Andrew Weaver: My New Study: Coal is 1500 Times Worse for the Environment than Oil Sands

We asked the question as to how much global warming would occur if we completely burned a variety of fossil fuel resources. Here is what we calculated for the following resources:

1. tar sands under active development: woud add 0.01°C to world temperatures.
2. economically viable tar sands reserve: would add 0.03°C to world temperatures.
3. entire tar sands oil in place which includes the uneconomical and the economical resource: would add 0.36°C to world temperatures
4. total unconventional natural gas resource base: would add 2.86°C to world temperatures
5. total coal resource base: would add 14.8°C to world temperatures

In other words: Coal presents a climate challenge 1500x greater than that presented by the oil sands.

McKitrick responds to Gleick « Climate Audit comment section

[Gleick] I will not comment on the substance or implications of the materials; others have and are doing so.

[Ross McKitrick] Nice cop-out. Having spread false and inflammatory material, it is the coward’s way out now to retreat into silence. You should be out there trying to repair the damage you have done by pointing out that the documents you obtained offer no support for the claims that Heartland is being paid by the fossil fuel industry to undermine the IPCC or dissuade teachers from teaching science, and that the only disinformation campaign going on here is the one you launched.

I only note that the scientific understanding of the reality and risks of climate change is strong, compelling, and increasingly disturbing, and a rational public debate is desperately needed.

To which end you distributed fraudulent and stolen material in order to provoke derision and hostility against people you disagree with. Spare us the high-minded lectures about the need for rational debate.

My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved.

Stop trying to mitigate your own guilt by making scattergun accusations of actions you imagine, without evidence, others to be engaged in, when the reality is, you are the one doing these things. You were the one who engaged in an anonymous and coordinated campaign to attack other scientists and destroy the atmosphere of debate, and yours were the actions lacking transparency. You only deepen your disgrace by trying to hide behind even more innuendo and slander.

Peter Gleick Confesses « Climate Audit

[comment by wws] Steve McIntyre asked: “why did Gleick confess? and why now?”

John Silver’s “limited hangout” is a very good general answer. More specifically, I think it is quite easy to analyze what happened. First, Gleick’s confession has clearly been heavily influenced and edited by legal counsel. When someone uses an email address to obtain documents, it’s actually fairly easy for someone with serious IT skills to track it down, especially when there are serious legal implications. Gleick apparently knows nothing about IT, and it seems a fair guess to say his electronic fingerprints were all over this, Heartland had already found out, and along with their legal demand notice to those who printed the faked documents today they must have let Gleick know that they were beginning legal action specifically aimed at him.

Gleick was worried enough to confer with legal counsel, and said counsel said “Boy, you inna heap’ a trouble!” So this is an attempt to defer civil and/or criminal liability for his actions, AFTER he realized that they had the goods on him.

Of course there’s a problem with his claim that he was sent the fake memo BEFORE he lied to get the other documents, and this mistake may leave him in even bigger legal trouble than before.

IF he got the fake memo BEFORE he got any of the other documents, how come all the internal metadata shows that the fake memo is dated well AFTER all of the other documents, and in fact appears to have been created on the same day that it was released? I think a court (whether it’s civil or criminal) is going to want to see the provenance of the document that Gleick claims he got before all the rest.

Because a cynical man might just suspect that Gleick is still lying, even in his “confession”, and that he wrote that fake document himself AFTER he got all of the other documents and found they wouldn’t suit his purpose. You, know that would explain how some of those other documents are quoted word for word in the fake document that Gleick now claims was written BEFORE any of the others were written.

I suspect that the hole Gleick is in is going to continue to get deeper and deeper.