Climate change conference lures no congressmen - BlogPost - The Washington Post

This year’s climate talks are the first in years where not a single member of Congress is attending.

Only a handful of congressional aides — including one to Boxer, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.), Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) and House Energy and Commerce Committee ranking member Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) — are making the trip.

The 2009 U.N. negotiations in Copenhagen represented the high-water mark in terms of congressional attendance, with then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) leading a delegation of more than 20 members, including Waxman, to the talks. Kerry and Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), the top Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, also attended separately. Roughly 50 House and Senate aides made the trip as well.

Matt Ridley: Global Warming Could Be Good

Today’s excerpt from Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist gives another reason why we shouldn’t fear global warming—extra warmth will be good for us.

First FOIA request launched after Climategate 2.0 – this one to the US Department of Energy | Watts Up With That?

It appears that the focus of this has to do with the refusal to give up station data in and the DOE’s apparent complicity in that issue as revealed in the CG2 emails in 2009 from Dr. Phil Jones at CRU.

Record low temp in Corpus Christi

AN ALL TIME RECORD LOW TEMPERATURE FOR THE MONTH OF NOVEMBER OF 27 DEGREES WAS SET IN CORPUS CHRISTI TEXAS ON MONDAY 28NOV11.

Malcolm Gladwell, tipping points and Climategate • The Register

Best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell had a powerful impact on the way climate change was marketed to the public, without even knowing it. Gladwell's marketing book, published in 2000, embedded the phrase "tipping point" into the public's imagination, and this in turn was used to raise the urgency of climate change.

It seems ridiculous today, with climate sensitivity models being tuned downwards, natural variability recognised as increasingly important, and climate institutions talking about a period of long-term cooling. Much of the urgency went out of the window after countries failed to agree on a successor to the Kyoto agreement at Copenhagen in 2009, and the costs and taxes of "low carbon" strategies are political poison.