Please email the NYT at nytnews@nytimes.com about this egregious piece and/or email its public editor at public@nytimes.com to explain you are “concerned about the paper’s journalistic integrity.”

Apparently the NYT felt a Magazine cover story pushing the pseudoscience of Freeman Dyson was not enough free publicity for the dwindling minority desperately trying to persuade humanity not to act in time to save itself from catastrophic climate impacts.

In a second inexplicable lapse in journalistic judgment, the paper of record has decided to promote the new disinformation campaign of the least credible global warming denier in the country — Swift Boat smearer Marc Morano, a man whose record of making stuff up would make disgraced former NYT reporter Jayson Blair cringe.

Yes, I know, I just promised “this blog will be a Morano-free zone” (see “Memo to media, blogosphere: Swift boat smearer Marc Morano has no credibility. He is unquotable and uncitable“).  But I was talking about ignoring his blog, since I assumed no serious reporter would flack Morano and his new disinformation-pushing website.  Who would have guessed that a NYT reporter, Leslie Kaufman, would want to smear her own reputation with a remarkably credulous profile of the Swift Boat smearer, “Dissenter on Warming Expands His Campaign“?

Here is how Kaufman writes of Morano’s background, including the Swift Boat smear:

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[Brad Johnson's post is reprinted from Wonk Room.]

As corporate lobbyists and conservative politicians strive to maintain a pollution-based economy, a new progressive alliance has formed to fight back.

The Climate Equity Alliance is calling for policies to ensure that energy legislation reaches President Obama’s desk benefiting people instead of polluters. The green economy legislation introduced in draft form by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) and Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) “” sets national standards for energy efficiency, renewable energy, and global warming pollution “” but leaves open whether polluters will be subsidized to achieve those standards.

Today, more than two dozen organizations from the research, advocacy, faith-based, labor and civil rights communities came together as the Climate Equity Alliance. Alliance members include the Center for American Progress, Green for All, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and the Service Employees International Union. Their principles recognize that clean energy legislation needs to be sustainable, honest, and fair:

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Last night, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Eugene Robinson discussed the “really crazy” lie that GOP leaders like Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) have been spreading that an MIT study says cap-and-trade legislation is a $3100 tax. “‘It’s just wrong. It’s wrong in so many ways, it’s hard to begin,’” Maddow quoted MIT economist John Reilly. “That is MIT-economist-speak for, ‘Liar, liar, pants on fire.’” After she noted that Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-MN) repeated the lie in a Minnesota Star Tribune editorial, the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson weighed in:

That’s just making stuff up. That $3,128 figure does not appear in the report. It’s not there. It is arrived at by taking an irrelevant number and dividing it by another irrelevant number and coming up with a number that means nothing. The actual calculation would be more like $340, although that wouldn’t show up on your electric bill, it would include all sorts of other costs that you wouldn’t necessarily see as energy costs, but they would be in there. But that’s a factor almost of ten. They just made it up. It’s really crazy.

Watch it:

In reality, the MIT report actually finds that clean energy policy that includes a fair cap-and-trade system would save us from our pollution-fueled path of job destruction, plummeting wages, skyrocketing energy prices, and catastrophic climate disasters.

One might surmise that’s why Republicans have to lie about the numbers.

Seth Borenstein of the AP caused a volcanic eruption yesterday with his interview of science adviser John Holdren, “Obama looking at cooling air to fight warming.”  Too bad the story isn’t quite accurate, as Holdren confirmed in an e-mail to me today and a separate email to others (that the NYT‘s Revkin published here).

Geoengineering is “the intentional large scale manipulation of the global environment” to counteract the effects of global warming or “emergency interventions to cool the atmosphere should less drastic measures fail.”  It is a last resort at best (see “Geo-engineering remains a bad idea”” and “Geo-Engineering is NOT the Answer“).

