Last night on Fox News’ Red Eye, Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI) explained to host Greg Gutfeld why he does not believe that human activity is causing global warming. McCotter, who is the chairman of the Republican House Policy Committee, a GOP group charged with helping Republican lawmakers come up with legislative ideas, has used his global warming denials as a pretense for fighting to block cap-and-trade proposals.

Environmental groups have declared that McCotter is a “Caveman Congressman.” The satirical Caveman Energy Caucus website notes that lawmakers like McCotter have “chosen OLD energy when they voted no” on Waxman-Markey clean energy legislation. Ironically, as he explained his backwards denial of settled climate change science, McCotter cited the experience of his cavemen namesake to note that the melting of glaciers had a positive effect:

MCCOTTER: Remember, the people who talk about the melting of the glaciers and others, imagine if you were in a peninsula around 1,000 BC or so or earlier and your name was Tor and you’re out huntin’ mastodon. And you didn’t notice that the glaciers were melting and leaving the devastating flooding in its wake that became the Great Lakes in the state of Michigan.

So I think what we have to do is go back in history and look at this and realize that the Earth has been here a long time and they’ve selected periods of time and say somehow this proves there’s a manmade global warming occurring is absolutely wrong. We have to look at the different periods of history, we have to look at the different effects, and then we have to have direct empirical data to correlate between man’s activity and the effect on the planet, and that is yet to be proven and highly doubt that it’s going to be any time soon.

Watch it:

McCotter is wrong on several fronts. First, the glacial melt which formed the Great Lakes occurred between a period of 15,000 and 10,000 BC, not 1,000 BC, as McCotter claims. But we do not have to look to the past to see shrinking glaciers. Global warming is currently melting 18,000 Himalayan glaciers — the largest concentration of glaciers outside the great polar ice sheets. The global trend of melting glaciers has only accelerated, with 2009 marked as the 18th consecutive year glaciers around the world have decreased in size.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has conclusively shown that carbon emissions, caused chiefly by the burning of fossil fuels, are the largest contributor to global warming. If McCotter is interested in what sets this “period in history” apart, he should know that every single year of this century (2001-2008) has been among the top ten warmest years since instrumental records began.

Cross-posted on ThinkProgress.

WASHINGTON – With the international climate change talks in Copenhagen fast approaching, there is real urgency to reach diplomatic consensus on a planetary solution. In a hearing this Wednesday, the Select Committee will explore with climate scientists from the Obama administration the urgent, consensus view on our planetary problem: that global warming is real, and the science indicates that it is getting worse.

Well this should be lively, as one can expect the conservatives on Energy Independence and Global Warming to bring up …. hmm, wait, don’t tell me … Tiger Woods?

You can find the webcast here, 10 am ET, Wednesday.  The rest of the news release follows:

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Professor Phil Jones has today announced that he will stand aside as Director of the Climatic Research Unit until the completion of an independent Review resulting from allegations following the hacking and publication of emails from the Unit.

That is from the University of East Anglia’s new release today.  This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, particularly once UEA and CRU made the mistaken decision not to send Jones out to talk to the media in the past week.

Jones isn’t Tiger Woods, and the scandal called ClimateGate isn’t a personal matter (and yes, I think Woods is making a serious mistake, too).  Jones and UEA should have jumped at the chance to talk to the status quo media about a subject it is too-rarely interested in — climate science.

The AP at least got the headline right:

UK climate scientist to temporarily step down

No, he hasn’t quit or been fired, at least not yet.

The UEA news release continues

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“Climate change is here, it is a reality. It’s not in the imagination.”

In January, a consortium of Dutch and Kenyan investors will begin construction on the $760 million project, which envisions more than 350 wind turbines towering over desert expanses near Lake Turkana in northern Kenya. When completed in 2012, the wind farm is expected to boost the power supply in this nation by almost 30 percent.

