George Will and the editorial page editors at the Washington Post proved a long time ago they don’t know science (see “The Post, abandoning any journalistic standards, lets George Will publish a third time global warming lies debunked on its own pages“).  And they don’t do any fact-checking (see WashPost op-ed page remains the home of un-fact-checked disinformation about clean energy and global warming).

But as a letter to the editor pointed out, they don’t know mythology either.  I was so focused on critiquing the substance of the original post (here and here), I missed the unintentional inanity of the headline, “Cooling Down the Cassandras,” and Will’s final line:

Environmental Cassandras must be careful with their predictions lest they commit what climate alarmists consider the unpardonable faux pas of denying that the world is coming to an end.

Other than not knowing the science or doing basic fact-checking, the faux pas is pretending to be an intellectual while not even knowing you’ve used a mythological metaphor containing a hidden army that destroys your whole damn message.   Cassandra famously had the gift of prophecy but the curse of not being believed, with archetypally tragic results:

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Now that John Kerry and Barbara Boxer have introduced their climate bill in the U.S. Senate, this fall will be all about changing canine colors.  To get the 60 votes they need to pass a bill, progressive Democrats will be trying to turn Blue Dog Democrats into Green Dog Democrats.

Welcome to the dog days of autumn.  Watch for progressives to offer milk bones, kibbles and bits to coax their more conservative colleagues into commitments that conscience alone should be sufficient to dictate.

The challenge for leaders in the Senate, as it was in the House, will be to prevent the climate bill from being negotiated into something far less than required to reinvent the American economy and reverse our greenhouse gas emissions, and to do both quickly.

Whether Senate leaders succeed in producing public policy that averts climate disaster will depend in large part on how they frame the debate. Here are three suggestions:

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Hundreds of business executives are descending on Washington this week in support of a clean energy economy. Calling for investment in American jobs instead of global warming pollution, the CEOs participating in the Business Advocacy Day for Jobs & Competitiveness — an effort organized by the new We Can Lead coalition — will tell the Senate to take action with strong climate legislation like the Clean Energy Jobs Act introduced last week by Sens. John Kerry (D-MA) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA). Several of these companies have written a public letter to Congress and the administration calling for “comprehensive legislation to cut carbon pollution”:

We need you to swiftly enact comprehensive legislation to cut carbon pollution and create an economy-wide cap and trade program. We support this legislation because certainty and rules of the road enable us to plan, build, innovate and expand our businesses. Putting a price on carbon will drive investment into cost-saving, energy-saving technologies, and will create the next wave of jobs in the new energy economy.

Carol Browner, the director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy and EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency are confirmed speakers before the We Can Lead companies, who will be lobbying Congress on Wednesday, October 7 on behalf of strong climate legislation. Many of the participants in the lobby day have endorsed the House legislation, the American Clean Energy and Security Act, and others have called for even stronger action. In addition, the CEOs are “scheduled to eat dinner with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Tuesday, and to hold a White House meeting with Energy Secretary Steven Chu and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke on Wednesday morning.”

Politico reports that “28 companies and labor and green groups — including United Technologies, Johnson & Johnson, GE, Weyerhauser, the Nature Conservancy and the Environmental Defense Action Fund — are launching” a million-dollar ad campaign “in support of comprehensive clean energy and climate change legislation.”

We Can Lead is a collaboration between the Clean Economy Network, Ceres, and other business groups including:

– Arkansas Business Leaders for Clean Energy Economy
– Apollo Alliance
– Business Council for Sustainable Energy
– Business Forward
– Environmental Entrepeneurs
– EDF – Less Carbon More Jobs
– Indiana Businesses for Clean Energy Economy
– National Venture Capital Association
– Ohio Business Council for a Clean Economy
– Pennsylvania Business Leaders for a Clean Economy
– Renewable Energy Business Network
– TechNet
– US Climate Action Network

1,000 mayors agree to reduce greenhouse gas emissions

When Greg Nickels became Seattle’s mayor in 2002, global warming was hardly at the top of the municipal agenda.

New York’s World Trade Center had been attacked, and officials had to figure out how to protect their own city from terrorism. Boeing was laying off 30,000 machinists, so there was the declining regional economy to deal with. Surely the federal government would worry about climate change.

Then came the winter of 2004, when the Cascade Mountains snowpack was so disastrously low that ski resorts — facing their worst year on record — laid off most of their employees. The same snow, when it melts, is what generates much of the Northwest’s electricity. “It was serious. It was truly serious,” Nickels said. “It became clear to me that global warming was not something off in the future, not far away, but something that was here and now.”

With the U.S. still not a signatory to the international Kyoto climate change accord, Nickels began talking to other mayors about halting carbon emissions in the cities — where the majority of Americans live, drive cars, operate factories, turn on lights and use power. On Friday, as outgoing president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, he announced that 1,000 mayors across the country had signed on to a pact to meet the Kyoto protocol targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. They also will urge the federal government and the states to cut emissions by 7% from 1990 levels by 2012.

Climate change will lead to massive decline in crop yield

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Stu Ostro, Senior Meteorologist at the Weather Channel, has written a must-read post on the recent record Georgia deluges, “Off the chain without a ‘cane” (reprinted below).  He makes a key point that had not occurred to me about the devastating September rainstorms:

Usually during that month when there’s wild weather, including precipitation extremes, it’s as a result of a hurricane or tropical storm. Not in 2009.

The main point of my post, Hell and High Water hits Georgia, was that, as climate scientists have predicted for a long time, wild climate swings are becoming the norm, in this case with once-in-a-century drought followed by once-in-a-century flooding.

