Some people naively believe we can get DC politicians to support adaptation funding if only we stop talking about climate science.  They call themselves “climate pragmatists.”  The true realists among us call them hopelessly naïve.

The fact is that if you reject science, if you think climate science in particular is some sort of liberal plot, then the last thing you would do is spend money “planning” or “adapting” for climate change.

The anti-science extremists who now run the House, of course, are not merely climate science deniers. They believe slashing all forms of government spending is more important than, say, voting to preserve the full faith and credit of the United States — even during the midst of the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression.

So other than faux pragmatists, the rest of us aren’t surprised in the least that the GOP-led House has been voting to gut climate adaptation efforts across the federal government — including even the most minimal planning efforts.  TP Green has a list:

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News of the World executive obtained hacked e-mails

Actually, that was a BBC headline — from March!

No, it doesn’t refer to Climategate, but you’ll be shocked, shocked to learn that the NY Times is reporting today:

Scotland Yard will expand its investigation of The News of the World and its parent company, police officials said Saturday, adding a new inquiry into possible instances of computer intrusion to the current accusations of phone hacking and payments to police officers.

The new investigation was opened after an examination of “a number of allegations regarding breach of privacy” received since the Metropolitan Police, also known as Scotland Yard, reopened inquiries in January into possible crimes by newspaper employees, a statement said.

I am one to say “I told you so” — it’s half the reason to have a blog, especially on climate, where the nation’s ongoing inaction all but guarantees that those of us warning of the most dire climatic consequences will be vindicated.

Two weeks ago I wrote, “News Corp and the Hacked Climategate Emails: Time for an Independent Investigation.”  Back then we knew that News Corp in the UK had done phone hacking, and that a News Crop division in this country apparently did computer and e-mail hacking.

Now, as the NY Times reports, Scotland Yard has reason to believe News Corp in the UK was involved in hacking computers and e-mails:

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By Sam Parry, Director, Online Membership and Activism, EDF

In a falsehood-filled Washington Times op-ed, Steve Milloy attacks the EPA and EDF for supporting tough new clean air standards for coal-fired power plants.

Asking EPA to “show us the bodies,” Milloy questions public health estimates that these standards will prevent up to 17,000 premature deaths every year.

Some might find it odd to question decades of research by innumerable scientists and public health professionals. But, for Steve Milloy, notorious climate denier and tobacco apologist, it’s something of a personal trademark.

Had he done any actual research for his hit piece, he may have come across a May 10, 2011, letter written by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Lung Association, the American Public Health Association, the American Thoracic Society, the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America, and the Physicians for Social Responsibility to Congressman Joe Barton (R-TX).

In that letter, these public health professionals challenged Rep. Barton’s bizarre “hypothesis” in an Energy and Commerce Committee hearing that there are no substantial health threats from air pollution. They write:

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OK, technically, the exclusive I have is an internal email from the head of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement that was sent to his entire staff on Friday about the actions being taken against polar bear researcher Charles Monnett.  I will repost that below, but the bottom line is that the decision to place him on administrative leave “had nothing to do with his scientific work , or anything relating to a five-year old journal article” on polar bears.

This whole story is Kafkaesque.  Let’s take it from the beginning.  Here’s the lede from NYT blogger Andy Revkin:

There’s been a rush to all manner of judgments over the strange case of Charles Monnett, the biologist for the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement who provided a powerful talking point for climate campaigners, including former Vice President Al Gore, with his description of several drowned polar bears spotted during an aerial marine-mammals survey in 2004 — an observation enshrined in a short paper published in Polar Biology in 2006.

Hmm, I guess that isn’t really the beginning, since Monnett’s work didn’t provide a talking point, powerful or otherwise, for Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth.

The fact is that the scientific  community had already come to the conclusion that  the polar bear would not survive an ice-free arctic.  The 2004 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, by leading scientists from the eight Arctic nations, including the United States, summarized the state of scientific understanding:

Changes in the extent and type of sea ice affect the distribution and foraging success of polar bears (Ferguson et al., 2000a,b; Mauritzen et al., 2001; Stirling et al., 1993). The earliest impacts of warming will occur at their southern limits of distribution, such as at James and Hudson Bays; and this has already been documented by Stirling et al. (1999)….

The survival of polar bears as a species is difficult to envisage under conditions of zero summer sea-ice cover.

In short, there was a broad scientific understanding by the leading experts on the Arctic that unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases would be catastrophic if not fatal to polar bears — back in 2004.

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There are some very nasty pieces of legislation floating around the House that could strip away some of the nation’s most important energy and environmental programs.

We’re not looking at some modest cuts here and there – Congress is considering spending bills that could completely decimate government’s ability to regulate clean air and water, while turning clean energy programs into an afterthought.

Since the 112^th Congress began, there have been 110 anti-environment votes taken by the House – with 20 related to climate change, 28 on air and water pollution, and 22 on clean energy.

So how has your representative been voting on environmental issues? Below is a list of the votes on key legislation. It’s a daunting list, but it does show how important (or unimportant) energy and environment are to the House:

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What happens when a community dependent on a finite fossil resource can no longer go on exploiting? These powerful pictures tell the story.

The dead island of Hashima delivers a lively warning about the importance of foresight. It offers a view of the end result of “development,” the fate of a community severed from Mother Earth and engaged in a way of life disconnected from its food supply. In short, Hashima is what the world will be like when we finish urbanizing and exploiting it: a ghost planet spinning through space—silent, naked, and useless.

— Brian Burke-Gaffney, Nagasaki Institute of Applied Science

Located 18 miles off the coast of Nagasaki, the island of Hashima was once the hub of Japan’s coal mining activity. From the early 1900′s to the 1970′s, the island played a major role in Japan’s economic growth. Owned by Mitsubishi, it was home to dangerous undersea mines that killed hundreds of people. At its peak, Hashima was producing about 400,000 tons of coal per year — more coal than the U.S. exported to China in 2009.

Hashima was was completely dependent on the outside world. It had coal, and that was it. The community, which peaked at over 5,200 people, had to import everything — food, fresh water, building materials and clothing. So when Japan started transitioning from a coal-based economy to an oil-based economy, the island had nothing else to rely on. Mitsubishi began laying off workers in the 1960′s and eventually shut down the entire community in 1974:

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Long wrong climate science disinformer Roy Spencer has published another deeply flawed article.  That ain’t news.  What is news is that the deniers have a couple of new tricks up their sleeves.

First, the disinformers have figured out they should focus on journals that don’t seem to have a very deep understanding of climate science.  In May, it was a paper in a statistics journal, which was ultimately withdrawn because of “evidence of plagiarism and complaints about the peer-review process.”  This time it’s an article in the open-access Remote Sensing co-authored by Spencer.

It bears repeating that Spencer committed one of the most egregious blunders in the history of remote sensing — committing multiple errors in analyzing the satellite data and creating one of the enduring denier myths, that the satellite data didn’t show the global warming that the surface temperature data did.

It also bears repeating that Spencer wrote this month, “I view my job a little like a legislator, supported by the taxpayer, to protect the interests of the taxpayer and to minimize the role of government.”

That doesn’t mean Spencer’s new paper on remote sensing is wrong, but it means his work on the subject does not deserve the benefit of the doubt, as most climate journals would know.  And it means we should pay attention to serious climate scientists when they explain how Spencer is, once again, pushing denier bunk.

As the famous critique goes, “Your manuscript is both good and original. But the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good”:

1. “He’s taken an incorrect model, he’s tweaked it to match observations, but the conclusions you get from that are not correct,” Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University.
2. “It is not newsworthy,” Daniel Murphy, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) cloud researcher, wrote in an email to LiveScience.
3. NCAR’s Kevin Trenberth in an email:  “I have read the paper. I can not believe it got published. Maybe it got through because it is not in a journal that deals with atmospheric science much?”
4. Trenberth and John Fasullo at RealClimate:  “The bottom line is that there is NO merit whatsoever in this paper.”

As for the second denier trick, well, they got Yahoo News to host a “news story” on the article — written by James Taylor.  Not the brilliant singer song-writer who wrote, “I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain, I’ve seen sunny days that I thought would never end.”  No, the uber-denier James Taylor whose Heartland Institute wants to bring to America’s heartland too much fire and too much rain — and heat waves that you thought would never end.  Sorry, couldn’t resist.

And so Yahoo enables this headline of denier bunk — “New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism” — to spread through the web like so much kudzu.  LiveScience noted in its debunking post:

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– Kalen Pruss

View data comparing Big Oil profits to prices for oil and gasoline (.xls)

This week the five Big Oil companies—ExxonMobil, BP, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, and Shell—posted massive second-quarter profits thanks in no small part to record-high gas prices and billions in unnecessary subsidies paid by American taxpayers.

