The Washington Post editorialized today that the Copenhagen Accord, “however imperfect, should prod the U.S. Senate to take up climate-change legislation. Even if China hadn’t moved, reducing America’s dependence on foreign sources of energy and tackling domestic pollution are strong enough reasons to pass a bill.” Guest blogger Daniel J. Weiss, Senior Fellow and Director of Climate Strategy at CAPAF, explains why.

The 15^th United Nations climate summit has just ended in Copenhagen after a tense two weeks of negotiations between the developed and developing world.  An “environmental Woodstock” to some, a high stakes diplomatic showdown to others, the meeting led to some critical but incomplete agreements.

Now that it’s over, the world’s attention will focus on the United States Senate as it plans to consider clean energy and global warming legislation in 2010.  The newly inked Copenhagen Accord, along with other factors, increases the odds for Senate passage of clean energy jobs and global warming legislation.

The Copenhagen Accord should form the basis for future negotiations that hope to culminate in an international agreement to reduce global warming pollution in levels sufficient enough to prevent a 2 degree centigrade (3.6 Fahrenheit) warming.  The Accord should also contribute to passage of a Senate clean energy and global warming bill.  The Accord includes two provisions that address some undecided Senators’ concerns about pollution reductions from China and India.  In advance of the summit, these two nations made their first commitment to reduce the rate of pollution compared to their economies.  Obviously, these two emerging economic powers could do more to reduce the rapidly rising emissions, but these levels of reductions are a good start.

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Brad Johnson at Think Progress notes today:

As President Obama brokered a last-minute deal with China, India, and other nations to jointly fight global warming, American conservatives continued their assault on reason when it comes to climate science. All through the week, right-wingers from Rush Limbaugh to Fox News highlighted the fact that Copenhagen, the site of the international climate negotiations, received snow at Christmastime, which they falsely characterized as a “blizzard.” Now the Drudge Report and others are highlighting the real blizzard sweeping up the East Coast as a supposed contrast to “global warming.”

For Drudge to call the dusting Copenhagen received last week a “blizzard is, of course, laughable.  To suggest it is ironic to get a little snow in mid-December in Denmark during a climate conference is doubly laughable (see “Snow in Copenhagen: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly“).

As for the East Coast storm, my home in DC did get 18 inches of snow — although if this had been a true blizzard, I doubt my flight from Copenhagen on Saturday would have been allowed to land in Dulles airport and I wouldn’t of been able to get home 12 hours after I left Denmark.  Certainly temperatures in the DC area have been in the normal range over the past week — it’s only the precipitation that has been very anomalous (for actual data on recent warming trend in the U.S., see “Record high temperatures far outpace record lows across U.S.“).

In any case, I have previously discussed the scientific literature, which makes clear that we have seen an increase in intense precipitation in this country, just as climate science predicted we would (see Why the “never seen before” Fargo flooding is just what you’d expect from global warming, as Obama warns).   The NOAA-led report by 13 federal agencies Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States issued earlier this year makes the same point.

I’ll review the science shortly, but first, TP points out:

Even CNN’s Ed Henry piled on, saying “DC snowstorm chills Pelosi’s global warming trip,” calling it a “strange twist.”

If having snow around the holidays on the East Coast were strange, I doubt the song “White Christmas” would have been written.  Ah, but what about record snow?  Capital Climate reports that the DC snowstorm has set multiple records (previous in parentheses):

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Senior administration official: “Well, no, no, no, no. We weren’t crashing a meeting; we were going for our bilateral meeting.”

The White House Office of the Press Secretary has now released the remarkable details of how Obama achieved the Copenhagen Accord.

The point CAP Senior fellow Andrew Light made in his summary analysis of the deal is that it represents “a move away from developed vs. developing countries to major emitters and everyone else” (see “Obama Hits the Reset Button on the Foundations of International Climate Agreements“).  Indeed, Obama’s key meeting to cut a deal at the Bella Center was with the big developing country emitters:  Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, South African President Jacob Zuma and Chinese premier Wen Jiabao.

The White House backgrounder reveals how this meeting –  a Shakespearean Comedy of Errors style “wrong door” escapade — came about.  It is quite long, but the must-read story defies paraphrasing, and indeed, would defy belief if it came from any other source.

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This is perhaps the best “analysis” for why  you should probably ignore most recent polling trends (see also “It’s the economy, stupid!“):

Same for commenters

If you sent me an important e-mail  in the last week and I didn’t respond, that may be because it quickly got buried under many dozens of Copenhagen-related e-mails every day.

And my AT&T iPhone didn’t seem to be taking any voicemails in Denmark.  And my home phone’s voicemail also maxed out.

It is possible, however, I was just ignoring your e-mail or phone call.  The only way to know is to try again.

And for CP commenters, moderation was imperfect last week since I was on Copenhagen time and didn’t always have internet access.  If your post failed to get through, try again.  Of course, it’s possible it still won’t get through….

I have spent the last week reading far more emails belonging to other people than I ever would have liked. While a number of the emails have been flogged around the blogosphere and captured much of the attention, I found that a lot of emails worth seeing have gotten no attention at all. Including some that show that the denialista’s claims of a grand conspiracy is more of a grand hallucination. Because the stolen emails contain plenty of discussions that reveal just how hard the scientists work to make sure they are getting the information right.

That’s Pete Altman, NRDC’s Climate Campaign Director, writing last week on the Switchboard blog on the stolen emails you haven’t heard about.

For debunking of misrepresentations of the emails you have read about, you can go to Fight Clean Energy Smears, Union of Concerned Scientists, Pew Climate Center, RealClimate.org, SkepticalScience or links below.  But Altman focuses on the “ones that haven’t caught much attention. Any attention, for that matter. Possibly because these emails show that the denialistas claim of a grand conspiracy to exaggerate global warming is in reality a grand hallucination.”

He offers this “sample” of the myriad “discussions that reveal just how hard the scientists work to make sure they are getting the information right”:

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