The UK Guardian reports today that the deniers are serving 2-year-old leftovers for Thanksgiving:

Fresh round of hacked climate science emails leaked online

A file containing 5,000 emails has been made available in an apparent attempt to repeat the impact of 2009′s similar release….

The initial email dump was apparently timed to disrupt the Copenhagen climate talks. It prompted three official inquiries in the UK and two in the US into the working practices of climate scientists. Although these were critical of the scientists’ handling of Freedom of Information Act requests and lack of openness they did not find fault with the climate change science they had produced.

Norfolk police have said the new set of emails is “of interest” to their investigation to find the perpetrator of the initial email release who has not yet been identified.

Actually nine independent investigations have vindicated climate science and climate scientists on the hacked University of East Anglia emails (as Skeptical Science explains, for those who want the full history).

As one scientist put it to me today:

“Two years ago, emails were released and the American people were lied to about their content.  Now, we are expected to be gullible enough to believe the original liars a second time.”

Media Matters also has a good post, “Memo To Media: Research First, Then Report On Climate Emails.”

The bad news is that, as Media Matters explains in its latest post, “Media Already Botching Reports On Hacked Climate Emails,” with some awful “reporting” by the Washington Post already (see below).

The good news is that the perpetrators and their fellow deniers apparently think the international climate talks in Durban are actually important enough to try to trick the media once again into prematurely running stories on out-of-context excerpts from private emails from scientists, most of which were written years ago, discussing science that has long since been resolved.

Leftovers, again? One climate scientist calls the email dump, “Two-year-old turkey from Thanksgiving 2009.”

These are the “second string” emails.  The Varsity team couldn’t derail the science so it’s  really hard to see how the Junior Varsity team could. In other words, if multiple independent investigations showed that climate science was unscathed by the original batch of emails — which must have been the ones the deniers thought were the best they had — then what precisely are the chances these even weaker second-stringers are going to beat the climate science team?  After all, the climate science team has gotten considerably stronger in recent years.

The U.S. National Academy of Sciences concluded its 2010 review of climate science, saying it is a “settled fact” that “the Earth system is warming.”  As for the cause, last year, Time reported on a comprehensive new review paper of “100 peer-reviewed post-IPCC studies” in an article titled, “Report: The Case for Global Warming Stronger Than Ever”:

By looking at a wide range of observations from all over the world,  the Met Office study concludes that the fingerprint of human influence on climate is stronger than ever. “We can say with a very high significance level that the effects we see in the climate cannot be attributed to any other forcings [factors that push the climate in one direction or another],” says study co-author Gabriele Hegerl of the University of Edinburgh.

In a AAAS presentation last year, the late William R. Freudenburg of UC Santa Barbara discussed his research on “the Asymmetry of Scientific Challenge“: New scientific findings since the 2007 IPCC report are found to be more than twenty times as likely to indicate that global climate disruption is “worse than previously expected,” rather than “not as bad as previously expected.”

And, of course,  in the real world, Arctic sea ice is disappearing faster than the IPCC climate models projected, the  Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are disintegrating faster than the climate models projected, the tropical zones  are expanding faster than the models projected (a key cause of Dust-Bowlification), and, sadly, greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster than the primary worst-case IPCC scenario — see An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts.

Recall the foundation of the phony Climategate charge.  Somehow the climate scientists at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, led by Phil Jones, were manipulating the data and the peer review process as part of a grand conspiracy to convince the public the earth has been warming faster than it really is.  The “CRU compiles the land component of the record and the Hadley Centre provides the marine component.”

The BEST team vindicated climate science.  The key paper found “ a degree of global land-surface warming during the anthropogenic era that is consistent with prior work (e.g. NOAA) but on the high end of the existing range of reconstruction.

D’oh!  The BEST data shows considerably higher warming in recent years than HadCRU.  The group whose emails were hack have been UNDERestimating global warming!

If you waste your time looking at these second-string emails, you’ll see, for instance, the perpetrators tout e-mails involved the urban heat island issue, but BEST have already demonstrated for the umpteenth time that that it isn’t tainting the surface temperature record.

So you can see why these emails didn’t make the Varsity team.  These truly are minor league emails.

Here is the UEA response to the emails, yet one more plea to the media from the scientists involved not to fall for the trick of the out-of-context excerpt:

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For the second time, I’m participating in an online debate sponsored by The Economist.

The proposition is awkwardly worded, as always, “This house believes that climate-control policies cannot rely on carbon capture and storage.”

