Excerpts from Palin’s big speech are already online:

“Our opponents say, again and again, that drilling will not solve all of America’s energy problems – as if we all didn’t know that already. But the fact that drilling won’t solve every problem is no excuse to do nothing at all. Starting in January, in a McCain-Palin administration, we’re going to lay more pipelines…build more nuclear plants…create jobs with clean coal…and move forward on solar, wind, geothermal, and other alternative sources. We need American energy resources, brought to you by American ingenuity, and produced by American workers.”

LIE #1 shows chutzpah, I’ll give her that much. Just two months ago, Palin said “I beg to disagree with any candidate who would say we can’t drill our way out of our problem.” Perhaps someone told the would-be energy expert that even billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens knows her July claim was absurd (see “Pork queen Palin is an earmark expert, NOT energy expert“).

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Nature has published a major analysis that supports my recent 2-parter (Why global warming means killer storms worse than Katrina and Gustav, Part 1 and Part 2). As Nature explains:

… scientists have come up with the firmest evidence so far that global warming will significantly increase the intensity of the most extreme storms worldwide.

The maximum wind speeds of the strongest tropical cyclones have increased significantly since 1981, according to research published in Nature this week. And the upward trend, thought to be driven by rising ocean temperatures, is unlikely to stop at any time soon.

The team statistically analysed satellite-derived data of cyclone wind speeds. Although there was hardly any increase in the average number or intensity of all storms, the team found a significant shift in distribution towards stronger storms that wreak the greatest havoc. This meant that, overall, there were more storms with a maximum wind speed exceeding 210 kilometres per hour (category 4 and 5 storms on the Saffir–Simpson scale)….

“It’ll be pretty hard now for anyone to claim that cyclone activity has not increased,” says Judith Curry, an atmospheric researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, who was not involved in the study….

“People should now stop saying ‘who cares, storm activity is just a few per cent up’,” says Curry. “It’s the strongest storms that matter most.”

Again, “More than half the total hurricane damage in the U.S. (normalized for inflation and populations trends) was caused by just five events,” explained MIT hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel in an email. Storms that are Category 4 and 5 at landfall (or just before) are what destroy major cities like New Orleans and Galveston with devastating winds, rains, and storm surges.

The impacts projected for coming decades are quite ominous in a world that currently refuses to take serious action on climate:

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My brother Dave lives in Minneapolis and has been interviewing RNC delegates. Here is Barb Davis White in her own words (audio here):

WHITE: My name is Barb Davis White and I’m running for the 5th Congressional District against Keith Ellison for the United States House of Representatives, which is called Congress.

ROMM: Where are you on global warming?

WHITE: Well, global warming really has not been proven. There are 30,000 scientists, including Al Gore’s professor, from Princeton, who says that we are now in a cooling stage. And ev-every — also every other climate that has been warmed had better grapes.

ROMM: So you don’t believe in global warming and you don’t think that people caused it.

WHITE: No, I think global warming is a scam. I think it’s a scam to put taxes — more taxes on us, and it’s called carbon taxes. Our environment has never been so clean, and if we want to push global warming, let’s push it on China, where the smog is so thick that you almost need a helmet to breathe. Let’s push it on Africa and see how they adapt to it, because they’re not going to.

That is frighteningly incoherent, even for a would be GOP representative. Is this really the best person Republicans can find in Minneapolis? Or perhaps that’s whom they are recruiting (see “The deniers are winning, especially with the GOP“). So you don’t end up totally depressed, there’s a second interview at the end with a DNC delegate who is a Minneapolis City Council member. So, yes, the Twin Cities has some sane politicians.

UPDATE: I’m trying out a new plug-in that will put audio files right into the post. Let’s see if it works:

The “hockey stick” graph is a reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere temperatures over the past thousand years. It showed a sharp rise starting about a century ago. Global warming deniers and doubters have long attacked the graph asserting that we were as warm if not warmer hundreds of years ago. But a 2006 National Academy of Sciences report largely reaffirmed the analysis.

A new peer-reviewed study by climatologists and earth scientists Michael Mann, Zhihua Zhang, Malcolm Hughes, Raymond Bradley, Sonya Miller, Scott Rutherford, and Fenbiao Ni now extends the reconstruction back nearly 2000 years:

Here is link to the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study, “Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millennia.” The Supplemental Material is here (warning, big PDF). I have also taken some of the PDF figures and turn them into JPEGs. For the first ever, I believe, the authors did a multi-proxy reconstruction of the Southern Hemisphere for the past 1500 years (see figure at end).

A key advance of the new work is that it derives historical temperature through multiple, overlapping proxy records, including “the growth patterns of trees and coral, the contents of ice cores and sediments, and temperature fluctuations in boreholes.” Proxies are used because modern scientific instruments were available for only a small and recent part of Earth’s climatic history.

“Ten years ago the estimates for earlier centuries were really primarily reliant on just one sort of information: tree ring measurements,” said Mann of Pennsylvania State University.

“To satisfy the critics, we now have enough other sources that we can achieve meaningful reconstructions back a thousand years without tree ring data, and we get more or less the same answer”–that global warming is not mainly due to natural variability.

Some 1,200 proxy records were used, mostly from the Northern Hemisphere. These figures show the spatial and temporal distribution of the nine different kinds of proxy records used:

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If you Google Palin “energy expert,” you’ll find more than 10,000 hits. It’s no surprise that conservative shills like George Pataki and Haley Barbour use that label — heck, a major conservative talking point is that she’s a foreign-policy expert because “Alaska is the closest part of our continent to Russia,” as Cindy McCain put it. Conservatives are desperate to inflate the resume of this partially vetted semi-qualified VP choice.

But it is outrageous for CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo to say on Meet the Press, “I think the biggest value she brings to the ticket is her expertise in energy.” What Palin is primarily knowledgeable about is drilling for oil in Alaska, which, of course, Senator McCain opposes — so she is “expert” in the one area that is utterly irrelevant for a McCain administration. But the larger point for the media is that she is knowledgeable on only one small and largely irrelevant subset (Alaska) of two types of energy (oil and gas).

And “knowledgeable” is a generous word for someone who said in July, “ I beg to disagree with any candidate who would say we can’t drill our way out of our problem.“ That absurd claim makes of her not even an oil expert, but an oil shill. I guess she has missed all those ads from billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens, who keeps saying, “I’ve been an oil man all my life, but this is one emergency we can’t drill our way out of.” And, oddly enough, she doesn’t read this blog (see “The cruel offshore-drilling hoax” and “Offshore drilling raises oil prices*“)

Shill may be putting it mildly. Palin has said that new multibillion-dollar fossil fuel infrastructure in Alaska is “God’s Will.” She has said:

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