“We reported the facts about science as we knew them…. We were not trying to oversell the science…. The fact is the IPCC has been very conservative.”

MEMO TO MEDIA:  Please start doing some damn journalism — like placing a simple phone call to a primary source.   A great many “newspapers” like the Daily Mail are no more reliable than the websites of the anti-science disinformers, like the thoroughly discredited ClimateDepot of Marc Morano.

In an exclusive interview  — “exclusive” in the sense that many of the people smearing Dr. Murari Lal haven’t bothered to ask him whether the original story was accurate — Dr. Lal asserts that the “most vilest allegations” in the Daily Mail story are utterly false.

Sunday, the Daily Mail‘s David Rose wrote a sensational piece supposedly based on direct quotes from Dr. Lal:

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: “It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.”

As you’d expect, this was immediately trumpeted by Morano (a spreader of uber-disinformation since the days he helped launch the shameful Swift Boat smear against John Kerry).  You’d think that science reporters and major media would know enough to treat claims from such sources with a grain of salt (see “FoxNews pushes falsehood-filled Daily Mail article on global cooling that utterly misquotes, misrepresents work of Mojib Latif and NSIDC“). But of course they don’t (see “Exclusive interview with Dr. Latif, the man who confused the NY Times and New Scientist, the man who moved George Will and Morano to extreme disinformation“).

At the very least, anyone who was going to repeat this inflammatory charge — let alone draw any conclusions from it — ought to have made a simple phone call to Dr. Lal, don’t you think?  But not Science News and US News & World Report.

Science News has been viewed with a lot of credibility, and their stuff is widely reprinted (even at CP).  But this piece of theirs is just not right:

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Introducing guest blogger Susan Lyon, the newest member of CAPAF’s Energy Opportunity team.

Earlier today, 1,198 state legislators sent a letter to President Obama and Congress calling for prompt enactment of “comprehensive clean energy jobs and climate change legislation.”  It calls for strong legislation in order to create jobs and increase national security while also protecting against the risks posed by climate change.

The letter, which has signatures of representatives from 49 states including over two dozen Republicans, was sent by the Coalition of Legislators for Energy Action Now (CLEAN), a bipartisan coalition of state lawmakers that formed in October 2009 to push for strong national climate action.  These signatories include 76 majority and minority leaders in their state legislatures.  Ironically, the one state whose legislators oppose any solutions, Louisiana, has already suffered more than most states from the impacts of climate change.

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Wind towers go up in northern Maine thanks to stimulus

How the stimulus bill saved renewable energy

On a mountain top 80 miles northeast of Bangor, Maine, in country where houses and gravel pits are mere pinpricks on a map green with forest, Paul Gaynor is making stimulus work.
Gaynor, chief executive of First Wind, is using $40 million in federal funds to help build a wind farm that will produce enough power for 13,000 homes and has created 200 construction jobs.
Without stimulus, First Wind’s project — and most renewable energy projects across the country — may not have happened.

“To us, it’s been essential to get through the nuclear winter of financing ability,” Gaynor said, referring to the dark days of early 2009 right after the financial collapse. “The recovery act was the bridge that got us from a broken market to one where projects actually get done.”

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The most powerful storm in recorded history for the region swept through the Southwestern United States last week, “bringing deadly flooding, tornadoes, hail, hurricane force winds, and blizzard conditions.” Rain dumped on Los Angeles, San Diego, and Phoenix, as mountains received up to four feet of snow. Wind gusts exceeding 90 miles per hour, tornadoes, and water spouts spun off the monster storm. Over 159,000 people lost power in the storm’s wake. Meteorologist Jeff Masters wrote on Friday that the storm was “truly epic”:

We expect to get powerful winter storms affecting the Southwest U.S. during strong El Niño events, but yesterday’s storm was truly epic in its size and intensity. The storm set all-time low pressure records over roughly 10 – 15% of the U.S.–over southern Oregon, and most of California, Nevada, Arizona, and Utah.

“California has been pounded by a series of winter storms and rains,” said Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger during a news conference in Los Angeles. “The storms brought wind gusts of up to 80 miles [an hour] across the mountains and the canyons, major highways and roads were closed, flights have been grounded, thousands of homes and businesses lost power, more than 2,100 homes were evacuated. Sadly and unfortunately, some people lost their lives.”

However, this record storm is only a preview of what is to come in a warmer world. The USGS Multi Hazards Demonstration Project at the California Institute of Technology is developing the ARkStorm scenario to “tackle what would happen if a series of powerful storms lashed at the state for 23 days“:

In the scenario, the storm system forms in the Pacific and slams into the West Coast with hurricane-force winds, hitting Southern California the hardest. After more than a week of ferocious weather, the system stalls for a few days. Another storm brews offshore and this time pummels Northern California. Such a monster storm could unleash as much as 8 feet of rain over three weeks in some areas, said research meteorologist Martin Ralph with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who is part of the project. It makes the latest Pacific storm system look like a drop in the bucket.

“Ironically, the team had scheduled meetings at Caltech to learn about the fictional storm’s impact to dams, sewage treatment plants, transportation and the electrical grid,” the Associated Press’s Alicia Chang writes. “About a dozen canceled due to the storms.”

Even Bush wanted to “move beyond a petroleum-based economy,” but not Sarah ‘Four Pinocchios’ Palin

In 2006, President Bush famously said in his State of the Union:

Keeping America competitive requires affordable energy. And here we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world.  The best way to break this addiction is through technology….

By applying the talent and technology of America, this country can dramatically improve our environment, move beyond a petroleum-based economy, and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past.

On the solution side, Bush was mainly following the advice of GOP spinmeister Frank Luntz on how to pretend you are interested in solving our energy problems without actually doing anything (see  Bush follows Luntz playbook: “Technology, technology, blah, blah, blah”).

But the news that night was how the former Texas oilman bluntly stated both the problem, our addiction to oil, and the ultimate goal, to  “move beyond a petroleum-based economy.”

Now along comes FoxNews contributor Sarah Palin, who has devised the perfect way to put forward for her backward energy policy — Facebook.  That way she can avoid any substance, avoid those pesky questions from reporters, and not bother to spend even two seconds editing her posts so she doesn’t utter blather like this:

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This is a guest repost from Wonk Room’s itinerant Brad Johnson.

I just returned from a two-week vacation in Ecuador. The nation, slightly smaller than the state of Nevada, is fascinating for its diversity. From the isolated Galapagos archipelago to the fecund jungles of the Amazon headwaters, from coastal forests to the volcanic highlands of Quito, one finds an explosion of life, culture, and language straddling the equator.

Part of my trip was spent in the rainforests of the Napo River, at an eco-lodge on the border of Yasun­ National Park, at the intersection of the Andean foothills, the Amazon basin, and the equator. Each day offered the chance to see dozens of species of birds, insects, and reptiles, as well as a practically uncountable array of plantlife. The Kichwa people own and maintain the land, farming on the river banks, hunting in the forests, and selling crafts in the city upstream. The apparent diversity is no mistake:

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