Thursday, October 29, 2009

Open Mind: Born-Again Bayesian

October 29th, 2009
Not too long ago someone posted about E.T. Jaynes’s Probability: the Logic of Science. Hobbled with injury, I at least had the opportunity to do some reading, so I’ve devoured it. I just might devour it again.
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Climate Progress: Limbaugh rejects an apology for Revkin

October 29, 2009
When we last left the most vociferous intellectual leader in the conservative movement, he was being widely condemned for telling NY Times environment reporter Revkin: “Why don’t you just go kill yourself?” Limbaugh’s remarks were far beyond the pale even for his brand of extremism.
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Climate Progress: Breaking: Toshiba tells San Antonio its new twin $13 billion nukes will cost $4 billion more! The city balks. This looks like a job for clean energy.

October 28, 2009
One of the very first new nuclear power plants proposed to be built in the U.S. in over 30 years just hit a brick wall.  It’s the same brick wall — absurdly high cost — being hit around the world (see “Nuclear Bombshell: $26 Billion cost — $10,800 per kilowatt! — killed Ontario nuclear bid” and “Turkey’s only bidder for first nuclear plant offers a price of 21 cents per kilowatt-hour“).
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Climate Progess: Arctic sea ice is refreezing quite slowly. Go figure! October

October 28, 2009
Arctic mutl 10-09
When records were being set for loss of summer Arctic sea ice area (2007) and sea ice volume (2008), the deniers spent all their time talking about how quickly the ice refroze in the ensuing months.  Now, they are strangely quiet on the remarkably slow refreezing we’re seeing.
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Climate Progress: University Of Kentucky approves new $7 million industry-funded dorm named after “Coal”

October 28, 2009
http://www.treehugger.com/epa-tougher-coal-plants.jpg
You can’t make this stuff up, as this Think Progress repost makes clear.
A group led by Alliance Coal CEO Joseph Craft recently proposed donating $7 million to the University of Kentucky for a new dorm for the men’s basketball team. The catch, however, is that the dorm would have to be named after Craft’s true love: coal. The proposed change sparked intense protests from local environmentalists and students. One professor said that as universities become “models for new energy sources,” putting “coal” on a prominent building could “make it difficult to attract top students and faculty members to the university.”
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Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Climate Progress: Memo to Baucus: Your state’s trees are being ravaged by warming-driven pests now and Montana faces 175% to 400% increase in wildfire burn area

October 28, 2009

Sen. Max Baucus said Tuesday he has “serious reservations” about climate legislation unveiled by his Democratic colleagues, signaling trouble for a proposal that is stronger in certain respects than a bill passed by the House.
In an effort to inject drama and conflict into a hearing that lack both, the WSJ and other media outlets trumpeted the fact that Baucus said he thought Boxer’s proposed bill was too strong.
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Climate Progress: Harvard Business Review: SuperFreakonomics Ignores the Business Case for Sustainability

October 28, 2009
Product image of Green Recovery: Get Lean, Get Smart, and Emerge from the Downturn on Top 
The error-riddled book Superfreakonomics got the economics dead wrong, too, as Nobelist Krugman and others have noted.  Now Harvard Business Review weighs in on how they got the business side wrong.  I’m reposting an HBR piece by Andrew Winston, co-author of the best-seller Green to Gold and the author of the new book Green Recovery.
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Climate Progress: Energy and Global Warming News for October 28: Solar industry takes on coal and oil lobby; White House continues to step up climate efforts

October 28, 2009
Solar Industry Takes on Coal and Oil Lobbies
A solar industry leader smacked down the oil and coal industries on Tuesday, calling for renewable energy proponents to open their wallets to level the playing field in Washington.
“The full promise of solar power is being restrained by the tyranny of policies that protect our competitors, subsidize wealthy polluters and disadvantage green entrepreneurs,” said Rhone Resch, chief executive of the Solar Energy Industries Association, according to prepared remarks for a speech he is to give at the opening of the Solar Power International conference.
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Climate Progress: Washington Post mocks Inhofe as “the last flat-earther”

