Tip O’Neil, former Speaker of the House of Representatives, once declared that “all politics is local.” The same might be said for climate change. While its consequences are global, its root cause is the greenhouse gas emissions each of us emits directly or indirectly from our vehicles, buildings and appliances.

Since anthropogenic climate change is the result of the millions of energy decisions each of us makes in the course of our lives, then it stands to reason that the solution to climate change lies in making those decisions differently. Each us must sign a treaty with ourselves, a personal Kyoto Protocol. Without that individual commitment, no international agreement to mitigate global warming will be worth the recycled paper it’s written on.

This point came home recently when I met a woman named Clare Dakin in London. Clare is the UK’s representative for a program called Project Green Hands. Its objective is to reverse the desertification of Tamil Nadu, the seventh most populous state in India, by planting 114 million trees within the next 10 years.

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Science blogger extraordinaire Tim Lambert (aka Deltoid) has called me out. I wrote:

Tierney is easily the worst science writer at any major media outlet in the country. Pretty much every energy or climate piece he writes is riddled with errors and far-right ideology, including this one.

Lambert writes that he “must, however, disagree with one of Romm’s points”:

The second sentence is correct, but what about Gregg Easterbrook?

I do realize that Tierney cites Easterbrook as a scientific authority, so his Easterbrook number is 1, but Easterbrooks’s Easterbrook number is zero.

I cannot argue with the assertion that Gregg Edmund Easterbrook (GEE) is one of the leading anti-scientific writers (see “People Who Just Don’t Get Global Warming: Gregg Easterbrook and the Editors of the Atlantic” and “Gregg Easterbrook still knows nothing about global warming — and less about clean energy“). And I must agree with Wonk Room, which recently documented “Brookings Science ‘Expert’ Doesn’t Understand Basic Science.”

But first off, I am going to claim victory on a technicality. GEE is not a science writer at a major media outlet (see his Wikipedia bio here). He writes on a broad variety of subjects, including football, for a broad variety of outlets. GEE is easily the worst freelance science writer published by multiple major media outlets — but that’s as far as I can go.

Tierney not only has a real science column with the NYT where he says staggeringly anti-scientific things and quotes anti-scientific organizations like CEI. Tierney states his anti-scientific philosophy right on the front page of his online column, Tierney Lab:

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Who the heck knows what the best posts are? But I do have two quantitative measures of the hottest posts — most comments and most views (Part II).

The most-discussed post received more than 500 comments, a figure I doubt I’ll ever match again! This most comments” list is, I think, a good introduction to what Climate Progress is all about:

44 (comments). Krauthammer, Part 2: The real reason conservatives don’t believe in climate science.

47. The Self-Limiting Future of Nuclear Power, Part 1

48. Is 450 ppm politically possible? Part 6: What the Boxer-Lieberman-Warner bill debate tells us

48. Obama’s strongest message on climate yet: John Holdren to be named Science Adviser

50. American Physical Society stomps on Monckton disinformation — thank you Climate Progress readers

50. Media enable denier spin 1: A (sort of) cold January doesn’t mean climate stopped warming

51. Is 450 ppm politically possible? Part 2.5: The fuzzy math of the stabilization wedges

57. Peak Oil? Bring it on!

61. How desperate are climate scientists? Desperate enough to contemplate geo-engineering.

61. What are the near-term climate Pearl Harbors?

64. Plug-in Hybrid FAQ

64. “Nature article on ‘cooling’ confuses media, deniers: Next decade may see rapid warming

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