Recently in Climate Change Category

Climate Progress offers a sampling of the best cartoons of the year about the climate crisis. It's worth a look, even if one of them includes the inaccurate boiling frog metaphor the Atlantic's James Fallows has been trying to stamp out.

Climate Progress' Dr. Joseph Romm links to several analyses of the stolen email scandal that has been unimaginatively called Climate Gate, including an editorial to appear in Nature magazine. That editorial makes several important points:

The e-mail archives stolen last month from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK, have been greeted by the climate-change-denialist fringe as a propaganda windfall (see page 551). To these denialists, the scientists' scathing remarks about certain controversial palaeoclimate reconstructions qualify as the proverbial 'smoking gun': proof that mainstream climate researchers have systematically conspired to suppress evidence contradicting their doctrine that humans are warming the globe.

This paranoid interpretation would be laughable were it not for the fact that obstructionist politicians in the US Senate will probably use it next year as an excuse to stiffen their opposition to the country's much needed climate bill. Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real -- or that human activities are almost certainly the cause. That case is supported by multiple, robust lines of evidence, including several that are completely independent of the climate reconstructions debated in the e-mails. (emphasis added)

Stolen emails, alas for the climate change deniers, do not change that last highlighted fact.

FiveThiryEight's Nate Silver runs the numbers as he tries to project from where 60 votes for the climate legislation may come in the United States Senate.

I don't think this is a wise bet. CNNMoney's Peter Valdes-Dapena reports:

After nearly a year of flagging sales, low gas prices and fat incentives are reigniting America's taste for big vehicles.

Trucks and SUVs will outsell cars in December, according to researchers at the automotive Website Edmunds.com, something that hasn't happened since February.

Meanwhile the forecast finds that sales of hybrid vehicles are expected to be way down.

(Hat tip: The Oil Drum)

Dear Gov. Palin: in a world of audio and videotape, you probably should not flatly deny something you've done in the past.

ABC's Jake Tapper fact checks the radical conservative vice presidential nominee after she challenges Charlie Gibson to show her where she has denied humanity's role in the climate crisis.

Climate Progress links to a report about the ice melt in the Arctic in August -- a huge loss. As Joseph Romm concludes:

It’s now pretty clear that the Arctic will be ice free within a decade or so — more than half a century earlier than most climate models predicted. The time to act is yesterday.

Which is why it is so great that Senator John McCain has picked a climate crisis denier for vice president.

Given Palin's denial that human activity is contributing to the climate crisis, is John McCain's decision to elevate her to the vice presidency immoral? Climate Progress makes the argument.

I suppose this is another one of those events about which we are not supposed to worry or notice. From the BBC:

A large chunk of an Arctic ice shelf has broken free of the northern Canadian coast, scientists say.

Nearly 20 sq km (eight sq miles) of ice from the Ward Hunt shelf has split away from Ellesmere Island, according to satellite pictures.

It is thought to be the biggest piece of ice shed in the region since 60 sq km of the nearby Ayles Ice Shelf broke away in 2005.

The Independent's Steve Connor reports about how polar scientists are concerned there will be no ice at the north pole this summer for the first time in recorded human history.

Isn't it grand what our species can accomplish with our uncontrolled experiment on the environment? ABC News' Lee Dye writes:

We humans are having such a dramatic impact on our planet that some leading scientists think the current era needs a new name. We're no longer in the Holocene epoch, they say. We're now well into what they are calling the Anthropocene.

This planet is being changed by human activities in ways that will continue to alter Earth for millions of years. The most obvious example is global climate change precipitated by the release of greenhouse gases from fossil fuels, but there are many more, some so obvious it's hard to think of them as insidious threats to our environment.

But they are indeed, according to the leader of the Anthropocene movement, Nobel laureate Paul J. Crutzen, who is said to have coined the word during a science meeting in 2000. Crutzen, former chief of atmospheric chemistry at the Max-Planck-Institute in Germany and now a part-time professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, is out with a new paper that leads off with a provocative question: "Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?"

(Hat tip: DeSmogBlog)

The New York Times' Matthew Wald reports on one way to make so-called alternative energies more competitive: by forcing companies to pay for the carbon emissions created by burning fossil fuels.

Rather, the change would come from Washington, if Congress does what it has talked about and puts a price tag on greenhouse-gas emissions. Suddenly the carbon content of fuel, or how much carbon dioxide is produced per unit of energy, would be as important as what the fuel costs. In fact, it might largely define what the fuel costs.

That could shake up the economics of energy, handicapping some fuels and favoring others. Those that produce hefty emissions, like coal and oil, would likely look much worse. And some — sunlight, wind, uranium, even corn stalks and trash as well as natural gas — would probably look much better. “Carbon-negative” fuels that take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere as they are made, might even become feasible.

Carbon dioxide is what economists call an “externality,” something that imposes a cost on somebody other than the manufacturer. At some point, the thinking goes, Congress will force industries to pay those costs, either with a tax or a cap-and-trade system in which allowances will cost money. The consensus in the energy business is that lawmakers will come up with a charge that could start at $10 per metric ton or more.

Over at the Language Log, Mark Liberman posts a Ted Rall cartoon updating the "number of words Eskimos have for snow" urban legend.

The Mother Jones blog highlights how the Bush Administration and Senator James Inhofe (R-Troglodyte) are working overtime to make sure that former Vice President Al Gore cannot use the national Mall or Capitol Hill for one of his Live Earth concerts.

Just when you think Inhofe cannot sink any lower, he finds new pathetic ways to act. As Mother Jones' Cameron Scott notes:

It's not like Inhofe is confronting a radical proposal to stop climate change. We're talking about a rock concert, for Christ's sake. When will somebody put Inhofe in a rubber room and let the rest of us get on with the baby steps toward sanity we're finally taking with regard to climate change?

The Bush Administration sure is working hard on behalf of its constituents.

No, not you, common American. Please. Don't be silly.

No, the Bush Administration's political appointees instead have been looking out for the leaders of big oil! ABC News' Justin Rood has the story:

Bush administration officials throughout the government have engaged in White House-directed efforts to stifle, delay or dampen the release of climate change research that casts the White House or its policies in a bad light, says a new report that purports to be the most comprehensive assessment to date of the subject.

Researchers for the non-profit watchdog Government Accountability Project reviewed thousands of e-mails, memos and other documents obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests and from government whistle-blowers and conducted dozens of interviews with public affairs staff, scientists, reporters and others.

The group says it has identified hundreds of instances where White House-appointed officials interfered with government scientists' efforts to convey their research findings to the public, at the behest of top administration officials.

The House Science Committee is going to see this evidence today. The fate of our species might be a stake here, but for the Bush Administration, record profits for big oil and not protecting our future is more important.

In addition to exposing a front in the Bush Administration's ongoing war against science, this report also leads me to join Dr. Eric Alterman's common refrain and say...

Thanks, Ralph.

Is there really no difference between the parties, you Naderites?

(Hat tip: JG's Daily Rant e-mail.)

When it comes to the plight of the polar bears, the Bush Administration would rather our scientists just not talk about it.

Because, in their ideological fantasy world, that will make it all better. Joe at Americablog has all the sordid details.