October 28, 2009
http://ventnorblog.com/copy_images/flat-earth.jpg
It must be very lonely being the last flat-earther.
Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, committed climate-change denier, found himself in just such a position Tuesday morning as the Senate environment committee, on which he is the ranking Republican, took up legislation on global warming. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) was in talks with Democrats over a compromise bill — the traitor! And as Inhofe listened, fellow Republicans on the committee — turncoats! — made it clear that they no longer share, if they ever did, Inhofe’s view that man-made global warming is the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”
… Agitated, his utterances disjointed, Inhofe went on: “Now, I also was — was kind of — I don’t want any of the media to think just because I had to sit here and listen to our good friend Senator Kerry for 28 minutes, that I don’t have responses to everything he said.”Nobody doubted that Inhofe had a response. The doubt was whether the response would make any sense.
That’s Dana Milbank in his regular “Washington sketch” column writing about yesterday’s Senate climate hearing.  Milbank is being kind not to count his fellow WashPost colleagues George Will and Fred Hiatt in calling Inhofe (R-OIL) the last flat-earther (see “WashPost recycles another denier WSJ op-ed, this time from coal apologist Bjorn Lomborg. Funny how two new senior Post editors came from the WSJ” and “Memo to Post: If George Will quotes a lie, it’s still a lie“).
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Tuesday, October 27, 2009

About This Blog

This forum was created to provide a clearing house for all the reasonable and respectful commentary out there that's been drafted and submitted to online climate blogs, or to online climate-related articles, only to be deleted, or pulled from moderation, in contradiction to the blog or website's stated comment guidelines, or due to what the commenter believes are unreasonable and unfair restrictions for an open forum.

AIC respects any blogger's right to moderate the discussions on their forum however they see fit, but is troubled by the descrepancy between some forums' claims of openness and even-handedness versus the reality of their moderation practices.

For general discussion of questionable moderation practices on climate blogs, RC Rejects is probably a more appropriate forum for than AIC.

This forum was created with two primary goals:

Through the publication of rejected comments,

1) To provide a more open and diverse extension of ongoing discussions at climate blogs where people have had difficulties in having their comments published. While this forum requests that initial comments on a mirrored post are copies of comments that were rejected at the source, responses to and discussions arising from those rejected comments are encouraged. This forum is not intended as an echo chamber; people of all viewpoints on any issues are very welcome to join the discussions in a respectful manner.

2) To encourage those who may have given up on contributing (or attempting to contribute) to discussions at blogs that rarely or never publish their comments to begin again, in hopes that what comments do go through contribute to a better discussion on those forums.

Since this forum's creation, the initiative of Roger Pielke, Jr., on his own blog, has suggested a third goal which might supplant the need for the first two:

3) For climate-related blogs to create a "Rejected Comments" thread where people are free to post comments rejected from the main threads, in the interests of transparency.

It can be a real sting when one spends time drafting polite and relevant commentary only to have disappear into a black hole because it doesn't support a specific scientific or policy perspective.

By providing a fallback outlet for such speech, this forum hopes to provide a directly related space for those unheard voices, and to encourage more meaningful discussion between differing viewpoints.

Climate Progress's Comment Policy

Climate Progress's Comment Policy:

It's a little hard to track down an explicit and succinct comment policy for Climate Progress, as Dr. Joe Romm seems to have only stated it in comments under a blog post in response to people's periodic complaints.

If Dr. Romm or someone from CP posts an explicit policy on their site, or would like to email an explicit policy to AIC, future posts will use what they provide.  The following, located in comment #13 here, is the best I've been able to find so far:

"I don’t delete dissenting voices...
I delete long-debunked stuff, and off-topic ad hominem stuff, and it (not surprisingly) comes to very little, probably not 1 post in 100. It isn’t censoring because there is no right to post here unedited — read the TOU.
...I won’t waste time continuing to debunk that which has been be long debunked — since wasting my time and my readers’ time is a core strategy of many posters. BUT I can’t leave disinformation unchallenged, because some people come to these posts without having read any other posts. So you see the dilemma.
I can waste time responding over and over and over again to the same nonsense — and subject my readers to it. Or, with fair warning, which I’ve given many times, just delete the stuff.
I don’t moderate all the posts as many places do."

