AP, WSJournal, NYT, and more: National Academy panel tells Congress to tax, cap, do anything to pole-ax carbon emissions
Now comes the counter-attack from the academy – with a capital A. Yesterday – as seen one post down – AP‘s Seth Borenfeld was one of several who moved quickly to cover a message from the National Academy of Sciences to Congress on the persistent conviction among most academics who study such things that the climate is moving rapidly into a state that ought to induce fear. Ergo, drop the blinders and do something about it. Slap on a fat tax, disguise it as cap and trade, whatever, just write the legislation and vote yes. (And a report from a NASA-NOAA-&international team in Nature today underscores things with details on how much the oceans are heating up – let’s see somebody blame that on freakin’ urban heat islands.) These are my words, not the academy’s, but judging by press reports it suits the mood.
The report is really a set of three documents from the academies’ National Research Council (including National Academy of Engineering and Institute of Medicine). The illus here is just one portion grabbed from one of the reports. The NRC’s job it is to put together just such reports as these by gathering up committees of the top, pertinent brains in a field. These three missives, it appears, reveal what the scientists really think and without hiding it entirely behind a cloud of maybes and error bars (and typical use of the latter reflects, one must say, the glorious employment of doubt that distinguishes scientific method from denialism, rumor, and theology).
One hopes White House science adviser John Holdren and DOE Sec’y Steve Chu, these documents in hand (and on thumb drive and iPad or Slate or whatever), are marching around Congress, the West Wing, and Cabinet-level agencies to enter fancy offices for earnest conversation. Um, not that I’m anything but an objective journalist about this. I’ve been getting steadily more scared during 30+ years covering climate science. Can’t help that – hearing the drumbeat not from opportunistic greenies, but the sober people at AGU and similar research meetings.
It may have been difficult for many reporters to pour much energy into this story. It may be more emphatic and more politically pointed than most such things, but the essential facts have been reported so many times that it looks like what we used to call boilerplate. So it goes in the news biz, and most of America’s A-list news outlets covered it even if they didn’t all give it great play. An angle to explore (again): With all the delays since the Earth Summit 20 years ago in Rio, is it too late, practically, to do anything as drastic as this report asks? History, one surmises, will not be kind to us on Earth now.
More Stories :
- NYTimes – John Broder : U.S. Science Body Urges Action on Climate ; Buried way inside – shoved aside in part, one supposes, by the more enterprising piece on gov’t's tepid use of scientific tools in reacting to the gulf oil spill up on p. 1. ; Also in the Times Andrew C. Revkin (Dot Earth blog): Academies (Again) Seek Climate Action ; despite the (again), Revkin calls the reports invaluable.
- Wall St. Journal – Gautam Naik: Scientists Reassert Man’s Role in a Changing Climate ;
- USA Today – Dan Vergano: 3 climate change reports: Set prices on carbon emissions; He lifts to prominence a curious side-aspect of the reports. They were requested during the Bush administration.
- LA Times – Thomas H. Maugh II : National Academy of Sciences urges strong action to cut greenhouse gases ;
- NPR – Christopher Joyce: U.S. Scientists Urge Action on Climate Change ; First words in the text version: “The nation’s pre-eminent scientific organization…” That’ll grab some (smart) readers. Others will get glazed eyeballs or start snorting. Sigh. And meeting the report’s goals, as it itself says, will according to one stop source require the “invention of technologies that don’t exist yet.” Point made, complete with redundancy.
- Christian Science Monitor – Pete Spotts : March and April warmest ever. Humans must adapt, report says. Nice tie of another piece of spot news to this report. And one is unsure, at an on line pub, between blog “Pete” posts and full-on “Peter Spotts” stories.
- Washington Times – Stephen Dinan: Scientists defend global warming work ; It’s the hed one expects for a pub whose readers mostly don’t believe climate is changing enough to warrant any action, esp. taxes. Fourth word: climategate. It leads on that – but does give the report’s authors their say too.
- San Francisco Chronicle – David Perlman: As oceans get warmer, Congress is facing heat ;
Grist for the Mill:
NRC Press Release ; NRC Full Report links ;
- Charlie Petit
