Latest Articles

Is this the fastest rebuttal of a denier study in history?

The deniers have been trumpeting an atrocious study that made it into the July 23 edition of Journal of Geophysical Research, “Influence of the Southern Oscillation on tropospheric temperature.”  The top anti-scientific blog, WattsUpWithThat, crowed, “Surge in global temperatures since 1977 can be attributed to a 1976 climate shift in the Pacific Ocean”: A new peer-reviewed […]

Is a 4-day workweek inevitable? Utah cuts energy use 13%

Closing Utah state offices on Fridays has resulted in a 13 percent reduction in energy use according to an internal analysis of the nation’s most expansive four-day workweek program. Since last August, about 17,000 of the state’s 24,000 executive branch employees have been working 10 hours a day, four days a week in an effort […]

Tony Blair, Climate Group, and CAP call for strong technology deployment policy

Tony Blair and the Climate Group have written an excellent report, “Breaking the Climate Deadlock: Technology for a Low Carbon Future (PDF).” While they endorse strong investment in technology development – as the Center for American Progress (CAP) and virtually everyone else does – it is squarely focused on the crucial role that strong government […]

NOAA: “El Niño is expected to strengthen and last through” winter

NOAA’s National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center released its monthly El Niño/Southern oscillation (ENSO) Diagnostic Discussion: Synopsis: El Niño is expected to strengthen and last through the Northern Hemisphere Winter 2009-2010. A weak El Niño was present during July 2009, as monthly sea surface temperatures (SST) departures ranged from +0.5°C to +1.5°C across the equatorial […]

How the Senate can fix cost containment in the climate bill with ‘price collar plus’

The climate and clean energy bill that narrowly passed the House has three problems related to cost containment (CC) that the Senate should — and I expect will — address: Fence-sitting Senators (and industries) worry that its CC provisions aren’t hard-nosed and specific enough to protect the public and businesses from carbon prices that get […]

Cash for Clunkers pays for itself in oil savings while generating free CO2 reductions

Seth Borenstein, the AP science writer I admire greatly, has a long piece explaining that Cash for Clunkers is a very cost-ineffective way to save CO2. Duh*. “As a means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, this “cash for clunkers” deal is probably among the least cost-effective uses of federal dollars one could imagine,” as I […]

NYT’s Revkin persists in selling spin from long-wrong deniers

Environmentalists assert that the reports by the panel are watered down by a requirement that sponsoring governments approve its summaries line by line. Some experts fret that the organization, charged with assessing fast-evolving science, has failed to keep pace with an explosion of climate research. At the same time, scientists who question the likelihood of […]

Unscientific America 2: Buy the book — and read it.

The fate of the next 50 generations may well be determined in the next several months and the next several years.  Will Congress agree to a shrinking GHG cap and the clean energy transformation?  If not, you can scratch a global climate deal.  But even if the bill passes and a global deal is achieved […]

Debunking the meat/climate change myth

Editor’s note: Eliot Coleman is one of the most revered and influential small-scale farmers in the United States, famous for growing delicious vegetables through the Maine winter with little use of fossil fuel. Eliot sent me the following letter as a response to my recent piece on the greenhouse-gas foorprint of industrial meat. At question […]

Forged climate bill letters a ‘blatant fraud,’ says women’s group

Among the forged anti-climate letters that found their way to Rep. Tom Perriello (D-Va.) earlier this summer was a message purporting to be from the American Association of University Women (AAUW). One can only assume that the coal-funded astroturfer who faked the letter worried that the etters he forged from minority groups wouldn’t get Perriello’s […]