Year-end green lists — climate change and denial

Ten days from 2012, we are awash in year-end lists, from best albums and movies to notable celebrity quotes.

But, on the green beat, we get to catalog 2011 on a totally different basis — for example, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s whiz-bang list of extreme weather events in the U.S. costing more than $1 billion this past year. We had 12 in all, to date, ranging from the Groundhog’s Day blizzard of Jan. 29-Feb. 3 to the wildfires in Arizona and New Mexico this summer and fall.

The total cost is about $200 billion — an all-time record.

In a video on the page–also posted to YouTube–NOAA Director Jack Hayes does not talk about global warming due to human activities, per se, but he does say that in his 40 years of tracking the weather, “I’ve never seen one like 2011. . . . We experienced record-breaking extremes in all types of weather.”

And he said, we must be prepared for more extreme weather in the future.  So NOAA has launched a new program — Weather Ready Nation.  Cities and communities must become more “weather-resilient,” he said.

Translation: We are past the point where we can reverse the impacts of climate change–however one believes it is being caused–we have to start adapting.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have conservative pundit Rush Limbaugh, who has been named Climate Change Misinformer of the Year by Media Matters for America, a website dedicated to countering inaccuracies of fact in the conservative media on a range of issues.

The article has a long list of the Rushter’s rants on the subject.  In one, he says he knows climate change is a hoax because it’s backed by liberals and liberals lie.

Meanwhile, Grist, one of the top green news websites, released its list of top stories for the year, which included, of course, Solyndra, but also California’s cap and trade program and lower tech things, such as the growing trend in “collaborative consumption” such as bike and car sharing programs.

The one story they didn’t list that for me was a game-changer was the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study done by Richard Muller, a leading climate skeptic, who found after reviewing about 1.6 billion weather records dating back to the 1800s, that global warming is real, and human contributions are a signficant portion–about one-half.

In testimony before the U.S. Congress, Muller says a broad range of studies agree that the earth’s temperature has increased about 1.2 degrees since the early 1900s and with human’s accounting for about .6 of that figure.

“My hope is that this will win over those people who are properly sceptical,” Muller was quoted as saying an article on the study in The Guardian.

“Some people lump the properly sceptical [sic] in with the deniers and that makes it easy to dismiss them, because the deniers pay no attention to science.”