[Note:  I'd be very interested in hearing from environmentally-responsible Climate Progress readers about what you think of the claim by Will and Shellenberger and Nordhaus that you are just trying to make a statement, just trying to assuage your guilt.]

Two weeks ago I wrote, “I can’t imagine why any serious journalist would cite the work of The Breakthrough Institute (TBI) “” except to debunk it” (see “Memo to media: Don’t be suckered by bad analyses from TBI“).

But here comes George Will to show us all why a semi-serious anti-science journalist would cite TBI founders, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus: They have the exact same worldview.  They are, to use the popular term, BFF.  Will’s piece, Green With Guilt, is an extended diatribe against all environmental action.  No surprise, then, that Will cites at length TBI’s New Republic piece, “The Green Bubble.”

Will loves the Shellenberger and Nordhaus piece, of course, and not for the reason you might think, namely that the S&N piece is a string of factually untrue, egregious statements just like his entire body of work.  No, oddly enough, even though most of the media treats TBI as if it were part of the environmental movement, uber-conservative George Will share S&N’s entire Weltanschauung, which I call “The Audacity of Nope.”

Will and Shellenberger and Nordhaus say “nope” to all those of you who are taking individual action to reduce your environmental impact and global warming emissions — and they also say “nope” to any major government effort to take collective action to reduce global warming emissions. Future generations — you are on your own!

Will and Shellenberger and Nordhaus are the anti-Obamas, quite literally:  Both Will and S&N have explicitly and repeatedly attacked Obama’s climate policies.

Note to media:  Perhaps now, after the Washington Post has gone to all the trouble of publishing this engagement announcement from George Will, you can stop pretending that Shellenberger and Nordhaus are part of the environmental movement.

Here is Will’s big wet kiss to Shellenberger and Nordhaus:

Read more

Mike Lemonick

In an article for Yale’s Environment 360, prominent science journalist Michael D. Lemonick rebukes the New York Times for its credulous 8,000-word profile of climate denier Freeman Dyson. As the Wonk Room previously noted, in March the New York Times Magazine ran a fawning cover article about Dyson by Nicholas Dawidoff, a baseball writer. Lemonick, who noted climate scientists describe Dyson’s ideas about global warming as “clueless,” “appallingly ill-informed,” and “flat-out wrong,” took particular umbrage at Dawidoff. When asked by NPR’s On the Media if whether it mattered if Dyson was right or wrong, Dawidoff answered:

Oh, absolutely not. I don’t care what he thinks. I have no investment in what he thinks. I’m just interested in how he thinks and the depth and the singularity of his point of view.

Lemonick responds with a sharp critique of Dawidoff and the New York Times:

This is, to put it bluntly, bizarre. It matters a great deal whether he’s right or wrong, given that his views have been trumpeted in such a prominent forum with essentially no challenge.

Lemonick, the senior writer at Climate Central and a twenty-year veteran science journalist for Time Magazine, interviewed Dyson, who freely admitted, “I have no credibility” on climate science or policy:

I have two great disadvantages. First of all, I am 85 years old. Obviously, I’m an old fuddy-duddy. So, I have no credibility. And, secondly, I am not an expert, and that’s not going to change. I am not going to make myself an expert.

Dyson’s happy explanation that his decades as a theoretical physicist should not substitute for actual knowledge raises into question the judgment of Dawidoff and his editors at the New York Times Magazine.

What is that wacky Swift boat smearer Marc Morano up to?  I don’t visit his website, of course, since it is filled with disinformation and apparently he is too busy to blog.

But somebody sent me the story and the link to his website, and then I noticed that Morano links to stories here on CP, strangely enough, so I thought I would return the favor this one time.

Anyway, one would suppose the Swift Boat Smearer is being mockingly humorous or satirical, like his namesake, Jonathan Swift, by making this article his banner headline.  But then really most of the articles Morano links to merit mocking or satire –  “GORE LIED:  Global temperatures plunge further; have dropped .63?F (.35?C) since Al Gore released An Inconvenient Truth” [he kills me!] — so you really can’t tell whether his whole damn website is just some sort of elaborate performance art, like something Andy Kaufman would have done.

