No, not the stuff in the stolen emails — although the University of East Anglia and its Climatic Research Unit (CRU) have yet another statement out I’ll excerpt below.  It notes “Over 95% of the CRU climate data set concerning land surface temperatures has been accessible to climate researchers, sceptics and the public for several years.”

No, the vital climate data that the Hadley Center and CRU are withholding from the public is the warming taking place in the Arctic (see “What exactly is polar amplification and why does it matter?“).  And that missing data is why NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies data are  almost certainly superior to CRU’s data “developed in conjunction with Hadley Centre of the UK Met Office.”

Remember, “there are no permanent weather stations in the Arctic Ocean, the place on Earth that has been warming fastest,” as New Scientist explained (see here and here). “The UK’s Hadley Centre record simply excludes this area, whereas the NASA version assumes its surface temperature is the same as that of the nearest land-based stations.” Thus it is almost certainly the case that the planet has warmed up more this decade than NASA says, and especially more than the UK’s Hadley Center says.

RealClimate has an excellent post on this very subject “” “the ‘hole in the Arctic’ in the Hadley data, just where recent warming has been greatest” “” with this great figure (and caption):

Figure. The animated graph shows the temperature difference between the two 5-year periods 1999-2003 and 2004-2008. The largest warming has occurred over the Arctic in the past decade and is missing in the Hadley data.

See also “Human-caused Arctic warming overtakes 2,000 years of natural cooling, “seminal” study finds.”

Thus contrary to what the global warming disinformers say about the recent temperature record, it is almost certainly the case that the planet has warmed up more this decade than NASA says, and especially more than the UK’s Hadley Center says.

So that’s why the NASA temperature record should be seen as more accurate, which puts 2005 as the warmest year on record, with 2007 just edging out 1998 for second warmest.  This is “the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years,” as climatologist Ken Caldeira puts it.  NASA has reported June to October were the hottest on record.* And next year may well be the warmest on record.

So, no, there hasn’t been any recent “global cooling” even for the surface temperature record. And when you look at where 90% of the human-caused warming was expected to go — the oceans — you find steady warming over the past several years:

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The challenges facing President Obama and the U.S. Congress have not gone away. Paul Krugman worries that “unemployment is likely to stay near its current level for a year or more,” because “much of the political establishment now sees stimulus as having been discredited by events, so that it’s very hard to come back and scale the policy up to where it should have been in the first place.” But there remains a pathway out of Krugman’s dire vision of “a process of defining prosperity down” — if enough politicians embrace the alternative vision of a green economy, promoted by political leaders as far apart on the ideological spectrum as Van Jones and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). The basic concept is simple, as this video from Repower America shows — heat up the economy by cooling down the planet:

The Recovery Act made a down payment for clean energy jobs, primarily through public spending. But the creation of a carbon market would drive private investment away from pollution and into clean energy. A Political Economy Research Institute clean energy economy report found that public-private investments of $150 billion a year could be sustained over ten years and create 1.7 million net long-term jobs in the U.S. economy. Fossil-based energy production sends money overseas and sinks money into capital-intensive projects like mining and drilling, whereas clean energy and energy efficiency requires greater local and labor investment.

The stronger the carbon cap is in a carbon market, the greater the investment. A $150 billion carbon market would be about double the size of what is being considered by Congress. That investment would be sufficient to construct a nationwide smart grid, retrofit every building in America for energy efficiency, and produce 20 percent of electricity from renewable sources — all by 2020.

If Congress truly wanted to restart this nation’s economy, it would take the legislative framework of the Kerry-Boxer Clean Energy Jobs Act and the Waxman-Markey American Clean Energy Security Act and:

– Strengthen the emissions targets to spur $150 billion in clean energy investment a year

– Strengthen the building efficiency standards to require every building in America be refitted by 2020

– Strengthen the renewable electricity standards to 20 percent by 2020

– Continue the Recovery Act’s ambitious smart grid plans

Conservatives are absolutely right that the future of the American economy depends not on long-term government spending but on private investment. But the economy needs to be first restarted by a clean energy stimulus and then pointed in the right direction by strong, swift federal action, ending our fealty to Exxon Mobil and Peabody Coal, and ushering in a new era of clean energy independence.

Ensemble mean forecast “predicts El Nino will last at least into the Northern Hemisphere summer 2010″

We seem to have settled into a moderate to strong El Ni±o.  NOAA’s latest weekly update on the El Ni±o/Southern oscillation, “ENSO Cycle: Recent Evolution, Current Status and Predictions” shows that the key region of the Pacific Ocean has stayed quite warm for all of November (see here for figures and data).

The question is how long it will stay fairly strong.  Last week I noted that NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center had asserted:

Based on current observations and dynamical model forecasts, El Ni±o is expected to continue to strengthen and last through at least the Northern Hemisphere winter 2009-10.”

This week they tweaked that to say:

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“The Gulf of Kutch, off Gujarat, is ideal for tidal energy and can be exploited by the turbines that are made by Atlantis Resources.”

British company to help India harness the power of the sea

A small British-based tidal energy company has won a landmark contract to attempt to harness the power of the sea around India for the first time.

