I am a big fan of the climate website, DeSmogBlog. So I was shocked when, the day after his unprecedented victory in Iowa, DeSmogBlog gave Barack Obama (!!) “the inaugural 2007 SmogMaker Award for blowing smoke on global warming.”

Gimme a break. How could anyone win that award any year — let alone in its inaugural year — when George W. Bush is still President? [Not to mention a year in which Lomborg and Inhofe continue their influential disinformation compaigns!]

After all, the “Prize honors those who sow confusion and delay on Climate Change.” Seriously. Bush is easily the confuser and delayer of the year … and the decade … and he surely will be on the short list for the entire century. Yet DeSmog says Obama is “looking like George Bush lite.” How can they make that claim? By misreading — or failing to read — Obama’s terrific climate plan. DeSmogBlog claims:

But he is campaigning on a greenhouse gas reduction ‘target’ that the U.S. won’t have to meet for 42 years….
While the world’s leading scientific bodies tell us we need to act immediately to avoid catastrophic climate disruption, Obama has set his own target date at 2050, long past any opportunity for voters to hold him accountable.

Uhh, no. In fact, his plan explicitly states:

Obama will start reducing emissions immediately in his administration by establishing strong annual reduction targets, and he’ll also implement a mandate of reducing emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.

Based on the links in their post, DeSmogBlog’s research on Obama’s climate apparently consists of reading a one-paragraph story on BusinessWire with Obama’s statement on Bali — which they link to not once but twice! They claim he is an unrepetent coal supporter, based on a June 2007 Washington Post article about his support for his state’s coal industry. And yet in his climate plan he bluntly commits:

Obama will use whatever policy tools are necessary, including standards that ban new traditional coal facilities, to ensure that we move quickly to commercialize and deploy low carbon coal technology. Obama’s stringent cap on carbon will also make it uneconomic to site traditional coal facilities and discourage the use of existing inefficient coal facilities.

I defy DeSmogBlog to tell me which serious U.S. politician has a climate plan substantially tougher or more comprehensive than Obama’s. It is a courageous plan for any Presidential candidate to run on. Now let’s compare that to Bush’s record. As I’ve written:

Thanks to the misleadership of our President, the world took no action at Bali to reduce emissions, we had a sham international “climate summit,” the country continues to take no national action on greenhouse gas emissions, Congress was forced to drop almost all non-oil-related provisions to cut GHGs from the energy bill, the EPA blocked California and other major states from regulating tailpipe GHGs on their own, the Administration keeps muzzling climate scientists, and it keeps misallocating scarce clean tech dollars to hydrogen fuel cell vehicle research at the expense of real and timely solutions like energy efficiency and renewables — and that’s just the stuff we know about for sure!

… Our person of the year … President George W. Bush doesn’t just fiddle while the planet burns, he actively fans the flames and thwarts the fire-fighters.

DeSmogBlog owes Obama three apologies, for

1. Giving him this undeserved “award”
2. Failing to read his climate plan and then mischaracterizing it (twice)
3. Saying Obama is “looking like George Bush lite.”

For completeness’s sake, the second unacceptable misstatement about the Obama plan they make is:

Read more

The global warming doubters/deniers (here and here) have jumped on a confused AP story about a confused Nature study (subs. req’d).

The normally first-rate AP reporter Seth Borenstein just wrote an article titled “Nature and Man Jointly Cook Arctic” that begins:

There’s more to the recent dramatic and alarming thawing of the Arctic region than can be explained by man-made global warming alone, a new study found. Nature is pushing the Arctic to the edge, too.

There’s a natural cause that may account for much of the Arctic warming, which has melted sea ice, ice sheets and glaciers, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Nature. New research points a finger at a natural and cyclical increase in the amount of energy in the atmosphere that moves from south to north around the Arctic Circle….

The Nature study suggests there’s more behind it than global warming because the air a couple miles above the ground is warming more than calculated by the climate models.

Climate change theory concentrates on warming of surface temperatures and explains an Arctic that is warming faster than the rest of the world as mostly because reduced sea ice and ice sheets means less reflecting solar rays.

Sounds like a hammer blow against global warming being the main cause of Arctic warming. And it might be, except for the small problem that the AP article is mistaken because the Nature article is, to put it kindly, confused.

You can read the real story at RealClimate.