Rather than  focusing on what Holdren doesn’t believe, let’s focus on what he does.  I asked him a simple question.  Does he stand by what he published 3 years ago, which I often quote:

“The ‘geo-engineering’ approaches considered so far appear to be afflicted with some combination of high costs, low leverage, and a high likelihood of serious side effects.“

He wrote back, “I said exactly that to Seth Borenstein.” In his earlier email, Holdren wrote bluntly:

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[Note to readers:  Many of you helpfully post links to stories you think other readers (and I) should see.  I'd like you to try to post them in the comments section of this post, which should appear every weekday.  That way, readers will know where to look for the key stories of the day.  You might also want to post a one or two line summary.]

Top Stories
E&E Daily (Subs. Req’d)
SunPower, Xcel Energy mull massive Colo. plant

Despite the recession the solar industry continues to grow. In southern Colorado, SunPower Corp. has started the ball rolling for the construction of a 17-megawatt solar PV plant, second-largest of its kind in North America:

SunPower Corp. is planning to build a 17-megawatt solar photovoltaic array in southern Colorado….  Minneapolis-based Xcel Energy Inc. would buy all of its output over 10 years….

[Colorado's] newly augmented power portfolio standard requires Xcel and other large utilities to derive 20 percent of their sales from renewable resources by 2020; 4 percent of the electricity sold must come from solar PV or concentrated solar power projects.

Xcel’s current solar portfolio consists of about 32 megawatts….  Xcel has bids out for at about 200 megawatts of concentrated solar power generation….  SunPower aims to complete construction of a 25-megawatt PV array in DeSoto County, Fla., by the end of the year.

(See also “First Energy Department loan guarantee goes to “¦ a solar manufacturer.”)

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NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center reported last month:

Based on preliminary data, the globally averaged combined land and sea surface temperature was  … the eighth warmest for boreal winter (December-February) and the January-February year-to-date period.

This is especially impressive because, as NCDC reported:

Cold phase El Ni±o-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) (La Ni±a) conditions were present across the equatorial Pacific Ocean during February 2009….

The Oceanic Ni±o Index [three-month (December-January-February) running mean] was -0.8°C (-1.4°F), which is below the threshold of -0.5°C (-0.9°F), indicating La Ni±a conditions.

We’ve been in a moderate La Ni±a for much of the past 2 years, one reason why global temperature rise has appeared to slow a tad and why we haven’t returned to the record highs of the moderate El Ni±o year 2005.

The rest of the year, however, appears poised to be back on the very warm side.  NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center released today its monthly ENSO discussion and forecast, which concludes:

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While Newsweek is wandering off into pseudoscientific climate denial, Time continues to do the best science-based global warming coverage of any major national magazine.

I don’t spend a lot of time on species extinction here, since so many others do such a great job on that subject.  But the cover story, “The new age of extinction” is an excellent popular overview which I highly recommend.

In 2007, the IPCC warned that as global average temperature increase exceeds about 3.5°C [relative to 1980 to 1999], model projections suggest significant extinctions (40-70% of species assessed) around the globe. That is a temperature rise over pre-industrial levels of a bit more than 4.0°C.  Since we are facing a much greater warming than that (see “M.I.T. joins climate realists, doubles its projection of global warming by 2100 to 5.1°C” and “Hadley Center: “Catastrophic” 5-7°C warming by 2100 on current emissions path“), we are presumably facing extinctions beyond the high end of that range.

Time focuses on what is happening right now.  Here are some notable, quotable excerpts:

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[My apologies to readers about the heavy denier traffic, but one of the most popular right-wing disinformation sites has trained its slime on me.  The main reason I am responding is that this involves an important progressive talking point that conservatives are trying to shout down.  I have been traveling this week, which hindered my response to the comments, but I will be more vigilant.]

I’m not certain it’s worth a lot more time debating people who can’t or won’t read, like those at Newsbusters.

But let’s do this one last time, since it involves an important talking point progressives should use comparing jobs in the wind industry with coal mining jobs, which is probably best stated:

Last year, windpower generated as many jobs in this country as coal mining.

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