When we last left our favorite former TV weatherman, he was offering the ‘inanity defense’ for his effort to censor Peter Sinclair’s Climate Denial “Crock of the Week” video.

The man behind the top anti-scientific website WattsUpWithThat regularly defames top climate scientists and pushes the most seemingly detailed but ultimately nonsensical analyses (see here) — yet he could not even be bothered to spend one minute googling “copyright laws” or “fair use.”  The result:   Not only did he publish the most embarrassing, torturous and self-revealing  defense of censorship ever seen on the blogosphere but, YouTube has now (inevitably) sided with Sinclair and reposted the original video:

Sinclair explained to me the process for reinstatement on YouTube — and thanked Watts for the publicity boom — in an email:

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It’s not enough for the coal lobby to hire a top GOP voter-fraud company to run massive “grassroots” efforts to undermine climate and clean energy action.

Now Ken Ward, Jr., the best journalist in West Virginia, reports today:

This afternoon, the coal industry is launching yet another public relations campaign “” this one billing itself as “an alliance of people from all walks of life who have joined forces to educate the general public and lawmakers about the importance of coal and coal mining to our local and national economies.”

This group is calling itself the Federation for American Coal, Energy and Security, which creates the nice abbreviation, FACES of Coal. The group is having a kick-off press event this afternoon at the offices of the Charleston Area Alliance, a regional chamber of commerce group.

The FACES of coal?  This acronym must be the work of real “Mad” Men, perhaps the genius who came up with Frosty the Coalman, Clean Coal Night, Deck the Halls with Clean Coal.   I’m guessing they figured it was better than their first choice, the Federation for Everyone’s Coal, Energy and Security.

Still, does the industry understand what people associate with “faces of coal”?

Here is the rest of Ward’s piece:

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Okay, the NYT op-ed by the sage of Omaha, “The Greenback Effect,” is almost entirely about our economic crisis.  Still, it’s nice that one of our top economic gurus  understands global warming is nonlinear — and thinks enough people might understand that point so he can use it as a springboard for discussing monetary policy:

IN nature, every action has consequences, a phenomenon called the butterfly effect. These consequences, moreover, are not necessarily proportional. For example, doubling the carbon dioxide we belch into the atmosphere may far more than double the subsequent problems for society.  Realizing this, the world properly worries about greenhouse emissions.

[Yes, Buffett may be confusing CO2 emissions with CO2 concentrations -- join the club -- but it's impossible to tell from this short hit.]

The butterfly effect reaches into the financial world as well. Here, the United States is spewing a potentially damaging substance into our economy “” greenback emissions.

The article’s final mention of climate impacts is, however, quite lame:

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The National Snow and Ice Data Center reports:

During the first half of August, Arctic ice extent declined more slowly than during the same period in 2007 and 2008. The slower decline is primarily due to a recent atmospheric circulation pattern, which transported ice toward the Siberian coast and discouraged export of ice out of the Arctic Ocean. It is now unlikely that 2009 will see a record low extent, but the minimum summer ice extent will still be much lower than the 1979 to 2000 average.

“The graph [click to enlarge] shows daily sea ice extent as of August 17, 2009. The solid light blue line indicates 2009; the solid dark blue line shows 2008; the dashed green line shows 2007; and the solid gray line indicates average extent from 1979 to 2000. The gray area around the average line shows the two standard deviation range of the data.”

Since the 2009 arctic extent AREA seem to be close to 2008 levels, which set the record for minimum ice VOLUME, it is too soon to say whether 2009 will set a volume record (see “Will we see record low Arctic ice VOLUME this year?“).

It remains as clear as ever that the Arctic ice isn’t going to recover, and we are headed for ice free summers in the foreseeable future:

• North Pole poised to be largely ice-free by 2020: “It’s like the Arctic is covered with an egg shell and the egg shell is now just cracking completely”
• New NSIDC director Serreze explains the “death spiral” of Arctic ice
• NSIDC: Arctic melt passes the point of no return, “We hate to say we told you so, but we did”
• The International Polar Year: “Arctic sea ice will probably not recover
• Permafrost loss linked to Arctic sea ice loss