Joe Nocera is a business columnist for the NY Times.  He understands business, including some aspects of the energy business  (see Nocera on “The Phony Solyndra Scandal”: The “Real Winner is … the Chinese Solar Industry”).

But his Monday NYT article on the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline reveals the myopia on climate that is characteristic of most business and economics reporters.  He simply asserts the tar sands “is hardly the environmental disaster many suppose,” while providing no evidence.

And Nocera asserts, “Environmental concerns notwithstanding, America will be using oil — and lots of it — for the foreseeable future,” which is true in a hand-waving sense:  If we ignore environmental concerns, we’re going to keep doing what we’re doing.  Whether humanity can withstand such self-destructive activity, however, is the real issue.

Ultimately Nocera writes:

As it turns out, the environmental movement doesn’t just want to shut down Keystone.  Its real goal, as I discovered when I spoke recently to Michael Brune, the executive director of the Sierra Club, is much bigger.  “The effort to stop Keystone is part of a broader effort to stop the expansion of the tar sands,” Brune said.  “It is based on choking off the ability to find markets for tar sands oil.”

This is a ludicrous goal.

In fact, it isn’t a ludicrous goal.  As the nation’s top climatologist, NASA’s James Hansen said back in June,  “Exploitation of tar sands would make it implausible to stabilize climate and avoid disastrous global climate impacts.”

If Nocera wants to take on Brune’s position, then he is going to have to actually discuss climate change, which he fails to do at all in this article.  So far, it seems as if Nocera’s views on global warming derive from reading the likes of the widely debunked physicist Freeman Dyson and attending Exxon-Mobil shareholder meetings, which causes him to dismissing knowledgeable people who express science-based views of as trying to “push Exxon Mobil toward their belief system — their global warming religion.”

That equation of science with religion puts him him the climate ignorati.

If Nocera wants to become informed on climate science, I’d suggest that he start talking to actual climate scientists, folks like Hansen (who is conveniently located in New York).  He might also call up Lonnie Thompson who can explain why climatologists are speaking out: “Virtually all of us are now convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization.”

Nocera could also review the recent scientific literature, which  I have summarized here: “An Illustrated Guide to the Science of Global Warming Impacts: How We Know Inaction Is the Gravest Threat Humanity Faces.”

One final note.   What is particularly ironic about Nocera being suckered by the “Big Lie” of the climate deniers is that he described how the Big Lie works in a different instance with uncanny accuracy  in a column titled, “The Big Lie“:

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U.S. Heat Records Demolish Cold Records 13th Month in a Row; January Ending With Incredible Ratio of 27.5 to 1 in Lower 48

For reasons that no major U.S. news outlet can apparently explain, it has been really, really warm in the middle of winter over much of the country.  How warm is it?  It is so damn warm:

• “Dick Cheney waterboarded himself.”
• “Charlie Sheen was snorting actual snow.”
• “I saw Rupert Murdoch trying to hack his way into a Cold Stone Creamery.”.
• “Congress had to install a fan on the debt ceiling.”

It was so damn warm that the New York Times ran this amazing story:

Now this is just the paper’s City Room blog, so it is almost understandable that the article never mentions global warming.  But the L.A. Times actually wrote an entire story the same day trying to explain why most of the country missed out on winter:

That story was filed under “news/science” — so climatologist Michael Mann rightly tweeted that it was “simply journalistic malpractice” to omit any mention of global warming in the story.  Indeed, as we’ll see, that omission was beyond absurd in this case.

But first, it is important to point out that this isn’t the case of just a few warm days over part of the country.  January has, statistically, seen an extremely off the charts heat wave for the whole month for most of the country.

Steve Scolnik at Capital Climate analyzed the data from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center and found U.S. heat records have been outnumbering cold records by a stunning amount, as this chart shows:

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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 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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