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In the end, after some false starts and rhetorical meandering, the question was simple: Do you believe that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and contributes to climate change and therefore poses a serious health threat to humans? Al Gore and an overwhelming majority of climate scientists the world over answer a straightforward yes to that question. Most of the Republicans in Congress, however, answer no. Oil and gas climate “researchers” also answer no. Dr. Chris Urbina, the new Director of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment didn’t seem sure how to answer the question, or at least didn’t know how to answer state Republican senators asking him the question at his confirmation hearing Thursday.

Urbina

“Lots of things contribute to air pollution,” Urbina told Republican Sen. Shawn Mitchell. “Things that we produce naturally are contributing to air and water pollution. Human waste. Lots of things … all of those things contribute to that pollution … natural products [like carbon dioxide] do contribute to pollution … whether one of those products contribute more than any others, I would be happy to come back to talk about this very issue….”

Mitchell wasn’t satisfied.

“Will it be your direction in the office that carbon dioxide is a harmful agent that needs to be restricted in output?”

Urbina wasn’t confident to speak on the matter at the moment.

“I need to look more at the detail of the science. I would like to get back to you on this question.”

The carbon dioxide interrogation started with questioning from Republican Sen. Kent Lambert and ended with questions from Mitchell.

Can’t see the audio player? Click here.

Can’t see the audio player? Click here.

Urbina is not a climate scientist. He is a trained medical doctor and has earned impressive degrees and has even more impressive experience in the field of public health.

Mark Salley, spokesman at the Department of Public Health and Environment, told The Colorado Independent that in the short time he has been working with the new director, the two have not had the time to discuss climate change science. Four hours later, neither Salley nor Urbina has called to answer Mitchell’s yes or no question, this time asked by The Colorado Independent.

Americans are used to seeing politicians back each other down on this issue. They’re not used to seeing professionals back down on this issue or cast about for answers when their work lives are based not on public posturing and rhetorical flourishes but on science.

From the governor’s website announcing Urbina’s appointment to the Department:

Urbina earlier worked in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at the University of New Mexico, holding positions of Associate Chair and Associate Professor. He also worked for the New Mexico Health and Environment Department as a district health officer.

Urbina continues to teach in introductory public health courses at the Colorado School of Public Health and at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. He is the current president of the Colorado Public Health Association and serves as a board member for the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in Denver Metro, the Denver Foundation and at Clinica Tepeyac, in addition to being involved in numerous other local health organizations.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Stanford University and a medical degree from the University of Colorado School of Medicine. He completed a family practice residency at the University of New Mexico and earned a master’s degree in public health from Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health. Urbina is board certified in Family Medicine and Preventive Medicine.

Hat tip to Colorado Pols for the audio.

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Former Vice President Al Gore will be in Aspen in February to attend what’s believed to be one of the first major public symposiums linking global climate change to the deteriorating health of forestland in the American West due to ongoing insect infestations and the growing threat of wildfire.

“Forests At Rick: Climate Change & the Future of the American West” is scheduled for Feb. 18 at the Doerr-Hosier Center on the campus of the Aspen Institute. Gore, a Democrat, Nobel laureate and Oscar-winning advocate for reversing the impacts of global climate change, will be the keynote speaker.

Harris Sherman, former head of Colorado’s Department of Natural Resources and current Obama administration undersecretary of agriculture for natural resources and environment (with oversight of the U.S. Forest Service), will kick off the event, which is sponsored by the Aspen-based nonprofit For The Forest.

Several scientists and forest health experts will also speak and conduct workshops throughout the day, culminating in the keynote address by Gore. Deteriorating forest health and the looming threat of catastrophic wildfires were hot topics this summer and fall as major blazes raged in and around Boulder and Winter Park – areas hit by an ongoing mountain pine bark beetle epidemic.

The outbreak is at least partially the result of warmer temperatures that allow beetle larvae to survive the winter months. Drought and warmer summer temperatures also stress lodgepole pines and limit their ability to repel the insects, which ultimately will kill up to 90 percent of the mature lodgepole pines in the state.

There is some debate about whether beetle-killed forests are more susceptible to wildfires and what steps should be taken to mitigate the situation, but most firefighters agree the red, dead trees burn hotter, making it difficult to fight blazes in increasingly populated mountain areas.

Some scientists predict up to half the forests in the American West will be lost to disease and fire during this century.

“Our forests are changing — and quickly,” John Bennett, executive director of For The Forest, said in a release. “While different superficial causes exist, the bottom-line common denominator appears to be the warmer forest temperatures we’re seeing across the West. Increased forest mortality is another calling card of climate change.”

