Climate Climate & Energy

Conservative pundit correctly recognizes the radical implications of the polar bear decision

This ran on VanityFair.com earlier today. George Will is far from the only middle-aged Boomer pundit who spends his time shadowboxing Dirty Hippies on the Washington Post editorial page, but his Thursday column is a doozy even by that genre’s dubious standards. Seems the Communist Greens, with their “hostility to markets” and contempt for individual […]

Earth screwed, but small Japanese towns happy

“We are seeing a flicker of light after long darkness. We never imagined coal would actually make a comeback.” — Michio Sakurai, mayor of Bibai, Japan, a coal mining town being revived by the international surge of demand for coal

Italy wants to reverse ban, move forward with nuclear power

After banning nuclear power for two decades, Italy has announced plans to build a new wave of nuclear plants. Concerns about oil prices, energy security, and fossil-fuel emissions contributed to the about-face by the world’s largest net importer of electricity. “Only nuclear plants safely produce energy on a vast scale with competitive costs, respecting the […]

Should you believe anything John Christy and Roy Spencer say?

I don't believe 'em. But should you?

You can't read everything or listen to everybody. Life is just too short. I debated Christy years ago, so I know he tries to peddle unscientific nonsense when he thinks he can get away with it.

But some of the comments in my recent post "The deniers are winning, especially with the GOP" can't seem to get enough of the analyses by these two scientists from the University of Alabama in Huntsville who famously screwed up the satellite temperature measurements of the troposphere.

In the interest of saving you some time, which is a major goal of my posts, let's see why these are two people you can program your mental DVR to fast forward through. First off, they were wrong -- dead wrong -- for a very long time, which created one of the most enduring denier myths: that the satellite data didn't show the global warming that the surface temperature data did. As RealClimate wrote yesterday:

350.org conference call

As he told Grist readers earlier this year, Bill McKibben is kicking off a new campaign based around the number 350 — as in 350 parts-per-million of CO2 in the atmosphere, the level scientists like Jim Hansen now believe is the safe upper threshold. (The bad news: we’re already closing in on 390.) The website, […]

Feds can dump more waste at Wash. Superfund site, says court

Washington State doesn’t have the right to refuse more dumping of radioactive waste at the nation’s most contaminated nuclear site, an appeals court ruled Wednesday. In 2004, nearly 70 percent of Washingtonians voted to keep the federal government from disposing of more toxic waste at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation until the highly polluted Superfund site […]

World’s leading energy monitor worried about oil supply

Predictions that global oil supply will keep up with demand may be just plain wrong, says some peak-oil-preaching wacko the world’s leading energy monitor. The International Energy Agency is in the midst of its first rigorous survey of global oil supply, and has indicated that future supplies may be tighter than expected. “The prices are […]

It does not save carbon and is not a carbon offset

The list of very knowledgeable folk who still are pushing no-till farming as a greenhouse-gas mitigation strategy -- even though science passed them by a while ago -- includes:

• Sen. John McCain
• Princeton University* [PDF]
• The Chicago Climate Exchange [PDF]
• The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions [PDF]

I buried the science in the McCain post, but it deserves higher visibility. As a major review article [PDF] from Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment, "Tillage and soil carbon sequestration -- What do we really know?" concluded:

Wall Street Journal editorial mischaracterizes both my position and biofuels

To my surprise, on Tuesday I found myself cited by the Wall Street Journal as a strong advocate of subsidies for food-based ethanol, and as a recipient of "federal dole" who ought to "take a vow of embarrassed silence." While I appreciate the Journal's foray into fiction writing (and I'd love to discuss my status on the dole with my accountant, who recently filed my taxes), I would like to clarify a few facts and offer a more rounded view of biofuels and ethanol in general.

A few facts:

Offset criticisms have not stopped being true

Patrick McCully has a great feature in The Guardian about some of the problems with offsets. (No single article can tackle all of them.)

The points are pretty standard:

1. At least two thirds of the offset are fraudulent.
2. Fraudulent offsets used as permissions to burn coal and increase climate chaos.
3. Throw in massive supporting evidence in an entertaining package.

Ho freaking hum, right?

Meanwhile, the world keeps burning. Every ton of offset-enabled coal power makes our climate a little sicker.