Nowadays, in an age of rising population and scarcities of food and water in some regions, it's a wonder that humanitarians aren't clamoring for more atmospheric carbon dioxide.

No, it's not The Onion. It's the Wall Street Journal editorial page, which nowadays is much the same thing.

Once again, the country’s leading financial newspaper is recycling long-debunked myths from disinformers with PhDs posing as climate scientists -- in this case, Harrison H. Schmitt and William Happer, "In Defense of Carbon Dioxide: The demonized chemical compound is a boon to plant life and has little correlation with global temperature."

But what nefarious forces have been demonizing CO2? Let’s see:

The National Journal has a long piece out, "The Coming GOP Civil War Over Climate Change: Science, storms, and demographics are starting to change minds among the rank and file."

Back in October 2010, NJ ran an article explaining, "The GOP is stampeding toward an absolutist rejection of climate science that appears unmatched among major political parties around the globe, even conservative ones."

Now reality is biting back, or, perhaps more accurately, nibbling back. The new piece begins with MIT climatologist Kerry Emanuel, a registered Republican since 1973. He switched his registration to "independent" shortly after a not-so-successful meeting with Republican presidential candidates in the run up to South Carolina’s GOP presidential primary, a meeting arranged by the influential Charleston-based Christian Coalition of America:

A lengthy new study opinion piece aims to pin the blame for the failure of the climate bill on the environmental community. It has already resulted in head-exploding headlines like this one in The Guardian:

First, if we’re going to truly learn from this epic failure, let’s frame the issue fully, something Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol fails to do in her incredibly long but oddly incomplete essay “Naming the Problem: What It Will Take to Counter Extremism and Engage Americans in the Fight against Global Warming” [PDF].

As readers know, I think the opponents of action -- the fossil fuel companies, the disinformers, the right-wing media, and the anti-science, pro-pollution ideologues in the Senate -- deserve 60 percent of the blame. The lame-stream media gets 30 percent for its generally enabling coverage -- see “How the status quo media failed on climate change” and "The media’s decision to play the stenographer role helped opponents of climate action stifle progress.” Then the “think small” centrists and lukewarmers get 5 percent for helping to shrink the political space in the debate (see here and here).

So we are divvying up the remaining 5 percent of blame between team Obama and environmental groups (along with Senate Democrats, scientists, progressives, and everyone else, including me). I’m not sure how much can be learned from the climate bill failure if your main focus is the elite environmental community. Skocpol does spend a lot of time discussing the Tea Party-driven extremism of the GOP, but, I think, drawing the wrong lessons.

Second, for that last 5 percent of blame, the lion’s share has to go to Obama (see “The failed presidency of Barack Obama, Part 2"). He is the agenda-shaper. He has the biggest megaphone by far. He made most of the decisive blunders (see below). But not according to Skocpol.

Obama didn't mention climate change in his State of the Union address, but on college campuses, it's a different story. (Photo by White House.)

Recently, climate change has been the Voldemort of the Obama administration: the "threat-that-must-not-be-named.”

In January, the president omitted any discussion of climate change from his State of the Union address, since what really does the gravest threat to Americans -- and indeed, all homo sapiens -- have to do with the state of the union? Then the White House edited climate change from Obama’s Earth Day 2012 proclamation.

But in an April Rolling Stone interview, Obama pulled a Harry Potter, saying outright that he thought “climate change” would be a campaign issue. Nervous campaign aides looked around to see if invoking the threat that must not be named would somehow cause it to mysteriously appear. And it did, as the nation went through brutal heat waves and wildfires and a record-smashing drought.

Having learned his lesson, the president was back to being silent on climate change in his big Iowa energy speech by the end of May. Then, earlier this month, the president recounted the story of climate change record-breaking heat and ever-worsening drought, but wisely decided not to tempt fate by naming names, or causes, or what’s going to happen in the future if we keep doing bloody little, or any of that scary science-y stuff.

But it turns out that the president was just being coy. He will talk about climate change to select audiences -- you know, the kind that are going to suffer the most from climate change, thanks to their parents’ greed and myopia: college students, Generation CO2.

A version of this article originally appeared on Climate Progress.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has a new report out, "Golden Rules for a Golden Age of Gas" [PDF]. Unfortunately, the IEA buried the lede -- the Golden Age of Gas scenario destroys a livable climate -- so the coverage of the report was off target.

For instance, The New York Times opines, “Energy Agency Finds Safe Gas Drilling is Cheap.” And the Council on Foreign Relations headline is similar: “Safe Fracking Looks Cheap.”

That’s true only if a ruined climate, widespread Dust Bowlification, an acidified ocean, and rapidly rising sea levels constitute your idea of “safe.”

Still, the IEA deserves much of the blame for this miscoverage. It’s not until page 91 (!) of the full report [PDF] that the agency explains that adopting its “Golden Rules” for developing shale gas doesn’t stop catastrophe:

The Golden Rules Case puts CO2 emissions on a long-term trajectory consistent with stabilizing the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse-gas emissions at around 650 parts per million, a trajectory consistent with a probable temperature rise of more than 3.5 degrees C [6.3 degrees F] in the long term, well above the widely accepted 2 degrees C [3.6 degrees F] target. This finding reinforces a central conclusion from the WEO special report on a Golden Age of Gas (IEA, 2011b), that, while a greater role for natural gas in the global energy mix does bring environmental benefits where it substitutes for other fossil fuels, natural gas cannot on its own provide the answer to the challenge of climate change.

D’oh! Or is that duh?

Obama's energy speech: lots about wind, nothing about climate. (Photo by Darin Leach for USDA.)

A version of this post originally appeared on Climate Progress.

Last month, the White House edited climate change from Obama’s Earth Day 2012 proclamation. That was after the president omitted any discussion of climate change from his State of the Union address.

But then, in a Rolling Stone interview, Obama unexpectedly broke out of his self-imposed silence on climate change, saying he thought climate change would be a campaign issue.

Of course, it would be hard for climate to be a campaign issue if the president doesn’t actually talk about it in public. After all, his challenger Mitt Romney seems unlikely to bring it up, having Etch-a-Sketched his position on that subject many times. And Lord knows that media isn’t itching to talk about climate.

So it was disappointing again once again that on Thursday the president reverted to form in his big speech on energy at TPI Composites, a wind-blade manufacturing plant in Newton, Iowa.

Photo by Sebastian Anthony.

A version of this post originally appeared on Climate Progress.

Journalist Bill Blakemore has a great piece on ABC’s website called "‘Hug the Monster’ for Realistic Hope in Global Warming (or How to Transform Your Fearful Inner Climate)."

He offers advice to journalists in covering climate change -- and advice to the rest of us in a world captured by denial.

The piece helps dispel the myth that climate scientists have long been overhyping climate impacts -- when everyone who actually follows climate science and talks to any significant number of climate scientists knows that the reverse is true.

Cross-posted from Climate Progress.

In a Rolling Stone interview published Wednesday, President Obama broke out of his self-imposed silence on climate change. He made some remarkable statements, including his belief that the millions of dollars pouring into the anti-science disinformation campaign will drive climate change into the presidential campaign.

Earlier this year, the president omitted any discussion of climate change from his State of the Union address. And he (or the White House communications team) edited it out of his Earth Day proclamation.

But in this interview, Obama was actually the first to bring up climate change, noting it was one of many big issues he’s had to deal with and then slamming the GOP for moving so far to the right on the issue.

The big news was that the president expects climate change to be a campaign issue:

Photo by Chuck Kennedy/White House.

Cross-posted from Climate Progress.

You’ll be glad to know that in the last 12 months, that whole climate change problem went away. At least that’s the impression left from comparing President Obama’s 2012 Earth Day proclamation with the 2011 one.

Photo by Magadan.

Cross-posted from Climate Progress.

One century ago this weekend, the great “unsinkable” ship ignored warnings of icebergs in the vicinity, maintained a high speed, hit an iceberg because it couldn’t change course fast enough, and sank. Most passengers died, in large part because there weren’t enough lifeboats.

The New Yorker and the Washington Post have devoted major columns to why "we can’t let go of the Titanic” and why "fascination with it seems to be” unsinkable.

Director James Cameron offered his own answer this week, in Titanic: The Final Word with James Cameron on National Geographic Channel, which I’ve transcribed here. Cameron, who has also released a 3-D version of his epic blockbuster movie on the doomed ship, made the connection between what happened on the Titanic and our climate predicament: