It’s so hot the Washington Post almost gets the story right!

A heat wave of unprecedented intensity has brought the world’s largest country its hottest temperature in history:

Globally, NOAA just reported that June is the fourth month in a row of record global temperatures, and the first half of 2010 is on a record pace.  This is all the more powerful evidence of human-caused warming “because it occurs when the recent minimum of solar irradiance is having its maximum cooling effect,” as a recent must-read NASA paper notes.

If the planet as a whole is busting global records,  you wouldn’t be surprised if national temperature records were dropping like overheated flies.  And they are, as uber-meteorologist Jeff Masters reported last week:

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As negotiations on a stripped-down bill to limit global warming pollution from coal-fired power plants reach the final hour, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) is sympathizing with the utility industry’s attempt to suspend Clean Air Act rules on pollutants that kill tens of thousands of Americans a year. At a meeting with environmentalists, Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers “led the call for regulatory relief on a number of existing Clean Air Act programs dealing with sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and mercury, including a new EPA rule proposed last week that deals with interstate pollution.” However, thirty-one environmental and health organizations sent a letter to senators last week calling such rollbacks “simply unacceptable.” Center for American Progress senior fellow Van Jones called it a “literal poison pill.” Today, Lieberman made the ironic claim that polluters “just want a breather” from clean air rules:

That’s a tough one. They frame it in a different way. They just want a breather. And not an eternal pre-emption. These are all topics of negotiation. That’s what we’re supposed to be doing here.

Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), Lieberman’s partner in developing a Senate climate bill, last Thursday said there was a little room for negotiation, but opposed any “rollback.” “If we put those requirements into a different form so that we are still adhering to them, that is a different issue and those are two different choices,” Kerry said. “But there is not going to be a rollback of current requirements.”

Other Democrats don’t find this one of the acceptable “topics of negotiation.” “I’d not want to see any weakening of the authority they have today,” Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD) said last week. “It’s been a major tool for cleaning up our air.”

The environmental and public health community — including NAACP and Green For All, Public Citizen and the American Lung Association, the Environmental Defense Fund and Environment America, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Union of Concerned Scientists — are united in their opposition, saying that “delaying the cleanup of these plants threatens the health of millions of Americans.” “I’m sure people throw everything on the table,” said League of Conservation Voters President Gene Karpinski. “But we’ve made it damn clear … that there are no trade-offs of any regulation of any [conventional] pollutants.”

Slams Lindzen, Singer and Happer as liars

MIT atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel has been at the forefront of trying to explain many aspects of climate science to the public, especially in his field of expertise — hurricanes.  He has written a good essay on the hacked emails, ” ‘Climategate’: A Different Perspective,” originally published at the National Association of Scholars [NAS] website.  Near the end, he notes:

While the climategate email authors are castigated for not being paragons of virtue, the sins of others go unremarked. In the summer of 2009, a one-page letter was sent to Congress, signed by one actual climate scientist and six physicists with little or no background in climate science, three of whom were retired. Among other untruths, it contained the sentence, referring to evidence of anthropogenic global warming, “There is no such evidence; it doesn’t exist.” I confronted the sole climate scientist among the authors with this statement, and he confessed that he did not hold that to be the case. Last I checked, lying to Congress was a federal crime.

Emanuel doesn’t mention Richard Lindzen by name, but that is who he means (as is made clear here).  The laughable letter itself is here.  Emanuel is thus calling out his old friend Lindzen, plus William Happer and S. Fred Singer, as liars on climate science.  No argument here.

Kerry Emanuel is author of the terrific book, Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes.  In 2006 he was named one of Time‘s “Time 100: The People Who Shape Our World.”  Here are more excerpts from his piece:
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China May Spend $738 Billion on Clean Energy Projects

China, the world’s biggest polluter, may spend about 5 trillion yuan ($738 billion) in the next decade developing cleaner sources of energy to reduce emissions from burning oil and coal, a government official said.

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Three months after BP’s Deepwater Horizon exploratory rig exploded, the Gulf of Mexico faces a murky future of imperfect solutions to intractable problems.   Think Progress has an update, cross-posted below:

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Guest bloggers Van Jones, CAP Senior Fellow and former adviser to president Obama on green jobs, and Jorge Madrid, Research Associate at CAP, explain the shortcomings of the latest attempt to broker a Senate compromise on carbon.

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Last July I discussed another ExxonMobil deceit: They are still funding climate science deniers despite their public pledge to “discontinue contributions to several public policy research groups whose positions on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner.”

Even though the UK’s Guardian and other media outlets pointed out the ExxonMobil lie last year, they continue to fund anti-science disinformers. Desmogblog‘s Brendan DeMelle has the story in this repost.

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Warns of dangers, high costs of inaction

A national television ad released Monday July 19^th by Vote Vets reminds us why clean energy reform is so crucial to our national security.  The ad, running in North Dakota, Arkansas, Virginia, and West Virginia, reminds us that our dangerous addiction to oil is a threat to our troops and national security:

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