Memo to status quo media:  We get it, already.  You have already written your “Copenhagen has failed” stories, and are just waiting for the flimsiest excuse to “scoop” everyone else.  Your desperation to file this as-yet-unwritten story is unbecoming and also perverse, since, as I’ve argued, prospects for a global deal have never been better. Worse, it is leading to the most dreadful herd-journalism and misreporting imaginable.  The following should be a cautionary tale.

Andy Revkin took the biggest “dog bites man” nonstory of the year — that Obama will not get a climate bill on his desk this year — and spun it into a major piece in the one-time paper of record, “Obama Aide Concedes Climate Law Must Wait” (online Friday, print Saturday).

How old is this supposed news?  Well, my very first piece explaining that the torturous process — getting through all of the House committees, then the House floor, then all of the Senate committees, and then Senate floor, and then out of conference to merge the two chambers’ bills into one, and then through the House and Senate again — would not put a bill on Obama’s desk until 2010 was on Febuary 3, eight months ago (!) — “Breaking: Sen. Boxer makes clear U.S. won’t pass a climate bill this year.”

For the record, though, Obama’s aide didn’t “concede” anything, with the implication that she was forced to make some sort of damning newsworthy admission.  In fact, Browner made this incredibly obvious statement almost as an aside at a confab put on by The Atlantic magazine.  The Atlantic thought so little of the supposedly newsworthiness of Browner’s statement that they buried it in the middle of their article on her remarks, “Carol Browner: Now is the Time to Move on Climate.”

In the entire story, Revkin never bothers to explain that for many, many months now the only issue for those who follow DC climate politics has been whether the Senate would pass a climate bill before Copenhagen, not whether a final bill would get onto Obama’s desk before Copenhagen.  I would note that his colleagues, John Broder and John Kanter, have written stories that are far clearer — and pointed out a while back that the issue was the timing of the Senate vote (see, for instance, this September 20th story).

The paper’s own editorial desk was so confused that in the print edition’s news summary table of contents on page A2, “Inside the Times,” the headline was, “Climate Bill Called Unlikely,” which would lead any reader just skimming, as most do, utterly misinformed.

But the true result of this bad reporting can be seen in the worst climate story of the week, by Suzanne Goldenberg today (Sunday), “US environment correspondent” for the UK Guardian, which apparently was even more desperate to file the first story that Copenhagen has failed and it’s all America’s fault:

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The brain waves of the American right continue to be erratic, when they are not flat-lining.

What’s more surprising — that a leading conservative scholar would admit that his entire movement may be brain dead or that he thinks the movement’s best hope is … wait for it … Glenn Beck.

Steven F. Hayward is “the F.K. Weyerhaeuser fellow at the American Enterprise Institute” who has, his bio notes, “written biographies of Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan and of Winston Churchill.”

I think it has been obvious for a while that the conservative movement should be renamed the conservative stagnation:

• Gingrich sums up conservative ethos: “I am not a citizen of the world! I think the entire concept is intellectual nonsense and stunningly dangerous”
• Joe Klein on the GOP: “How can you sustain a democracy if one of the two major political parties has been overrun by nihilists?”
• House GOP leader Boehner on ABC: “The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical.”

But who would have imagined a leading conservative intellectual like Hayward would make the following damning admission in his concluding paragraph:

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In the face of seemingly accelerating climate change, some have proposed tackling the problem with geoengineering: intentionally altering the planet’s physical or biological systems to counteract global warming. One such strategy “” fertilizing the oceans with iron to stimulate phytoplankton blooms, absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and export carbon to the deep sea “” should be abandoned.

So begins a recent Nature opinion piece, “Ocean fertilization: Time to move on” (subs. req’d, excerpted below) by four researchers and oceanographers.

The more you know about geo-engineering, the less sense it makes (see Science: “Optimism about a geoengineered ‘easy way out’ should be tempered by examination of currently observed climate changes”).  The most “plausible” approach, massive aerosol injection, has potentially catastrophic impacts of its own and can’t possibly substitute for the most aggressive mitigation — see Caldeira calls the vision of Lomborg’s Climate Consensus “a dystopic world out of a science fiction story.” And for the deniers, geo-engineering is mostly just a ploy — see British coal industry flack pushes geo-engineering “ploy” to give politicians “viable reason to do nothing” about global warming.

Geo-engineering is a “smoke and mirrors solution,” though most people understand that the “mirrors” strategy is prohibitively expensive and impractical.  One of the few remaining non-aerosol strategies still taken seriously by some is ocean fertilization.  This Nature piece explains why it should be abandoned:

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