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"The content of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is accelerating super-exponentially.”

Cross-posted at Climate Progress. UPDATE:  I had a good conversation with the co-author Didier Sornette.  This was a draft analysis:  They made a numerical mistake in one of the footnotes and used some inapt wording in a couple of places, none of which changes the main conclusion about CO2 concentrations.  They will be revising the […]

Still giving lessons in how not to communicate

The White House is just lousy at messaging across the board, as I and others have noted many times. Obama also seems to have bad luck.  He endorsed offshore drilling shortly before the biggest offshore oil disaster in history.  He embraced new nuclear power plants in a speech last February, and now we are seeing […]

The Climate Post: The aftermath in Japan

Japan’s been through a lot in just one week.Photo: Matthew BradleyLast Friday, Japan was rocked by a magnitude 9.0 quake — its most powerful earthquake on record, and the strongest anywhere in the world in the past 140 years — with its epicenter off the coast, creating a 30-foot-high tsunami that swallowed up whole towns and killed more than 5,000 people. […]

Cost, not Japan crisis, should scrub nuclear power

Please ignore this image.Photo: GlobovisionThe plumes of smoke rising from Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor create a visceral reaction. But the crisis should not persuade Americans to abandon nuclear power.  Instead, Americans should abandon nuclear power for its prohibitive and uncompetitive costs. The wildly escalting costs of nuclear plants under construction in the U.S. are […]

If President Obama calls it safe, watch out

Pondering whether “safe” means what he thought it meant.Photo: The White HousePresident Barack Obama is a good fellow at work in a difficult era, to say the least. So this post is not intended to be a slam on the president. Still, it is a good idea for Obama to be much more cautious when […]

Forget the gloom — new ways of living and organizing our economy are flourishing

Despite a flurry of bad news recently, good things are spouting up.Photo: Judy Merrill-SmithThe last couple of days have been gloomy ones. I kept checking in with the vague and dire reports from the nuclear-power bleeding edge in Japan. For part of the time I was also immersed in a post about truly awful things […]

Majority of Americans still understand global warming, despite best efforts of Fox

A new Gallup poll shows that 52 percent of Americans understand that global warming is due more to human activities than natural variation, and only 43 percent believe the opposite. That’s marginally better than last year — 50 to 46, barely holding on to a “believe in science” majority” — but way down from 2007, […]

If Rush Limbaugh’s heart fell out of his chest and into a bowl of raisins, you wouldn’t spot it

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.1011853&w=620&h=511&fv=config%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fmediamatters.org%2Fembed%2Fcfg3%3Fid%3D201103150020] Rush Limbaugh is laughing at Japan’s earthquake refugees. “They’ve given us the Prius. Even now, refugees are recycling their garbage.” Here, he began to laugh, continuing, “and yet, Gaia levels them! Just wipes them out!” h/t John Rennie for the headline Read more: “Rush Limbaugh Mocks Japan Quake Refugees [VIDEO],” The Huffington Post

Does sprawl development drive away talented professional people?

Troy, Michigan: can this place be saved?Photo: Wayne Senville, Planning Commissioners JournalThere’s a great discussion going on at the indispensable blog about the industrial Midwest, RustWire.com. It was prompted by their posting last week of a letter from Andrew Basile, Jr., the CEO of a legal firm with offices in Troy, Mich., entitled “Why our […]

Wanna green your ride? Ditch the Prius, hop on a train

Chart: EPA Here’s one to piss off the yuppies: Driving your hybrid car from your Energy Star home to the food co-op is not as green as hopping on the subway from your apartment. A new EPA study says that moving from a car-oriented to a transit-oriented community has the biggest impact on your energy […]