This week’s debate between the presidential candidates again offered slim pickings on global warming and energy. There was one question specifically about global warming, while energy prices and energy security came up briefly in several contexts.

Senator John McCain (R-Az.) actually began his answer to the first question by saying that the solution to the financial crisis was energy independence. “Now, I have a plan to fix this problem and it has got to do with energy independence.” 

Neither candidate brought up global warming as a major problem that needed to be addressed by the next President until asked about it. Both then agreed that it was a huge challenge that had to be faced. McCain said that he would solve it and address our energy problems by building lots of new nuclear plants. Senator Barack Obama (D-Ill.) said that he would solve it by creating five million new green jobs. Obama also denied that he was against new nuclear power plants, clean coal technology, or more offshore oil production.

Chairman John Dingell

Climage change is making its way back into the news and House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman John Dingell and Rep. Rick Boucher managed to do something that other global warming proposals have not: They’ve actually upset the environmental groups that have been clamoring for reductions on carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases in the first place.

Last week Dingell and Boucher released a climate change legislation discussion draft that, similar to past legislation, calls for enormous emissions reductions by 2050 but has:

Is it time yet to put global warming on milk cartons? Perhaps. You might have noticed, or rather, not noticed the lack of much discussion of global warming in this campaign despite months of hammering by the mainstream media about its supposed danger to the planet. Al Gore even stated last summer that global warming was even more of a threat to us than terrorism. And now that the election campaign has begun, nothing, or almost nothing, on this topic.

Why? One reason is probably that the MSM is believing the polls which oversample the Democrats due to Operation Chaos as well as fraudulent ACORN "voters" and don't want to jinx things for Barack Obama by bringing up the topic of global warming and all the spending they previously claimed would be necessary to counter it.

Another reason is that Mother Nature is just not cooperating with the global warming theory. Here is a sampling of current weather reports from around the nation starting with this report from the Idaho Mountain Express:

According to latest poll results released by SurveyUSA, climate realists' biggest Congressional ally Senator James Inhofe (R), Oklahoma, is maintaining a 16 point lead over his Democratic challenger, Andrew Rice.

Here's a video of a recent debate between Inhofe and Rice on the issue of anthropogenic global warming.

A guest post by Roger Pielke, Jr., University of Colorado

The IPCC offers a number of statements expressing its confidence in the likelihood of various claims based on very explicit guidance that it prepared for conveying uncertainties to its readers. These statements are the subject of much confusion and debate. This post discusses the IPCC statements on attribution of increasing global temperatures to various causes, as reported in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report from 2007.

First, let’s consider three possibilities (which are actually quite close to those presented here by my father on this blog not long ago).

A) Natural forces alone account for the observed warming
B) Natural and human forces together account for the observed warming
C) Human forces alone account for the observed warming