We wrote yesterday concerning the Twentieth Century Reanalysis Project and of the controversy engendered by, and the threat to credibility surrounding, misquotes in the climate change sphere. We should have added "and misquotes also take away from the main story line."  The point of the posting was the potential lack of correlation between extreme weather and climate change.  We obscured that by focusing on the misquote. So let's return to extremes. A view proffered by Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. is that "there's no data-driven answer yet to the question of how human activity has...

What if we had it all wrong?  What if the weather really wasn't getting more extreme, wasn't getting hotter (or colder, wetter, drier), wasn't changing?  Then  any efforts to rein in carbon dioxide emissions would be misguided and, worse, costly.  Is there any evidence that scientists are getting it all wrong?  The Twentieth Century Reanalysis Project is working on figuring that out.  An international team of climatologists enlisted millions of hours of supercomputing time and plugged in over a century of weather data.  The goal is to permit climate rese...

There was a lot of hype in the papers today about some contest in Dallas with people running around, bumping into each other, dropping balls and otherwise exhaling a lot of greenhouse gases.  We contemplated a discussion of the Superbowl but knew you would be more interested in some shameless marketing.  So here's where we are:  LexisNexis has nominated the blog for the first ever LexisNexis “2011 Top 50 Environmental Law & Climate Change Blogs.”  In their words, “For the first time, the LexisNexis Environmental Law & Climate Change Community is ho...

We’ve previously written in this blog concerning regulatory uncertainty and its impact on investment or growth of renewable energy.  One example of how this has recently played out is in the early retirement of Exelon’s Oyster Creek nuclear facility in New Jersey.  Setting aside any philosophical debate with regard to whether nuclear is a form of energy that should be lauded as a resource that generates no carbon dioxide emissions, we focus here on the issue of regulatory uncertainty, the dilemma that arises when an agency leans toward choosing one means of technology as ...