Green Weenie of the Week: The Climate Campaign (Again) | Power Line

The media is slowly starting to give up on the whole game. The New York Times has decided to break up its entire environmental unit and reassign reporters to other beats. A lot of climateers are striking their best Kevin Bacon “All-is-well” poses (from Animal House), but this looks to me just like what happened around the time of 9/11, when urban affairs reporters who couldn’t stop churning our five-part features on how suburban sprawl was ruining St. Louis (or plug in your own local metropolis) were reassigned to other beats. I went from getting two or three calls a month from reporters working on sprawl to none almost overnight. Andy Revkin, one of the better Times reporters, is trying to be upbeat but is concerned.

Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: Extreme Misrepresentation: USGCRP and the Case of Floods

In no US region is there strong statistical evidence for flood magnitudes increasing with increasing CO2. This is precisely the opposite of the conclusion expressed in the draft report, which relies on Hirsch and Ryberg (2011) to express the opposite conclusion.

Arctic Blast Set to Freeze New York and Chicago Next Week - Bloomberg

Temperatures are forecast to be 8 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit (4.4 to 8.3 Celsius) below normal across the Midwest, Northeast, Ontario and Quebec from Jan. 20 to 24, said Matt Rogers, president of Commodity Weather Group LLC in Bethesda, Maryland. The temperature may reach below zero across a large part of the Midwest, including Chicago, during the same time frame, Rogers said.

Black carbon ranks as second-biggest human cause of global warming - The Washington Post

Although some lighter-colored fine particles can have a cooling effect because they block sunlight, other black carbon sources have a warming effect because they absorb it. They also accelerate glacier melting and can disrupt regional weather patterns.
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“There are exciting opportunities to cool climate by reducing soot emissions but it is not straightforward,” Forster said, adding that cutting emissions from diesel engines and domestic wood and coal fires is “a no-brainer” because it would improve public health and the climate. Fine particles cause heart and respiratory problems, leading to premature death, as well as asthma and other illnesses.

These emissions cuts would produce an immediate cooling effect, the authors estimated, which would avoid nearly a 1-degree Fahrenheit temperature rise in the near term.

“You save lives, and you produce really fast cooling,” said Durwood Zaelke, president of the Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development.