How hot is it? So hot that June “breaks the record for the warmest average temperature observed for any calendar month in Miami”

“We’re getting a dramatic taste of the kind of weather we are on course to bequeath to our grandchildren,” says Tom Peterson, Chief Scientist for NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center.

An “excessive heat warning” has been issued this week for parts of the East Coast, home of the status quo media, so please send me examples of coverage — good or bad. Also, drink plenty of fluids and stay cool!

I got a call last week from a Florida reporter.  Did I know that it was so hot that Miami set the all-time monthly temperature record in June?  Was all the strange weather part of some longer-term pattern?

No and yes. He directed me to the National Weather Service summary for Miami here.  And I pointed out to him that NASA reported that globally it was easily the hottest spring “” and Jan-May “” in the temperature record (and NOAA, too).

Record-smashing temps are precisely what scientists have been predicting.  As the UK’s Royal Society and Met Office (the UK’s National Weather Service [i.e. meteorological office], within the Ministry of Defence) said in their must-read statement on the connection between global warming and extreme weather:
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Dutch foresee much higher sea-level-rise risk than IPCC — and urge IPCC to “to pay attention to ‘worst-case scenarios’. “

Our findings do not contradict the main conclusions of the IPCC on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability related to climate change. There is ample observational evidence of natural systems being influenced by climate change on regional levels. The negative impacts under unmitigated climate change in the future pose substantial risks to most parts of the world, with risks increasing at higher global average temperatures.

The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL) examined the Regional Chapters in the Working Group II portion of the 2007 Fourth Assessment.  Full 100 page report is here; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change  comment is here.

Overall, as the BBC headline makes clear, “Dutch review backs UN climate science report.”  So, naturally, the Wall Street Journal headline on the report was, “Dutch Review Raises Concerns About Climate Report.”

Also, there is an effort to spin this report as showing the IPCC has some sort of a bias toward reporting negative impacts.  In fact the overwhelming majority of research since the IPCC has found that the IPCC has consistently underestimated many key current and future impacts, particularly sea level rise (and carbon-cycle feedbacks). Read more

The president has called for bold legislative action to create a clean energy economy. It would be a tragic mistake if this legislation did not include the broadest possible carbon pricing signal….

It would indeed be regrettable if Members of Congress, who universally prefer carbon markets over command-and-control regulation, could not enact a bill that spares us such regulation and begins to solve the climate problem.

Those are the opening and closing sentences of a Roll Call op-ed coauthored by economist Richard Schmalensee, director of MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, who served on President George H.W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers.

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BP’s tax deduction was “more than $225,000 a day”

Transocean, the company that owns the failed Deepwater Horizon rig that caused the Gulf oil spill, used well-known tax havens in the Cayman Islands and Switzerland to lower its U.S. corporate tax rate by almost 15 points. And, as TP reports, due to a break in the U.S. tax code, BP was also allowed to write off the rent it paid to Transocean on its own tax bill, saving it hundreds of thousands of dollars per day:

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