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Obama All-of-the-Above Energy Policy Lacks Moral Urgency

A lot of my friends are still on a high about Obama's recent discovery of the words climate change. He broke his climate silence after Hurricane Sandy. And climate change took prominent place in his inaugural address. In Tuesday’s the State of the Union, he brought it up again. "But for the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate change. Now, it’s true that no single event makes a trend. But the fact is, the 12 hottest years on record have all come in the last...

2012 Hottest Year on Record in US

Last week NOAA announced that 2012 was likely to be the hottest year on record in the continental US based on temperature readings through November. Climate Central has done the math and that chance is a 99.99999999%, based on analysis of 118 years of temperature records through December 10,2012. That should come as no news to anyone who has lived through the winter that never happened, summer hot weather in early spring, a cross-country heatwave, an epic drought, massive wildfires, and balmy fa...

James Hansen: The Runaway Greenhouse Effect

According to a Washington Post poll published in July, only 18% of Americans view climate change as their top environmental concern.  Compare this to 33% who said so in 2007, (amidst a highly publicized IPCC report and Al Gore's Academy Award-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth). The survey findings and follow-up interviews with respondents show that Washington's inaction on climate policy may have caused the issue to recede. Even though many people link extreme weather events to global w...

Climate Change: Game Over or Just Beginning

The Club of Rome, a global network of independent thinkers, has also issued a new report this week: The Report says the main cause of future problems is the excessively short-term predominant political and economic model. “We need a system of governance that takes a more long-term view”, said Professor Randers, speaking in Rotterdam. “It is unlikely that governments will pass necessary regulation to force the markets to allocate more money into climate friendly solutions, and must not ass...

Hansen on Climate Change: I Need Your Help

Climate Scientist and Director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James Hansen decided early in his career that investigating a planet with a climate changing before our eyes was a more interesting and important area of study.  So, he changed his focus from Venus to Earth. Studying global warming on Earth was nothing new to science. British physicist, John Tyndall ,studied the greenhouse effect in the 1850s. When Hansen began speaking out during the Bush Administration of the la...

What happened to the science in Durban?

Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and one of the world's foremost authorities on climate science, Rajendra Pachauri,  would like to have seen the climate science driving the climate negotiations at the COP17 in Durban last week. "I’d like to see the science driving some of the discussions and the decisions that are taken. I’m sorry I don’t see much evidence of that right now", Pachauri told Amy Goodman last week on Democracy Now. AMY GOODMAN: What do you w...

NASA Scientist to President Obama: we must find someone who is worthy of our dreams

  "We had a dream that the new president would understand the intergenerational injustice of human-made climate change. That he would recognize our duty to be caretakers of creation, of the land, of the life on our planet. And that he would exercise hands on leadership, taking the matter to the public, avoiding back-room, crippling deals with special interests. But we will not give up. There can be no law or no regulation that stops us from acting on our dreams. Have no doubt that...

American Heroes Protest Tar Sands Pipeline

Over the next two weeks, from August 20- September 3, heroes from all over America will be taking part in acts of civil disobedience in front of the White House to protest the proposed Keystone XL pipeline . The proposed pipeline would run 1500 miles from the tar sands in Alberta, Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, allowing the Canadian government to connect the tar sands oil project to the United States and foreign markets. Plans are also in the works for the pipeline to crisscross America's farmlan...

Alec Loorz: Climate Youth Activists Unite!

Last month, I streamed some of the live Bioneers 21 Conference. I wanted to see James Hansen, having recently finished his book, Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity.  After his presentation, Dr. Hansen introduced a face I hadn't seen before, Alec Loorz.  Sixteen-year-old, Alec leads a non-profit organization called Kids Vs Global Warming . In this inspiring video, Alec quotes Thomas Jefferson,"every generation needs a ne...

James Hansen on Cap-and-Trade, Tipping Points and Where We Go From Here

In a recent interview, post- the COP15 Conference, the nation's top climate scientist and director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James Hansen discussed his views on cap and trade, tipping points and how we can move forward in the aftermath of Copenhagen. Hansen also has a new book, Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth About the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity where he discusses these issues at length. The entire interview with A...