It's getting tough to be a global warming skeptic within the public arena. Just ask Oregon state climatologist George Taylor, who may be fired by Gov. Ted Kulongoski for having views not in line with state policy on greenhouse gas reduction.

The article I linked refers to 3 other state climatologists (there are 47 all together) who hold skeptical views, Patrick Michaels of Virginia, David Legates of Delaware and John Christy (incorrectly spelled as Christie in the article) of Alabama (who was also a lead author on the 2001 IPCC Assessment and a contributing author on earlier IPCC reports).

A quick Google search for more information on Taylor led me to a response he wrote to an August, 2005 newspaper article in the Willamette Week in which Taylor addresses, point by point, the criticisms leveled at him in the article.

As an aside, I would encourage people to read the two page Policy Statement on Climate Variability and Change by the American Association of State Climatologists. It covers the difficulty of climate prediction and, perhaps more importantly, the difficulty of verifying the accuracy of climate prediction and also addresses public policy on climate change in a sensible, practical manner.

One of my coworkers emailed me this link, and I had to post it. You know, it's all right not to be serious all the time.

Just when I thought all California politicians were built in the mold of Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer comes Republican Dana Rohrabacher - who speculates that perhaps a period of dramatic climate change 55 million years ago was caused by dinosaur flatulence. The transcript of Rohrabacher's remarks:

ROHRBACHER: So, whether or not how dramatic this change will be, or is, what it’s caused by, are things that honest people, I think, can disagree with, and I really personally, having been a journalist, the first thing I was always cautioned by when someone was claiming, well, everybody is on my side, or everybody says this, or there is a total consensus, almost always when people said that to me over my years as a journalist, it wasn’t true. It was that there were honest people who disagreed and significant disagreement on such issues. We don’t know what those other cycles were caused by in the past. Could be dinosaur flatulence, you know, or who knows? We do know the CO2 in the past had its time when it was greater as well. And what happened when the CO2 was greater since then and now? There have been many cycles of up and down warming. So with that said, I think that we’ve had a great discussion today.

Visiting the link is worthwhile, because you can watch it all on video. Interesting to note, too, that 87 percent of congressional Republicans don't believe in man-made global warming.

Sunday's The New York Times Magazine contained an interview with Drew Shindell, the physicist and climatologist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies who recently testified before Congress that the Bush administration attempted to prevent him from releasing information on global warming. (You may have to create a free account in order to read the article.) He touches on a range of issues, and pulls no punches while doing so.

In explaining how the Bush administration censored climate change research, Shindell attests that "Press releases about global warming were watered down to the point where you wondered, Why would this capture anyone's interest? Once when I issued a report predicting rapid warming in Antarctica, the press release ended up highlighting, in effect, that Antarctica has a climate."

He agrees with the Times interviewer that the administration is "phobic" about adopting energy-efficiency regulations, saying it is "irrational not to conserve when you think of all the advantages, such as keeping money in consumers' pockets instead of sending it to Middle Eastern countries that hate us."

He even finds the term "global warming" to be distasteful, saying it sounds "cozy and comfortable." He prefers the term "Climate meltdown."

An esteemed plethora of our nation's corporate heads--along with sundry experts and organizations, all calling themselves the Global Roundtable on Climate Change--yesterday called on world governments to cut emissions. According to the Reuters article as picked up by CNN, "The group includes General Electric, Ford Motor Co., Toyota Motor North America, investment bank Goldman Sachs, and Wal-Mart among its major corporations." The article helpfully points out that "President George W. Bush's administration has rejected mandatory caps on emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases in the United States that contribute to a documented rise in world temperatures -- which is linked to more severe storms, worse droughts, rising seas and other ills." It will be interesting to see how long the Bush administration will continue to hold out on the issue of emissions caps when one of its key pillars of support--corporate America--is increasingly more vocal about global warming. After all, it's hard to say no to GE and Wal-Mart.

Not to be outdone, yesterday the European Union also called for emissions cuts, as related in an article in this morning's The New York Times (free registration may be required to read the article). The EU's ministers "pledged Tuesday to raise their own targets if industrialized countries like the United States made similar efforts." (The Bush administration must be feeling pretty friendless these days, although I suspect they're more concerned about the stance of corporate America than they are about that of the minister of Finland.)

All is not harmonious amongst the members of the EU, however. A proposal that "20 percent of all energy must come from renewable sources, like wind and solar power, by 2020" was not approved because of resistance from Poland and Hungary, who are concerned that the poorer European countries will further fall behind as they attempt to develop their economies.

