The Chicago Tribune Online has a helpful Q&A that summarizes where climate science stands today.  It also addresses the IPCC, emails, and temperature stations issues.

Its “just the facts” approach is superior to more than 90% of what has been written by the media these days (see Boykoff on “Exaggerating Denialism: Media Representations of Outlier Views on Climate Change” and here):

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Mike Gonzalez, Heritage Foundation

The Heritage Foundation, a once-influential conservative think tank, has lost its grip on reality. Mike Gonzalez, Vice President of Communications for Heritage, believes that the scientific consensus on global warming is a massive hoax, perpetrated because of “politicians putting pressure on scientists to come up with theories that would vastly add to their regulatory and taxing powers.” Gonzalez — who abandoned print journalism to become a mid-level speechwriter for the Bush administration — argues that the “whole edifice of global warming is now falling apart” because the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is like a birthday-party magician:

The whole edifice of global warming is now falling apart. It is collapsing with such rapidity that it is worth pausing from time to time to take stock. The foundations of such edifice rest on a single assumption. This hypothesis—one that drove many people, even some reasonable ones, to contemplate upending the world as we know it — is that that traditional fuels will have cataclysmic consequences on the environment because they emit gases that make the world too hot.

The authority to turn this assumption into fact rested largely on a U.N. document – the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 report – which declared climate change “unequivocal” and its man-made origin “very likely.” The purpose of the IPCC report was to turn hypothesis into fact.

The reason Sens. Kerry, Graham and Lieberman had to turn away from cap-and-trade, and target industries individually, is that the idea of an iron-clad scientific consensus is now being revealed to be a bit, shall we say, exaggerated. The IPCC’s turning of hypothesis into fact now looks less like the scientific process and more like the magician you paid $50 an hour to pull flowers out of hats at your daughter’s birthday.

The IPCC report was a summary of existing scientific literature — its conclusions are those of the world’s scientists. The threat of manmade global warming is, quite simply, a fact. As democracy derives much of its strength from the rational debate of ideas, it’s sad to see that the Heritage Foundation has fallen into the swamp of conspiracy theories.

The “edifice of global warming” is the edifice of modern civilization, the edifice of free enterprise, the edifice of Western thought. The great scientific endeavor to understand the world around us — not through superstition and demagoguery but through tedious observation and critical examination — has granted us the modern world, with the promise of previously unimaginable wealth and prosperity for billions. Much of the success of the scientific edifice is its ability to clarify inconvenient truths — to allow society to face difficult decisions and recognize unintended consequences. Treating science like a buffet, picking only the facts that fit his reality and ascribing the rest to an inchoate conspiracy, is a threat to the edifice upon which modern man depends.

“Any broadcast that pits a climate change skeptic against a serious climate scientist is automatically a win for the skeptic, since a false position is being given equal time and legitimacy.”

Climate Scientists continue to see persuasive evidence of global warming and climate change when they speak at academic conferences, even though, as Andrew Sullivan rightly put it, the science is being ‘swift-boated before our eyes.’ (See also Bill McKibben at Tomdispatch.com on Climate Change’s OJ Simpson moment).

This article at mongabay.com includes some hand-wringing from scientists who say that they should have responded to the attacks earlier and more forcefully in public last fall, or who worry that scientists are not charismatic t.v. personalities who can be persuasive on that medium.

Let me just give my scientific colleagues some advice, since as a Middle East expert I’ve seen all sorts of falsehoods about the region successfully purveyed by the US mass media and print press, in such a way as to shape public opinion and to affect policy-making in Washington:

That is U. Michigan history professor Juan Cole writing on his blog, Informed Comment, Sunday.  Cole is “an American scholar, public intellectual, and historian of the modern Middle East and South Asia,” as Wikipedia puts it.

The full title of Cole’s piece is “Advice to Climate Scientists on how to Avoid being Swift-boated and how to become Public Intellectuals.”  I’ll excerpt it below with my comments.  The main issue I take with his piece is that the overwhelming majority of climate scientists don’t want to become public intellectuals, in part because that is perceived as the kiss of death for their scientific careers.

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There appears to be a lot more natural gas than previously thought.  And that could have huge implications for low-cost CO2 emissions reductions in the near term, if we pass a climate and clean energy bill with a shrinking emissions cap and rising price, as I discuss here.

But can the gas be developed in an environmentally responsible fashion?  That question is explored by Sarah Collins, an intern with the Energy Opportunity team, and Tom Kenworthy, a Senior Fellow at CAP, in this repost.  In the 2008 AP photo above, a natural gas well pad sits in front of the Roan Plateau near Rifle, Colorado.

Hydraulic fracturing, also called “fracking” or “fracing,” is a widely used but somewhat controversial oil and gas drilling technique that is opening up new energy possibilities in the United States. It’s also starting to draw a lot of high-level attention in Washington, and this scrutiny is appropriate and overdue.

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CleanTech, Clean Energy Jobs: The New Face Of Cleveland

Three demonstrations won attention and approval in Cleveland on a snowy Friday in February. The TEDxCLE conference at the renovated Capitol Theater brought together Northeast Ohio “creators, catalysts, entrepreneurs, artists, technologists” and other thinkers and doers.

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Andrew Jakabovics, the Associate Director for Housing and Economics at American Progress, has put together a nifty graphic and article about how the Federal Housing Administration can salvage some value from foreclosed homes, while simultaneously stimulating the energy efficiency market and revitalizing neighborhoods.

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