Kenya is one of the continent’s greenest countries, with nearly three-quarters of its power coming from hydroelectric and geothermal sources. But its efforts to harness the wind have put it at the forefront of a budding movement in Africa, ahead of a global climate change conference in Copenhagen next month.

That’s from a Saturday WashPost news story by Christopher Vourlias, a freelance journalist based in East Africa.  Africa’s largest wind farm is to be built in Kenya’s Chalbi Desert.  The picture above is from Kenya’s first wind farm, in the Ngong Hills outside Nairobi, which began providing power to the national grid in August.

During Copenhagen, I’m planning on running stories and interviews from around the world on climate impacts and what different countries are doing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, stop deforestation, and adopt clean energy.  Here’s more on what’s happening in Africa:

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Senator Lindsey Graham, (R) South Carolina: “We believe the Savannah River Site, Georgia, South Carolina can lead the country in this effort to become energy independent.”

… The U.S. Secretary of Energy Dr. Steven Chu was on hand to break down the specifics on one of the largest biomass plants in the nation….

Sen. Graham: “I want it to be said about SC when it comes to energy independence in the green economy that we led the nation. That the innovation was better because it existed in South Carolina.”

Chu made several stops in the Palmetto State yesterday

U.S. falling behind in clean-energy race: Chu

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Here’s a short primer from the Independent, for those who are very new to this issue — not you, of course, but this is something you can send to your friends who don’t read Climate Progress:

The December 7-18 UN climate conference in Copenhagen is tasked with framing a new deal for tackling global warming and its impacts beyond 2012. Here is a factfile on the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Kyoto Protocol and the talks.

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Palin and Limbaugh are most powerful conservatives in country; Cheney, not so much

A new WashPost poll finds that GOP-leaning voters support bipartisan action on energy.  Whereas such voters oppose Congressional Republicans working with Democrats on health care by 77 to 23 , they support working with Democrats on energy 49 to 46.  This is consistent with all recent polling:

• Yet another major poll finds “broad support” for clean energy and climate bill: “Support for the plan among independents has increased slightly”
• Swing state poll finds 60% “would be more likely to vote for their senator if he or she supported the bill” and Independents support the bill 2-to-1
• Voters in Ohio, Michigan and Missouri overwhelmingly support action on clean energy and global warming

Think Progress has more on what the poll tells us about how the key conservative thought leaders are: Read more

Strong action will save millions of lives, improve health of billions

“Climate change is the biggest global health threat of the 21st century.” So concluded a Lancet“”UCL Commission earlier this year.  A systematic appraisal of available evidence showed that the risks from changing patterns of disease, food insecurity, unsafe water and sanitation, damage to human settlements, extreme events, and population growth and migration were far more severe for human health than most observers had understood. The message added an important new dimension to the political debate about how to respond to climate change. The threat was not only environmental and economic; it was directed at life itself.

So begins “The climate dividend,” a commentary on six new studies appearing in the Lancet medical journal (here).  I had blogged on the earlier commission report here.  Green Car Congress has a good story on the studies, noting that “a potential 150-million-stove program in India from 2010-2020 gives the largest co-benefit of any examined in the six papers.”  By “providing low-emission stove technologies in poor countries that currently rely on solid fuel household stoves to cook and heat their homes,” the “10-year program could prevent 2 million premature deaths in India” while reducing greenhouse pollution by hundreds of millions of tons.

One of the papers “contains analysis of 18 years of data on the long-term health effects of black carbon””the first study of its kind ever conducted. The study followed 352,000 people in 66 US cities.”  Black carbon is a major GHG pollutant.  Kirk R. Smith, professor of global environmental health at UC Berkeley and lead author of the paper, said:

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Here’s a useful online tool for converting a major country’s 2020 emissions reduction target from one baseline year to another.

This is an interview with Tzeporah Berman, Executive Director and co-founders of PowerUp Canada.  If you don’t think the U.S. is doing enough, you’ll love what our northern neighbors are (not) doing:

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