California and several other states have leapt into the Senate fray over climate change, attacking a GOP-led measure.

The United Nations is under attack from climate skeptics, but that hasn’t stopped it from continuing to issue warnings about modeling that predicts dangerous global warming.

A UN report released Tuesday looks at why various national emissions pledges won’t hold global temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius or less. That’s the level needed to prevent the most devastating effects of climate change, climate scientists say.

“Yearly greenhouse gas emissions should not be more than 40 and 48.3 gigatonnes of CO2-equivalent in 2020 and should peak between 2015 and 2021, according to new modeling released on Tuesday by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP),” notes this Reuters account of the report.

A swing at EPA’s climate change rules will end up hitting – and bloodying – Detroit automakers.

That’s the case the White House is making as it fights Capitol Hill plans that would nullify EPA’s power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, refineries and other industrial sites.

The effort to block these planned EPA regulations would also upend a popular upcoming rule that creates a single, national mileage and emissions standard for automobiles.

Just what does a czar do anyway? 

Judicial Watch, a public interest group, is suing the Energy Department and the Environmental Protection Agency to get documents that may suggest what role Carol Browner has played in developing climate change and other energy policies in the administration.

Browner was a former administrator of EPA under the Clinton administration. Her role in the current White House is a bit more nebulous: special assistant on energy and climate. The media routinely shortens that to climate czar.

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Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) crowed Tuesday that recent events prove he was right seven years ago when he called global warming the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American public.”

Inhofe, the ranking member on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee and Public Enemy Number 1 in the eyes of climate bill advocates, pointed to recently uncovered errors in a widely cited U.N. climate change study, hacked “Climategate” emails that suggest climate scientists suppressed dissenting views, and comments by a leading climate scientist that the planet has not warmed significantly in the past 15 years to support his contention that the whole thing is, in fact, a giant hoax.

But Lisa Jackson, administrator of EPA, said issues Inhofe and other Republicans raised at an EPW hearing on Tuesday do not undermine the overwhelming scientific evidence that the planet is warming and humans are a leading cause.

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Pop and hip-hop stars are trying to accomplish what Democrats and green groups haven’t on their own: to win enactment of a sweeping climate and energy bill.

Two separate events this week highlight joint efforts between environmentalists, urban advocates and pop stars around energy policy.

On Tuesday afternoon, will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas is slated to announce a new partnership between the popular band and three groups including the League of Conservation Voters (LCV).

Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) on Tuesday declined to say if he will push to bring a controversial natural gas drilling method under federal environmental regulation, noting that his inquiry with Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) has just begun.

“We are just at the beginning of the process right now, so we are not reaching conclusions, we are initiating an inquiry,” he told reporters.

The pair this month sent letters to eight companies that use a practice called hydraulic fracturing, a method increasingly being employed to access abundant U.S. supplies of natural gas from shale formations.

Don’t expect a sweeping White House climate and energy proposal any time soon.

While the administration has become newly assertive in the healthcare fight by floating its own overhaul plan, White House climate and energy czar Carol Browner said Tuesday that a repeat performance isn’t in the offing right now.

Instead, she said the White House is very engaged in the effort to get a climate and energy bill done but leaving lawmakers to craft the guts of the measure.

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) said Tuesday that Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) remains committed to tackling energy and climate legislation. .

"He affirmed he wants a bill and wants a bill soon," Kerry told a climate change conference at the National Press Club.

Kerry said the election of Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.), which ended Democrats' filibuster-proof 60-vote majority, doesn't change the landscape for the climate bill.

"It was always going to take more than just Democrats to do this," Kerry said.

The comments come amid uncertainty about whether a controversial measure to limit greenhouse gas emissions can gain traction in the Senate.