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Unconventional gas offers no advantage over other fossil fuels when considering its impact on the climate, according to a new report from a group of researchers at Cornell University. The Cornell Team, who made waves in the shale debate with groundbreaking research on methane leakage in gas production are challenging the gas industry’s claim that gas offers a clean, environmentally-friendly alternative to conventional fossil fuels. The team, comprised of Robert Howarth, Anthony Ingraffea and Renee Santoro, recently released a companion study to their contentious April 2011 report, continuing to reveal that shale gas is inadequate as a bridge fuel and may be worse for climate change in the long run than coal.

The team’s new study analyzes the combined effect of methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over a 20-year timeframe. Investigating the impact of emissions from both electricity generation, which accounts for about 30 percent of US gas usage, and heat generation, which accounts for the majority of the country’s gas usage, the report emphasizes the enormous projected role of unconventional gas – and its associated emissions – in America’s energy future. 

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Sea level rise. It’s been the subject of myth, legend and pop culture for millenia. It is going to be one of the major destructive effects of global climate change. So naturally, its something that makes deniers do and say crazy things.

Here’s the updated, remixed video on a misunderstood topic.

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One of the enduring myths of climate denialism is that global warming stopped sometime in the last decade. I see it in the blaring headlines of pseudoscience websites, in comments on my videos, even some of our most “distinguished” journalists have been taken in.

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What a difference a year can make. While the consensus on the Hill may not have grown stronger in the interim—I’m looking at you, House Republicans—the American public seems to be increasingly wising up to the idea that global warming is, in fact, a real threat and not some nefarious liberal plot to deprive it of its God-given right to pollute.

That is the principal finding of a new survey, entitled “Global Warming’s Six Americas,” that was released this past week by the Center for American Progress. The survey, which the authors describe as an “audience segmentation analysis,” splits the American public into six distinct groups based on their level of engagement with global warming: alarmed, concerned, cautious, disengaged, doubtful, and dismissive.

The authors polled 2,129 American adults in the fall of 2008 on a variety of issues related to global warming, including risk perceptions, policy preferences, and values.

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Is the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) deliberately trying to sabotage the EPA’s efforts to regulate carbon dioxide emissions? Is Peter Orszag, the agency’s brainy and genial director, secretly in cahoots with Republican opponents of President Obama’s climate policies?

Not quite – though that may have been your first impression upon reading the raft of articles published yesterday that breathlessly reported that an OMB memo had strongly criticized the EPA’s proposal to regulate greenhouse gases.