University of California Davis/Livermore in 1968. His dissertation used a 2-D climate model to evaluate the plausibility of several hypotheses of the causes of ice ages. Following his graduate work, he joined the Physics Department of the University of California's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) as an atmospheric physicist. His research in the ensuing 25 years included numerical modeling of various causes of climate change (including study of the potential climatic effects of greenhouse gases, volcanic aerosols, land-cover change, and nuclear war) and of factors affecting air quality (including photochemical pollution in the San Francisco Bay Area and sulfate air pollution in the northeastern United States)... .
From 1993-2002, Dr. MacCracken was on assignment as senior global change scientist to the interagency Office of the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) in Washington D.C., also serving as its first executive director from 1993-1997. From 1997-2001, he served as executive director of the USGCRP's National Assessment Coordination Office, which coordinated the efforts of 20 regional assessment teams, 5 sectoral teams, and the National Assessment Synthesis Team (which was constituted as a federal advisory committee) that prepared the national climate impacts assessment report that was forwarded to the President and on to the Congress in late 2000. During this period with the Office of the USGCRP, Dr. MacCracken also coordinated the official U.S. Government reviews of several of the assessment reports prepared by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and he was a co-author/contributing author for various chapters in the IPCC assessment reports.
.... His affidavit relating global climate change and impacts on particular regions was recently cited favorably by Justice Stevens in his opinion in the recent decision in Massachusetts et al. versus EPA.
And, we have an excellent crew from our environmental community:
Desmogblog, Unenergy, mogmaar, RLMiller, Josh Nelson, citisven, Oke, rb137, FishOutofWater, Jill Richardson, Bruce Nilles, and A Siegel.
This may be the first blogathon at Daily Kos to have so many honorable and eminent scholars of climate change science, law, and policy. It should be a fun weekend.