Hard-core deniers assert that the current warming is just part of a natural cycle.  Joe Bastardi, for instance, in a Climate Progress comment, absurdly predicted that “the earth will cool back … to levels we saw in the late 70s, and the [Arctic sea] ice will increase back to those levels in the N hemisphere.“ Not.

The cynical, climate-destroyers at Exxon, however, are placing a massive bet that global warming is real and that the Arctic will keep warming — even as they keep funding deniers to obfuscate the science and block action (after they publicly stated they would stop such funding).

Below is a guest post by Christopher Jones on this subject.  Jones is a Ciriacy-Wantrup fellow at the University of California-Berkeley.

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… what would it be?  I’ll try to get practicing climate scientists to answer the most popular questions, so as the list of questions grows, please indicate which ones you would also like the answer to.

The Yale Project on Climate Change Communications has actually asked Americans in their “Global Warming’s Six Americas in May 2011” report “If you had the opportunity to talk to an expert on global warming, which of the following questions would you like to ask?”

They divide things up by their six groupings:

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by Jill Fitzsimmons, in a Media Matters repost

In an editorial blasting President Obama’s green jobs initiatives, the New York Post falsely claimed that despite significant investments in clean energy, California’s “environmental sector has actually lost jobs, not gained them”:

[T]he Obama administration’s entire green-jobs initiative has been a massive boondoggle.

As The New York Times reported last month, Obama’s grand plan to create 5 million green jobs over 10 years has turned into an enormous “pipe dream.”

In California, for example, the environmental sector has actually lost jobs, not gained them.

Which raises serious questions about this administration’s ability to come up with any kind of plan that will productively address America’s unemployment crisis.

In fact, those job losses refer only to the San Jose metro area, not to the state of California as a whole, which has gained almost 80,000 green jobs since 2003 — a 4.2% annual increase – and leads the nation in the number of clean energy jobs.

Those numbers come from a recent Brookings Institution report assessing green jobs nationally and regionally, which was the subject of the New York Times/Bay Citizen article cited by the New York Post editorial. The Times article has been criticized for cherry-picking information from the Brookings report to paint a misleadingly negative picture of green job growth.

Contrary to the New York Post‘s dismissal of green jobs programs, Brookings found that Recovery Act investments contributed to a surge of growth in the clean economy, despite the recession:

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