The Aspen symposium, according to Bennett, will try to “reframe the national dialogue about climate change in personal terms that people can relate to. Some people in Colorado may wonder what significance melting glaciers in Antarctica or rising sea levels in the South Pacific have to their lives in the Rocky Mountains, but when they see millions of acres of forests dying across the state, they know immediately why it matters.”

Colorado Independent

One of the standout moments in the last weeks of the heated U.S. Senate race in Colorado pitting Republican Ken Buck against Democrat Michael Bennet came when Buck appeared on the stump with famous climate-change-denying U.S. Senator James Inhofe, who believes global warming theory is a hoax. For a few days in Colorado, climate change was a mainstream news story again, yet another version where climate change was framed as a matter of politics.

That’s an ongoing problem, according to the nineteen MediaClimate scholars, who have just published a book on media coverage of the last two United Nations climate summits called Global Climate, Local Journalisms. The fact that journalists overwhelmingly write about climate change as political news and in stories that lean heavily on politician-lawmakers as sources gives the views of people like Inhofe vastly disproportional power on the issue.

In the popular media, in the U.S. and in countries across the globe, members of the scientific and business community are cited less often than politicians by a wide margin.

“Politics is the avenue through which people come to understand climate change, which may be a way to say that politics is a way people come to misunderstand climate change or, more accurately, how they come to understand mostly just the politics of climate change,” said University of Denver media studies professor Adrienne Russell, one of the authors of the book.

Russell told the Colorado Independent that recent statistics on public perceptions of climate change make more sense when seen in that light. As has been widely reported, climate change denial is increasing among the public even as the science becomes more robust and policy changes to address the issue take effect and the clean energy industry advances.

“In Copenhagen during the last summit, you had new-energy business people trying to tell their stories. Yet reporters from every country were largely quoting only politicians,” Russell said. “Granted, it was a United Nations summit. The big story was what policy would come out of the gathering. Yet, major business and science players were there too.

“Danish Climate Consortium representatives told me that the case they wanted to make at the summit was that alternative energy models developed in Denmark demonstrated that development could successfully take place without adding to global warming. The models show there is money to be made and infrastructure to build and energy to use in a post carbon-fueled world. This is a business topic. The story is that it can be done very successfully. Yet, by comparison to politicians, they were left to wander in the media wilderness.”

A chart from the book on journalism story sourcing at the UN summits:

Other interesting findings related in the book include the fact that reporters from nations more vulnerable to climate change– countries such as Bangladesh and Egypt– write more urgently and often about the topic than reporters based elsewhere. Also, women are rarely included in climate change reporting, making up a scant 12 percent of story sources.

In her chapter of the book, Russell found that coverage of climate change in general and of the climate change summits in particular was more robust online than offline. She said reporters at mainstream outlets were producing way too much material to be reprinted in the newspapers they worked for and that the online work being done by people like New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin, for example, was more insightful and rapid fire and leaned on more diverse sourcing. Revkin’s Dot Earth blog is hosted on the New York Times platform.

Russell said that despite the million laments about the death of journalism brought by the Web, she viewed the coverage she studied for the book being produced by U.S. journalists online as a source of great hope.

“There is real energy and credibility in the material, which is feverishly followed and fact checked in real time by readers and other journalists. The sourcing is different from the sourcing of offline stories, which I think is a welcome change. Significant is that professional models of journalism for a century-plus have been mostly exported from the United States to the rest of the world. In that light, I look at many of the changes in U.S. journalism tied to the Web as a sign of larger changes to come and for the better.”

Inhofe, incidentally, was one politician who got a cool reception in Copenhagen. The few reporters who showed up for the fleeting staircase press conference he called asked him for details to support his claim that a global warming “hoax” has been perpetrated over decades by scientists all over the world.

“It started in the United Nations,” Inhofe said, “and the ones in the United States who really grab ahold of this is the Hollywood elite.”

A reporter for Der Spiegel told him he was ridiculous.

[ Image: Aaron Koblin video of flight patterns over the U.S. About 2 million Americans travel by air every day. ]
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Note: Prof. Adrienne Russell is related to the author of this post.

