Climate scientists who've been interviewed on KVMR

I want to settle a disagreement, in which I'm pretty sure of my position, but without more data it's hard to be certain. It'd help to have a (much) more complete list, of who's been interviewed about climate science on KVMR in the last several years; if anyone has more info...?

KVMR's mission statement, and a Q

KVMR's mission statement:

For KVMR folk, on science communication - excellent piece by Chris Mooney

Excerpts from Good Communication is Good Scientific Practice:

Excellent KVMR climate interview with "Rough Guide" author Robert Henson

Edited with followups - and podcast link - on Wed Jan 12, 13, 18.
There was an extremely fine interview on KVMR's science show Soundings today with UCAR's Robert Henson, author of the Rough Guide to Climate Change; it's available as a podcast.

Speaking up as a citizen - KVMR climate commentary tonight

There was an impassioned - but IMO misguided - commentary on KVMR's science show Soundings, day before yesterday. I asked to respond with a 3 minute commentary on KVMR News, and Paul Emery graciously consented and recorded it today; it will air tonight. You'll be entertained if you listen (live or later) - my lips don't behave well when chilly, so it has the distinct auditory aura of a mouthful of marbles. Or you can just read it, below.

Confessions:
1. I didn't credit Teresa Nielsen Hayden for her "extremely interesting ancient times" big picture, which is flat out wonderful, nor presidential science advisor John Holdren for his "car with bad brakes headed toward a cliff in the fog" metaphor - I was trying to keep it a) flowing and b) under 3 minutes w/o speaking like an auctioneer.
Update, upon listening: more like a Yugo trying to run at 40 below.
2. I don't know 100% that the Climate Science Rapid Response Team promises to provide information and commentary to journalists, or just information; I'm 90% sure the former though.)
3. Pre-emptive apologies for disappointing a certain local contrarian; when I'd met him, I'd (verbally) brandished my Harvard PhD in an attempt to convey that I might actually have some idea what I'm talking about. Let's just say it turned out to be a bad move, apparently never to be forgotten; I have learned from it.
4. Partial apologies to Mr. Stahler, whose commentary I was responding to, since I don't directly address most of his points here - IMO it was something of a Gish Gallop, not amenable to a substantive 3 minute rebuttal. AGU-related advice to same, based on last year: attend plenary sessions, which can be excellent for conveying the big picture.

The commentary:

This is Anna Haynes with a Free Speech message about climate science and climate action - and about the big picture.

Some people don't think the science on climate justifies urgent action - and don't want the scientists themselves to speak up about it.

This raises some basic questions.

Should we use science to inform climate policy? I'd say yes - to do otherwise is to act from ignorance.

Does climate science tell us exactly what the future holds, or even exactly what the current reality is?
No, never; science is about the weight of evidence and probabilities and getting ever closer to the truth - not about certainty.

Does the lack of certainty mean it has nothing useful to tell us? No, since it does give information on the severity and likelihood of the dangers we create for ourselves and generations to come, the longer we wait to curb our greenhouse gas emissions.

To wait for certainty is misguided - When you're "in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog" (*), with your children in the back seat, a good parent does not keep their foot on the gas.

Should scientists themselves go before the public and explain the risks we're running? I'd say yes - ideally they could stay in the lab & do their science & leave the communication to others, but with today's journalism of false balance, or worse yet, journalism snookered by industry public relations, as responsible citizens, scientists need to speak up. They have children too.

Do some actions pose their own risks? Yes, but they're much more tractable than global climate destabilization.

But why listen to me, I'm no climate expert - you need a reliable source. Ideally that'd be the media, but it hasn't covered climate well. This may improve, with the Climate Science Rapid Response Team, a group of working climate scientists who've gathered to fight back against misinformation - they're now a resource for journalists who want reliable climate information and commentary.

But what about for the public - for you and me, now? For us the Rapid Response Team recommends a website that uses science to assess dubious climate claims.
The site they recommend is SkepticalScience.com.

People can get caught up in details, so let's keep the big picture in mind:

We are "ancestral peoples"; "this is the very dawn of the world. We're hardly more than an eyeblink away from the fall of Troy - and scarcely an interglaciation removed from the Altamira cave painters. We live in extremely interesting ancient times." We need to be "earnest and ingenious and brave, as befits ancestral peoples" (link) ...

- and make our descendants proud.

FYI, a new local climate communication experiment

2011 update: This experiment was not very productive.

In this blog I've critiqued past climate-related communication from KVMR science correspondent / The Union science columnist Al Stahler, but continuing this effort seems fruitless - he's got an audience of thousands, I don't. And since neither he nor I have any formal climate science expertise, it looks like the blind critiquing the blind, epistemologically speaking. So it just bounces off.