Anyway, if we drop the part of the story that connects things to global warming — which is beyond tenuous — the article itself, from Russia Today, has some interesting stuff on the weather conditions over the Intertropical Convergence Zone that can make for “white knuckle” flying:

Read more

The Waxman-Markey bill has a very strong set of building efficiency codes (see Section 201, page 214 of the bill — a big PDF).  Our guest blogger, Craig A. Severance, discusses what the bill requires in a post first published on his blog.  Craig, a practicing CPA and former Assistant to the Chairman and to Commerce Counsel, Iowa State Commerce Commission, did one of the most detailed cost analyses publically available on the current generation of nuclear power plants being considered in this country (see “Exclusive analysis, Part 1: The staggering cost of new nuclear power“).

The greenhouse gas cap-and-trade title of the Waxman-Markey bill gets most of the attention, as it should, but the bill has many other provisions, some good, some lame.

It’s important to “get things right” when a new building is constructed.  More so than perhaps anything else we create, new buildings will be with us for a very long time.

Read more

ENSO Alert System Status: El Ni±o Watch

Synopsis: Conditions are favorable for a transition from ENSO-neutral to El Ni±o conditions during June ˆ’ August 2009.

So begins the monthly El Ni±o/Southern oscillation (ENSO) Diagnostic Discussion issued by the Climate Prediction Center of NOAA’s National Weather Service.  This is a significant change from their recent predictions of ENSO-neutral conditions for the rest of the year (see “La Ni±a conditions end“).  You can read the basics about ENSO here.

Figure 3:  Area-averaged upper-ocean heat content anomalies (°C) in the equatorial Pacific (5°N-5°S, 180º-100ºW).

I’ll go through the report in some detail since this is potentially a very big deal for the climate debate.  After all, the La Ni±a conditions over the past 18 months helped temporarily mute the strong human-caused warming signal, allowing the global warming deniers to push their nonsensical global cooling meme with the help of the status quo media (see “Media enable denier spin 1: A (sort of) cold January doesn’t mean climate stopped warming“).

Remember that back in January, NASA had predicted:

Given our expectation of the next El Ni±o beginning in 2009 or 2010, it still seems likely that a new global temperature record will be set within the next 1-2 years, despite the moderate negative effect of the reduced solar irradiance.

ENSO doesn’t change the overall warming trend, but it is a short-term modulation, what NASA labels the largest contributor to the “natural dynamical variability” of the climate system.  How are El Ni±o and La Ni±a defined? Read more

In an interview with the Wonk Room, Todd Stern, the U.S. special envoy for climate change, explained that he believes the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454) is both necessary and sufficient to achieving an international agreement to tackle global warming. Following a speech yesterday at the Center for American Progress on his trip to engage China in a bilateral climate partnership, Stern explained that Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) is doing “what can be done.” Stern recognized, however, that the United States has to catch up to the rest of the world because of the Bush administration’s refusal to act:

We’re starting later! It’s unfortunate, but it’s just the reality. We can’t rewrite the last eight years, so we’re starting later.

Watch it:

Recent scientific papers have defined the global warming challenge as keeping cumulative global greenhouse emissions between 2000 and 2050 below a trillion tons. Only by staying below that threshold is the world likely to avoid catastrophic increases in global temperatures. When asked, Stern dismissed the differences between the Waxman-Markey targets and what the Europeans want as resulting in “only one or two parts per million” of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. He argued that the key question is what the “major developing countries” like China, India, and Brazil achieve:

There’s a very big difference between whether the major developing countries do a lot and don’t. There you have not one or two parts per million but a big difference. Eighty percent of the growth in emissions going forward for the next several decades is going to come from the developing world.

