shenanigans

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:

Waxman is going to punch somebody

Wow, it looks like House oversight committee chair Henry Waxman is getting a little sick of EPA head Stephen Johnson: More here.

Kentucky taxpayers pony up $400,000 a year for coal industry ‘educational materials’

Some crackerjack reporting by John Cheves in the Lexington Herald-Leader finds that the state of Kentucky sinks about $400,000 of taxpayer money a year into public campaigns that promote coal and even mountaintop-removal mining: The money is funneled through non-profit groups controlled by the coal industry … The money is used largely for statewide classroom […]

Legal strategies for battling climate change

This post is by ClimateProgress guest blogger Bill Becker, Executive Director of the Presidential Climate Action Project.

When President Bush delivered his much-hyped climate policy speech from the Rose Garden last April (see here), he voiced an interesting concern. He's worried that the courts will do what the other two branches of government have failed to do: take meaningful action to curb the country's carbon emissions.

"We face a growing problem here at home," the president said. "Some courts are taking laws written more than 30 years ago -- to primarily address local and regional environmental effects -- and applying them to global climate change."

"Decisions with such far-reaching impact should not be left to unelected regulators and judges," he continued. "Such decisions should be opened -- debated openly; such decisions should be made by the elected representatives of the people they affect. The American people deserve an honest assessment of the costs, benefits and feasibility of any proposed solution."

The White House promised that Bush's Rose Garden remarks would be important and it was correct: The president's call for open debate and an honest assessment of climate action was a major policy shift. His complaint about unelected judges making decisions was specious, however. The elected members of past Congresses and Bush's predecessors signed the 30-year-old laws on which some of the current court decisions are based. Old laws are being applied to global warming because the current Congress and White House have failed to pass new ones.

WV Supreme Court chief justice and friend to dirty coal loses reelection bid

Remember Spike Maynard? He was the chief justice of the West Virginia Supreme Court, the one caught canoodling around the Caribbean with mountaintop mining executive Don Blankenship — and some young women to whom, suffice to say, they were not betrothed — while Blankenship’s company, Massey Energy, had a case before the court. Maynard said […]

Whitehouse and Boxer want answers from EPA’s Johnson on Gade ouster

Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) sent a letter to EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson today, calling for information about the circumstances surrounding the ouster of Mary Gade, the administrator of the agency’s Midwest regional office. Gade was allegedly fired after attempting to force Dow Chemical to clean up dioxin pollution around the […]

EPW subcommittee seeks answers on politicization in EPA, gets few

The U.S. EPA is committed to transparency, representatives of the agency testified yesterday before a subcommittee of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. The hearing was called to look into recent allegations of politicization and secrecy within the agency. EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson — the man everyone wants to hear from on the subject […]

Clinton sings the faux-populist, anti-intellectual Manichean blues

I must say I’m surprised and gratified at the amount of coverage the gas-tax holiday is getting. It appears to be blowing up in Clinton’s face, which is exactly what would happen in a Good and Just world. Earlier this week, asked about the fact that not a single policy expert or economist thinks the […]

Who’s looking into the circumstances of the Gade firing?

After yesterday’s news about the ouster of Mary Gade from the head of the EPA’s Midwest office, the next question is who, if anyone, is looking into whether her firing came at the behest of Dow Chemical and the White House. According to EPA spokesperson Jonathan Shradar, no internal investigation into the circumstances of Gade’s […]