Does that increase the chances he’ll vote for the bipartisan climate and clean energy bill?

Sen. Byron Dorgan, a 18-year veteran Democrat, dropped a late-day bombshell, announcing he will retire when his term ends this year.  Dorgan’s announcement represents an opportunity for Republicans: North Dakota is a Republican-leaning state, where President Obama got just 45% of the vote last year.

What’s bad news for the Dems in the longer term could be good news for the climate bill in the short term.  Nate Silver had given Dorgan a “Probability of Yes” vote of 22%.  He was certainly going to be among the 5 toughest Dem votes to get.

But now he doesn’t face a tough reelection, and the Senator from the state he himself calls “the Saudi Arabia of wind” is free to vote his conscience.  Indeed, all things being equal, I think he’d like to vote ‘yes’ — see post “When Sen. Dorgan finds out what’s in the climate bill “” hint, hint, White House “” he might just support it,” which I’ll excerpt and update here:

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Once upon a time in a galaxy not very far away there was some scientific research that found the global carbon sinks (oceans, soils, vegetation) were not saturating — assuming, of course, that its general methodology and simplifying assumptions were in fact correct.

The research, by Wolfgang Knorr, had a title that tried to do too much in too few words:  “Is the airborne fraction of anthropogenic CO2 emissions increasing?“   And so when the American Geophysical Union published this interesting-if-true study, it issued a press release with the catastrophically wrong headline, “No rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide fraction in past 160 years.”

As an aside, Joseph Pulitzer’s “standing order to his staff” of reporters was:  ACCURACY. TERSENESS. ACCURACY.  For science reporting, you probably need to drop “terseness.”  My motto is “better a long headline, than a wrong headline”  — especially since a large fraction of people never go much beyond the headline, even more especially in the internet age, where the headline can truly take on a life of its own.

Now it’s kind of scary this particular headline got through whatever editors AGU uses, since it is directly at odds with what is arguably the single most famous chart of observational data in the entire climate arena, the Keeling Curve of Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2):

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The Lexington County Republican Party in South Carolina voted late Monday to censure Sen. Lindsey Graham for his positions on several controversial issues, including his recent support for a compromise on cap-and-trade legislation.

The Lexington GOP is now the second county party organization in a matter of months to censure Graham after Charleston County leaders approved a similar resolution in November. But unlike Charleston County, Lexington is one of the most conservative counties in South Carolina and is considered a bellwether of Republican sentiment in the state.

CNN Politics reported yesterday on GOP efforts in SC to make averting catastrophic global warming and promoting clean energy jobs a litmust test.  This doubly self-destructive trend is nothing new (see Honey, I shrunk the GOP, Part 3: RNC Chair Steele withdraws support for Rep. Kirk over his vote on climate and clean energy bill).

CNN Politics ran this caption on its photo of Graham above), “Sen. Lindsey Graham has frustrated grassroots conservatives in his home state for years.”   That’s pretty scary considering Graham has a lifetime American Conservative Union rating of 89.79.  Graham is an ACU “Senate Standout,” among the 20 most conservative U.S. Senators in 2008!  Just how right-wing do you have to be not to frustrate grassroots conservatives??  They’d have impeached Reagan for agreeing to save the ozone layer!

If you read this profile of Graham, then you’ll know that these attacks are not likely to move him.  Indeed, he knows that he bipartisan climate and clean energy bill would be very good for South Carolina and the nation:

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Independent study says Michigan’s plan to fight climate change also would boost state economy

Michigan could gain a significant economic boost and thousands of new jobs by reducing emissions of gases that cause climate change, according to an analysis released Monday.

The report by the Center for Climate Strategies said a plan devised last year for battling global warming in Michigan would help limit the state’s heat-trapping gas emissions over the next 15 years.

But more than the environment would benefit, the nonprofit group said. It projected gains of 129,000 jobs, a $25 billion uptick in the gross state product and lower prices for home energy sources such as electricity, oil and natural gas.

“This study validates our commitment to energy efficiency and renewable sources of fuel,” said Steven Chester, director of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. “It’s the right thing to do for a healthy environment and a healthy economy.”

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UPDATE:  Memo to Cato, Michaels — A quick change isn’t an apology.  For the original, which also needs fixing, go here.

One of the leading anti-science disinformers, Patrick J. Michaels, can’t seem to stop spreading the most blatant disinformation.  And the Cato Institute, where’s he’s Senior Fellow, actually seems to encourage this falsification, since they let “research fellow” Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar also repeat the easily fact-checked howler.

Cato needs to issue an apology and multiple retractions.

Cato has published on its website a piece titled, “Climate Scientists Subverted Peer Review.”   While it rehashes many debunked falsehoods, one in particular is a blatant lie:

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Plus a review of the best analyses on the UN climate conference

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva signed a law Tuesday requiring that Brazil cut greenhouse gas emissions by 39 percent by 2020, meeting a commitment made at the Copenhagen climate talks.

Brazil announced at the summit a “voluntary commitment” to reduce CO2 emissions by between 36.1 and 38.9 percent in the next 10 years.

For me, the Copenhagen “glass” is 2/3 full, since the point wasn’t just the meeting, but the remarkable commitments that countries made leading up to the meeting by the biggest emitters, the ones who hold the fate of the planet in their hands (see “What Bill McKibben doesn’t like about the Copenhagen Accord is precisely what I like about it“).

Since so much of the reporting and analysis on Copenhagen has been dreadful, I’m going to review below what I think are the best essays on it (with links).  I’ll start with the key point CAP’s Andrew Light explained about those commitments:

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BEIJING: Freak snowstorms and record low temperatures sweeping northern China are linked to global warming, say Chinese officials….

The head of the Beijing Meteorological Bureau, Guo Hu, linked the blizzard-like conditions this week to unusual atmospheric patterns caused by global warming.

”In the context of global warming, extreme atmospheric flows are causing extreme climate incidents to appear more frequently, such as the summer’s rain storms and last year’s icestorm disaster in southern China,” Mr Guo told Beijing News.

Those dang Chinese.  They aren’t pushing the party line of the anti-science crowd.  Must be why they are seizing leadership on a variety of clean energy technologies that we invented and/or once led the world in (see “Beijing’s crash program for clean energy” and “China begins transition to a clean-energy economy“).

Of course, it’s hard to tell what’s going on in China, given how hard they are trying to modify their weather:

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