New study supports finding that “the amount of [multi-year] sea ice in the northern hemisphere was the lowest on record in 2009″

Map of air temperature anomalies for December 2009, at roughly 3,000 feet above surface, Areas in orange and red are warm anomalies, areas in blue and purple are cool.

It’s cold here and in northern Eurasia, but it’s been positively toasty ar0und the Arctic circle — thanks to an extreme negative phase of the Arctic Oscillation, as the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) explained in their online report yesterday.

The temperatures reported by NSIDC show some Arctic anomalies exceeding 7°C (13°F)!  That’s not good news for the kind of re-freezing one wants to see in the otherwise rapidly melting Greenland ice sheet (see Nature: “Dynamic thinning of Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheet ocean margins is more sensitive, pervasive, enduring and important than previously realized”).  It’s also one reason “December 2009 had the fourth-lowest average ice extent for the month since the beginning of satellite records, falling just above the extent for 2007. The linear rate of decline for December is now 3.3% per decade.”

Significantly, a new study, “Perennial pack ice in the southern Beaufort Sea was not as it appeared in the summer of 2009” by Barber et al. finds that all the crowing by the anti-science crowd about the supposed “recovery” of Arctic sea ice was quite premature:

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I am less and less a fan of the more and more center-right Politico (see “Memo to Politico: Do you really aspire to being nothing more than a new media version of the MSM — stenographers of the status quo?“)  This TP repost has some blunt comments from a leading TV journalist:

Last month, Politico conducted an “interview” with former Vice President Dick Cheney. As ThinkProgress noted at the time, the paper’s top reporters “” Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen “” transcribed Cheney’s attacks on Obama without challenge, criticism, or rebuttal.

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I have some more videos taken while waiting in line to try to get into the Bella Center in Copenhagen (for background, see “Welcome to Disneyland in Denmark “” plus one reason Europe’s been eating our lunch on renewables, creating hundreds of thousands of clean energy jobs“).

Here is Paul Allen, Senior VP and Chief Environmental Officer, Constellation Energy, a Fortune 500 company with 7,100 megawatts of generating capacity, on why the company is a “big supporter of climate legislation, cap-and-trade”:

Constellation is the largest wholesale power seller and largest retail power seller in the country.  In Part 2, Allen explains Constellation’s view of natural gas and energy efficiency and why we don’t need to wait for new technologies to address climate change now:

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Plus video of Waxman and Markey in Copenhagen

A key House committee chairman today dismissed the idea that stalled cap-and-trade legislation is dead for the year and waved off the conventional political wisdom that it will cost Democrats seats.

“We’re determined to accomplish all our goals, and climate is a very important one that I expect to see in the Senate, with a bill emerging this year,” said House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.). “I feel confident based on the intelligence I’ve received from conversations with some of the key players in the Senate.”

So E&E News PM (subs. req’d) reported last night.  E&E feels obliged to quote Sen. Inhofe saying the bill is dead, but Waxman notes:

“On every issue that I’ve worked on this year, people have said it can’t happen and it’s dead for the year,” Waxman said.

As for those who think the bill is a political liability, Waxman explains:

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Qingyuan seeks to boost electric car sales in US

Tianjin Qingyuan Electric Vehicle Co, the first Chinese automaker to break into the United States, hopes to significantly boost sales of its self-developed electric models in the world’s second-largest market this year, a source with direct knowledge of the matter said on Wednesday.

State-backed Qingyuan is among a growing army of Chinese automakers, including BYD Co partly-owned by U.S. billionaire Warren Buffett, eager to tap the fledgling green car sector in mature markets.

Qingyuan hopes to sell 3,000 self-made electric vehicles mostly in the United States in 2010, 50 percent more than what it shipped there in the past five years, the source told Reuters.

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Human-caused global warming doesn’t turn January into July, and so it’s no surprise we’ve got lots of snow now.  The anti-science crowd keeps confusing precipitation with temperature, seeing almost any snowstorm as evidence we’re not warming (see “Was the “Blizzard of 2009″³ a “global warming type” of record snowfall “” or an opportunity for the media to blow the extreme weather story (again)?“).  In fact, since climate change will keep bringing more precipitation to certain regions, many northern ski areas will probably have lots of snow for the foreseeable future.  But most major U.S. ski resorts would be devastated if we keep on our current path of unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions (see Our hellish future: Definitive NOAA-led report on U.S. climate impacts warns of scorching 9 to 11°F warming over most of inland U.S. by 2090 with Kansas above 90°F some 120 days a year “” and that isn’t the worst case, it’s business as usual!).  This CAP repost looks at some impacts on and actions by the ski industry.  The AP photo is a 1.5 megawatt wind turbine built by Jiminy Peak Mountain Resort in Hancock, MA.

The ski industry could be in big trouble if climate change continues unabated, and leaders in the industry are taking steps to make their resorts more sustainable while educating their guests.

Take Aspen, for instance. The resort is already seeing a gradual increase in frost-free days and warmer nights, according to Mike Kaplan, CEO of Aspen Skiing Company, and aspen trees are dying off in large numbers. A study by the Aspen Global Change Institute forecasts that if global carbon emissions continue to rise, Aspen will warm by 14 degrees by the end of this century””giving it a feel similar to Amarillo, TX.

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This guest post by Robert Stavins, Director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program, was first published here.

Whether you like it or not, for the time being the most important product of the December meeting in Copenhagen of the Fifteenth Conference of the Parties (COP-15) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is the “Copenhagen Accord,” which I assessed in my December 20^th blog post (“What Hath Copenhagen Wrought?“).  In the long term, however, it is quite possible that another outcome of the December meetings may prove to be equally or more consequential.  I’m referring to the decreased credibility of the UNFCCC as the major institutional venue for international climate policy negotiation and implementation.

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But this is probably good news for Dems

Embattled Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd (D) has scheduled a press conference at his home in Connecticut Wednesday at which he is expected to announce he will not seek re-election, according to sources familiar with his plans.

Unlike the announcement yesterday of Sen. Dorgan (D-ND) to retire, this greatly increases Dem chances of holding the seat:

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People think you were elected to address more than one serious national problem a year!