Oceanographer at AGU: Western Antarctic Peninsula is seeing “the highest increase in temperatures of anywhere on Earth.”

“Warm waters carried by the Antarctic Circumpolar Current are brushing the ice front in the western part of the continent, in the area of the Bellingshausen Sea.” [Click to enlarge.]

Antarctica is disintegrating much faster than almost anybody imagined — see “Nothing in the natural world is lost at an accelerating exponential rate like this glacier.” In 2001, the IPCC “consensus” said neither Greenland nor Antarctica would lose significant mass by 2100. They both already are.  As Penn State climatologist Richard Alley said in March 2006, the ice sheets appear to be shrinking “100 years ahead of schedule.”

A presentation Monday at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union sheds some light on the underlying cause of this rapid melt — the ice is being attacked from the bottom.  Discovery News has the story:

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Almost eight months after BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, causing one of the greatest environmental disasters in United States history, the Department of Justice today announced a civil suit “in an effort to recover billions of dollars” from the responsible parties.  Brad Johnson has the story.

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In a memo obtained by Media Matters, Fox News vice president Bill Sammon ordered his reporters last year to question global warming, citing conspiracy theories about climate scientists based on hacked emails. Weeks before the leaders of the entire world gathered to address global warming pollution in Copenhagen, Denmark, hackers released a selective cache of emails stolen from the servers of the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. Right-wing blogs and global warming deniers scanned through the thousands of messages, attempting to portray the scientists who sent them as conspirators that falsified data and suppressed dissent. Furthermore, they argued that the handful of scientists in the emails controlled the entire enterprise of climate research, throwing the decades of work by thousands of scientists into doubt.

Bill Sammon, the Washington managing editor and vice president of Fox News, dictated to his reporters that the facts of climate change were just “notions,” because of the “debate” over the “Climategate” emails that Fox’s commentators were promoting. “Given the controversy over the veracity of climate change data,” he wrote in the email, sent during the Copenhagen climate conference on December 8, 2009, “we should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question”:

From: Sammon, Bill
To: 169 -SPECIAL REPORT; 036 -FOX.WHU; 054 -FNSunday; 030 -Root (FoxNews.Com); 050 -Senior Producers; 051 -Producers; 069 -Politics; 005 -Washington
Cc: Clemente, Michael; Stack, John; Wallace, Jay; Smith, Sean
Sent: Tue Dec 08 12:49:51 2009
Subject: Given the controversy over the veracity of climate change data…

…we should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question. It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies.

It is, of course, the place of journalists to sift fact from fiction. The assertion of a global scientific conspiracy to falsify the existence of a warming planet — particularly when the physical evidence of declining glaciers, changing seasons, intensifying weather disasters, and rising seas would be rather difficult to concoct — is a fantastic claim.

As Media Matters notes, Sammon sent the email 15 minutes after Fox News correspondent Wendell Goler performed his journalistic duties, debunking the Climategate conspiracy theory. Goler reported from Copenhagen that the World Meteorological Organization found the last decade is “expected to turn out to be the warmest decade on record.” When asked by anchor Jon Scott about the East Anglia temperature records, Goler responded that “the data also comes from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and from NASA. And scientists say the data of course across all three sources is pretty consistent.”

Watch it:

The evening after the memo was sent, Wendell Goler, anchor Bret Baier, and correspondent James Rosen all promoted the Climategate conspiracy theory to question global warming.

From: Sammon, Bill
To: 169 -SPECIAL REPORT; 036 -FOX.WHU; 054 -FNSunday; 030 -Root (FoxNews.Com); 050 -Senior Producers; 051 -Producers; 069 -Politics; 005 -Washington
Cc: Clemente, Michael; Stack, John; Wallace, Jay; Smith, Sean
Sent: Tue Dec 08 12:49:51 2009
Subject: Given the controversy over the veracity of climate change data”¦

“¦we should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question. It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies.

This morning, MediaMatters released the bombshell e-mail “sent by Fox News Washington managing editor Bill Sammon … less than 15 minutes after Fox correspondent Wendell Goler accurately reported on-air that the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization announced that 2000-2009 was ‘on track to be the warmest [decade] on record.‘ ”

Well, okay, this would be a bombshell email coming from any other news organization in the world (see Howell Raines: “Why has our profession “¦ helped Fox legitimize a style of journalism that is dishonest in its intellectual process, untrustworthy in its conclusions and biased in its gestalt?”)  So maybe the only bombshell is that Sammon was foolish enough to put this egregious Fox News policy into an email.

UPDATE:  Al Gore blogs, “Fox News has consistently delivered false and misleading information to its viewers about the climate crisis. The leaked emails now suggest that this bias comes directly from the executives responsible for their news coverage.”

What follows is an extended excerpt of the MediaMatters story, including a video of the story that triggered the email:

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US Exported $723 Million More Solar Power Products Than It Imported in 2009

Next time someone bemoans the fact that even all the renewable energy manufacturing is heading overseas, point this next report out: According to new industry analysis carried out by GTM Research for SEIA, the US is a net exporter of solar power products, to the tune of $723 million in 2009. Here are more of the key points from the US Solar Energy Trade Assessment 2010:

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This HuffPost repost is by Peter Gleick, Co-Founder and President of the Pacific Institute.

As the Earth’s climate continues to change at an accelerating rate, the juggling and magical thinking and outright hypocrisy of climate change deniers continues to accelerate as well. While there are many examples of the remarkable ability of deniers to hold onto mutually contradictory beliefs and ideas, here are four well-worn arguments regularly put forward by deniers in public forums despite the fact that they’ve all been debunked (over and over and over) by scientists:

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