Imagine if, in 1963, two years after JFK's famous speech to Congress, The New York Times had run a story titled "Space program fails to live up to promise." That will give you some idea of how bad a recent NYT story on the clean energy economy was: "Number of Green Jobs Fails to Live Up to Promises." The story is triply terrible: It's incorrect, premature, and misleading. So of course it has been quoted endlessly by the right-wing media. It's sad when the U.S. press isn't any better than the U.K. press. First, the core inaccuracy: A study released …

The "hockey stick" temperature chart.National Science Foundation (NSF) inspector general: "Finding no research misconduct or other matter raised by the various regulations and laws discussed above, this case is closed." Two things we know with extremely high confidence: Recent warming is unprecedented in magnitude, speed, and cause (so the temperature history looks like a hockey stick). Michael Mann, the lead author on the original hockey stick paper, is one of the nation's top climatologists and a source of first-rate analysis. We know these things because both the hockey stick and Mann have been independently investigated and vindicated more times than …

Last week, Jon Huntsman began to call out Gov. Rick "Four Pinocchios" Perry and others in his party for being anti-science. He started with the tweet above, which went viral. On ABC's "This Week" with Jake Tapper on Sunday, Huntsman went even further, explaining that being anti-science would harm his party -- and America's future: TAPPER: These comments from Governor Perry prompted you to tweet, quote: "To be clear, I believe in evolution and trust scientists on global warming. Call me crazy." Were you just being cheeky or do you think there's a serious problem with what Governor Perry said? …

Image: net_efektOne of the silliest headlines to come out of the debt ceiling postmortems comes from ClimateWire (sub req): Debt deal, promising energy budget cuts, appear to chill hopes for a carbon tax How exactly do you chill something that has been frozen near absolute zero? In fact, in my reading, the debt deal actually warmed up hopes for a carbon tax from those liquid helium temperatures to at least liquid nitrogen temperatures -- you know, around -321 degrees F. Why? Because it didn't include any revenue increases or reforms in the tax code. That means a grand bargain is …

Climate change planning? We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.Photo: CorpsNewEnglandSome people naively believe we can get D.C. politicians to support adaptation funding if only we stop talking about climate science. They call themselves "climate pragmatists." The true realists among us call them hopelessly naïve. The fact is that if you reject science -- if you think climate science in particular is some sort of liberal plot -- then the last thing you would do is spend money "planning" or "adapting" for climate change. The anti-science extremists who now run the House, of course, are not merely climate …

I'll bet you didn't know that: What recent history shows us is that the only politically pragmatic climate strategy for the U.S. should be built around a big new federal spending effort of $15 billion a year or more for low-carbon technology. A "no regrets" voluntary emissions reduction effort is a "new framework" for addressing climate change that hasn't failed to produce results for decades. The science doesn't make crystal clear that reducing emissions aggressively now is an scientific imperative. "Alone again among present low-carbon technologies, nuclear power can approach cost competiveness with fossil-based energy and it remains the low-carbon …

Rupert Murdoch.Photo: World Economic ForumThere have been countless independent investigations into the scientists whose emails were hacked in November 2009. And the scientists have been (quietly) vindicated every time. But we still don't know who hacked the emails! And now we know that one of the key investigative bodies tasked with tracking down the hackers -- Scotland Yard -- was compromised at the time. How were they compromised? Neil Wallis -- the former News of the World executive editor -- became a "£1,000 ($1,613) a day" consultant to Scotland Yard in October 2009. Last week, he became the ninth person …

Steve Scolnik at CapitalClimate analyzed the data from NOAA's National Climatic Data Center and found that U.S. heat records in June outnumbered cold records by 2,706 to 251 -- nearly 11 to one: Image: CapitalClimate I like the statistical aggregation across the country, since it gets us beyond the oft-repeated point that you can't pin any one record temperature on global warming. If you want to know how to judge whether the nearly 11 to one ratio is a big deal, see "Record high temperatures far outpace record lows across U.S." As for global temperatures, the anti-science crowd had been …

You may recall last year that Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe's grandchildren built an igloo to mock a killer snowstorm, calling it "Al Gore's New Home." Of course, extreme precipitation is precisely what we expect from human-caused global warming, but the story still got a lot of play in the media. What's more ironic is that the Senate's leading climate denier bailed on the annual Heartland climate science denial conference this morning -- saying "I am under the weather" (!) -- just as his home state is being slammed by a record-smashing heat wave and a drought more severe than the …

So I'm reading The Washington Post today and come across a full-page ad for natural gas from the marketing geniuses at General Electric: Click for a larger version. Apparently nobody involved with the new ad campaign understands the unintentional irony, that natural gas is one of the most potent heat-trapping greenhouse gases. This, as we've seen, is something a lot of people aren't clear on. Even when it is burned completely, natural gas is still "hot stuff." As an exclusive 2009 analysis I published from climatologist Ken Caldeira explained, "the burning of organic carbon warms the Earth about 100,000 times …