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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