For newcomers, this is intended as an introduction to Climate Progress.

Regular readers will find links to some of our best content on climate and clean energy, continually updated (and always accessible by clicking on the “Newcomers, start here” link atop the right hand bar). Please post in the comments any suggestions you have for what you would like to see on this page.

We try to inform and entertain here — and be a one-stop-shop for anyone who wants the inside view on climate science, solutions, and politics. A key goal is to save readers’ time, save you from wading through the sea of irrelevant information — or outright disinformation — on climate and energy that pervades the media and blogosphere.

Climate Progress, a project of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, was launched in August 2006, with me posting only once (!) a day. Over time, this blog morphed into a true community of interest on climate and energy, with some of the top experts and activists guest posting, sharing their thoughts in interviews, and even commenting regularly — people like climate author and activist Bill McKibben.

In June 2010, Time magazine named Climate Progress one of the 25 “Best Blogs of 2010″ — and one of the “top five blogs Time writers read daily.”

To get our posts the instant they are online, join the more than 25,000 subscribers to our twitter feed.

I’m the founder and editor. Tom Friedman described me in a 2009 column as “Joe Romm, a physicist and climate expert who writes the indispensable blog climateprogress.org.”

I was also Acting Assistant Secretary of Energy for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy in 1997, where I oversaw $1 billion in R&D, demonstration, and deployment of low-carbon technology. So this blog focuses as much on solutions as it does on science and politics. You can read a longer bio here.

Last year, we added a first-rate reporter Stephen Lacey, who is now Deputy Editor for Climate Progress. He edits content for publication and writes on a variety of clean energy issues. Before joining Climate Progress, he was an editor/producer with RenewableEnergyWorld.com.

We are now merging with ThinkProgress Green, and that means we’ll be adding two new regular bloggers, Jessica Goad, manager of research and outreach for CAP’s Public Lands Project, and Rebecca Leber, a ThinkProgress blogger and research assistant. They join Stephen, me, and all the regular Climate Progress contributors from the CAP energy team and blogging news room.

This team, together with our endless quest to re-post, excerpt, and/or link to the best climate and content from around the web, now more than ever makes Climate Progress the one place you need for news.

In 2009, Time named me a “Hero of the Environment″ and “The Web’s most influential climate-change blogger.” I write from what I call a climate realist perspective — the emerging scientific view that on our current greenhouse gas emissions path we are poised to destroy the livability of the climate for centuries to come. The most important post that lays out that case is:

• An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces

Humanity’s Choice (via M.I.T.):  Inaction (“No Policy”) eliminates most of the uncertainty about whether or not future warming will be catastrophic.  Aggressive emissions reductions dramatically improves humanity’s chances.

Some other key climate science overview posts include:

• Climate Story of the Year: Warming-Driven Drought and Extreme Weather Emerge as Key Threat to Global Food Security
• USGS on Dust-Bowlification: Drier conditions projected to accelerate dust storms in the U.S. Southwest
• NOAA: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe
• Eight Must-Have Charts Summarize the Evidence for a “Human Fingerprint” on Recent Climate Change

Another good post is Royal Society Special Issue on Global Warming Details ‘Hellish Vision’ of 7°F (4°C) World — Which We May Face in the 2060s! “In such a 4°C world, the limits for human adaptation are likely to be exceeded in many parts of the world, while the limits for adaptation for natural systems would largely be exceeded throughout the world.” This would be the worst-case for the 2060s, but is in any case, close to business as usual for 2090s.

We also spend a lot of time describing the solution(s). Fundamentally we have most of the needed technology now (or soon will), and avoiding catastrophe requires only a very small fraction of the nation’s and world’s wealth — one tenth of a penny on the dollar:

• The full global warming solution: How the world can stabilize at 350 to 450 ppm
• An introduction to the core climate solutions
• IEA’s Bombshell Warning: We’re Headed Toward 11°F Global Warming and “Delaying Action Is a False Economy”
• Study Confirms Optimal Climate Strategy: Deploy, Deploy, Deploy, Research and Develop, Deploy, Deploy, Deploy
• Breaking: Socolow reaffirms 2004 ‘wedges’ paper, urges aggressive low-carbon deployment ASAP
• McKinsey 2008 Research in Review: Stabilizing at 450 ppm has a net cost near zero.

Stephen Lacey has created a portfolio of chart-filled posts that dive deeper into the individual clean energy solutions and how they have been starting to achieve significant market penetration and sharp drops in cost:

• Solar is Ready Now: ‘Ferocious Cost Reductions’ Make Solar PV Competitive
• Top Three Reasons Cheap Natural Gas Won’t Kill Renewable Energy
• One Trillionth Dollar Invested in Clean Energy in 2011: Will American Business Capture the Second Trillion?
• Google Phases Out Clean Energy R&D in Favor of Deployment, Citing the “Compelling” Cost Reductions in Solar PV
• Investments in Renewable Energy to Double by 2020, Reaching $395 Billion Per Year, Says Bloomberg New Energy Finance

We also spend a lot of time keeping readers up on the politics of energy and climate action:

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The Environment Protection Agency is a favorite punching bag for Republican lawmakers, including freshman Tea Party Rep. Stephen Fincher (R-TN). In the fall, Fincher co-sponsored the House GOP’s Farm Dust Regulation Prevention Act, a bill that uselessly “fought” a mythical attempt by the EPA to regulate farm dust.

At an April 5th roundtable in Dyersburg, TN, Fincher said the agency’s efforts to clean up the air and water warrant the political equivalent of a violent physical attack:

We must, we must cut the EPA’s legs off. I hate to say that because it sounds rotten but they are choking this country to death with legislating through the bureaucracy in Washington. I mean we have fought dust legislation we have fought water. You name it it is something every day from the Environmental Protection Agency and every group I talk to is the same message, ‘please stop them, please stop.”

Watch it:

This adds to the long list of extreme rhetoric from Republicans about the nation’s environmental agency.

House Republicans have attempted to strip both funding and regulatory power from the EPA, including trying to block overdue mercury pollution limits, and even nonexistent regulations, like the made-up farm dust rule.

Recent EPA measures will save tens-of-thousands of lives while the economic benefit of the regulations outweigh their costs by $10 billion to $95 billion a year.

Speaking to a group of Republican political donors last week, Ohio’s conservative Governor John Kasich called for action on climate change, saying he was “all for” developing clean energy

At a time when climate change denial has become a de facto national platform for the Republican party, Kasich’s comments are a notable break from GOP rhetoric. The Columbus Dispatch reported on his statement to fellow Republicans:

“This isn’t popular to always say, but I believe there is a problem with climates, climate change in the atmosphere,” Kasich told a Ross County Republican function on Thursday. “I believe it. I don’t know how much there is, but I also know the good Lord wants us to be good stewards of his creation. And so, at the end of the day, if we can find these breakthroughs to help us have a cleaner environment, I’m all for it.”

Kasich’s comments came during a talk about his “all-of-the-above” energy plan. However, that plan, which does support efficiency, wind and solar, still relies heavily on fossil fuels — particularly coal and shale gas.

Meanwhile, scientists warn that we are hitting tipping points that could soon force unstoppable global warming. Given this reality, squaring aggressive support for fossil fuels with the need to address climate change is virtually impossible.

The fact that Kasich’s comments are “news” shows how dramatically Republicans have turned around on climate change. Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, once said that “now is the time to take action toward climate protection” and called for a “no regrets” approach to dealing with the problem.

Today, Romney says “we don’t know” whether humans are causing climate change — even though 97% of climate scientists actively publishing in the field say human influence is the primary driver of a warming planet.

I know you’ve heard the established wisdom: The climate bill failed in large part because it lacked public support.

That was never true, as over a dozen polls we reported on in the last 3 years make clear (see them here and below). But that myth became popular because it suited the narrative of both the deniers and do-little centrist crowd and their enablers in the media.

What’s amazing is that even though essentially none of the major national “influencers” in the public arena — the President, Congress, media and so on — has been using their bully pulpit to talk about mandatory controls on carbon dioxide pollution for almost two years now, the public still supports it overwhelmingly.  A full 65% of Americans support “imposing mandatory controls on carbon dioxide emissions/other greenhouse gases.”

Here is the key chart from Gallup:

That’s doubly amazing because the right-wing media has never stopped its assault on climate action, ensuring that at least Tea Party crowd thinks the whole notion is absurd. Again, climate action is a classic wedge issue that separates the extreme conservatives from everyone else in the country, as many polls make clear.

Gallup wins the award for the lamest headline, “Americans Endorse Various Energy, Environment Proposals.” They don’t just bury the lede, they ignore it entirely, offering this frame instead in the sub-hed, “Republicans and Democrats show substantially differing levels of support.”

Note that even 51% of  Republicans and Republican-leaning independents still support a policy that has been vocally opposed by every GOP presidential candidate and every conservative media outlet and was the subject of carpet bombing ads during the 2010 election.

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It’s official. This was “the warmest March on record” since records began in 1895, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

How hot was it? It was so hot that NOAA reports “there were 15,272 warm temperature records broken (7,755 daytime records, 7,517 nighttime records).”

NOAA released some amazing charts and factoids yesterday:

• Hundreds of locations across the country broke their all-time March records. There were 21 instances of the nighttime temperatures being as warm, or warmer, than the existing record daytime temperature for a given date.
• A persistent weather pattern led to 25 states east of the Rockies having their warmest March on record. An additional 15 states had monthly temperatures ranking among their ten warmest.
• NOAA’s U.S. Climate Extremes Index, an index that tracks the highest 10 percent and lowest 10 percent of extremes in temperature, precipitation, drought and tropical cyclones, was 39 percent, nearly twice the long-term average and the highest value on record for the January-March period [see figure]:

U.S. Climate Extremes Index was the highest on record so far in 2012.

It was so hot that “March heat records crushed cold records by over 35 to 1“ and top scientists and meteorologists said that global warming loaded the dice. If you prefer sports metaphors, like a baseball player on steroids, our climate system is breaking records at an unnatural pace.

It was so hot that both ABC News and NBC ran excellent stories that connected the heat wave to global warming. Here is the ABC story, which spells out the health and food security “dangers” posed by “extreme climate risks”:

Here is the NBC News story, which labels manmade global warming, “the prime suspect” for the heat wave:

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by Auden Schendler, via Huffington Post

With magazines like Scientific American publishing articles titled: “Global Warming Close to Becoming Irreversible,” and 15,000-plus temperature records set this spring in the U.S., it’s no wonder the CFO of the business I work for said to me yesterday: “I have this crippling anxiety about climate change… What are our children going to have to deal with?”

At Keystone, in Colorado, ski season is still going on but a nearby fire meant the lodge was being used as an evacuation center a few weeks ago. Meanwhile, the Washington Post expressed bafflement about U.S. inaction in the face of obvious climate threats highlighted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

This all leaves most of us in the movement to solve climate change with a borderline debilitating creeping terror that haunts our daily activities and inclines many of us to want to rock in the corner holding our knees, eating Chinese food out of the box.

But that’s neither productive nor healthy, and Kung Pao stains carpet.

Instead, we need to find signs of hope. And surprisingly, there are a few.
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Did you know that China accounts for one third of the world’s garbage output? Or that only 1 in 5 plastic bottles is recycled? Or that Americans throw away enough trash each year to cover the state of Texas twice over?

I don’t want to give away all the cool trash factoids I just learned in one sitting. So I encourage you to check out this neat infographic on our ever-growing waste problem:

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Below is our morning round-up of the latest in climate, environment and clean energy. Here is what we’re reading. What are you?

Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health have “estimated that greater summer temperature variability, a predicted consequence of climate change, is causing 10,000 additional deaths per year in the United States, a figure that is likely to rise along with the mercury.”  The study found, “For each increase of 1 degree Celsius in summer temperature variability, the death rate for infirm elderly residents rose between 2.8 percent and 4 percent, depending on the ailment.” [Boston Globe]

Global warming may initially make the grass greener, but not for long, according to new research conducted at Northern Arizona University. [Drovers]

With diesel prices topping $4 a gallon, some companies have upgraded to fuel-efficient diesel, natural gas, electric and hybrid rigs. Others are changing driver habits or using software to minimize idling. [Los Angeles Times]

Lighting manufacturer Cree Inc. says it has halved the cost of its light-emitting-diode streetlights and hopes the new lower prices will sway local governments to adopt the new technology. [Wall Street Journal]

Many cities have green reputations — Portland, Ore., even has its own vertical gardens. But in the developing world, where middle classes are growing along with consumption, waste and energy use, Mexico City is a brave new world. [New York Times]

A group of American zoo and aquarium officials are asking the federal government to let them import orphaned bear cubs from Canada, so that some can be bred in captivity. [Washington Post]

New York City has tripled its production of solar power by completing the installation of panels on 10 city-owned buildings, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Monday. [Wall Street Journal]

The sun is shining on homeowners in less affluent neighborhoods who are discovering they can afford solar energy after all — by leasing rather than buying the panels on their roofs. [Renewable Energy World]

Arizona’s solar energy advocates are watching their state’s legislature for a possible move to undercut policies of deploying and harvesting perhaps the finest U.S. solar resource. [Greentech Media]

The Internet of Things could have a mind-boggling 24 billion devices connected by 2020 and that means there will be more than three times the amount of connected devices as people on the planet by that time. [earth2tech]