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Abstract: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – comprised of top climate scientists from around the globe – has reached consensus that human activities have contributed significantly to global climate change. However, over time, the United States has refused to join concerted international efforts – such as the Kyoto Protocol – to curb human activities contributing to climate change. US newspaper and television media constitute key influences among a set of complex dynamics shaping information dissemination in this politicized environment. Mass-media coverage of climate change is not simply a random amalgam of newspaper articles and television segments; rather, it is a social relationship between scientists, policy actors and the public that is mediated by such news packages. This paper demonstrates that consistent adherence to interacting journalistic norms has contributed to impediments in the coverage of anthropogenic climate change science. Through analysis of US newspaper and television coverage of human contributions to climate change from 1988 through 2004, this paper finds that adherence to first-order journalistic norms – personalization, dramatization, and novelty – significantly influence the employment of second-order norms – authority-order and balance – and that this has led to informationally deficient mass-media coverage of this crucial issue. By critically scrutinizing US print and television media as a ‘public arena,’ we improve understanding of how journalistic activities have shaped interactions at the interface with climate science, policy and the public. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The U.S. National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change was a federally coordinated nationwide effort that involved thousands of experts and stakeholders. To draw lessons from this effort, the 10 authors of this paper, half of whom were not involved in the Assessment, developed and administered an extensive survey, prepared a series of working papers, and conducted an invitational workshop in Washington, DC, on April 29, 2004. Considering all these sources, the authors conclude that the Assessment was largely successful in implementing its basic design of distributed stakeholder involvement and in achieving its basic objectives. Future assessments could be significantly improved if greater attention were devoted to developing a collective understanding of objectives, preparing guidance materials and providing training for assessment participants, developing a budgeting mechanism which would allow greater freedom in allocating resources across various assessment activities, and creating an environment in which assessments were part of an ongoing process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars and journalists alike interpreted “A Southern Baptist Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change”, a document released in 2008 by a group of American Southern Baptists, as evidence that American evangelicals were becoming increasingly concerned about the environment. Using the tools of textual analysis, I show that this was not the only interpretation of the document at play. While journalists and scholars understood the Declaration as addressing the need to halt climate change, for a group of key Southern Baptist signatories, the document expressed a need for Southern Baptists to engage more actively in the public environmental discourse, lest they relinquish this domain to secular and liberal voices. Critically, the latter group viewed the Declaration as compatible with climate scepticism. My analysis shows how cultural context informs climate change attitudes, while also suggesting socio-historical factors—particularly evangelicals’ embattled mentality—that may support climate change scepticism in Southern Baptist circles. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Global climate change is one of the most serious challenges humans currently face. The US courts have been called upon to adjudicate disputes concerning the proper way to confront this challenge. Most recently, the US Supreme Court faced one such dispute in Massachusetts v. E.P.A. Faced with a question of what to do, and the legal mandate of a federal agency, with a question of natural background rates of warming, the Court decided the issue upon narrow constitutional grounds. In so doing, the authors contend that the Court sidestepped a significant issue of how the US Courts understand and handle important questions of statistical evidence. Repeatedly, disputes are brought to court that are questions to be resolved by determining nothing more that the difference between a base rate and another rate. Yet, the authors' research has shown this simple principle is addressed rarely, and sometimes not appropriately. The authors call for more education in math and statistics for the legal profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The public choice model of rent-seeking economics is used to analyze the behaviour of firms, interest groups and scientists participating in efforts to impose climate change cap-and-trade regulations of greenhouse gasses in the USA. This may serve as a case study for the entire world. Yandle's "Bootleggers and Baptists" model and McChesney's model "money for nothing" are used to explain the formation, motives and interests of the groups lobbying for or against this type of regulation. The eco-industrial complex includes firms seeking favorable treatment under cap-and-trade regime, scientists relying on the global warming panic to keep research funds flowing and environmentalist NGOs interested in setting the public agenda and attracting grants and donations. According to our analysis nuclear and renewable energy firms are acting as bootleggers (who profit from legally restricted energy market), while the oil firms are behaving as agents paying protection money) to politicians and NGOs for not demanding harmful public regulation (legal extortion, i.e. "money for nothing"). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Erosion along the West Coast of the United States is affected by climate controls that include a trend of increasing wave heights during at least the past 25 years that might be related to global warming and the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) range between El Niños and La Niñas that affects both annual wave conditions and monthly mean water levels that raise tidal elevations. These processes are analyzed for sites from Washington to south-central California, revealing a latitude dependence of the individual processes and how their combinations affect total water levels at the shore, which is important to beach and property erosion. Particularly significant on the coast of the Pacific Northwest (Washington and Oregon) has been the progressive decadal increases in deep-water wave heights and periods, which have increased breaker heights and elevated storm wave runup levels on beaches. Along the entire West Coast, the annual variations in wave conditions above and below any progressive decadal increase are controlled by the North Pacific index (NPI), the atmospheric pressure difference between the Hawaiian High and Aleutian Low, and the ENSO range, as demonstrated by a strong correlation with the multivariate ENSO index (MEl), with the highest wave conditions occurring during El Niños. In addition, the ENSO range is particularly important in controlling mean water levels, causing tides to reach their highest elevations during El Niños, again shown by correlations with MEIs along the entire West Coast. With El Niños producing increased deep-water wave heights, runup levels on beaches, and elevated tides, the total water levels at the shore from the combined processes are significantly higher compared with normal or La Niña years, resulting in episodes of major property erosion along the entire US West Coast. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The glaciers in the Blackfoot - Jackson Glacier Basin of Glacier National Park, Montana, decreased in area from 21.6 square kilometers in 1850 to 7.4 kilometers in 1979. Over this same period global temperatures increased by 0.45 degrees C. We analyzed the climatic causes and ecological consequences of glacier retreat by creating spatially explicit models of the creation and ablation of glaciers and of the response of vegetation to climate change. We determined the melt rate and spatial distribution of glaciers under two possible future climate scenarios, one based on carbon dioxide-induced global warming and the other on a linear temperature extrapolation. Under the former scenario, all glaciers in the basin will disappear by the year 2030, despite predicted increases in precipitation; under the latter, melting is slower. Using a second model, we analyzed vegetation responses to variations in soil moisture and increasing temperature in a complex alpine landscape and predicted where plant communities are likely to be located as conditions change.

Discusses the response of U.S. policymakers on reports concerning global warming and climate change. Nature of ecological climate-change research; Review of the government's draft strategic plan on global climate-change research; Evidence of the existence of a global fingerprint of climate-change effects in natural systems.