Climate denial is now in a decadent phase of absurdity.

“Forget global warming – it’s Cycle 25 we need to worry about (and if NASA scientists are right the Thames will be freezing over again),” the Daily Mail says. “Global warming trend ended in 1997, new data shows,” the Washington Times promotes.

This is strange, since temperature data and NASA scientists show the 2000s to be the warmest decade in recorded history, significantly hotter than the 1990s.

As it turns out, the Daily Mail’s David Rose concocted the “entirely misleading” story by cherry-picking from two different press releases from the UK Met Office. The first press release said that low solar activity would not counteract global warming from greenhouse gases — the second that 2012 will be much warmer than the 20th century average because of global warming.

Rose deliberately ignored the science, cherrypicked data, and quoted scientists on the fringe of reality. By excluding as many actual facts as possible, Rose came to the conclusion that global warming stopped years before the warmest decade in recorded history.

The Daily Mail is controlled by right-wing British billionaire Jonathan Harmsworth, Viscount Rothermere.

With billion-dollar deals becoming the norm in clean energy, investors have “confidence” in the sector. But after rebounding from the 2008 financial crisis, companies are facing a new range of diverse challenges.

If the 2008 financial crisis was a swift punch to the face for the clean energy industry — and for the whole energy sector — the global uncertainty of 2011/2012 is more like a rolling series of blows to the body. In both cases, the sector continues to stand back on its feet. But it’s still going to be a hard fight to the top.

In the aftermath of the financial implosion in 2009, mergers and acquisitions in the sector fell by one third, venture capital capital investments fell 50%, and total global investment grew by only 4%. Today, as markets have recovered and deal flow has increased, we’ve seen a massive surge increase in investment — with global investment up by two thirds since then.

However, even while leading investors continue to say that companies not investing in clean technologies “risk becoming irrelevant to the marketplace,” there are still plenty of risks involved for companies doing deals. Those risks, which range from Europe’s debt crisis to the political freeze in the U.S., are creating what experts call “rolling uncertainty.”

As the global advisory firm PricewaterhouseCoopers explains in a new report on 2011 mergers and acquisitions in clean energy, decisions are being made with a far more difficult range of options to consider:

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Appearing on Fox News, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) equivocated on the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, which Republican senators are pushing with new legislation to grant immediate approval to the foreign oil company TransCanada. Lieberman, who co-sponsored climate legislation with Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) in 2003, 2005, and 2007, recognized that tar sands crude is a “higher pollution kind of fuel.” He then said the Keystone XL pipeline is “probably one way” to get fuel “in a way that doesn’t destroy our environment”:

Though this is a higher pollution kind of fuel that comes from this area of Canada, the question is, are we going to get to use it in America or is it going to be sold to China? I want it to come to America but I want it to come in way where the pipeline is built so it doesn’t have bad environmental consequences throughout this country. I support what the president did because there is a little more time necessary for the environmental reviews to be done. But I hope it doesn’t take long, because we need fuel from wherever we can get it here in the United States in a way that doesn’t destroy our environment, and this is probably one way.

Watch it:

Expansion of tar sands development in Canada in line with the 50-year lifespan of the Keystone XL pipeline would guarantee environment-destroying global warming. The purpose of the pipeline is to ship Canadian tar sands crude to Gulf Coast refineries for tax-free export to foreign markets. The Keystone XL pipeline means higher pollution for America and higher profits for foreign oil companies.

by Araceli Ruano and Rebecca Friendly

Last Friday, California regulators unanimously approved a robust package of progressive automobile standards known as the California clean car rules.

After three years in the making, this emissions-control program will increase the number of low-pollution vehicles available to consumers starting in 2017, with a goal to have 1.4 million zero-emission cars on the road by 2025. These vehicles, which include plug-in hybrids, electric battery-powered cars, and hydrogen fuel cell cars, currently make up a tiny portion of all the fleet in California and around the country.

The clean car rules will begin a new chapter for the automobile industry in California. By 2025 one in seven new cars sold in the state must emit little or no pollution. Half a million of these cars are expected to be fuel cell or electric powered.  The clean car rules also set the goal that by 2050 87% of vehicles must be fueled by clean technologies.

The California clean car rules also address emission standards for gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles by extending limits on greenhouse gas emissions and smog forming pollutants. Again, by 2025 all new vehicles must emit 34% fewer global warming gases and 75% fewer smog forming emissions. These provisions should be welcomed in a state with over 26 million cars and the top five smoggiest metropolitan areas in the country.

