George Bush today reiterated his concerns about greenhouse gases:

And therefore, I remind those who share my concern about greenhouse gases that nuclear energy produces no greenhouse gases. If you are interested in cleaning up the air, then you ought to be an advocate for nuclear power. (Applause.) Without nuclear power here in the United States, there would be nearly 700 million additional tons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere every year. There is no single solution to climate change, but there can be no solution without nuclear power.

Since Ban Ki Moon’s Washington Post op-ed, drought and Darfur seems to be on the agenda. Today, AP moved this feature, which seems to be getting widespread play:

Decades of drought helped trigger Darfur’s violence as rival groups fought over scarce water and arable land.

Now, experts fear the war and its refugee crisis are making the environment even worse, leaving the land increasingly uninhabitable and intensifying tensions with no end to the drought in sight.

Darfur’s tragedy could be repeated in much of North Africa and the Middle East, experts fear, because growing populations are straining a very limited water supply. Data show rainfall steadily declining in the region, possibly because of weather changes linked to global warming.

On the heels of Europe’s remarkable summer of 2003, last autumn and winter were anomalously warm – as much as three standard deviations from normal, likely the warmest in 500 years, according to Luterbacher et. al in GRL. ((Exceptional European warmth of autumn 2006 and winter 2007: Historical context, the underlying dynamics, and its phenological impacts, Luterbacher et al., GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 34, L12704, doi:10.1029/2007GL029951, 2007)) The coolest (pardon the pun) part:

Phenological impacts related to this warmth included some plant species having a partial second flowering or extended flowering till the beginning of winter. Species that typically flower in early spring were found to have a distinct earlier flowering after winter 2007.

A group of climate modelers at Lawrence Livermore and elsewhere has taken issue (in the peer-reviewed literature) with an argument made by Roger Pielke Sr. and others that the models cannot adequately explain variability in ocean temperatures:

Using simulations of 20th century climate performed with 13 numerical models, we demonstrate that the apparent discrepancy between modeled and observed variability is largely explained by accounting for changes in observational coverage and instrumentation and by including the effects of volcanic eruptions. Our work casts doubt on two recent claims: (i) that the 0- to 700-m layer of the global ocean experienced a substantial OHC decrease over the 2003 to 2005 time period and (ii) that models cannot replicate such changes. Our analysis shows that the 2003–2005 cooling is largely an artifact of a systematic change in the observing system, with the deployment of Argo floats reducing a warm bias in the original observing system.

Simulated and observed variability in ocean temperature and heat content, AchutaRao et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, 10.1073/pnas.0611375104