The so-called paper of record ran a major story Tuesday on the country’s most infamous climate-driven pest, “Bark Beetles Kill Millions of Acres of Trees in West.” Great story, other than neglecting to mention climate change. It’d be like an article on an outbreak of avian flu that left out any discussion of birds

So we have the national “liberal” media, like the NYT and NBC, blowing this story, while the local, conservative media get it right, see “conservative San Diego Union knows climate change is killing Western forests” and “Oldest Utah newspaper: Bark-beetle driven wildfires are a vicious climate cycle.”

Of course, the journal Nature understands the science, as an April article made clear: “Mountain pine beetle and forest carbon feedback to climate change.” So does the Canadian media: “Climate-Driven Pest Devours Canada’s Forests.”

The NYT did get the grim, superficial facts of the story right:

From New Mexico to British Columbia, the region’s signature pine forests are succumbing to a huge infestation of mountain pine beetles that are turning a blanket of green forest into a blanket of rust red. Montana has lost a million acres of trees to the beetles, and in northern Colorado and southern Wyoming the situation is worse.

“We’re seeing exponential growth of the infestation,” said Clint Kyhl, director of a Forest Service incident management team in Laramie, Wyo., that was set up to deal with the threat of fire from dead forests. Increased construction of homes in forest areas over the last 20 years makes the problem worse.

Yeah, home building is the cause of this problem — that’s why in Alaska, “over three million acres of forest land has been devastated by the beetle,” as senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) described in a May 2006 speech on climate change. Seriously, that is pretty much the only explanation the NYT story offers, although the accompanying video does inch much closer to the truth, strangely enough.

Read more

E&E News (subs. req’d) has the breaking story on the political pugilistic prizefight to police pollution:

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) scored a slim opening round win today in his bid to take the gavel of the House Energy and Commerce Committee from Chairman John Dingell (D-Mich.).

Waxman captured a majority of support from the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee, a group heavily tilted toward allies of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). The final tally was 25-22, according to Steering Committee co-Chairwoman Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.)

So this was definitely not a knockout, but more of a split decision by the judges. The bad news for Waxman is that he scored a close win in a Pelosi-friendly group that is more liberal than the Democratic caucus as a whole.

To win the chairmanship, Waxman, a 17-term lawmaker from Beverly Hills, still needs a majority vote from the entire House Democratic Caucus. A secret-ballot vote is scheduled for 9 a.m tomorrow among approximately 260 Democrats who will serve in the 111th Congress — and a heavy dose of lobbying from both sides is expected before then.

The prize remains a big one, which is why this is a major prizefight:

The victor will play an important role over the next two years in moving President-elect Barack Obama’s energy, environment and health care agenda.

Here are more details:

Read more

NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center reports:

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

Given that this report is just out, I’m assuming they have sorted out the data entry issues that briefly caused problems for NASA (see here and here). Also worth noting from the NCDC report:

• According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, the October 2008 Northern Hemisphere sea ice extent, which is measured from passive microwave instruments onboard NOAA satellites, was the third least October sea ice extent on record, behind 2007 and 2006. Average ice extent during October 2008 was 8.4 million square kilometers, which is 9.5 percent below the 1979-2000 average. Sea ice extent for October has decreased at a rate of 5.4 percent per decade, since satellite records began in 1979.
• El Ni±o-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) conditions remained in a neutral phase during October.

Since interest in the monthly temperature reports is so keen these days, let me repeat the key points from my an earlier post on the monthly data. While the monthly data doesn’t tell us much about the climate, the peer-reviewed scientific literature has a couple of interesting forecasts for the next decade:

Read more

Our guest blogger is Rick Weiss, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Fund.

Here’s a wild proposition for the transition: Choose a life scientist or a climatologist for the presidential science advisor.

Maybe that doesn’t seem like a radical move to you, but in fact it would be a major break with tradition. The presidential science advisor (who doubles as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy) has traditionally been a physicist or nuclear scientist. After all, the biggest science-based threat to the nation has long been the threat of nuclear war. So of course the president needed someone at his side who knew about bombs and fallout and such.

But while atomic physics is still a field with great national security import (think dirty bombs and the suitcase-sized nuclear devices that terrorists are purported to be trying to get their hands on) there is a good case to be made that molecular biology (which has so simplified the tools for making bioterror weapons, for example) or even ordinary earth science (the specialty that best understands global climate change) are the fields that are today most relevant to our national and economic security concerns.

The presidential science advisor (which used to be a cabinet level position until Bush demoted it, but is likely to get elevated again under Obama) is just one of hundreds of science policy-related openings that the new president and his appointees will soon be filling and that officials in the new administration need to think about in new, out-of-the-box ways.

Imagine a surgeon general selected from one of the nation’s gang-busting food activist groups, ready to take on obesity the way C. Everett Koop took on smoking.  Or a Food and Drug Commissioner who’s maybe not a medical doctor (as is usual) but has great expertise in international trade law (trillions of dollars-worth of food and drugs are today imported from abroad with precious little inspection or oversight). Or a Secretary of Energy who has real business experience and expertise in cap-and-trade economics or in solar or wind technology or low-loss transmission lines—the keys to an energy-independent America.

Now multiply that times all the science-based openings in Agriculture, the Environmental Protection Agency, Interior and even Defense. To learn more about what the Obama administration has to think about when filling out its technical ranks, see below, drawn from my recent column on Science Progress, “A Taxonomy of Scientific Appointments:” Read more

Assuming this story is real — I’ll let those who can translate Chinese check out the original source, which, of course, could also be wrong — the US government isn’t going to let this happen.

But I’m gonna print this because the non-primary source, The Truth About Cars, is pretty credible, and because I can put this under the category (gallow) humor:

Read more

The first rule of journalism: Do NOT talk about journalism.

No, that isn’t it. The first rule of journalism is “If your mother says she loves you, check it out,” which is to say never rely on any non-primary sources, especially other journalists. So this recent post — Schwarzenegger mandates 33% renewables by 2030 — isn’t right because this story isn’t.

Schwarzenegger’s Executive Order is here, and it clearly states:

Read more

There is no lack of ideas for what President Obama and the 111^th Congress should do to address three of the most pressing issues they will face when they take office in January — global climate change, the energy crisis, and economic transformation. It may be winter in Washington, D.C., but it’s springtime in national politics. Policy agendas are blooming like cherry blossoms.

For example, last week alone, Washington, D.C. was introduced to three comprehensive plans to address economy, energy and climate. Two were issued by the Center for American Progress, headed by John Podesta, co-chair of President-elect Obama’s transition team, including an excellent strategy for green recovery by Bracken Hendricks and Benjamin Goldstein.

The Presidential Climate Action Plan (PCAP) was released during a standing-room only briefing on Capitol Hill, after two years of gestation at the University of Colorado. PCAP contains more than 180 proposals for President Obama and the next Congress, across 18 topics, ranging from natural resource stewardship to public health and from farm policy to zero-carbon buildings and transportation systems. All were designed for action during President Obama’s honeymoon period — the six months in which a new president traditionally sets the tone of his administration, between inauguration and the August congressional recess.

Read more