If you didn’t read the 2007 IPCC report — and won’t read the scientific literature since then — there might be a microscopic chance you would gain some value from skimming the Royal Society’s “new short guide to the science of climate change.”

The headline over at the mostly widely read — and most widely discredited — website for spreading pro-pollution, anti-science disinformation, WattsUpWithThat, tells you all you need to know, “The Royal Society’s Toned Down Climate Stance.”  The Brits own anti-sciencer disinformers, Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation, brag, “Royal Society Bows To Climate Change Sceptics.”

A long, long time ago on planet Earth, June 2007, to be exact, the UK’s Royal Society (the UK’s national academy of science, “the world’s oldest scientific academy in continuous existence,” founded in 1660), had something called a Royal Society Climate Change Advisory Group, which released a “simple guide” to climate controversies.  It was “an overview of the scientific understanding of climate change aimed at helping non-experts to better understand some of the debates in this complex area of science.  It debunked several standard pieces of disinformation and concluded:

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They just don’t make 500-year weather events like they used to.  Just look at how much of coastal North Carolina got hit by over 10 inches in the past 5 days, over 12 inches, and even over 15 inches.

Steve Scolnik of CapitalClimate has the story and the data:

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Education as well as technology is key to realizing benefits

This cross-post is by CAP’s Richard W. Caperton.

Twenty years from now your relationship with your electric utility likely will be fundamentally different from today. Currently you use electricity whenever you want, pay a flat rate for all of the energy you use, and the only real service you expect from your utility is to keep the lights on. Consumers in 2030, however, will have houses that are optimized to use energy when it’s most efficient, pay rates more closely related to the power’s cost, and expect their utility to be much more of a service provider.

At the heart of this change is information: information about the energy we use, how we use it, and the real value of that power. Data will flow in a two-way conversation between homeowners using electricity””and maybe even producing it, too””and the energy companies managing the electricity grid.

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The main (though not only) reason the climate and clean energy jobs bill died this year was that anti-science, pro-pollution ideologues killed it.  Until Senate rules change, any such bill would have required at least three Senate Republican votes and probably five.

In a semi-rational world, heck, even a semi-hemi-demi-rational world, that was imaginable, but not on on planet Eaarth.  Who could have imagined that just 18 months after campaigning for President on a platform of climate action, the strongest conservative voice in the Senate for action on global warming would demagogue and campaign against policies that were weaker than the ones he had spent years advocating?

But McCain hasn’t merely drunk the flip-flop inducing Kool-Aid served by those who oppose even modest, centrist, business-friendly, Republican designed climate strategies (see “Republicans demagogue against market-oriented climate measures they once supported“).

Now he has sipped from the frosty, globally-cooled beverage made from the water of the river Lethe and served by the Tea Party climate zombies and the rest of the anti-science, pro-pollution crowd.  Brad Johnson just re-posted this video from McCain campaigning in New Hampshire with Senate candidate (and fellow denier) Kelly Ayotte.

Watch it and weep for homo ‘sapiens’ sapiens:

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How biochar production could help climate change fight

Win-win solutions can be hard to come by. But if Cornell University soil scientist Johannes Lehmann is right, there may be a way to lower our emission of heat-trapping greenhouse gases, save millions of people’s lives, and significantly boost the productivity of the world’s farms””all at the same time. And, most remarkably, his strategy is based on a deceptively simple technology invented 8,000 years ago.

Lehmann’s idea starts with organic leftovers that people normally burn or leave to rot””forest brush, corn husks, nutshells, and even chicken manure. When this stuff decays or goes up in smoke, it releases vast amounts of heat-trapping carbon into the atmosphere. Lehmann’s plan is to short-circuit this carbon cycle by creating a material called biochar. Making biochar involves heating this organic matter without oxygen in a process called pyrolysis. It can be carried out in a small household stove, or it can be an industrial operation. Either way, the pyrolysis doesn’t produce carbon dioxide as ordinary, oxygen-fueled fire does. Instead, the carbon gets locked up in black chunks of charcoal-like matter.

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The Progress Report has a good overview of the Prop 23 fight, excerpted below:

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Prime Minister Harper on Hurricane Igor: “I have never seen damage like this in Canada.”

CONTEST:  Describe Canada in 2050, assuming we listen to folks like John Allemang, feature writer for The Globe and Mail, and keep doing not bloody much to restrict CO2 emissions.

In what appears to be a mostly serious — and thus mostly dreadful — article, “Canada in 2050? Future’s so bright . . . you know the rest,” John Allemang embraces human-caused climate change.

Perhaps I am missing something from the Canadian dry wit, since the column is printed with the above cartoon and opens with this mashed up intentional (and, I think, unintentional) humor:

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Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), once a champion of strong action to fight global warming pollution, has joined the rest of the Republican Senate caucus in questioning the overwhelming science. From 2003 to 2007, McCain pressed for Congress to pass comprehensive cap-and-trade legislation to ratchet down greenhouse gas pollution, because, he said, global warming is “such a threat to our planet and our future and our children.” Now, like every other GOP candidate for the U.S. Senate this year, he opposes the climate policy he once supported. In a little-noted appearance stumping for Senate candidate (and fellow denier) Kelly Ayotte in Nashua, NH, this March, McCain gave credence to the outlandish Climategate smear campaign against climate science:

I think it’s an inexact science, and there has been more and more questioning about some of the conclusions that were reached concerning climate change. And I believe that everybody in the world deserves correct answers whether the scientific conclusions were flawed by outside influences. There’s great questions about it that need to be resolved.

Watch it:

McCain went on to argue, in video captured by Gather.com contributor David Anderson, that it’s only possible to reduce greenhouse gas emissions with nuclear power, his personal, scientifically unfounded obsession.

In 2007, McCain said of global warming: “unequivocally I believe that it’s real.” He also accurately predicted that global warming means “much more violent weather patterns that are going to—and then of course that increases the disasters that befall countries like Bangladesh.” Sadly, now that Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh have faced catastrophic floods of an unprecedented scale during the hottest year ever recorded, McCain is a global warming skeptic. The Straight Talk Express has derailed into the Tea Party abyss.

(HT New Hampshire Primary)

This repost is by Scott A. Mandia, Professor of Physical Sciences.

There are some that that wish to delay action on climate change and some that refuse to accept the scientific consensus that humans are causing significant global warming with possible devastating impacts.

These delayers and contrarians often hang their hats on the Wegman Report as proof that climate scientists are either corrupt or incompetent. The Wegman report, commissioned by Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) and Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-KY), is central to the infamous Hockey Stick Controversy and was promoted as ”independent, impartial, expert” work by a team of “eminent statisticians.”  It was none of those.

As detailed in John Mashey on Strange Scholarship in the Wegman Report, the Wegman report was a facade for a PR campaign well-honed by Washington, DC “think tanks” and allies, underway for years.

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Guest blogger Bill Becker is Executive Director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.

A new poll in California indicates a dead heat among that state’s voters on Proposition 23, the ballot initiative in which out-of-state oil companies are trying to cripple the nation’s most progressive law to combat global climate change.

That law is AB 32.  Proposition 23 would stall its implementation. In the event voters decide to keep AB 32 intact, the attorneys general of at least three states — Texas, Alabama and Nebraska — say they’re ready to sue California to kill it.  In effect, the three AGs want to prove it’s unconstitutional for a state to decide it won’t purchase dirty energy – for example, coal-fired electricity — from somewhere else.

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Hague: “We must be undaunted by the scale of the challenge.”

The time to act is now….

We need to shift investment urgently from high carbon business as usual to the low carbon economy – this means building an essentially decarbonised global economy by mid century.

The EU must accelerate its own progress and demonstrate that a low carbon growth path makes us more competitive. I am convinced that this is in the long-term interests of Europe’s economy.

The anti-science, pro-pollution extremism of leading American conservative politicians is in sharp contrast to the science-based, low-carbon approach of their British counterparts (see British PM Gordon Brown attacks “anti-science, flat-earth climate sceptics” while UK Conservatives reaffirm climate science).

Nowhere is that clearer than in a must-read speech Monday from Foreign Secretary William Hague to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.  Hague was actually Conservative Party leader for a while and is a pretty right-wing guy by British standards, as his Wikipedia entry makes clear.

Hague’s views aren’t dissimilar to some old-school US conservatives, such as the man who held his position under Reagan (see George Shultz on Prop 23: “Those who wish to repeal our state’s clean energy laws through postponement to some fictitious future are running up the white flag of surrender to a polluted environment” and losing on Prop 23 “would be a catastrophe”).

It is all but inconceivable that any modern US conservative seeking national office would deliver a speech that sounded anything like this.  Heck, I’d do “a backward 2 and ½ somersaults with 2 and ½ twists in the piked position” if President Obama gave this same speech from the Oval Office during prime time.  It deserves to be widely read:

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Waves Power US Grid for the First Time

OPT’s PB40 PowerBuoy was hooked up to the grid at the Marine Corps Base Hawaii as part of the firm’s programme with the US Navy to test wave energy technology. The connection demonstrates the device’s ability to produce utility-grade renewable energy that can be transmitted to the grid according to international and national standards, says the firm.

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President Obama issued a call to arms to progressives yesterday ahead of the midterm elections. Obama told a cheering crowd of 26,000 at the University of Wisconsin, “We cannot sit this one out. We cannot let this country fall back because the rest of us didn’t stand up and fight.” “[P]rogress is going to come, but you’ve got to stick with me. You cannot lose heart,” he implored.

Whatever else you can say about Obama, he is no extremist, nor has he lacked for achievements.  He has governed from a center-left position and has enacted a set of policies that have eluded progressives for decades.

Yes, despite pushing through a variety of clean energy and CO2-reducing strategies that make him the greenest president to date, he has utterly failed on his crucial campaign commitment of passing comprehensive climate and clean energy legislation.  In part this is for lack of serious trying by his White House, but mostly because of the disinformation campaign pushed by Big Oil and corporate polluters and because the Republican Party has been captured by Big Oil, Big Polluters, and the Tea Party extremists, who themselves are backed by Big Oil , as discussed here.

The radicalization of the Republican Party is exemplified by the disgraced former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who back in 2007 was actually described as the “move to the pragmatic center on climate and energy,” by one NYT reporter.  Now, he has become just another Tea Party extremist backed by dirty energy, as explained in this Think Progress crosspost, “TenMillionVoters.Com: Newt Launches Tea Party Campaign To Stop ‘Radical, Secular Socialist Machine’ “:

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President Barack Obama is committed to throwing “the whole weight of the presidency” behind serious climate change reform, which he considers an “urgent priority.” In an interview with Rolling Stone publisher Jann Wenner and executive editor Eric Bates, Obama addressed the collapse of comprehensive climate legislation in the U.S. Senate and highlighted some of the steps his administration has taken in the absence of Congressional action: new fuel-economy standards and investments in renewable energy and retrofitting buildings, which he believes will lead to a 17 percent reduction in greenhouse gases from 2005 levels by 2020. When asked if he would “throw the whole weight of the presidency” behind climate policy as he did with health care and financial reform, Obama responded in the affirmative:

Yes. Not only can I foresee it, but I am committed to making sure that we get an energy policy that makes sense for the country and that helps us grow at the same time as it deals with climate change in a serious way.

“I’ve been here two years, guys,” Obama reminded. What is left undone of his campaign commitments — including climate legislation an immigration policy — “well, that’s what the next two years is for, or maybe the next six.” “Bringing about change is hard,” he concluded the interview. “But if people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren’t serious in the first place.”

Obama recognized that solving the problem of free fossil fuel pollution may require that Congress “do it in chunks, as opposed to some sort of comprehensive omnibus legislation.” Unfortunately, the morass of political reality, darkened by $500 million of spending from coal and oil interests, does not reflect the real world. Our out-of-control climate does not merely have “the potential to have devastating effects on people around the globe,” as Obama argued, but has already destroyed the futures of millions of people, from Pakistan to Russia, from New Orleans to Nashville.

