An article in last week’s British paper, The Telegraph, claimed that the IPCC had made yet another significant mistake – this time overstating the sensitivity of the Amazon rainforest to drought.  It turns out that the article severely misrepresented the state of the science. While that one very dry year did not produce the kind of vegetation changes detectible by satellite imagery, it did, in fact, kill a number of trees, turning the rainforest from a “sink” that absorbed 2 billion tons of CO2, to a “source” of even more CO2 from the resulting number of dead trees. The culpa for an initial post to Desmogblog, taking the IPCC to task, is exclusively mea.  The correct narrative of the rainforest’s vulnerability to severe drought comes courtesy of the scientists at Realclimate.

The US Congress's most ardent global warming sceptic is being accused of turning the row over climate science into a McCarthyite witch-hunt by calling for a criminal investigation of scientists. Climate scientists say Sen. James Inhofe’s call for a criminal investigation into American as well as British scientists who worked on the UN climate body's report represents an attempt to silence debate on the eve of new proposals for a climate change law.

The climate denial echo chamber is again in high gear trying to assassinate the character of respected scientist Michael Mann of Penn State. Their latest ruse is to squawk that Dr. Mann is the indirect recipient of federal stimulus dollars.

That is not at all surprising since last year $3 billion in federal stimulus funds was provided to the National Science Foundation in addition to their normal budget of about $6 billion. That means that about one third of all research grants from the NSF nation-wide benefited from stimulus money.

Lets drill a little deeper into this smear campaign. Penn State and the University of Hawaii both shared a grant of $770,000 for a research project called “Improved Projections of the Climate Response to Anthropogenic Forcing: Combining Paleoclimate Proxy and Instrumental Observations with an Earth System Model”.

Of this money, Dr. Mann received $57,000 (or 7.5%) over a three-year period, or $19,000 a year. Clearly these climate scientists are in it for the money…

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.

Solomon's New Book Full of Hysteria, (Imagined) Persecution, and Fraud

National Post stringer Lawrence Solomon's book-length version of his newspaper series on purported climate change deniers is just as unconvincing - and misleading - as the original Post articles. But at least he admits his motivation for writing it: he's an anti-nuclear, anti-mega-hydro guy watching the environmental tide turn against him.