Dr. Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, announced the second annual Climate B.S. of the Year Awards on Huffington Post and Forbes blogs Thursday to make examples of bad climate science that was produced, cited, or used in 2011 to try to influence or confuse the public.

Scores of conservative lawmakers and Fox News personalities amplified their pro-greenhouse-gas mantra last year, even as extreme weather, record-breaking temperatures and billion-dollar catastrophesdominated the planet.

First place went to all of the Republican candidates running for president, none of whom sided with the science accepted by 97-98 percent of all climate scientists and every national academy of sciences in the world. Second place went to Fox News and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation “because of its regular misrepresentation of climate science and anti-climate science reporting among the different Murdoch outlets in the UK, the U.S., and Australia,” the Pacific Institute announced.

Third place went to Roy Spencer and William Braswell “for a debunked research paper on climate sensitivity, and John Christy, for an astounding piece of misleading testimony at a Congressional climate change hearing,” Gleick wrote.

Billionaire badboy brothers Charles and David Koch, who own Colorado property and bankroll lawmakers like Cory Gardner and Scott Tipton, slide into the fourth spot of the bad-science list. The Pacific Institute makes note of the Koch brothers’ well-funded network of anti-climate science groups and highlights a quote from the president of Americans for Prosperity, a Koch-supported super-PAC.

“If you look at where the situation was three years ago and where it is today, there’s been a dramatic turnaround. Most of these candidates have figured out that the science has become political. We’ve made great headway,” Americans for Prosperity’s Tim Phillips “brags outright,” Pacific Institute reports.

For a detailed report on how the Koch brothers influence environmental politics, click here.

Colorado’s conservative congressional delegation has helped the cause. Gardner, Tipton, Doug Lamborn and Mike Coffman have all taken the No Climate Tax Pledge and repeatedly voted to weaken protections for land, air and water. Calling out Gardner specifically, one report found Congress averaged more than one anti-environmental vote for every day it was in session.

Fifth place went to anti-climate-science blogger Anthony Watts, “who said he would accept the results of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature … even if it proved him wrong.” The Koch brothers actually funded the study but it backfired and, like many studies before it, confirmed the Earth’s surface is warming and doing so at an accelerating rate. In the end, Watts attacked the study.

The Pacific Institute’s runners-up for its 2011 Climate B.S. of the Year Awards were Harrison Schmitt and the Heartland Institute for ‘Arcticgate’ (documented errors in denying disappearance of Arctic sea ice); Rush Limbaugh for his consistent falsehoods about climate science; and Steve McIntyre for his smear of climate scientist Dr. Michael Mann of Penn State University.”

“There’s a long tradition of people who don’t like a particular message turning to attack the person delivering the message,” he said on NPR’s Talk of the Nation today. “I view it as an honor, really. The message is an important one and I will continue doing my best delivering it the best I can.”

The man who won both a Nobel Peace Prize and an Oscar for standing up for the environment set off a firestorm of controversy in the conservative blogosphere after he referenced the book “Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming” by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, while speaking at the Aspen Institute on Aug. 4. In his interview with NPR, he duplicated the message he delivered in Aspen, sans the swear words.

Gore said “carbon polluters” are “doing exactly the same thing that the tobacco industry did after the Surgeon General’s report came out” linking smoking to cancer.

“They hired actors and dressed them up as doctors and gave them scripts saying that smoking isn’t harmful,” Gore told NPR. “Some of the same people and same organizations who took money from the tobacco companies to lie about the science of cigarette smoking are now taking money from the large carbon polluters and the oil and gas industry to mislead people about climate science.”

The one-time presidential candidate pointed to the extreme drought that has gripped Texas, flooding in Vermont and other states, millions of people displaced in Pakistan, flooding in Australia, and fires and drought in Russia as evidence that the earth’s changing climate is no joke. “These are the events that scientists have been warning us about,” Gore said. “And now they’re saying if we keep putting all of this global warming pollution up there, these events will become worse and more frequent.”

Acknowledging the vitriol that sometimes surrounds climate change discussions, Gore praised Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman’s “willingness to take big risks in the Republican primary by saying that he believes that the climate scientists are telling the truth. The deniers have accused him of all kinds of things. It’s interesting, you know, 97-98 percent of all the climate scientists in the world are in agreement on this. Every national academy of science in every major country in the world is in agreement. So do you believe them or do you believe the Koch brothers and ExxonMobil and Rush Limbaugh? That’s an easy choice for me. For some evidently it’s not. Eventually reality has its day.”

Gore was on the program to promote The Climate Reality Project, which beginning at 6 p.m. MDT tonight will stream “24 hours of reality” about the earth’s climate crisis and extreme weather. It will be streamed in every time zone, in 13 languages, and feature top scientists and other experts.

Earlier this week, he appeared on The Colbert Report where he also made the case for climate change.

“One of the reasons the economy is in trouble is because we keep going to war in the Middle East in the place where most of the oil is located and we keep borrowing money from China to buy oil from a market dominated by Saudi Arabia and then burn it in ways that destroy the future of the planet,” Gore said. “All of that has got to change. We can put people to work and strengthen the economy by building solar and wind facilities, refurbishing inefficient buildings, and building smart grids and fast trains and putting people to work instead of continuing this addiction to very expensive dirty oil and coal.”

Meanwhile, extreme skier Chris Davenport of Old Snowmass, Olympic snowboarder Gretchen Bleiler of Aspen, and snowboard star Jeremy Jones of Truckee, Calif., were on Capitol Hill today where they made their view clear: “There is no debate. Climate change is already happening and we’re seeing it every day. … In our work, we’ve witnessed first-hand climate impacts on our mountains, from reduced snowpack and melting glaciers to dying alpine forests and shorter winter seasons,” they told Congress.

Al Gore calls B.S. on climate change naysayers … by RealAspen

From Friday’s story:

Gore recalled how not long ago tobacco giants “succeeded in delaying the implementation of the surgeon general’s report for 40 years – 40 years! In every one of those 40 years the average number of Americans killed by cigarettes each year exceeded the total number of Americans killed in all of World War II: 450,000 per year. My sister was one of them. … It was evil, evil, evil.”

The model of media manipulation used then, Gore said, “was transported whole cloth into the climate debate. And some of the exact same people — I can go down a list of their names — are involved in this. And so what do they do? They pay pseudo-scientists to pretend to be scientists to put out the message: ‘This climate thing, it’s nonsense. Man-made CO2 doesn’t trap heat. It may be volcanoes.’ Bullshit! ‘It may be sun spots.’ Bullshit! ‘It’s not getting warmer.’ Bullshit!” Gore exclaimed.

An image that says, “This is really embarrassing. We’ve just realized that Prop. 23 is a bad idea. It turns out you can solve the climate crisis and create jobs at the same time,” is displayed on all of the following websites:

• http://yes-on-23.com
• http://yes-on-23.org
• http://voteforprop23.com
• http://voteforprop23.org
• http://yes-on-prop23.com
• http://yes-on-prop23.org

The websites redirect users to another website laying out the reasons to, in fact, vote “no” on Prop 23.

The Climate Protection Action Fund, the advocacy arm of former Vice President Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection, announced that it had set up the websites in a blog post today.

Prop 23 would, in effect, overturn California’s landmark climate change law. While Texas oil refiners have mounted a campaign to pass the measure, environmentalists and others outspent them in their campaign to reject the ballot initiative. The latest polling indicates that California voters will reject Prop 23.

The report also finds more than 40 instances of Koch Industries donating to groups that have in the past opposed climate legislation.

Some examples from the report:

• “More than $5 million to Americans for Prosperity Foundation (AFP) for its nationwide ‘Hot Air Tour’ campaign to spread misinformation about climate science and opposing clean energy and climate legislation.”
• “$365,000 to Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment (FREE) which advocates against taking action on climate change because warming is ‘inevitable’ and expensive to address.”
• “$360,000 to Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy (PRIPP) which supported and funded An Inconvenient Truth…or Convenient Fiction, a film attacking the science of global warming and intended as a rebuttal to former Vice-President Al Gore’s documentary. PRIPP also threatened to sue the US Government for listing the polar bear as an endangered species.”

