MORE MUST READ TIDBITS: Kevin Trenberth on ocean heat content, changing trade winds, mechanism for heat to be carried down deeper in the ocean

Global warming is here to stay, whichever way you look at it

by Kevin Trenberth, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, The Conversation, May 22, 2013

Has global warming stalled? This question is increasingly being asked because the local weather seems cool and wet, or because the global mean temperature is not increasing at its earlier rate or the long-term rate expected from climate model projections.

The answer depends a lot on what one means by “global warming.” For some it is equated to the “global mean temperature.” That keeps going up but also has ups and downs from year to year. More on that shortly.

Why should it go up? Well, because the planet is warming as a result of human activities. With increasing carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, there is an imbalance in energy flows in and out of the top of the atmosphere: the greenhouse gases increasingly trap more radiation and hence create warming. “Warming” really means heating, and this can exhibit itself in many ways.

Rising surface temperatures are just one manifestation. Melting Arctic sea ice is another. So is melting of glaciers and other land ice that contribute to rising sea levels. Increasing the water cycle and invigorating storms is yet another. But most (more than 90%) of the energy imbalance goes into the ocean, and several analyses have now shown this. But even there, how much warms the upper layers of the ocean, as opposed to how much penetrates deeper into the ocean where it may not have much immediate influence, is a key issue.

The ups and downs of global temperature

My colleagues and I have just published a new analysis showing that in the past decade about 30% of the heat has been dumped at levels below 700 meters, where most previous analyses stop.

The first point is that this is fairly new; it is not there throughout the record. The cause of the shift is a particular change in winds, especially in the Pacific Ocean where the subtropical trade winds have become noticeably stronger, changing ocean currents and providing a mechanism for heat to be carried down into the ocean. This is associated with weather patterns in the Pacific, which are in turn related to the La Niña phase of the El Niño phenomenon.

The second point is that we have found distinctive variations in global warming with El Niño. A mini global warming, in the sense of a global temperature increase, occurs in the latter stages of an El Niño event, as heat comes out of the ocean and warms the atmosphere. The ocean’s temperature is also affected by volcanic eruptions, which also affect the perceptions of global warming.

Normal weather also interferes by generating clouds that reflect the sunshine, and there are fluctuations in the global energy imbalance from month to month. But these average out over a year or so.

Another prominent source of natural variability in the Earth’s energy imbalance is changes in the sun itself, seen most clearly as the sunspot cycle. From 2005 to 2010 the sun went into a quiet phase and the warming energy imbalance is estimated to have dropped by about 10 to 15%.

Some of the penetration of heat into the depths of the ocean is reversible, as it comes back in the next El Niño [whenever that is -- no signs of one for the rest of this year]. But a lot is not; instead it contributes to the overall warming of the deep ocean. This means less short-term warming at the surface, but at the expense of greater long-term warming, and faster sea level rise. So this has consequences.

Global warming is here to stay

Coming back to the global temperature record, one thing is clear. The past decade is by far the warmest on record. Human-induced global warming really kicked in during the 1970s, and warming has been pretty steady since then.

While the overall warming is about 0.16 °C per decade, there are three 10-year periods where there was a hiatus in warming, as the graph above shows, from 1977 to 1986, from 1987 to 1996, and from 2001 to 2012. But at each end of these periods there were big jumps. We find exactly the same sort of flat periods in climate model projections, lasting easily up to 15 years in length.

Focusing on the wiggles and ignoring the bigger picture of unabated warming is foolhardy, but an approach promoted by climate change deniers. Global sea level keeps marching up at a rate of more than 30 cm per century since 1992 (when global measurements via altimetry on satellites were made possible), and that is perhaps a better indicator that global warming continues unabated. Sea level rise comes from both the melting of land ice, thus adding more water to the ocean, plus the warming and thus expanding ocean itself.

Global warming is manifested in a number of ways, and there is a continuing radiative imbalance at the top of atmosphere. The current hiatus in surface warming is temporary, and global warming has not gone away.

Kevin Trenberth does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.


