elevatedtrain:

I was able to experience Mr. Hightower’s family’s land before it was demolished by TransCanada. My time there was very enlightening and I enjoyed hearing the stories he and his family members shared with us. Any hope of regrowing his vinyard was shattered today when heavy machinery leveled the land taking the vine roots with it. This is what the pipeline is doing to people’s property. Get informed and get active. http://tarsandsblockade.org/

letterstomycountry:

futurejournalismproject:

CIA Rejects Freedom of Information Act Request for Climate Data

Via Secrecy News:

When the Central Intelligence Agency established a Center on Climate Change and National Security in 2009, it drew fierce opposition from congressional Republicans who disputed the need for an intelligence initiative on this topic. But now there is a different, and possibly better, reason to doubt the value of the Center: It has adopted an extreme view of classification policy which holds that everything the Center does is a national security secret.

Last week, the CIA categorically denied (pdf) a request under the Freedom of Information Act for a copy of any Center studies or reports concerning the impacts of global warming.

“We completed a thorough search for records responsive to your request and located material that we determined is currently and properly classified and must be denied in its entirety…,” wrote CIA’s Susan Viscuso to requester Jeffrey Richelson, an intelligence historian affiliated with the National Security Archive.

With some effort, one can imagine records related to climate change that would be properly classified. Such records might, for example, include information that was derived from classified collection methods or sources that could be compromised by their disclosure. Or perhaps such records might present analysis reflecting imminent threats to national security that would be exacerbated rather than corrected by publicizing them.

But that’s not what CIA said. Rather, it said that all of the Center’s work is classified and there is not even a single study, or a single passage in a single study, that could be released without damage to national security. That’s a familiar song, and it became tiresome long ago.

Image: Global Temperature Trends via NOAA Environmental Visualization Laboratory.

Very interesting.  Normally it would be easy to jump to the conclusion that this data indicates global warming is a national security threat, but…oh wait, we probably can based on past statements:

Interest in climate change as a national security  issue developed even later. Although the Central  Intelligence Agency (CIA) did commission a study to  look into the security implications of climate change in  the late 1970s, the issue had little resonance until the  late 1990s when the Senate Armed Services Committee  declared that environmental destruction, including  global warming, was “a growing national security  threat.”  The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate  Change (IPCC) was created in 1995 in part to allay  fears.  And then, in 2003, the rather notorious report  commissioned by the Pentagon, “An Abrupt Climate  Change Scenario and its Implications for United States  National Security,” provided a worst-case scenario,  which suggested that climate change might have a  catastrophic impact, leading to rioting and nuclear  war.

The question then becomes: is the CIA using technology/methodologies that our civilian Climate Scientists don’t have?  Doubtful, in my view.  More likely that they just want to classify everything possible so nobody knows what’s going on, even when the objects of classification are trivial.

jtotheizzoe:

The Damaging Impact of Roy Spencer’s Science … or, “How to Lose Credibility and Alienate Fellow Scientists”

Back in July, a climate researcher named Roy Spencer published a paper that was hyped by climate skeptics to blow a hole in warming models that would sink the Titanic. He used satellite data to make a case that far more heat was escaping into space than we currently think, and that this was prime evidence that climate change is being overblown as a risk.

He is, and was wrong. Of course that didn’t stop “major news outlets” from publishing the work like it was the Watergate papers (thanks, Fox News). However, mainstream climate scientists tore the work to shreds almost as soon as it was released (with no such fanfare, of course).

Dr. Spencer has a history of researching “against the grain”. He also has a history of being wrong.

It gets even better! That work from July that was so hyped and was supposed to sink the threat of global warming? The editor of the journal it was published in resigned on Friday, apologizing that the work was ever published under his watch. He clearly stated that it did not receive proper peer review and should be viewed as such.

It’s sad that this news comes on a holiday weekend here in the U.S., and that the news outlets so eager to publish the hype will make no such effort for the rebuttal and discrediting of that work. We saw this last month when Dr. Michael Mann was cleared of wrongdoing in the “ClimateGate” non-controversy (again).

It’s up to us to spread the word and report, I guess. Climate science is a danger, and the world deserves better effort from the media than this.

they displayed (via Climate Central)

jtotheizzoe:

Rick Perry: Climate Change Is A Hoax Drummed Up By Scientists Looking To Make Money

How do you engage in climate debate with people who think it’s acceptable to lie with such enormous testicular fortitude? I mean, the set of brass balls on Gov. Perry’s lies here would sink the Titanic under their own weight.

(via TPMDC)