J.C. Moore Online

Current Events from a Science Perspective

Thanks  to those of you who entered nominations. The four top candidates have been selected from those nominated by readers. Please help select the winner by voting for the nominee who you think has most affected the environment for good or ill.  If you will, please post a reason for your vote and a suggestion for other suitable gifts for your favorite candidate. Some great gifts have already been proposed. The author will buy the gifts from his blogging earnings, so please don’t worry about the expense. Voting will  close and the winners announced on March 7, 2015.

Please  put your choice as a comment or take the poll at this site.

Hall of Fame Nominees

1.  John Holdren –  a lauded theoretical physicist who is President Obama’s science adviser. He has been a strong influence on the Administration’s science policy and has been quite effective in shutting down Congressmen who deny the human influence on climate.

Prize : Election defeats  for all Congressmen who exclaim, “I’m not a scientist, but…” .

2.  Physicist John Cook for creating the Skeptical Science site in 2007 which conveniently catalogues all paid denier memes/propaganda and the scientific responses to them. He has posted a large number of articles and videos explaining the facts of climate science.

Suggested Prize: a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.

3. Boyen Slat – a 19 year old Dutch student/ inventor and founder and CEO of The OCEANCLEANUP . He developed a method for removing much of the 30 million tons of plastic entering the oceans annually, convincing 70 scientist to help, producing a 530 page feasibility study, and raising over 2 million dollars to start the project.

Prize : a ban on disposing of plastic bottles in waterways.

4. Pope Francis – for his Protect Creation efforts. He is preparing a comprehensive Vatican teachings on climate change, which will urge 1.2 billion Catholics worldwide to take action. He  also plans to convene a summit of the world’s main religions in hopes of bolstering next year’s crucial U.N. climate meeting in Paris.

Hoped for Reward: A strong agreement from the climate conference.

Hall of Shame Nominees

1. Senator James Inhofe who claims “climate change is the biggest hoax in history”. He has compared the United States Environmental Protection Agency to a Gestapo bureaucracy, EPA Administrator Carol Browner to Tokyo Rose, and now he’s chairman of the Senate Science Committee.

Award:  a path for the KXL pipeline through his backyard.

2.  Freedom Industries and its ex-CEO  Gary Southern  – for contaminating the drinking water for 300,000 West Virginians. They have been charged with multiple violation of the Clean Water Act related to polluting West Virginia’s Elk River, including a massive chemical spill this past January that saw 10,000 gallons of a coal-cleaning chemical called crude MCHM dumped into the river.

Award: A prison cell with drinking water from the Elk River.

3. Dr. Richard S. Lindzen  – Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute who  described the recent U.S. Senate climate vote as a bizarre and ludicrous “attempt to hijack science for political purposes”. The Cato Institute is a part of the Climate Change Denial Machine, and the “focus his work is on the interaction between climate science and policymakers”. Once a fine scientist, denial for political purposes is now Dr. Lindzen’s job and he knows enough to sound impressive as he disputes accepted science.

Prize: a trophy engraved “Outstanding Climate Science Hypocrite Award”.

4. Tony Abbot – Australian Prime Minister who led the repeal of the carbon tax, even though Australia is one of the world’s largest polluters per capita and is facing serious changes to climate and weather systems as a result of global warming. The Guardian described it as “an act of gross moral negligence to the future prosperity of this country and future generations.”

Suggested Award: ??

Nominations were taken and votes will be taken from four sites. The  poll will close on March 7, 2015.

Please  put your choice as a comment or take the poll at this site.

It is important that we keep in mind those who have most affected the environment by words or action.  Each year, this site takes a poll to find those most deserving to be in the Environmental Hall of Fame and the Environmental Hall of Shame. Please send  your nominations  for  each category by e-mail through the “Contact” link or put it in the comment section . If you would, please include a short reason that your nominee should be chosen and suggest a suitable gift if they win.

Nominations will be taken until January 31st, 2015. The nominees will then be  listed  and this site will conduct a poll to determine the winner in each category.   You may suggest a suitable prize for your nominee. Please be imaginative, as particularly thoughtful or humorous  nominations will  be recognized and published on this site

Past years winners and their awards were:

Hall of Fame Winners – Award

2013       Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org – Many new members so subscribe to his is weekly newsletter .

