‘Green News Report’ – November 22, 2011

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IN TODAY’S RADIO REPORT: Meet the world’s newest oil spill, now in Brazil and starring Chevron!; Supercommittee FAIL a big win for Big Oil; Confirmed again: Extreme weather is the New Normal; Bye-bye oysters; PLUS: Surprise! Fox News deceives its viewers on climate change, or the more you watch Fox, the less you know … All that and more in today’s Green News Report!

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IN ‘GREEN NEWS EXTRA’ (see links below): Not-so-fresh round of hacked climate science emails leaked online; TX towns will run out of water in 2 weeks; Hackers target US water utility; Future cancers from Fukushima plant may be hidden; Solyndra accounts for less than 2% of the DOE’s loan program; Scientists slam BLM’s coal-friendly slant on climate change; Obama Says Climate Threat ‘Cannot Be Denied’… PLUS: The art of talking about climate science … and much, MUCH more! …

STORIES DISCUSSED IN TODAY’S ‘GREEN NEWS REPORT’…

• VIDEO: The GOP War on the EPA, starring Sen. Rand Paul (R-Coal): Rachel Maddow Interviews EPA’s Lisa Jackson: (The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC):
• Mitt Romney Goes Glenn Beck: ‘I Exhale Carbon Dioxide’ (Think Progress Green)
• Meet the World’s Newest Oil Spill, Now in Brazil!:
• VIDEO: Chevron Press Conference on Brazil Oil Leak (AFP YouTube)
• Chevron, Transocean Spill May Trigger Fines, Bans in Brazil (BusinessWeek)
• Chevron Says Brazil Oil Spill Reduced to ‘Residual’ Seepage (BusinessWeek)
• SuperCommittee FAIL a Big Win for Big Oil:
• VIDEO: Press Conference: Obama addresses supercommittee’s failure (CBS News)
• Super Committee Collapse Leaves Big Oil Subsidies Untouched (Think Progress Green)
• Bye Bye, Oysters (And Other Things With Shells):
• Northwest Oyster Die-offs Show Ocean Acidification Has Arrived (Yale 360) [emphasis added]:
  The acidification of the world’s oceans from an excess of CO2 emissions has already begun, as evidenced recently by the widespread mortality of oyster larvae in the Pacific Northwest. Scientists say this is just a harbinger of things to come if greenhouse gas emissions continue to soar.
  …
  Because of the way seawater circulates around the world, the deep water now washing ashore in Oregon and Washington is actually 30 to 50 years old and absorbed its CO2 long before the fall of the Berlin Wall. This time lag is important because oceans absorb about 50 percent of the CO2 released by burning fossil fuels, emissions that have been rising dramatically in recent decades. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) ocean acidity has increased approximately 30 percent since the Industrial Revolution, and if we continue our current rate of carbon emissions, global oceans could be 150 percent more acidic by the end of the century than they have been for 20 million years.
• Climate change pantry raid: Oysters (Grist):
  Here’s the current list of delicious foods that climate change is going to take away: pecan pie, chocolate, coffee, wine, bacon, peanut butter. Now, a new addition: oysters.
• Confirmed, AGAIN: Extreme Weather Is the New Normal:
• IPCC Report: We Are Poisoning Our Weather (Think Progress Green) [emphasis added]:
  The world’s climate scientists agree that humanity is poisoning the weather with fossil fuel pollution, making extreme weather more dangerous and deadly.
  …
  A special report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change summarizes some of the latest scientific findings, which paint a dire picture of increasing disaster for a largely unprepared civilization:

  “We need to be worried,” said one of the study’s lead authors, Maarten van Aalst, director of the International Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre in the Netherlands.

