The times are changing in the wake of Climategate. And more is to come as the polluted science embedded in the email exchanges gets reviewed by talented amateurs and pros alike on the blogosphere (see Climate Audit,  Roger Pielke Jr., and WattsUpWithThat, in particular).

Given time, the rethink will go mainstream. Scientists are truth seekers at heart, but an entrenched mainstream of climate scientists–so many of them friends and political allies–will need to be nudged out of their denialism.

Old voices are challenging their ‘mainstream’ colleagues, and new voices are coming forth. I have seen this clearly here in Houston (examples below), and I expect it is happening elsewhere.

Consider what Andy Revkin, the recently retired climate-change science writer at the New York Times, told the public editor at the Times regarding Climategate: “Our coverage, looked at in toto, has never bought the catastrophe conclusion and always aimed to examine the potential for both overstatement and understatement.”…

My ‘Left’ friends are mad at me now that the climate debate/ discussion has shifted, at least temporarily, from Save the World to Why Did We Fail? Here is what a former Enron executive (his name will remain confidential) emailed me a few days ago:

Rob- shame on you. The [Breakthrough Institute] article [Apocalypse Fatigue: Losing the Public on Climate Change] names only 3 reasons why the U.S. will not address climate mitigation: far off threat, greed, and telling them what they don’t want to hear. It ignores the real reason: the constant effort from people like yourself to undermine the case for action with its ancillary affect of dividing the country and paralyzing the system.

Then the sarcasm comes in:

I am not being facetious: you should pat yourself on that back for helping create an atmosphere that will prevent any meaningful action on the false threat of climate change from happening in this country.

One of the ugliest battles in the blogosphere climate wars has involved the newly released Superfreakonomics, sequel to the best-selling Freakonomics. In the new book’s final chapter (available here in pdf), economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner set out to challenge the view that massively restricting carbon emissions is the only hope for averting planetwide catastrophe.

In this post I will link to some of the major commentary on the book so far, and then focus on U.C. Berkeley economist Brad DeLong’s specific claims that Levitt and Dubner’s arguments in support of geoengineering are somehow “bad economics.” As we’ll see, Levitt and Dubner might be wrong, but if so they are wrong because of the numbers. DeLong is painting their views as self-evidently absurd, but that’s only because he himself is overlooking a basic economic point.…

[Editor: This MasterResource post from July is reprinted given the ‘war on coal’ strategy by environmental groups and certain activist strands of the upstream natural gas industry, led by Chesapeake Energy (Aubrey McClendon.]

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., president of Waterkeeper Alliance, posits in the Financial Times (July 19) that converting our fleet of coal-fired power plants to natural gas could be accomplished “practically overnight” and will have the effect of “jump-starting our economy….without the expense of building new power plants.” Thus did Kennedy express his new-found love of natural gas: It’s our “bridge fuel to the ‘new’ energy economy.” (Where have we heard that before–wasn’t that Enron’s tag line decade or two ago?)

Yet Kennedy’s proposal ignores the extremely high cost of fuel conversion (upwards of $100 million for a medium-size coal plant) and the added fuel cost to burn gas.…