Today, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), the chairman of the U.S. Senate Republican Conference, called on President Obama to figure out how to make Alexander’s pipe dream of “100 new nuclear power plants in 20 years” actually work, because he hasn’t been able to figure it out. Alexander’s “blueprint” is part of what had been billed as “new climate change legislation” from the GOP, an alternative to the Democratic American Clean Energy and Security Act recently passed by the House of Representatives. The Wonk Room attended Alexander’s unveiling of the blueprint at the National Press Club. As it turns out, Alexander’s “plan” for how the United States would double the number of nuclear power plants in twenty years was really just to ask President Obama to make it so:

What is needed boils down to two words: “presidential leadership.”

Watch a compilation of Alexander pleading for President Obama to make his dreams into real live policy:

As he described his attempt to devise a nuclear-dependent energy policy, Alexander complained, “I wish I didn’t have to do that. I think the president should be doing that!” When a reporter said he was “still confused what you want the government to do,” Alexander’s big idea was to have President Obama “direct the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to give him a plan.”

Alexander seemed genuinely baffled that President Obama is choosing to implement the clean energy and climate plan Obama promoted as a presidential candidate, instead of Alexander’s “nuclear plant in every backyard” plan, more than twice the number of plants promoted last year by losing candidate John McCain (R-AZ).

When not begging Obama for help, Alexander argued the American Clean Energy and Security Act should be “junked” because it is a “$100 billion a year job-killing national energy tax that will create a new utility bill for every American family.” In fact, non-partisan analyses show the legislation supported by Obama would lower utility bills, reduce coal and oil dependence, and clean up the planet at a cost of a postage stamp a day.

Even though Alexander claimed that his new-nukes plan would lower utility bills, he later admitted that all the cost of building 100 new $7 billion nuclear plants should be paid for entirely with “ratepayers’ money” — in other words, a “new utility bill” of $700 billion. The reason Obama isn’t jumping on the Alexander-McCain-nuclear lobbyist bandwagon is because Alexander’s plan boils down to one word: dumb.

The climate science deniers favorite myths are about cooling.  They have cooling myths about the past — see “Killing the myth of the 1970s global cooling scientific consensus.”  They have cooling myths about the present (asserting that we’ve been cooling since 1998) — see “Very warm 2008 makes this the hottest decade in recorded history by far.“  And they claim that recent studies predict future cooling.

In regards the last claim, a favorite new study is “Has the climate recently shifted?” (Swanson and Tsonis, 2009).  I have previously noted how absurd it is for deniers to cite that study — see New study quoted by Cato Institute deniers concludes “warming over the 21st century may well be larger than that predicted by the current generation of models.”

Now RealClimate has published a long post by Swanson, “Warming, interrupted: Much ado about natural variability.”  Swanson says that we’re NOT cooling, that he never predicted we will start cooling, but that we are in for about a decade of not much warming.

That view requires believing 1) something very unusual happened in the past decade and 2) global warming is linear.  Now the second assumption myth has no basis in climate science, a conclusion so obvious that I’m certain RealClimate agrees.  Before addressing that myth, here is what Swanson says on the first point:

Everything hinges on the idea that something extraordinary happened to the climate system in response to the 1997/98 super-El Ni±o event (an idea that has its roots in the wavelet analysis by Park and Mann (2000). The figure [above] shows the spatial mean temperature over all grid boxes in the HadCRUT3 data set that have continuous monthly coverage over the 1901-2008 period. While this provides a skewed view of the global mean, as it is heavily weighted toward North America, Europe and coastal areas, unlike the global mean temperature it has the cardinal virtue of being a consistent record with respect to time. The sole exclusion in the figure is the line connecting the 1997 and 1998 temperatures.

It may well be that something unusual did happen, since something unusual seems to have happened in upper ocean warming:

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We have made a couple of tweaks to respond to some comments here:  “So how do you like the new redesign?”

We have narrowed the main column to 600 px (20 pixels skinnier), which is I’m told what the NY Times has.  This will hopefully improve readability while giving more breathing room for the sidebar.  Also we turned off the background pattern.

Everybody has assumed we would need 60 votes to pass a climate bill in the Senate.   As one Democratic senator told me recently, the Republicans now filibuster pretty much everything — even bills and amendments supported by most of their members, just to slow the process down as much as possible and minimize the time available for Democrats to achieve any legislative successes.  Such is the GOP’s audacity of nope.

But TPM reports:

Despite opposing cloture on a previous cap and trade bill, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) says that–whether he supports the underlying bill or not–he won’t support a filibuster of climate change legislation this Congress.

