Links

Obama: Learn from Sweden, home of the carbon tax | The Daily Caller

Obama’s praise of Sweden comes at an odd time, since just last week, the administration hailed booming U.S. oil production for lowering the trade deficit and increasing economic growth last quarter.

Scientist James Lovelock on why UK winters are getting colder - FT.com

The next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, due to be published in part next month, will have to address the fact that, despite an increase in the use of fossil fuels, and carbon dioxide emissions, temperatures have not risen as rapidly over the past 15 years as in previous decades. So what does Lovelock make of this anomaly?

“I remember back to the IPCC in the 1990s, the ice-core data were coming in very well,” he says. “At that time you could look at the temperatures in Antarctica and the atmospheric concentrations together over about 500,000 years, now you can look at about a million, and it’s extraordinary, there’s a complete one-to-one correlation between temperature and CO2. So they said, ‘Right, well we know the sensitivity now, so we can predict the climate’. The problem is that there’s now all that junk going into the atmosphere from burning fuels so the sensitivity’s no longer what it was.”

Some have suggested an increase in aerosols – particles of smoke, and mist in the earth’s atmosphere that reflect some of the sun’s heat – has affected temperatures. Lovelock agrees and he points to the smoke produced as a result of large-scale coal and forest burning in China and Indonesia, suggesting that the growth of emerging economies could, in fact, be contributing to a short-term cooling effect.

Hagan campaign says she opposes carbon tax - The Hill's E2-Wire

Sen. Kay Hagan’s campaign said the North Carolina Democrat doesn’t support a carbon tax, despite a new advertising push that suggests she does.

“She opposes it (as evidenced by the act she voted against it),” Sadie Weiner, a spokeswoman for Hagan’s 2014 reelection effort, told The Hill in an email.