With huge investment from the Government, tons of sand are being pumped from offshore sandbars by two huge dredgers and then sprayed along miles of Cancun’s hardest hit areas.

The annual international climate talks began this week in Cancun, Mexico, the beach resort city that has already lost most of its beaches to climate change.  Brad Johnson, who will be reporting live from the climate talks through next week, has the story.

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Claims that global warming has slowed down over the past decade were partly based on faulty data. Instead, the rate of global warming was underestimated because of a new way of measuring sea-surface temperatures, suggests a new study….

[Lead author John] Kennedy says the underestimation of the change in sea-surface temperature could account for up to 0.03 °C of the apparent slowdown in global temperatures. The correction could mean that 2010 will be the warmest year on record, surpassing 1998 and 2005.

That’s the New Scientist reporting on a new re-analysis of the global sea-surface temperature (SST) dataset by the Met Office.

Of course, everybody but the anti-science disinformers have known for a long time that the Hadley/CRU (Climatic Research Unit) temperature data UNDERestimates “” not OVERestimates “” the recent global temperature rise.  Their data excludes “the place on Earth that has been warming fastest” (see “Why are Hadley and CRU withholding vital climate data from the public?” and “What exactly is polar amplification and why does it matter?“).   NASA’s James Hansen has made this point for years.

Last December, the Met Office had concluded that “The global temperature rise calculated by the Met Office’s HadCRUT record is at the lower end of likely warming.” In a 2009 analysis, “New evidence confirms land warming record,” the Met Office explained that they had been lowballing land-based temperatures, “because HadCRUT is sampling regions that have exhibited less change, on average, than the entire globe over this particular period.”

There is little doubt that these two problems are responsible for a large fraction of the apparent slow down of the rate of warming in the Hadley/CRU dataset — and that the rest of the slowdown is due to well understood factors such as the deepest solar minimum in a century, which we are just coming out of.  The Met Office said as much last week.

I emailed Kennedy to get the study, which has been accepted for publication in Remote Sensing of Environment but isn’t online yet.  I also wanted to ask him if the second paragraph cited above in the New Scientist article was accurate — it is — and whether the Met Office would be incorporating these corrections for its final 2010 temperature calculation.  Kennedy elaborated:

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The Wonk Room will be covering the United Nations climate talks in Cancun, Mexico for their duration, with on-the-ground reports beginning later this week.

At a Heritage Foundation event last month, the head of the Koch Industries front group Americans For Prosperity unveiled a new, focus-group-tested messaging strategy to attack climate science and policy. In a wide-ranging discussion with conservative bloggers, AFP president Tim Phillips said that it was now safe to smear climate scientists “because of the UK email scandals,” and that “the other thing that we’re really pushing with allies is the myth of green jobs.”

With the onset of the Cancun climate talks, hosts and guests on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News and Fox Business Network are implementing a furious assault against climate action, using the Americans For Prosperity playbook. On Fox Business Network on Sunday, six panelists agreed that supporters of climate policy are trying to dismantle capitalism, citing the “Marxist” Van Jones and arguing that there isn’t a “single free-market capitalist” that wants to fight global warming (other than Bill Gates, Richard Branson, the members of USCAP, BICEP, BELC, BusinessEurope, and so on):

Global warming “hysteria” is “crap,” Greg Gutfield argued this Sunday on Fox News, calling anyone who disagrees a “racist, homophobic globalphobe.” (On the other hand, comedian Amy Schumer compares global warming denial to ignoring warnings about obesity and drunkenness.) He and his guests cited “Climategate” to dismiss the threat of global warming pollution:

On Monday, right-wing contrarian Bjorn Lomborg agreed with Fox Business Network’s David Asman that “Climategate” delegitimized climate scientists, and argued that we have “twenty to forty years” to spend on researching new technology for global warming:

On Monday, Fox News’s Neil Cavuto hosted stunt climate denier Phelim McAleer, who was upset that he wasn’t allowed to practice “journalism” at the Cancun talks by dressing up in a dog suit:

Meanwhile, extreme storms are leaving a path of destruction from Mississippi to Virginia, and Perth, Australia, has had its hottest spring ever, with its “first November heat wave for 32 years.”

When the anti-science crowd first took over in the Gingrich Congress, I had the pleasure of testifying in front of Dana Rohrabacher’s House subcommittee three times.

The former Reagan speechwriter is a garrulous and affable politician, but a hard-core and implacable denier — so dead set against anything that smacks of climate, that he worked hard to shut down every applied clean energy program at the Department of Energy.  Heck, he helped zero out the urban heat island mitigation program — which was arguably the single most cost-effective climate and clean air strategy ever devised, encompassing adaptation, mitigation, geo-engineering and smog reduction — simply because it was part of the President’s climate action plan and we called it “Cool Communities.”

Now, Politico reports, the pro-nuke, anti-climate California Republican is battling Ralph Hall (R-TX) to chair the House Science Committee:

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Humpback Whales Inspire New Ocean Tidal Energy Turbine

The next generation of ocean tidal energy turbines could be based on humpback whale flippers, and we may have the U.S. Naval Academy to thank for that. The new design is being developed by Ensign Timothy Gruber, who is pursuing a graduate degree at MIT, with guidance from Naval Academy engineering professors. If it proves successful, the new design could give a major boost to efforts by the U.S. Department of Defense to ditch risky, out-of-date fossil fuels in favor of renewable energy.

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I met with Lisa Jackson last week, and I was once again struck by how forcefully she fights to protect the health of American families. As the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, she is helping make our air safer to breathe and getting toxins out of everyday products.

That’s Peter Lehner, NRDC’s Executive Director, writing in Huffington Post.

The anti-science, pro-pollution crowd has said the EPA will their primary target in the next Congress.  Since the EPA is tasked with using science preserves clean air and clean water — and now a livable climate — for our children, EPA will be a major focus of Climate Progress over the next two years.

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