Back in 2007, the NYT reported, “For the first time in more than 100 years, much of the Southeast has reached the most severe category of drought….  The situation has gotten so bad that by all of [state climatologist David] Stooksbury’s measures “” the percentage of moisture in the soil, the flow rate of rivers, inches of rain “” this drought has broken every record in Georgia’s history.“  So it was more than a once-in-a-century event.

As for the flooding, as one CP commenter posted, the USGS quantified that “the rivers and streams had magnitudes so great that the odds of it happening were less than 0.2 percent in any given year. In other words, there was less than a 1 in 500 chance that parts of Cobb and Douglas counties were going to be hit with such an event.”

I have called this type of rapid deluge, “global warming type” record rainfall, since it is one of the most basic predictions of climate science “” and its an impact that has already been documented to have started.

But in fact this deluge is even more of a global-warming-type rain event because, as Ostro notes, unlike typical Georgia deluges, this one was not associated with a tropical storm or hurricane.  Ostro is “Senior Director of Weather Communications. Stu leads the team of tornado, hurricane, and climate experts at The Weather Channel.”  Because these extreme rain events becoming more common, and because Ostro’s excellent explanation is really too long and technical to simply excerpt, I’m going to repost the entire thing below:  Read more

Last year, Thomas Fingar, then the U.S. intelligence community’s top analyst, warned that climate change is among the gravest threats to US national security (see here).  This year, John Warner, the former (GOP) chair of the Senate Armed Services committee has been repeating the same warning to anyone who would listen (see here).

But some Senate conservatives are deaf to the facts, as E&E News (subs. req’d) reports.

The Senate may vote tomorrow on whether to block funds for a new Central Intelligence Agency program to assess the national security implications of climate change.

Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) is offering an amendment to the fiscal 2010 defense spending bill that would bar funding for the Center on Climate Change and National Security launched last month.

The center will examine the national security impact of changes such as desertification, rising sea levels and greater competition for natural resources.

Here is Barrasso’s justification, which is intentionally mocking and unintentionally self-mocking [from E&E News (subs. req'd)]:

“We have threats from around the world. The most immediate of these threats is the prevention of future terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. I do not believe that creating a Center on Climate Change is going to prevent one terrorist attack,” Barrasso said yesterday.

“Will someone sitting in a dark room watching satellite video of northern Afghanistan now be sitting in a dark room watching polar ice caps?” he said.

First off, is Barrasso really saying that the entire mission of the Central intelligence Agency is preventing terrorist attacks? Although he sits on the Foreign Relations Committee, he apparently has no conception of what the CIA does.  He strikes me as one of those guys who in the 1990s probably wanted to block the CIA from looking into terrorism, since that was not going to prevent one communist attack on us.

Second, although he sits on the Environment and Public Works Committee, he apparently missed all the hearings about climate impacts and how they pose a major national security threat to us — and yes, will help create conditions that foster terrorism.  In fact, an unusually savvy new intelligence forecast reported last year should have served as a wake-up call for the largely clueless Establishment:

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AT HOME IN MY BASEMENT WEARING SWEATS SINCE MY DAUGHTER WOKE UP EARLY, Oct 5 (ClimateProgress) — Reuters reported this interesting piece of news Friday:

ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE, Oct 2 (Reuters) – U.S. President Barack Obama would consider attending climate talks in Copenhagen in December if heads of state were invited, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters on Friday.

“Right now you’ve got a meeting that’s set up for a level not at the head of state,” Gibbs said on Air Force One as Obama traveled home from a brief trip to Copenhagen. “If it got switched, we would certainly look at coming.” (Reporting by Jeff Mason)

Okay, sure, I’m never going to get the dateline Jeff Mason’s story had — but then he’s not going to get the one I had!

Anyway, I don’t think it would be much trouble to extend an invitation to heads of state.  After all, VP Gore went to Kyoto in 1997.  And then there is that other overseas trip the President made last week (see “If Obama is going to Copenhagen to push Chicago’s Olympic bid this week, he has to go in December to push a climate deal, yes?“)

So he should go, and I think there is a good chance he will.

UPDATE:  Please note this was a comment by Gibbs, who probably doesn’t follow this issue very closely.

Media reports of the death of the clean tech industry have been exaggerated (see “Global recession? Must be time for the media’s alternative-energy backlash“).  The Cleantech group reported Thursday, third quarter “results for clean technology venture investments in North America, Europe, China and India totaling $1.59 billion across 134 companies.”

That means total cleantech VC funding this year is already about $3.8 billion — which puts total funding on a pace to exceed every year except 2008!  And what has brought about this miraculous recovery:

“The billions in government funding being allocated globally in clean technology have begun emboldening private capital, which has in turn helped propel clean technology to the leading venture investment sector, now eclipsing biotech and IT,” said Dallas Kachan, Managing Director, Cleantech Group. “The two largest venture deals (Solyndra and Tesla Motors) and the largest IPO (A123Systems) this quarter were all recipients of U.S. government funding. Hundreds of millions of dollars in new venture funds this quarter are also evidence of investor confidence and momentum, including $1.1 billion in two new funds by Khosla Ventures alone.”

“The extension of tax credits for renewable-based power generation along with government stimulus and regulatory requirements to meet renewable portfolio standards are helping to drive continued investment on the part of VCs and utilities into the cleantech sector,” said Scott Smith, U.S. leader of Deloitte’s Clean Tech practice. “Utilities are increasingly bringing their access to capital to the sector through direct investment and power purchase agreements, driving new projects and increased capacity. We continue to see utilities investing in wind and solar and expect this trend to continue as cleantech projects become more economically viable and desirable for utilities.”

Thank you President Obama and progressives in Congress (see “Sure Obama stopped the Bush depression, cut taxes for 98% of working families, and jumpstarted the shift to a clean energy economy with a $100 billion in stimulus funds “” but what has the green FDR done lately?“)

Where is the money going?  Solar, transportation, green buildings:

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