RealClimate: Putting the recent Antarctic snowmelt minimum into context

27 October 2009
Guest Commentary by Andrew Monaghan and Marco Tedesco
Our study published in mid October in Geophysical Research Letters (Tedesco and Monaghan, 2009) documents record minimum snowmelt for Antarctica during austral summer 2008-2009 and lower-than-normal melt for several recent years, based on a 30-year satellite microwave record. Numerous blogs have cited the results as a challenge to previous studies reporting Antarctic warming, while also steadfastly ignoring other studies with similar results (e.g. Barrett et al., 2009). They have overlooked that these studies show that Antarctic warming has occurred mostly in winter and spring, whereas melting of course occurs in summer. And they oversimplify the causality and hence confuse our prediction for the future. We found that the same mechanism that has primarily caused low snowmelt in recent years will likely change in a manner that will enhance snowmelt in forthcoming decades. A brief summary follows.
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RealClimate: 350

27 October 2009
I was quoted by Andrew Revkin in the New York Times on Sunday in a piece about the 350.org International Day of Climate Action (involving events in 181 countries). The relevant bit is:
Gavin A. Schmidt, a climate scientist who works with Dr. Hansen and manages a popular blog on climate science, realclimate.org, said those promoting 350 or debating the number might be missing the point.
“The situation is analogous to people trying to embark on a cross-country road trip to California but they’ve started off heading to Maine instead,” Dr. Schmidt said. “But instead of working out ways to turn around, they have decided to argue about where they are going to park when they get to L.A.”
“If you ask a scientist how much more CO2 do you think we should add to the atmosphere, the answer is going to be none.”
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Climate Progess: The weak El NiƱo appears to be strengthening, as expected, so record temperatures will continue.

October 27, 2009
Two weeks ago I blogged that NASA reports hottest June to September on record; NOAA says “weak” El NiƱo “expected to strengthen and last through” winter.
NOAA’s National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center (and most other models) have been predicting for a couple of months that the weak El NiƱo would strengthen, but it hasn’t.  Until now, that is.
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Climate Progress: The landmark Senate climate hearings: Day 1 debrief

October 27, 2009
 
Kerry testifies before EPW
The Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works began its hearings today on the climate and clean energy bill.  I don’t think there was any big news.  Sen. Baucus (D-MT) and Sen. Voinovich (D-OH) were a tad more negative than I expected.  I’ve no doubt Baucus will support the final bill, but I definitely have doubts Voinovich will.  This Wonk Room post is a great summary of everyone’s position on the key issues:

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Climate Progress: Obama announces $3.4 billion in smart grid investments “to build a clean energy superhighway.” Creating a clean energy economy...


Obama announces $3.4 billion in smart grid investments “to build a clean energy superhighway.” Creating a clean energy economy will require an “all-hands-on-deck approach similar to the mobilization that preceded World War II…. I also believe that such a comprehensive piece of legislation that is taking place right now in Congress is going to be critical.”

October 27, 2009
The President said today that we’re having a debate “between those who are ready to seize the future and those who are afraid of the future.”
ARCADIA, FLORIDA – Speaking at Florida Power and Light’s (FPL) DeSoto Next Generation Solar Energy Center, President Barack Obama today announced the largest single energy grid modernization investment in U.S. history, funding a broad range of technologies that will spur the nation’s transition to a smarter, stronger, more efficient and reliable electric system.  The end result will promote energy-saving choices for consumers, increase efficiency, and foster the growth of renewable energy sources like wind and solar.
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Climate Progress: SuperFreaks claim book doesn’t have “a moral or policy perspective.” Yet they wrote, “Any religion, meanwhile, has its heretics, and global warming is no exception” and warming is “at the forefront of public policy.”

 October 27, 2009
Yesterday, SuperFreakonomics co-author Steven Levitt said his book’s erroneous statement on recent global temperature trends was just an attempt at “irony” (see Caldeira — “To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous.” Levitt “said he does not believe there is a cooling trend”!!).
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Climate Progress: Energy and Global Warming News for October 27: Climate change endangers human health

October 27, 2009
Ailing planet seen as bad for human health
Climate change will make Americans more vulnerable to diseases, disasters and heat waves, but governments have done little to plan for the added burden on the health system, according to a new study by a nonprofit group.
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Climate Progress: Green Halloween tips you may not have thought of PLUS when you see kids out trick-or-treating tonight…

October 27, 2009
 
halloween-small.jpg
There’s a whole website GreenHalloween.org.  And everybody’s favorite green website, Treehugger, has a bunch of ideas (reprinted below).
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Climate Progress: Sen. Kerry downplays prospect of floor debate on the climate bill this year; Sen. Alexander is still unaware of staggering cost of nuclear power

