It is a common refrain in headlines at Joe Romm’s Climate Progress:

• “Koch-Fueled Americans for Prosperity Takes Credit for Bullying GOP Lawmakers Into Climate Denial” (Emilee Piece: December 8, 2011);
• “Koch-Fueled Denial Backfires: Independents, Other Republicans Split With Tea-Party Extremists on Global Warming” (Romm: December 2, 2012); and
• “Koch-Fueled Americans for Prosperity Spends $2.4 Million on Solyndra Attack Ad (VIDEO)” (Stephen Lacey: November 28, 2011).

Smearing and innuendo is hardly fair play. But in this case, Joe Romm has something embarrassing to hide. Just as Koch Industries might be his least favorite company, Enron was his darling company.

Specifically, Romm was not only a cheerleader of Enron (Enron is “a company I greatly respect,” Romm would say). He was also an unpaid consultant and collaborator with the infamously fraudulent division, Enron Energy Services (EES), purveyor of energy efficiency service in (gamed) long-term contracts.…

“There has to be a lot of shrillness taken out of our language,” Environmental Defense Fund chief Fred Krupp said in a moment of candor last month. “In the environmental community, we have to be more humble. We can’t take the attitude that we have all the answers.”(1)

Fred Krupp–please call Joe Romm, the incendiary editor of the (‘Lack of’?) Climate Progress blog of the Center for American Progress. Romm is as shrill as ever, and except to his apocalyptic apostles, people are turned off. What is wine for his hard core is whine to the open-minded, which is the large majority of us. Making jokes about global-warming exaggeration has turned into pretty good sport, as Krupp must know.

The latest from Dr. Doom (what’s new?) is that we are living on borrowed time.…

The innocent layperson may have gotten the idea that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) represented the “consensus” view that urgent government action is needed to avert catastrophic impacts on humanity.

And yet, as Jim Manzi’s recent exchange with uber-alarmist Joe Romm makes perfectly clear, even the latest IPCC report punctures holes in the alarmist claims. Perhaps without realizing it, Romm implicitly admits that the IPCC AR4 report never supported the alarmist view.

Manzi Uses the IPCC to Take Down Al Gore

In his relatively new position as “in-house critic” at The New Republic, Manzi criticized a characteristically alarmist piece that Al Gore had published in the same venue. Manzi wanted to show that Gore was misleading the public on what the “scientific consensus” actually had to say about the risks of climate change.…

In a provocative post, Joe Romm argues that even “strong climate action” would be well worth the effort. Yet Romm’s claim that stabilizing atmospheric greenhouse gases at 445–535 ppm (CO₂-eq) would cost only “one tenth of a penny on the dollar” (through 2050) understates the IPCC’s actual cost estimate by about 95%. In reality, the IPCC’s reported estimate translates into a mitigation cost of about 2.2 cents on the dollar–far far higher than Romm’s figure. Romm’s mistake has nothing to do with climate science: he simply confuses the rate of growth in income, with income itself.

To make matters worse, even when correctly interpreted, the IPCC estimate significantly understates what the cost will be in practice. The IPCC admits that its estimate is a theoretical textbook case, which assumes all participating countries implement their mitigation policies perfectly, and keep them in force throughout the 21st century.…