Summers: Comprehensive bill “is an absolutely crucial priority for the president” in 2010

UPDATE:  Summers entire, amazing speech, “The Economic Case for Comprehensive Energy Reform,” is reposted below.

White House aides Larry Summers and Carol Browner insisted that the administration was willing to bend on several key issues, including the mechanism for pricing carbon and increased domestic energy exploration. But both said the president would not budge when it comes to placing a first-ever price on domestic greenhouse gas emissions.

E&E News PM (subs. req’d) reported on the remarks from both the director of Obama’s National Economic Council and Obama’s chief climate aid.  In a forum sponsored by Google, Browner said of the bipartisan Senate effort of Lindsey Graham (R-SC), John Kerry (D-MA), and Joe Lieberman (I-CT):

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No, really you can’t make this stuff up — unless you are an anti-science disinformer like Monckton.  Straight from “FreedomWorks” Tabitha Hale:

As you have probably surmised, there will be a large round of Tea Parties coming up on April 15th. There will be large names, even larger crowds — and honestly, organizers would be unable to stop people from coming if they wanted to at this point. I will be speaking in Atlanta, and the FreedomWorks event in DC has a fantastic line-up including Lord Monckton, Andrew Breitbart, and Ron Paul.

That’s right.  The original Tea Party was aimed at freeing us from the rule and influence of the British monarachy.  But the Tea Partiers — who are unburdened by both irony and historical knowledge — have asked a British peer, The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley (TVMOB), to speak at two Tax Day Tea Parties!

[Please note that the picture on the right is not TVMOB nor do I think he would ever participate in this.]

For the record, of all the disinformers in the world, TVMOB is one of the most grotesque liars.  Rather than being given a platform, he should be widely condemned for his extremist hate speech:

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UPDATE:  You can watch the video here.  It’s somewhere between pointless and unhelpful.

UCS climate scientist Brenda Ekwurzel goes head to head with a skeptical meteorologist during “couples counseling” tonight on the Colbert Report (Comedy Central, 11:30 p.m. EDT).

And that skeptical meteorologist would be none other than InAccuweather’s long-range conspiracy theorist Joe Bastardi!

Good luck Brenda!  And no, I don’t think that “marriage” can be saved.

For people who haven’t read my various debunkings of Bastardi, start here:  Joe Bastardi can’t read a temperature anomaly map and so spins another conspiracy theory and Accuweather’s Joe Bastardi admits, “Earth continues warmest winter since satellite measurements started” and “Feb should be warmest on record!!!”

Television meteorologists and weather forecasters — the primary source for many Americans for science news — are predominantly skeptical of the science of manmade climate change. In fact, a recent poll by George Mason University found that a quarter of TV weather guys are outright conspiracy theorists, believing that the scientific consensus is a hoax. However, television meteorologist Dan Satterfield of WHNT in Huntsville, AL has written why his colleagues should be explaining science, not denying it:

Scientists are taught to be skeptics. Show us the data. Being skeptical is good scientific practice but ignoring a mountain of evidence while giving credit to claims in political journals instead is not scientific skepticism. It’s politics. This is why I am not afraid to talk about climate change. I think I’m obligated to do so when there is overwhelming evidence we are tampering with the very air conditioner of our planet. I have all the world’s major scientific organizations backing me up as well.

Satterfield — a real meteorologist with a background in atmospheric physics — was on the advisory panel for the George Mason poll. He was “absolutely floored” that 26% of the respondents believe global warming is a scam, and recognizes that some resistance to the science of climate change may come from the inability of models to forecast long-term weather:

It is very difficult to forecast the weather for the next 7 days and perhaps the idea of talking about the weather 100 years ahead is the problem. I used to feel exactly the same way. I’ve since learned that climate and weather are two very different things.

The climate science community needs to work hard on explaining this to TV weather people and the public at large. Weathercasters on the other hand need to take a page from good journalists and learn to set aside political beliefs and really study the science. Especially if they are going to talk about it on air. They have an obligation to do so.

“Peer review and scientific method have taken us from living in log cabins to exploring the outer planets in two centuries,” Satterfield continues. “The great thing about the way science works is that the knowledge is built upon those that have come before.”

He then demolishes a series of myths about the science of climate change, noting that peer-reviewed science has dealt with questions such as the effect of the sun, the unprecedented pattern and scale of warming, data reliability, and the “dozen other independent climate proxies that all show warming.”

“The world of science is waiting,” Satterfield writes. “All you have to do is write it up and submit it to a peer reviewed journal. That’s how science works. Political spin does not, but science does.”

There have been critics of the scientific understanding of global warming for decades, but over that time the consensus has grown. Satterfield rightly recognizes that what’s left are not skeptics, but “nutters” who believe in a giant conspiracy:

So we are left with the giant conspiracy to prevent the truth from being published. The claim is thousands of scientists around the world are all working together to prevent the “truth” from being published. The great thing about a conspiracy is this. If someone proves it wrong, you can just claim the proof is part of the conspiracy! Every newsroom gets these conspiracy calls every day. Castro shot Kennedy, Area 51, contrails are really chemical mind control, etc. News folks just call them nutters. Twenty people can’t keep a secret, much less thousands. Get real.

Dan recently finished a Masters degree in Earth Science, is a full member of the American Meteorological Society and has also been elected a member of the International Association of Broadcast Meteorologists. He has held the AMS Seal of approval since 1985, and is an AMS Certified Meteorologist. His blog is the Wild Wild Science Journal, and he is on Twitter as @danwhnt.

Okay, the Washington Post‘s circulation will probably keep declining even in the unlikely event their coverage of global warming improves.  But my headline is at least as scientific as the WP‘s latest climate piece “Scientists’ use of computer models to predict climate change is under attack.”

Memo to WashPost:  Scientists use of computer models to predict/project climate change has been under attack for a long, long time by the anti-scientific disinformers.  That ain’t news.  The real news, which you almost completely ignore, is:

1. The models have made accurate projections (see NASA:  “We conclude that global temperature continued to rise rapidly in the past decade” and “that there has been no reduction in the global warming trend of 0.15-0.20°C/decade that began in the late 1970s“).
2. When the models have gone awry, it is primarily in underestimating how fast the climate would change.
3. Staying anywhere near our current emissions path — i.e. listening to the disinformers and doing nothing significant to restrict emissions — removes most uncertainty about the future climate impacts and leads with high probability to human misery on a scale never seen before.

But what do you expect from an article that begins this way:

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Conservatives keep compiling a collection of videos that future generations will ponder with combination of anger and bewilderment.  Here’s the lastest, courtesy of Think Progress.

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Steve Martin lives!

The joke goes, The economy is so bad Exxon Mobil laid off 25 Congressmen.  If only.

Turns out the economy is never really bad for the oil giant, and the last thing they would want to do is cut off support to members of Congress who allow them to pull off the remarkable trick of making $45 billion in profits last year but paying no federal income tax.  Think Progress reports the stunning news, which, sadly, is not a Steve Martin routine:

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Seven miners were killed and another 19 are missing “after an explosion rocked a Massey Energy underground coal mine” in southern West Virginia this afternoon.  Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson has the story in this repost.

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