Atlantis Resources has forged a deal with the western state of Gujarat, under which the privately owned company will establish the feasibility of developing tidal power projects capable of generating more than 100 megawatts of power “” enough to supply about 40,000 households.

Of particular interest are the Gulf of Kutch and the Gulf of Khambhat in the Arabian Sea: two sites renowned for extreme daily tides. The project could lead to hundreds of millions of pounds worth of investment in tidal energy if the results of the study are positive.

India has more than 4,500 miles of coastline and is scrambling to tackle a gaping power deficit but has yet to establish a single tidal power project. The move to explore the untapped resource comes ahead of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, an event where India will strive to demonstrate that it is doing its utmost to limit emissions while refusing to cap economic growth.

India, which imports 70 per cent of its oil and relies on modest coal reserves to generate most of its electricity, is on course to become the third-largest user of energy by 2030, behind the US and China.

Atlantis’s backers include Morgan Stanley and Statkraft, the Norweigan state utility. The company, which is run by Tim Cornelius, an Australian former pilot of manned submersibles, is also hoping to establish a £400 million project to build one of the world’s biggest tidal power plants in the Pentland Firth, off the Scottish coast.

The waterway, famous for its treacherous currents, has the potential to turn Scotland into “the Saudi Arabia of tidal energy”, according to Alex Salmond, the Scottish First Minister.

Proponents of tidal current power argue that it is the most reliable and predictable form of clean energy, even though the technology lags that used in wind power.

The gravitational pull of the moon and sun is predictable and moves horizontally around the earth, creating high and low tides. Tidal current energy takes the kinetic energy in these tidal currents and converts it into renewable electricity

Dalai Lama says climate change needs global action

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The Washington Times is the other DC newspaper, the “conservative” one.  That’s assuming you can call the primary DC paper — the one that loves un-fact-checked op-ed pieces attacking climate science and clean energy and that is now run by former Wall Street Journal editors — not conservative (see “Washington Post recycles another disinformation-filled WSJ op-ed, this time from coal apologist Bjorn Lomborg. Funny how two new senior Post editors came from the WSJ).

Still, as Wikipedia notes, The WashTimes was “founded in 1982 by Unification Church founder Sun Myung Moon, and is subsidized by the Unification Church community. The Times is known for its conservative stance on political and social issues.”

The WT puts out a very useful daily Washington Insight/Energy (sub. req’d), which gives another perspective on inside-the-beltway analysis.  As was widely reported last week, Obama to attend Copenhagen, announces “a U.S. emissions reduction target in the range of 17% below 2005 levels in 2020.”³

Now, much of the status quo media remains stuck in an everything-progressives-are-doing-will-fail bandwagon, so they missed the key implications of that amazing announcement — Obama just doubled down on a domestic climate bill.  Yes, I know, you keep reading stories about how the administration is walking away from the bipartisan climate and clean bill.  Not.   As the WT put it last Wednesday:

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Thanks to human-caused global warming

President Obama and other world leaders will gather in Copenhagen next week to discuss climate change. Though this is a global issue, it’s also a profoundly local one. For this reason, the Op-Ed editors asked writers from four different continents to report on the climate changes they’ve experienced close to home. Here are their dispatches.

Here are snippets of the four stories that ran in the NYT this weekend, along with their illustrations:

South Africa’s Fire Kingdom
In Cape Town, a rise in unpredictable and more ferocious fires are destroying the ecosystem.

… “When we were young,” the old man in Greenmarket Square observed, “seasons came and went in a predictable rhythm. Now seasons have gone amok.”

The Penquins of Brazil
In Rio de Janeiro, shifiting ocean currents and water temperatures have changed bird migration patterns.

… In the years that followed, dozens and then hundreds of gray-and-white Magellanic penguins appeared on our coasts, coming all the way from Patagonia and the Straits of Magellan.

In Japan, Concerns Blossom
In Tokyo, it no longer snows in winter.

… In place of the snow that used to fall in winter, the dry, cold blasts of wind come back, followed almost immediately by the unbearable heat of summer….

Because of climate change, the weather always betrays our expectations, making us wonder if the earth isn’t in its last days.

Since the climate conference is in Copenhagen, here’s the entire essay on Denmark:

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In December 2009, twenty thousand people, including about 40 heads of state, will converge in Copenhagen to decide how the world responds to escalating climate change over the next half century.

If successful, the meeting of 192 member countries of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) will send a clear signal to business and industry, governments and citizens around the world. Commitments made and mechanisms agreed will signal that the future belongs to a low-carbon economy and that tomorrow’s winners will be those that invest in clean energy solutions. It will also set in motion swift support for the most vulnerable in adapting to a warming world.

Copenhagen starts next week, and Climate Progress will be doing double duty covering the conference and continuing to blog on climate science, solutions, and politics.  And that means I’m getting a lot of help.  The Center for American progress will have a team of bloggers there, including me.  But I’ll also be running lots of guest posts.

For instance, a good backgrounder on the conference was just put out by the World Resources Institute, “Foundation for a Low Carbon Future: Essential Elements of a Copenhagen Agreement,” quoted above.

WRI has a very good overview figure on “A Two Step Process: Completing A New Legal Climate Agreement,” which I reprint below (click to enlarge)

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