All five companies sat squarely in the black with $35.1 billion in combined second-quarter profits, 9 percent higher than in 2010. Exxon, at a whopping $10.7 billion, reported the largest profits by far. Shell saw an $8 billion profit for the quarter, a 77 percent increase from last year, putting the company on track to meet or exceed its 2008 record of $31.4 billion—the most a British company has ever earned in a single year. Even BP clocked in at $5.3 billion little more than a year after the fatal Deepwater Horizon disaster rocked the U.S. Gulf Coast, forcing BP to put $20 billion in an escrow fund for people harmed by the blow out.

Big Oil once again has American families to thank for these enormous gains: Oil profits grow when Americans pay more for gasoline. Because oil averaged $107.35 a barrel during the second quarter—a 39 percent increase over 2010—Americans are forking over more than a third more at the pump than they were just a year ago.

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by Raj Salhotra

With partisanship at an all-time high in Washington, Congress can’t even agree on an emergency plan to raise the debt ceiling that would avoid a potentially-catastrophic financial crisis.

But that doesn’t mean political leaders can’t do something across party lines – even if that something is a bit smaller in scope.

Of course, the smallest actions often have an enormous impact. And a bill introduced this week that puts Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) back in the spotlight would do just that.

“It’s not just a win-win situation, but win-win-win: homeowners get the benefit of lower utility bills; workers in the stagnating construction industry get jobs; and the nation gets the benefit of increased energy efficiency and reduced energy costs.”

That was the co-sponsors’ message upon introducing the PACE Assessment Protection Act of 2011, which will prohibit “Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and other Federal residential and commercial mortgage lending regulators from adopting policies that contravene established State and local property assessed clean energy laws.” The bill is sponsored by two Republicans and a Democrat.

Sounds arcane, right? Well, the implications are huge for the energy efficiency and renewable energy sectors.

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A round-up of climate and energy news. Please post other stories below.

Japan’s New Energy Strategy Calls For Reduced Dependence On Nuke Power

In line with Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s call for phasing out atomic power in the country, the government has drawn up a new energy strategy aimed at lowering the proportion of nuclear-generated electricity.

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The climate denier blogosphere is going mad over “Polarbeargate,” supposedly the story of a rogue government scientist manipulating the evidence that polar bears are threatened by melting Arctic sea ice. The scientist, Dr. Charles Monnett, is on administrative leave and forbidden from communicating with co-workers pending an investigation by the Department of Interior’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG).

In reality, Dr. Monnett, one of the country’s top Arctic scientists, “is being hounded in a political attempt to impugn his observations on polar bears’ vulnerability to retreating sea ice,” according to a scientific misconduct complaint filed today on his behalf by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) against Interior Department officials. Dr. Monnett, who has monitored bowhead whales in the Arctic since 1984, was the co-author of a seminal paper that recorded polar bears found dead in the open Arctic Ocean, stranded by retreating sea ice and a powerful storm, both symptoms of the region’s rapid warming.

PEER has posted the interview conducted by OIG Special Agents Eric May and Lynn Gibson with Dr. Monnett on February 23, which offers the only public clues to the reasoning behind his persecution. The transcript shows May and Gibson to be primed with skeptical questions about Dr. Monnett’s research observing sea life as a wildlife biologist for the Minerals Management Service. Dr. Monnett points out that many of the questions are “stupid” and “goofy,” evidently composed by someone “deficient in fifth grade math.”

A few months later, the OIG locked down the scientist, spurring a feeding frenzy among climate deniers who somehow don’t realize that the evidence that polar bears are going extinct has only grown starker each year, independent of Dr. Monnett’s work.

Monnett’s wife, scientist Lisa Rotterman, is concerned his persecution will send a “chilling message” at the agency right as it decides whether to open the Arctic to drilling by Shell Oil. “I don’t believe the timing is coincidental,” she told the Associated Press.
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by Stewart Boss

At a time when many conservative lawmakers are strongly opposing renewable energy and denying the science of climate change, it’s interesting that the Department of Defense – the nation’s largest energy user, representing 80% of federal sector energy consumption – remains fully committed to reducing energy consumption and developing renewable energy technologies.

Given the massive scope of these initiatives, perhaps no other federal agency is pushing toward a clean energy economy more decisively than the U.S. military.

This month marks the one-year anniversary of the signing of the 2010 Memorandum of Understanding between the DoD and the Department of Energy (DOE):

Energy efficiency can serve as a force multiplier, increasing the range and endurance of forces in the field while reducing the number of combat forces diverted to protect energy supply lines, as well as reducing long-term energy costs.

DoD is also increasing its use of renewable energy supplies and reducing energy demand to improve energy security and operational effectiveness, reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in support of U.S. climate change initiatives, and protect the DoD from energy price fluctuations. Solving military challenges through innovation has the potential to yield spin-off technologies that benefit the civilian community as well.

The Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI), E3G and Operation Free hosted a Hill briefing titled “More Fight, Less Fuel” on Wednesday with top military and civilian experts to provide an in-depth analysis of the DoD’s ambitious goals.

Although the military is looking at how climate change could impact operations, the rationale for action has more to do with getting access to secure resources. Thomas Hicks, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Energy, acknowledged the DoD’s position that climate change “may act as an accelerant of instability or conflict,” but described the consideration of climate change as a “second-order effect” of the military’s green energy innovation.

What’s abundantly clear is that the military’s commitment to clean energy innovation is motivated by a desire to save money and improve the DoD’s bottom line. Sherri Goodman, Executive Director of the Center for Naval Analyses Military Advisory Board, said:

These programs, by and large, particularly the energy programs, are going to be saving the military departments money in a year of declining defense budgets, so it would be penny-wise and pound-foolish to cut too deeply.

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The climate denier blogosphere is going mad over a new paper that supposedly “should dramatically alter the global warming debate” by showing that “far less heat is being trapped than alarmist computer models have predicted.” The paper, written by conservative climate scientist Roy Spencer and his University of Alabama colleague William Braswell, finds that “satellite observations and climate models display markedly different behaviors” and posits, with caveats, that there may be “lower climate sensitivity of the real climate system.” As LiveScience’s Stephanie Pappas writes, the paper then was promoted by a Heartland Institute blogger on the Forbes.com website:

The study, published July 26 in the open-access online journal Remote Sensing, got public attention when a writer for The Heartland Institute, a libertarian think-tank that promotes climate change skepticism, wrote for Forbes magazine that the study disproved the global warming worries of climate change “alarmists.” However, mainstream climate scientists say that the argument advanced in the paper is neither new nor correct.

Pappas interviewed climatologists Gavin Schmidt, Kevin Trenberth, and Andrew Dessler, who eviscerated Spencer’s shoddy science:

The study finds a mismatch between the month-to-month variations in temperature and cloud cover in models versus the real world over the past 10 years, said Gavin Schmidt, a NASA Goddard climatologist. “What this mismatch is due to — data processing, errors in the data or real problems in the models — is completely unclear.”

“He’s taken an incorrect model, he’s tweaked it to match observations, but the conclusions you get from that are not correct,” Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, said of Spencer’s new study.

“I cannot believe it got published,” said Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

In his paper, Spencer relies on a toy model of the climate system which geochemist Barry Bickmore (a Republican) had previously exposed as being one that could “give him essentially any answer he wanted, as long as he didn’t mind using parameters that don’t make any physical sense.”

This case is an excellent example of how the right-wing climate disinformation media machine works. Roy Spencer, one of the handful of publishing climate scientist ideologues, gets his work into an obscure journal. Then James Taylor, an operative for a fossil fuel front group, claims it is “very important” on Forbes.com, a media website owned by a Republican billionaire. The Forbes blog post was redistributed by Yahoo! News, giving the headline “New NASA Data Blow Gaping Hole In Global Warming Alarmism” a further veneer of respectability, even though the full post is laughably hyperbolic, using “alarmist” or “alarmism” 15 times in nine paragraphs.

The Onion:  For some reason, climatologists have been running around in an agitated state, waving their little arms and squawking about “global warming.”

Nation’s Climatologists Exhibiting Strange Behavior

More Humor From America’s Finest News Service:

• Major new report finds “Global warming issue from 2 or 3 years ago may still be problem”
• Planet Earth Doesn’t Know How To Make It Any Clearer It Wants Everyone To Leave
• Republicans vote to repeal Obama-backed bill that would destroy asteroid headed for Earth