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Every few years, the public, generally as a result of disappointment or opposition to either the incumbent, the political process, the economy, or certain policies, decides to do the equivalent of a political purge, or “vote the bums out.” Unfortunately, in most cases, all this has done is replace one set of dysfunctional office holders [...]
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The midterm elections brought an unprecedented number of climate skeptics into Congress, with no incoming Republicans acknowledging the existence of man-made climate change. Environmentalists have all but given up on passing significant climate legislation in the near future, but in the long term, it may be difficult for climate skeptics to hold their ranks: Young Americans are significantly more concerned about global warming than older generations, and there are no major organizations of young climate skeptics.

UPPA/ZUMApress.com

This raises the question: What will come of climate skeptics as young people begin to rise to positions of power?

The Washington Independent put this question to Warren Meyer, who runs the website climate-skeptic.com. Meyer, in an email, said younger generations are drawn to “the ‘civilization in peril’ line,” and he suggested that people’s views change over time. “The lack of teenage skeptics today is meaningless for whether there will be skeptics in 20 years,” he said.

Meyer said young people will eventually become more attuned to the economic cost associated with lowering greenhouse gas emissions. “This seems really compelling to the young,” he said. “Until you understand that on the other side of the equation is a 100% chance of really high economic costs.”

There is evidence to suggest that older people care much more about the cost of policies like cap-and-trade than younger people. A June National Journal/Society for Human Resources Management poll shows that while 65 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds favor “protecting the environment” — to 29 percent concerned with “keeping prices low” — those numbers change for older people: 40 percent of people over 65 care about protecting the environment, while 47 percent are concerned with keeping prices low.

Overall though, the issue breaks down along party lines. A recent Pew Research Center poll found that about 79 percent of Democrats and just 38 percent of Republicans believe the earth is warming. Among Republicans who identify with the Tea Party, just 23 percent say there is solid evidence of climate change. The majority of Tea Partiers are over 45, with just 7 percent between the ages of 18 and 29, according to an April New York Times poll.

In an effort to find young people who question the science behind global warming, I allowed Meyer to put a call out on his blog. During the last several weeks, I’ve heard from about half a dozen young people who question climate science.

Andrew Funk, a 27-year-old biologist at the Department of Agriculture, is one of those people. Funk rejects the term climate skeptic in favor of “rational optimist.” In a phone conversation, Funk said he believe climate science is “pretty shaky.” He added, “I think it’s a shaky platform to re-engineer large portions of society.”

In a city flush with young Democrats, Funk said he has found a small group of like-minded individuals. “I end up hanging out with friends that are more independent, a little more libertarian-minded,” he said.

Other skeptics preferred to remain anonymous. For example, one 26-year-old graduate student at the University of Maryland said in an email:

It would be imprudent of me to let my heterodoxy on this issue be publicly known, as, sadly, I feel this has become more of a political matter in academic circles than a scientific one. I would rather my name not be associated with dissent on this matter.

The student’s comments say a great deal about the way young people think about climate change and the potential implications for somebody who questions the broad scientific consensus on the issue.

Anthony Watts, a prominent climate skeptic who runs the popular and controversial site “Watts Up With That,” blamed the “liberal” education system for the lack of young climate skeptics. “I suppose such a group would be unlikely because our children are conditioned by textbooks and a generally liberal education process to believe in the [man-made global warming] premise as factual and without question,” he said.

“In colleges, there are so many activist groups recruiting to ‘save the planet’ that skepticism generally gets drowned in the cacophony,” he added.

Maura Cowley, national director of the Sierra Student Coalition, organizes the types of “save the planet” activists Watts criticizes. “My opinion is that this whole dialogue will just fade into the past,” she said. “If you look at the millennial generation, you look at a generation that is savvy and soon to be the best educated generation.”

Cowley said young people recognize what’s at stake if nothing is done to address climate change “It’s really clear that this generation has the most to lose with this issue,” she said. “I think that’s a big part of the reason they care about this.”

Polling shows that climate skepticism has increased significantly in the last couple of years, as the issue has heated up in Congress. A recent Pew Research Center poll shows that between April 2008 and October 2009 — a period that saw the passage of a cap-and-trade bill in the House and the beginning of debate on a similar bill in the Senate — the percentage of Americans who believe there is “solid evidence” that the earth is warming fell drastically, from 71 percent to 57 percent.

Joe Romm, a former Clinton administration official who now runs the popular blog Climate Progress, said any effort to address climate change in Congress will run into opposition from a number of powerful industry interests.

“The disinformation campaign is incredibly well funded,” he said. “There’s a staggering amount of money in it.

But he said the effects of climate change will become more obvious over time, forcing skeptics to change their tune. “Come 2020 we’re going to be desperate to respond to global warming and the skeptics will be condemned,” he said.

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