Automakers have been given sufficient lead-time to adjust to these new demands and have largely been receptive. Although they have expressed concerns that new technologies needed to meet the standards may drive up the price of a vehicle by $1,900 and potentially lower consumer demand. However, the California Air Resources board estimates that the initial increase in cost will be offset by an average of $6,000 worth of fuel savings over a vehicle’s lifetime.

Automakers also initially expressed fears that consumers would steer clear of new clean car technologies without alternative fueling stations in place. This problem has been addressed by a private-public partnership designed to build new infrastructure for vehicle charging and fueling.

With more than 26 million cars on California’s roads, this ground-breaking clean car standard will help combat  smog, reduce carbon emissions and spur a new era of innovation in the automobile sector.

Araceli Ruano is a Senior Vice President and the Director for California at the Center for American Progress. Rebecca Friendly is a special assistant in the Center for American Progress California office.

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, sixteen prominent global warming deniers with scientific backgrounds — such as tobacco apologist Richard Lindzen of MIT and ExxonMobil executive Roger Cohen — concede that manmade carbon dioxide emissions have a warming effect on the planet, but argue that the effect is “small” and nothing to “panic” about. All the other scientists in the world who believe the science are part of a conspiracy to intimidate people like themselves, they write, just as Soviet biologists who believed in genes were “sent to the gulag and some were condemned to death.”

As climate scientist Peter Gleick reports at his Forbes.com blog, those other scientists include 255 members of the United States National Academy of Sciences who wrote a letter about the scientific threat of climate change for the Wall Street Journal — but were turned down:

The most amazing and telling evidence of the bias of the Wall Street Journal with respect to manmade climate change is the fact that 255 members of the United States National Academy of Sciences wrote a scientifically accurate essay on the realities of climate change and on the need for improved and serious public debate around the issue, offered it to the Wall Street Journal, and were turned down. The National Academy of Sciences is the nation’s pre-eminent independent scientific organizations. Its members are among the most respected in the world in their fields. Yet the Journal wouldn’t publish this letter. Instead they chose to publish an error-filled and misleading piece on climate because 16 so-called experts aligned with their bias signed it. This may be good politics for them, but it is bad science and it is bad for the nation.

The NAS letter was eventually published by Science magazine.

Even though the first decade of the 2000s was warmer than the 1990s, and 2005 and 2010 were the warmest years on record, the denier op-ed asserts “the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now.”

This op-ed was promoted on Fox News, Real Clear Politics, Alex Jones’ Infowars, and other right-wing political and conspiracy sites.

By Jessica Goad, Manager of Research and Outreach, Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Today the Colorado College State of the Rockies Project released a new poll demonstrating that westerners of political affiliations ranging from the Tea Party to Occupy Wall Street support strengthening protections for clean air, clean water, and the public lands that belong to all of us.

Pollsters Dave Metz and Lori Weigel, representatives of Democratic and Republican polling firms, spoke to ThinkProgress about the results of their “Conservation in the West” poll, which was conducted amongst registered voters in Arizona, Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming.  Metz told us that the surprising results show how conservation is “a pretty unique issue in the current political environment”:

And one of the things that were most interesting about this survey is the degree to which Democrats, Republicans and Independents in the West really share some common values when it comes to public lands and their importance, both to their quality of life and to the economy. What we found was that roughly 9 out of 10 westerners, regardless of party affiliation, believe that public lands in their state play an important role, not just in their quality of life, but as a driver of their economy. And to see that kind of agreement and unanimity across party lines reflects a pretty unique issue in the current political environment.

Watch it:

Western voters want more protections for public lands due to both quality of life and their economic impacts.  Here are some examples of questions and voter response in the poll:

-  96 percent agreed with the statement “our national parks, forests, monuments, and wildlife area are an essential part of [your state’s] quality of life.”

-  91 percent agreed that “our national parks, forests, monuments, and wildlife areas are an essential part of [your state’s] economy.”

-  86 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that “even with state budget problems, we should still find money to protect [your state’s] land, water and wildlife.”

The poll also delves into the question of public access to public lands, asking respondents to agree or disagree with the statement that “we should NOT allow private companies to profit from using our public lands when their doing so would liming the public’s enjoyment of — or access to — these lands.”  More than two-thirds of all voters surveyed — 68 percent — agreed with that statement, including 71 percent or Arizonans and 70 percent of Wyomingites.

The results of this bi-partisan poll stand in stark contrast to the dozens of attacks on our air, water, and lands perpetrated by our recently-dubbed “most anti-environmental House [of Representatives] in the history of Congress.”

