The Wonk Room is reporting and tweeting live from the international climate talks in Cancun, Mexico.

A group of four Republican senators, led by climate denier Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), have lashed out at the Obama administration’s efforts to protect the poorest and most vulnerable people of the world from climate disasters. Inhofe, Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY), Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), and Sen. George Voinovich (R-OH) wrote a letter to President Barack Obama telling him to drop an international adaptation fund for the least developed nations — part of the Copenhagen Accord signed last year by President Obama and over 130 other nations. Under Democratic leadership, the United States appropriated $1.3 billion for the climate fund in 2010 (compared to $136.8 billion for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan). After citing the budget deficit and high unemployment as reasons not to invest in protecting the vulnerable, the senators attacked the scientific basis for taking action:

In addition, several of the findings of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concerning the eventual impacts of climate change in developing countries were found to be exaggerated or simply not true. We understand that reforms of the IPCC process are currently underway and we believe that no American taxpayer dollars should be committed to a global climate fund based on information that is not accurate.

The Wonk Room contacted the Climate Science Rapid Response Team, a new volunteer effort by top scientists, to find out what they thought about the claim that the threat to the developing world is too uncertain for the United States to act.

“This is a dishonest climate change denier myth,” top climate scientist Michael Mann, director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center, explained. The senators are referring to two or three errors in the thousand-page impacts report that are “so insubstantial that they didn’t even make the summary for policy makers or the technical summary report.”

Dr. Gary Yohe, the Huffington Professor of Economics and Environmental Studies at Wesleyan University, charged the senators with “misdirection and misrepresentation”:

They are continuing an effort of misdirection and misrepresentation so that the debate does not focus on the issue – the urgent need for adaptation and the value to the United States of investing in adaptation (around the world).

Dr. Spencer Weart, a physicist and leading science historian, told us that “senators are incorrect in their claim that there are substantial errors in the IPCC’s evaluation of the science of impacts of climate change on developing nations”:

Unless the senators can point to serious deficiencies in the actual main conclusions about impacts of the IPCC report — which they have not done and cannot do — the prudent thing is to take the IPCC’s severe warnings about impacts at face value and prepare accordingly.

The senators have received a collective $5.1 million from the fossil fuel industry in campaign contributions.

Dr. Weart’s full response debunks in detail the senators’ letter: Read more

The Wonk Room is reporting and tweeting live from the international climate talks in Cancun, Mexico.

As the world’s environmental ministers arrive in Cancun, Mexico, for the 19th year of negotiations to address global warming pollution, new climate disasters are killing people across the planet. The slow-moving climate talks are hobbled by insufficient amibition, and uncertainty over whether the United States or China — the world’s largest climate polluters — will follow through with their Copenhagen Accord commitments. The Obama administration’s stated commitment to cut pollution by 17 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels, after Republican climate deniers killed cap-and-trade legislation, now depends on whether the Environmental Protection Agency’s planned greenhouse standards survive a polluter onslaught.

Meanwhile, the building heat trapped by billions of tons of fossil fuel pollution is fueling catastrophic changes in the world’s climate system predicted years ago by scientists:

– The worst wildfires in Israel’s history, fueled by record warmth and drought, “have destroyed large sections of Israel’s northern area” and killed 41 people. Four days of intense battle during the celebration of Hanukkah, with assistance from Greece, Cyprus, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Russia, France, Britain, Switzerland, Spain, US, Germany, Bulgaria, Italy, Azerbaijan and others, have finally begun to bring the devastation under control.

– Forty-two separate wildfires are burning in neighboring Lebanon, which has the same tinderbox conditions.

– Dynamic winter-storm systems driven by the rapidly warming Arctic have plunged much of Europe into killer cold weather for the second year in a row, months after a summer of record heat and precipitation. Up to 30 people have frozen to death in Poland, and thirty more killed in the rest of Europe.

– Floods have hit Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia after “three weeks of torrential rains,” forcing the evacuation of tens of thousands of people.

