Another year, another weblog contest duped into including the widely discredited, anti-science and anti-scientist blog WattsUpWithThat.com as a finalist for “Best Science Blog.”

This time’s it’s the 11th annual Weblog Awards, “the 2011 Bloggies.”  You can vote for one of the four real science blogs on the list — David Robertson, Boing Boing, Wired Science, or Women in Planetary Science — by clicking here.

I wouldn’t be surprised if WUWT wins, though.  Of course the best science blog is being chosen in the most unscientific fashion possible — online voting (see “Memo to media: Enough with the online polls!“).  And, as its right given such a gamable process, WUWT is shilling for votes far more than the two likeliest contenders, the high-traffic websites Boing Boing and Wired.  Voting is complicated — after you cast your vote you have to scroll to the bottom and fill out a captcha and give them an e-mail address and then click on the link you get in your inbox.

I voted for Wired Science because I don’t really see BB as a science blog whereas Wired is consistently the top ranked science blog at Technorati based primarily on the quantity and quality of websites linking in.  For whatever reason, Technorati puts me in the “Green” category where I am currently ranked number one, with an Authority of 995 out of 1000.

Anthony Watts does more than any person in the blogosphere to spread anti-scientific disinformation and smear climate scientists.  Giving WUWT a best science blog award would be like giving the Edward R. Murrow award to Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh.

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Confirming the obvious to anyone who’s been watching the world’s weather go haywire, Nature has published a pair of articles that link greenhouse pollution to killer weather disasters. In “Human contribution to more-intense precipitation extremes,” researchers in Canada and Scotland found that carbon pollution “contributed to the observed intensification of heavy precipitation events” in the northern hemisphere from 1950 to 1999:

Our results provide to our knowledge the first formal identification of a human contribution to the observed intensification of extreme precipitation.

The scientists — Seung-Ki Min, Xuebin Zhang, and Francis W. Zwiers of Environment Canada and Gabriele C. Hegerl of the University of Edinburgh — modeled the influence of global warming pollution on maximum one-day and five-day precipitation events, and found the strong fingerprint that the probability of intense precipitation on any given day has increased by 7 percent over the last 50 years.

The second paper, “Anthropogenic greenhouse gas contribution to flood risk in England and Wales in autumn 2000,” used a different kind of modeling to determine the influence of climate pollution on the catastrophic floods that rocked Great Britain in 2000. They relied on the distributed computing project climateprediction.net to run thousands of iterations of scenarios with and without greenhouse pollution, finding a strong influence:

Here we present a multi-step, physically based ‘probabilistic event attribution’ framework showing that it is very likely that global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions substantially increased the risk of flood occurrence in England and Wales in autumn 2000.

Essentially, the authors — Pardeep Pall,Tolu Aina, Dáithí A. Stone, Peter A. Stott, Toru Nozawa, Arno G. J. Hilberts, Dag Lohmann, and Myles R. Allen — found that global warming approximately doubled the risk of flooding. Expressed differently, about 70 percent of the risk of flooding was attributable to greenhouse pollution, with a high degree of confidence that at least 20 percent of the risk was attributable. In laymans’ terms, burning oil and coal caused England to flood. Finally, a decade after the $5 billion floods devastated the United Kingdom, scientists have provided the analysis that demonstrates greenhouse pollution is a cause:

By demonstrating the contribution of such emissions to the risk of a damaging event, our approach could prove a useful tool for evidence-based climate change adaptation policy.

Neither study has looked at the last decade of climate, the hottest and wettest on record — including unprecedented, catastrophic floods and storms on every continent (even Antarctica).

“This has immense importance not just as a further justification for emissions reduction, but also for adaptation planning,” says Michael Oppenheimer, a climate-policy researcher at Princeton University in New Jersey, who was not involved in the studies, told Nature.

“They should help lay to rest the myth that human-caused global warming will contribute to grievous harm only in some far-off future,” Joe Romm comments.

One also has to wonder how much longer the oil and coal companies will avoid liability for their decades-long campaign to lie about the threat of global warming and prevent action to protect humanity.

Munich Re Says Natural Disasters in Germany Tripled Since 1970 on Climate

German insurers’ losses from natural catastrophes are rising as global climate change causes more inundations and storms, Munich Re said.

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Republicans try to defund NOAA’s satellite program — just as climate change is making the weather much more extreme.

UPDATE:  The author respond to comments below.

By Michael Conathan, CAPAF’s new Director of Oceans Policy

Weather predictions were once a frequent punchline but have improved dramatically in recent years. More often than not you’ll need an umbrella if your local television channel or website of choice tells you to take one when you leave the house. But we could take a huge step back to the days when your dartboard had a reasonable chance of outpredicting Al Roker if House Republicans have their way with the 2011 federal budget.

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The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) is still crazy with climate denial and delay after all these years.  They have partnered with other groups that oppose strong climate action, like The Breakthrough Institute, to push right-wing energy myths and attack even the most mainstream strategies like a clean energy standard, which is used by half the states and dozens of countries around the world.  No wonder AEI’s Steven Hayward wrote in 2009: “The brain waves of the American right continue to be erratic, when they are not flat-lining.”

Brad Johnson has the story of AEI’s latest effort, pushing the Big-Oil-funded attack on clean energy jobs.

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By CAP Energy Intern Emily Bischof

This week, President Obama announced the Federal transportation budget for FY2012; demonstrating the administration’s commitment to maintaining and improving the mobility of our nation while creating millions of jobs for Americans, improving accessibility for the most needy, and reducing harmful pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. The allocation of $128 billion to the transportation sector for FY 2012, is part of a long term 6 year plan totaling $556 billion worth of investments in the surface transportation network.

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