The New Republic

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Via Joe Romm, two new scientific studies reaffirm the infamous hockey stick graph. The first study appeared in Geophysical Research Letters: "We conclude that the 20th century warming of the incoming intermediate North Atlantic water has had no equivalent during the last thousand years." READ MORE >>

Trying to convince the countries of the world to reduce their carbon emissions is one hell of a coordination problem. It's no surprise that UN climate talks always descend into bickering and in-fighting. But what if we decided to cool the Earth through geo-engineering means instead? True, that would be far from a perfect solution—we probably couldn't stave off most sea level rise, and the oceans would continue to acidify—but mightn't it be easier to get a global deal? READ MORE >>

The march of science proceeds apace: READ MORE >>

Recently, White House science adviser John Holdren got some unwanted attention when he noted, in a speech at Oslo, that "global warming" might be a "dangerous misnomer." Yes, emitting greenhouse gases will raise overall global temperatures, he noted, but the warming won't be uniform everywhere, and we can expect a lot of weird variations from place to place. So Holdren suggested "global climate disruption" as a preferred term of art. READ MORE >>

Last month, The New Yorker's Jane Mayer published a long piece on how billionaires David and Charles Koch fund a variety of libertarian causes—from Tea Parties to the Cato Institute. Given that the brothers own Koch Industries, the second-largest privately held oil company in America, it's no surprise that the Kochs also like to wade into the carbon/climate debate. (The Koch-funded wing of the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, for instance, has a... creative... READ MORE >>

Yesterday I noted that only one Republican running for a Senate seat this year believed in climate change. That was Delaware's Mike Castle, who got ousted in his state's primary last night by Christine O'Donnell. And what's O'Donnell's deal? Well, she doesn't believe in the greenhouse effect. But she also doesn't believe in evolution. READ MORE >>

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Congress is in session this week and it's not likely that any energy legislation will come up, much less pass. But there's still important maneuvering afoot: Namely, a number of Republicans and conservative Democrats may try to block the EPA from regulating greenhouse-gas emissions on its own: READ MORE >>

These days I do believe we're supposed to hail China as our clean-energy overlords. The country now produces half the world's wind turbines and half its solar panels. How did the Chinese do it? Partly through aggressive renewable-energy laws and various incentives for budding tech industries. And that's to be expected—as long as fossil-fuel externalities go unpriced, renewables are always going to need a little boost. READ MORE >>