Climate Climate & Energy

Sun rises in east

I suppose everyone’s heard by now that the U.S. plans to stiff Germany and the UK on climate change at the upcoming G8 summit. German and British leaders will no doubt express grave concern to the media, and then when it becomes obvious the U.S. won’t budge, try to recast their utter ineffectuality as some […]

Pick-me-up books needed

I was at a wedding last week, on the beach. Waves! Friends! Tecates! I was finally starting to unwind.

And then I did something very bad.

I picked up Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

Holy moly.

The press ignores science

The bad news is that we are in quite a pickle.

The good news about the bad news is that the national science academies of the G8 countries, along with those of Mexico, Brazil, South Africa, China, and India, have issued a unanimous and remarkably strong statement (PDF) about our global energy quandary.

The bad news about the good news about the bad news is that the press is almost totally silent about it, at least in English-speaking countries.

I’ll Be Back, Eh

Schwarzenegger visits Canada to talk tough on emissions It’s hard to believe any country could be worse on climate than the U.S., but Canada seems to be making a run for it. Yesterday, Friends of the Earth Canada and Sierra Legal filed a lawsuit in federal court, alleging that their government is shirking its Kyoto […]

Coal companies try a fast one

There is no better reminder of the perils of the end of the cheap gasoline era than the article in today's New York Times, ""Lawmakers Push for Big Subsidies for Coal Process," i.e., coal-to-liquids. This is the process that converts coal to diesel fuel, and while doing so, according to the NYT, emits 119 percent more greenhouse gases than conventional diesel. (David discussed the article this morning.)

Of course, the coal companies will allegedly "try" to sequester the carbon, a position which will inevitably move to "just too expensive" and "technical difficulties."

Dick Gephardt, of Democratic congressional fame, has even been recruited by the coal companies to lead the charge, complete with multibillion dollar subsidies for plants and floors on the price of the diesel that comes out.

Yet another pioneering green move from the state

… for recognizing that coal is the enemy of the human race. This means all those proposed new Western coal-fired power plants will have to reduce their emissions via carbon sequestration if they want to sell to Cali, one of their biggest prospective clients. And if you ask me, the likelihood of sequestration on that […]

Real Climate tears apart another fraudulent presentation from E. G. Beck

Over at RealClimate today, they present and debunk another fraudulent reconstruction from German school-teacher-plays-skeptic-scientist E. G. Beck. First it was his groundbreaking (as in stick your head in the sand) work on CO2; now he turns his attention to temperature reconstructions for the past millennium.

When bad science still doesn't get the result you want, why not spice it up with a bit of plain and simple fraud?

The ‘in it for the money’ theory of climate science doesn’t pan out

We have all heard the following argument: in order to get funding for research, the scientific community is forced to produce alarmist predictions of climate change.

There's a lot wrong with this argument. But it recently occurred to me that it doesn't even make sense. In the latest IPCC reports, what the scientific community said is that our understanding of climate change is quite good (although not "settled"). This does nothing to build up research funding.

Man wants to put wind turbines on his ailing farm

Opposition from neighbors drives man to suicide. And you thought the rich whingers at Cape Wind were irksome!

Beachfront property in Hawaii for only $40!

That is, if you’re willing to wait 10,000 years for the ocean to reach it.