James West

Climate Desk Producer

James West is a producer for the Climate Desk. He wrote Beijing Blur (Penguin 2008), an intimate yet far-reaching account of modernizing China’s underground youth scene. After completing a masters in journalism at New York University in 2007, James returned to Australia where he worked as the executive producer of the national affairs program Hack. He has produced a variety of Australian television and radio programs, including the debate show Insight on SBS TV.

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Explained in 90 Seconds: It's Cold. That Doesn't Mean Global Warming is Fake.

—By James West

| Fri Jan. 25, 2013 4:11 AM PST

At Climate Desk, we like to call them—affectionately—our "pet trolls." (You know who you are. Hi!) They are regular readers that pepper us on Twitter and Facebook with one of several climate myths upon the publication of every article, sometimes with freakish speed. One of the most popular myths is this: Global warming isn't real because it's really cold outside; climate models are thus full of sh*t. So, here in 90 seconds, is our attempt to explain something we interact with every day, in all sorts of ways, from flying in a plane, to getting a loan, to betting on a horse: computer modeling.

Our video features Drew Purves, from Microsoft in Cambridge, UK, a statistics whiz specializing in modeling the climate and ecosystems. Think of him as the Nate Silver of carbon. You can read about his latest research project, a rallying cry to model the entire world's ecology—that's right, the entire world—in the latest edition of Nature.

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Is it Obama? Is it Gore? No! It's the Green Ninja!

—By James West

| Tue Jan. 22, 2013 4:01 AM PST

President Obama's high-profile statements about climate change in his inauguration speech—"Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms"—will need to be backed by strong action if there's any hope of dimming recent attacks on science in America's classrooms.

The National Center for Science Education lists four new bills in the last week alone that have been introduced in state legislatures: two in Oklahoma, and one each for Missouri and Colorado. For example, House Bill 179, introduced in the Missouri House of Representatives on January 16, labels as controversial the teaching of "biological and chemical evolution;" Ditto for Colorado, which on the same day introduced House Bill 13-1089 (PDF) which also misrepresents global warming and evolution as questionable science.

No wonder Dr Eugene Cordero thinks climate change needs a superhero. Bam! Enter the Green Ninja, the not-very-talkative martial arts master who whips up all sorts mayhem to teach young minds about carbon footprints, energy-saving strategies and gas guzzling leaf blowers, a kind of climate-bent Captain Planet, for a younger generation.

Cordero—both the creator of Green Ninja and a climate scientist at San Jose State University—has already created a series of videos and lesson plans for teachers. And they are now looking to the crowd on the popular funding website Kickstarter for more cash to produce a 16-episode YouTube series, starting this Spring. At the time of writing, with just 10 days to go, the Green Ninja team has raised half of its stated $10,000 goal.

"Like Owning Rosa Parks' Bus": Stonewall Inn Celebrates Obama Speech

Patrons of the historic gay bar in New York City reflect on President Obama's inauguration speech.

—By James West

| Mon Jan. 21, 2013 11:16 PM PST

From L-R: Michael Padden, the assistant director of "Hit The Wall", a play about the Stonewall riots; director Eric Hoff and playwright Ike Holter. James West

Just your average Monday night at the Stonewall Inn: A truculent drag queen battles a fold-out table and a bingo ball wheel; her assistant arranges the swag (porno, mainly); a game of pool amongst some pretty boys focuses more on each other than the game; and then there's the clutch of regulars who can name the heroes fading in framed pictures in the backroom (and can tell you stories from when the backroom really was a backroom).

But there were a few people here on this chilly January night who came to honor the legacy of the bar President Obama named as a touch-stone of the American civil rights movement. Equality, the President said, "is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall"—referring to the early hours of Saturday, June 28, 1969, when patrons decided enough was enough, and reacted en masse to a routine police raid to clear out deviants. Resistance attracted crowds in the streets of New York's Greenwich village, escalating into violent protests that lasted for six days. It was a moment that galvanized the gay rights movement.

Those that spoke of the significance of President Obama's words were emotional, overjoyed at having this historic place ranked in that lineage of struggles, in such an important speech.

"We're not just a bar. We're the Stonewall. It's like owning Rosa Parks's bus. We don't own the movement, but we own the bus," said Stacey Lentz, one of the bar's owners, and an activist. "This is where it started, and to have that history acknowledged in the civil rights context, that's the thing too. We've always said gay rights is civil rights, and I think he summed that up today perfectly." She called President Obama's speech "a huge, huge win for gay rights across the country."

One of the owners of the Stonewall Inn, Stacy Lentz. James West

Also at the bar was Ike Holter, who has written a new play about the riots called "Hit The Wall", which follows 13 unlikely characters who end up at the bar in 1969. Holter couldn't believe the coincidence between his current work and the President's speech and was the first one to arrive at the bar when it opened.

"I thought it was a beautiful speech," he said, "And I thought it was important that he basically said that the gay rights movement was a civil rights movement, and it's just as important as any movement that has come before it."

"I was very proud of my President," he said. Holter's play will open off-Broadway at Barrow Street Theater, mere blocks from the Stonewall Inn, in early March.

Holter's director, Eric Hoff, joined him at the bar for a few drinks. "The alliteration is nice for one thing. It's a really poetic way of highlighting the kind of cascade of forward-thinking movement in this country," he said. "I don't think I expected him to be so explicit."

"I was very emotional today watching the President deliver those words," Hoff said.

Opera director Beth Greenberg rocked up just to be in the bar on an historic night: "To say in the same phrase: Seneca Falls, Selma Alabama, and Stonewall, just blew me away, legitimizing everything that we've striven for for the past 40 years in the gay rights movement. What can I say? Amazing."

"I'm not a real flag-waver, but today's a day to wave the flag," she said. "We're still trying to make a perfect union, and we will continue to try to make this union perfect, but it's pretty darn good."

Beth Greenberg, with her friend Tony, at Stonewall Inn. James West

"I found it so impressive," said Jerry Holste, standing underneath the portraits of 1969 protesters in a room behind the bar. "I never thought in my lifetime I'd see Stonewall included in that list," he said. "To see a President do this, it's..."

He couldn't find the words.

Jerry Holste, reacting to President Obama's words. James West

Chart: The Black Triangle Suffocating Beijing

—By James West

| Fri Jan. 18, 2013 4:01 AM PST

In 2008, Beijing pulled off what some (myself included) considered a miracle: banishing choking smog to reveal an Olympic city bathing in blue. They reportedly took a million of the city's 3.3 million cars off the road, and closed down factories and construction sites.

But try as they might, in the years since the Olympics, city officials have rarely replicated that success, despite replacing the city's coal-fired power stations with natural gas, capping its annual coal consumption at 20 million tons by 2015, forcing heavy trucking to go nocturnal, and limiting car exhaust and construction dust.

The recent crisis that featured "beyond index" rates of pollutants and a thick, blanket of smog that choked the city for days, proves why Beijing just can't do it alone. China's enormous boom in cars often gets blamed, but in fact the bigger problem lies farther afield.

The chart above shows that without controlling emissions across the country—especially from neighboring coal-producing provinces like Hebei and Shanxi—prevailing winds will keep blowing toxic smog Beijing's way. Climate Desk has compiled data from NOAA, Greenpeace, and CARMA to show 38 power plants that lie in the path of the winds that brought smog to Beijing during its pollution crisis from January 10-12.

The pollution is bad news for people's health: A recent study by Greenpeace East Asia and Peking University’s School of Public Health estimated that 8,572 premature deaths occurred in four major Chinese cities in 2012 because of the smog.

A note about the data: CARMA produces a detailed list of carbon-emitting power plants around the world—but for China, it can be tricky to get their precise locations and emissions because there is no public disclosure database provided by the government. The area displayed on the map is a rough approximation.

European Mammals Make Like Gérard Depardieu, Flee to Russia

New research shows that climate change will expand habitats across Northern Europe for many mammals.

—By James West

| Wed Jan. 16, 2013 4:06 AM PST

By 2080, Russia might witness a vast mammalian invasion, as sub-arctic European animals flee global warming and adapt to a thawing tundra. New textbooks may need to accommodate never-before-seen communities of species as climate change pits predator against predator beyond the Russian steppe. That's what a group of Swedish researchers predict in a new climate change study published in the journal, PloS One.

"North Western Russia will be some kind of hotspot of species richness," said Christer Nilsson, an ecology professor, via Skype from Umeå University in Sweden. "Species will be on the move and there will be new combinations of species."

Red and fallow deer, wild boar, the Eurasian badger, rabbits, mice and beaver will all be on the move as new tracts of habitable land open up.

Fallow deer, heading to Russia John Kent/Flickr

In a surprising twist, Professor Nilsson and his team found that most species in the Barents Region, which includes the northern half of Norway, Sweden, Finland and a big chunk of North Western Russian, will actually be favored by climate change. Forty-three out of the 61 animals studied will expand and shift their "ranges"—or habitats—mostly in a north-easterly direction, sometimes traveling hundreds of miles.

Suitable area for the tundra vole and its suitability for potential predators. "A" shows 2000 and "B" shows one 2080 scenario. Anouschka R. Hof, Roland Jansson, Christer Nilsson

But no one can predict how all the animals will interact in their new, climate-changed world, and far from helping animals, climate change might force new, and deadly, interactions: "Predators might be in contact with new prey," Nilsson said.

There might be tough times ahead for the poor little tundra vole, for example, which will need to elude more foxes, badgers, pine martens, stoats, weasels, polecats, and mink. That's because right now, only one percent of the area Nilsson studied is suitable for three or more predators; by 2080, that could increase to nearly 40 percent. That means turf warfare for the mountain hare and the European hare, as both vie for similar habitats.

Two major caveats exist in the report. The findings assume that humans won't—as we are so often wont to do—get in the way of the mass movement by fragmenting animals' habitats. And the findings only apply to the "generalists" that can adapt to changing conditions. Those that require very specific habits—the "specialists" such as the wolverine and the Siberian flying squirrel—are going to have a much tougher time in a warmed world.

Even so, the report found something encouraging: No extinctions predicted in the area surveyed. "We couldn't find any evidence that any species will disappear, given the climate change predictions we've used," Nilsson said. Nevertheless, vulnerability of those already threatened may increase due to the introduction of new competing or predatory species.

Naturally, a climate report that shows even a glimmer of hope can be latched onto and overblown. Fox News uses Nilsson's study to declare the "poster animal" of the climate movement, the polar bear, totally OK: "Global Warming Helps Polar Bears."

Polar bears are north of the area the researchers studied, and are not mentioned at all in the report.