Bad science journalism shot down again

A little while ago, there was a Nature paper concerning methane emission by plants that suggested that they might be a major overlooked source of methane, a greenhouse gas. In the popular press, this immediately got spun as "reforestation programs may do no good because trees cause global warming" (that was certainly what it had become by the time I heard about it).

The short RealClimate article on the subject now has an addendum pointing to a clarification by the authors to the effect that, even if they're right, this is not so: the calculated effect on the efficacy of reforestation programs is slight.

Hansen and his bosses

Political appointees at NASA really don't like what Jim Hansen has been saying about global warming. A scientist who works for Hansen speaks here.

We mostly have Hansen's side of the story here, but nothing I've heard about his statements suggests to me that he's a hysterical loose cannon. His warnings about a closing window of opportunity to prevent major ice sheet melting further down the line are, as far as I can tell, pretty much based on consensus science on the subject, and downright conservative compared to, say, James Lovelock's recent we're-all-gonna-die-with-Gaia strangeness.

I don't think global warming is going to kill us all; I do think that if global temperatures go up by a few degrees over the coming century, and sea levels rise, storms become more destructive, etc., the usual thing is going to happen, which is to say that the poorest and most defenseless people in the world are going to be hit hard—and the rest of us will lose some things we'd rather not, such as, say, New York and Boston. But in the near term, an American administration judging results in climate science on the basis of loyalty bothers me more.