Last month, NOAA reported the world experienced the warmest January in both satellite records.  And NOAA just reported (here) that it was the second warmest February on record in both satellite records.  Now the UAH satellite data shows record-smashing temperatures in the first half of March:

The yellow line is the 20-year average temperature, the purple line is of the 20-year “record highs,” and the green line is the 2010 temperature [make your own chart here -- I have a more complete, though messier, graph at the end].

Other temperature datasets show slightly different results.  For NASA, January and February were tied for the second hottest on record.

Of course, there never was any global cooling — see Must-read AP story: Statisticians reject global cooling; Caldeira “” “To talk about global cooling at the end of the hottest decade the planet has experienced in many thousands of years is ridiculous.” The vast majority of the warming went right where scientists had predicted — into the oceans (see “How we know global warming is happening” and below).

In fact, 2005 was the hottest year on record in both NOAA’s and NASA’s dataset — and in every dataset, the 200os were the hottest decade on record.  But the anti-science crowd loves their much-vaunted satellite data.  Why?

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UPDATE:  More details at the end.

Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), John Kerry (D-MA), and Joe Lieberman (I-CT) “shared an eight-page outline of their draft legislation that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions over the next four decades, including provisions to limit business costs while ramping up domestic production of oil, gas and nuclear power.”

E&E News PM (subs. req’d) reported the following details of the bill, which leaked out from the Senators “closed-door meeting with major industry groups they are courting”:

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“The Government of Canada has cut virtually all programs aimed at funding climate science. I get the sense that they feel that science is a nuisance. They ignore science in their decision making; they muzzle their federal scientists by imposing impossible media-contact regulations; they cut programs designed to allow scientists to develop knowledge.” “” Andrew Weaver, professor at the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, University of Victoria, and Canada Research Chair

That’s from “Troubling Evidence,” a startling new report from the Climate Action Network Canada.  It was “released just days after a federal budget that effectively slashed funding for university-based climate science.”

A CAN Canada spokesman says of the Harper government, “they’re putting climate deniers in key oversight positions over research, and they’re reducing funding in key areas.”¦  It’s almost as though they’re making a conscious attempt to bury the truth.”

The muzzling is quite extensive, as the Montreal Gazette reported Monday:

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Today, the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History unveiled a new exhibit named after right-wing billionaire polluter, David H. Koch. Greenpeace dispatched its Climate Crime Unit at the opening of the $20.7 million David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins in search of Koch, the billionaire scion of Koch Industries and founder of a vast network of conservative organizations that deny the threat of global warming. Greenpeace research director Kert Davies noted that the true Koch family legacy is “one of environmental crimes“:

While David Koch’s oil wealth may get his name on a museum exhibit, the Koch family legacy is one of environmental crimes, lobbying to block clean energy, and funding global warming denial front groups.

Greenpeace notes:

Koch Industries is among the biggest lobbying spenders in the oil industry and Koch’s PAC spent more on contributions to federal candidates since the 2006 election cycle than any other oil-and-gas sector PAC. [OpenSecrets]

Koch Industries is also a major source of funding for climate denier think tanks and organizations, including Americans for Prosperity, which David Koch founded. According to the Washington Post, next week AFP will launch another “Hot Air Tour” aimed at opposing climate and clean energy policy. [Washington Post, 3/1/10]

AFP founder David Koch, with a net worth of about $17 billion, is the richest man in New York City, owning a $17 million apartment at 740 Park Avenue, a home in the Hamptons, an Aspen retreat, and the Villa Del Sarmiento in Palm Beach. The David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins joins the David H. Koch theater at Lincoln Center ($100 million), the American Museum of Natural History’s David H. Koch Dinosaur Wing ($20 million), the Johns Hopkins University’s David H. Koch Cancer Research Building ($20 million), and MIT’s David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research ($100 million). Koch enjoys not just ballet and fine art but big game hunts, whose kills he features in his Aspen ski chalet.

