“It’s almost certain by now that January 2010 will also be the globally warmest January on the UAH record”

Yes the anti-science crowd, from WattsUpWithThat to FoxNews, have been touting cold snaps over a small fraction of the globe as evidence of the non-exist cooling trend (see “disinformers to media: Please make case for something that isn’t true using data we don’t believe“).

Well now even they have been forced to acknowledge that the global record that’s going to be set this month is, in all likelihood, for warming — because it is showing up on their beloved satellite data (click to enlarge).

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What her “Dirty Air Act” would mean for Alaska

New details are emerging of just how involved a pair of energy industry lobbyists were in writing a controversial amendment by Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski that would strip the Environmental Protection Agency of its authority to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant….

Jeffrey Holmstead, head of the environmental strategies division at Bracewell & Guiliani, and Roger Martella Jr., a partner at Sidley Austin, walked Senate staffers through the details of the amendment, via speakerphone, during a meeting held at 8:45 a.m. in Room 370 of the Hart Senate Office Building on Sept. 23, 2009, a person familiar with the meeting told POLITICO. The meeting, convened by aides to Murkowski and Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.),  was called to gauge interest among staffers to four or five Democrats.

Holmstead and Martella are lobbyists for big corporations and polluters (see here).  Senate Majority Leader Reid described Murkowski’s “misguided amendment” as “a highly hazardous one to our health and the environment” (see Senate Majority Leader expects to pass bipartisan energy and climate bill this spring: It “may be the most important policy we will ever pass”).  Working with James “I Am The Planet’s #1 Worst Enemy“ Inhofe is a new low for this once-moderate Senator from the state most devastated by climate change.

The rest of this post is a reprint of “Lisa Says, Let Alaska Melt” by guest bloggers are Daniel J. Weiss, Director of Climate Strategy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, and Jaren Love.

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Investors urge governments to act on climate change

Global investors representing $13 trillion in assets called on the United States and other countries on Thursday to adopt policies to fight climate change they said would unleash a potential flood of private money into renewable and efficient energy.

“Without policies that create a stable investment environment our hands are tied,” Anne Stausboll, chief executive of the California Public Employees Retirement System, a pension fund with more than $205 billion in assets, said at a meeting called the Investor Summit on Climate Risk.

“We are ready and willing to up the ante to finance the transition to a low carbon global economy but you need to have the courage to act,” said Mindy Lubber, the president of Ceres, a coalition of investors and environmentalists which was hosting the meeting.

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Every week seems to bring a new development that underscores the incoherence of the environmental movement, which believes global warming is the world’s most pressing problem yet is often the biggest roadblock to efforts to address the problem by developing cleaner sources of energy.

The latest example: Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s push to protect 1 million acres of the Mojave Desert, which inevitably will kill 13 major solar power and wind power projects planned for the area.

I have been quite critical of the senior Senator from California for favoring protecting deserts over protecting a livable climate for humans (see “Does Sen. Feinstein get global warming, desertification, and California’s looming demise?“).

Newsweek reports the Senator has proposed a “wilderness designation bill intended to rope off more than half a million acres of Southern California land between Joshua Tree National Park and the Mojave National Preserve, restricting the area to both solar developers and off-road vehicles. Such prime desert land shouldn’t be touched, she has argued, and the accentuated effects of global warming will make that territory increasingly valuable to desert wildlife.”

She apparently likes deserts so much that she wants them to stretch from Oklahoma to California and cover one third the planet.

The excerpt that starts this post is from an editorial in the San Diego Union-Tribune, “Green talk vs. green action / Feinstein’s scuttling of solar, wind projects a baffling mistake.”  The piece is significant because, as Wikipedia notes, the paper is “reliably conservative.”  I lived in the greater San Diego area (La Jolla) for more than two years when I was doing my thesis work at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, so I can attest to that description.  I can also attest to the fact that while the climate of Southern California is unparalleled in the United States, it won’t be by the second half of this century if we don’t dramatically reverse emissions trends.

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Connecting Islam and Environmentalism

Mohamad A. Chakaki is a doctoral student in the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT and a senior fellow at the Environmental Leadership Program. He received a master’s degree in urban ecology and environmental design from Yale University, and has worked in parks and gardens throughout the country, as well as with the Peace Corps in Cameroon and the United Nations in Syria. Most recently, he consulted on environment and community development projects in the Arab Middle East.  Last week he spoke with Sally Steenland, CAP’s Senior Policy Advisor for Faith and Progressive Policy [in this repost], about the environment and nature’s importance, the Green Muslims, social justice issues, and the challenges and opportunities facing young Muslim Americans today.

Sally Steenland: I’d like to start off by asking you a question about identity””how you see yourself and how others see you. You have worked in the Peace Corps; you were a gardener at the National Arboretum; you taught in a public charter school in Washington, D.C.; you were one of the founders of Green Muslims; and you’re now in a Ph.D. program at MIT. All of these things are part of you. Can you talk about your identity as a Muslim American, as well as the identity that gets thrust on you by others?

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