Mystery solved about that little tweak of the tax code regarding special treatment of CO2, thanks to some insight passed my way via Capitol Hill: this was not a drafting error poorly identifying CO2 credits but indeed, the Senate has just voted to elevate carbon dioxide to a distinct status. Not as a “pollutant,” but as a natural resource worthy of encouragement and preservation. Huzzah!

Here’s what we know, thanks to THOMAS. The House didn’t pass this loophole, it was slipped in by the Senate. There is no discussion of it in the House report or bill summary (obviously), and the Senate didn’t bother with either one of those things.

Two new studies summarised in a news article in Science magazine point to wind-induced circulation changes in the ocean as the dominant cause of the recent ice losses through the glaciers draining both the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets, not ‘global warming.’

The two stuides referred to are:

‘Acceleration of Jakobshavn Isbræ triggered by warm subsurface ocean waters’ by Holland et al, published in Nature Geoscience.

The Abstract states:

Magazine editors honor global warming image that angered veterans. 

How do you get nominated for a magazine award? Do something that offends almost everyone and tears down an American icon at the same time. Even better, claim you were just trying to get “attention.”

That’s certainly the strategy Time magazine deployed and they are seeing the benefits. Time’s persistent global warming hype led it to run a cover photo of the Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima – only the magazine deleted the flag and replaced it with a tree. The cover read: “How To Win The War On Global Warming.”

The cover, skewered by veterans, critics and even the National Press Photographers Association, was just nominated for an award from the American Society of Magazine Editors. Time was even picked as a 2008 Best Cover Concept Finalist for the design – competing with The New Yorker, Wired and Vanity Fair.

The controversy began with the April 28 issue when Time doctored the famous Iwo Jima photograph by Joe Rosenthal of the Marines raising the American flag. The cover story by Bryan Walsh called green “the new red, white and blue.”

Climate Change: Imagine a society in which children are encouraged to be informants against their families over a phony issue? Imagine no longer.

We're not talking about kids turning in parents who commit serious crimes. We're talking about children tallying up environmental transgressions, such as leaving the water running or the lights on too long.

Sounds benign, almost like a little family fun? That's what NPower, a British electricity provider and creator of the Climate Cops campaign, which has its own Web site, wants the public to think.

But the program has an unpleasant odor. In fact, it is truly Orwellian. Kids are expected to keep diaries in which they record their families' environmental sins — a "climate crime case file" — and are urged to talk about the offenses in their classrooms.

It's just a way to raise awareness of global warming and how waste contributes to climate change, nothing more, NPower says, and children won't really be telling on mom and dad anyway.

Don't be duped. One, the threat of kids informing on their parents is implied and should make anyone uncomfortable. Two, the campaign puts into place a foundation — and a mind-set — that a future informant program could operate on.

LIKE many, I'm finding it hard to decide whether climate change is a man-made phenomenon or part of a natural order, a natural cycle of things.

But it seems as if there can be no debate about this. Dare to challenge the "inconvenient truth", that global warming, leading to climate change, is man-made, and heaven help you. In ages gone by, it seems you either died of the black plague, were drowned as a witch or burned as a heretic. Life choices were thus somewhat limited.

Isn't there now a little of "Middle Ages" intolerance in the climate change debate?

Now, before you bring out the stocks and load up with tomatoes to aim in my direction, let me explain my position.

I'm going to be able to watch my child gasp for air on bad air days because someone gave money to a politician.

—Robert Kennedy Jr., referring to an 'asthma epidemic' caused by illegal coal-burning plants, in which three of his sons are afflicted. There are no illegal coal-buring plants in his home state or the U.S., and there is no 'asthma epidemic' as defined by the CDC.

The Frontier Centre for Public Policy has commissioned some polling on Canadian views of anthropogenic global warming. (You can see the PDF here.) The summary:

Canadians are deeply frustrated by the quality of politicians’ discussions of climate change and global warming according to a nationally representative poll carried out for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy by COMPAS Research and completed September 29, 2008. Such frustrations cut across regions and party groupings.

Most Canadians tend to subscribe to the anthropogenic viewpoint that human activity is responsible for global warming and climate change. An overwhelming majority of the public nonetheless does not believe that the causes of climate change have been fully identified or that the debate has been settled. By a more than 4:1 margin, the public calls upon the media to provide more multi-sided reporting on the issue.

Profound change doesn't always require consensus. Sometimes it is achieved when just a few people see the way ahead and decide to set in motion events that will overtake resistance, change the unsatisfactory status quo, and leave something better in its place.

—From the book, "The Art of Great Decisions,"  by John McCain and Mark Salter, published in 2006.

Slim Pickens was a country and western singer, but a slim picking is not the adjectival phrase for T Boone Pickens and his wealth. One of his books is titled. “The First Billion is the Hardest: Reflections on the Life of Comebacks and America’s Energy Future.” He is busily making the second and likely the third billion much easier. His plan uses the combination of wind power with energy sufficiency and independence for the US. 

Initially, his advertisements put wind power front and center. In doing so, he put on the cloak of green, a phrase I co-opted from Elaine Dewar’s wonderful book of the same name. I’ve used the phrase to describe what many politicians feel forced to do. They understand the real science of climate change, but dare not appear opposed to protecting the environment.

[H/T to Leslie]  A Canadian scientist says the largest known hole in the ozone will occur over the South Pole in the next week. If that happens, it will help us understand global warming.

Dr. Qing-Bin Lu, of Canada’s University of Waterloo, says NASA satellites and laboratory measurements show cosmic rays are the real cause of the seasonal hole in the earth’s ozone layer over the Antarctic. Cosmic rays are tiny, invisible, high-energy particles from exploding stars which constantly strike the earth—and people. Cosmic rays probably cause some of our cancers, by altering the DNA inside our bodies.

However, if Dr. Qing-Bin Lu and others are correct, they also are connected to climate change. The number of cosmic rays hitting the earth varies sharply based on the activity level of the sun and the size of the magnetic wind it projects out into space. A weak sun means a weak magnetic wind and more cosmic rays striking earth. Britain’s BBC recently reported that the solar wind is now blowing at the weakest rate in more than 50 years, and is also 13 percent cooler than it was 15 years ago.

Many thanks for the invitation and for the opportunity to be here with all of you. I have visited the U.S. many times since the fall of communism in November 1989 when – after almost half a century – traveling to the free world became for people like me possible again, but I’ve never been to this beautiful city and to the state of Oregon before. Once again, thank you very much.

I am expected to talk here about global warming today (even though I don’t really feel it, especially not in this room) and my address will be devoted mostly to this issue. As you may expect Oregon is – for me – in this respect connected with the well-known Oregon petition which warned and keeps warning against the irrationality and one-sidedness of the global warming campaign. Rational people know that the warming we experience is well within the range of what seems to have been a natural fluctuation over the last ten thousand years. We should keep saying this very loudly.