 

Human emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases have risen so rapidly that they now overwhelm any plausible decrease in solar activity.  Indeed, a paper from last June found that even if the Sun goes into “Hibernation” it won’t stop catastrophic global warming.

But that doesn’t stop serial disinformer David Rose of the UK’s Daily Mail from misleading the public — even after being slammed by top scientists in 2010 for falsely asserting “no global warming since 1995″ — see “Error-riddled articles and false statements destroy Daily Mail’s credibility.“  Rose has another willfully misleading piece, “Forget global warming – it’s Cycle 25 we need to worry about (and if NASA scientists are right the Thames will be freezing over again): Met Office releases new figures which show no warming in 15 years.”

I saw “willfully misleading” because the UK’s Met[eorological] Office, part of its Defence Ministry, has taken the unusual step of releasing a statement utterly debunking Rose’s assertions as “entirely misleading” — and pointing out that they spoke to Rose before the piece came out but he chose to ignore what they had to say.

Climate Progress has debunked the “we’re not warming” myth umpteen times, most recently yesterday when 16 know-nothings with scientific degrees pushed a particularly laughable version of it in Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal of Lies.

Even so, I’m reposting the Met Office debunking because they do a good job, have a great new chart people might like (above), and they repeat a low-ball estimate of warming this century that merits a response:

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by Zachary Rybarczyk

With concerns mounting that injection wells from natural gas fracking are causing earthquakes and contaminating groundwater, Vermonters appear ready to stop the practice in the state before it starts.

On the heels of a 4.0 magnitude earthquake in Youngstown, Ohio this past New Year’s Eve, and a growing number of reports from around the U.S. that fracking operations have fouled water supplies, the Vermont legislature is considering either a moratorium or complete ban of fracking within its borders.

Last week, the House Water Resources committee approved a bill that would put a three-year moratorium on fracking in Vermont.

Although no one is sure if it’s worth drilling in the area, a number of politicians in Vermont say they support a moratorium or a ban in order to preserve the environmental integrity of the state.

“This is kind of saying, ‘Don’t bother. Close the door on the issue,’” said Rep. Tony Klein, D-East Montpelier, sponsor of a bill the House Fish & Wildlife Committee is preparing to vote on this week. “It’s about protecting our most precious resource — our groundwater.”

If Vermont goes further and actually bans fracking, it would be the first state to do so. Neighboring New York State, which sits on top of the Marcellus Shale formation, approved a moratorium in 2010 in order to assess the environmental impact of drilling.

Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, pumps water, sand and a range of chemicals underneath shale formations to force out trapped gas or oil. Last year, France became the first country to ban the practice entirely. Many environmental groups and American citizens with operations in their communities have questioned the safety of the extraction method.

Jake Brown of the Vermont Natural Resources Council, an environmental group in favor of the state bill being voted on next week, explained that a three year ban or moratorium is the best option for protecting public health.  “The industry should be the one to prove this is safe,” he noted.

Measurable seismic activity around fracking injection wells has also added to concerns. From Oklahoma to the United Kingdom, earthquakes ranging from 1.0 to 4.0 on the Richter scale have been recorded near fracking sites. While these small earthquakes have not caused structural damage (only annoyance to people living around the wells), Arthur McGarr, geophysicist with the U.S. Geological Survey, has warned that the risk of anthropogenically inducing large, deadly quakes cannot be ruled out.

Related Posts:

• Shale Shocked: “Highly Probable” Fracking Caused U.K. Earthquakes, and It’s Linked to Oklahoma Temblors
• Natural Gas Is A Bridge To Nowhere — Absent a Serious Price for Global Warming Pollution
• France Bans Fracking for Shale Gas

by Arpita Bhattacharyya

With two fifths of the world’s population now living within 100 km of the shoreline, keeping our oceans healthy is not just an extraordinarily important environmental issue — it’s also a human development one.

This is the core case of the new UNEP Report, “Green Economy in a Blue World,” which urges protecting the oceans from pollution, overfishing, and climate change, while fueling economic growth through developing new marine industries.

Among other immeasurable benefits, the ocean provides coastal populations food, millions of jobs, a thriving tourism industry, transportation, sites for renewable energy development, and vast carbon sinks.  The implications of mismanaging such a bountiful resource are clear and coastal communities cannot afford to do it.

Achim Steiner, UNEP Executive Director warns that with the growing population, “pressures and impacts [on the ocean] are likely to intensify unless the world becomes more intelligent about managing these essential resources.”

