From Climate Progress quoting James Hansen (emphasis mine):

The point I made with the audience is the overwhelming importance of a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants. Without that, the “101 things” that citizens can do to reduce their emissions do not amount to a hill of beans; all savings of emissions would be blown away by a utility building a new coal-fired power plant. Conversely, a successful moratorium is the main action needed to achieve a stabilization of climate.

A fundamental issue arose, because the “Live Earth” pledge had a waffle-worded statement about coal plants, which implied new coal-fired power plants were o.k. if it was claimed that sometime in the future they would be fitted out for carbon capture and sequestration [”To fight for a moratorium on the construction of any new generating facility that burns coal without the capacity to safely trap and store the CO2“]. Gore’s people confirmed that this was the intended statement of their “energy experts”. When I explained the distinction to Al Gore, he immediately agreed that, by a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants, he meant the same thing that I did: a real moratorium. This is a case where such leadership is essential.

Read more at the link above.

I was wondering when someone would finally get around to posting pictures of the Tucson USHCN surface station online. That day was yesterday. It was originally posted (I’m guessing) at SurfaceStations.org, and quickly picked up by Climate Audit.

The biggest complaint offered by these sites seems to be that the station is in a parking lot. It’s true that situating a weather station in a parking lot is not the best location. However, we need to think about what effect this will have on temperature and precipitation measurements. Everything else equal, a temperature reading taken over an asphalt surface will be higher than one taken over a grassy area. But we’re not interested in temperature. Wait a minute, I thought we were interested in temperature. Nope, it turns out we’re interested in the change in temperature. Just because the station is located in a hot spot means it will add a positive bias, but it does not necessarily mean that it will introduce a change in the trend.
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I’m not big on the use of the term debunking, but wow! Check out Anti-global heating claims - a reasonably thorough debunking.

A sample:

DENIAL CLAIM #5: CO2 is a sufficiently weak greenhouse gas that it could not be responsible for the level of climate change being modeled and observed (Source: distillation of multiple people’s claims at Wikipedia.org).
Debunking: CO2 is a relatively weak greenhouse gas compared to methane or nitrous oxide. If we use the radiative forcing (RF) values from Table 2.1 (page 141) of the IPCC Working Group 1 Report, Chapter 2 and assume a linear relationship between RF and concentration in the atmosphere, CO2 is about 0.0044 Watts per square meter per ppm (Wm-2ppm-1), compared to 0.2706 Wm-2ppm-1 for methane and 0.5016 Wm-2ppm-1 for nitrous oxide. This means that methane is about 62x as powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and nitrous oxide is about 114x as powerful as CO2. The problem is that CO2 concentration in the atmosphere is measured at 379 ppm, while methane is only 1.774 ppm (1,774 ppb), and nitrous oxide is only .319 ppm (319 ppb). Because there is 213x more CO2 than methane, and 1188x more CO2 than nitrous oxide, the fact that CO2 is a relatively weak greenhouse gas is more than compensated for by concentration in the atmosphere. (Source linked above)

From Lifecycle Carbon Footprint Monitor:

As can be seen, my total Co2 equivalent is much less than the typical American. Woohoo! However, it is still more than the World average by 40%. Booo!
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