Sweden and Denmark, on the other hand, are pushing for a 30 percent target, and the German Parliament has recommended a 40 percent target. Concludes the article, "Such differences could foreshadow a showdown in March, when political leaders are to meet in Brussels and reach a final position."

A delegation of Inuit people from the U.S., Canada, Russia and Greenland are heading to Washington, D.C. to testify that global warming is destroying their way of life. It's long been believed that global warming will have the largest impact on Arctic areas, and many areas have already seen shortened winter seasons.

The delegation will testify before the InterAmerican Commission on Human Rights that the U.S.'s position on global warming is undermining their human rights.

"The impacts of climate change, caused by acts and omissions by the US, violate the Inuit's fundamental human rights protected by the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man and other international instruments," the Inuit argued in a letter to the ICHR. "Because Inuit culture is inseparable from the condition of their physical surroundings, the widespread environmental upheaval resulting from climate change violates the Inuit's right to practice and enjoy the benefits of their culture."

If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen. So said Harry Truman - it's a phrase that holds true in life and especially in politics. A politician with a thin skin isn't going to get very far. I'm sure Al Gore has a thick skin, and it's probably serving him well this week. After "nonpartisan" research organization The Tennessee Center for Policy Research released details of the Gore's electricity consumption, Keith Olbermann revealed that the Gores choose to pay extra to utilize electricity generated via renewable resources. (Click on the watch video link to see the details.)

The criticism doesn't end there, however. From around the blogosphere come cries of hypocrisy, combined with the rather interesting criticism that if Gore is using all that green energy, there won't be any green energy for anyone else to use. A blogger at Economist.com calls Gore's response "flatly silly."

Is Gore green enough to tell other people how to live? I don't know. But I'm sure he knows he's going to take the heat for telling people global warming is a moral issue, and I'm sure he's got a thick enough skin to handle that heat.

Al Gore will be among those testifying before the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works committee this afternoon at 2:30 Eastern time. If your cable system includes C-SPAN3, you can watch there. If you, like me, don't have C-SPAN3, you can watch online.

Three hours. That's how long yesterday's Senate hearing featuring former Vice President Al Gore ran. This after Mr. Gore spoke before the House in the morning. I have to admit I did not get a chance to watch Mr. Gore's House appearance, other than the clips that appeared on the news, but I did watch the full hearing before the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee. Not a whole lot of new information to pass along from the hearing, Mr. Gore is in favor of a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions along with a carbon tax. In fact, Mr. Gore has proposed replacing the payroll tax with a pollution tax. Gore asked the committee not to waste a lot of their question time on that idea, as it wasn't a high priority.

As I've mentioned here before, politics aren't my favorite thing - if you like to see sparks fly, you would enjoy portions of the hearing. Senators Boxer and Inhofe mix it up even before the opening comments, and following Mr. Gore's remarks, Senator Inhofe doesn't pull any punches (wait - shouldn't it be Boxer not pulling punches? Such good pun potential gone to waste) criticizing Gore for his personal energy use and for refusing to take a personal energy ethics pledge.

Speaking of Gore's personal energy use, a zoning ordinance in his neighborhood will be changed as of April 1st, and that will allow the Gores to install solar panels on the roof of their home.

As for the battling senators, we'll be hearing from both of them soon - Katie sat down with Senator Inhofe and Senator Boxer - separately - during a recent visit to Washington and the next several installments of Headline: Earth will feature those interviews.

As I mentioned yesterday, Katie Fehlinger had the opportunity to interview Senators James Inhofe and Barbara Boxer on a recent trip to Washington, D.C. Here is part one of Katie's interview with James Inhofe.

Ailing Cuban leader Fidel Castro took time out from his convalescence from stomach surgery to write a scathing editorial about U.S. biofuel plans.

Castro wrote that more than 3 billion people in the world (almost half the world's population) were condemned to die prematurely of hunger or thirst because of United States plans to convert corn and other "foodstuffs" into fuel for cars. And he says his figures are cautious, not exaggerated.

So, is he right? I don't think so. Yes, corn prices will be on the increase in the short term, but in the longer term - when biofuels will really be widely used - I think a combination of higher efficiency production, and production of fuel from other biomass sources, will at least limit if not eliminate the food vs. fuel problem. In fact, just yesterday I read an article on cellulosic ethanol which states that by using cellulosic materials such as stems, leaves and stalks of plants rather than using corn grain, the food vs. fuel debate simply goes away. There is no competition for materials. Of course, that does take away the organic material that can be plowed under to enrich soils, which adds another layer of complexity to the puzzle of meeting all of our needs.