Forbes.com has an interesting editorial on why “all hope for action to limit climate change died” in 2010, when Senate Leader Harry Reid moved energy legislation this week with no firm caps on GHG emissions.

No doubt there are strong opinions on either side of the issue of what motivated the discussion of climate change and what caused Reid to move on energy legislation without GHG caps. This editorial writer suggests that a political issue “died” for political reasons.

With the health care vote out of the way, the Obama administration and Congress are once again focusing on climate change regulation.

President Obama’s top aides huddled yesterday with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Democratic committee leaders to map out a strategy for cobbling together 60 votes on a comprehensive energy and climate change bill once lawmakers return next month from their spring break.

Fox13Now cameras recorded an interesting debate outside of the Utah Legislature this past Wednesday. The discussion was between UT State Rep. Mike Noel (who is chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee) and former Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson. Anderson was aided in the debate by a few of the more opinionated and boisterous members of the gathered crowd.

The debate is about 8 minutes long and goes through a few less-than-comfortable moments. However, it generally gets to the heart of the entire debate over how to proceed in the face of a rapidly changing scientific “consensus” over the issue of climate change.

Via the LA Times – California’s nonpartisan legislative analyst’s office report states that pending global warming law could have negative impacts on the state’s already lagging economy. “Short-term job losses can be expected.”

Senator Inhofe, ranking minority member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works has just released a damning Senate report, titled “Consensus‟ Exposed: The CRU Controversy.” The just-released report reviews the leaked emails and documents from the East Anglia Climate Research Unit (and the associated “Climategate” issues). The report claims that,

CRU EMAILS SHOW SCIENTISTS

• Obstructing release of damaging data and information;
• Manipulating data to reach preconceived conclusions;
• Colluding to pressure journal editors who published work questioning the climate science ―consensus; and
• Assuming activist roles to influence the political process.

Ralph Hillman, Executive Director of the Australian Coal Association discusses Australian efforts to implement carbon capture and storage (CCS), the recent Senate vote on the ETS, and the COP15 conference in Copenhagen.

The Australian Senate has voted against their proposed emissions trading scheme (ETS) a second time. Further debate saw the Senate then reject a motion for a third reading of the bill. (The Aussie emissions trading scheme is similar to the American Cap & Trade climate bill in that it aims to cap greenhouse gas emissions through legislated caps and by imposing higher costs on GHG emissions.)

via wsj.com

In this just-released report, Lord Monckton investigates the unfolding ClimateGate scandal.

Monckton’s work follows the release of several years worth email and files from the East Anglia University Climate Research Unit (CRU). Monckton asserts that those files have revealed a sordid morass of systemic corruption in the climate science field. He alleges that, through the emails and files, we can see how a small group of politically-connected and financially-motivated climate scientists routinely distorted their research findings,

to fit a nakedly political story-line profitable to themselves and congenial to the governments that, these days, pay the bills for 99% of all scientific research.

Interesting Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute research shows that some shell-building marine life  (clams, shrimp, lobster, coral, etc.) actually increase their ability to build shells at higher levels of CO₂ levels.

“We were surprised that some organisms didn’t behave in the way we expected under elevated CO2″…“They were somehow able to manipulate CO₂…to build their skeletons.”

While some species were sensitive to changing CO₂ levels, some species of coral and lobster “didn’t seem to care about CO₂ until it was higher than about 1,000 parts per million [ppm] … a couple … didn’t respond till it was sky-high—about 2,800 parts per million.”