As an alum, I was happily surprised when a few weeks ago a senior M.I.T. professor directed me to major study by a dozen leading experts associated with their Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Climate Change that made clear M.I.T. had joined the climate realists.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has just doubled its previous (2003) projection of global warming by 2100 to 5.1°C. Their median projection for the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide in 2095 is a jaw-dropping 866 ppm. Human civilization as we know it could not survive such warming, such concentrations (see likely impacts here).

But there is one MIT professor who has remained blind to the remarkable strengthening of our understanding of climate science in the past 2 years — Richard Lindzen. A general debunking of Lindzen’s popular disinformation tracts can be found on RealClimate here.

At the Heartland conference of climate-change deniers that began Sunday in New York, however, Lindzen went from denial to defamation as he smeared the reputation of one of the greatest living climate scientists, Wallace Broecker.

Before discussing that indefensible and hypocritical smear, it is worth noting that the Heartland conference is so extreme that even “moderate” deniers, like John Christy won’t go, as Andy Revkin reports:

John R. Christy … said he had skipped both Heartland conferences to avoid the potential for “guilt by association.”

Now when a guy who has been as wrong for as long as Christy has (see here) is afraid his reputation will be harmed by attending your conference, you are way, way out there!

And indeed, Lindzen chose to abandon what little is left of his professional reputation, as the astonishing report on the conference from Examiner.com makes clear:

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***Wednesday, March 11^TH, 9:00 am***

Greenpeace Report: How to Solve Global Warming for Half the Cost and Twice the Jobs as Dirty Energy

Blueprint Cuts U.S. Energy Pollution 85% by 2050 without Nuclear Power or Coal

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Our guest blogger is Alexandra Kougentakis, a Center for American Progress Action Fund Fellows Assistant.

This week in New York City, the Heartland Institute is holding its “International Conference on Climate Change,” a gathering for VIPs of the climate denial movement. Despite the extremist positions taken by speakers at the conference, funding and support comes from the top echelons of the conservative movement, including the Heritage Foundation and Americans for Prosperity. Unfortunately, these climate skeptics can’t even agree with each other:

Some concede that humans probably contribute to global warming but they argue that the shift in temperatures poses no urgent risk. Others attribute the warming, along with cooler temperatures in recent years, to solar changes or ocean cycles.

Most of the speakers hail from conservative think tanks like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, and the Science and Public Policy Institute, repeating last year’s effort with the same long-debunked arguments. Keynote speaker Richard Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, rallied his fellow deniers by with the Tinkerbell strategy: “We will eventually win against anthropogenic global warming alarm simply because we are right and they are wrong.”

Lindzen is a particular favorite of the deniers for his academic credentials — but his ties to Big Oil and conservative ideology might have more to do with his positions on climate. Industrial polluters from OPEC to the Western Fuels Association have paid him generous consulting fees. Lindzen is on the record for describing Exxon Mobil, who has spent $16 million funding the climate denier industry, as “the only principled oil and gas company I know in the US.”

[JR: Please Digg this post by clicking here.]

Coastal property values won’t wait to (permanently) fall until sea levels have actually risen 4 or 5 feet, as they almost certainly will by the end this century on our current CO2 emissions path (see Startling new sea level rise research: “Most likely” 0.8 to 2.0 meters by 2100 and Report from AGU meeting: One meter sea level rise by 2100 “very likely” even if warming stops?).

Coastal property values will crash when a large fraction of the financial community and of opinion-makers — along with a smaller but substantial fraction of the public — realize that it is too late for us to stop 4 to 5 feet of SLR. And remember, if we don’t get on the sustainable sub-450-ppm path soon, then people will quickly come to understand that SLR won’t stop in 2100. Seas will continue rising post-2100 perhaps 10 to 20 inches a decade (or more) for centuries until we are ice free and seas are 250 feet higher. And that makes protecting most coastal cities very, very difficult and expensive.

One of the points of my post “Is the global economy a Ponzi scheme and what comes next? Part 1,” of course, is that we haven’t hit that critical mass of knowledge yet. If we had, the world would be engaged in a massive, desperate effort to avert catastrophe.

And so I pose the question in my talks: What year will coastal property values crash?

I am certainly interested in your thoughts on this.

I pose the question mostly to stimulate thinking. And certainly the collapse is unlikely to happen in just one year — so perhaps the better question is, What year will U.S. coastal property values peak?

I tend to think the peak comes some time in the 2020s.

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So what are you doing transit-wise to cope with the recession and the inevitability of much higher oil prices in the future?

The Washington Post reports today:

Despite job losses and falling gasoline prices, record numbers of Americans rode subways, buses and commuter rail last year, boosting public transportation ridership to its highest level in 52 years, according to a survey to be released today by the American Public Transportation Association.

Advocates say the ridership figures show growing support for public transportation. They hope to use that support to push for federal funding beyond the $8.4 billion in stimulus money set aside for transit. More investment in transit not only helps the economy, advocacy groups say, but also helps the environment and fosters energy independence.

This would seem to be the shape of things to come for most Americans, especially once peak oil drives gasoline prices back above $4 a gallon — and probably above $6 — in the next decade (see “Merrill: Non-OPEC production has likely peaked, oil output could fall by 30 million bpd by 2015” and “Normally staid International Energy Agency says oil will peak in 2020“).

Here are some encouraging excerpts from the article:

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I am in the process of reading a terrific new book, by Auden Schendler, Sustainability Director for Aspen Skiing Company. But Andrew Jones beat me to the punch with his review. So am reprinting his post here. This allows me to kill two birds with one stone [Note to self: Need new, eco-friendly metaphor], since I also wanted to draw attention to Andrew’s amazing work using climate simulations to educate policymakers on what it will take to preserve a livable climate. Auden is well known to CP readers as one of the hardest working people in the sustainability trenches (see Schendler I: Those quotes in Businessweek’s “Little Green Lies”) and a skeptic of rip-offsets (see “Schendler II: Good RECs vs. Bad RECs“).]

Old friend and fellow Rocky Mountain Institute alumnus Auden Schendler this week has released a gem of a book: “Getting Green Done — Hard Truths from the Front Lines of the Sustainability Revolution.”

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Salon has published my article on the biggest flaw in the strategy of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I’m going to expand on that article in a two-parter here.

The timing could not be better with the Tom Friedman “Ponzi scheme” discussion. For while the the richest foundation in the world certainly has taken on the noblest and greatest of challenges — to help billions of people who “never even have the chance to live a healthy, productive life” reach that opportunity themselves — its efforts are ultimately doomed to fail if we don’t stop catastrophic warming.

Also, the two men who have donated much of their vast wealth to make it possible, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, are Exhibits One and Two of the “very serious people who are perceived as essentially nonpartisan opinion leaders” who must speak out on climate change if we are to avert the worst (see “Is 450 ppm (or less) politically possible? Part 7: The harsh lessons of the financial bailout “).

Yet when we saw them together last summer, they were touring the Ponzi Canadian tar sands, as The Calgary Herald reported (see here):

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