Warning:  Please put your head in a vise before reading further.

Andy Revkin has just written the most illogical climate post on Earth.  Or maybe he’s written the most logical climate post on the Bizarro World Htrae.

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The need is urgent for climate scientists to communicate more effectively to policymakers and the public. This article details some of the problems with how climate scientists communicate and offers practical suggestions for improvement. For example, scientists can improve their effectiveness by avoiding jargon as well as words that mean different things to scientists than to non-scientists. They can use appropriate metaphors and re-frame poorly framed questions. As policymakers grapple with the climate challenge, scientists should take the opportunity and responsibility of clearly communicating what the wider world needs to know about this issue.

Saying scientists are not doing a terribly good job communicating climate science is like saying the status quo media are not doing a terribly good job communicating climate science.  But then the media doesn’t suffer the consequences of that failure.  At least not more than, say, the American pika….

Our guest blogger is Susan Joy Hassol, an expert in climate communication. She was lead author of “Impacts of A Warming Arctic,” the synthesis report of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, and helped author or edit many major climate reports in the past decade.  In 2008, she wrote “Improving How Scientists Communicate About Climate Change,” which is reprinted below with her permission:

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Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA) is “sick” of the “insider baseball crap” dominating the Senate debate over global warming and energy reform. In an interview with Grist, the first-term congressman stated in no uncertain terms that the country is at risk from global warming and our economy is at risk of losing the clean energy race. Like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Perriello has not one lick of sympathy for those in the Senate who deny these threats:

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It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.

That how Al Gore’s op-ed big Sunday NY Times op-ed begins.

Since the anti-science disinformers get such absurdly unjustified amount of ink these days — even in the paper of record (see “NYT Faces Credibility Siege over Unbalanced Climate Coverage” — the least I can do is excerpt an actual science-based analysis at length.  I’ve added links to the relevant scientific literature:

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But will 60 Senators salute?

UPDATE:  Since many commenters seem confused about my position on cap-and-dividend (CAD) and the Cantwell-Collins (C-C) version of CAD, I elaborate below.

Senators to propose abandoning cap-and-trade

Three key senators are engaged in a radical behind-the-scenes overhaul of climate legislation, preparing to jettison the broad “cap-and-trade” approach that has defined the legislative debate for close to a decade.

That’s the lead WashPost story today.  My sources say the final proposal is not fully baked, so this scoop is closer to a “leaked” trial balloon [shaped like a flag, of course, to put all my metaphors in the mixing bowl].  Indeed it’s not even clear whether Graham, Kerry, Lieberman will float a final bill or something closer to a discussion draft.

Frankly, I’m not sure they have the winning proposal yet, but here’s what’s out there:

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What do you think of the sustainability efforts of the retail giant? Our guest blogger is Sarah Collins, intern with CAP’s Energy Opportunity team at the Center for American Progress.

In 2009, Wal-Mart received the Aspen Institute Energy and Environment award for Corporate Energy Efficiency.  To build on this success, Wal-Mart just announced its new sustainability goal: to eliminate 20 million metric tons of greenhouse gases from the supply chain by 2015.  This amount, roughly equivalent to the company’s total corporate emissions last year, is “the equivalent of taking more than 3.8 million cars off the road for a year.”  Efforts to reach this goal involved extensive collaboration with the Environmental Defense Fund, ClearCarbon Inc., the Carbon Disclosure Project, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and the University of Arkansas’ Applied Sustainability Center.

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Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA) is “sick” of the “insider baseball crap” dominating the Senate debate over global warming and energy reform. In an interview with Grist, the first-term congressman stated in no uncertain terms that the country is at risk from global warming and our economy is at risk of losing the clean energy race. Like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Perriello has not one lick of sympathy for those in the Senate who deny these threats:

That’s more insider baseball crap. I don’t really care. I’m sick of starting with what can we get through the Senate; let’s start with what solves the damn problem. Until the Senate gets its head out of its rear end and starts to see the crisis we’re in, our country is literally at risk. Our economy is at risk, because these jobs are being created overseas. It should have the same urgency with this problem that it had bailing out Wall Street. We are swearing an oath to do what’s necessary to protect this country, not do what’s necessary to get a bill through the Senate.

Perriello repeatedly expressed his belief that Congressional inaction on jobs, national security, and scientific “challenge of our era” is due to a lack of courage and responsibility:

– This is the challenge of our time—the jobs opportunity, the national security challenge, the scientific challenge of our era. Any plan that uses market forces to signal a carbon-constrained environment is going to move us in the right direction. People who don’t support this kind of aggressive energy independence are just selling Americans short.

– We’re so far behind China, Europe, and other areas in the energy jobs of the future because neither party has had the guts to take this on. There are so many spineless people in D.C.

– Every week the Senate doesn’t act, it either freezes that investment and innovation or it sends it overseas. We’re giving up jobs. The Senate—the ridiculous tactics of the Republicans and the timidity of the Democrats—is standing in the way of the kind of job creation we need.