• Concise Overview: The IPCC report on extreme climate and weather events (Real Climate)
• READ the IPCC Report: Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)
• TV Media Ignore Extreme Weather Report (Media Matters):
  Last week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a summary report on the risks posed by climate disasters. The report says climate change will likely worsen certain extreme weather events like heat waves, floods, droughts and storms.
  …
  The panel’s findings have been reported by every major print outlet in the U.S., but have been almost entirely ignored by the television news media, including CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, ABC and CBS. The only mention of the U.N. report on a major TV news outlet was a segment on NBC Nightly News.
• World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns: If fossil fuel infrastructure is not rapidly changed, the world will ‘lose for ever’ the chance to avoid dangerous climate change (Guardian UK) [emphasis added]:
  The world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels, and the last chance of combating dangerous climate change will be “lost for ever”, according to the most thorough analysis yet of world energy infrastructure.
  …
  “The door is closing,” Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, said. “I am very worried – if we don’t change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety]. The door will be closed forever.”
• Surprise! Fox News Deceives Its Viewers on Climate Change:
• Study Confirms: Fox News Creates Alternate Reality On Climate Science (Media Matters):
  Published by The International Journal Of Press/Politics, the study examined primetime cable news broadcasts from 2007 and 2008, and found that Fox “discussed climate change most often,” but “the tone of its coverage was disproportionately dismissive.”
• Fox News Climate Denial Dominates Cable News (Think Progress Green)
• TV Media Ignore Extreme Weather Report (Media Matters):
  Last week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a summary report on the risks posed by climate disasters. The report says climate change will likely worsen certain extreme weather events like heat waves, floods, droughts and storms.
  …
  The panel’s findings have been reported by every major print outlet in the U.S., but have been almost entirely ignored by the television news media, including CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, ABC and CBS. The only mention of the U.N. report on a major TV news outlet was a segment on NBC Nightly News.
• FLASHBACK: FOXLEAKS: Fox boss ordered staff to cast doubt on climate science (Media Matters, 12/15/2010)
• PLUS: The MORE You Watch Fox, the LESS You Know:
• STUDY: Some News Leaves People Knowing LESS (Fairleigh Dickinson University) [emphasis added]:
  The conclusion: Sunday morning news shows do the most to help people learn about current events, while some outlets, especially Fox News, lead people to be even less informed than those who say they dont watch any news at all.
  …
  “Because of the controls for partisanship, we know these results are not just driven by Republicans or other groups being more likely to watch Fox News,” said Dan Cassino, a professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson and an analyst for the PublicMind Poll. “Rather, the results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these questions than those who don’t watch any news at all.”
• VIDEO: Fox Asks Viewers: Is Global Warming “A Real Threat Or An Attack On Capitalism?” (Media Matters)
• Some News Makes You Know Less (Political Wire)
• New public study: Watching Fox News makes you dumber (Daily Kos)
• FLASHBACK: Univ. of MA Study: Fox News Viewers Often Misinformed (Political Wire, 12/10/2011)
• Erratic, Extreme Day-To-Day Weather Puts Climate Change in New Light (ScienceDaily):
  The first climate study to focus on variations in daily weather conditions has found that day-to-day weather has grown increasingly erratic and extreme, with significant fluctuations in sunshine and rainfall affecting more than a third of the planet.
• Global Temps `Virtually Certain’ to Rise: UN (Bloomberg News) [emphasis added]:
  The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change whirrs into action this week with a significant assessment of extreme events and disasters.
  ….
  The panel says it’s “virtually certain” that warm daily temperature extremes will increase in this century. It’s “likely” that human influences have led to a warming of extreme daily minimum and maximum temperatures across the globe, and that instances of heavy rainfall will increase. The report finds the average maximum wind speed of hurricanes is likely to increase, though storm frequency is likely to drop or remain the same.

  “Likely” or “virtually certain” imply precision in science that’s generally absent from everyday speech. So when they say “virtually certain,” they’re using a definition of 99 to 100 percent probability. “Very likely” is 90 to 100 percent, and “likely” is 66 to 100 percent.

• NBC’s Must-See TV: “Today No One Can Deny That Extreme Weather is Here to Stay” Thanks to Fossil-Fuel Driven Warming (Climate Progress)

‘GREEN NEWS EXTRA’ (Stuff we didn’t have time for in today’s audio report)…

• Fresh round of hacked climate science emails leaked online: A file containing 5,000 emails has been made available in an apparent attempt to repeat the impact of 2009’s similar release (Guardian UK):
  A fresh tranche of private emails exchanged between leading climate scientists throughout the last decade was released online on Tuesday. The unauthorised publication is an apparent attempt to repeat the impact of a similar release of emails on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit in late 2009.
• Climategate 2.0: Have Journalists Learned Their Lesson? (Think Progress Green)
• Memo To Media: Research First, Then Report On Climate Emails (Media Matters)
• Did Foreign Hackers Target U.S. Water Plant? Or Someone Closer to Home?: (Washington Post):
  Despite misleading and poorly sourced reports, it now appears that a successful and damaging cyberattack on a Springfield, Ill., water utility may have used a variant of the Stutznet worm. Reports have raised the question of whether the U.S. government, along with Israel, was involved in developing it.
• Future cancers from Fukushima plant may be hidden (AP) [emphasis added]:
  Even if the worst nuclear accident in 25 years leads to many people developing cancer, we may never find out. Looking back on those early days of radiation horror, that may sound implausible.

  But the ordinary rate of cancer is so high, and our understanding of the effects of radiation exposure so limited, that any increase in cases from the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster may be undetectable.
  …
  That’s partly because cancer is one of the top killers of people in industrialized nations. Odds are high that if you live long enough, you will die of cancer. The average lifetime cancer risk is about 40 percent.

• Solyndra Accounts For Less Than 2% of the DOE’s Successful Loan Program (Daily Kos)
• Scientists Slam BLM’s Coal-Friendly Slant On Climate Change (Think Progress Green):
  The BLM did not analyze the effects of mining and burning this coal on global climate change because, it claimed, “existing climate prediction models are not at a scale sufficient to estimate potential impacts of climate change within the analysis area.”

  Dr. Werner Aeschbach-Hertig, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Heidelberg’s Institute of Environmental Physics, says the BLM reasoning “makes scientifically no sense.”

• VIDEO: Down Under, Obama Says Climate Threat ‘Cannot Be Denied,’ U.S. Has ‘Responsibility To Lead’ (Think Progress Green) [emphasis added]:
  “We need growth that is sustainable,” President Barack Obama said last week 20 minutes into his address to the Australian government. “This includes the clean energy that creates green jobs and combats climate change, which cannot be denied. We see it in the stronger fires, the devastating floods, the Pacific islands confronting rising seas,” Obama continued, talking about climate change in a way he has rarely done in his own country. “And as countries with large carbon footprints, the United States and Australia have a special responsibility to lead.”
• Texas town faces loss of water (UPI) [emphasis added]:
  A small town in Texas in the grip of record-setting drought faces the possibility it will run out of water by the first week in December, officials said. Groesbeck is one of 11 cities and communities on a state agency list of those most at risk of running out of water in six months if there is no significant rain.
• The Art of Talking About Climate Science: (Grist):
  For many scientists, the moral dimensions of their work are self-evident. But articulating them is risky.
  …
  Four of Somerville and Hassol’s recommendations seem most important and most appropriate for scientists…..
• Walmart’s promised green product rankings fall off the radar (Grist)
• Essential Climate Science Findings:
• VIDEO ANIMATION: Time history of atmospheric CO2 (NOAA Carbon Tracker YouTube channel):
• Skeptical Science: Get the FULL DEBUNKING of All Climate Science Denier Arguments
• World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns: If fossil fuel infrastructure is not rapidly changed, the world will ‘lose for ever’ the chance to avoid dangerous climate change (Guardian UK) [emphasis added]:
  The world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels, and the last chance of combating dangerous climate change will be “lost for ever”, according to the most thorough analysis yet of world energy infrastructure.
  …
  “The door is closing,” Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, said. “I am very worried – if we don’t change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety]. The door will be closed forever.”