We are the first to admit, recognize, and talk about our own historic responsibility. The U.S. is the biggest historic emitter of greenhouse emissions. We have a huge responsbility to take leadership, to take action, and to move forward. But, having said that, if you look at the trajectory from now on — hugely weighted toward the developing countries.

The short answer to your question is that I think we can be quite consistent with those sort of scientific goals provided everybody gets in the act.

When asked about the concerns of legislators like Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) about the potential for job loss due to a cap on global warming pollution, Stern also said that climate policy offers “a lot of gain” by driving the “transformation to a clean energy economy,” and noted the free allowances given to exporting industries in the Waxman-Markey legislation. He concluded:

It’s a fair question. We don’t want to be at a competitive disadvantage. But the real, most important way in the long run — whether or not it’s immediate or not, but in the slightly longer run — to address these questions is to have an international agreement that has all the parties involved and all the parties taking real action.

Oil hit $67 a barrel yesterday, driven the perception the global economy may have hit bottom, among other factors:

Much of oil’s rally this year has tracked stock market gains as investors look to equity markets for signs of economic recovery, while a weaker dollar can boost the appeal of oil and other commodities as a hedge against inflation.

“Equity markets are performing well, the dollar is falling, add to that Goldman Sachs and you see why oil has risen,” said Simon Wardell, oil analyst at Global Insight.

Goldman Sachs raised its end of 2009 oil price forecast to $85 a barrel from $65 and introduced a new end of 2010 forecast of $95.

“The recent rally in WTI (U.S. crude) prices is likely to be but the first stage in the oil price rally that we expect will accompany a recovery in economic activity,” Goldman said in a research note.

If oil hits $85 this year, then no doubt it will exceed $100 a barrel some time before my June 2009 prediction (even if it ends 2010 at $95, which I doubt).  And that means some lucky reader is going to win the CP contest “When will oil hit $100 a barrel?“  Just goes to show you, you can’t be sufficiently pessimistic these days about peak oil!

Indeed, as the Miami Herald reported Tuesday, leading forecasters are warning that “low oil prices now may mean higher oil prices later“:

Read more

Clean Energy Funding Trumps Fossil Fuels

Global investors spent about $250 billion building new power capacity in 2008, and for the first time the lion’s share of that money went to renewable sources, according to the United Nations Environment Program.

Renewable sources accounted for 56 percent of investment dollars, worth $140 billion, while investment in fossil fuel technologies was $110 billion, the U.N. program said in a report, Global Trends in Sustainable Energy Investment 2009, released on Wednesday and produced in collaboration with New Energy Finance, a research company based in London.

Here is the full study, “Global Trends in Sustainable Energy Investment.”

The U.N. report highlighted how investment in developing countries in 2008 had surged forward by 27 percent to $36.6 billion, and now accounted for nearly one third of global investments. “Bright points” last year included the growth of wind power in China and a rise in spending on geothermal energy in countries including Australia, Japan and Kenya, according to Achim Steiner, the executive director of the United National Environment Program.

Brazil, Chile, Peru and the Philippines had brought in, or were poised to introduce, policies and laws fostering clean energy, he said. China led new investment in Asia while Brazil accounted for almost all renewable energy investment in that region.

Read more

The link between global warming and extreme weather events is evident – much as conservatives try to deny this reality (see “Why do the deniers try to shout down any talk of a link between climate change and extreme weather?“).  Research predicts that the trend will intensify, most likely causing more crop losses for farmers.  This piece by guess blogger Tom Kenworthy, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, was first published here.  The picture is of a sign outside the Iowa Welcome Center, which was partially submerged by flood water on June 15, 2008.

Farm belt lawmakers are posing a challenge to passage of clean-energy legislation in Congress because of a proposed Environmental Protection Agency ruling that they claim could make it harder for ethanol produced from corn and other U.S. crops to meet the federal renewable fuel standard under a 2007 law. But torpedoing the American Clean Energy and Security Act, H.R. 2454, would actually hurt farmers because harms linked to global warming””including drought, flooding, and other crop damage””would continue unabated.

Read more