The bad news: CNN continues to treat basic climate science as a he-said/she-said debate. On Piers Morgan Tuesday night, CNN presented a false balance between well-established climate science and long-debunked disinformation.

The good news: The disinformer CNN ran with last night was Marc Morano aka the Swift-boat Smearer, who has emerged as one of the least effective advocates for unrestricted carbon pollution. Indeed, Morano was so bad last night that even the normally tame Piers Morgan felt obliged to basically call him a liar.

Here’s the video — head vise required:

Yes, Morano’s Gish Gallup was so transparently nonsensical that Morgan broke out of the moderator roll to put his finger on the scale:

I respect that you have views. I don’t think they’re facts. And there are many scientists who would take issue with you about the use of the word ‘facts’.

Given that even Morgan understood that Morano isn’t pushing facts but rather anti-scientific blather, this raises the serious question “Why did CNN put Morano on the air in the first place?”

On CNN’s website, where they give Morano’s BS more equal time, CNN said they invited “a pair of experts whose respective opinions place them on polar opposite ends of the spectrum” and then they write, “Marc Morano presented an alternate theory regarding the impact, and concern, associated with carbon dioxide.” Uhh, no and no.

Morano didn’t present an “alternate theory.” That would have actually required him to not merely rattle off a string of factors many of which were irrelevant to the recent accelerated warming (“tilt of the Earth’s axis” — seriously!) but also to explain what precisely is negating the well-known warming effect of CO2.

And Morano is no “expert,” except at getting paid big bucks to spread disinformation: As SourceWatch explains:

Morano was “previously known as Rush Limbaugh’s ‘Man in Washington,’ as reporter and producer for the Rush Limbaugh Television Show.”

He later joined the right-wing news service CNS:

CNS and Morano were the first source in May 2004 of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth claims against John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election and in January 2006 of similar smears against Vietnam war veteran John Murtha.

Expertise in smearing distinguished Americans was apparently just what Sen. James Inhofe (R-OIL) was looking for, so he hired Morano as his denier-in-chief (see “Inhofe and Morano keep making stuff up“).

Finally, Morano launched a website notable both for having little original content and for promoting the harassment of scientists (see “UK Guardian slams Morano for cyber-bullying and for urging violence against climate scientists“). As Media Matters explains:

His website is sponsored by the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, an organization that has received funding from oil companies…. His website often publishes the email addresses of scientists, leading to a barrage of hate mail, and he defended a billboard campaign comparing those who accept climate science to the Unabomber, saying it was “edgy.”

Nye was obviously unaware Morano was no expert but a paid disinformer, as evidenced from his attempt to reason with Morano: ”Let’s see if we can agree about a couple of things.” As if.

Fortunately Morano was mostly incoherent to CNN’s audience, so the “debate” merely turned into 10 lost minutes of primetime where science and anti-science were given equal billing.

In case you think this was just an off night for Morano, just listen to him on the BBC, appearing on the same show with climatologist Michael Mann. He continues to defend his cyber-bullying.

Bottom Line: The media really needs to stop the false balance, but if they insist on airing the falsehoods of the pro-pollution disinformers, at least we can hope they continue to use their most ineffective ones.

From: David Fenton

To: John Watson, CEO of Chevron

Dear Mr. Watson,

I’m the one who asked you about global warming at the Council on Foreign Relations last week. I accused you of being in denial. I’m afraid your answer proved it.

I pointed out that three recent reports warned we are headed for 4 to 6 degree centigrade warming over the next century — from those radicals at PricewaterhouseCoopers, The International Energy Agency and the World Bank. This is what your industry business model is threatening us with, a future that UK climate scientist Kevin Anderson has called “incompatible with an organized global community.” It will make coastlines unstable for generations as seas rise, bring the price of food beyond the reach of the world’s poor, create even stronger storms, droughts, wildfires and floods — all while wrecking the global economy. And it is happening now.

If you need a reminder, you can watch our exchange here.

Your answer? We have no choice but to keep burning all the fossil fuels to avoid returning to the Stone Age. China and India are doing it so we will too (sounds like what a five-year-old would say). There is no alternative technology, so we have no choice but to advance towards collective suicide. Such foresight and leadership!

But none of it is true.

What will return us to the Stone Age is burning all your reserves, and those of the other fossil fuel companies. That isn’t politics — its physics, as burning them will warm the earth beyond anything civilization has known.

Meanwhile, as the experts at McKinsey, the Rocky Mountain Institute and many others have shown, we can move towards an almost carbon-free energy system over the next 30 to 40 years at either zero net cost (McKinsey) or a $5 trillion dollar net present value savings to the economy (rmi.org). We have almost all the technologies needed, and as they scale they are coming down in price rapidly. Wind and solar are competitive in many places now, and soon won’t need subsidies (when will you give up yours?). With a smart grid, solar and wind can scale to at least 50% of our energy needs even before storage becomes more affordable, which it will. The new Tesla electric sedan gets 300 miles on a charge, and those prices will fall as volume rises too. Why isn’t Chevron leading us into this survivable and profitable world?

We can also save at least 40% of the energy we use just by making systems efficient, without sacrifice and with enormous savings, especially in buildings. This would end the recession and put millions to work. Why aren’t you leading this?

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by Andrew Light and Gwynne Taraska

Those who have followed the international climate negotiations over the last few years have had good reason to expect that this year’s UN climate summit in Qatar would be comparatively more quiet. The primary reason is straightforward. Last year, the 194 parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change decided in Durban to set themselves on a three year path to create a new climate agreement “applicable to all parties” to be finalized by 2015 and enter into force by 2020.

In the already difficult arena of these negotiations, where every party has an effective veto, a three-year time table for a treaty greatly slows things down, as parties carefully float test balloons for ideas and bits of language and gauge reactions.  It can be frustrating to watch from the outside given the gravity of the situation at hand — just as frustrating as watching the paralysis of the U.S. Senate in the face of the filibuster rule — but no party has the power to force a more timely agreement once this clock has been set. The last time something like this happened in this forum, in the 2008 Poznan meeting between the 2007 start of the run-up to Copenhagen and the actual summit in 2009, the result was a staid affair as appropriately dreary as the Polish winter. There was no motivation to push decisions to the brink until the scheduled showdown.

So far, this year’s meeting has followed this predictable pattern except for one noteworthy exception: a steady stream of largely unsubstantiated accusations that the U.S. is somehow blocking progress at a meeting where almost nothing is moving forward except for debates about the future of the Kyoto Protocol which the U.S. does not participate in.

A more extreme example happened this week in Doha at a press conference titled  “What Obama Must Do Immediately.” The questions leveled by the participants were reasonable.  Will Hurricane Sandy change the dynamic of climate policy in the U.S., especially when polling now indicates that 70 percent of the American people think climate change is happening?  How will the U.S. fulfill its pledge to reduce its emissions 17 percent by 2020?  Will the U.S. continue its funding for mitigation and adaptation in developing countries now that the $30 billion fast start period between 2009 and 2012 has ended?  And how will the U.S. contribute to the goal of sourcing the new Green Climate Fund, which aims to deliver a significant portion of the promised $100 billion per year in climate finance by 2020?

But what struck us as unreasonable, if not a distraction from the hard work that is actually before this body right now, was the repetition of charges that the U.S. is actually doing nothing on climate change now and is determined to shirk any responsibility whatsoever in the global struggle over climate change.  The high point, or low point, depending on one’s perspective, was a call by Greenpeace International’s Kumi Naidoo for President Obama to order America’s lead negotiators back to Washington. While Naidoo opined that without a different mandate these negotiators are only “producing more hot air” in the climate talks, the call for recalling them is likely some of the hottest air yet seen in Doha.

The 17% Target

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by Kevin Matthews

A person — a public figure, member of the media, maybe even an international climate negotiator — could be confused about U.S. carbon dioxide emissions.

In August, 2012, the Associated Press reported this:

In a surprising turnaround, the amount of carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere in the U.S. has fallen dramatically to its lowest level in 20 years, and government officials say the biggest reason is that cheap and plentiful natural gas has led many power plant operators to switch from dirtier-burning coal.”

Since August, the misleading meme of shrinking U.S. greenhouse gas emissions has been picked up and carried forward by a variety of respected sources. As recently as November 26, for instance, the Guardian reported on how the findings were influencing climate negotiations:

Greenhouse gas emissions from the US have fallen sharply in recent years, owing to the replacement of coal-fired power generation by gas in the US, following its widespread adoption of shale gas.

Jonathan Pershing, a senior negotiator for the US, said: “Those who don’t know what the US is doing may not be informed of the scale and extent of the effort, but it’s enormous.”

Given these claims, you’d think that there was solid information that U.S. greenhouse gas emissions have dropped. But the real story is somewhat different.

Back in August, the U.S. Energy Information Agency (EIA), part of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) that collects and reports certain energy-related data, posted an article centered on this graph:

That graph is labeled obscurely, but with partial accuracy, as showing U.S. “carbon dioxide emissions from energy demand.”

That’s the same as “carbon dioxide emissions from energy use” or “carbon dioxide emissions from energy consumption,” which is primary data collected by the EIA. It’s relatively easy to track in real time, since it’s essentially based on adding up the sales figures for coal, oil, and natural gas.

Therein lies the first layer of confusion. The EIA does not include biomass combustion energy, hydroelectric power, or true renewables like wind and solar in its main energy consumption figures. Except for biomass, there is little CO2 associated with the use of these clean energy sources.

So the EIA graph in the article should be labeled as U.S. “carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel consumption.” In fact, that’s exactly how the graph is labeled in EIA’s deeper technical reports. According to the most recent official EPA figures, carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel consumption represented about 79% of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions in 2010.

Starting a tally of this U.S. fossil fuel use “grade inflation,” we can use these terms:

(CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use) + (CO2 emissions from all other energy use) = (total CO2 emissions from energy use).

The big headline on the EIA article adds another level of exaggeration. It says “U.S. energy-related CO2 emissions in early 2012 lowest since 1992.” Note the shift from “energy-use” CO2 emissions to “energy-related” CO2 emissions.

The headline is directly wrong because the underlying data does not include CO2 emissions from energy production and distribution such as flaring of natural gas, an increasing element in the U.S. EIA seems to use the this sloppy label regularly.

(CO2 emissions from energy use) + (CO2 emissions from energy production & distribution) = (energy-related CO2 emissions)

The headline also sets people up for another natural error. While CO2 is the biggest greenhouse gas, it’s not the only one. It’s common practice in adding up climate numbers to convert all the differing units of other greenhouse gases into CO2-equivalent values.

It’s tedious to always say “CO2-equivalent greenhouse gas emissions.” And pretty often, people just say “CO2 emissions” when “CO2-equivalent emissions” is what they really mean.

That’s just a little slippage in our language, but it has big implications for the numbers.

(energy-related CO2 emissions) + (non-CO2 energy-related emissions) = (energy-related greenhouse gas emissions)

Missing Methane

The biggest energy-related non-CO2 emissions are methane — and that’s huge.

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by Jackie Weidman and Whitney Allen

Under the leadership of climate science denier and chairman Fred Upton (R-MI), the House Energy and Commerce Committee has repeatedly passed legislation that would increase oil and gas drilling and promote unchecked carbon pollution in the face of a rapidly warming climate. Nearly half of the sitting Republican committee members have made public statements indicating that they question or reject the scientific consensus that climate change is real, it’s happening, and it’s caused by human production and consumption of fossil fuels.

On November 29^th, Upton announced five new Republican representatives that will join the Energy Committee.  He said that these members – Gus Bilirakis (FL), Renee Ellmers (NC), Ralph Hall (TX), Bill Johnson (OH), and Billy Long (MO) – have “diverse backgrounds.”  However, their records indicate that they all have unwavering support for fossil fuel interests and hostility toward carbon pollution reductions.

Over the course of their congressional careers, these five members received a combined $1.7 million in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry, electric utilities, and coal mining companies.  Four of the new members – Bilirakis, Hall, Johnson, and Long – signed onto an anti-climate protection pledge from the Koch Brothers’ outside-spending group Americans for Prosperity.  The pledge “opposes any legislation relating to climate change that includes a net increase in government revenue.”

Interestingly, these new members come from states that have experienced many climate change related extreme weather events that have severely harmed their residents and communities. These record-breaking droughts, severe floods, and heavy storms, have disproportionately affected counties with middle-and lower-income households in each of their states.

Let’s take a look at some of the new Energy and Commerce Republicans who will vote on essential climate, energy, and environmental legislation, as well as their campaign contributions from the industries responsible for most climate pollution:

1. Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-FL) represents a state that is a frequent victim of hurricanes.  This year Florida experienced damages from Hurricane Isaac and a string of severe thunderstorms. Middle-class households in the Florida counties that were declared a disaster due to Isaac and other events, earn 1 percent below the U.S. median household income.  Meanwhile, Rep. Bilirakis sponsored legislation that would have prevented the United States from participating in any international climate agreement.  He has also voted against ending billions of dollars in special oil and gas tax breaks and shifting this revenue to invest in renewable forms of energy. Rep. Bilirakis has received a total of $117,100 in congressional campaign contributions from fossil fuel companies.

2. Rep. Renee Ellmers (R-NC) has voted for a suite of measures that would permanently block EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions and undo public health safeguards.  Meanwhile, Rep. Ellmer’s state experienced six different severe storms and hurricanes in 2011-12 that caused over $1 billion in damage each.  These storms affected half of the counties in North Carolina.  Households in these counties earn 11 percent less than the U.S. median household income. Although she claims to support renewable energy and efficiency, Ellmers voted against efficiency standards for light bulbs and in favor of retaining special tax breaks for Big Oil.  Since her congressional career began in 2010 she has received $34,850 in campaign contributions from fossil fuel companies.

3. Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX) is rejoining the committee after serving as the chair of the Science, Space, and Technology Committee.  Last year, Hall said that he wasn’t worried about climate change because he’s “really more fearful of freezing.” It’s astonishing that Hall isn’t concerned about extreme heat since Texas has experienced crippling drought in 2011 and 2012, a problem that Travis Miller of the Governor’s Drought Preparedness Council says will “have a lasting impact on Texas agriculture.” These extreme temperatures also led to the most destructive wildfire in Texas history, burning 34,000 acres and 1,700 homes in Bastrop during September 2011.

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by Arpita Bhattacharyya, Michael Werz, and Christina DiPasquale

As the effects of climate change gain increased attention due to recent natural disasters and the international climate talks taking place in Doha, the Center for American Progress released a new report, “Climate Change, Migration, and Conflict in South Asia,” which examines the role of climate change as it intersects with migration and security broadly at the national level in India and Bangladesh.

This report zeroes in more closely on northeast India and Bangladesh to demonstrate the interlocking tensions that might face the population in the future, there and writ large across all of South Asia. It also discusses three policy collaborations that the United States can initiate with South Asian partners as these complex crisis scenarios unfold in the wake of climate change: high-level climate-vulnerable cities workshops, an open dialogue on migration, and ecological infrastructure development.

Recent disasters in South Asia demonstrate what could be a more frequent reality for the region. Floods in September 2012 displaced 1.5 million people in the northeastern state of Assam, while Cyclone Aila in 2009 displaced 2.3 million people in India and almost 850,000 in Bangladesh. The Asian Disaster Preparedness Center recently reported that Bangladesh “is already under pressure from increasing demands for food and the parallel problems of depletion of agricultural land and water resources from overuse and contamination. Climate variability and projected global climate change makes the issue particularly urgent.”

South Asia will be among the regions hardest hit by climate change. Higher temperatures, more extreme weather, rising sea levels, increasing cyclonic activity in the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea, as well as floods in the region’s complex river systems will complicate existing development and poverty reduction initiatives. Coupled with high population density levels, these climate shifts have the potential to create complex environmental, humanitarian, and security challenges. India and Bangladesh, in particular, will feel the impacts of climate change acutely.

The Asian Development Bank 2012 report “Climate Change and Migration in Asia and the Pacific” concludes that while uncertainties exist on where, how, and how many will be displaced by climate change impacts, it is imperative to begin aggressively examining emerging climate challenges to avoid future complex crisis scenarios. The extreme vulnerability of South Asia raises concern of potential changes and increases in both internal and international migration across the subcontinent. In areas of existing conflict in South Asia, added stressors of climate change and changing migration patterns could be a security concern.

Thomas Fingar, chairman of the National Intelligence Council, testified to the U.S. Congress that climate change will exacerbate poverty and increase social tensions, leading to internal instability and conflict, and giving parts of the global population additional reasons to migrate. As discussed in the Center for American Progress’s framing report of this issue globally, “Climate Change, Migration, and Conflict,” we assert that climate change, migration, and security should be understood as three distinct layers of tension and assess scenarios in which the three layers will overlap.

In the new CAP report, specific to South Asia, the Indian border state of Assam is analyzed as a case study on where the three factors converge in South Asia because of the overlap of climate, migration, and security concerns in the northeast Indian province.

The internal and temporary displacement of people in this region will probably account for the bulk of migration that takes place in the face of environmental changes and degradation. People may move within country for a couple days, weeks, or months, or even years to a new location before trying to resettle in their home towns and cities. Rural-to-urban migration has taken place throughout India and Bangladesh and could be more sought after if climate change threatens rural livelihoods, particularly in the agriculture sector.

International migration may also be an option, particularly to areas in which historical, familial, and cultural ties exist across borders, either through a legal or unauthorized process aided by porous and unguarded international borders. As the Asian Development Bank reports, substantial and established flows of migration takes place between India and Bangladesh, particularly to the Indian states of West Bengal and Assam. The bank’s report goes on to say, “It has been suggested that this is the largest single international migration flow, with more people involved than estimated for top-ranked Mexico-United States migration flows.”

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by Kiley Kroh

After struggling to get the last of their drilling equipment out of the Beaufort Sea as winter sea ice encroached, it appeared the long list of criticisms and setbacks that marked Shell’s first Arctic Ocean drilling season had come to an end.

That respite was very brief.

Seattle’s NPR affiliate KUOW has released internal emails between Interior Department officials, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, detailing Shell’s failed test of underwater oil spill response equipment. Shell and the federal government kept a close hold on the specifics of what exactly went wrong during the test – and now it’s clear why.

The September sea trial was conducted in the temperate waters of Puget Sound – a long way from the harsh Arctic conditions in which it would be deployed – and was expected to last about day. As KUOW reports, the end result was a complete disaster:

• Day 5: The test has its worst accident. On that dead-calm Friday night, Mark Fesmire, the head of BSEE’s Alaska office, is on board the Challenger. He’s watching the underwater video feed from the remote-control submarine when, a little after midnight, the video screen suddenly fills with bubbles. The 20-foot-tall containment dome then shoots to the surface. The massive white dome “breached like a whale” Fesmire e-mails a colleague at BSEE headquarters.

Then the dome sinks more than 120 feet. A safety buoy, basically a giant balloon, catches it before it hits bottom. About 12 hours later, the crew of the Challenger manages to get the dome back to the surface. “As bad as I thought,” Fesmire writes his BSEE colleague. “Basically the top half is crushed like a beer can.”

The oil spill containment dome is an important piece of response equipment that would capture spilled oil in the event of an uncontrolled blowout similar to the one that led to the catastrophic Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Shell first unveiled plans for its oil spill containment system back in 2010, saying it had “designed and equipped the most robust oil spill response system in the Arctic known to the industry.”

As we’ve detailed numerous times, the region’s extreme and volatile conditions, coupled with the dearth of infrastructure and scientific knowledge, add an enormous and unpredictable amount of risk to any Arctic operations. And these warnings aren’t just coming from environmental groups – a major insurance company, bank, legislative body, and even a fellow oil major have added their concerns to the growing chorus of opposition. Therefore, the importance of preparedness cannot be understated and Shell’s track record to date is far from comforting.

Perhaps the greatest irony in the rush to drill the Arctic Ocean is the fact that climate change – the direct result of rampant burning of fossil fuels – is being felt more acutely in the Arctic than any place on Earth, manifesting itself in unprecedented warming and ice melt. The response? Digging up more fossil fuels, which will be burned and emitted into the atmosphere as CO2, perpetuating the destructive cycle. In order to avoid catastrophic warming, the International Energy Agency estimates that we’ll need to leave 2/3rds of global carbon reserves in the ground before 2050.

Continuing on our current path of fossil fuel consumption will drive oil companies into some of the most extreme conditions on the planet, like the fragile Arctic Ocean – a frightening prospect not just for the people and ecosystems that are threatened by their unpreparedness, but also the urgent need to curb our carbon emissions and slow climate change.

Kiley Kroh is the Associate Director of Ocean Communications at the Center for American Progress

In recent weeks, college students on dozens of campuses have demanded that university endowment funds rid themselves of coal, oil and gas stocks. The students see it as a tactic that could force climate change, barely discussed in the presidential campaign, back onto the national political agenda. [New York Times]

The Natural Resources Defense Council kicked off an effort Tuesday to press the Obama administration to set limits on carbon dioxide emissions for existing power plants, a goal that environmentalists say is their top priority for the president’s second term. [Washington Post]

Researchers who compared data from 545 counties across the U.S., including many in California, found that a drop in fine particulate matter, known as PM2.5, between 2000 and 2007 corresponded with an average rise in life expectancy of 0.35 of a year. [Los Angeles Times]

U.S. crude-oil production reached its highest level in nearly 15 years in September, thanks in large part to the drilling method known as hydraulic fracturing, the U.S. Energy Information Administration said Tuesday. [Wall Street Journal]

According to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), renewable energy projects — including solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal and biomass — made up almost half of all new power generation installations in the U.S. in the first 10 months of 2012. [Rewire]

The Middle East and North Africa will be especially hard hit by climate change in the coming decades, the World Bank said in a report Wednesday, saying the region will see less rainfall, more recording-breaking temperatures and rising sea levels. [Associated Press]

Food prices will more than double and the number of malnourished children spiral if climate change is not checked and developing countries are not helped to adapt their farming, food and water experts warned on Tuesday at the UN climate talks in Doha. [Guardian]

Rich countries are to blame for climate change and should take the lead in forging a global climate pact by 2015, a deadline that “must be met,” the head of the United Nations said Wednesday. [Associated Press]

After they break off, the enormous slabs of ice discharged from glaciers — sometimes as much as 300 feet thick — can potentially wander into shipping lanes or slam into drilling rigs before they eventually break up. [Climate Central]