On June 10, a group of technology-focused business leaders — including Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist John Doerr, and the current or former chief executives of General Electric, DuPont, Lockheed Martin, and Xerox — issued a mayday manifesto urging a massive public-private effort to accelerate research into clean-energy innovations. Without such a commitment, they warned, the United States will remain vulnerable to energy price shocks; continue to “enrich hostile regimes” that supply much of the United States’ oil; and cede to other nations dominance of “vast new markets for clean-energy technologies.” At precisely the moment these executives were scheduled to unveil their American Energy Innovation Council report, the Senate was to begin debating a resolution from Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, to block the Environmental Protection Agency’s plans to regulate the carbon dioxide emissions linked to global climate change.

Murkowski’s proposal would have blocked the EPA from using the Clean Air Act to regulate carbon emissions to fight global warming. It lost by four votes (47 to 53). But every single Republican (and six Democrats, namely Bayh, Rockefeller, Pryor, Landrieu, Lincoln and Ben Nelson) voted for the proposal. (How could anyone in the party of obstructionism fail to support a proposal to obstruct something? Especially something that’s urgently necessary.)

Yes, the Murkowski proposal lost, but as Ron Brownstein points out:

… the substantial support that Murkowski’s proposal attracted highlights the political obstacles looming in front of any policy that aims to seriously advance alternatives to the carbon-intensive fossil fuels that now dominate the United States’ energy mix. Her resolution collided with the Innovation Council report like a Hummer rear-ending a hybrid.

The Innovation Council has made a passionate plea for action on a new energy policy, pointing out that the stakes are no less than the future of the American economy, of American competitiveness in the global economy:

The council frames the need for a new energy direction as being as much of an economic imperative as an environmental one. It calls for a national energy strategy centered on a $16 billion annual federal investment in energy research — as much, the group pointedly notes, as the United States spends on imported oil every 16 days.

Equally important, the group urges that government catalyze the development of energy alternatives by sending “a strong market signal” through such mechanisms as mandates on utilities to produce more renewable energy or “a price or a cap” on carbon emissions. Such a cap is precisely what the Senate resolution sought to block. But the business leaders said that it is one of the policies that could “create a large, sustained market for new energy technology.”

One of the council’s key insights was to recognize that expanded energy research and limits on carbon (or other mandates to promote renewable power) are not alternative but complementary policies: One increases the supply of new energy sources; the other increases demand for them. Earlier this month, the nonpartisan Information Technology & Innovation Foundation echoed this conclusion in a report warning that the United States is already faltering in the race for new markets. With the world readying to spend $600 billion annually on clean-energy technology by 2020, the group noted, the United States is now running a trade deficit in these products and facing “declining export market shares” virtually everywhere.

Other nations are seizing these opportunities faster. In China, stiff mandates to deploy renewable sources domestically are nurturing local companies capable of capturing international markets. It’s revealing that even as venerable an American firm as California-based Applied Materials, which produces the sophisticated machinery used to manufacture solar panels, opened a research center last fall in Xian, China. “If the U.S. becomes a bigger market for us, definitely we’d have to readjust our strategy,” general manager Gang Zou recently told visiting journalists. “But today, our customer market is in Asia.”

Yes, there are six Democrats who are aligned with Republicans in obstructing any progress on a new energy policy. But, ultimately, a new energy policy is currently outside the realm of political possibility because of the united opposition of Senate Republicans. Every single Republican stands staunchly opposed to any action. Including such alleged moderates as Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins and Scott Brown.

The Republican Party’s position is crystal clear. Here’s what they are singing to one clear harp in divers tones:

Fuck the US economy! Fuck US competitiveness in global markets! All we care about is obstructing every single thing that Democrats propose. It doesn’t matter if a proposal makes perfect sense. It doesn’t matter if it proposes action that’s urgently necessary. It doesn’t matter if opposing the proposal will screw us for generations. We’re simply going to obstruct it. Because we see that as the only way that we can possibly get back in power. Doesn’t matter how slim the prospect of getting back in power actually is. It’s the only way we see, so that’s that. And nothing is more important than getting back in power. Because then we can go back to totally buggering up the economy all over again. The economy, and everything else in sight.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) says he’s pulling his support for a bipartisan climate bill — seemingly killing its chances in this Congress — because, he says, President Obama has abandoned climate legislation in favor of immigration reform.