October 27, 2009
E&E News (subs. req’d) reports this morning:
International attention on the Senate’s progress on the issue is heightened given the major U.N. climate summit to be held this December in Copenhagen, Denmark. Underscoring that point, Reid yesterday took a call from U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
“The secretary general emphasized the urgency of trying to have some movement in the Senate” before the Copenhagen meeting, Kerry said. “I think we’re going to deliver some movement because we’re working in the EPW Committee to try to get the Kerry-Boxer bill and the chairman’s mark out.”
Meanwhile, Kerry also downplayed the prospect of floor debate on the climate bill this year, signaling instead that committee action is about as far as he expects the Senate can go before the two-week Copenhagen negotiations begin on Dec. 7.
“Bottom line, we’re going to keep working this as hard as we can,” Kerry said. “We’re going to keep moving forward. I’m confident we’ll have some kind of effort, whether it’s out of committee, or out of all the committees, or the working group or whatever, before we go to Copenhagen. We’re going to try to do as much as we can.”
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Climate Progress: New CNN poll finds “nearly six in 10 independents” support cap-and-trade

October 27, 2009
Two weeks ago I blogged that NASA reports hottest June to September on record; NOAA says “weak” El NiƱo “expected to strengthen and last through” winter.
NOAA’s National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center (and most other models) have been predicting for a couple of months that the weak El NiƱo would strengthen, but it hasn’t.  Until now, that is.
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Climate Progess: Rural Electric Cooperatives: Efficiency measures more important than allowance allocations

October 26, 2009
Here’s a  stunner from Climate Wire (subs. req’d) today:
Rural electric cooperatives, which represent many small, coal-dependent utilities in the Midwest and raised a ruckus in the House debate, are eligible for a portion of allowances under the new draft.
But at a conference last week, the head of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association, Glenn English, said “the basis for a deal” on climate would not revolve so much around allowances, but around whether people in coal-dependent regions would get enough help with efficiency retrofits on homes so they can manage potential electricity spikes.
Wow — somebody who would rather have smart policies than more allowances.
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Guidelines for Comments

(Updated 12/9/09)

Comment Policy


This forum has an unrestricted posting system at the moment, but the following types of comments may be deleted after review:
  1. Comments on a thread for rejected comments that were not initially deleted or rejected at the source in question and are not in response to a discussion that's arisen in response to such a comment
  2. Off-topic comments
  3. Abusive or offensive comments
  4. Spam (of course)


Aside from the hard rules above, the tone we're shooting for here is one of thoughtfulness, substantiveness, and a due amount of respect.  Comments will not be judged on the stance they take on any issue, and the fact a comment on this forum has not been deleted in no way means it reflects the administrator's own opinions.

I'm hoping that this will be enough to keep this place running smoothly enough and working towards the goals stated in "About this Blog".

-----

To the first visitor to submit a comment to one of the off-site-related posts:

With apologies, thanks for your visit, and I hope you stick around.  I very much appreciated your honesty, and hope everyone holds to the same level in the future here, but if you're going to open a discussion in a thread for rejected comments, please don't open it up with "I'm not even going to try to post this at..." ;-)

(Anyone with thoughts on how to improve the comments policy is encouraged to share them in the comments here.  Cheers!)

Monday, October 26, 2009

Open Mind: AIC part 1: Kullback-Leibler Divergence

October 5th, 2009

"Warning! This post is mathematical. Disinterested readers beware!
One of the goals of time series analysis is to model the signal underlying the data. If the data have some random element to them, they’ll follow some probability distribution. The distribution might be dependent on external variables (like time), in which case we usually create a model in which the mean of the distribution is time-dependent. Suppose, for example, we model a variable as following a straight line time trend, plus random noise..."

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Climate Progress: Must-read AP story: Statisticians reject global cooling...

Must-read AP story: Statisticians reject global cooling; Caldeira — “To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous.” Levitt “said he does not believe there is a cooling trend”!!

October 26, 2009

"A terrific story by the AP’s Seth Borenstein, “Statisticians reject global cooling,” not only debunks that myth — it will make your head spin once again on error-riddled Superfreakonomics (coauthored by Levitt).
Have you heard that the world is now cooling instead of warming? You may have seen some news reports on the Internet or heard about it from a provocative new book.
Only one problem: It’s not true, according to an analysis of the numbers done by several independent statisticians for The Associated Press."
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Climate Progress: Nature: “Dynamic thinning of Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheet ocean margins is more sensitive, pervasive, enduring and important than previously realized”

