Yes, the next person poised to enter the presidential race has bought the disinformation campaign hook, line, and sinker. From the Paul Harvey radio show (audio here):

Plutonic Warming

By Fred Thompson

Some people think that our planet is suffering from a fever. Now scientists are telling us that Mars is experiencing its own planetary warming: Martian warming. It seems scientists have noticed recently that quite a few planets in our solar system seem to be heating up a bit, including Pluto.

NASA says the Martian South Pole’s “ice cap” has been shrinking for three summers in a row. Maybe Mars got its fever from earth. If so, I guess Jupiter’s caught the same cold, because it’s warming up too, like Pluto.

This has led some people, not necessarily scientists, to wonder if Mars and Jupiter, non signatories to the Kyoto Treaty, are actually inhabited by alien SUV-driving industrialists who run their air-conditioning at 60 degrees and refuse to recycle.

Silly, I know, but I wonder what all those planets, dwarf planets and moons in our SOLAR system have in common. Hmmmm. SOLAR system. Hmmmm. Solar? I wonder. Nah, I guess we shouldn’t even be talking about this. The science is absolutely decided. There’s a consensus.

Ask Galileo.

Stunning. I have previously debunked this bit of denyer disinformation and will repeat the key facts below. What is most sad to me is the ease with this otherwise intelligent man believes the entire scientific community somehow failed to examine the contribution of the sun to recent global warming.

His Law and Order alter ego D.A. Arthur Branch would not be so easily duped. He would demand evidence. Here it is:

Read more

Chinese Reject Emissions Targets — The Guardian. China’s climate plan made headlines but seems little different from Bush’s do-nothing plans.

Dutch Plan Extra Tax for Gas-Guzzling Cars – Reuters. I’m not sure this will do much. “The rule would add an additional 1,600 to 1,800 euros in taxes for BMW’s X5 3.0si.” Not a lot of money for a BMW buyer.

Dry Winter Setting Off Canada Forest Fires – Reuters. “A winter of unusually little snow has brought five times the normal level of forest fires to parts of Central Canada,” the article begins. But no mention that this is just what you would expect from global warming, an all-too-common omission by the media (here and here, for instance).

Australia to launch carbon trading scheme by 2012 – Reuters. Seems like good news, but then you read, Prime Minister John Howard “said an ‘aspirational’ target for reducing carbon emissions would be set in 2008 once the economic costs had been fully studied.” I’m afraid “aspirational” is Bush-speak for “purely symbolic.”

Last week, NASA administrator Michael Griffin made some inane comments about climate change on NPR. NASA’s James Hansen rightly called those remarks “ignorant and arrogant.”

Some people told Hansen they thought his remarks were “excessive.” Here is his no-nonsense reply, which links Griffin’s comments and the “massacre” of NASA’s Earth Science budget :

Read more

A bipartisan group of Senators have called on President Bush to “make climate change a priority for G8 Summit.” This is probably the very definition of tilting at windmills. You can read the letter here.

I’ll be speaking and moderating a panel on technological solutions. The Norwegian Embassy and National Geographic Society host an all-day conference to celebrate World Environment Day.

Details can be found here.

Global warming has long been predicted to make the weather more extreme. Wouldn’t it be great if there were an official government index of extreme weather — of heat, drought, rainfall, and hurricanes — that would let us know if in fact the prediction had come true?

Well, such an index exists, the National Climatic Data Center’s Climate Extremes Index. As the figure shows, the most extreme year by far was 1998, and 2006 was the second most extreme year, followed closely by 2005. The fourteen least extreme years all predate 1981. The weather is becoming more extreme, as predicted.

Yet my guess is that you’ve never heard of the U.S. Climate Extremes Index, even though it was explicitly created to take a complicated subject (“multivariate and multidimensional climate changes in the United States“) and make it more easily understood by American citizens and policy makers.

I follow this subject of the connection between climate change and extreme weather very closely — and yet, until 2006, I had not seen a single mention of the Index in the media or even in a scientific paper since its original introduction more than a decade ago. Global warming may be a hot subject, and 2006 was the second most extreme year ever, but just try a Google News search of “Climate Extremes index.”

Story after story after story after story after story after story after story appear in the mainstream media with no link whatsoever between extreme weather and global warming, uncoupled from the man-made trend that will ultimately transform all our lives. The media must do a better job.