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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