on-climate.com

From Andrew C. Revkin and James Kanter, The New York Times.

The decade of 2000 to 2009 appears to be the warmest one in the modern record, the World Meteorological Organization reported in a new analysis on Tuesday.

The announcement is likely to be viewed as a rejoinder to a renewed challenge from skeptics to the scientific evidence for global warming, as international negotiators here seek to devise a global response to climate change.

The period from 2000 through 2009 has been “warmer than the 1990s, which were warmer than the 1980s, and so on,” Michel Jarraud, the secretary general of the international weather agency, said at a news conference here.

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From firedoglake

It should be bizarre, but is in fact grimly typical, how the whole phony “climate-gate-scandal” has played out so far. Hundreds of emails between climate scientists were hacked — stolen — from servers at East Anglia University. The stolen materials were then misrepresented, distorted, and lied about, and the scientists involved abused, insulted, and accused of everything from deliberate fraud to acting as the willing dupes of the shadowy liberal-fascist “global warming industry.”

The bizarre part is that the only people being asked to Seriously Question Their Motives and Practices, or who are facing scrutiny for what they did, are the climate scientists who just got robbed, even though there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that they have actually done anything clearly unethical. (The worst bit is the suggestion as to deleting emails, something that everyone concedes is pretty bad and nobody is defending, though there’s no proof anything was ever deleted.) More important, nothing in all this nonsense even approaches a challenge to the science that shows the reality of global climate change, at least to a reasonable person.

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From Leah Germain, University World News.

Proposals from China and India for the Copenhagen climate change conference that patent protection should be weakened for green inventions have generated significant concerns in universities, colleges and research centres.

Pro-intellectual property activists argue that a patent for their invention could mean the difference between a marketable, successful product and an interesting idea. Intellectual property rights or IPR and patent protection laws are coveted since they protect an innovator’s right to their hard work.

But developing country governments have noted that licences to reproduce a product can be expensive. China and India, along with 77 other developing countries, have set out a proposal for discussion at Copenhagen to liberalise global intellectual property rights for new innovations designed to reduce carbon emissions.

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From The Guardian

This editorial calling for action from world leaders on climate change is published today by 56 newspapers around the world in 20 languages.

Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.

Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year’s inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world’s response has been feeble and half-hearted.

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