Lisa Moore is a scientist in the Climate and Air Program.
The EPA just released its most recent estimate of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, which shows that our global warming pollution continues to climb. Since 1990, emissions are up more than 16 percent. But the EPA is casting this as a victory. How?
Lisa Moore is a scientist in the Climate and Air Program.
Bill Chameides is out of the office, but science, policy and news about global warming keep coming in. Yesterday, a group of military experts declared that climate change threatens national security (registration required). Their report [PDF] says:
Climate change can act as a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world, and it presents significant national security challenges for the United States…. The increasing risks from climate change should be addressed now because they will almost certainly get worse if we delay.
Lisa Moore is a scientist in the Climate and Air Program in Environmental Defense’s New York office. Along with principal author Jennifer Kefer, colleague Tim Searchinger and the National Wildlife Federation’s David Conrad, she is a co-author of the new report “America’s Flood Risk is Heating Up.”
This weekend’s monster nor’easter prompted flood warnings and evacuations from the Carolinas to Maine. And what ironic timing: last week, as the storm wreaked havoc in the South, Environmental Defense and the National Wildlife Federation released a report detailing how the Army Corps of Engineers’ flood-control program needs to be completely re-vamped [PDF], especially in light of climate change.
While helping draft the report, I was struck by two things in particular.
“Who are the fanatics now? The ones that live in denial – political denial, economic denial, and environmental denial.”
– Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, speaking on “Twenty-First Century Environmentalism: How Protecting Our Environment Will Create Economic Growth” for the Council on Foreign Relations, April 12, 2007.
ignoratio elenchi n.
A logical fallacy of presenting an argument that may in itself be valid, but has nothing to do with the proposition it purports to prove. Also known as “irrelevant conclusion”. [Lat. ignorance of refutation.]
George Will is at it again with his OpEd piece "Fuzzy Climate Math" in yesterday’s Washington Post. He makes a lot of pronouncements about global warming, and gets it all wrong. Although I already gave Richard Lindzen an Ignoratio Elenchi Award this week, Mr. Will’s piece is too deserving to go unrewarded.
The second installment of the IPCC’s 4th Assessment on Climate Change, titled “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability”, was released on April 6, 2007. In recognition of this report, I’m doing a weekly series called “Climate Dangers You May Not Know About“.
1. More Acidic Oceans
2. Drinking Water and Disease
3. Shifts in Lifecycle Timing
4. Drought and Violence
5. Melting of the North Pole
The recently released second report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) talks about the many ways that global warming will affect people’s health. Their list includes malnutrition, heat exhaustion, diarrhea from water-borne disease, cardio-respiratory problems from air pollution, and more.
People think of these as third world problems, but the U.S. is by no means immune. Heat waves in urban areas cause dangerously bad air quality, both from pollutants and ozone (see our article for details). Plus increased precipitation and flooding (see report [PDF]) can cause dangerous water pollution problems. Here’s why.