This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

http://theconversation.com/global-warming-is-here-to-stay-whichever-way-you-look-at-it-14532

Russia abandoning its North Pole research station due to thin ice breaking up

Russia abandoning ice station

Guest Post by R. Gates on Neven's Arctic Sea Ice Blog, May 23, 2013

Russia has ordered an "urgent" evacuation of its drifting ice station known as North Pole-40 that sits on top Arctic sea ice, because of disintegrating sea ice that is posing dangerous conditions to reseachers. This is one more indication that the thickness of the ice is now getting very thin at places it was not before, a metric not fully captured in the extent and area data.

Barents Observer reports:

Floating research station in need of evacuation

The scientific research station was placed on the ice floe in October 2012 and was planned to stay there until September. Now the floe has already started to break apart and the crew has to be evacuated as soon as possible.

Russia’s Minister of Nature Resources and Ecology Sergey Donskoy has ordered that a plan for evacuation should be ready within three days, the Ministry’s web site reads.

“A collapse of the station’s ice floe poses a threat to its continued work, the lives of the crew, the environment close to the Canadian Economic Zone and to equipment and supplies,” a note from the minister reads.

Donskoy suggests that the nuclear-powered icebreaker “Yamal” could evacuate the station from the floe and move it to Severnaya Zemlya.

With ice levels in the Arctic reaching record lows, finding a suitable floe for the station proved to be a difficult task last autumn. The icebreaker carrying the station’s crew had to sail all around the North Pole before finding an ice floe solid enough to hold the station. None of the three floes that had been pre-evaluated from land as possible objects were considered safe enough.

Also the previous shift of Russian scientists experienced problems with the ice situation in the Arctic. In late April the members of North Pole-39 had to move the whole research station to another ice floe because the first one was breaking up.

Only three times has a station had to be evacuated before schedule. The last time was in 2010, when the icebreaker “Rossiya" had to go out and rescue the people on the floating station “North Pole-37” already in May.

Read the rest here, or over at PhysOrg, BBC, NDTV, Channel NewsAsia and many more.

Here's the current position of NP-40, as shown on the AARI website:

Let's hope the evacuation is a success.

http://neven1.typepad.com/blog/2013/05/russia-abandoning-ice-station.html

Jason Samenow, WaPo: National Weather Service systems crumbling as extreme weather escalates

by Jason Samenow, Capital Weather Gang, The Washington Post, May 23, 2013

As painfully obvious from the recent events in Oklahoma, tornado season is in full gear. Meanwhile, hurricane season is a week away.  Yet budget woes and multiple system failures at the National Weather Service (NWS) in the past week, not to mention staffing shortages, are raising concerns that its ability to warn the public of hazardous weather could crack at any time.

In the past 5 days alone, a telecommunications outage near Chicago made it difficult for NWS forecasters to issue warnings, a major weather satellite failed, the website for the entire NWS Southern Region went down, and a NWS official in tornado alley declined to launch a weather balloon citing budget concerns.

These problems are symptomatic of insufficient funding and dated infrastructure, advocates for more generous NWS budgets say. What follows is an overview of the problems NWS has encountered, just since Sunday.

Telecommunications outage

Late Monday evening, just hours after the Moore, Okla. tornado carved a deadly, 17-mile path, a Verizon telecommunications outage occurred at a facility outside Chicago, affecting 6 forecast offices according to Chris Vaccaro, an NWS spokesperson.

At the forecast office serving Chicago in Romeoville, Ill., when forecasters attempted to issue a severe thunderstorm and flash flood warning for the Windy City, systems went down. Forecasters were unable to disseminate the warnings according to Eugene Izzi, a forecaster at the office and also a representative of the National Weather Service Employees Organization (NWSEO), a labor union.

“We and our neighboring offices lost internet and we were unable to transmit any products, we only received some limited data (our own radar, but no other sites) and we were essentially left crippled,” explained Izzi in a Facebook post.

The Romeoville office contacted its secondary back-up office in Milwaukee and, over the phone, dictated the warning information.