Update: It turns out, this report came out in March. But it’s still worth taking a look at, given all the talk about the Koch brothers.

Writing in The New Republic, the former vice president blasts the idea that offshore drilling would lead the country to energy independence, calling that notion an “illusion.”

“The addition to oil company profits may be significant, but the benefits to our national security are trivial,” he wrote. The image he included — based on Energy Department data — tells the tale more convincingly:

Translation: By 2030, the country will be slurping up 16.6 million barrels of oil per day, and only 200,000 (or 1.2 percent) will come from expanded offshore drilling.

If that’s not convincing enough, the Bush administration’s Energy Information Administration has reported that expanding offshore drilling “would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030.”

This is what the fight is about?

But now the Northeast’s snowy January and February have given way to a balmy March — and, more meaningfully, global temperatures have been setting records in 2010. Check out this graphic from the University of Alabama:

The yellow line represents average temperatures over the past 20 years. The purple line indicates record highs over the same period. And that green line — the highest of all? That’s global temperatures so far this year.

Of course, it’s just as silly to point to a few warm months as evidence of global warming as it is to point to a few cold ones as evidence of global cooling. But add to these data points the fact that the 2000s were the hottest decade on record, and you start to see a trend that a few flurries can’t call into question.

(Via Joe Romm, who also points out that the slightly different NASA data show January and February to be tied for the second-hottest on record.)

Gibson, who now hosts a radio show for Fox, is back on bookshelves with some serious heavy lifting: “How the Left Swiftboated America: The Liberal Media Conspiracy to Make You Think George Bush Was the Worst President in History.” How “swiftboating” makes any sense in this context, I don’t know. Suffice to say that the book is pretty terrible.

It begins with a recap of the 2000 Florida recount that’s riddled with errors. An example: “It was Gore who took the case to the Supreme Court.” That’s exactly the opposite of what happened. The Bush campaign appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, asking it to overturn the judgment of the Florida Supreme Court, which it did. That’s why the case was titled “Bush v. Gore” and not “Gore v. Bush” — Bush sued first. That’s the level of fact-checking you get in this book. You also get convincing “rebuttals” like this:

Indeed, Bush’s “smartest move” was … wait, what?

Gibson’s on the same slippery soil when he goes after the agents of “swiftboating” by name. In a chapter titled “The Echo Chamber: Dailykos and the Left-Wing Noise Machine,” Gibson fingers dailykos.com as an all-powerful source of lies and conspiracy theories.

That section represents a little bit of mission creep: The real problem with the blog, and with all of the liberal blogosphere, is that it refuses to acknowledge that George W. Bush was right about everything.

It’s an awful but fascinating little train wreck of a book.

The full text of the release is after the jump.

Today, the White House announced President Obama will travel to Copenhagen on Dec. 9 to participate in the United Nations Climate Change Conference, where he is eager to work with the international community to drive progress toward a comprehensive and operational Copenhagen accord. The White House also announced that, in the context of an overall deal in Copenhagen that includes robust mitigation contributions from China and the other emerging economies, the President is prepared to put on the table a U.S. emissions reduction target in the range of 17% below 2005 levels in 2020 and ultimately in line with final U.S. energy and climate legislation.

This announcement was promptly met with strong support from a diverse group of leaders, representing Congress, business and environmental organizations.

Key quotes are highlighted below:

Former Vice President Al Gore:

“President Obama took an important step today with the announcement that he will attend the global warming treaty talks in Copenhagen.

This action is another example of the significant change in policy on the climate crisis.…Those who feared that the United States had abdicated its global responsibility should take hope from these actions and work towards completing a strong operational agreement next month in Copenhagen and guidelines for negotiators to complete their work next year on a comprehensive treaty.

It is my hope that the Senate will support the President and move quickly to pass climate and energy legislation early next year in order to ensure that the world moves toward speedy solutions for the climate crisis.”