October 26th, 2009
"The most detailed satellite information available shows that ice sheets in Greenland and western Antarctica are shrinking faster than scientists thought and in some places are already in runaway melt mode, a new study found….
Using 50 million laser readings from a NASA satellite, scientists for the first time calculated changes in the height of the vulnerable but massive ice sheets and found them especially worse at their edges. That’s where warmer water eats away from below. In some parts of Antarctica, ice sheets have been losing 30 feet a year in thickness since 2003, according to the study….
“To some extent it’s a runaway effect. The question is how far will it run?” said lead author Hamish Pritchard of the British Antarctic Survey. “It’s more widespread than we previously thought.”
That’s from “Study: ‘Runaway’ melt on Antarctica, Greenland,” the pull-no-punches MSNBC story last month.  The full study, “Extensive dynamic thinning on the margins of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets,” was published in Nature (subs. req’d, excerpted below)."

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Climate Progress: Energy and Global Warming News for October 26: Markey expands “clean coal” forged letter investigation

October 26th, 2009
"Markey expands “clean coal” forged letter investigation

A House committee is investigating whether the coal industry’s largest influence group failed to accurately report its lobbying spending to Congress.

The Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming has expanded its investigation into forged letters sent to lawmakers and their ties to the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, according to documents viewed by E&E.

In an Oct. 21 letter, Chairman Ed Markey (D-Mass.) asked ACCCE whether its lobbying disclosure for 2008 and the first half of 2009 should have included work conducted by the Hawthorn Group, a public relations firm hired in part to coordinate efforts to fight the House climate bill."
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Climate Progress: Sen. Boxer on “Telling the Whole Story on Global Warming” plus the witness list for her marathon hearings this week on the clean energy bill

October 26th, 2009

"The Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works launches a full week of hearings this week on the climate and clean energy bill.  You’ll certainly want to tune in (at the EPW website) for first hearing Tuesday, 9:30 ET to hear:
  • Energy Secretary Steven Chu;
  • Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood;
  • Interior Secretary Ken Salazar;
  • U.S. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson; and
  • Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Jon Wellinghoff.
Wellinghoff in particular may be the best Obama appointment you never heard of, who said in April of new nuclear and coal plants:  “We may not need any, ever.” I’ll repost the full witness list for Wednesday and Thursday at the end."

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Climate Progress: Caldeira tells Yale e360: “Thinking of geoengineering as a substitute for emissions reduction is ....


Caldeira tells Yale e360: “Thinking of geoengineering as a substitute for emissions reduction is analogous to saying, ‘Now that I’ve got the seatbelts on, I can just take my hands off the wheel and turn around and talk to people in the back seat.’ It’s crazy…. If I had to wager, I would wager that we would never deploy any geoengineering system.”

October 26, 2009

"Yale Environment 360: I want to start with this little dust-up over SuperFreakonomics. In the book, you are quoted as saying, when it comes to global warming, “Carbon dioxide is not the right villain.” Is that accurate?
Ken Caldeira: That is not accurate. I don’t believe I said anything remotely like that because I believe that we should be outlawing the production of devices that emit carbon dioxide, and I don’t think we can solve this carbon climate problem unless we drastically reduce our carbon dioxide emissions very soon.
e360: They also write that you are convinced that human activity is responsible for “some” global warming. What does that mean?"

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Sunday, October 25, 2009

RealClimate: Climate Cover-Up: A (Brief) Review

October 20th, 2009
"We often allude to the industry-funded attacks against climate change science, and the dubious cast of characters involved, here at RealClimate. In recent years, for example, we’ve commented on disinformation efforts by industry front groups such as the “Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Fraser Institute, and a personal favorite, The Heartland Institute, and by industry-friendly institutions such as the Wall Street Journal editorial board, and other media outlets that assist in the manufacture and distribution of climate change disinformation.
When it comes to the climate change disinformation campaign, we have choosen to focus on the intellectually bankrupt nature of the scientific arguments, rather than the political motivations and the sometimes intriguing money trail. We leave it to others, including organizations such as SourceWatch.org, the sleuths at DeSmogBlog, authors such as Ross Gelbspan (author of The Heat is On, and The Boiling Point), and edited works such as Rescuing Science from Politics to deal with such issues."
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RealClimate: Why Levitt and Dubner like geo-engineering and why they are wrong

