The nation’s top climate scientist is so frustrated over the nonsense racing about the blogsophere and mainstream media about the tiny flaw in NASA’s U.S. temperature database that he has already sent out two e-mails on the subject. In the first, James Hansen wrote:

The flaw did have a noticeable effect on mean U.S. temperature anomalies, as much as 0.15°C, as shown in Figure 1 below (for years 2001 and later, and 5 year mean for 1999 and later).

Not bloody much of an effect. He goes onto say

The effect on global temperature (Figure 2) was of order one-thousandth of a degree, so the corrected and uncorrected curves are indistinguishable.

Yes, the globe is still warming at an alarming rate — and we still aren’t doing anything about it — which is why in his second, more impassioned email, he writes:

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… you’ll see this picture (Bush ex-speechwriter, Michael Gerson) and a copy of this unbelievable Post column: “Hope on climate change? Here’s why.” Without a trace of irony, Gerson writes that we should be hopeful on climate change because a simple policy, a “cap-and-trade system,” could solve the problem.

I’d normally say, “Duh!” but Gerson seems blissfully unaware that his old boss actually campaigned in 2000 on a carbon cap-and-trade for utilities, and then not only reneged on that promise shortly after taking office, but then repeatedly opposed such a system in this country — and worked tirelessly behind-the-scenes to block other countries from developing a new post-Kyoto cap-and-trade system.

The blogosphere is already rife with take-downs of this laughable piece (see here and here). But if you really want to see Gerson taken down, get this month’s Atlantic Monthly (subs. req’d so try this), where Gerson is trashed by a fellow Bush speechwriter as a petty, self-aggrandizing credit-stealer.

Jeers to the Washington Post for giving Gerson that rarest of platforms — a regular column on the Op-Ed page.

While the blogosphere has been up in arms over a trivial revision to a few years of U.S. temperature data, the country and the planet keep smashing records for extreme weather. The National Climatic Data Center reports:

• “Record warmth in Western US in July”
• Nearly half the country in some stage of drought
• More than 5 million U.S. acres burned by wildfires
• The second warmest January-July globally on record
• The warmest Jan-July over land on record
• “The least [Arctic] sea ice extent in July since records began in 1979″ as the figure shows:

The recent rate of ice loss is stunning. If, as new research suggests, the planet is really going to heat up after 2009, then this rate might continue and the Arctic might soon become ice free during the summer –a condition not experienced for more than a million years.

Why should Americans care about Artic sea ice? Well a 2004 study in Geophysical Research Letters (subs. req’d) found that “future reductions in Arctic sea ice cover could significantly reduce available water in the American west.”

The global climate system is interconnected — and we change it at our peril.

The Washington Post has a terrific front-page story on offsets. I’ve been meaning to post on renewable energy certificates (RECs) as offsets, but this article beat me to it:

Even more head-spinning [than trees as offsets] are the questions about “renewable energy certificates” from wind farms and solar plants, certifying that they made a certain amount of clean energy.

Offset companies buy these pieces of paper. Then, they use them to claim credit for pollution “avoided” — reasoning that they helped produce energy that would otherwise have come from a polluting coal or natural-gas plant.

Some of the money paid for these certificates stays with the offset vendor or with a middleman. The rest usually winds up with the energy project’s builder or the utility that buys its electricity. In some cases, this can amount to something like a donation to a for-profit company: American Electric Power, which sold an undisclosed amount of certificates from wind farms last year, earned more than $1 billion in profit.

Some environmentalists balk at this. If the certificate is bought only after the energy is produced, they wonder, how can an offset vendor know the energy wouldn’t have been produced anyway?

Consider how this plays out for one offset company, Carbonfund.org, whose Executive Director, Eric Carlson, I actually debated earlier this month:

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