Last week (February 25, 2009), Dr. James Hansen, the most influential scientist in the alarmist camp, testified before the House Ways & Means Committee on “Scientific Objectives for Climate Change Legislation.” In oral remarks, Hansen, who spoke as a faculty member of Columbia University’s Earth Institute rather than as an employee of NASA, said the scientific objective of climate policy should be to lower atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) from 385 parts per million (ppm) to 350 ppm or less. This, as he surely knows, is an impossible goal barring radical breakthroughs not just in energy production but also in air capture of CO2.

Even if by 2050, the United States, Europe, Canada, Japan, and former Soviet Union achieve zero net emissions and developing countries reduce their carbon intensity to 62% below 2005 levels, this would only be enough to…

I was recently pointed to an amusing post by Joe Romm over at Climate Progress last week about the “unprecedented global warming during the past year.” Joe pointed out that the earth had apparently warmed rapidly (“20 times [greater than] what most climate models have projected we should be experiencing”) during the period January 2008 through January 2009.

It turns out that Joe was only joking—not about the temperature rise, but as to whether or not it was comment-worthy.

As I’ll show you, the global temperature behavior during the last year isn’t particularly noteworthy, but that during the past decade or so, it is starting to become interesting.…

The debate about the environmental impact of ethanol rages on. Last month, the most recent study on the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with ethanol use was published by researchers from the University of Nebraska (Liska et al.). That analysis used the most recent data available on individual facility operations and emissions, observed corn yields, nitrogen fertilizer emissions profiles, and co-product use; all of which prove important because of improved energy efficiencies associated with ethanol production over the past several years. The authors found that the total life-cycle GHG emissions from the most common type of ethanol processing facility in operation today are 48-59 percent lower than gasoline, one of the highest savings reported in the literature. Even without subtracting-out the GHG emissions associated with ethanol co-products (which accounted for 19-38 percent of total system emissions), ethanol would still present GHG advantages relative to gasoline.…

The blogosphere has been much abuzz about the implications of the finding reported last week in Nature magazine that Antarctica, on average, has warmed over the past 50 years.

An author of the report explained to the Associated Press that their findings were especially significant because “contrarians” had latched onto the idea that Antarctica has been cooling, and thus “bucking the trend [of global warming].” The “contrarians” meanwhile, caught somewhat off-guard, mounted a seemingly confused defense focused on attacking the methodology employed to reach such a conclusion rather than the actual contention itself.…