Dana Nuccitelli, via Skeptical Science

William Happer is a Princeton physicist and Chairman of the Board of Directors at the right-wing fossil fuel-funded think tank George C. Marshall Institute.  Although he has not published any climate-related research in his scientific career, Happer nevertheless seems to enjoy making his opinions about climate science known, as we have previously examined here and here.  Unfortunately, Happer does not seem interested in taking the time to ensure that those are informed opinions.

Rather than subject his thoughts to the peer-review process, Happer’s publication of choice appears to be The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), as he was one of the 16 scientists who recently published a plea for climate inaction in that paper, and a follow-up article defending their previous misrepresentations.  Happer has now gone solo, publishing another opinion-editorial in the WSJ with such a Gish Gallop of climate-related myths as to be a truly Moncktonian effort.

Though we will briefly whack each of Happer’s moles in the post below, one particular myth caught our attention.  This myth was also recently endorsed by Roy Spencer in an interview with John Stossel on Fox News – the myth that the planet has not warmed in the past 10 years.

Global Warming Continues

The quotes relevant to this myth are:

Happer: “What is happening to global temperatures in reality? The answer is: almost nothing for more than 10 years…The lack of any statistically significant warming for over a decade has made it more difficult for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its supporters to demonize the atmospheric gas CO2 which is released when fossil fuels are burned.”

Spencer: “…for some reason it stopped warming in the last 10 years, which is one of those dirty little secrets of global warming science”

There are a number of problems with these assertions.  First, Happer mentions statistical significance, but global surface temperature trends are rarely if ever statistically significant (at a 95% confidence level) over periods as short as a decade, even in the presence of an underlying long-term warming trend, because of the natural variability and noise in the climate system.

Second, if we filter out some of those short-term (i.e. interannual) influences, as Foster & Rahmstorf (2011) did (the El Niño Southern Oscillation, volcanoes, and solar activity), once we reduce the noise, the global surface warming trend over the past decade does become statistically significant.  We can use the new SkS temperature trend tool developed by Kevin C to illustrate this with any data set, but since the argument was made by the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH)’s Roy Spencer, we will choose the UAH data set (Figure 1).

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JR: Brad Johnson, one of the country’s best climate bloggers, is leaving the ThinkProgress team. He will be missed. His knowledge of and passion for the subject is unmatched. That’s why I reposted virtually everything he ever wrote. The good news is he’ll still be working on climate issues and still be a guest blogger for Climate Progress. We need his voice!

Here is his farewell TP Green blog post from yesterday. Please join me in wishing him the best of luck.

Today is my last day at ThinkProgress, after four exciting years of reporting on the front lines of climate and energy politics. The experience has taken me from Biloxi to Copenhagen, from New Hampshire to Cancun. I’ve gotten to publish guest bloggers from John Kerry to Van Jones, from Bill McKibben to Paulina Borsook. And I’ve been privileged to share my own perspective on this special moment in history.

Here are some of the highlights of that work:

Exposing The Koch Brothers. One of my proudest achievements was in starting the national conversation on the corrupting influence of the Koch brothers on our politics. I was the first ThinkProgress writer to start investigating the Kochs in 2008, exposing McCain spokeswoman Nancy Pfotenhauer and Americans For Prosperity president Tim Phillips as Koch operatives. I covered the extremist AFP summit and AFP’s goofy climate-denial ads. When Lee Fang joined ThinkProgress in 2009, he took the lead in investigating how the Kochs manipulated Tea Party activists and DC politics as the puppetmasters of American conservatism, kindling their fame. In 2010, I even hosted a conversation about the Kochs with AFP staffer Phil Kerpen at the Center for American Progress.

Supporting Climate Hawks. The best moments of the climate fight have been interviewing climate hawks such as Ira Magaziner, Tim DeChristopher, John Fullerton, Nicholas Stern, NOAA Administrator Dr. Jane Lubchenco, Kevin Trenberth, Gavin Newsom, Bangladesh Environment Minister Hasan Mahmud, Rep. Jay Inslee, Maggie Fox, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Dr. Markus Reichstein, C40 Climate Leadership Group manager Simon Reddy, African environmental activist Mawusé Hountondji, and Tulane University student Stephanie Stefanski:

How Carbon Cash Polluted Climate Legislation. Unfortunately, the effort to achieve Barack Obama’s promised goal of strong climate change legislation was hobbled by the U.S. Senate from the start of his presidency, when enough Democrats voted with Republicans to preserve the power of the filibuster over any kind of clean-energy legislation whatsoever. Along with detailed analysis of the provisions of several iterations of climate legislation, I investigated how the carbon pollution industry manipulated Congress through campaign contributions, powerful lobbying, paid-for witnesses, and dirty tricks.

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by Bruce Dorminey, via Renewable Energy World

For years, third world ranchers have been using methane from manure to run electrical generators down on the farm. This clean-burning biogas is not only a good local fuel in countries with little or no infrastructure, now even countries like the U.S. are reaping energy from this foul-smelling source.

Some 80 percent of the estimated 160 biogas energy projects in the U.S. are currently installed on dairy farms, which then combust the gas to generate electricity.  The combined installed capacity of all dairy farm projects is nearly 60 MW.

It’s a complicated process. First the farms have to facilitate both the production and collection of biogas in anaerobic digesters.  These are processing systems that allow methanogenic bacteria to feed on the manure’s natural acids in a very oxygen-depleted environment.  In turn, the bacteria both generate methane-rich biogas and reduce the manure’s foul odor by as much as 90 percent.

After collection from storage systems such as covered lagoons — akin to large swimming pools very nearly brimming with manure — this gas is usually piped to an electrical power generator.

Although a large portion of the U.S.’ biogas energy projects are found in New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and Wisconsin, they represent only a fraction of the estimated 8,000 farms out there that could support some method of biogas energy production.  By some estimates, the total electrical capacity of all these farms could range as high as 1,600 MW.  That’s about 10 percent of the U.S.’ current electricity needs.

To date, Vermont has been a standout.  Since 2002, Central Vermont Public Service, the state’s largest utility, has delivered over 47 million kWh of local “Cow Power” to some 3 percent of its 160,000 customers.

Dave Dunn, an animal scientist with the Vermont utility, says that while its cow power customers are mostly homeowners, they also have 200 non-residential customers, from a gas station to a brewery to Green Mountain College in Poultney.  The college now gets about half of its monthly electricity (100,000 kWh) from the utility’s biogas energy program.

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Opine away.

As a bonus, here’s Toles’ blog post on “Huffing and puffing“:

“Experts are enlarging the area of the U.S. they believe is regularly in the path of severe storms, tornadoes, and hail damage.”

I’ll keep this simple. Climate change deniers used to ask, “Where’s the evidence of change?” This was the trump card in their thin deck. “Where’s the evidence of change? If the climate were warming, we’d see evidence of it by now. Where’s the evidence?” This is what they said. Go back and look. They represented the question as telling.

Now the evidence is in. And everywhere. And ferocious. And what do the deniers say now? “Climate changes all the time, all by itself!”

This is not just a different position, it is a different position that means when you answer one question for them, they forget that they ever asked it and switch around to a completely different position. That is the mark of a predetermined answer looking for any argument at hand. Climate denial changes all the time, all by itself!