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Coal group wants climate bill to build more coal plants

News from the Super-Shoddy Climate Change Reporting desk: The Bemidji Pioneer broke this story on Tuesday:

Partners for Affordable Energy, which describes itself as "a broad-based coalition of organizations and businesses that support coal-based electricity as a low-cost, reliable, and increasingly clean energy source for consumers, farms and businesses in the Upper Midwest," is lamenting the fact that Minnesota's Next Generation Energy Act, particularly its standards for CO2 emissions, would put a stop to coal-fired power plant construction.

Setting any moral judgments aside, that's what you would expect them to say. It's not especially noteworthy, but check out how the group justifies their argument:

NASA: 'Likely that a new global temperature record will be set within the next 1-2 years'

NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies has released its final report on "2008 Global Temperatures." Last year "was the coolest year since 2000." Given 0.05°C "uncertainty in comparing recent years," NASA "can only conclude with confidence that 2008 was somewhere within the range from 7th to 10th warmest year in the record."

The bigger climate news, of course, is that "in the period of instrumental measurements, which extends back to 1880 ... The ten warmest years all occur within the 12-year period 1997-2008." That's why the climate story of the decade is that the 2000s are on track to be nearly 0.2°C warmer than the 1990s. And that temperature jump is especially worrisome since the 1990s were only 0.14°C warmer than the 1980s.

The headline coming out of NASA's report, however, is clearly that they are sticking by their near-term forecast of an imminent record:

Finally, in response to popular demand, we comment on the likelihood of a near-term global temperature record. Specifically, the question has been asked whether the relatively cool 2008 alters the expectation we expressed in last year's summary that a new global record was likely within the next 2-3 years (now the next 1-2 years).

Since global temperature in any year can be affected by many factors that have nothing to do with the long-term climate trend, and since short-term predictions gone awry are inevitably seized on by the DICKs (denier-industrial-complex kooks) as evidence the long-term predictions are wrong (even though they are no such thing), I'm not sure it is wise for GISS to make such predictions. But they have made the prediction:

Given our expectation of the next El Niño beginning in 2009 or 2010, it still seems likely that a new global temperature record will be set within the next 1-2 years, despite the moderate negative effect of the reduced solar irradiance.

Their analysis is certainly worth reviewing since, for better or worse, what happens to temperatures in the next few years may well affect just how much climate action that we are going to take (I will discuss the medium-term temperature forecast in the literature at the end):

MIT and NBER (and Tol and Nordhaus) — right wing deniers love your work. Ask yourselves 'why?'

"Study Shows Global Warming Will Not Hurt U.S. Economy" -- That's the Heritage Foundation touting a new study by economists from MIT and the National Bureau of Economic Review.

This study, "Climate Shocks and Economic Growth: Evidence from the Last Half Century" [PDF] -- wildly mistitled and deeply flawed, as we will see -- is yet another value-subtracting contribution by the economics profession to climate policy.

What makes the paper especially noteworthy, however, is not merely the credentials of the authors, but that they thank such climate economist luminaries as William Nordhaus and Richard Tol for "helpful comments and suggestions." The only helpful comment and suggestion I can think of for this paper is, "Burn the damn thing and start over from scratch."

Heritage quotes the study:

Our main results show large, negative effects of higher temperatures on growth, but only in poor countries. In poorer countries, we estimate that a 1?C rise [sic -- the Heritage folks haven't mastered the ° symbol] in temperature in a given year reduced economic growth in that year by about 1.1 percentage points. In rich countries, changes in temperature had no discernable effect on growth. Changes in precipitation had no substantial effects on growth in either poor or rich countries. We find broadly consistent results across a wide range of alternative specifications.

Heritage then quotes a commentary on the study by right-wing blogger for U.S. News & World Report James Pethokoukis, "Sorry, Climate Change Wouldn't Hurt America's Economy." Pethokoukis also quotes from the study:

Despite these large, negative effects for poor countries, we find very little impact of long-run climate change on world GDP. This result follows from (a) the absence of estimated temperature effects in rich countries and (b) the fact that rich countries make up the bulk of world GDP. Moreover, if rich countries continue to grow at historical rates, their share of world GDP becomes more pronounced by 2099, so even a total collapse of output in poor countries has a relatively small impact on total world output.

(If these excerpts suggest to you that the study authors and the economist commenters are victims of some sort of collective mass hysteria, then you are a getting (a little) ahead of me ... but the fact that thoroughly-debunked denier Ross McKitrick is a commenter on this paper certainly suggests this entire effort is indefensible.)

Pethokoukis himself then offers a conclusion that, though amazing, is not utterly ridiculous given a narrow misreading of this absurdly narrow, easily-misread study:

Magnetically levitated wind turbines

Some surprisingly cool green tech, brought to you by ... Jay Leno?

(via Jetson Green)

New York Times creates dedicated environmental reporting team

This is extremely kick-ass news: The New York Times is creating a dedicated unit of eight reporters, with their own full-time editor, to cover environmental stories.

Columbia Journalism Review has all the details:

That editor is Erica Goode, a former behavior and psychology reporter turned Health editor who has been at the Times since 1998 and spent her last year in Baghdad covering the Iraq War. Her impressive team comprises Andrew Revkin and Cornelia Dean from Science, Felicity Barringer and Leslie Kaufman from National, Elisabeth Rosenthal from Foreign, Mia Navarro from Metro, and the Washington bureau's Matthew Wald, who writes for the paper's Energy Challenge series (another multi-department project).

Lou Dobbs works to make CNN viewers less informed

Will you look at the monumental, paleolithic, mind-boggling idiocy that's appearing on CNN in prime time?

Amazing. But there's more:

"Advocates of global warming." They're called scientists, you neanderthal. Christ. What year is it?

Illinois leg. and gov. hoodwinked by 'clean coal'; will Obama be as susceptible?

Impeachment notwithstanding, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich (D) signed a bill this week that will send another $18 million down the "clean coal" rabbit hole in Illinois.

The delusional symbolism couldn't be more obvious. In fact, the Chicago Tribune captured the carbon truth of the story:

Lolcats go green!

(More animals)

ZapRoot takes on 'clean coal'

The anti-coal bandwagon grows ever larger:

The U.S. needs a tougher 2020 GHG emissions target

A U.S. climate bill should set a target of reducing U.S. greenhouse gas emissions 20 percent to 30 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. That conclusion is based on the latest science from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and NASA, among others, but it also involves matters of timing and U.S. cap-and-trade design. To achieve its goals, domestic climate legislation should limit the use of both international and domestic offsets.

The United States has the technology and resources to reduce its emissions levels substantially below 1990 levels by 2020, and having already lost much of its credibility in the international community by failing to act, there is no time to lose in adoption of binding targets to avoid the risks of dangerous impacts of global warming.

That is the executive summary of a new report I have written for the Center for American Progress (Full report here [PDF]). I have changed my thinking on the 2020 target a bit in the past year for three reasons:

1. Scientific observations and analysis in 2007 and 2008 make clear the pace and threat of climate change has accelerated (see Nos. 8, 7, and 3 here).
2. We must try to keep open the option of going much lower than 450.
3. Politicians insist on effectively watering down their 2020 targets with rip-offsets.

The full report is reprinted below: