It was a battle down to the wire in Iowa with many unexpected twists and turns.  But in the end, Climate Science Denier (CSD) edged out Denier of Climate Science (DCS) and Science of Climate Denier (SCD) in the first GOP contest for the right to compete against Climate Science Ignorer (CSI) in the general election.

CSD told a small crowd at the airport, “The citizens of Iowa have spoken and decided that I am uniquely qualified to deny climate science.  They’ve sent a message to the president that simply ignoring climate change isn’t going to cut it with the  American people, especially the job creators.  We need somebody who can deny the problem entirely so the job creators can feel better about pocketing most of the wealth generated in this country while ruining a livable climate for everyone else.”

The real story of the caucuses may be SCD, who came from nowhere just a week ago to come within a few points votes of victory.  SCD told a smaller crowd at the airport, “I am the only true denier in the race.  CSD has flip-flopped on this issue, like so many others.  Just last spring he said he actually believed in the findings of the overwhelming majority of climate scientists, that the climate is changing, humans are the main cause, and failing to act threatens modern human civilization.  What poppy-cock!  There isn’t an inch of difference between CSD and CSI.”

Meanwhile, SCD told a massive crowd at the airport, “We really need to get rid of the Federal Reserve.  As for climate change, that’s best left to individuals to address, even it exists, which I doubt.”  SCD said he did not think he would win the nomination but refused to say whether he would mount a third-party run, which many fear would split the denial vote and allow CSI to capture a second term, thereby threatening 4 more years of left-wing, socialist inaction on the gravest threat to humanity.

One-time front runner, GWSOCWNPBRDCS (Guy who sat on couch with Nancy Pelosi but really denies climate science), finished far behind the 3 leaders, but vowed to press on saying, “CSD has been lying to you and getting his millionaire buddies to fund ads attacking me.  He’s really someone who used to believe in climate science, whereas I was just pretending to so I could be more credible as a critic of cap-and-tax.  I’m a genius, don’t you forget, and so even my mistakes are unintentional works of brilliance.  I’m going to win this thing just as soon as I come up with a shorter, catchier acronym.”

Jon Huntsman, speaking to his wife and family in New Hampshire, said something about how we must teach our children to respect science and scientists, since they are the engine of economic growth and the only hope for humanity, but no reporter was there to record it.

In unrelated news, greenhouse gas emissions and concentrations reached record levels in 2011, as did extreme weather disasters.

NOTE:  Watch this space for any late breaking updates.

New U.S. daily high temperature records exceeded daily cold records in December by a ratio of 1.8 to 1, a margin of 80%. The overwhelming excess of heat records continued into New Year’s Day, when the 116 high maximum records set or tied absolutely crushed the one lonely low minimum record…. The annual value [of the high/low record ratio] was 2.8 to 1, well above the 2.3 to 1 in 2010. Data from NOAA.

Steve Scolnik at Capital Climate analyzed the data from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) and created the chart above.

So if you live on the East Coast and thought it was unusually warm the last few weeks, you were right.  Although “unusual”  isn’t what it used to be.  As the figure makes clear, this was a very hot summer (see “Third Hottest Summer Globally, Second Warmest for U.S. With Stunning Weather Extremes, Texas Drought Worst in Centuries“).

I like the statistical aggregation across the country, since it gets us beyond the oft-repeated point that you can’t pin any one record temperature on global warming.

If you want to know how to judge whether the 2.8-to-1 ratio for the entire year is a big deal, here’s what a 2009 National Center for Atmospheric Research study found over the past six decades (see “Record high temperatures far outpace record lows across U.S.“):

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Our guest blogger is Mike Casey, president of cleantech communications firm Tigercomm.

Currently, fossil fuel industry lobbyists, flacks, allied pundits, and government officials are far too comfortable dismissing concerns about what their pollution does to other people. What if we had a system that required those who are advocating, defending or producing large sources of pollution to be one of the other people? What if they had to drink the dirty water, breathe the polluted air, and have their livelihoods compromised by (their) status quo industries. It wouldn’t be fun for them. But they’d be accountable, deeply accountable, for what they are doing.