– Unfortunately, good ideas, ideas that could save our country, sometimes take 30 minutes to explain and only 30 seconds to demagogue. In between those two things is leadership, and we haven’t had the moral courage to take this on.

Perriello’s support for cap-and-trade legislation has made him a target of Republicans and polluters, who have mocked him with ads about snowstorms and flooded his office with forged letters of opposition.

Goodbye, Hummer

The world might be saved: It looks as if the Hummer is destined for the junkyard. The plan by General Motors to sell the muscular brand to a Chinese company went up in a puff of exhaust smoke on Wednesday after government officials in China said that they had never received the necessary application for approval and thus couldn’t grant it.

We suspect the deal collapsed because the Chinese Communist Party “” which rarely shows much shame “” is worried about China’s image as the most polluting nation on the planet. If true, that is good news.

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Earlier this week, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works considered the 2011 budget request for the Environmental Protection Agency. During the questioning of EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) responded to the litany of Republicans denying the science of global warming:

The reason that this debate is so important is that it reminds me in some ways of the debate taking place in this country and around the world in the 1930s. And during that period with Nazism, fascism growing — a real danger to the United States and democratic countries around the world — there were people in this congress and the British parliament saying don’t worry, Hitler is not real. It’ll disappear. We don’t have to be prepared to take it on. Fortunately, there were other people in this country, Roosevelt, Republicans who said, “You know what, we are going to have to be prepared for a war.” Winston Churchill in England led the effort there. But because we were as slow as we were, millions of people probably died unnecessarily. Global warming is real. If we do not get our act together there will be devastating impacts for our kids and our grandchildren, causing among other things trillions of dollars in order to repair that damage if it is repairable at all. And the longer we delay, the longer we have this senseless debate, the less prepared we will be.

Watch it:

Right-wing climate-conspiracy bloggers called Sanders’ remarks “completely irresponsible rhetoric” from the “climate change cult.” Fox News jumped in, Tucker Carlson telling Sean Hannity that “real questions have been raised about global warming”:

It’s so . . . The truth is people denying the Nazi threat in the late ’30s were the left, for whatever that is worth. This is a classic — rather than engaging the other side, the other argument, you write them off as bigots or racists. This is a sign of weakness not strength. He knows that real questions have been raised about global warming.

Watch it:

Following World War I, isolationism drew supporters of all political stripes , although hard-left Communists and Socialists with ties to revolutionary Russia were, unsurprisingly, among the loudest opponents of fascism in the 1930s. After Hitler invaded Poland, however, the leading isolationists were right-wing opponents of President Franklin D. Roosevelt like Charles Lindbergh, Chicago Tribune publisher Robert McCormick, the segregationist Rep. John Rankin (D-MI), Sen. Robert Taft (R-OH), and former president Herbert Hoover. As Sanders noted, the mobilization against the threat of fascism involved both parties — confronting the climate threat must as well.

Despite the efforts of Fox News to promote conspiracy theories about climate science, their unrelenting attacks have no relation to the fact of manmade global warming, which indeed will bring more devastation the more we delay.

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Has the WSJ’s vaunted ‘firewall’ between straight news and ideological-driven editorials been breached?

I’d like your help debunking this atrocious piece of media misreporting, “Push to Oversimplify at Climate Panel.”

Yes, the WSJ piece wins the prize for the most unintentionally ironic headline since it is the media’s self-destructive push to oversimplify that has led to repeated libeling of Michael Mann and other climate scientists (see “Newsweek staff who play fast and loose with the facts are imperiling not just their profession but the planet” and “Abandoning all journalistic standards, CBS libels Michael Mann based on a YouTube video “” while reporting his exoneration!”

I am running a full response by Dr. Mann below.  It seems the least I can do in response to the umpteenth false attack on his reputation.  It simply boggles the mind — and raises serious questions of journalistic bias for the paper — that the WSJ can run this error-riddled attack on Mann and the Hockey Stick without even mentioning any of these three central facts:
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Public health organizations oppose Murkowski resolution; DOT finds Murkowski will block cleaner, more efficient cars; Murkowski struts past protesters to attend lobbyist fundraiser for her; American public power association misleads its members

Opposition continues to grow to the Dirty Air Act — Senator Lisa Murkowski’s (R-AK) Resolution of Disapproval of the Environmental Protection Agency’s endangerment finding, S.J. Res 26.  CAPAF’s Director of Climate Strategy, Daniel J. Weiss, has the story.

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Another species on the brink — thanks to human-caused global warming — is abandoned

The American pika, a mountain-dwelling mammal in the West, does not do well in temperatures above 78 degrees.

I typically focus on what the science tells us about the catastrophic impacts humans face if we stay anywhere near our current emissions path.  If self-preservation won’t motivate us, whatever empathy we can muster for our furry friends surely can’t.

