As we also have noted, the punishing winter storms that have battered Washington are fueling climate change deniers like Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), whose family apparently built an igloo and called it Al Gore's new home.

The Los Angeles Times' blog Greenspace has a nice, short take on how you can have global warming and still get storms like Snowmageddon.

"The cold weather spells in the East have been linked with an 'El Nino' year and a shift in the arctic oscillation that sent a jet of cold air down the Eastern United States and elsewhere," the blog notes. Lost in the hype: Alaska has been enjoying unusually warm weather.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that FirstEnergy Corp. agreed to a $4.7 billion takeover of Allegheny Energy Inc. 

Read more...

More on the controversy surrounding the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The Union of Concerned Scientists comes to the U.N. panel's defense in response to questions regarding its credibility. Those questions stem in part from an apparently faulty claim that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 due to global warming. See the response here.

The IPCC has said it regretted its estimate about those glaciers, which was included in the second of four reports the panel issued on climate change. UCS says basically that one poorly sourced statement shouldn't discredit the whole report. IPCC's 2007 climate study remains the most comprehensive synthesis of climate change science to date, according to UCS.

The Associated Press, though, has a story today about growing concern within the scientific community about that same report that included the Himalayan glacier claims. The report tries to estimate the possible effects on humans and the environment due to climate change, and according to some scientists, relies on more subjective data.

As we’ve been writing about, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) and some other conservatives are using the recent snowstorms to try and fuel skepticism about global warming, while liberals counter that climate scientists predict that more extreme storms are expected in a warming climate.

Time magazine is weighing in today with a story that succinctly lays out the issue. “There is some evidence that climate change could in fact make such massive snowstorms more common, even as the world continues to warm,” the story notes, adding that “hotter air can hold more moisture, so when a storm gathers it can unleash massive amounts of snow.”

The story by Bryan Walsh then calls for both sides to avoid reading too much into any given weather event.


“Ultimately, however, it's a mistake to use any one storm – or even a season's worth of storms – to disprove climate change (or to prove it; some environmentalists have wrongly tied the lack of snow in Vancouver, the site of the Winter Olympic Games, which begin this week, to global warming). Weather is what will happen next weekend; climate is what will happen over the next decades and centuries,” he writes.

Al Gore’s climate advocacy group is launching new TV ads that pressure Senate centrists from Indiana, Missouri, Maine and Arkansas to support comprehensive energy and climate change legislation.

The ads by Repower America – which is part of Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection – show residents from the states touting the benefits of “clean energy” and calling on their senators to get on board.

“Our communities are hurting. We need more jobs, and clean energy is the way to go,” says Dennis Murphy of Missouri.

The climate part of comprehensive climate and energy legislation is surely the harder sell in Congress. But lawmakers face tough questions about energy policy too.

Here are two that some powerful utilities are worried about: who should decide where new transmission lines will be built? And who should pay for them?

A Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee-passed energy bill would give federal regulators new authority over transmission line siting decisions – language designed to overcome NIMBY hurdles and speed up a process that can take years.

Rep. James Moran (D-Va.) will likely take the helm of the House appropriations subcommittee that controls Interior Department and EPA spending.

He would replace Rep. Norm Dicks (D-Wash.), who’s poised to assume chairmanship of the defense spending subcommittee in the wake of Rep. John Murtha’s (D-Pa.) death.

The change would place Moran in an interesting spot as an easterner overseeing Interior's budget.

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) says those who think climate change legislation is dead for the year are “dead wrong.”

Those who think blizzards and record snow falls in Washington will make it tough to move a global warming bill are guilty of "inside the beltway" thinking, Kerry said.

"The inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom that this issue has stalled is dead wrong," Kerry said in a statement e-mailed to The Hill. Read more...

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The Washington Post editorial page hopes the Senate can find a way forward on floundering climate legislation, and has some nice things to say Wednesday about a proposal by Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine).

The Wall Street Journal checks in again on the embattled Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

“Some top officials of a Nobel Prize-winning climate-science organization are acknowledging the panel made some mistakes amid a string of recent revelations questioning the accuracy of some of the information in its influential reports,” the Journal piece notes.

Sen. Jim DeMint’s (R-S.C.) attempt to use the latest D.C. snowstorm to fuel skepticism about global warming is drawing fire from liberal and environmental bloggers.

As Tuesday’s snowstorm approached, DeMint proclaimed via Twitter that “It's going to keep snowing in DC until Al Gore cries ‘uncle.’”

On the blog Treehugger, Daniel Kessler writes, “It's to be expected that climate change skeptics and deniers would use any strange weather to back up their case that climate change is a hoax, but this is beyond the pale.”