Alaska Dispatch

Luckily, former Gov. Palin's Twitter posts yesterday on climate science were only amuse-bouches to the op-ed entrée presented in The Washington Post this morning. In the op-ed, Palin repeats the same criticisms -- based entirely on the release of confidential material from the hacking of the UK's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) -- of climate science and policy deliberations regarding global climate change. She also reiterates her call that President Obama boycott the summit on climate change in Copenhagen. Of interest to Alaska, she recounts her actions as governor to meet the challenges that Alaska faces as the Arctic warms. One action she mentions is the suit she filed against the federal government to block the listing of polar bears on the endangered species list. In the Post editorial, Palin alleges that that listing would have "irreversibly hurt" Alaska's economy and that she stood her ground under severe criticism (but she doesn't mention the negative impact oil and gas tax increases she helped enact as governor may be having on the state's economy). All in all, most of Palin's editorial repeats amateur distortions about the realities of climate change research, especially as it relates to the CRU matter, and there's really nothing new about her formulation of the policy argument. But, it's still worth checking out; read it here. Also, Marc Ambinder from The Atlantic annotated a version of Palin's op-ed; read that here.

Ambinder took issue with quite a bit Palin writes in the Post, but he did not call her out for perpetuating one particular, insidious falsehood, so I will. Palin writes that the famous "hide the decline" phrase from a stolen CRU email refers to a conspiracy to hide information that global temperatures are declining. The writer of that email wasn't talking about global temperature measurements declining. "The decline" refers to temperatures indicated by tree-ring proxies, not actual temperatures, and a robust argument among scientists is going on right now over whether or not tree-rings should be used to reconstruct archaic climate data. The average global temperature is still rising, as it has been since the 1970s. For a good presentation about the emails -- and resulting distortions -- watch this video from a science journalist who started making a series explaining actual climate science before the CRU emails were hacked. Fair warning, though, he gets a little sarcastic, perhaps out of frustration at seeing his hard work being undone in one news-cycle. If you have the time, check out his videos concerning climate change myths -- on both sides of the ideological fight -- here, here, and here.

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