So, I want to try something different - I've asked Al if I can put up his latest Union column (it's not yet online AFAIK; it's titled "Climate is Complex", & conveys the themes & memes that you'd expect from that title) and ask those with climate science expertise to critique it.

Waiting forGot permission; stay tuned.

"It’s going to be a terrible wake-up call" - Jeff Masters on climate change

Al Stahler on KVMR interviewed Weather Underground's Jeff Masters just now; and from what I heard, no Qs were asked about climate change, and Masters only briefly touched on it.

So you likely don't know his views - here they are, from a recent Yale Climate Media Forum profile:

"Masters considers himself different from most meteorologists, many of whom he says are unreasonably skeptical of climate change science. He says he thinks their skepticism stems in part from bachelors degree meteorology students’ not being required to study climatology or climate science as part of their formal degree requirements.

Masters says he believes that the conclusions of the IPCC report are “genuine, valid, and probably understated.” And he is critical of what he sees as well orchestrated and well funded climate misinformation campaigns.

“They’re able to persuade even intelligent people with a background in meteorology” that climate change isn’t occurring, he said. “It’s going to be a terrible wake-up call when the climate becomes unstable, and we’ll kick ourselves for being resistant to cutting our use of fossil fuels.”

“The ignorance and greed that human society is showing in this matter will be to our ultimate detriment and possible destruction,” he says.

He urges his 14-year-old daughter to educate herself on climate change. “It will be the defining issue of their generation,” he says. ...
...
He plans to continue being “a spokesperson for the best science we have on what the planet is doing and where’s it is headed.”

(Sorry for the shouting; but how to reach resistant ears?)

Also, Al did ask about modeling, and Masters spoke about weather models' variability and uncertainty; but he didn't present the distinction between modeling for short-term prediction - weather - and modeling for long-term prediction - climate: the latter is *not* sensitive to initial conditions, so it doesn't suffer from the flakiness of weather predictions. Paging Jeff Masters - this is something a *lot* of people don't grasp.

I'll ask him to weigh in on this, and report back.

Three questions for Al Stahler, The Union science columnist & host of KVMR's Soundings

No answers yet.

1. Do you agree that it is possible for a speaker - for example, a public relations professional - to mislead their audience by presenting (or differentially stressing) selective truths?
   


2. Do you agree that it is possible for a speaker to mislead their audience about science, by presenting (or differentially stressing) selective scientific information?


3. Do you agree that science communicators have a responsibility to paint a basically accurate picture of science?

Clearing up climate confusion from today's Al Stahler Union column on Venus

If you perused today's The Union science column about Venus, "Many Ways To Shine"(no link), by Union columnist and KVMR science host Al Stahler, you might have come away thinking that the CO2 we're spewing into the air here on Planet Earth isn't so important.
- which is false, so in this post I'll explain how the column could mislead someone, and how the reality differs.

Here's the passage that could misdirect. Read it carefully, think about the message it sends:

"Orbiting closer to the sun than Earth, Venus long ago lost her oceans to evaporation, loading the air with a powerful greenhouse gas. Water vapor. Venus grew hot.

Without oceans, Venus was unable to sequester her carbon dioxide. If not as powerful as water vapor, carbon dioxide [CO2] is, too, a greenhouse gas.

Venus remains hot today, her surface averaging some 860 degrees Fahrenheit."

OK, quiz time. Based on this passage -

1. Which greenhouse gas makes Venus hellaciously hot - water vapor, or CO2?
2. Which greenhouse gas should we be more concerned about here on earth - water vapor, or CO2?


To me, the passage suggests both answers would be "water vapor" (not CO2) - which just ain't so.

From RealClimate's post Lessons from Venus -

"...the atmosphere of Venus has as much mass as about 100 Earth atmospheres, and it is almost pure CO2. This accounts for its very strong greenhouse effect."

How to reconcile this with the Union article passage above - which talks about the oceans of Venus evaporating into water vapor, and about water vapor being a more powerful greenhouse gas than CO2 - and each sentence of which, AFAIK, is accurate?

RealClimate explains the larger picture:

"Venus succumbed early to a "runaway water vapor greenhouse"...much of the ocean evaporated into the atmosphere.
[as the Union article mentions.]

Once this happens, it is easy for the water vapor to decompose in the upper atmosphere...
[as the Union article mentions, but many paragraphs later, in an entirely different context.]

Once water is lost, the reaction that turns carbon dioxide into limestone can no longer take place,
[as the Union article mentions.]

so CO2 outgassing from volcanoes accumulates in the atmosphere instead of staying bound up in the rocks.
[as the Union article implies.]

The end state of this process is the current atmosphere of Venus... essentially no water in the atmosphere and essentially the planet’s whole inventory of carbon in the form of atmospheric CO2."
[ which the Union article does not mention at all.]

This omission would be fine - you can't convey every nuance in a column, after all - if there weren't an important lesson for us humans in the parallels between the atmosphere of Venus (packed to the gills with carbon dioxide) - and the changes we're making to the atmosphere of Earth (packing it with carbon dioxide).

Which is not to say that we're facing runaway global warming that'll yield another Venus, the RC hosts clarify:

"The runaway greenhouse that presumably led to the present Venus is an extreme form of the water vapor feedback that amplifies the effect of CO₂ increases on Earth. Is there a risk that anthropogenic global warming could kick the Earth into a runaway greenhouse state? Almost certainly not. ..."

OK, on to our second quiz question, "Which greenhouse gas should we be more concerned about here on earth?"

The Union article's [untangled] statement, "Carbon dioxide [CO2] is not as powerful a greenhouse gas as water vapor", implies that the answer is "water vapor". But this is misdirection, since with water vapor vs. CO2, "more powerful" does not translate to "more important" (as the excellent SkepticalScience.com explains here). Even though CO2 is a less powerful greenhouse gas in and of itself, it's more important than water vapor because of the processes it drives.

So the reader's being misled if you just mention the "more/less powerful" relation; you're telling her something that's literally true but that paints a false picture; it's not the right metric for grasping the problem.

(It's kind of like the 1960s nuclear power PR folks telling us that the amount of nuclear waste per person per year would be equivalent - in mass - to a couple of aspirin in your medicine cabinet; really not a helpful metric, if these "aspirin" could sicken everyone in the neighborhood.
(And no, I don't want to discuss nuclear power here; I probably support it more than you do.))

The so-called skeptics (who aren't true skeptics) ignore the huge difference in how long extra water vapor vs. CO2 stays up in the atmosphere - added water vapor rains back out within days, while added CO2 takes centuries to come out. And CO2 is the climate change driver, the "control knob" of climate, that - by the warming it causes by itself - causes the atmosphere to *hold onto* more water vapor, which amplifies the just-CO2-only-caused warming.
(all of which the SkepticalScience.com article will explain better than I've done here.)

Did that help?
(Was it clear, or clear as mud?)

I want to keep doing these "corrective" posts, and I want them to be useful...

KVMR climate commentary response to George Rebane

Last Friday KVMR ran a commentary from Dr. Rebane that described&named "camps" who hold various climate views, extolled Bjorn Lomborg, and argued for a Yes vote on Prop 23; and since I'd been told I could reply if Rebane started using his commentary for climate contrarianism, I was invited to respond to that one. My response airs tonight on KVMR's 6pm news.
(As I've said elsewhere, I'm uncomfortable being put in the position of advocating a particular vote - I'm a flashlight-wielder, not an arm-twister or persuader - so after countering Rebane's climate-delay talking points, for the "Prop 23" part I just cribbed from the recent NYTimes editorial.)

Here's the text , with references.

---

Last Friday, KVMR ran a commentary by retired engineer George Rebane, who cited author Bjorn Lomborg in arguing for Prop 23, the out-of-state-oil-funded initiative to roll back California's global warming law.

I thought about what to tell you in response. Should I point out it's a red flag when someone doesn't accept climate science and uses the term "true believers" to describe those who do? - including the 29 out of 30 active climate scientists who agree there's a consensus of evidence that global warming is happening and largely human-caused. (The small group of doubters has demonstrably lower expertise. )

Or perhaps I should note that Bjorn Lomborg, the fellow Rebane touted, has no expertise in climate science or environmental economics, his background's in poli sci and game theory. And while he's written several books that are loaded with footnotes and references, a review of the references found they're a sham, they don't support his claims.

Or I could share some pointers on judging who to trust - like, when there are two sides on an issue, if one side has the recycled tobacco PR flacks & the other has pretty much every major scientific organization on the planet, to treat the two sides equally is...unwise.

Or I could point out that Rebane's "there's no proof" argument' is a red herring - science deals in probabilities, not proof - by the time there's proof it'll be too late. If a mom sits back and lets her son play in traffic since there's no *proof* he'll get run over, we call it reckless endangerment.

Or I could share my prediction that the climate delay effort will turn out to be the most pervasive, effective and destructive commercial PR disinformation effort that the world has ever known. The fossil fuels industry is just as threatened as tobacco was; and we *know* what the tobacco folks were doing behind the scenes to confuse the public. This industry's 10 times bigger; you do the math.
(In his Prop 23 [KVMR] debate with Steve Frisch, in the context of climate science Rebane mentioned a scientist who'd lost his position at UCLA - but neglected to say that the guy's a tobacco researcher.)

No, what I should do for you is share some points from the Prop. 23 editorial in Monday's[?] New York Times; it's called The Brothers Koch and AB 32:
Note: I cut out a lot, & did a lot of paraphrasing for brevity/clarity; the link above goes to the original.

"Four years ago, bipartisan majorities in the California Legislature approved a landmark clean energy bill. Now a coalition of right-wing ideologues, out-of-state oil & gas companies & climate-change skeptics is seeking to effectively kill it.

The money men include Charles and David Koch, the Kansas oil and gas billionaires who have played a prominent role in financing the Tea Party movement.

The law they want to kill, AB32, aims to reduce] California’s emissions of co2 and other greenhouse gases. The prospect that it could reduce gas sales strikes terror into some energy companies. Much of the $8.2 million raised to stop the law came from just two Texas-based oil and gas companies, Valero and Tesoro. The Koch brothers gave another million, partly because they worry about damage to the Koch Industries bottom line, and also because they think climate change is a left-wing hoax.

Since the law was passed, there's been an enormous increase in investments in clean energy technologies — and the jobs that go with them. Overturning it would threaten that and the effort to fight climate change, since State and regional efforts are crucially important drivers — if California pulls back, other states that are trying to reduce emissions may do so as well.

The Kochs and their allies are disastrously wrong about the science... and wrong about the economics. So AB 32’s many friends — led by Schwarzenegger and another respected Republican, Nixon and Reagan cabinet member George Shultz — have mounted a spirited counterattack to defend the law, which Shultz credits for an unprecedented outburst of technological creativity and investment.

Who wins if Prop 23 passes and our global warming law is repudiated? The Koch brothers, maybe, but the biggest winners will be the Chinese, who are already moving briskly ahead in the clean tech race. And the losers? The people of California, surely. But the biggest loser will be the planet. "

Nobel economist Paul Krugman's New York Times piece Building a Green Economy is a great intro to environmental economics and climate policy.
He sums it up saying,

"We know how to limit greenhouse-gas emissions. We have a good sense of the costs — and they’re manageable. All we need now is the political will. "

Thank you.

Response by KVMR's Al Stahler, host of Soundings

This is a followup to two NCFocus posts from last month:

• Engaging climate contrarians on the science - An experiment (in which I asked two local residents - one being Soundings host Al Stahler - who hold [IMO] contrarian views (and who prefer to form their views by reading the original scientific literature), for their evidence for those views)
• KVMR science and the climate threat - calibration (on looking into Al's and my disagreement on what the science says is the likely range for climate sensitivity, what I found when I looked, and my difficulty reconciling what I'd found with what he was saying).
  

Here is his reply:
( I've taken the liberty of adding a few links where he's referred to outside information, so you can read for yourself if you choose.)

This week: Prop. 23 - Kochs give, KVMR/Frisch/Rebane; and McKibben

Prop 23 (essentially, "Paralyze California's Global Warming Solutions Act") news:

The Kansas-based Kochs have now weighed in, as it were, with a hefty million-dollar "Yes on 23" contribution from a Koch Industries subsidiary, Flint Hills Resources. Campaign finance data here.

KVMR hosted a Prop. 23 "discussion, not a debate" with Steve Frisch and George Rebane on Wed. eve; see Jeff Pelline's "before" and "after" posts for details and discussion.
No transcript available, but you can listen to the audio recording.

KVMR science and the climate threat - calibration

See Aug 20 update below, on meaningful vs. misleading assertions; and Aug 24 update below it, on what sensitivity can't tell us. Also see the Soundings host's response.

KVMR's biweekly science show Soundings has been extremely light on climate coverage, and what coverage it's done has skirted the all-important question, "how serious is climate change likely to get under Business As Usual, and how should we go about deciding what actions to take and when?"

In part this is by design; since the show avoids policy, it won't address the second part of this question.

This week: First it came for Moscow, Pakistan, the Arctic... - and our response

Global climate destabilization.

Engaging climate contrarians on the science - An experiment

This post - and project - is an exploration into taking a different, "nitty gritty science" path, looking into the science cited as supporting some contrarian climate science claims. The purpose is to see what we find on the journey, and to compare the efficiency & the outcome of two approaches: the "look at the [purported] science" approach, and the "CEO using science" one.

KVMR science, aerosols and climate policy

In short: The climate science policy preferences that the "aerosol" segment of yesterday's KVMR show Soundings might have seemed to suggest, are not those of the climate scientist interviewed.

Brian's leaving KVMR News

Reliable sources (plural) informed us today that Brian, the keeper of the news at KVMR, gave notice a week or two back.

Another journalism-at-KVMR news flash - a couple days ago I learned we have another big-fish editor here in town, Michael Young from the LA Times foreign desk; he's on the KVMR board. Move over JeffP; it looks like we're going to have to rename a certain street Editors' Row...

Edited*:
Welcome Michael and Karen (belatedly; they moved here a summer or two ago.)
(Michael, if you start a local blog, please put it in the the Suggestion Box for Nevada County Voices.)