The debate will be “decided” by online voting, so do go and vote.  And, no, I haven’t changed my view of online voting, but I don’t make the rules. Yes, it is sponsored by Statoil.  ’nuff said.

Here is my opening statement as the “proposer”:

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With European solar markets in decline, the industry is looking to the next hot solar region. Even with political troubles in the U.S., companies still see America as a good long-term bet. (And let’s remember, Europe’s slowdown doesn’t mean the region is going to stop being a major player.)

But analysts now see the Asia Pacific solar market as the Next Big Thing, driven largely by growing domestic demand in China. For the first time this year, China may surpass the U.S. market, according to analysis from NDP Solarbuzz. Historically, that country has been a supplier of solar technologies, not an installer. But that trend is shifting.

Most of the growth — particularly in the second half of 2011 — is being driven by China and India. These countries hold the most promise due to their sheer size. But they are also very immature markets, with major regulatory hurdles and a limited downstream installation network, explains SolarBuzz:

“As the European markets no longer present certain growth, the Asia Pacific markets are increasingly the focus of international companies looking to expand. Companies seeking to take a share of this growth still face significant hurdles to define strategies to successfully access the downstream value chain,” said NPD Solarbuzz analyst Christopher Sunsong. “These challenges, though, are unlikely to deter their determination to participate given the potential of this new regional market opportunity.”

This comes as Ernst and Young has issued its latest Country Attractiveness Indices report, which tracks the top countries for clean energy investors. China came in number one, with the U.S. coming in at number two. While many developed countries will continue to lead, Ernst and Young calls attention to the rapidly tipping scales:

Gil Forer, Ernst & Young’s Global Cleantech Leader, explains, “the mature renewable energy markets of Western Europe and the US have been hit by a perfect storm of reduced government incentives, restricted access to capital, and increased competition from abroad.

“At the same time we are seeing growing support for renewable energy in emerging markets. Such countries, with a strongly growing energy demand, are seizing this opportunity to leap-frog fossil fuel generation to secure a low carbon and resource efficient future in renewable energy, with 15 emerging markets being added to the CAI in the past two years.”

In the Asia Pacific region, the solar market is expected to grow around 130% this year, with China representing 45% of total demand.

by Jill Fitzsimmons, in a Media Matters cross-post

Last week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a summary report on the risks posed by climate disasters. The report says climate change will likely worsen certain extreme weather events like heat waves, floods, droughts and storms.

This could be costly for the U.S., which has already experienced a record number of weather disasters this year, resulting in economic costs of almost $50 billion. The report discusses strategies for reducing vulnerability to extreme weather events.

The panel’s findings have been reported by every major print outlet in the U.S., but have been almost entirely ignored by the television news media, including CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, ABC and CBS. The only mention of the U.N. report on a major TV news outlet was a segment on NBC Nightly News.

This is not the first time television networks have made time for stories that are less than newsworthy, but not for important developments in climate change science.

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Californians for Clean Energy and Jobs, led by hedge-fund manager Tom Steyer, has figured out a way to get corporate tax evaders to give back to the 99 percent, funding schools and green jobs. The coalition, which saved California’s climate law from a Big Oil ballot attack last year, has “filed a ballot initiative to raise $1.1 billion from out-of-state companies for schools and green building projects“:

For the first five years, the Steyer measure would raise an estimated $1.1 billion each year, with $550 million going toward retrofitting of public and commercial buildings for energy efficiency, as well as job training in clean energy technology. The remaining funds would go toward the state’s general fund, including more than $200 million for K-12 schools and community colleges.

After five years, the entire amount raised by the tax law change would go toward the state general fund budget.

“It closes an existing corporate tax loophole and uses the savings to create hundreds of thousands of construction jobs in California, all designed to jump start the economy,” Chris Lehane, a Democratic consultant working on the initiative, told the Sacramento Bee.

A recent poll by the University of Southern California and Los Angeles Times shows that 64 percent of registered voters would support higher taxes for better schools.

by Chris Mooney, in a DeSmogBlog cross-post

Two of my most popular posts here at DeSmogBlog were a pair of items documenting 1) just how many surveys have found Fox News viewers to be more misinformed about factual reality and 2) taking PolitiFact to task for giving Jon Stewart a “false” rating when he pointed this out.

Stewart wasn’t wrong, PolitiFact was.