“Thankfully, it was a run-of-the-mill, ordinary, marginal, wind event for our county warning area,” Izzi said. “Think of how close this was to being a catastrophe. If this had happened hours earlier during the Moore tornado, I shudder to think of the results.”

The cause of the outage is unclear, but Vaccaro stressed it was “not related to any failure of NWS equipment.”

Dan Sobien, president of the NWSEO, questioned why there was no back-up.

“If NWS has to rely on Verizon to get its warnings out, then it’s doing something wrong,” Sobien said.

Major weather observing satellite fails

On Wednesday, the weather satellite that keeps an eye on the sky over much of eastern North America and the western Atlantic ceased operating.  The satellite, known as GOES-13, had failed one time earlier last fall and was restored.

As a temporary solution to the current outage, NOAA switched its other primary weather satellite, GOES-15, which focuses on the West Coast and parts of the Pacific, into “full-disc mode” to provide broader coverage and fill the gap left by GOES-13.

But meteorologists warned the quality of the substitute imagery would be compromised due to the larger viewing angle.

“The satellite coverage from GOES-15 results in distorted images of the eastern U.S. and the western Atlantic and would be a significant concern for forecasters and the public at large going into the Atlantic hurricane season,” wrote AccuWeather meteorologist Alex Sosnowski.

NOAA said that a European satellite provides high-quality substitute imagery in the gap region, and it plans to move its backup satellite, GOES-14, into position today to resume dedicated coverage there.

But if GOES-13 cannot be fixed and GOES-14 encounters technical difficulties, there is no backup (aside from relying on European data) until NOAA’s next-generation weather satellite GOES-R is launched in 2015. And that launch has encountered delays.

In February, the Government Accountability Office classified the possible satellite gap among the top 30 challenges facing the Federal Government.

Southern Region websites down

Since Wednesday evening, NWS websites for the entire Southern Region have functioned only intermittently. This has limited public access to forecasts and warnings. The Southern Region covers a huge area from Florida to Oklahoma including areas under a heightened risk of severe weather today in Texas.

Although the website operations have been spotty, the public can (and could) still access forecast and warnings for these areas from NWS’ main portal, weather.gov.

Last fall, during and following Hurricane Sandy, the website for the Eastern Region of the NWS experienced an outage and was out of commission for several days. The NWS post-storm assessment recommended: “NWS needs to develop redundancies in web services prior to the 2013 hurricane season to ensure backup in case of equipment failure.”

We are awaiting word from the National Weather Service on the cause of the current problem and the status.

Special weather balloon launch opportunity turned down

Just hours before several tornadoes touched down in Oklahoma on Sunday, the Midland, Texas, official at the NWS forecast office turned down a voluntary opportunity to launch a midday weather balloon to sample atmospheric conditions, citing budget concerns.

Morning and evening balloon launches are mandatory. Forecast offices may initiate “special” midday balloon launches when severe weather is expected in the region to provide additional data. Several offices in the Plains, including Norman, Okla., released special launches during the Sunday and Monday severe weather outbreaks, although Midland passed on the opportunity.

“Given our budget (cough) situation, I’ll decline,” typed Brian Curran, Science Operations Officer at the Midland NWS office, into the agency’s internal chat system.

Midland was not in an elevated risk zone for severe weather at the time.

Chris Vaccaro, an NWS spokesperson, said the decision not launch the balloon had “no effect” on subsequent severe weather watches and warnings.  He also stressed Curran’s decision was a personal one and “not a direction.”

But Dan Sobien, president of the NWS Employees Organization, said he thought the data would have been a useful input to forecasts and that to decline the request was unusual.

“I’ve never seen [a balloon launch request] shot down like that before,” Sobien said. “Not for budget reasons.”

Broader implications

In addition to these budget and technology systems issues, forecast offices are short-staffed. There is a 10% vacancy rate within the NWS, and hiring is frozen as a cost-savings measure motivated by the sequester.

Related: Hiring freeze hobbling operations at local Weather Service office

The Department of Commerce had also proposed four furlough days for NWS forecasters, a move that was challenged by Congressman Frank Wolf (R-Va.) Wednesday.

“The severe weather events in Oklahoma this week have further convinced me that we should not take any chance that avoidable furloughs might result in a degradation of weather prediction and forecasting services,” Wolf said in a letter to Rebecca Blank, acting secretary of the Department of Commerce.

The NWS Employees Organization has persistently voiced objections about vacancy rates, the furlough plan, hiring freeze, tight forecast office budgets and aging technology infrastructure.

“The NWS is falling apart, it’s not funded correctly,” said Dan Sobien, NWSEO president. “The NWS has been neglected for a decade.”

Marshall Shepherd, president of the American Meteorological Society, used the Oklahoma twister’s aftermath to express significant concerns about the various troubles facing the NWS.

“I, and other colleagues, have repeatedly warned that we are risking lives with bad decisions on weather funding, staffing, satellite capacity, etc.,” Shepherd wrote on his Facebook page.

“We need a national response, sound policy/decisions, not posturing on sequester/budgets,” Shepherd said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2013/05/23/weather-service-systems-crumbling-as-extreme-weather-escalates/

Obama DOJ formally accuses Fox journalist James Rosen of committing crimes under the 1917 Espionage Act

Obama DOJ formally accuses journalist in leak case of committing crimes

Yet another serious escalation of the Obama administration's attacks on press freedoms emerges

by Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian, May 20, 2013

Fox News chief Washington correspondent James Rosen had his emails read by the Obama DOJ, which accused him of being a co-conspirator in a criminal leak case. Photo: screen grab

(updated below — Update II — Update III)

It is now well known that the Obama justice department has prosecuted more government leakers under the 1917 Espionage Act than all prior administrations combined — in fact, double the number of all such prior prosecutions. But as last week's controversy over the DOJ's pursuit of the phone records of AP reporters illustrated, this obsessive fixation in defense of secrecy also targets, and severely damages, journalists specifically and the news gathering process in general.

New revelations emerged yesterday in the Washington Post that are perhaps the most extreme yet when it comes to the DOJ's attacks on press freedoms. It involves the prosecution of State Department adviser Stephen Kim, a naturalized citizen from South Korea who was indicted in 2009 for allegedly telling Fox News' chief Washington correspondent, James Rosen, that US intelligence believed North Korea would respond to additional UN sanctions with more nuclear tests — something Rosen then reported. Kim did not obtain unauthorized access to classified information, nor steal documents, nor sell secrets, nor pass them to an enemy of the US. Instead, the DOJ alleges that he merely communicated this innocuous information to a journalist — something done every day in Washington — and, for that, this arms expert and long-time government employee faces more than a decade in prison for "espionage."

The focus of the Post's report yesterday is that the DOJ's surveillance of Rosen, the reporter, extended far beyond even what they did to AP reporters. The FBI tracked Rosen's movements in and out of the State Department, traced the timing of his calls, and — most amazingly — obtained a search warrant to read two days worth of his emails, as well as all of his emails with Kim. In this case, said the Post, "investigators did more than obtain telephone records of a working journalist suspected of receiving the secret material." It added that "court documents in the Kim case reveal how deeply investigators explored the private communications of a working journalist."

But what makes this revelation particularly disturbing is that the DOJ, in order to get this search warrant, insisted that not only Kim, but also Rosen — the journalist — committed serious crimes. The DOJ specifically argued that by encouraging his source to disclose classified information — something investigative journalists do every day — Rosen himself broke the law. Describing an affidavit from FBI agent Reginald Reyes filed by the DOJ, the Post reports [emphasis added]:

"Reyes wrote that there was evidence Rosen had broken the law, 'at the very least, either as an aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator.' That fact distinguishes his case from the probe of the AP, in which the news organization is not the likely target. Using italics for emphasis, Reyes explained how Rosen allegedly used a 'covert communications plan' and quoted from an e-mail exchange between Rosen and Kim that seems to describe a secret system for passing along information. . . . However, it remains an open question whether it's ever illegal, given the First Amendment's protection of press freedom, for a reporter to solicit information. No reporter, including Rosen, has been prosecuted for doing so."

Under US law, it is not illegal to publish classified information. That fact, along with the First Amendment's guarantee of press freedoms, is what has prevented the US government from ever prosecuting journalists for reporting on what the US government does in secret. This newfound theory of the Obama DOJ — that a journalist can be guilty of crimes for "soliciting" the disclosure of classified information — is a means for circumventing those safeguards and criminalizing the act of investigative journalism itself. These latest revelations show that this is not just a theory but one put into practice, as the Obama DOJ submitted court documents accusing a journalist of committing crimes by doing this.

That same "solicitation" theory, as the New York Times reported back in 2011, is the one the Obama DOJ has been using to justify its ongoing criminal investigation of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange: that because Assange solicited or encouraged Manning to leak classified information, the US government can "charge [Assange] as a conspirator in the leak, not just as a passive recipient of the documents who then published them." When that theory was first disclosed, I wrote that it would enable the criminalization of investigative journalism generally:

"Very rarely do investigative journalists merely act as passive recipients of classified information; secret government programs aren't typically reported because leaks just suddenly show up one day in the email box of a passive reporter. Journalists virtually always take affirmative steps to encourage its dissemination. They try to cajole leakers to turn over documents to verify their claims and consent to their publication. They call other sources to obtain confirmation and elaboration in the form of further leaks and documents. Jim Risen and Eric Lichtblau described how they granted anonymity to 'nearly a dozen current and former officials' to induce them to reveal information about Bush's NSA eavesdropping program. Dana Priest contacted numerous 'U.S. and foreign officials' to reveal the details of the CIA's 'black site' program. Both stories won Pulitzer Prizes and entailed numerous, active steps to cajole sources to reveal classified information for publication.

"In sum, investigative journalists routinely — really, by definition — do exactly that which the DOJ's new theory would seek to prove WikiLeaks did. To indict someone as a criminal 'conspirator' in a leak on the ground that they took steps to encourage the disclosures would be to criminalize investigative journalism every bit as much as charging Assange with 'espionage' for publishing classified information."

That's what always made the establishment media's silence (or even support) in the face of the criminal investigation of WikiLeaks so remarkable: it was so obvious from the start that the theories used there could easily be exploited to criminalize the acts of mainstream journalists. That's why James Goodale, the New York Times' general counsel during the paper's historic press freedom fights with the Nixon administration, has been warning that "the biggest challenge to the press today is the threatened prosecution of WikiLeaks, and it's absolutely frightening."

Indeed, as Harvard Law Professor Yochai Benkler noted recently in the New Republic, when the judge presiding over Manning's prosecution asked military lawyers if they would "have pressed the same charges if Manning had given the documents not to WikiLeaks but directly to the New York Times?", the prosecutor answered simply: "Yes, ma'am." It has long been clear that this WikiLeaks-as-criminals theory could and would be used to criminalize establishment media outlets which reported on that which the US government wanted concealed.

Now we know that the DOJ is doing exactly that: applying this theory to criminalize the acts of journalists who report on what the US government does in secret, even though there is no law that makes such reporting illegal and the First Amendment protects such conduct. Essentially accusing James Rosen of being an unindicted co-conspriator in these alleged crimes is a major escalation of the Obama DOJ's already dangerous attacks on press freedom.

It is virtually impossible at this point to overstate the threat posed by the Obama DOJ to press freedoms. Back in 2006, Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales triggered a major controversy when he said that the New York Times could be prosecuted for having revealed the Top Secret information that the NSA was eavesdropping on the communications of Americans without warrants. That was at the same time that right-wing demagogues such Bill Bennett were calling for the prosecution of the NYT reporters who reported on the NSA program, as well as the Washington Post's Dana Priest for having exposed the CIA black site network.

But despite those public threats, the Bush DOJ never went so far as to formally accuse journalists in court filings of committing crimes for reporting on classified information. Now the Obama DOJ has.

This week, the New Republic's Molly Redden describes what I've heard many times over the past several years: national security reporters have had their ability to engage in journalism severely impeded by the Obama DOJ's unprecedented attacks, and are operating in a climate of fear for both their sources and themselves. Redden quotes one of the nation's best reporters, the New Yorker's Jane Mayer, this way:

It's a huge impediment to reporting, and so chilling isn't quite strong enough, it's more like freezing the whole process into a standstill."

Redden says that "the DOJ's seizure of AP records will probably only exacerbate these problems." That's certainly true: as surveillance expert Julian Sanchez wrote in Mother Jones this week, there is ample evidence that the Obama DOJ's seizure of the phone records of journalists extends far beyond the AP case. Recall, as well, that the New York Times' Jim Risen is currently being pursued by the Obama DOJ, and conceivably faces prison if he refuses to reveal his source for a story he wrote about CIA incompetence in Iran. Said Risen:

I believe that the efforts to target me have continued under the Obama Administration, which has been aggressively investigating whistleblowers and reporters in a way that will have a chilling effect on the freedom of the press in the United States."

If even the most protected journalists — those who work for the largest media outlets — are being targeted in this way, and are saying over and over that the Obama DOJ is preventing basic news gathering from taking place without fear, imagine the effect this all has on independent journalists who are much more vulnerable.

There is simply no defense for this behavior. Obama defenders such as Andrew Sullivan claim that this is all more complicated than media outrage suggests because of a necessary "trade-off" between press freedoms and security. So do Obama defenders believe that George Bush and Richard Nixon — who never prosecuted leakers like this or formally accused journalists of being criminals for reporting classified information — were excessively protective of press freedoms and insufficiently devoted to safeguarding secrecy? To ask that question is to mock it. Obama has gone so far beyond what every recent prior president has done in bolstering secrecy and criminalizing whistleblowing and leaks.

Goodale, the New York Times' former general counsel, was interviewed by Democracy Now last week and said this:

AMY GOODMAN: "You say that President Obama is worse than President Nixon.

JAMES GOODALE: "Well, more precisely, I say that if in fact he goes ahead and prosecutes Julian Assange, he will pass Nixon. He's close to Nixon now. The AP example is a good example of something that Obama has done but Nixon never did. So I have him presently in second place, behind Nixon and ahead of Bush II. And he's moving up fast. . . .

"Obama has classified, I think, seven million — in one year, classified seven million documents. Everything is classified. So that would give the government the ability to control all its information on the theory that it's classified. And if anybody asks for it and gets it, they're complicit, and they're going to go to jail. So that criminalizes the process, and it means that the dissemination of information, which is inevitable, out of the classified sources of that information will be stopped.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: "What about the—

JAMES GOODALE: "It's very dangerous. That's why I'm — I get excited when I talk about it."

That was before it was known that the Obama DOJ read James Rosen's emails by formally labeling him in court an unindicted co-conspirator for the "crime" of reporting on classified information. This all just got a lot more dangerous.

UPDATE

Even journalists who are generally supportive of Obama — such as the New Yorker's Ryan Lizza — are reacting with fury over this latest revelation:

Ryan Lizza @RyanLizza

WP piece about another DOJ leak investigation is absolute must-read: http://m.washingtonpost.com/local/a-rare-peek-into-a-justice-department-leak-probe/2013/05/19/0bc473de-be5e-11e2-97d4-a479289a31f9_story.html … Tactics used against Fox's Rosen are outrageous.

7:01 AM - 20 May 2013

Lizza added:

Ryan Lizza @RyanLizza

Case against Fox's Rosen, in which O admin is criminalizing reporting, makes all of the other "scandals" look like giant nothing burgers.

7:23 AM - 20 May 2013

The Daily Beast's Eli Lake said this:

Eli Lake @EliLake

Serious idea. Instead of calling it Obama's war on whistleblowers, let's just call it what it is: Obama's war on journalism.

6:56 AM - 20 May 2013

Any journalist who doesn't erupt with serious outrage and protest over this ought never again use that title to describe themselves.

UPDATE II

Several other journalists have made some excellent points about the dangers presented by these actions, beginning with the Washington Post's Karen Tumulty:

Karen Tumulty         ✔ @ktumulty

The alternative to "conspiring" with leakers to get information: Just writing what the government tells you. @JamesRosenFNC

9:08 AM - 20 May 2013

That, of course, is precisely the point of the unprecedented Obama war on whistleblowers and press freedoms: to ensure that the only information the public can get is information that the Obama administration wants it to have. That's why Obama's one-side games with secrecy — we'll prolifically leak when it glorifies the president and severely punish all other kinds — is designed to construct the classic propaganda model. And it's good to see journalists finally speaking out in genuine outrage and concern about all of this.

Meanwhile, to convey just how warped this all is: it really is true that this very behavior of trying to criminalize national security reporting was a driving force of the worst elements on the Right during the Bush years; back then, I wrote constantly about the dangers to press freedoms such threats, by themselves, posed. Please just watch this 4-minute segment from a 2006 "Meet the Press" episode where the Washington Post's Dana Priest explains to Bill Bennett, who had called for her imprisonment, exactly what press freedoms and the law actually provide; Bill Bennett is who — and what — the Obama DOJ and its defenders are channeling today:

UPDATE III

Here's an amazing and revealing fact: after Richard Nixon lost the right to exercise prior restraint over the New York Times' publication of the Pentagon Papers, he was desperate to punish and prosecute the responsible NYT reporter, Neil Sheehan. Thus, recounted the NYT's lawyer at the time, James Goodale, Nixon concocted a theory:

"Nixon convened a grand jury to indict the New York Times and its reporter, Neil Sheehan, for conspiracy to commit espionage . . . .The government's 'conspiracy' theory centered around how Sheehan got the Pentagon Papers in the first place. While Daniel Ellsberg had his own copy stored in his apartment in Cambridge, the government believed Ellsberg had given part of the papers to anti-war activists. It apparently theorized further that the activists had talked to Sheehan about publication in the Times, all of which it believed amounted to a conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act."

As Goodale notes, this is exactly "the same charge Obama's Justice Department is investigating Assange under today," and it's now exactly the same theory used to formally brand Fox's James Rosen as a criminal in court.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/20/obama-doj-james-rosen-criminality

"Gasland 2" Grassroots Premiere in Illinois Highlights Industry PSYOPS and Ongoing Fracking Fights

by Steve Horn, DeSmogBlog, May 21, 2013

"Gasland 2" screened yesterday in Normal, Illinois, and DeSmogBlog was there to gain a sneak peak of the documentary set for a July 8 HBO national premiere. 

Josh Fox's documentary played at the Normal Theater, the second-ever screening since the film officially premiered on April 21 at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City. 

The movie builds on Fox's Academy Award-nominated "Gasland," further making the case of how the shale industry's hydraulic fracturing ("fracking") boom is busting up peoples' livelihoods, contaminating air and water, polluting democracy and serving as a "bridge fuel" only to propel us off the climate disruption cliff. 

A central theme and question of the film is, "Who gets to tell the story?" That is, industry PR pros and bought-off politicians utilizing the "tobacco playbook" and saying "the sky is pink," or families directly injured by the industry? Fox explains how the industry has gamed the system, ensuring the communities have their voices drowned out. The Gasland films seek to tell some of the victims' stories. 

Another theme is the bread and butter of following any big industry's influence: following the money. In depicting the financial clout of Big Oil, "Gasland 2" shows that the oil and gas industry has gone to the lengths of deploying warfare tactics -- literally -- on U.S. citizens to ram through its agenda. 

PSYOPs, Other DeSmogBlog Work Featured

Much of the content in "Gasland 2" has also been covered on DeSmogBlog over the past few years. 

Robert Howarth's and Anthony Ingraffea's prominent "Cornell Study" receives some good play in the film. Howarth and Ingraffea demonstrated that from cradle to grave, fracked gas has a more dangerous global warming effect than coal, a death knell to the "natural gas as a bridge fuel" meme. President Obama's deployment of American Petroleum Institute "jobs" talking points for fracking is in there too. 

