I suspect very few of us Coloradans will ever forget the day, a few years back, when our nitwit former governor posed before the cameras and pronounced that “today, the entire state of Colorado is on fire.”  Full story »

Weather reached a record-breaking 84 degrees in my area of Michigan, the Mitt State. This time of year, we are usually still wearing out mitt-ens. It was the hottest March day ever on record in the state, continuing a record blitz of early and mid-summer temps followed by a much milder than normal winter. The blue herons never left to fly south.

The stretch has been wonderful. The spring peeper frog started chirping a week ago. The mosquitoes are just hatching but the daffodils, crocus, even the forsythia, are already in full bloom. The robins are back and so are the red-winged blackbirds. Full story »

In case you missed it, today is Vernal Equinox 2012. From everybody here at S&R, may your day and your night be of approximately equal duration…  :)

Photograph: Stonehenge Aotearoa, New Zealand. Click image for more.

Earlier this morning Chris offered up a post entitled “Why are environmentalists missing a mild-weather opportunity?” It raises a pragmatic point about how the climate “debate” plays out in the public sphere and is well worth a read. Go ahead – I’ll wait.

Predictably – and by “predictably,” I mean that last night I e-mailed our climate guru, Brian Angliss, and said “when Chris’s post lands, here’s what’s going to happen,” and it has played out as though I had scripted it; the denialists have jumped on the post in an attempt to cast Chris and the rest of the S&R staff as “hypocrites.” One prominent anti-science type wants you to believe that the message is “we know weather isn’t climate, but let’s lie to people anyway!”

Like I say, as predicted.

The truth is that Chris’s post is part of a larger context. Full story »

[Update When I corrected the number of documents that Heartland authenticated on March 15 from eight to seven, I missed a few other places where minor corrections and updates were needed. I've updated this first section to make it clearer that Heartland authenticated the seven internal documents that were published.

See also the 3/19/12 Editor's Note at the bottom of the post.]

Today is March 16. 31 days ago, on Valentine’s Day, eight seven internal Heartland Institute documents that revealed the Institute’s 2012 budget, 2012 and 2011 donors, and their plans for climate disinformation for the coming year, were published without permission. 21 days ago, Massachusetts Representative Edward Markey, ranking member on the House Committee on Natural Resources, gave Joseph Bast of The Heartland Institute a deadline of today to authenticate those eight seven documents.

[Correction: When this post was written, Heartland's response to Markey had not yet been published. However, Heartland did respond to Markey's requests. The following section has been updated accordingly.]

Bast and The Heartland Institute refused to comply with Markey’s request and deadline. As such, we can now assume that Heartland’s silence means that

On March 15, Bast and The Heartland Institute responded to Markey’s request. Their response confirms that:

1. the seven internal documents are authentic;
2. those documents are accurate and correctly describe the subjects contained within the documents; and
3. those documents have not been changed since they were obtained and published.

Full story »

There’s still time for one more doozy of a snowstorm before winter gives up its ghost, I tell myself—although the next storm we get will be the first. We’ve had hardly any snow at all here this winter, which is saying something considering that I live in western New York, famous for the thick bands of lake-effect snow that pummel us every year. This year, not so much.

Everyone’s talking about it—what a mild winter we’ve had. How little snow has fallen. How warm it’s been. Everyone. And it’s not just here; it seems to be all across the country.

I can’t help but wonder about the missed opportunity:  Why hasn’t someone been using the mild weather to bang the drum about climate change? Full story »

Just the other morning, I ran across this article from ThinkProgress:

Inhofe: God Says Global Warming Is a Hoax

That article links to a short clip from an interview Inhofe gave to one Vic Eliason at Voice of Christian Youth America to promote his book The Greatest Hoax:

“Well actually the Genesis 8:22 that I use in there is that “as long as the earth remains there will be springtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night.” My point is, God’s still up there. The arrogance of people to think that we, human beings, would be able to change what He is doing in the climate is to me outrageous.”

Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy. Tsk. Tsk. Tsk. Full story »

Last week, in part one of our series on Denver photographer Greg Thow, we saw some fantastic shots of the 5280, one of America’s most beautiful cities. Of course, stunning nature photography is a prerequisite for shutterbugs living in Colorado, and while it was his urban photos that first caught my attention, Thow has an eye for the Centennial State’s trees, mountains and skies, as well. Full story »

Figure 1 – The carbon cycle

Update: To read other articles in this series, click here.

Over the last few decades, scientists have learned a lot about how life interacts with the air, land, and sea. And in the process, they’ve made observations that have demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that the increasing carbon dioxide in the air is from people burning coal, petroleum, and natural gas.

So how did the scientists put together all the pieces to make a complete conclusion? They started with an understanding of how plants use carbon during photosynthesis. That knowledge showed that the increased carbon dioxide in the air was from plants. Then they formulated some guesses as to where that much plant-based carbon dioxide could come from and, by process of elimination and careful accounting, determined that the source was human consumption of fossil fuels. Full story »

by Brett Keegan

Shortly after five in the morning, a sun still buried behind the hills threads a paper-thin line across a level horizon. It’s a hazy shade of red, fragile and alone in the black space spattered by stars. Four hikers—three high school students and a forester, a father to one member of the group—wait for it to finish its climb, as they watch from Mount Marcy’s summit. Hiking in the middle of summer, they nevertheless wear winter coats, long jeans, and wool hiking socks. Still, they shiver.

At 5,344 feet, the wind is ruthless. Around them, gusts and alpine climate blast plants into stubby patches, cracks sheltering roots and veins of frigid water. Slick lichen drink in clouds parting against the peak, and red and green patches of moss pockmark the clean gray granite. Here, air has a clean taste, faintly metallic—like a garden after a thunderstorm, when fire and rain have sterilized the air. Full story »

It’s now been 17 days since confidential Heartland Institute documents describing the Institute’s budget and fund raising plan for 2012 were published on the web. In that time, Heartland has steadfastly refused to authenticate the content of the published documents even as they have implied the documents’ authenticity with email screen captures and multiple claims that the documents were stolen. It’s difficult to steal a document from someone if they’re not in possession of the document in the first place, after all.

Over the last 17 days, Heartland president Joseph Bast has been very busy, what with all the emails, interviews, blog posts, and detailed analyses of allegedly fabricated documents. So why hasn’t he officially acknowledged the authenticity of the Heartland documents? Has he simply been too distracted by begging for donations and threatening journalists to execute on his responsibilities as the head of The Heartland Institute? Full story »

On February 24, 10 days after multiple internal documents from a Heartland Institute Board meeting were published on the web, The Heartland Institute posted redacted screen captures of some of the emails that had been sent to Peter Gleick’s spoofed email address. These emails show that there are some discrepancies between the files Heartland transmitted and those that were later published. The emails also show how easy it was for Gleick to impersonate a member of Heartland’s Board. Full story »

On February 24, The Heartland Institute published a press release from Heartland’s president Joseph Bast announcing that they’d published screen captures of several emails. While I’ll have more to say about the emails themselves in the next day or so, I wanted to briefly focus on a different point.

Toward the end of the release, Bast writes

We repeat our request that the fake climate change strategy memo be removed from Web sites and blogs such as DeSmog Blog, Think Progress, and the Huffington Post, along with documents that were stolen from Heartland. It is the ethical thing to do. [emphasis added]

Given The Heartland Institute’s history of unethical behavior, calling on others to behave ethically is the height of chutzpah. Full story »

I began my career as an engineer in a large Illinois manufacturing plant. Chuck, the only African-American engineer in the company, was comically paranoid—he rarely spoke above a whisper, refused to say anything over the phone, and before every meeting would check outside his door to see if anyone was lurking in the hallway. When Chuck was passed over for a promotion, he left the company. A year later I heard the head of engineering explain why Chuck had not gotten the job, “Reinhardt (the plant manager) was never going to promote a n…..r.” The moral of the story, obviously enough, is that Chuck’s paranoia was justified.

Gas prices are predicted to go up to $5 in the summer. The timing smells. I may be paranoid, but that doesn’t mean I am wrong.
Full story »

Recently, a left-wing colleague described his vision of where America is headed over the next forty years–breakdown of government, mass starvation, roving bands of marauders, etc. It’s interesting that this is exactly the same vision shared by those on the far right who star in the new TV show Doomsday Preppers, about people who are stockpiling cases of beans in their suburban basements, while asking themselves, “What load would Jesus shoot?” Maybe the visions of both left and right are so similar because that future has been portrayed so many times in movies.

Of course, we could end up like that. But we probably won’t.

Full story »