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Trip report - "Wild Weather" Climate One panel talk at SF's Commonwealth Club Dec 13

Tuesday afternoon I drove down to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco  for an evening Climate One event titled  "Wild Weather", a panel discussion with a host and 3(?) IPCC authors and an extreme-weather crop insurance startup CEO - the panelists were Chris Field, Michael Oppenheimer, Karen O'Brien, and David Friedberg.

The event has been blogged, with link to its podcast, by Justin Gerdis, who IMO did a stellar job.

Here I offer some bits not blogged there; and some event format feedback; and one piece of my-two-cents advice: namely, it probably makes more sense to watch or listen to the recordings than to attend these events in person, if you have any distance to travel.

Assessing contrarian Roy Spencer's science and outreach

This post - an assessment of Roy Spencer's climate views and actions - was created to serve as a resource for Spencer's SourceWatch page.

Guidestar: IRS revoked nonprofit status of anti-science Science and Public Policy Institute

The IRS has revoked the nonprofit status of the global warming denial Science and Public Policy Institute.

"Nonprofit" anti-regulation groups evading transparency by exploiting IRS loopholes

A lot of anti-regulation groups seem to be evading the spirit of the law with the IRS & transparency lately.

David H. Freedman SciAm article raising doubts about econ models; implications for climate?

Note: I'm no expert on models & would appreciate corrections.
Over in the Nov. 2011 Scientific American, Wrong author David H. Freedman has an article titled Why Economic Models Are Always Wrong, in which Freedman builds off a 2005 paper (pdf) by earth scientist Jonathan N. Carter et al. from a conference on Sensitivity Analysis of Model Output; the paper's titled "Our Calibrated Model has No Predictive Value: An Example from the Petroleum Industry" (Freedman, pers. comm.). The SciAm article starts with this geophysical model, draws conclusions about economic models, and mentions climate models not at all.

If a YouTube video is captioned, you can pull & read the transcript

The glory that is this YouTube closed-caption ripper likely renders unnecessary many of the "notes and transcripts" blogposts in here.

(This is a good thing.)

Notes from Alex Steffen’s Aug 2011 TED talk, "The shareable future of cities"

Update: this was unneeded effort - on each video's webpage, TED has an "interactive transcript" (where you can click on that text, to see the transcript). So read the whole thing, go there instead.

My notes from watching Alex Steffen’s (10 min.) August 2011 TED talk, The shareable future of cities:

2011 GMU survey: 3/4 of weathercasters holding highest cert. don't know climate change basics

As noted elsewhere on Tuesday, an analysis (xls; results on line 18; mine, perhaps flawed, please report an error ) of weathercaster survey data pulled from the June 2011 George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication (4C) report (pdf), found that the highest-certified weathercasters, the American Meteorological Society Certified Broadcast Meteorologists (AMS CBMs), indeed had more climate understanding than weathercasters holding lesser certifications, and were twice as likely to grasp the scientific consensus (that climate change appears to be happening & human-caused) as the lowest, no-certification group. But a bigger truth is disturbing: more than 3 out of 4 CBM-holders didn't know this.

Why is AMS certifying weathercasters who either don't know or don't care about climate scientists' understanding of climate change?

Notes from Oreskes "Merchants of Doubt" interview

See Tamino's post for the excellent (34 min) interview & a discussion thereof. Here are my notes from watching:

Oreskes, Stanford, April 2008, snippet

Sadly, we seem to have lost smartenergyshow.com, on which the April 2008 talk was hosted, to spammers; but from an archived page, here's the transcript of Naomi Oreskes's response to the Q "Now that you know all this [about how they operate], what do you do about it?"

Transcript of Scott Denning's Heartland talk/challenge

Transcript of the YouTube video of Scott Denning's challenge ("the political right has been AWOL in proposing effective solutions...the world needs Heartland, Heritage, AEI...") to those attending the Heartland Institute's summer 2011 climate conference.

Who's really funding the Heartland Institute?

We think we know who's funding Heartland from the info on sites like Media Matters, but we don't.

The foundation funding turned up by Media Matters is a tiny fraction of what Heartland is receiving - for example, in 2006 MM shows about $300k in foundation funding, just 12% of Heartland's reported contributions for the year. And these mystery donations are far from evenly distributed - 38% of Heartland's 2007 revenue came from just one mystery donor, who would have chipped in about $2million. *
If you'd like to look for yourself, you could see how much funding remains "unsourced" by comparing what Media Matters turns up for a given year, against that year's Heartland's IRS Form 990 reported revenue which I've provided in rough form below:
(year, direct public support, gross amt rxd )

2009, 6.5mil, 6.785mil
2008, 7.6 mil, 7.78mil
2007, 5mil, 5.2mil
2006, 2.5mil, 2.75mil
2005, 4.25 mil, 4.5mil
2004, 1.77mil, 2 mil
2003, 1.55mil, 1.8mil
2002, 1.25mil, 1.55mil
--------------

*The "38%" donor info comes from an audit that got filed as part of Heartland's 2007 Form 990. The audit also mentioned what look to be rather generous (to someone other than a Heartland donor) lease payments of $1400/mo for a photocopier, an arrangement starting in 2003, and $850/quarter for a postage meter.(edited)


2011-07-19 update: not that it changes anything, but our 38% donor presumably gave via Donors Capital Fund (donor-advised, anonymous funding), which reported giving almost $3 million to Heartland in 2007 (pdf; scroll down near the bottom to see it).

Drawing distinction between policy and politics - cogently expressed where?

Had a hyperpolitical friend visit recently, who - along with her hyper-apolitical friend - has a worldview that doesn't distinguish between politics and policy. Thus they see policy as inseparable from politics; so for one, any mention of policy becomes a discourse on politics, and for the other, any mention of policy is anathema (note: this representation might be outdated.)

This is a problem.

Where is the distinction between policy & politics drawn, well? (and what search parameters can I use to find it in future, by Googling?)

(I did try [to sketch out the distinction myself] last year; but as "cogent" is not my middle name...)
Update 2012-02-02: minor edits, plus I've seen the distinction drawn as "politics is the art of the possible, policy is the art of the practical."

Why it's important to speak up about misleading climate info in the media - an anecdote

For media executives who aren't climate savvy, the simplest way to assess the quality of their climate science programming is to consider the nature and distribution of complaints received. When nobody - or only one person - has complained, the media exec takes this to mean there's no problem.