So let me see if I’ve got this right. Lindsey Graham thinks that President Obama has abandoned climate legislation. That outrages him. A lot. So what does he do? He turns around and abandons climate legislation.

That’ll show President Obama, all right!

Because this time it’s not just so-called scientists who have prostituted themselves to the oil companies who are questioning the scientific consensus on global warming. It’s respected scientists, respected by none other than the UN’s Nobel-prize-winning global warming panel, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The United Nations climate panel faces a new challenge with scientists casting doubt on its claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution.

In its last assessment the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the evidence that the world was warming was “unequivocal”.

It warned that greenhouse gases had already heated the world by 0.7C and that there could be 5C-6C more warming by 2100, with devastating impacts on humanity and wildlife. However, new research, including work by British scientists, is casting doubt on such claims. Some even suggest the world may not be warming much at all.

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.

The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.

These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.

Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.

“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”

The IPCC faces similar criticisms from Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph, Canada, who was invited by the panel to review its last report.

The experience turned him into a strong critic and he has since published a research paper questioning its methods.

“We concluded, with overwhelming statistical significance, that the IPCC’s climate data are contaminated with surface effects from industrialisation and data quality problems. These add up to a large warming bias,” he said.
[...]
Terry Mills, professor of applied statistics and econometrics at Loughborough University, looked at the same data as the IPCC. He found that the warming trend it reported over the past 30 years or so was just as likely to be due to random fluctuations as to the impacts of greenhouse gases. Mills’s findings are to be published in Climatic Change, an environmental journal.

“The earth has gone through warming spells like these at least twice before in the last 1,000 years,” he said.

I don’t see how anyone can dismiss the likes of John Christy and Ross McKitrick and Terry Mills as kooks or prostitutes.

Wisely, the IPCC is not challenging their credibility or motives. Instead, it is resorting to the spin method of damage-control:

Kevin Trenberth, a lead author of the chapter of the IPCC report that deals with the observed temperature changes, said he accepted there were problems with the global thermometer record but these had been accounted for in the final report.

Which may not be so wise. Because, like the article said, “In its last assessment the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the evidence that the world was warming was “unequivocal”.

Words like that will come back and bite you if they’re not warranted.

Sen. Jim Inhofe flew across the Atlantic and — on little sleep — braved the snow, the cold and the dark to deliver his skeptical message at the international climate conference.

What he found when he got here: a few aides and a single reporter.

“I think he’s going to be a little disappointed,” one of his aides remarked.

Inhofe was at least impatient.

The ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hoped to spread two messages in Copenhagen: Global warming is a hoax, and there’s no way the Senate is going to pass a cap-and-trade bill.

But it was early morning when he arrived at the Bella Center, and the halls were still half-deserted. He walked quickly, brushing off an aide who suggested that he slow down and take a breath.

“I don’t want to breathe — I want to get something done,” he said.

The senator didn’t have any meetings scheduled in Copenhagen, and he did not see chief U.S. negotiator Todd Stern or the members of the House delegation, who were not scheduled to fly in until later in the afternoon.

But Inhofe’s aides eventually rustled up a group of reporters, and the Oklahoman — wearing black snakeskin cowboy boots — held forth from the top of a flight of stairs in the conference media center.

“We in the United States owe it to the 191 countries to be well-informed and know what the intentions of the United States are. The United States is not going to pass a cap and trade,” he said. “It’s just not going to happen.”

A reporter asked: “If there’s a hoax, then who’s putting on this hoax, and what’s the motive?”

“It started in the United Nations,” Inhofe said, “and the ones in the United States who really grab ahold of this is the Hollywood elite.”

One reporter asked Inhofe if he was referring to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Another reporter — this one from Der Spiegel — told the senator: “You’re ridiculous.”

Inhofe ignored the jab, fielded a few more questions, then raced to the airport for the nine-hour flight back to Washington.

After Inhofe left, some reporters were still a bit confused about what had happened and who he was.

“His name is Inhofe,” a German journalist told a Japanese reporter, “but I don’t know if it’s one or two f’s.”

Ian Fry, the lead negotiator for Tuvalu at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen seems to think his country’s future is in the hands of the U.S. Senate. And he seems to think there’s some future in trying to shame U.S. Senators into action:

It appears that we are waiting for some senators in the U.S. Congress to conclude before we can consider this issue properly. It is an irony of the modern world that the fate of the world is being determined by some senators in the U.S. Congress.

Someone should take the poor man aside and explain to him: “Dude, better men than you have tried to shame U.S. Senators into action. The ones who need to be shamed have no conscience. What they do have is a deep and abiding thirst for political contributions. And a fine sense of quid pro quo.”

After all, we’re talking about a bunch of men and women who are not just cheerfully willing but eager to sabotage healthcare reform, even though the reality is that in their own country, 45,000 people die every year due to a lack of health insurance. People who don’t care diddly-squat about killing off 45,000 of their own countrymen each year in order to achieve narrow partisan political ends, can hardly be expected to care if a few island nations vanish off the face of the earth because of a rise in sea levels. It’s not even as if the people will die. They’ll just be displaced. Hey, it might even improve their lives.

Dear AP, in context, does that constitute success or failure?

To Stewart’s credit, he did acknowledge a few days later that he may have made an error (though it fell far short of being an apology or a mea culpa):

We had on a guy on the show, Steve Levitt — Freakonomics — whose science was, according to actual people who know climate science, not good, but it seemed like the tone of the book was, “Why don’t we just think about these other things?” People came at him hard.

The other co-author of SuperFreakonomics turned up recently on (where else?) Fox Business Network to offer some particularly disturbed ravings:

Thousands of emails from the webserver of the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU) — a top climate research center in the United Kingdom — “were hacked recently” and dumped on a Russian web server. Global warming deniers are sifting through the illegally obtained letters of private correspondence for “proof” that the scientific consensus on climate change is actually a global conspiracy to suppress “skeptics.”

This week, Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of SuperFreakonomics, embraced the fevered “Climategate” ravings of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), and other global warming deniers in an interview with Fox Business Network host David Asman. Dubner purports that the hacked University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU) emails reveal that the supposed consensus on global warming is because “everybody’s scared to be an outlier, everybody’s scared to be a skeptic (emphasis mine).” After Asman compared climate scientists to Joseph Stalin and Adolph Hitler — Dubner did his own Glenn Beck impression, accusing “potent” scientists of “colluding” to “tell Al Gore what to say,” and “distorting evidence” to “make their findings be right for their position”

These ravings are very much of a piece with the book’s tone towards climate change:

Levitt had portrayed former Vice President Al Gore as the “patron saint” of the “religion” of global warming, who has chilled investigation into “cheap and simple” solutions because of his “moralism and angst.”

Actually, if global warming is a hoax perpetrated by a cabal of powerful scientists,
a) It should be possible to produce papers that incontrovertibly debunk many of the key pieces of evidence supporting global warming. For example, it should be possible to prove that Arctic sea ice is not shrinking at an alarming rate, or that the world’s glaciers are not disappearing at an alarming rate, or that the past decade has not been the hottest in recorded history.
b) The first scientist who can do so will be set up for life (and then some).

That’s the nature of science, especially today, with keen competition among international institutions to hire world leaders in their field, especially paradigm-shifting trailblazers. So the fact is that if the Dubner-Levitt premise of a global conspiracy of scientists is true, then “everybody’s scared to be an outlier” is balderdash and poppycock. Everybody’s actually dying to be the outlier who huffs and puffs and blows the house down.

That’s the nature of science. And without invoking hysterical global political conspiracies, there have always been powerful vested interests in every scientific field who had much to lose from the prevailing orthodoxy being overturned. From time to time, such vested interests have even tried to collude to prevent new ground-breaking discoveries from being published in reputable journals. And they’ve failed every time. Because that’s the nature of science. And somebody who doesn’t understand even this much about science has no fucking business dabbling in it.

And certainly shouldn’t be taken seriously by the likes of Jon Stewart. He still owes his viewers an apology; these ravings give him a perfect opportunity to tender it.