Transcript: Read more

113°

Los Angeles Bakes as Temperature Breaks All-Time Record
National Weather Service Thermometer Stopped Working

Temperatures hit an all-time high this week across much of Southern California – according to records that date back 133 years.  Capital Climate has the details.

UPDATE:  Meteorologist Jeff Masters notes “a station in the foothills at 1260′ elevation near Beverly Hills owned by the Los Angeles Fire Department hit 119°F yesterday–the hottest temperature ever measured in the Los Angeles area, tying the 119°F reading from Woodland Hills on July 22, 2006.”

Weather historian Christopher C. Burt has a great post at Weather Underground, “The Remarkable Summer of 2010,” which concludes, “it is probable that no warmer summer in the Northern Hemisphere has ever been experienced by so many people in world history.”  He reprints this climatecentral.org graph

For climate deniers and big oil interests, this is an unfortunate coincidence.  In the midst of the hottest year on record, they are the main supporters of Prop 23, a controversial ballot measure that would effectively repeal the California’s Global Warming Solutions Act, “AB 32″.  CAP’s Jorge Madrid has the story.

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UPDATE:  Listen to Hansen LIVE on WPFW in DC, online here, from 10 to 11 am.

Yesterday, scientists, youth, and coal-field residents came together to protest the coal industry’s destruction of our future in a global day of action.  Wonk Room’s Brad Johnson has the story.

In Washington, DC, top climate scientist James Hansen, who warned Congress of the coming scourge of global warming in 1989, joined over a hundred others who were arrested at the White House for protesting mountaintop removal, which Barack Obama has called an “environmental disaster.”  The Rainforest Action Network, which helped organize the Appalachia Rising protest, reports on the arrests:

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Water use in Southwest heads for a Day of Reckoning

LAKE MEAD NATIONAL RECREATION AREA, Nev. “” A once-unthinkable day is looming on the Colorado River.

Barring a sudden end to the Southwest’s 11-year drought, the distribution of the river’s dwindling bounty is likely to be reordered as early as next year because the flow of water cannot keep pace with the region’s demands.

For the first time, federal estimates issued in August indicate that Lake Mead, the heart of the lower Colorado basin’s water system “” irrigating lettuce, onions and wheat in reclaimed corners of the Sonoran Desert, and lawns and golf courses from Las Vegas to Los Angeles “” could drop below a crucial demarcation line of 1,075 feet.

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Lee Fang wrote this Think Progress cross-post.

Paul Nyden, writing in the Charleston Gazette this Sunday, revealed that Koch Industries “” the massive conglomerate of oil, chemical, manufacturing, timber, hedge fund, coal, and shipping interests run by the right-wing ideologues David and Charles Koch “” has seeded West Virginia with several conservative front groups. Koch foundations provide the cash for anti-government efforts in the Mountain State, including a right-wing “think tank” called the Public Policy Foundation of West Virginia and for free-market faculty members at West Virginia University.

Nyden notes that Russell Sobel, a local economist whose research and writing has been underwritten by Koch fronts, argues against the minimum wage and against mine safety laws:

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Excerpting the book Greening Our Built World

More and more communities of faith””including Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and Quaker groups”” are embracing green design and green building. While beliefs, traditions, and practices vary in many respects, care for the earth is a value that transcends religious distinctions and emerges as a common motivation for incorporating environmentally friendly designs into construction projects. Belief in a higher being, respect for creation, and a mandate to care for one’s neighbor are at the core of many faiths. Many religious traditions call upon members to be good stewards of the earth and its resources.

The results of a more qualitative survey in Greening Our Built World of 17 faith-based institutions that have built green buildings reveals a common sense that building green is a way of committing an entire community to the moral imperative to care for the earth and help all people share in the benefits of a healthy, sustainable environment. For a growing number of religious institutions, building green has become not just a cost-effective investment but, more importantly, a way to embody and demonstrate a religious and moral commitment to care for the earth and for life. The process of learning about and undertaking greening, in turn, commonly reinvigorates the religious community. According to Rose McKenney, a faculty member at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma Washington, the presence of the green building on campus is a major recruiting tool for new students.

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Our favorite climate de-crocker, Peter Sinclair has a new video:
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