I think it’s time to explore what Deep Accountability would look like. I’ll start here, with this Modest Proposal for University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Professor Karl Smith. He’s the newest addition to the crowd that believes global climate disruption isn’t a problem because we can all move to the top of the world.

Alexander Konovalov
Minister of Justice of Russia
Address: 4 Zhitnaya Ulitsa, Moscow 119991
Telephone/fax: (495) 955-59-99

Dear Minister Konovalov:

I received your name from contacting the Russian embassy in Washington. I apologize in advance for not having the resources to translate this unusual proposal into Russian.

I am the owner of a United States public relations firm, Tigercomm. We represent renewable energy and energy efficiency businesses both here in the U.S. and internationally. In our company’s view, renewable energy and energy efficiency represent a path toward economic revitalization in many countries, as well as addressing the threat of global climate disruption.

In that context, I wanted to bring to your attention the recent, remarkable writings of Professor Karl Smith, Assistant Professor of Public Economics and Government at the School of Government at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Professor Smith recently received attention with his assurance that global climate disruption isn’t really a big deal because a good chunk of the world population can just move to the northern part of your country if things transpire as most scientists fear they will.

Specifically, Professor Smith argues in his article, “In Praise of Dirty Energy: There Are Worse Things Than Pollution, and We Have Them,” that “a large part of the harmful affects of climate change will be mitigated simply because so many people move to North America and Siberia over the next 100 years.”

Needless to say, if you believe Professor Smith’s predictions are correct, then there is going to be an influx of tens or even hundreds of millions of people to the northern part of your great country. This would likely be a significant change for Siberia, from a region with a current population density of just 3 persons per square kilometer, to one of the most densely populated places on earth in a few decades.

I thought you and other Russian leaders might have some views on the merits of this assertion, because Professor Smith isn’t alone in saying global climate disruption is no big deal. Some, such as Peabody Energy Vice President of Government Relations Fred Palmer have asserted that we will benefit from global climate disruption.

With that in mind, I’d like to raise with you an idea I’ve had for a while, one that I call “Deep Accountability.” Under this concept, the foolish and the reckless in American punditry – and they seem to increasing, even as the climate science gets more damning – would be forced to actually sample the realities they advocate for others.

Therefore, I am trying to confirm the viability of an unusual proposal. Would it be possible for my company to pay for the rental of unoccupied space in any of the estimated 476 former Soviet prison facilities, particularly those in northern Siberia? If such space is available, we would like to pay to house Professor Smith for a year or more as a guest of your great country. We are seeking to provide him with a direct experience of the vigorous Siberian climate firsthand, and see for himself what the future home of tens or hundreds of millions of global climate disruption refugees would be like.

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Mike Klink: Let’s be clear — I am an engineer; I am not telling you we shouldn’t build pipelines. We just should not build this one.

By forcing the White House to make a decision on the politically and environmentally-toxic Keystone XL pipeline as part of an agreement reached in December to extend the payroll tax cut, Republicans are being lambasted by environmental groups for undercutting the federal environmental review process.

Now a whistleblower is claiming that the company overseeing the development of the proposed project, TransCanada, also has a track record of undercutting quality at the expense of the environment — further calling into question the decision by Congress to prevent a new federal environmental impact study for Keystone XL.

Mike Klink is a former inspector for Bechtel, one of the major contractors working on TransCanada’s original Keystone pipeline, completed in 2010. Klink says he raised numerous concerns about shoddy materials and poor craftsmanship during construction of the pipeline, which brings tar sands crude from Canada to Midwestern refineries in the U.S. Instead of actually addressing the problems, Klink claims he was fired by Bechtel in retaliation. He filed a complaint with the Department of Labor in March of 2010, and made his story public last fall.