Still it seems to me that the apparently ‘expendable’ pika deserves at least one blog post, no?  Here’s the story, from MSNBC:

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Last week, the South Dakota House of Representatives passed a resolution to “urge” public schools to teach astrology.  Brad Johnson has the amazing story in this Think Progress repost.

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Freudenburg: “Reporters need to learn that, if they wish to discuss ‘both sides’ of the climate issue, the scientifically legitimate “other side” is that, if anything, global climate disruption is likely to be significantly worse than has been suggested in scientific consensus estimates to date.”

Mass media have been a key vehicle by which climate change contrarianism has traveled, according to Maxwell Boykoff, a University of Colorado at Boulder professor and fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, or CIRES.

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Now let’s hope they’ll fix the problems that have caused them to lowball recent warming.

The Met Office has called for a re-examination of more than 150 years of global temperature records as part of a new comprehensive approach for analysing temperature data – to better assess the risks posed by changes in extremes of climate.

Great idea, especially since an independent December 2009 analysis found “The global temperature rise calculated by the Met Office’s HadCRUT record is at the lower end of likely warming.”

Everybody but the anti-science disinformers has known for a long time that the Hadley/CRU (Climatic Research Unit) temperature data UNDERestimates “” not OVERestimates “” the recent global temperature rise.  Why?

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The HOME STAR program is a new initiative to create jobs in the construction industry and make it easy for every American homeowner to quickly and immediately cut their rising monthly energy bills by improving the energy efficiency of their homes. HOME STAR will empower homeowners to seize control of skyrocketing energy costs, create good living-wage jobs, and drive economic recovery in the United States.

CAP’s Bracken Hendricks and Tom Kenworthy explain HOME STAR in this repost.

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Obama:  “Price on carbon pollution” key to “competitive America”

President Barack Obama reiterated his support for putting a price on carbon during an address to the Business Roundtable today.

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Senator James Inhofe, ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, has gone a step beyond promoting his long-notorious global warming denialist propaganda. He is now using the resources of the Senate committee to seek opportunities to criminalize the actions of 17 leading scientists who have been associated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment reports. A report released by Inhofe’s staff on February 23 outlines this classic Joe McCarthyite witch-hunt: page after page of incorrect and misleading statements, a list of federal laws that allegedly may make scientists subject to prosecution by the U.S. Justice Department, and a list of names and affiliations of 17 “key players” in the “CRU Controversy” over stolen e-mails and their connections with IPCC reports.

That’s from Rick Piltz, the guy who blew the whistle on the Bush Administration’s censorship of federal climate science. This is a repost from his website, Climatesciencewatch.org:

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Senate Majority Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has instructed Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) to produce a revamped climate bill as soon as possible, according to sources, a task Kerry intends to accomplish within two weeks.

So the Washington Post reported at 7:37 pm ET, at their cleverly (ironically?) named Post Carbon site.

Looks like Reid wants a vote on this — as he’s been saying all along (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.”)  Here’s more:

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Our guest blogger is Sarah Collins, intern with the Energy Opportunity team at the Center for American Progress and a graduate of the University of Michigan Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.

The Congressional Budget Office’s new analysis determined that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) created up to 2.1 million jobs and boosted the economy by up to 3.5 percent in the last three months of 2009. This assessment disproves the claims of nay-saying conservative lawmakers who voted against ARRA and continue to claim that it has not created jobs while wasting money. Despite their opposition to and untrue claims about the nationwide benefits of ARRA, many Congressional Republicans continue to seek funds for clean energy projects and programs that would create jobs in their state or district.

For instance, every member of the Illinois congressional delegation signed a letter urging Gov. Pat Quinn to provide “Recovery Act (ARRA) funding to expand the Illinois Community College Sustainability Network.” Among the signers were Republican Reps. Mark Kirk, Don Manzullo, Peter Roskam, Tim Johnson, Aaaron Schock, and John Shimkus. They received $1.7 million for campus energy projects such as green skills development, decreasing campus energy consumption, energy technology demonstration, and green collar jobs creation. Yet all of these members have attacked ARRA:

– Kirk: Out of control federal spending and borrowing is not sustainable and threatens to dramatically increase the long-term tax burden of our children.

– Manzullo: The original bill was chock full of spending that would neither create jobs nor stimulate our economy, and very little was focused on job-creating infrastructure improvements and putting money back in people’s pockets so they could re-invest it in the economy.

– Roskam: By spending over $1 trillion, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that this legislation will have zero impact on our gross domestic product by 2013, and a negative impact on GDP by 2019 — greatly weakening our economy over time.

– Johnson: This plan was flawed from the outset and nearly everything in it runs contrary to common sense.

– Schock: And while our unemployment continues to hover around 10 percent, Speaker Pelosi and the Administration continue trumpeting this failed plan as a success story despite the fact they know it has failed to meet the goals they set.

– Shimkus: I have expressed my discontent with how much money is being spent in Washington, and my votes reflect that position.

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