October 18th, 2009
"Many commentators have already pointed out dozens of misquotes, misrepresentations and mistakes in the ‘Global Cooling’ chapter of the new book SuperFreakonomics by Ste[ph|v]ens Levitt and Dubner (see Joe Romm (parts I, II, III, IV, Stoat, Deltoid, UCS and Paul Krugman for details. Michael Tobis has a good piece on the difference between adaptation and geo-engineering). Unfortunately, Amazon has now turned off the ’search inside’ function for this book, but you can read the relevant chapter for yourself here (via Brad DeLong). However, instead of simply listing errors already found by others, I’ll focus on why this chapter was possibly written in the first place. (For some background on geo-engineering, read our previous pieces: Climate Change methadone? and Geo-engineering in vogue, Also the Atlantic Monthly “Re-Engineering the Earth” article had a lot of quotes from our own Raypierre)."
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Climate Progress: Bill McKibben’s wrap up of the more than 4300 (!) demonstrations for 350 ppm around the planet

October 25th, 2009
"The great environmental writer and founder of 350.org, Bill McKibben, is the guest blogger.
We’re sitting here in our temporary offices in lower Manhattan hunched over laptops drowning in images—15,000 photos and thousands of minutes of video have arrived from what turned out to be 5,200 rallies, protests, and demonstrations in 181 countries around the world.
It was, according to any number of journalistic accounts, “the most widespread day of political action in the planet’s history.” But here’s the thing that impresses us. There wasn’t a rock star or a movie star or a charismatic politician in sight.  It was ordinary citizens and scientists coming together around a scientific data point."
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Climate Progess: Beck escalates feud with Lindsey Graham: “I’m going to stick with the angry people”; Pence, chair of House GOP Conference, sides with Beck

October 25, 2009
"When we last left Sen. Graham (R-SC), far-right-wingers were, as predicted, going after him for his breakthrough partnership with John Kerry (D-MA).   Teabaggers were trying to “flush” Graham out of the GOP, calling him “traitor” and “RINO” and “wussypants, girly-man, half-a-sissy.”  Graham responded, “We’re not going to be the party of angry white guys.”  Now Beck has responded to Graham, as Think Progress explains:
Graham has previously dismissed Beck as an entertainer who is “aligned with cynicism.” “Only in America can you make that much money crying,” Graham said of Beck. When Beck responded by saying Graham’s criticism was the “highest honor” he’s ever received, Graham reiterated his view that Beck “doesn’t represent the Republican Party".”
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Climate Progess: Investing in a clean energy recovery to create 1.7 million net new jobs

October 25, 2009
 "The Center for American Progress, alongside the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, has undertaken detailed analysis of the impacts that strong climate and clean-energy legislation could have on the U.S. economy. It looked at a suite of policies designed to curb CO2 emissions by driving investment into clean energy technology, and assessed their impact on employment opportunities, economic growth and people’s incomes. This modeling focused on the combined impacts of two federal government initiatives. 1) The set of clean-energy provisions incorporated within the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, initiated by the Obama administration and passed into law by Congress in February, and 2) The recently passed American Clean Energy and Security Act, co-sponsored by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA)."
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Welcome!

This blog is the result of a straw-that-broke-camel's-back rejected attempt to comment - in a polite, relevant and academic manner - on a popular climate-related blog earlier today.

From my own experience, on the blog in question today and on others, and drawing from others' experiences I've come across within the climate blogosphere, it's my personal belief that very often comments are rejected from blogs such as Real Climate and Climate Progress not because they violate their stated comment policies, and not because they're offensive or abusive off-topic, but because they meaningfully take issue with something within the post that authors don't feel comfortable acknowledging or responding to, for whatever specific reason.

This forum is intended as a clearing house for such speech, and hopefully as a more open extension to discussions taking place on some other blogs.

While the initial motivation for this blog was my own personal frustration with certain blogs' approaches to moderation, I genuinely hope this can serve as an open forum, so I plan to keep as free from editorialization as possible.

The general format I plan is to post a link to stories on climate blogs readers have had moderation difficulties with, along with a copy of the source blog's comment policy, if one is explicitly stated.  If someone has attempted to post a non-offensive and on-topic comment on the source blog without luck, they're welcome and encouraged to post it here, preferably within quotes or otherwise indicating it was a rejected comment.

If others feel like responding to previously rejected comments, that's great, and discussion that arise from there are, too.

For more description and a sort-of mission statement, please see the "ABOUT THE BLOG" sidebar on the right of the page.

The whole reason for this forum is to be as open and constructive as possible, so please try to keep the discourse as respectful and on-topic and substantive as possible.

Cheers!

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