Klink, who says he’s speaking as an engineer and not an environmentalist, has just published a scathing op-ed in the Lincoln Journal Star criticizing Keystone XL, a proposed extension of the current tar sands pipeline network that would bring crude down to refineries in the Gulf Coast, crossing a major aquifer along the way:

As an inspector, my job was to monitor the construction of the first Keystone pipeline. I oversaw construction at the pump stations that have been such a problem on that line, which has already spilled more than a dozen times. I am coming forward because my kids encouraged me to tell the truth about what was done and covered up.

When I last raised concerns about corners being cut, I lost my job — but people along the Keystone XL pathway have a lot more to lose if this project moves forward with the same shoddy work.

A recent environmental impact statement — outsourced by the State Department to another major TransCanada contractor — found that there would be “limited adverse environmental impacts” associated with the 1,700-mile Keystone XL pipeline. Opponents of the pipeline cried foul, saying it was yet another major conflict of interest between the State Department and TransCanada.

Klink’s assertions about poor management of the first Keystone pipeline provide yet more ammunition for critics of the pipeline:

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The danger posed to the nation and the world by unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gases is truly the greatest story never told.

JR:  I’ll add my thoughts on this story at the end.

by Douglas Fischer, cross-posted from the Daily Climate

Media coverage of climate change continued to tumble in 2011, declining roughly 20 percent from 2010′s levels and nearly 42 percent from 2009′s peak, according to analysis of DailyClimate.org’s archive of global media.

The declining coverage came amid bouts of extreme weather across the globe – historic wildfires in Arizona, drought in Texas, famine in the Horn of Africa – and flashes of political frenzy. Australia’s approval of a carbon tax, the U.S. presidential election, a Congressional inquiry into the failed solar startup Solyndra all generated significant coverage within the mainstream press, but it was not enough to stem the larger trend.

“If you thought last year … was the year that media coverage collapsed, the headline this year would be ‘What coverage???’ ” said Robert Brulle, a professor of sociology and environmental science at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
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by Michael Wertz and Laura Conley

The costs and consequences of climate change on our world will define the 21st century. Even if nations across our planet were to take immediate steps to rein in carbon emissions—an unlikely prospect—a warmer climate is inevitable. As the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, noted in 2007, human-created “warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level.”

As these ill effects progress they will have serious implications for U.S. national security interests as well as global stability—extending from the sustainability of coastal military installations to the stability of nations that lack the resources, good governance, and resiliency needed to respond to the many adverse consequences of climate change. And as these effects accelerate, the stress will impact human migration and conflict around the world.

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Other stories below: Court puts cross-state air pollution rule on hold; California farmers and skiers fret about a dry spell

Expert: Wastewater well in Ohio triggered quakes

A northeast Ohio well used to dispose of wastewater from oil and gas drilling almost certainly caused a series of 11 minor quakes in the Youngstown area since last spring, a seismologist investigating the quakes said Monday.

Research is continuing on the now-shuttered injection well at Youngstown and seismic activity, but it might take a year for the wastewater-related rumblings in the earth to dissipate, said John Armbruster of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York.

Brine wastewater dumped in wells comes from drilling operations, including the so-called fracking process to extract gas from underground shale that has been a source of concern among environmental groups and some property owners. Injection wells have also been suspected in quakes in Astabula in far northeast Ohio, and in Arkansas, Colorado, and Oklahoma, Armbruster said.

See Shale Shocked: “Highly Probable” Fracking Caused U.K. Earthquakes, and It’s Linked to Oklahoma Temblors.

Thousands of gallons (liters) of brine were injected daily into the Youngstown well that opened in 2010 until its owner, Northstar Disposal Services LLC, agreed Friday to stop injecting the waste into the earth as a precaution while authorities assessed any potential links to the quakes.

After the latest and largest quake Saturday at 4.0 magnitude, state officials announced their beliefs that injecting wastewater near a fault line had created enough pressure to cause seismic activity. They said four inactive wells within a five-mile (8 kilometer) radius of the Youngstown well would remain closed. But they also stressed that injection wells are different from drilling wells that employ fracking.

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