For the second year in a row, President Barack Obama has signed a federal disaster declaration for North Dakota due to record flooding of the Red River in a changing climate. “More than a third of the contiguous United States faces a high or above average flood risk this spring,” the National Weather Service reported yesterday. “We are looking at potentially historic flooding in some parts of the country this spring,” Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said. The Red River’s spring flood is coming three weeks earlier than average, after unprecedented warm weather “set records for both the earliest and longest spring melt in recorded history,” as a “10-day stretch of March never saw the mercury dip below freezing.” The 2009 flood set records for streamflow and river height. This year’s flood is coming more than a week earlier, having passed flood stage on Saturday:

STREAMFLOW: 11,600 cfs

FLOOD HEIGHT: 30.74 ft

This is the ninth “ten-year flood” of Fargo since 1989, with streamflow greater than 10,300 cfs. That is to say:

In the last twenty years, Red River floods expected to occur at Fargo only once every ten years have happened every two to three years. 2010 is the fourth year in a row with at least a “ten-year flood.” In the 90 years before 1990, there were only eight ten-year floods.

ANNUAL PEAK FLOW, RED RIVER OF THE NORTH AT FARGO, ND

The standard for a hundred-year flood of the Red River of the North at Fargo set by the Army Corps of Engineers in 2001 is 29,300 cfs, a discharge rate never yet recorded.

A key consequence of global warming predicted by climate scientists is an increase in overall precipitation as well as extreme precipitation events, leading to increased flooding. As President Obama said last year:

If you look at the flooding that’s going on right now in North Dakota, and you say to yourself, “If you see an increase of 2 degrees, what does that do, in terms of the situation there,” that indicates the degree to which we have to take this seriously.

After analyzing all of the data from 2009 survey, Krosnick and his Stanford colleagues concluded that the 5-point drop in the percentage of Americans who believe in the global warming was largely made up of people who both mistrust scientists and think that the Earth is cooling down naturally.

We’re subjected to many dubious claims about science messaging — stuff like, “the world’s scientists are struggling with the unsettling feeling that the more they talk about climate change, the less progress they make.”

Scientists may have that feeling, but it has little basis in fact.  You can’t discuss this subject in a serious fashion without looking at key factors like the anti-science disinformation campaign, the he-said/she-said coverage by the media, the decision by many enviros to downplay talk of global warming, and, in the U.S., the relatively coolish temperatures of the past two years (see “The disinformers are winning, but mostly with the GOP“).

So I wanted to bring you further analysis by someone who has done actual detailed polling and research on the subject, Stanford communications expert Jon Krosnick.  He has released an analysis of his latest survey of U.S. public opinion on global warming.  Below is a synopsis, plus a video interview of Krosnick (with links to the analysis and working papers).  His results indicate:

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Second known tropical cyclone forms in “cooler” South Atlantic, while Red River braces for fourth “ten-year flood” in a row!

“I actually think the science around climate change is real. It is potentially devastating,” Obama told reporters Monday [March 24, 2009]. “If you look at the flooding that’s going on right now in North Dakota and you say to yourself, ‘If you see an increase of two degrees, what does that do, in terms of the situation there?’ That indicates the degree to which we have to take this seriously.“

The media love to focus on the few extreme weather events that they (mistakenly) believe are inconsistent with human-caused climate change [see "Was the 'Blizzard of 2009' a 'global warming type' of record snowfall "” or an opportunity for the media to blow the extreme weather story (again)?"].  But will they keep ignoring all the extreme weather that scientists have been predicting for years would become more common as we pour more heat trapping gases into the atmosphere?

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Clean-Energy Investments Are Moving Ahead ‘Without Copenhagen’

Clean-energy investments are moving ahead even without an international agreement to limit carbon dioxide, Bloomberg New Energy Finance Chief Executive Officer Michael Liebreich said.

Investment last year in wind turbines, solar panels and other technologies that emit little or no CO2 pollutants declined 6 percent last year, Liebreich said today in a television interview at the start of a summit in London.

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Green Fees are becoming more and more common on campuses all across the country.  Today’s guest blogger, Dan Cannon, a Florida Organizer at the Southern Energy Network, has the story in this repost from It’s Getting Hot In Here.

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“Regardless of what the skeptics may think, there are indeed 20-dollar bills lying on the ground all around us. We only need the will — and the ways — to pick them up.”

Energy Secretary Steven Chu wrote an op-ed in this behemoth World Economic Forum report.  HuffPost reposted it, and we repost them.

For the next few decades, energy efficiency is one of the lowest cost options for reducing US carbon emissions. Many studies have concluded that energy efficiency can save both energy and money. For example, a recent McKinsey report calculated the potential savings assuming a 7% discount rate, no price on carbon and using only “net present value positive” investments. It found the potential to reduce consumer demand by about 23% by 2020 and reduce GHG emissions by 1.1 gigatons each year — at a net savings of US$ 680 billion.

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