Former head of the Dept. of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush and Republican Gov. of Pennsylvania, Tom Ridge, also takes a beating in the film. His appearance on "The Colbert Report" is righteously roasted, the same appearance in which he lied to U.S. citizens and declared he was "not a lobbyist" even though he was registered to lobby at that time for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. 

"Tailsman Terry the Fracosaurus," which demonstrates the industy's willingness to utilize propaganda on young children, receives a similar round of ridicule in "Gasland 2." Fox also explains the oil industry's use of Big Tobacco's Playbook through interviews with Naomi Oreskes, author of Merchants of Doubt, a major theme of our coverage of both the shale gas industry and the Tea Party. 

Steve Lipsky, who was left in the dust by Range Resources and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), is one of the central characters of the film. The major villain of that tale is former PA Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell, who helped derail and censor the EPA's fracking groundwater contamination study motivated by Lipsky's water contamination in Weatherford, Texas. 

While the prospective shale gas export boom is covered in some depth in the film, so too is the concept of the government-industry revolving door, particularly as it pertains to Pennsylvania. The Public Accountability Initiative's study "Fracking and the Revolving Door in Pennsylvania" is featured in the film, a study we also covered. 

Last but certainly not least, Gasland 2 devotes an entire section to the industry's admitted use of psychological warfare tactics (PSYOPs) on U.S. citizens, as we first revealed in November 2011.

The Houston PR conference referred to in the film is one I attended and covered in some depth. It was a gathering of industry public relations executives talking among friends about how to best manipulate mainstream media journalists, divide and conquer anti-fracking activists, and intimidate local communities to go along with fracking operations that endanger their health and drinking water. 

"Gasland 2" presents the audio of Range Resouces Director of Corporate Communications and Public Affairs Matt Pitzarella revealing that Range hires PSYOPs Iraq War veterans to use their skills to pressure local communities. The film also features Anadarko Petroleum External Affairs Manager Matt Carmichael advising gas industry PR pros to read the Army "Counterinsurgency Field Manual" and "Rumsfeld's Rules," because "we are dealing with an insurgency."

Both audio clips were obtained by Earthworks' Sharon Wilson at the conference and provided to media by Earthworks and DeSmogBlog. CNBC first broke the story on November 8, 2011. 

Frackalypse Now: DeSmog PSYOPS Spoof by Mark Fiore

DeSmog partnered with Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Mark Fiore to produce this spoof video in the vein of Coppola's "Apocalypse Now," making its debut today, "Frackalypse Now":

Illinois Fracking Fight Wages On

The grassroots premiere of "Gasland 2" in Illinois is significant since a major battle royale is brewing over fracking in the Land of Lincoln. The battle lines have been drawn: grassroots "fracktivists" are fighting for a statewide moratorium, while the industry and major green NGOs are pushing through a bill that would regulate fracking, but allow the controversial and dangerous practice to continue long before it's been independently proven safe for water, health and the global climate. 

With two weeks left in the legislative session, activists -- informed by inside sources -- believe there could be an 11th hour effort to ram through the bill.

Because of that, Illinois Peoples Action (IPA) and Southern Illinoisans Against Fracturing our Environment (SAFE) held a press conference in the afternoon before the film's screening. The conference featured Fox, a SAFE activist, and Illinois native and prominent anti-fracking author and scientist, Sandra Steingraber -- author of the book Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis.

"How are we going to receive our education [about fracking]?," Fox asked rhetorically at the press conference. "From an industry that would come into Illinois and do a third-world exploitation model in America, with the President in his home state absent, with the major big green groups cutting backroom deals? 

"I'm here to say there's a model that's been used in New York that's revolved around incredible insistence. They said fracking was a done deal to us in New York and four years later, it's not a done deal there and it's not a done deal here in Illinois."

http://www.desmogblog.com/2013/05/21/gasland-2-grassroots-premiere-highlights-industry-psyops-fracking-fights