2012       President Barack Obama – A little coöperation from Congress, so please write your Representatives.

2011        James Hansen – A massive presence at the 2012 Citizen’s Climate Lobby 

2010        RealClimate.org  – A recommendation from this site. ( Priceless)

2009       Benno Hansen,  ThinkAboutIt Blogger – A Subscription to Science News.

Hall of Shame 

2013      The Koch Bothers -A boycott of their products: less money, less lobbying.

2012       Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund – An IRS investigation of their of their tax-exempt status.

2011        Halliburton (Cheney) –  A big glass of water from a well next to a hydrofracking operation.

2010        Koch Brothers – A petition to the Wizard of Oz for  the grant of a social conscience.

2009       SpaceGuy,  Newsvine Blogger – The movie Wall-E,  representing his view of the future of Earth.

Bill McKibben (44%): He is the founder of 350.org , an international grassroots organization whose goal is to cut CO2 levels to 350 ppm in order to minimize the damage from global warming. His weekly newsletter keeps followers updated on the latest research and issues in climate science. Award:  many new members, so please check out his newsletter.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (Tie, 25%): He a strong advocate in the Senate for legislation to reduce our carbon emissions, often countering Senator Inhofe’s anti climate rhetoric.  Award:  more support from fellow Senators for action on climate change, so please vote for  those who will help him.

The Candu Engineers (Tie, 25%): They designed the Candu nuclear reactor to run on thorium. The reactors are very fuel efficient and have been adapted to use thorium in existing reactors that already have regulatory approval. http://www.the-weinberg-foundation.org/2…  Award:  regulatory approval of new designs for thorium reactors.

Kevin Cowtan and Robert G. Way (7%): They found  the ‘missing heat’ in the climate system.  Their research published in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society shows that the Arctic is warming at about eight times the pace of the rest of the planet. Award:  the acclaim of having a link to their paper attached to every article which says: “Global warming has stopped”.

The Hall of Shame Selection:

The Koch Bothers (67%): They are pushing Keystone XL pipeline as they own almost 2 million acres of Alberta tar sands land.  The Kochs,  one of the largest funders of AGW denier groups, have been using their extensive wealth to lobby politicians to let the KXL pipeline go through. Award: A boycott of their products: less money, less lobbying.

The Executive Producers and Hosts of the five Sunday Morning talk shows (16%): They have done a terrible job of covering climate change. Their coverage of the topic dropped from an inadequate 61 minutes in 2009 to a four-year low of 8 minutes in 2012. They are:

• NBC – Meet The Press – Rob Yarin, Executive Producer, David Gregory, Host
• CBS – Face The Nation – Mary Hager, Executive Producer, Bob Schieffer, Host
• ABC – This Week- Jonathon Greenberger, Producer, George Stephanopolus, Host
• FOX – News Sunday – Jay Wallace, Executive Producer, Chris Wallace, Host
• CNN – State of the Union – Rick DiBella, Producer, Candy Crowley, Host

        Award for each : a copy of the booklet recently published jointly by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the British    Royal Society “Climate Change – Evidence and Causes.”

 James Delingpole (8%): He is not a scientist, yet he wrote columns for the Telegraph denying climate change and personally attacking climate scientists, comparing them to Nuremberg criminals and suggesting they be tortured.  Award: A job on Fox news.

The George C. Marshall Institute(8%):  They espouse “Science for a Better Public Policy” but they specialize in churning out misinformation about Climate Change. They developed the strategy of “Doubt Is Our Product”, i.e. creating doubt about the scientific evidence and the scientific consensus to keep effective action from being taken.  Award: required reading of Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes, who exposed their strategy.

It is important that we keep in mind those who are heroes and villains to the environment. I wish to thank those who provided the nominations, the prize suggestions, the insightful and often humorous comments, and the votes to determine the winners. As this year goes by, please take note of those you wish to nominate for the 2014 awards.

(C) 2014 J.C. Moore

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It is important that we keep in mind those who are heroes and villains  in our efforts to protect the environment. Each year, this site takes a poll to find those most deserving to be in the Environmental Hall of Fame and the Environmental Hall of Shame. Nominations are now open for awards for those who have most affected the environment by words or action. With the ongoing  debate about  global warming and environmental regulations,  nominees should be easy to find.  Please send  your nominations  for  each category by e-mail through the “Contact” link or put it in the comment section . If you would, please include a short reason that your nominee should be chosen and suggest a suitable gift if they win.

Nominations will be taken until March 31st, 2014. The nominees will then be  listed  and this site will conduct a poll to determine the winner in each category.   You may suggest a suitable prize for your nominee. Please be imaginative, as particularly thoughtful or humorous  nominations will  be recognized and published on this site

The 2012 Environmental Hall of Fame winner was President Barack Obama for his efforts to protect the environment through executive action, such as  mileage standards and addressing air pollution through EPA action.

The 2012 Hall of Shame award went to Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, both who fund climate denial activities while allowing donors to remain anonymous and hide their vested interests.  

Past years winners and their gifts were:

Hall of Fame – Gift 

2012       President Barack Obama – A little coöperation from Congress, so please write your Representatives.

2011        James Hansen – A massive presence at the 2012 Citizen’s Climate Lobby 

2010        RealClimate.org  – A recommendation from this site. ( Priceless)

2009       Benno Hansen,  ThinkAboutIt Blogger – A Subscription to Science News.

Hall of Shame    

2012       Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund – An IRS investigation of their of their tax-exempt status.

2011        Halliburton (Cheney) –  A big glass of water from a well next to a hydrofracking operation.

2010        Koch Brothers – A petition to the Wizard of Oz for  the grant of a social conscience.

2009       SpaceGuy,  Newsvine Blogger – The movie Wall-E,  representing his view of the future of Earth.

Earthrise over the Moon from Apollo 11.

It is important that we keep in mind those who are heroes and villains  in our efforts to protect the environment. Each year, this site takes a poll to find those most deserving of recognition in the Environmental Hall of Fame and the Environmental Hall of Shame. Nominations are now open for those  awards to those who have most affected the environment by words or action. With the ongoing  debate about  global warming and environmental regulations,  nominees should be easy to find.  Please send  at least one nomination  for  each category by e-mail through the “Contact” link or put it in the comment section . If you would, please include a short reason that your nominee should be chosen and suggest a suitable gift if they win.

Nominations will be taken until June 31st, 2013. The nominees will then be  listed  and this site will conduct a poll to determine the winner in each category.   You may suggest a suitable prize for your nominee. Please be imaginative, as particularly thoughtful or humorous  nominations will  be recognized and published on this site

The 2011 Environmental Hall of Fame Winners  was James Hansen for  playing a pivotal role in delaying a decision on the XL pipeline  whose construction  would greatly accelerate global warming. The 2011 Hall of Shame award went to Halliburton (Cheney),  for the Halliburton clause in the Clean Water Act. This clause provided a loophole that allows the composition of fracking chemicals to remain secret, thanks to Cheney. Past years winners and their gifts were:

Hall of Fame    – Gift    

2011        James Hansen – A massive presence at the 2012 Citizen’s Climate Lobby 

2010        RealClimate.org  – A recommendation from this site. ( Priceless)

2009       Benno Hansen,  ThinkAboutIt Blogger – A Subscription to Science News.

Hall of Shame    

2011        Halliburton (Cheney) –  A big glass of water from a well next to a hydrofracking operation.

2010        Koch Brothers – A petition to the Wizard of Oz for  the grant of a social conscience.

2009       SpaceGuy,  Newsvine Blogger – The movie Wall-E,  representing his view of the future of Earth.

There is evidence that the authors of a recent paper may have gamed the peer review system to publish a biased climate science paper.

The Review Process: When a paper is submitted to a journal for publication, the editor removes the name of the author and sends the manuscript to several experts in the area, usually three, for review. The editor keeps the names of the reviewers confidential. If an error is found, the reviewer’s comments are returned to the author with suggestions for corrections. It is a good system for ensuring the quality of research publications, but even then papers are sometimes published that contains errors. The reviewers may miss an error, a biased editor may publish the paper in spite of flaws, or authors may exploit loopholes in a journal’s rules to get a paper published. Some journals allow the author to suggest names of reviewers and the editor often picks reviewers from the list. Most scientists submit names of reliable reviewers as it is an embarrassment to have errors found in their paper after publication. However, even if the papers are properly reviewed, the practice can bring accusations of “pal” review. Since reviewer’s names are kept confidential by the editor, it is difficult to know for sure whether that may have happened. However, there is evidence that the authors of a recent paper may have gamed the system by suggesting a set of reviewers that shared their bias. See what you think.

