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I’ve been meaning to thrown in my congratulations to Gavin Schmidt of NASA and RealClimate.org, who is the first recipient of the American Geophysical Union’s new $ 25,000 annual prize for the year’s top climate science communicator.

Yes, you read that right, $ 25,000! (Full disclosure: I am on the board of directors of the American Geophysical Union, but I did not select Schmidt for the prize or have fore-knowledge of his selection; nor was I involved in the creation of the prize, which is funded by Nature’s Own.)

Schmidt is a very worthy choice—RealClimate.org has revolutionized climate science communication online since its inception in the mid-2000s. And Schmidt has built from that platform to become a major commentator, and a lucid one at that, on outlets like CNN.

But at least as newsy as Schmidt’s choice is the creation of this prize in the first place.

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What a difference a year can make. While the consensus on the Hill may not have grown stronger in the interim—I’m looking at you, House Republicans—the American public seems to be increasingly wising up to the idea that global warming is, in fact, a real threat and not some nefarious liberal plot to deprive it of its God-given right to pollute.

That is the principal finding of a new survey, entitled “Global Warming’s Six Americas,” that was released this past week by the Center for American Progress. The survey, which the authors describe as an “audience segmentation analysis,” splits the American public into six distinct groups based on their level of engagement with global warming: alarmed, concerned, cautious, disengaged, doubtful, and dismissive.

The authors polled 2,129 American adults in the fall of 2008 on a variety of issues related to global warming, including risk perceptions, policy preferences, and values.

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This is my final posting debunking professional climate denier Joanne Nova’s “The Skeptics Handbook.”

Nova’s final pseudo-scientific arguments is greenhouse signature.

The greenhouse signature argument boils down to the following:

Because weather balloons haven’t yet been able to locate the “hot spot” – a patch of air above the tropics that should show signs of greenhouse gas-induced warming (hence, the greenhouse “signature”) – there must be something else causing the warming. This was somehow also proof that the models had it all wrong – since they had predicted that, in the tropics, the warming of the troposphere should have been larger than that of the surface.

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Today we’ll look at two more of the (supposedly) bullet-proof points in Joanne Nova’s “The Skeptics Handbook.”

“Professional Speaker” turned climate expert Nova rehashes two of the more common skeptic talking points, that: the world is no longer warming and the Vostok ice core record proves that rising CO2 emissions are not the cause of warmer temperatures.

As skeptics love to point out, the planet has not appreciably warmed over the last decade even though carbon dioxide levels have greatly increased. While it’s true that surface temperatures have remained essentially flat over the last 10 years, taking such a myopic view of the temperature record obscures the much more meaningful long-term trends.

Indeed, if you look at the temperature record of the last 150 years or so, you’ll find it extremely hard not to notice the obvious upward trend (there’s a reason why the nine warmest years on record have all occurred between 1998 and 2008).

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There is a warm air of celebration in the DenierSphere because the statistical mavens at Climate Audit and WattsUpWithThat have discovered an error in the October global temperatures as reported by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).

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Journalist and failed politician Christopher Walter (the self-celebrating Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley) has launched a blustering counter-attack on Dr. Gavin Schmidt at RealClimate, attempting to avenge Schmidt's impertinence for picking apart Monckton's amateur science submission to a newsletter of the American Physical Society.

I won't wade into the science: Drs. Schmidt and (Tim) Lambert (at Deltoid ) have done an admirable job of that already. But Monckton's tactics are evident even in the way he sets up his piece.