Turns out the latest green issue of Time (online) has a list of the top 15 Green Websites selected by its editors. Climate Progress is on it (click here) — one of the few websites devoted to global warming on the list. Here is what Time says (and I do think they start out with my best headline ever, on the IPCC Synthesis Report):

“Debate over. Further delay fatal. Action not costly.” This headline pretty much sums up Joe Romm’s message. Romm is a one-man anti-disinformation clearinghouse. His Climate Progress blog, a project of the liberal Center for American Progress, counters bad science and inane rhetoric with original analysis delivered sharply, usually with either humor or incredulity or both. Romm occupies the intersection of climate science, economics and policy. Resist temptation to lump him in with knee-jerk enviros. On his blog and in his most recent book, Hell and High Water, you can find some of the most cogent, memorable, and deployable arguments for immediate and overwhelming action to confront global warming (with infrequent guest bloggers — present company included).

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Americans for Balanced Energy Choices (ABEC), the $40 million coal-propaganda front group founded in 2000, is no more. In recent months, youth, environment, and health activists have exposed the dirty secrets of ABEC’s astroturf efforts to attack green-collar jobs and propagandize coal. ABEC and the Center for Energy and Economic Development (CEED) — the trade organization that started the front group — have now become the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE).

That acronym just happens to be remarkably similar to:

ACEEE — the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, opposing coal plant construction in Kansas

GPACE — the Great Plains Alliance for Clean Energy, also leading the fight against coal plant construction in Kansas

SACE — the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, opposing coal plant construction in Florida

ACE NY — the Alliance for Clean Energy New York, promoting renewable technologies like wind over coal

At the Switchboard blog of the National Resources Defense Council — who make the case that “there is no such thing as ‘clean coal’” — Rob Perks notes, “They say a leopard can’t change its spots. That goes double for the sooty paw prints of the coal industry’s well-fed pet.”

H/T Gristmill, who found ACCCE’s “creepy new 60-second ad.”

California’s AB32 cap on greenhouse gas emissions has its regulatory agencies working to find a set of measures that will add up to enough savings to cut 2020 emissions by about 30%. Since twelve years is too short to change California’s vehicle fleet or its power plants, a myriad of measures are being considered, each rather small, but cummulatively are hoped to make a difference.

One such effort is to find paints and coatings to reduce how hot cars get when parked, so the driver is less likely to turn on the air conditioner:

This strategy is based on measures to reduce the solar heat gain in a vehicle parked in the sun. A cooler interior would make drivers less likely to activate the air conditioner, which increases carbon dioxide emissions.

Potential approaches include reformulation of paint to reflect near-infrared sunlight, parked car ventilation, and solar reflective window glazing. It is expected that cool paints, together with reflective glazing, will reduce the soak temperature of the typical vehicle parked in the sun by 5 to10 degrees celsius.

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In remarkable defiance of Congressional oversight, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has flatly declined to respond to a House Global Warming Committee subpoena. The subpoena for documents relating to the EPA’s refusal to obey the Supreme Court mandate to regulate greenhouse gases was issued by a unanimous, bipartisan vote on April 2, a year after the Supreme Court decision.

On April 11, the EPA requested and received an extension to respond, but today the agency has decided not to turn over the documents:

Whether or not the EPA has “grave concerns” about “erroneous impressions,” a “chilling effect,” and “institutional prerogatives,” these are not legally defensible reasons to defy a Congressional subpoena. In a terse response, Committee chair Ed Markey (D-MA) found the reasoning “unpersuasive.” The letter continues:

Of course, if the EPA simply turned over the documents, it would no longer be under such a “cloud.”

The EPA is also defying the House Oversight Committee’s subpoena for related documents on White House involvement. Behind this defiance of Congress is EPA assistant administrator Christopher P. Bliley — who was Jim Nussle’s chief of staff in Congress. As Think Progress reports, Nussle — now the head of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) — was dressed down today by Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) for his “snarky, scolding, dismissive” responses. Bliley evidently shares his mentor’s contempt for Congress.

UPDATE: Warming Law notes this defiance likely triggers contempt of Congress proceedings for EPA administrator Stephen Johnson.

UPDATE II: On Wednesday, Oversight Committee chair Henry Waxman (D-CA) issued a subpoena to the OMB to turn over documents related to White House interference in EPA smog standards.

View the full letter: EPA 4-16-08 Subpoena Response (PDF)

[I was thinking of writing on this very subject, so I'm glad that a real (former) journalist beat me to the punch. See also this post for more MSM nonsense from Tim Russert.]

I was a journalist once. Today I’m ashamed to admit it.

It’s bad enough that Fox News is allowed to call itself “news”. There should be a standard for using that term — for example, fairness, balance, timeliness, newsworthiness, etc. — so viewers have help differentiating real journalism from rank sensationalism and propaganda (Check out Parts 1-2 of “The Meter is Running”).

But if there were such a standard, ABC News would have been forced to change its name to ABC SmackDown Wednesday after it hosted the 21st, and possibly the final, televised debate between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Hosts Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos managed to waste the first half of the 90-minute debate on tabloid journalism. They pressed the candidates — mostly Obama — on verbal gaffs, controversial associates, and lapel pins.

The superficial and the silly dominated the debate and the news coverage that followed. The next day, for example, ABC offered video outtakes from the debate on its web site, covering highlights such as Clinton Explains Bosnia Botch, Obama’s Pastor Under Fire, Doubting Obama’s Patriotism?, Clinton’s Baggage an Asset?, Clinton on “bitter” Pa. Voters, and Does Hillary Think Barack Can Win?

[JR Note to ABC: National politics will be just like high school as long as you make it that way.]

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On MSNBC’s Morning Joe today, Joe Scarborough discussed the role of global warming and the environment in the presidential race with Rick Stengel, the editor-in-chief of Time Magazine, and Tim Russert, host of NBC’s Meet the Press and moderator of four presidential debates. Stengel challenged Russert to weigh in why “the percentage of questions from the very beginning with the environment has been absolutely tiny,” only “a handful among the thousands of questions that the candidates have been asked.”

Russert claimed:

In some of the debates, I remember a couple of them I raised it, they all talk about energy independence and then you see them go off in different directions.

He then talks about energy independence and goes off in different directions — including incorrectly claiming the United States gets oil from Iran — before finally concluding:

I’m with Rick. I’m more surprised that the candidates don’t take the initiative to try to talk more about it and certainly when asked, but I think they have to be pressed for specifics on this and all of these issues.

Watch it:

The truth of the matter is that Tim is not “with Rick” — he has only raised the topic once in a single Republican debate. Of the three Democratic debates Russert moderated, he has never asked about global warming or climate change.

Contrary to Russert’s claim “that the candidates don’t take the initiative to try to talk more about it,” the candidates have brought up climate change, global warming, and green-collar jobs at every debate he moderated. In fact, in an October debate moderated by Brian Williams and Russert, candidates Clinton, Dodd, Edwards, Kucinich, Obama, and Richardson all “took the initiative” to discuss climate change, clean energy, and the environment.

UPDATE: Time’s landmark issue on “How to Win the War on Global Warming” is now out. (H/T Climate Progress.)

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I now seem to be on some media distribution list to gin up early PR. Green publicists of the world — Bring it on!

Here are links to key stories (plus some summaries, from Time):

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From Reuters:

Climate change expert Nicholas Stern says he under-estimated the threat from global warming in a major report 18 months ago when he compared the economic risk to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Latest climate science showed global emissions of planet-heating gases were rising faster and upsetting the climate more than previously thought, Stern said in a Reuters interview on Wednesday.

I guess he has been reading this blog. Everyone should read his report (here). It found that avoiding catastrophic climate change might cost countries 1% of gross domestic product (spent largely on clean energy technologies that have many other benefits such as reductions in urban smog), but failing to act could cost up to 20% of GDP. What else is Stern now saying?

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A few days ago, Climate Progress brought you “Breaking News: The Great Ice Age of 2008 is finally over — next stop Venus!” That scientific finding was based on the NASA (and Hadley Center) temperature data through the end of March. Now NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) weighs in with its data (here), reaffirming the end of the Great Ice Age of 2008:

Based on preliminary data, the globally averaged combined land and sea surface temperature was the second warmest on record for March and the January-March year-to-date period ranked eleventh warmest.

March 2008 missed the record for the warmest March (2002) by a whopping 0.07°F. March 2008 was the warmest March over land in the record, beating the previous record by nearly 0.3°F. And it was the warmest March over land and sea in the northern hemisphere on record by 0.2°F .

Once again, the geographical distribution of the warming continues to be really, really bad news for those worried about …

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I’m watching Morning Joe on CNBC — the joys of having a baby who wakes up at 6:30 am — and a guy from Time magazine is discussing their major forthcoming cover story that has a picture of the soldiers raising the flag on Iwo Jima, but now they are raising a tree.

Kudos to Time for making the clear analogy to World War II — that is the only way we are going to beat 450 ppm.

Yes, the journalists wonder why global warming is not a bigger subject of the debates [Note to journalists: Uhh, maybe because you don't ask any questions on global warming.]

Tim Russert did inform listeners that McCain is an environmentalist [Note to Russert: McCain has a League of Conservation Voters rating of ZERO.]

I’ll blog more on this when the article comes out.

No.

The central point of the recent Nature article, “Dangerous Assumptions” (available here) is that the IPCC made dangerous assumptions in their reference scenarios:

… the scenarios assume a certain amount of spontaneous technological change and related decarbonization. Thus, the IPCC implicitly assumes that the bulk of the challenge of reducing future emissions will occur in the absence of climate policies. We believe that these assumptions are optimistic at best and unachievable at worst, potentially seriously underestimating the scale of the technological challenge associated with stabilizing greenhouse-gas concentrations.

That would be a powerful conclusion, if it were true. But it isn’t, as this post will make very clear. In fact, I suspect most people will be quite surprised at how clear it is that this conclusion is not true, given that it appears in a major science journal. First, I think it is worth noting that the head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, said late last year:

“If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.”

Does that sound like the head of a group that has underestimated the scale of the climate challenge?

So what is going on? Yes, it is true that “the IPCC implicitly assumes that the bulk of the challenge of reducing future emissions will occur in the absence of climate policies.” BUT, as we’ll see, that is really a semantic point. It is extremely misleading to imply that technological changes occur spontaneously or automatically.

In fact, in its scenarios, the IPCC assumes energy and environmental policies, but just isn’t allowed to call them “climate policies.” I kid you not.

Here is what the Special Report on Emission Scenarios (SRES), which the Nature article cites, says about the scenarios:

As required by the Terms of Reference, however, none of the scenarios in the set includes any future policies that explicitly address additional climate change initiatives, although GHG emissions are directly affected by non-climate change policies designed for a wide range of other purpose.

Let me give a very specific example. Most of the IPCC scenarios are of little interest because they result in global warming of much more than 2°C — and thus they make catastrophic climate impacts likely. The B1 scenario, however, is worth examining because it keeps warming close to 2°C through energy efficiency and decarbonization. Does this happen spontaneously? Quite the reverse:

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