Bjorn Lomborg’s effort at mass miscommunication, Cool It, looks like it will go down as one of the great box office bombs in history.

According to Box Office Mojo, in its first month (from 11/12 to 12/12), the movie made a whopping $61,967.  Last Sunday, for instance, the movie played in 10 theaters and made a total of $279.  Ouch!  You don’t have to be a statistician like the Danish delayer himself to figure out that nobody is watching and somebody has lost a bundle of money.  We’re talking Heaven’s Gate, The Adventures of Pluto Nash and Gigli territory.

Lomborg has no natural audience because conservatives don’t like the fact that he pretends to believe in global warming science and progressives don’t like the fact that he doesn’t actually want to do anything about global warming except diss the people who do.

The movie is just a clever loss leader for Lomborg’s bad ideas, as I noted (see Climate Science Rapid Response Team debunks Bjorn Lomborg’s Washington Post op-ed).  A film is a ticket to widespread media attention, far more than even a new book provides.  For instance, the movie means that credulous reviewers who don’t follow the energy and climate debate closely will write columns that millions will read (see “Cool It and plausible deniability“), compared to the, uhh, hundreds that are flocking to the film.

Lomborg continues to spread disinformation, this time in Slate, with another laughable effort to disempower the masses, “Go Ahead and Guzzle.  Face it: There’s not much any one person can do about climate change.”  It is rather pathetic that Slate doesn’t fact-check its pieces and just lets Lomborg make up head-exploding crap like this:

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Amanda Carey

In a blatant piece of coal-industry propaganda, the Daily Caller claimed limits on global warming pollution “will drastically increase costs for the majority of Americans who get their heat generated from coal.” The Daily Caller’s Amanda Carey rewrote a press release from the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR), a polluter front group, that tried to shift blame for the struggles of millions of Americans to keep warm this winter onto the Environmental Protection Agency:

“With millions of Americans unemployed and struggling to keep their homes warm, the need for government assistance will only increase,” said Deneen Borelli of the National Center for Public Policy’s Project21. “Heavy demand and higher prices due to the Obama Administration’s assault on the fossil fuels we rely upon are going to stretch charities to their limits and beyond,” she said in a press release. Borelli went on to say that “By having the EPA regulate carbon emissions, [EPA Administrator] Lisa Jackson is laying the foundation for the 2010 version of bread lines by supporting efforts that will raise energy costs.”

“Environmental Protection Agency regulations could make it difficult for Americans to stay warm this winter,” Carey writes. In fact, EPA rules on greenhouse pollution aren’t scheduled to be implemented until 2012, and rules limiting pollution can actually lead to lower utility bills. Somehow, Carey and Borelli fail to mention the real reason that most Americans are now suffering while the super-rich take home record profits: the deregulatory Bush economy that has rewarded Wall Street speculators, rapacious bankers, and fossil fuel polluters at the expense of everyone else. Meanwhile, Republicans filibustered tax cuts for the middle class, tried to slash funding for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, and have successfully stalled the Cash for Caulkers program to make homes more energy efficient.

Carey ties the NCPPR defense of coal pollution to “reports predicting brutally-cold weather to envelop much of the U.S. in the coming weeks.” It is absolutely true that winters can be cold, and that global warming has increased the frequency of extremes. Overall, winters in the United States have become milder, but with more extreme storms and temperature swings. Even as parts of the United States are seeing record cold, the Southwest is experiencing record-breaking heat. The Daily Caller unjustifiably raised the question of the potential costs of limiting coal pollution without considering the costs of the pollution itself. Traditional coal pollution already kills about 10,000 Americans a year — disproportionately the young, elderly, and poor. As global warming accelerates, the deaths and damages from our degraded climate will only compound that suffering.

An unprecedented combination of heat plus decades of drought could be in store for the Southwest sometime this century, suggests new research from a University of Arizona-led team….

“The bottom line is, we could have a Medieval-style drought with even warmer temperatures,” [lead author Connie] Woodhouse said.

In 2007, Science (subs. req’d) published research that “predicted a permanent drought by 2050 throughout the Southwest” “” levels of aridity comparable to the 1930s Dust Bowl would stretch from Kansas to California.

In October, a National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) study warned, “The United States and many other heavily populated countries face a growing threat of severe and prolonged drought in coming decades … possibly reaching a scale in some regions by the end of the century that has rarely, if ever, been observed in modern times.”

UPDATE:  A new Environmental Research Letters article, “Characterizing changes in drought risk for the United States from climate change,” comes to a similar conclusion as the NCAR study, “Drought frequencies and uncertainties in their projection tend to increase considerably over time and show a strong worsening trend along higher greenhouse gas emissions scenarios, suggesting substantial benefits for greenhouse gas emissions reductions.”  See especially Figure 4C.

Now a new Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study, “A 1,200-year perspective of 21st century drought in southwestern North America” looks at the paleoclimate record to see the kind of drought the southwest — and other regions — might experience.  It concludes:

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Global Warming Deal Decades Away as ‘Dysfunctional’ U.S. Delays Commitment

Bloomberg wins the prize for the worst Cancun headline.  There is no doubt that the dysfunctional U.S. deserves criticism and that our inaction is a substantial reason why talks couldn’t progress anywhere near as far as they need to.

But I’m not certain the U.S. deserves all the blame, and I am quite certain a global warming deal is not “decades away.”

Robert Stavins, Director of the Harvard Environmental Economics Program, has a good post on What Happened (and Why) at Cancun which I reprint below.

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The hockey stick lives! Recent global warming is unprecedented in magnitude and speed and cause.

Shane (updated): A Hockey Stick is a tool, Marian; no better or no worse than any other tool: an axe, a shovel or anything. A Hockey Stick is as good or as bad as the man using it. Remember that.

The rate of human-driven warming in the last century has exceeded the rate of the underlying natural trend by more than a factor of 10, possibly much more.  And warming this century on our current path of unrestricted greenhouse gas emissions is projected to cause a rate of warming that is another factor of 5 or more greater than that of the last century.  We are punching the climate beast “” and she ain’t happy about it!

Future historians — and countless long-suffering future generations — will be quite puzzled that during the same short window humanity was given to avert multiple catastrophes predicted by basic science, a vast amount of effort went into a debate over the so-called “Hockey Stick” graph developed by leading U.S. climatologists and substantiated by multiple independent analyses.  As WAG notes, within a few decades, nobody is going to be talking about hockey sticks, they will be talking about right angles (or hockey skates, see figure above) — when they are done cursing our greed and myopia and gullibility in the face of polluter-funded disinformation, that is.

Here in the present, the evidence just keeps accumulating that

1. Recent global warming is unprecedented in magnitude and speed and cause (see “Two more independent studies back the Hockey Stick” and figures below)
2. Future global warming on our current emissions path risks multiple simultaneous ever-worsening disasters that individually justify strong action now but, taken together, demand it (see “A stunning year in climate science reveals that human civilization is on the precipice” and Royal Society special issue details ‘hellish vision’ of 7°F (4°C) world — which we may face in the 2060s!“

And so into this fray walks a gunman — well, two statisticians, McShane and Wyner.  Gavin Schmidt and Michael Mann, the real gunslingers, can take it from here (reposted from RealClimate) — while we just watch:

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Bingaman cracks open door to backing ‘clean’ energy standard

A leading Democrat on energy policy signaled Monday that he’s open to a “clean” energy standard for utilities “” a GOP-backed proposal that’s favorable to new nuclear plants and low-emissions coal projects. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) has long championed a renewable electricity standard that would require utilities to supply escalating amounts of power from sources like wind and solar. Bingaman said in the Capitol Monday that he’d look at a wider standard that includes non-renewable forms of energy “” but only if it doesn’t crowd out the renewables.

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Even before taking office, Republican Govs.-elect John Kasich (OH) and Scott Walker (WI) swiftly delivered on their “promises to kill America’s future” by rebuking a total of $1.2 billion in stimulus funding for high-speed rail projects in their states. Shunning the $810 million for the long-planned Wisconsin rail project, Walker promised to kill the Milwaukee-Madison link if President Obama tried “to force this down the throats of the taxpayers.”

But campaign rhetoric has very real consequences, as this ThinkProgress cross-post makes clear.

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