Energy pick ardent about climate change - USATODAY.com

Chu is "arrogant" with a "we-know-best attitude," says Ignacio Chapela, a UC Berkeley ecologist who clashed with Chu over Chu's plan for the university and the Lawrence Berkeley lab to take part in a research effort funded by energy giant BP.
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Past Energy secretaries have often been content to take orders from above, says the University of Texas-Austin's Tad Patzek, a former UC Berkeley colleague.

"Chu will … want to implement his own policies. So there's this potential for conflict," says Patzek, who clashed with Chu for the Nobelist's enthusiasm for biofuels, gasoline substitutes derived from plants. "I actually don't know why he agreed to do this."

Those who know him say he's up to the job.

Chu's ex-wife is confident he will make progress on the intractable problem of how to power the nation without destroying the environment.

"I'll be stunned if he doesn't succeed," says Lisa Chu-Thielbar. "He might leave a few bloody corpses behind him, but he won't succumb to pressure. He'll do what he thinks is right."

What global warming? U.S., Europe feel big chill -- chicagotribune.com

But climate change shows no end in sight, scientists say
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LONDON — Where has global warming gone when we need it most?

As cities from Chicago to London deal with an unusually bitter winter, weather records show that 2008 was one of the cooler years in the last decade. And the early months of 2009 are shaping up as "numbing" in the United States, according to the Farmer's Almanac, that nearly 200-year-old source of traditional weather lore.

The chilly weather has fueled arguments that man-made global warming is bunk. "This [climate] 'crisis' is over," insists Joseph Bast, president of the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, which will sponsor a conference for climate change dissenters in March in New York.

Local lightning trackers promise better weather probe

The company's reference radiosonde probe will sample humidity, temperature, wind speed and direction and barometric pressure 18 to 25 miles above Earth, said Pekka Utela, market segment director for meteorology applications at Vaisala's Finland operation.

"The critical factors in climate change are temperature and water vapor, greenhouse gas," he said from the American Meteorological Society's annual meeting, being held in Phoenix through Thursday. "At this time the amount of water in the upper atmosphere is not really known."
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"The data available is severely lacking in many areas," he said. "There are big gaps in what we know about the climate. There has not been enough data available."