Some things must be seen to be believed. If you don’t believe Palin could have said this, you can listen to the video on CBS’s website:

Couric: What’s your position on global warming? Do you believe it’s man-made or not?

Palin: Well, we’re the only Arctic state, of course, Alaska. So we feel the impacts more than any other state, up there with the changes in climates. And certainly, it is apparent. We have erosion issues. And we have melting sea ice, of course. So, what I’ve done up there is form a sub-cabinet to focus solely on climate change. Understanding that it is real. And …

Couric: Is it man-made, though in your view?

Palin: You know there are – there are man’s activities that can be contributed (sic) to the issues that we’re dealing with now, with these impacts. I’m not going to solely blame all of man’s activities on changes in climate. Because the world’s weather patterns are cyclical. And over history we have seen change there. But kind of doesn’t matter at this point, as we debate what caused it. The point is: it’s real; we need to do something about it.

Note to Governor Palin:

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This morning, CNN anchor John Roberts questioned Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) about Gov. Sarah Palin’s statement that the U.S. should go into Pakistan after terrorists, a clear contradiction with McCain’s position that such measures should never be discussed publicly. Roberts asked why McCain called this “gotcha journalism.” McCain responded that the “circumstances were very different.” Roberts asked, “How so?”

I believe it was a town hall meeting that he said it. Hers was an encounter in a pizza parlor where the question was framed, so that of course we’re going to go after terrorists.

Watch it:

McCain is wrong. In fact, at a town hall meeting of his own that same week, Sen. McCain said that he supported an end to mountaintop removal, a position his campaign initially denied. McCain also criticized the construction of new coal plants, saying they “will increase greenhouse gas emissions dramatically.” A week later, at the Clinton Global Initiative, McCain said, “We now know that fossil fuel emissions, by retaining heat within the atmosphere, threaten disastrous changes in climate.”

Unfortunately, no one in the media has challenged McCain on these statements, which strongly imply that McCain considers the continued use of coal “disastrous.”

UPDATE: Factcheck.org calls the ads “false.”

They’re back! I’ve been bombarded by people wanting a comment on the new S&N L.A. Times piece, “The green bubble bursts.” How about “naive and dangerous”?

Shellenberger and Nordhaus get coverage in the media because they are green(ish) recyclers of rubbish. They take piles of garbage (i.e. Republican talking points) and repackage them with some green-sounding lingo and then put their green credentials behind them. I have been ignoring them for a while now, but this piece is high profile and even more outrageous than their typical attacks on the environmental community and Al Gore.

The recycling begins in the first paragraph:

Republicans stole the energy issue from Democrats by proposing expanded drilling — particularly lifting bans on offshore oil drilling — to bring down gasoline prices. Whereas Barack Obama told Americans to properly inflate their tires, Republicans at their convention gleefully chanted “Drill, baby, drill!” Obama’s point on conservation and efficiency was lost on an electorate eager for a solution to what they perceive as a supply crisis.

No, that wasn’t written by Karl Rove, although it sounds like it.

“Barack Obama told Americans to properly inflate their tires.” You must be kidding. That is precisely the GOP talking point — heck, the GOP even handed out tire gauges to mock Obama on this (see “Will GOP’s cynical lies destroy the chance for serious energy and climate policy?“).

Why would anybody claiming to care about progressive politics or clean energy repeat such a lie? In fact, Obama was asked by a voter what individuals can do to conserve. And Obama stated correctly that measures like proper tire inflation and tuning up your car can save more oil than coast drilling would provide.

To ignore Obama’s entire energy plan and suggest that somehow it can be summed up by “Obama told Americans to properly inflate their tires” is to be nothing more than a cynical GOP shill.

Obama has the most comprehensive energy plan ever offered by a Presidential candidate (see “Breaking news — A real energy plan for America: Efficiency now, 10% renewables by 2012, and one million plug-in hybrids by 2015” and a terrific climate plan (see “Obama’s excellent energy and climate plan“). In fact, his climate plan has so much clean energy in it that, to my great surprise, S&N took up my challenge from last year and endorsed it. But you’d never know anything about Obama’s plan from reading this piece.

Let’s continue with a stunning series of paragraphs, in which Shellenberger and Nordhaus reveal their policies to be all but indistinguishable from those of global warming delayers:

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Of all the talents bestowed upon men, none is so precious as the gift of oratory. He who enjoys it wields a power more durable than that of a great king…. The subtle art of combining the various elements that separately mean nothing and collectively mean so much in an harmonious proportion is known to very few…. [T]he student of rhetoric may indulge the hope that Nature will finally yield to observation and perseverance, the key to the hearts of men.

So wrote a 23-year-old Winston Churchill in a brilliant, unpublished essay, “The Scaffolding of Rhetoric.”

The ever-worsening reality of human-caused global warming is driving more and more scientists to become desperate about our future (see “Desperate times, desperate scientists“). Yet poll after poll shows that scientists and those who accept scientific understanding as the basis for action on climate change are failing to persuade large segments of society about the urgent need to act (see “The Deniers are winning, but only with the GOP” and “The deniers are winning, especially with the GOP“).

Anyone who wants to understand — and change — the politics of global warming, must understand why the deniers, delayers, and inactivists are so persuasive in the public debate and why scientists and scientific-minded people are not. A key part of the answer, I believe, is that while science and logic are powerful systematic tools for understanding the world, they are no match in the public realm for the 25-century-old art of verbal persuasion: rhetoric.

Logic might be described as the art of influencing minds with the facts, whereas rhetoric is the art of influencing both the hearts and minds of listeners with the figures of speech. The figures are the catalog of the different, effective ways that we talk–they include alliteration and other forms of repetition, metaphor, irony, and the like. The goal is to sound believable. As Aristotle wrote in Rhetoric, “aptness of language is one thing that makes people believe in the truth of your story.”

The figures have been widely studied by marketers and social scientists. They turn out to “constitute basic schemes by which people conceptualize their experience and the external world,” as one psychologist put it. We think in figures, and so the figures can be used to change the way we think. That’s why political speech writers use them. To help level the rhetorical playing field in the global warming debate, I will highlight the three rhetorical elements that are essential to modern political persuasion.

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Earth to deniers — global warming is caused by human emissions, not solar activity.

The Naval Research Laboratory and NASA report that, “if anything,” the sun contributed “a very slight overall cooling in the past 25 years.” D’oh! The study, “How natural and anthropogenic influences alter global and regional surface temperatures: 1889 to 2006,” finds:

Empirical models that combine natural and anthropogenic influences (at appropriate lags) capture 76% of the variance in the monthly global surface temperature record, suggesting that much of the variability arises from processes that can be identified and their impact on the global surface temperature quantified by direct linear association with the observations.

Natural influences produce as much as 0.2 K warming during major ENSO events, near 0.3 K cooling following large volcanic eruptions and 0.1 K warming near maxima of recent solar cycles. To properly quantify their amplitudes, the natural and anthropogenic changes must be accounted for simultaneously when analyzing the surface temperature anomalies, since neglecting the influence of one can overestimate the influence of another. For this reason, we suggest that estimated solar cycle changes of 0.2 K and Pinatubo cooling of 0.4 K are too large.

None of the natural processes can account for the overall warming trend in global surface temperatures. In the 100 years from 1905 to 2005, the temperature trends produce by all three natural influences are at least an order of magnitude smaller than the observed surface temperature trend reported by IPCC [2007]. According to this analysis, solar forcing contributed negligible long-term warming in the past 25 years and 10% of the warming in the past 100 years…

Here are some excellent visual “reconstructions of the contributions to monthly mean global surface temperatures by individual natural and anthropogenic influences (at appropriate lags) are shown”:

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Duh! — ClimateProgress (see “Did House Dems kill renewable tax credit extension?“).

E&E News has the painful, yet tragically inevitable, story:

The House will likely adjourn without passing a suite of renewable energy tax breaks, House leaders told Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) today.

Asked whether House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) had given him hope during their meeting that anything would happen with a tax extenders measure before the House adjourned, Baucus said flatly, “No.”

If Congress does not extend the renewable energy tax credits, it will be the single biggest failure of the Democratic Congress on energy this year. Here’s the rest of the story for those interested in autopsies:

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