Senator John Kerry:

“This could be one hell of a global game changer with big reverberations here at home. For the first time, an American Administration has proposed an emissions reduction target and when President Obama lands in Copenhagen it will emphasize that the United States is in it to win it. This announcement matches words with action. The Obama Administration is now undeniably mustering bona fide leadership on climate change, not merely departing from Bush Administration intransigence and ideology,” Kerry said. “By announcing a provisional target, contingent on the support of Congress, the President has defined a path to an international agreement that challenges the developed and developing nations to fulfill their obligations. It lays the groundwork for a broad political consensus at Copenhagen that will strip climate obstructionists here at home of their most persistent charge, that the United States shouldn’t act if other countries won’t join with us. It is an enormous shot in the arm for those of us working overtime to get a comprehensive bill passed in the Senate. And the fact that the President will attend the Copenhagen talks underscores that the Administration is putting its money where its mouth is, putting the President’s prestige on the line.”??

Senator Barbara Boxer:

“I am so pleased that the President is going to Copenhagen to address one of the most pressing issues of our time – global warming. The goal he announced today, in the range of 17 percent, reflects the work that was done in the House of Representatives and in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. It is realistic, it’s smart, and it’s credible.”

Senator Joe Lieberman:

“Obama’s announcement of an emissions goal “has laid the groundwork for productive negotiations in Copenhagen, including a significant commitment by China to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions.”

Representative Ed Markey:

“By putting a serious number for U.S. emission reductions on the table, the President just called the world’s bet and then raised it for our negotiating partners. The President’s attendance in Copenhagen demonstrates his personal commitment to getting a deal that is good for the U.S. and good for our clean energy future. It’s a powerful statement that the U.S. is back, ready to lead the world….In the effort to protect the planet from climate change, these are the most significant travel reservations ever made. With one trip to Copenhagen, President Obama will put U.S. leadership back on the map in the fight against carbon pollution.”

Lew Hay, Chairman and CEO of Florida Power & Light:

“We commend the president for his efforts and leadership as the world strives for agreement on reducing greenhouse gases. Here at home, it’s critical that Congress act to cap and price carbon emissions while providing financial protection to energy consumers,” said Lew Hay. “The U.S. energy sector is ready to lead the world into a low-carbon future, but we need the right price signals to point the way.”

Jim Rogers, CEO of Duke Energy:

“I applaud President Obama’s travel to Copenhagen, demonstrating the United States’ commitment to action on climate change. His presence will help ensure a successful outcome at the global climate talks, driving new investment, strengthening our global economic recovery, and moving us forward in building a productive, competitive economy here at home. The rules that Congress is developing will complement Copenhagen’s global road map, supporting our business objectives to provide clean, efficient, affordable, and reliable energy to our customers.”

Frances Beinecke, President of NRDC:

“President Obama is taking the full power and prestige of the highest office in the land to Copenhagen. He goes with a serious climate protection proposal from the United States that shows we mean business. It shows we’re ready to lead. And it will help advance efforts to secure commitments for action from other countries around the world. We urge Congress to support the President and pass clean energy and climate protection legislation that will put millions of Americans back to work, reduce our reliance on foreign oil and create a healthier future for our country and the world.”

Jonathan Lash, President of the World Resources Institute:

“President Obama’s willingness to go to Copenhagen and put numbers on the table are two necessary pieces to make a binding global agreement possible. The 17 percent number is consistent with what Congress has been debating and we hope legislation eventually reaches an even higher target. The President’s leadership in Copenhagen will have an even greater impact if he is able to give the world a timetable for when he expects a bill on his desk.”

One example of how the divergence squeezes candidates came in 2000, when most voters approved of President Bill Clinton’s work, but most had an “unfavorable” view of his post-impeachment character. That flummoxed Al Gore’s campaign when it thought about how to handle Clinton. According to Gore campaign vets like Bob Shrum, Clinton was toxic in states that he’d won twice and where the economy was booming, like Iowa.

Since Sarah Palin doesn’t have a job outside of her book tour, her “favorable” rating is all she has. Not only is it lower than Barack Obama’s favorable rating, it’s lower than a credible national candidate can really stand — Republicans argued that Hillary Rodham Clinton might be unelectable as a presidential candidate when her “unfavorable” rating was a good 10 points lower than Palin’s.