The solicitor general of the Obama Administration is arguing against former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman's appeal of his controversial bribery conviction to the Supreme Court. The Friday development, first reported by the Birmingham News, hinges on the argument by Siegelman and co-defendant Richard Scrushy, former CEO of HealthSouth Corp., that their case throws into doubt standards for determining whether bribery has occurred. The News reports on the Obama Adminstration's counterargument that prosecutors in the case did prove "corrupt intent."

Of the eight leading Republican candidates for President in 2012, five deny humans are responsible for climate change. The remaining three accept human responsibility, but oppose all meaningful action to address it.

In a November 17, 2009 op-ed in USA Today, Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO) falsely stated clean energy legislation would kill jobs and drastically increase expenses. Contrary to Bond's statement, legislation increasing our investment in clean energy technologies would create jobs in every state and help America become more energy independent, all for less than a quarter a day.

Six months is all it took to flip Europe’s climate from warm and sunny into the last ice age, researchers have found

Many Midwestern members of Congress have expressed reservations about clean energy legislation because they say they are unsure about the plans' effects on agriculture. A new study from the University of Tennessee and 25x'25, a group dedicated to increasing the amount of renewable energy used in America, shows that cap-and-trade legislation could actually increase farmers' profits.

...the announcement yesterday from the APEC meeting in Singapore that next month’s Copenhagen climate talks will be nothing more than a glorified talking session makes it clear that Obama has, at least for now, punted on the hard questions around climate. The world won’t be able to get started on solving our climate problem, and the obstacle—as it has been for the last two decades—is the United States. The real tip-off of Obama’s unwillingness to lead, however, has been the endless spinning of his climate negotiators. For twelve months they have been fibbing about the science—reiterating over and over again that their goal is the “scientific standard” of 450 parts per million co2 in the atmosphere. That’s no longer scientifically accurate—in the last two years, since the rapid Arctic melt in the summer of 2007, scientists have made it clear that a treaty that aimed at 450 ppm would be a treaty that left the planet free of ice, a planet where many current nations would disappear beneath the waves.

Clara Gutteridge, an investigator of secret prisons and renditions from the human rights organisation, Reprieve, said Bagram is seen as "Guantanamo's lesser-known evil twin"..."All this talk about transparency, and the US government still won't release a simple list of names of prisoners who are in Bagram," she told Al Jazeera. "None of them have had access to a lawyer ... and that just seems very unfair. We at Reprieve see this as the next big fight after Guantanamo Bay. But one thing that the US government is saying is that Afghan prisoners in Afghanistan have less rights than any other prisoner which just seems absurd."

At the same time that various organizations involved with fossil fuels are competing to obtain profitably favorable arrangements for themselves and the respective countries to which they supply fuels, leading climate change scientist around the world are putting out an entirely contrary message. They are indicating that, very quickly, global fossil fuel dependence has to greatly shrink to avoid run-away climate change that would cause much of the world's surface to be inhospitable to life. In other words, an almost complete cessation of its use must occur fairly soon despite ever increased worldwide demand.

Inhabitants of Bangladesh's chars or river islands, some of the most climate vulnerable communities in the world, urged the government Saturday to push hard, as a key player in Copenhagen, for binding emission pledges by developed nations. Others, addressing a poverty and climate hearing staged on floating boats, called on the government to secure at least $200 billion per year for poor countries in mitigation and adaptation funds. "The frequency and duration of floods and river erosion have increased drastically in the last few years causing severe harm to our lives and livelihoods," char dweller Hamida Begum told a panel of judges in the hearing.

Also this week: melting glaciers releasing pollutants from decades ago; IEA: climate treaty necessary to keep energy prices low; floating cities as a response to sea level rise; American Physical Society rejects changes to climate change statement.

Republican leaders in a South Carolina county have censured their own U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham for working with Democrats on a climate bill and other legislation.The Republican has often worked with Democrats in Congress, but Charleston County Chairwoman Lin Bennett says his work on climate legislation is the last straw.The party resolution passed Monday says Graham has weakened the Republican brand. Bennett expects a similar resolution to be introduced at the state GOP convention next year.

The IEA, energy adviser to 28 industrialized countries, said the world must act urgently to put greenhouse gases on a track to limit global warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius. Every year's delay beyond 2010 would add another $500 billion to the extra investment of $10,500 billion needed from 2010-2030 to curb carbon emissions, for example to improve energy efficiency and boost low-carbon renewable energy.

The stance of the developing world makes a lot of sense. After all, as Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, enlightened me, the rise in world temperatures is almost all the rich nations’ fault, since it’s due to combined greenhouse gas emissions since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. “What we’re actually seeing … has been extraordinarily destructive behavior on the part of the U.S. government, on the part of the Obama Administration, absolutely derailing the climate negotiations in the lead-up to Copenhagen,” says Naomi Klein. “Developing countries are absolutely shocked by what U.S. climate negotiators have done.”

Amid increasing incidents of climate protesters disrupting the operations of fossil-fuel industries and airports in Britain and elsewhere, Gore suggests the scale of the emergency means non-violent lawbreaking is justified. "Civil disobedience has an honourable history, and when the urgency and moral clarity cross a certain threshold, then I think that civil disobedience is quite understandable, and it has a role to play," he says. "And I expect that it will increase, no question about it."

Will was repudiated by his own newspaper’s newsroom, whose reporters, Juliet Eilperin and Mary Beth Sheridan, noted satellite data showing that the average multiyear wintertime sea ice cover in the Arctic in 2005 had declined, which “contradicts data cited in widely circulated reports by Washington Post columnist George F. Will that sea ice in the Arctic has not significantly declined since 1979.” So too did Andrew Freeman, at the Post’s weather blog ...

In the introduction to Last Chance – Preserving Life on Earth, author Larry J. Schweiger, the CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, comes right out and says that he’s not trying to change minds with this book. Instead, it’s his hope that the book will motivate millions of people to transform their concerns over global warming into activism.

The U.S. Senate has previously expressed its opposition to joining any agreement that does not include major developing countries such as China; China has insisted that Western countries take responsibility for a problem that they caused and provide assistance for developing countries in the form of finance and technology to move them toward a low-carbon pathway. Yet both countries have an unprecedented opportunity to move beyond this impasse.

There is no point in denying it: we're losing. Climate change denial is spreading like a contagious disease. It exists in a sphere that cannot be reached by evidence or reasoned argument; any attempt to draw attention to scientific findings is greeted with furious invective. This sphere is expanding with astonishing speed. A survey last month by the Pew Research Centre suggests that the proportion of Americans who believe there is solid evidence that the world has been warming over the last few decades has fallen from 71% to 57% in just 18 months. Another survey, conducted in January by Rasmussen Reports, suggests that, due to a sharp rise since 2006, US voters who believe global warming has natural causes (44%) outnumber those who believe it is the result of human action (41%).

Yet from my vantage point, internationally negotiated climate agreements are fast becoming obsolete for two reasons. First, since no government wants to concede too much compared with other governments, the negotiated goals for cutting carbon emissions will almost certainly be minimalist, not remotely approaching the bold cuts that are needed. And second, since it takes years to negotiate and ratify these agreements, we may simply run out of time. This is not to say that we should not participate in the negotiations and work hard to get the best possible result. But we should not rely on these agreements to save civilisation.

"In a SPIEGEL interview, former US vice president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore, 61, discusses Barack Obama's environmental policies, the endless push by lobbyists to derail reforms and his hopes for a global deal at the climate change summit in Copenhagen next month."