In these pieces, I identified 6 separate studies showing Fox News viewers to be the most misinformed, and in a right wing direction—studies on global warming, health care, health care a second time, the Ground Zero mosque, the Iraq war, and the 2010 election.

I also asked if anyone was aware of any counterevidence, and none was forthcoming. There might very well be a survey out there showing that Fox viewers aren’t the most misinformed cable news consumers on some topic (presumably it would be a topic where Democrats have some sort of ideological blind spot), but I haven’t seen it. And I have looked.

There really does seem to be a “Fox News effect,” then, and one that is playing a central role in driving our political divide over reality in the U.S. And now comes a true tour-de-force seventh study showing that Fox News viewers are the most misinformed, this time once again about global warming.

The new paper, already flagged here by Farron Cousins, is just out in the International Journal of Press/Politics, by communication scholar Lauren Feldman of American University and her colleagues. The paper is quite sophisticated, and performs several powerful analyses. But for our purposes, here’s what matters.

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“What appears to be a new batch of emails and other documents from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit has been released,” reports the BBC. The emails are accompanied by a new selection of pull-quotes that include words like “trick” and “deceptive” and “scheme,” causing right-wing hacks like the Telegraph’s James Delingpole to salivate about the threat of “Climategate 2.0″ to “global warming loons.”

Climategate was a scandal of corrupt, deceitful, and shoddy reporting. In 2009, as all of the world’s leaders prepared to meet in Copenhagen to tackle global warming, thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit webmail server — a top climate research center in the United Kingdom — were hacked and dumped on a Russian web server. Polluter-funded climate skeptics, along with their allies in conservative media and the Republican Party, sifted through the e-mails, and quickly cherry picked quotes to falsely accuse climate scientists of concocting climate change science out of whole cloth.

The results weren’t pretty — for the credibility and reputation of the news media. As several progressive and environmental organizations wrote in a letter in July 2010:

News outlets across the globe hastily published hundreds of stories — based on rumors, unsubstantiated claims, and the shoddy reporting of their competitors — questioning the overwhelming scientific consensus that human activities are causing climate change. One by one, the pillars of evidence supporting the alleged “scandals” have shattered, causing the entire storyline to come crashing down.

There have been nine independent investigations of the allegations made based on the stolen emails of scientific fraud and wrongdoing, and all of them cleared the scientists. In addition, a Koch-funded project independently confirmed the validity of the data at the heart of the claims of manipulation.

Pollution from burning fossil fuels continues to destroy our climate. There is now a record-breaking Category 4 storm, Hurricane Kenneth, in the eastern Pacific. The real scandal continues to be the failure to report and to act on the incontrovertible threat. Hopefully, journalists have learned their lesson.

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A deep ideological objection to science has caused House Republicans to block a restructuring effort within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that would have provided a valuable climate service to industry and the military. Ironically, it would have made this vital government agency more efficient. This is an extraordinarily sad casualty in the War on Science. Read on to understand the absurdity in this obstruction. — Stephen Lacey

By Kiley Kroh and Michael Conathan

House Republicans, led by Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX), killed the budget-neutral provision to create a climate service within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA’s proposed Climate Service, or NCS, would have consolidated NOAA’s existing, widely dispersed, climate-monitoring capabilities under a single management structure to meet Americans’ rising demand for authoritative and timely climate information. The move indicates a broader Republican assault on sound science as the basis for informed decision making, and in this instance, their intransigent opposition accomplished nothing more than preventing the government from working more efficiently.

Here are the top 10 reasons why the House Republicans’ war on the NCS is inherently indefensible and will be particularly damaging to small businesses, industry, the economy, and the American people.

1. Axing the NCS didn’t save any money. A House Appropriations Committee release last week implied that refusing to fund the proposed climate service saved $322 million. But as The Washington Post pointed out on November 20, Congress is still giving NOAA those funds for climate research and data delivery. In fact, NOAA didn’t ask for one additional penny of spending to create the service. Now, instead of enabling the agency to use taxpayer dollars more efficiently, those funds will be spread throughout multiple departments. Same investment, less return.

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Other stories below: Scientists See Little Chance of Avoiding Dangerous Global Warming; Brazil’s Environment Secretary Calls Chevron Oil Spill an “Environmental Crime”

Oil tax breaks safe as supercommittee flops

The collapse of the deficit supercommittee means oil companies fighting to preserve billions of dollars in tax breaks can once again breathe easy.

Many Democrats had sought to kill the tax subsidies as part of any major deal on spending cuts and revenues, prompting strong oil industry pushback.

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