The paper: Last July 25th, Roy Spencer and Danny Braswell authored a paper in the rather specialized technical journal, Remote Sensing, titled “On the Misdiagnosis Of Surface Temperature Feedbacks From Variations In Earth’s Radiant Energy Balance“.  The paper claimed “The sensitivity of the climate system to an imposed radiative imbalance remains the largest source of uncertainty in projections of future anthropogenic climate change. Here we present further evidence that this uncertainty from an observational perspective is largely due to the masking of the radiative feedback signal by internal radiative forcing, probably due to natural cloud variations.”  It seems that only an expert in climatology would know what that means or what its implications were, but in three days a sensationalized version of the paper appeared on internet sites, in major business magazines, and in news articles in major newspapers. Millions of people likely read about the paper.

The Publicity: The renewed public interest in science should have made climate scientists pleased; however, they were not. Beneath the technical language is a claim that the climate sensitivity to CO2 has been misinterpreted by climate scientists because of natural cloud variations. Were it true, it would mean that natural forces, not man, were responsible for much of the observed global warming. That idea had been examined before and found to be inconsistent with the evidence, but the idea is one that some climate skeptics have been promoting. And, they are part of a well-funded pipeline that carries misinformation about climate science to major news outlets before all the facts can be known.

Forbes: One main branch of the misinformation pipeline runs through the Heartland Institute, where James Taylor is listed as a senior fellow. James Taylor once wrote articles for the tobacco industry suggesting that secondhand smoke was not harmful, and he has now turned his talents to denying the ties between rising CO2 levels and global warming. Inexplicably, James Taylor has been hired by Forbes magazine to write on energy and environmental topics. James Taylor picked up on Spencer’s paper and wrote an article for Forbes titled, New NASA Data Blows Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism. Not only was the title inaccurate and misleading, but the article was clearly an opinion article, miscategorized as news.  The editors of Forbes might not have known that Spencer’s “NASA Data” was the same data that climate scientists use to reach a very different conclusion, but perhaps they should have noticed that no reasonable news story would describe climate scientists as “alarmists” 15 times. The business community considers legislation that would reduce our carbon emissions to be anti-business, and business newspapers such as Investors Business Daily, the Wall Street Journal, and Forbes often are biased toward the skeptic’s position. The bias shows up in story selection, opinions miscategorized as news, a disproportionate number of skeptics articles on opinion pages, and  in sensationalized headlines. From Forbes, the article was picked up as a news story by other business magazines, Yahoo! News, MSNBC, and skeptic’s blog sites, which had a field day with the article. It is sad that millions will have read the distorted article, but few will ever read the climate scientist’s rebuttal. The article will soon sink into obscurity,  but it will have accomplished it’s purpose, which was to spread doubt about climate change.

Reproducibility: Publication in a peer-reviewed journal is not the only requirement for a paper to become accepted as part of the science literature. The research must stand up to the scrutiny of other experts in the field and it must be reproducible by other scientists with comparable knowledge and skill. Spencer’s paper reached the news media before climate scientists had a chance to respond, but they soon found a number of obvious errors in the paper. Trenberth and Fasullo summed it up:”The model has no realistic ocean, no El Niño, and no hydrological cycle, and it was tuned to give the result it gave. The bottom line is that there is NO merit whatsoever in this paper.”  Given time, A.E. Dessler analyzed Spencer’s paper in detail and published a rebuttal. The abstract in Geophysical Review Letters reports the key points of his paper:

• Clouds are not causing climate change;
• Observations are not in disagreement with models on this point;
• Previous work on this is flawed;  ( referring specifically to Spencer’s paper in Remote Sensing).

Clearly, Spencer’s paper had serious methodological flaws and was not reproducible. How did the paper get through Remote Sensing’s peer review process? The answer would likely not have been found, except for the publicity.

The Catastrophe: The editor of Remote Sensing, who had been trying to build the reputation of the Journal, considered the publicity a catastrophe. The instructions in Remote Sensing asks authors to suggest five reviewers, and it is possible that Spencer could choose five skeptics.  The editor would not have to pick from those, but apparently in this case he did.  In the next issue of Remote Sensing, the editor, Dr. Wolfgang Wagner, resigned and issued a public apology for this article saying, “With this step I would also like to personally protest against how the authors and like-minded climate skeptics have much exaggerated the paper’s conclusions in public statements.” “The problem is that comparable studies published by other authors have already been refuted in open discussions and to some extent also in the literature, a fact which was ignored by Spencer and Braswell in their paper and, unfortunately, not picked up by the reviewers. “ And he concluded, “But, as the case presents itself now, the editorial team unintentionally selected three reviewers who probably share some climate sceptic notions of the authors.”

© 2012 J.C. Moore