The titular head of the GOP is one Michael Steele, who coined the phrase “Drill, baby, Drill”

In a recent interview with Bill Bennett, Steele revealed he is an unusually ill-informed global warming denier — if that isn’t too redundant:

We are cooling. We are not warming. The warming you see out there, the supposed warming, and I am using my finger quotation marks here, is part of the cooling process. Greenland, which is now covered in ice, it was once called Greenland for a reason, right? Iceland, which is now green. Oh I love this. Like we know what this planet is all about. How long have we been here? How long? No very long.

What can one say to this litany of disinformation?

We are, in fact, warming and not cooling, Mr. “Head of the GOP.” I am now using quotation marks since anybody who spouts such nonsense is clearly taking direction from ideologues, not giving direction to anybody — as if recent events hadn’t made clear that Steele-Head-GOPer answers to Rush Limbaugh.

For those open to the facts on warming and Greenland, here are some places to start:

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On Friday, the New York Times Andy Revkin directed his readers to the new column, “The Green Home” by Julie Scelfo. The column he linked to, “Five Beginners’ Steps to a Greener Home,” is not terribly useful at all — indeed I would say it is counterproductive.

Only one of her five steps make part of my top 5 list. A number of readers have asked me to write more about personal energy and climate solutions. Since the traditional media is clearly not doing a good job, here goes.

The first thing to say is that the exercise is pointless if you don’t define what you mean by “green.” We aren’t — or shouldn’t be — trying to take actions to impress other people or even to make us feel good. We are trying to reduce the pollutants and resource consumption that threaten the health and well-being of ourselves, our family, the rest of the nation, the entire human race, and future generations.

Second, beginners especially should focus on that which is easy and high impact. After that, people can decide for themselves if they want to pursue hard and high impact action or easy and low impact action.

With that in mind, let me go through the NYT’s five steps and then, at the end, offer my own. By way of a teaser: From browsing around the Internet, I see that virtually all of the lists leave off what are arguably the two most important steps to greening your home.

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The gust of wind that surged through Washington D.C. earlier this month was not a warm front moving in. It was the collective sigh of relief when President Barack Obama issued a memorandum that will protect the work of the 100,000 scientists and engineers in the U.S. government (see “Scientific housecleaning: Integrity and transparency to have their day in the Sun“).

But it’s likely that no one felt a greater sense of relief — or vindication — than Rick Piltz.

Rick is the guy who blew the whistle on the Bush Administration’s censorship of federal climate science. More specifically, he’s the guy who told the New York Times about the politically motivated manipulation of climate science reports by Phil Cooney, an oil industry lobbyist who was appointed to a top position in the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ).

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I have long argued the IPCC “consensus” grossly underestimated both the speed and severity of climate change (see my 2007 post, “Scientists are underestimating climate change, Part III“). That’s one reason I rarely use the term “scientific consensus” and prefer the term “scientific understanding” when discussing global warming (see “Disputing the ‘consensus’ on global warming,” which also discuss the many reasons that the IPCC lowballs its projections). My guest blogger today, Elizabeth Grossman, updates this story. She is author of the forthcoming book “Redesigning the Future” and is a frequent contributor to Earth Island Journal. This post was first published here.

The predictions about what climate change may bring are pretty dire, but now it seems, they were actually underestimated.

In its most recent official report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) significantly underestimated the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that would occur during the last seven years, a miscalculation that has put the planet beyond the “range of possibilities” considered by some of the world’s top climatologists. The overly optimistic predictions in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment, released in 2007, appear to have been driven, in part, by the political dynamics involved in the international effort. The underestimation means that government negotiators meeting in Copenhagen later this year to write a replacement to the Kyoto Protocol will have a tougher task than previously imagined.

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The Pentagon has apparently found a new enemy — Americans! And a new purpose — a geo-engineering arms race

From the annals of really, really bad ideas, Eli Kintisch at Science magazine’s blog reports:

An official advisory group to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is convening an unclassified meeting next week to discuss geoengineering, ScienceInsider has learned. DARPA is the latest in a number of official science funding agencies or top scientific societies that are exploring the controversial idea. But one leading advocate of the work opposes the military developing geoengineering techniques.

That advocate, Carnegie’s Ken Caldeira, says

The last thing we need is to have DARPA developing climate intervention technology.

Seriously. You could write an entire field manual on why this is a dreadful idea.

First, DARPA does the cutting edge research for the military. DARPA’s mission is develop weapons! Most of the major geoengineering strategies can be used to alter the weather and climate for the worse. For that reason alone you really, really don’t want the military anywhere near geoengineering research.

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