“Daily sea ice extent as of July 21. The solid blue line indicates 2009 … the purple line shows 2008; and the solid gray line indicates average extent from 1979 to 2000.”

The blogosphere and scientific community are all abuzz as to whether 2009 will beat 2007 in minimum Arctic sea ice area. See, for instance, RealClimate’s “Sea ice minimum forecasts.”  But while the Arctic ice’s two-dimensional measurements are easier to make, the more important record is the three-dimensional one, which looks to have been set in 2008 (see NSIDC stunner: Arctic ice at “Likely Record-Low Volume” and below).

Now the National Snow and Ice Data Center has a July 22 update, “Arctic sea ice extent tracking below 2008,” which notes:

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See also A true American hero, Tom Perriello (D-VA), on Waxman-Markey: “The Republicans may win some seats because of this vote, but they can’t regain their souls for demagoguing the issue.”

h/t Schoolboy Heart

Washington Post columnist George Will attacked the “altar of climate change” and “climate confabulations” again today, the sixth such column this year. Post editors Fred Hiatt and Alan Shearer have refused to run corrections for any of these fact-challenged screeds, even as Post reporters, columnists, and cartoonists criticize Will. Without a reference, Will claims that “skepticism about the evidence that supposedly supports current alarmism about climate change is growing”:

Fortunately, skepticism about the evidence that supposedly supports current alarmism about climate change is growing, as is evidence that, whatever the truth about the problem turns out to be, U.S. actions cannot be significantly ameliorative. When New York Times columnist Tom Friedman called upon “young Americans” to “get a million people on the Washington Mall calling for a price on carbon,” another columnist, Mark Steyn, responded: “If you’re 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you’re graduating high school, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade.”

Steyn, a Canadian right-winger who writes for the National Review blog, is not exactly a reliable source for climatological data. As Michel Jarraud, Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization explains, global warming “has accelerated particularly in the past 20 years”:

Data collected over the past 150 years by the 188 members of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) through observing networks of tens of thousands of stations on land, at sea, in the air and from constellations of weather and climate satellites lead to an unequivocal conclusion: The observed increase in global surface temperatures is a manifestation of global warming. Warming has accelerated particularly in the past 20 years.

Jarraud’s letter debunking the myth of recent global cooling was published by the Washington Post on March 21, in response to George F. Will’s February 15 denier column.

It may be true that the “dead baby juice” conspiracy wing of the conservative movement is growing, but Fred Hiatt’s continued publication of George Will’s alternate-universe diatribes is a blot on the Washington Post’s reputation.

When New York Times columnist Tom Friedman called upon “young Americans” to “get a million people on the Washington Mall calling for a price on carbon,” another columnist, Mark Steyn, responded: “If you’re 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you’re graduating high school, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade.”

There are lies, damn lies, Breakthrough Institute statistics, and then — at the very bottom, where you find the crap that is really hard to scrape off –  George Will columns, like the one quoted above.  Since the senior editors at the Washington Post continue to publish his long-debunked falsehoods with no caveat whatsoever, one can only assume that they mindlessly endorse every single word of bullshit he writes — and that they hold their readers and letter writers in utter disdain.

When we last left Will and the Post in April, they were once again repeating the disinformation that the globe hasn’t warmed in over a decade — even though they had just published a letter from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) blasting them for this very “misinterpretation of the data and of scientific knowledge” (see “The Washington Post, abandoning any journalistic standards, lets George Will publish a third time global warming lies debunked on its own pages“).

Will is not inaccurately quoting WMO this time — he is just accurately quoting disinformation from the National Review, repeating the long-debunked myth that “there has been no global warming” for 11 years.  Yet the definitive global temperature record from U.S. climate experts would be that of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, which says the warmest year on record was 2005 — not 1998 (see here).  See also “Very warm 2008 makes this the hottest decade in recorded history by far.”

So by failing to put in any caveats or explanation, the Washington Post has managed to let George Will publish the same two outrageous lies in one sentence that two previous letters to the editor had already debunked (see “Washington Post publishes two strong debunkings of George Will’s double dose of disinformation“) — a journalistic first that editorial page editor Fred Hiatt can be proud of, if no one else.   Perhaps Hiatt will now publish three letters debunking Will, and then let Will publish three versions of the falsehood.

Let me come back to the caveats.  First, let’s note another falsehood that Will and the Post publish in the final paragraph: Read more

JR:  This story is a follow up to “Siemens, Munich Re study $555 Billion, 100 GW concentrated solar project in the Sahara.”  The map above comes from Desertec — and looks to me to be the inevitable future for the region in a carbon-constrained world.

Industry lines up behind bold concentrated solar project in hopes politicians will follow

For centuries, Mediterranean countries have found countless ways to disagree — over religion, ethnicity, colonialism and trade. But there are signs the region might yet unite in pursuit of a common goal: renewable energy.

European government and industry have been eyeing tracts of sun-drenched, vacant land in North Africa and the Middle East for some time. And now, officials and business executives are beginning to sweat out the details that could see renewable power sprouting in the desert.

Their vision is ambitious. By 2050, massive solar thermal plants, which concentrate the sun’s energy using mirrors to heat steam-generating media, would sprawl across the Sahara and Middle East, feeding most of their power to their host nations. Leftover energy, meanwhile, would travel north on a new ‚¬45 billion grid to meet 15 percent of Europe’s electricity needs….

All the Arab states attended the Paris meetings, and Egypt, in particular, has been a strong supporter. According to Egyptian officials, this is because for the first time, in a Mediterranean detente, Europeans are treating African and Middle Eastern countries as equal partners. This is best seen in the union’s co-presidency, which Sarkozy and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak share….

Costs for solar thermal could eventually come down to about 10 cents a kilowatt-hour as the technology scales up, said the Center for Global Development’s Wheeler, who has written an influential paper on the topic.

That paper is “Desert Power: The Economics of Solar Thermal Electricity for Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.”

Meet Belcha – Europe’s biggest carbon polluter (and it’s about to get even bigger)

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