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by Shuana Theel, cross-posted from Media Matters

Conservative media have misrepresented the results of Chevy Volt crash tests, claiming the batteries “blow up” and are a “fire trap,” and suggesting that fires have occurred spontaneously during use. In fact, fires only occurred after crash tests and regulators concluded an inquiry after finding that Volts are just as safe as conventional cars.

Regulators Concluded Inquiry After Finding Volts Are Just As Safe As Conventional Cars

Battery Fire Happened Weeks After Pole Crash Test And Rollover Test. From the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s description of the test:

During an NCAP [New Car Assessment Program] oblique side pole impact test conducted by NHTSA in May 2011, the pole struck and deformed the sill plate under the driver’s door at a location where there is a structural member. The lateral member displaced inward, pierced the HV battery enclosure and battery, and caused a battery coolant leak. Thereafter, the Agency conducted a rollover test (the rollover test consists of four 90-degree rotate-and-hold movements about the vehicle’s longitudinal axis). In that test, the HV battery and electronics were exposed to coolant that leaked as a result of the crash. The vehicle fire that occurred three weeks later and the additional testing NHTSA conducted are discussed in a report titled “2011 Chevrolet Volt Battery Fire Incident Report” a copy of which is available in the public file. The report indicates that intrusion induced coolant leakage, and subsequent rollover that saturates electronic components, were the only test conditions which resulted in a subject vehicle HV battery fire. [NHTSA, 1/26/12]

CNN: “No Fires Were Reported In Cars That People Were Actually Driving.” CNN’s Erin Burnett made clear that fires had only occurred in crash tests, not real-life scenarios:

ERIN BURNETT: Investigators did not find a safety defect. They also supported GM’s fix, which reinforces the structure surrounding the battery. No fires were reported in cars that people were actually driving. This came from crash tests. [CNN, Out Front with Erin Burnett, 1/20/12]

NHTSA Did Not Drain Battery After Crash, As GM Protocols Require. From an Associated Press report:

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Other stories below: Southwest turns an anxious eye toward a shrinking Lake Mead; Renewable energy deals hit record high in 2011

Boehner: House Will Likely Attach Keystone Approval to New Jobs Bill

Speaker John Boehner says that the House will try again to tie approval for the Keystone pipeline project to a new jobs bill being introduced next week.

“All options are on the table. If it’s not enacted before we take up the American Energy and Infrastructure Jobs Act, it’ll be part of it,” Boehner said of the Keystone project, which would extend an oil pipeline from Canada through the United States.

Boehner led an unsuccessful effort to attach approval of the Keystone project to the extension of the payroll tax cut in December, but had to back down after not securing Senate support.

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A lot of folks have asked me to debunk the recent anti-truthful Wall Street Journal article with the counterfactual headline, “No Need to Panic About Global Warming.”  I’ll combine my debunking with the rapidly growing list of debunkings from scientists and others.  And I’ll update this as new debunkings come in.

That the WSJ would publish an amateurish collection of falsehoods and half truths is no surprise.   The entire global Murdoch enterprise is designed to advance the pollutocrat do-nothing agenda (see Scientist: “The Murdoch Media Empire Has Cost Humanity Perhaps One or Two Decades in Battle Against Climate Change”).  As National Academy of Sciences member Peter Gleick explains in his evisceration of the piece, “Remarkable Editorial Bias on Climate Science at the Wall Street Journal“:

But the most amazing and telling evidence of the bias of the Wall Street Journal in this field is the fact that 255 members of the United States National Academy of Sciences wrote a comparable (but scientifically accurate) essay on the realities of climate change and on the need for improved and serious public debate around the issue, offered it to the Wall Street Journal, and were turned down. The National Academy of Sciences is the nation’s pre-eminent independent scientific organizations. Its members are among the most respected in the world in their fields. Yet the Journal wouldn’t publish this letter, from more than 15 times as many top scientists. Instead they chose to publish an error-filled and misleading piece on climate because some so-called experts aligned with their bias signed it. This may be good politics for them, but it is bad science and it is bad for the nation.

Science magazine – perhaps the nation’s most important journal on scientific issues – published the letter from the NAS members after the Journal turned it down.

A tad more surprising is that 16 admittedly non-leading scientists would choose to soil their reputations by stringing together a collection of long-debunked falsehoods.  What is surprising is that these falsehoods are more easily debunked than the typical disinformer clap-trap because they are so out-of-date!

Guys, if you’re going to push disinformation, you have to do better than this:

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now.  This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 “Climategate” email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t”….

The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause.

Well, as the chart above shows, the last 10 years were easily the hottest on record.  As the Union of Concerned Scientists debunking notes, “2011 was the 35^th year in a row in which global temperatures were above the historical average and 2010 and 2005 were the warmest years on record.”  Doh!

And apparently these guys missed the news that last year’s Koch-Funded and Skeptic-Led Study Finds Recent Warming “On the High End” and Speeding Up.  The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Study (BEST) concluded:

… we find that the global land mean temperature has increased by 0.911 ± 0.042 C since the 1950s….  our analysis suggests a degree of global land-surface warming during the anthropogenic era that is consistent with prior work (e.g. NOAA) but on the high end of the existing range of reconstruction.

Double Doh!

Then again, what do you expect from a list of 16 scientists that include:

• Richard Lindzen, one of the most debunked  climate scientists in the world (see Lindzen debunked again: New scientific study finds his paper downplaying dangers of human-caused warming is “seriously in error”:  Trenberth: The flaws in Lindzen-Choi paper “have all the appearance of the authors having contrived to get the answer they got”).  See also Kerry Emanuel slams media, asserts Lindzen charge in Boston Globe is “pure fabrication.”
• William Happer, physicist, Chairman of the Board of a leading disinformer think-tank George Marshall Institute, heavily funded by Exxon Mobil and other anti-science funders.
• Roger Cohen, Former manager for Strategic Planning and Programs ExxonMobil Corporation, now a George Marshall Institute ‘expert’.
• Harrison H. Schmitt, geologist and astronaut, who believes enviros and climate scientists like Holdren are communists.

This gang that couldn’t shoot straight assert “it is likely that more CO2 and the modest warming that may come with it will be an overall benefit to the planet.” In fact, as Fatih Birol, the chief economist for the International Energy Agency explained last year, the world is on pace for 11°F warming, and “Even School Children Know This Will Have Catastrophic Implications for All of Us.”

Yes, even school children know more than these guys!

They utterly misrepresent the work of serious climatologists like Kevin Trenberth.  Anybody who is actually paying attention to real science knows Trenberth explained 2 years ago that the way the disinformers were quoting him was nonsense, and they know recent analysis has done a good job of identifying where the “missing” warming went — the deep oceans (see my 9/11 post “Hottest Decade on Record Would Have Been Even Hotter But for Deep Oceans — Accelerated Warming May Be On Its Way“).  Let’s go through this one more time.

As Trenberth explained back in 2009, we have a vast amount of evidence that “global warming is continuing”:

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“There is an old joke, widely told among economists, about an economist strolling down the street with a companion when they come upon a $100 bill lying on the ground. As the companion reaches down to pick it up, the economist says ‘Don’t bother — if it were a real $100 bill, someone would have already picked it up’.”

by Ryan Matley, reposted from the Rocky Mountain Institute

President Obama’s call in his State of the Union address to capitalize on “the strongest two-year period of manufacturing growth since the 1990s” by encouraging businesses to bring work back to the United States can be accelerated with energy efficiency innovation.

While Obama urged Congress to take a series of tax steps to encourage businesses to bring jobs back to the United States, RMI has strong evidence that industry can take cost-saving efficiency steps without waiting for policy-makers. Doing so can quantifiably improve U.S. manufacturing’s competitive advantage right now.

Stories about the death of U.S. manufacturing are a recurring theme since the “Japanese invasion” of electronics and autos in the early 1980s, and the sector hemorrhaged 5.5 million jobs over the past decade. But U.S. manufacturing is far from dead, in fact providing a rare bright spot in today’s economy.

Manufacturing employment has grown each of the last two years, driven by a rebounding auto sector, and now employs 11.7 million people.

A number of trends are coinciding to make U.S. manufacturing increasingly competitive globally. Wages and benefits are growing rapidly in China—as Obama noted in his speech—at the same time that U.S. manufacturing wages are falling. The risks of operating a supply chain that stretches halfway around the world are growing: rising transportation costs, the threat of import duties, less product flexibility, slower time to market, intellectual property theft, and product safety/reputation risks are growing concerns when moving manufacturing offshore. All of these factors are translating into making U.S. manufacturing more appealing.

Efficiency and whole-system design can help industry accelerate these growing advantages. Analysis from Reinventing Fire, RMI’s blueprint to running a 158 percent bigger 2050 U.S. economy powered by efficiency and renewables reveals that the industrial sector can achieve 84 percent greater production using 9 to 13 percent less energy, and save $0.5 trillion net.

JR:  That’s a big bill on the ground waiting to be picked up (see also “Energy efficiency is THE core climate solution. Part 1: The biggest low-carbon resource by far”).

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