– Thousands of people have been evacuated amid catastrophic floods in Australia that have already destroyed $500 million in crops, with rivers still rising.

Thunderstorms, high winds and tornadoes ripped through the southern United States, injuring at least 30 people, destroying buildings, toppling trees, flooding highways and forcing schools to close.

– New Zealand is facing an intense heatwave and its third consecutive summer of drought.

– “The death toll from the incessant rains in Venezuela has risen to 34,” with “more than 70,000 people who have been affected” by the catastrophic floods.

– “As many as 200 people may have been buried in a landslide Sunday that swept over 10 houses near Medellin, Colombia’s second largest city,” as the country “has been lashed in recent weeks by heavy rains that have left at least 176 people dead and 225 injured, as well as 1.5 million people homeless nationwide.”

– In India, “more than 150 people have died following heavy rains in the coastal districts of Tamil Nadu over the past few days.”

– A “massive wildfire in Tibet‘s Sichuan province killed 22 people, including Chinese soldiers during a rescue operation” on Sunday.

Speaking at the funeral of a teenage volunteer firefighter, President Shimon Peres said the wildfire “disaster taught us that all of us, Jews, Arabs, Druze, and other peoples, share the same fate.” If the climate negotiators in Cancun can find the same sense of solidarity in crisis shown in their home countries, there could be reason for hope.

National Snow & Ice Data Center explains Bastardi can’t read graphs and “is unclear as to how standardized anomalies are derived”

UPDATE:  Bastardi responded in the comments here.  He couldn’t bring himself to admit that his accusation of fraud against NSIDC was not merely completely unwarranted but totally inappropriate and in fact based in part on his simple misreading of a graph.  Finally, though, on Sunday afternoon, Accuweather took the post down and Bastardi admits in his new “Emily Litella” post his charge was baseless.

Note: Accuweather’s contact info is online here and below.

I suppose it is Accuweather’s business if they want to seriously undermine their credibility by employing arguably the worst professional long-range forecaster on Earth:  See Joe Bastardi asserts “The coming cooling of the planet overall will return it to where it was in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s.”

So what if Bastardi is a man who just makes crap up, like “The vast majority of the long-range private sector meteorologists can see what is coming down the road and agree with me”?  So what if Bastardi has now firmly established himself as the least informed, most anti-scientific meteorologist in the world (see here)?  So what if he can’t read a temperature anomaly map?

Why should, Accuweather, the self-proclaimed “World’s Weather Authority” care?  They are a private company and they can hire whomever they want and, Lord knows, make whatever wild claims they want about their supposed “authority.”

But Bastardi has now moved beyond the realm of bluster and bad forecasting.  His inability to read simple charts has combined with his endless quest to attack those whose data or analysis supports the well-established scientific understanding that humans are changing the climate and induced him to try to undermine the reputation of the nation’s leading Center for acquiring and analyzing ice data.  As long as Bastardi stays at Accuweather, they are endorsing his willful errors and anti-science smears — and they merit the name Inaccuweather.

Bastardi’s latest error-riddled smear-fest is posted directly on the Inaccuweather site with an innocuous headline, “Monday Morning Sea Ice/Global Temp report” but a libelous caption:

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Right-wing opponents of climate action such as Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) and Koch Industries’ Americans For Prosperity have attempted to demonize climate scientists as part of a corrupt, conspiratorial United Nations bureaucracy trying to accumulate money and power. In an interview on Friday with the Wonk Room, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), explained the reality of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization.

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Worried that “there is something catastrophic” that will happen to the economy within years, Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) pleaded for action on the budget deficit in a Fox News interview today, using incipient climate disasters in a forceful metaphor.  Brad Johnson has the story.

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Why are climate negotiators meeting in Cancun, Mexico this week? What can we expect from this round of negotiations? What steps can the United States and other countries take to fight climate change if a deal isn’t reached?   CAP’s Andrew Light explains in this cross-posted video:

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