In a bizarre pop-culture flip-flop, Kenneth Green of the American Enterprise Institute has compared the mild-mannered EPA administrator to Dirty Harry:

You can just see Jackson standing there with a .44 magnum in her hand, and a steely glint in her eye, telling industry “You’ve got to ask yourself one question, ‘do I feel lucky?’ Well, do ya, punk?”

Seriously!

Let me get this straight, the right-wing is now saying it’s bad to be like Clint, the quintessential tough guy hero lionized by conservatives because he’ll do whatever is needed to save human life?  That means Green is directly equating U.S. industry with the psychopathic serial killer and criminals that Clint fights in the iconic 1971 movie.

Well, logic was never a priority of Denier-Industrial-Complex Kooks (DICKs) like Green, who regularly spouts nonsense like, “We’re back to the average temperatures that prevailed in 1978″¦.  No matter what you’ve been told, the technology to significantly reduce emissions is decades away and extremely costly” — from a 2008 speech AEI later removed from their website (excerpts here).

In fact, Green’s analogy makes no sense whatsoever since Jackson is simply obeying the command of the highest court in the land to regulate carbon pollution (see here).  Green entirely omits the fact that in 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court determined that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases were pollutants and that the EPA would have to regulate them if they were found to endanger public health and welfare.

So the only part of the analogy that makes sense is that deniers and delayers like Green oppose the rule of law — while Jackson is trying to enforce it.

Ironically, in its zealous quest to kill climate action, AEI has done another flip-flop.  Jackson proposes to start regulating only  “large industrial facilities that emit at least 25,000 tons of GHGs a year.”  Jackson explained, “This is a common sense rule that is carefully tailored to apply to only the largest sources – those from sectors responsible for nearly 70 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions sources.”  She told the Governors Climate Summit in Los Angeles, “we can begin reducing emissions from the nation’s largest greenhouse gas emitting facilities without placing an undue burden on the businesses that make up the vast majority of our economy,” adding, “The corner coffee shop is not a meaningful place to look for carbon reductions.”

But Green doesn’t believe in common sense — he urges big polluters to sue to make sure small businesses and farmers are regulated also:

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For the source of this video — and for youth action — go here.

Experts see Arctic warming decades faster than models predict

When it comes to climate change, what happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic.

The latest science suggests that warming in the far northern region will affect ocean currents and weather patterns around the world, said Nal¢n Ko§, director of the Centre for Ice, Climate and Ecosystems at the Norwegian Polar Institute.

Ko§ is in Washington this week for a Capitol Hill briefing on the state of polar ice. But much of her attention right now is focused on upcoming U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen. She’s leading an international group of scientists writing a report on the state of Arctic ice. Norway’s foreign minister, Jonas Gahr St¸re, and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore will officially release the scientific update at the U.N. negotiations.

The scientists, many of whom participated in an April conference organized by St¸re and Gore, are still writing their report, which draws on science released since a 2007 U.N. Environment Programme report on the state of the world’s ice and snow.

But Ko§ said that some themes are emerging from recent observations of Arctic ecosystems and scientific studies.

“We’ve observing changes that are happening much faster than the climate models have predicted,” Ko§ said.

During the last four years, she said, the extent of Arctic summer sea ice has fallen below the average level recorded since 1979, when satellite measurements began. In fact, in 2007, sea ice hit a record low.

Climate models predicted a similar drop below the average, along with abrupt decreases like that seen in 2007 — but they projected that pattern wouldn’t emerge for decades.

“These events have happened 30 years ahead of time,” Ko§ said….

She cited a recent study by scientists at Rutgers University and the University of Delaware, which concluded that Arctic thaw has the potential to alter weather patterns throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Much of North America, including Alaska, and northern Europe would become drier than normal. The western and central Mediterranean and Japan would become wetter than normal.

“It’s all connected,” Ko§ said. “There are no walls on the Arctic.”

A plan to save rainforests gains international momentum

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Blue Jays win the World Series in 1993.

Washington Post opinion page editor Fred Hiatt continued to disgrace his paper, publishing yet another column questioning climate science by George Will, the seventh this year. “Cooling Down the Cassandras” (alternatively titled “For Alarmists, Ugly Truths on Global Warming”) is a master class in cherrypicking words and misinterpreting science. Will’s thesis — that there has been no global warming since 1998 — is based on his reading of a poorly written article about temperature trends by New York Times climate reporter Andy Revkin:

By asserting that the absence of significant warming since 1998 is a mere “plateau,” not warming’s apogee, the Times assures readers who are alarmed about climate change that the paper knows the future and that warming will continue: Do not despair, bad news will resume.

By Will’s logic, we’d have to conclude that the Toronto Blue Jays just clinched the A.L. East division title — after all, they’ve won six games in a row and are 9-1 in their last ten games, while the New York Yankees lost their last game and are only 7-3. However, when the Wonk Room contacted Mr. Will to confirm this theory, he responded:

You don’t seem to understand baseball. The Blue Jays are not even in contention.

Will’s persistent assertion that global warming has stopped during the hottest decade in recorded history is just as nonsensical as the idea that a team that is nine games below .500 is beating one that is 45 games above .500. Unfortunately, Will hung up before we could ask who he believed was the hottest team in baseball. Read more

A massive shift to clean energy is needed to stop one third of the planet’s habited land from turning into a permanent Dust bowl and to stop several meters of sea level rise (see “Hell and High Water“).  And unrestricted fossil energy use is “capable of wrecking the marine ecosystem and depriving future generations of the harvest of the seas” and, at the same time, it is expected to sharply increase Western wildfire burn area “” as much as 175% by the 2050s.

But that doesn’t stop really bad analysis from suggesting dirty energy somehow protects our land better for than clean energy, with wind supposedly 8 times as destructive as coal!  In fact, modern wind turbines are so tall that they take up very, very little land — allowing virtually all of the surrounding  land to be used for other purposes, including farming.

Guest debunker Dr. Matthew Wasson, Director of Programs for Appalachian Voices, notes “the habitat impact of the Mount Storm Wind Farm in the first image [below left] is assumed to be 25% greater than the impact of the 12,000 acre Hobet mountaintop removal mine in the second image (images are taken from the same altitude and perspective; the bright connect-the-dots feature in the windfarm image is the actual area disturbed)”: