The planet just keeps warming, as NASA data makes clear (via Tamino).

Perhaps you thought that the whole “planet isn’t warming” meme was killed by record-smashing Arctic ice loss and off-the-charts heat waves and extreme weather. Maybe you thought the deniers would move on to another strategy after last summer’s bombshell Koch-funded study. After all, it found ”global warming is real,” “on the high end” and “essentially all” due to carbon pollution.

Sadly, the disinformers have a strategic single-mindedness that would make a hedgehog jealous. What has set them rolling up into a spiny ball this time is the UK Met Office, which recently revised its near-term temperature prediction (through 2017) down slightly. If that new projection comes true (which I doubt), then the planet’s apparent warming compared to the super El-Nino year of 1998 will be modest.

I say apparent warming because the overwhelming majority of manmade warming goes into the oceans, which just keep warming (see charts below) — and because even the land-based temperature clearly show the warming trend continued unabated. Skeptical Science has an excellent new video on this last point:

[O]nce the short-term warming and cooling influences of volcanic eruptions, solar activity, and El Niño and La Niña events are statistically removed from the temperature record, there is no evidence of a change in the rate of greenhouse warming. This replicates the result of a study by Foster and Rahmstorf (2011) under slightly different assumptions.

The human contribution to global warming over the last 16 years is essentially the same as during the prior 16 years. Human-caused greenhouse warming, while partially hidden by natural variations, has continued in line with model projections. Unless greenhouse gas emissions are brought under control, we will see faster warming in the future.

I’ll repeat the analogy (from my previous debunking of this myth) to the notion it hasn’t warmed from the El-Nino-fueled summer of 1997 through the La-Nina-cooled summer of 2012. Imagine your kid got 11 B’s and 1 A+ in 9th grade science class. Then, in 10th grade science, she gets 9 A’s and 2 A+’s — but her last grade was “just” an A. Would you say she is doing better in science class or worse in science class? (Dan Braganca did a nice charticle on that analogy.)

You can’t slow global warming with either cherry-picking or hand-waving (see “The Radiative Forcing of the CO2 Humans Have Put in the Air Equals 1 Million Hiroshima Bombs a Day“). You need to rapidly deploy carbon-free energy to do that  (see Study: We’re Headed To 11°F Warming And Even 7°F Requires “Nearly Quadrupling The Current Rate Of Decarbonisation“).

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by Mindy Lubber

“Rebuild smarter.” That’s the constant refrain in the wake of Superstorm Sandy, as New York, New Jersey and Connecticut work to repair the devastation to seaside communities, businesses and the infrastructure that ties them together.

Policymakers and thought-leaders at the local, regional and national level are warning that plans to rebuild must take into account the likelihood that more, and stronger, storms like Sandy will hit again – whether on the East Coast, Gulf Coast or West Coast – in the not-too-distant future.

“You don’t have to be a believer in climate change to understand the dangers from extreme weather are already here,” said New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg at a recent press conference. “Whether or not one storm is related to climate change or is not, we have to manage for risks, and we have to be able to better defend ourselves against extreme weather and natural disasters.”

Insurers, who absorbed an estimated $25 billion in losses from Sandy, are sounding the alarm, too.

“We need to figure out how to close this climate resiliency gap,” Zurich Financial Services’s Lindene Patton said, referring to outdated infrastructure ill equipped for higher sea levels and bigger storm surges. “What we have today is a series of physical assets which are becoming less and less appropriate given the changing weather patterns that we face. You don’t want to assume something’s going to last 30 years only to have it blown away in 10.”

Rebuilding smarter means finding ways to keep people, and vital infrastructure, out of harm’s way. It means strengthening power systems with smarter designs to prevent the multi-day outages that left hundreds of thousands in the cold and dark for days following the storm. It means revitalizing the natural systems, such as creating wetlands, which once helped protect our shores from storm surges and flooding.

But it won’t happen quickly. By some estimates, it may take ten years, and tens of billions of dollars, before hard-hit areas like the Jersey Shore start to resemble their pre-Sandy outlines. Additional resiliency measures for thwarting more powerful storms will cost exponentially more. (One example of this: Consolidated Edison says it would cost $40 billion to put its electric lines underground.) One thing is certain: no one jurisdiction can do it alone. Extreme events like superstorms and super-droughts cross all boundaries, political and geographic. And solutions, both the financial costs and necessary policies, must cross those boundaries as well.

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Boosted by the fracking boom that has opened up fossil fuel reserves trapped under the Bakken Shale, North Dakota is now the second-largest oil producing state in America. But the state has a dirty little secret: drilling companies are wasting a lot of natural gas to get to that oil.

How much natural gas is getting wasted in North Dakota? Producers are flaring roughly one third of gas reserves in the state — enough natural gas each day to heat half a million homes. The flaring is so widespread, North Dakota is starting to rival some of America’s biggest cities in light pollution. Check it out:

The image comes from the sustainable investment group Ceres. According to the organization, one of its investors, Mercy Investment Services, has filed a shareholder resolution with the large oil developer Continental Resources to encourage adoption of policies that limit flaring.

According to the World Bank, the oil boom in North Dakota has made the U.S. one of the top-10 gas flaring countries in the world.

A new study from Media Matters found that coverage of climate change on Sunday talk shows dropped to a four-year low in 2012, plummeting to a total of eight minutes from over 60 minutes in 2009.

This, despite the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s announcement that 2012 was officially the hottest year ever recorded for the lower 48 states, and that the year was the second-most extreme for weather. And of the Sunday shows’ meager coverage, none was driven by actual scientific developments.

Nightly news reports fared somewhat better. Their coverage is still severely depressed from what it was in 2009, but the amount of time devoted to climate in 2012 doubled from 2010, driven largely by coverage of extreme weather events:

Since 2009, climate coverage on the Sunday shows has declined every year. In 2012, the Sunday shows spent less than 8 minutes on climate change, down from 9 minutes in 2011, 21 minutes in 2010, and over an hour in 2009. The vast majority of coverage — 89 percent — was driven by politics, and none was driven by scientific findings. [...]

The nightly news shows devoted just under an hour to climate change in 2012, up from 38 minutes in 2011 but significantly less than in 2009. Coverage was largely driven — 69 percent — by the extreme weather the U.S. experienced this year; 17 percent of coverage was driven by scientific findings and 12 percent was driven by political stories related to climate change. [...]

Further illustrating how Sunday shows cover climate change as a political dispute rather than an ongoing scientific story, not one person quoted by them on the topic in 2012 was a scientist. According to the study, 54 percent were media figures, and 31 percent were politicians. Just as remarkably, over half the Sunday shows’ mentions of climate were Republicans criticizing efforts to address the problem — Rick Santorum went so far as to call global warming “junk science” on ABC’s This Week, without critique or push-back — and not once was a Democratic politician quoted. Finally, a mere 11 percent of the Sunday shows’ coverage implied there is a scientific consensus on global warming, and 44 percent failed to challenge a guest who questioned the science.

Once again, the nightly news reports bested their higher-profile Sunday competitors. Of the politicians they quoted in 2012, Republicans still dominated at 60 percent, but Democrats made up the other 40 percent. More encouragingly, two-thirds of the total interviews and quotes offered up by the nightly news that year regarding climate change were from scientists. And 60 percent of their coverage mentioned the scientific consensus.

This is all consistent with other studies: In 2012, the Checks and Balances Project determined that across sixty major news outlets over five years, print media coverage quoting sources funded by fossil fuel interests mentioned those ties only 6 percent of the time.

In 2011, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting found that media coverage of extreme weather events downplayed the role of climate change. That same year, an independent review of the BBC concluded that a fixation on appearing “impartial” and “balanced” had led the organization to vastly overstate the level of disagreement within the scientific community over the reality of climate change.

And in a 2011 moment of out-and-out self-parody, the New York Times allowed its coverage of global warming to collapse after peaking in 2006 and 2007, then published a large front page Sunday Review article asking “Where Did Global Warming Go?”

New York City officials are thinking more about climate resiliency in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. But adaptation — making the city more resilient to intensifying extreme weather — is only one part of an effective strategy.

Mitigating climate change through clean energy and other carbon reduction efforts is just as important. And New York Governor Andrew Cuomo seems to understand that.

In his State of the State address yesterday, Cuomo outlined plans for a new billion-dollar  “green bank” to leverage private funds for deploying clean energy technologies, announced a 10-year expansion of the state’s solar program by increasing funds $150 million per year, and named a new cleantech czar to oversee the efforts. The cumulative impact could be a massive expansion of renewables and efficiency in New York.

Here’s what the Governor had to say about the Green Bank:

The NY Green Bank leverages private capital in a fashion that mitigates investment risk, catalyzes market activity and lowers borrowing costs, in turn bringing down the prices paid by consumers. Through the use of bonding, loans and various credit enhancements (e.g.,loan loss reserves and guarantees), a Green Bank is a fiscally practical option in a time of severe budget conditions. Many public credit and investment programs require only a small amount of government funds, even holding taxpayers harmless or acting asmoney makers. And along with these benefits, the long-term public and social benefits of a robust and clean economy are virtually incalculable.

And here’s the language on the solar program:

Last year Governor Cuomo created the NY-Sun solar jobs program to bolster the use of solar power in New York, while also protecting the ratepayer. The goal of NY-Sun is to install twice as much customer-sited solar photovoltaic capacity in 2012 as was added in 2011, and to quadruple the 2011 amount in 2013. The NY-Sun program is authorized through 2015. This year, Governor Cuomo proposes to extend the successful NY-Sun program, continuing through 2023 the existing annual funding levels established under the program. The extended solar jobs program will provide longer program certainty to solar developers than current programs, funded through 2015, and is expected to attract significant private investment in solar photovoltaic systems, enable the sustainable development of a robust solar power industry in New York, create well-paying skilled jobs, improve the reliability of the electric grid, and reduce air pollution.

Solar has the potential to play a huge role in New York’s climate-conscious building strategy. Consider this: Two-thirds of New York City’s buildings could feasibly host solar-electric systems — enough to meet half the city’s demand for peak power. And a lot of that could be developed today at a cost competitive with current electricity rates.

The solar industry has been working hard for many years to expand New York’s solar policies. And this latest announcement from Governor Cuomo shows it’s really starting to pay off.  But actually funding these programs is the real issue. The State of the State address is designed to outline priorities — not always outline a plan for implementation. It remains to be seen if the Governor can fully raise the amount of money needed to meet these goals. The appointment of Richard Kauffman, a former adviser to Energy Secretary Steven Chu, as energy czar will certainly help the process along.

The Union of Concerned Scientists has releasing a new video featuring two climate scientists calling for bipartisan action on climate change. The scientists, one a Republican and one a Democrat, are urging both parties to “speak to the reality and risk of human caused climate change” and embrace the known science. Check it out:

Water levels on Lake Michigan are the lowest in recorded history. If the level continues to drop, the Chicago River could reverse itself and send untreated sewage into Lake Michigan. [ABC 7 News]

Federal officials declared a disaster area Wednesday for the entire state of Oklahoma, along with parts of 13 other drought-stricken states stretching almost coast to coast. [Tulsa World]

As she prepares to step down from her position as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Lisa Jackson said she is proudest of presiding over the landmark finding that climate-changing greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare. [USA Today]

The United States isn’t quite as reliant on foreign oil as it used to be. Imports of crude oil and other petroleum products are on pace to drop to 6 million barrels per day by 2014, according to new forecasts by the Energy Information Administration. [Wonk Blog]

Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources Chairman Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has finalized his committee staff, his office announced Wednesday. [The Hill]

On Wednesday, the chief executive of MiaSolé, one of the most promising Silicon Valley solar start-ups, appeared in Beijing for the announcement that Hanergy Holding Group of China had completed the purchase of his company and its technology for a fraction of what investors had put in. [New York Times]

The pillar of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s energy plan—a 730-mile line called the Northern Gateway that would carry crude from landlocked Alberta to the Pacific port of Kitimat—is mired in political and public opposition, focused in the province of British Columbia. [Wall Street Journal]

Lifeboats from an oil rig that was temporarily grounded on a small island in southern Alaska may have leaked as much as 272 gallons of diesel fuel into pristine waters along the shoreline, but that cannot be determined until a full inspection is completed, U.S. Coast Guard officials said. [Los Angeles Times]

Wind in the Americas has tremendous opportunity for growth, particularly in Latin America. By 2025, the region is expected to reach 46 GW of total installed wind capacity, according to a new IHS Emerging Energy Research study. [Renewable Energy World]

Google, which closed a $200 million investment in the 161-megawatt Spinning Spur Wind Project near Amarillo, Texas in late December, has now enabled more than two gigawatts of low-carbon energy to come online. [Atlantic]