“I’m not going to be part of a filibuster on climate change,” Brown told me today. Brown voted against ending debate on the Lieberman-Warner bill in 2007, but he says he did that because the bill had no real chance of making it to the floor, and opposing cloture was his way of expressing his objection to aspects of that legislation.

“I was not blocking the bill from having a hearing on the floor, because it wasn’t gonna get to that,” Brown said. “I wanted to show that I don’t support this bill unless you take care of American manufacturing.”

I consider this a semi-big deal.

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A new report may put The Big Question — “How likely is it that Global Warming will destroy human civilization within the next century?” — back on the front pages:

The planet’s future: Climate change ‘will cause civilisation to collapse’

An effort on the scale of the Apollo mission that sent men to the Moon is needed if humanity is to have a fighting chance of surviving the ravages of climate change. The stakes are high, as, without sustainable growth, “billions of people will be condemned to poverty and much of civilisation will collapse”.

This is the stark warning from the biggest single report to look at the future of the planet – obtained by The Independent on Sunday ahead of its official publication next month. Backed by a diverse range of leading organizations such as Unesco, the World Bank, the US army and the Rockefeller Foundation, the 2009 State of the Future report runs to 6,700 pages and draws on contributions from 2,700 experts around the globe. Its findings are described by Ban Ki-moon, Secretary-General of the UN, as providing “invaluable insights into the future for the United Nations, its member states, and civil society.”

Still not the worst-case scenario for homo “sapiens” sapiens (see “Lovelock warns climate war could kill nearly all of us, leaving survivors in the Stone Age“).  The story notes:

The effects of climate change are worsening – by 2025 there could be three billion people without adequate water as the population rises still further. And massive urbanisation, increased encroachment on animal territory, and concentrated livestock production could trigger new pandemics.

Although government and business leaders are responding more seriously to the global environmental situation, it continues to get worse, according to the report. It calls on governments to work to 10-year plans to tackle growing threats to human survival, targeting particularly the US and China, which need to apply the sort of effort and resources that put men on the Moon.

Right diagnosis, but wrong treatment.  The Apollo program was far, far too tiny an effort to serve as an analogy for what global warming requires.  Also, it was about developing new non-commercial technology for the government.  We need a WWII-scale effort (see “Advice to a young climate blogger: Always use WWII metaphors“) — massive deployment of existing and near-term technology for the public and businesses.

Chinese-American cabinet officials to prod China on climate change

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[You can offer your thoughts on the debate between the Chamber of Commerce and Ceres here.  Yes, you would have to give them a lot of personal information -- one more benefit of CP!]

While other media outlets give short shrift to the transformational climate and energy bill, the same can’t be said of the Politico.  They have a whole special section today on “Energy Test: Cap and Trade” as well as a debate on Waxman-Markey in their Arena section.

Now I don’t agree with all of the Politico’s analysis.  The story “The energy bill’s ticking timebomb” fails to mention the real ticking timebomb of doing nothing — catastrophic climate impacts aka “ Hell and High Water.“  Also, this assertion is somewhere between misleading and false:

The acid rain program worked, in part, because the solutions were obvious: Use coal with less sulfur or install scrubbers in plants. After the law passed, a flurry of new scrubbing technology soon hit the market.

In fact, just like today, the utility industry back then said there were no obvious solutions and that the cost of addressing pollution would be exorbitant.  Like today, the industry underestimated the possibility of fuel switching — back then, from high-sulfur coal to low-sulfur coal, today from coal to natural gas and biomass (see “Game changer, Part 2: Why unconventional natural gas makes the 2020 Waxman-Markey target so damn easy and cheap to meet“).  And who can doubt that if Waxman-Markey passes, a flurry of new technology will hit the market (and a flurry of underutilized existing technology will accelerate into the market)?

JR UPDATE:  The BBC has an interesting piece here, about an incorrect reading from one (very outdated) source for the loss of virtually the Himalayan glacier.  I think it would be very good news indeed if the 2035 date were wrong, since that would mean human action could still avert the worst.  That said, we know from this CP post, Another climate impact comes faster than predicted: Himalayan glaciers “decapitated” that a major 2008 study, “Mass loss on Himalayan glacier endangers water resources,” concluded ominously: “If Naimona’nyi is characteristic of other glaciers in the region, alpine glacier meltwater surpluses are likely to shrink much faster than currently predicted with substantial consequences for approximately half a billion people.“

So the good news is the Himalayans will probably endure past 2035 — but if we don’t reverse emissions trends sharply and soon, then before then, we will likely have made their disappearance inevitable with tragic consequences, most like felt by the second half of this century.  See this recent story, “Vanishing glaciers jolt smokestack China.”

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