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Telling Americans that scientists don’t agree is the classic climate denial strategy. It’s been over a decade since consultant Frank Luntz famously furnished the GOP with strategies to kill climate action during the Bush years, recommending in a leaked memo [PDF]: ”you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue.” Oh yeah, and avoid truth: “A compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth.” It seems to have worked: only a minority of Americans believes global warming is caused by humans: 42 percent, according to a 2012 Pew study.

That “consensus gap”, as it’s known, has proven fertile ground in which to sow resistance to climate action, says John Cook, a climate communications researcher from the University of Queensland in Australia. He has led the most extensive survey of peer reviewed literature in almost a decade (published online this week in Environmental Research Letters). And what he found, just as in other attempts to survey the field, is that scientists are near unanimous.

A group of 24 researchers signed up to the challenge via Cook’s website, Skeptical Science (the go-to website for debunking climate denial myths), and collected and analyzed almost 12,000 scientific papers from the past 20 years. Of the some 4000 of those abstracts that expressed some view on the evidence for global warming, more than 97 percent endorsed the consensus that climate change is happening, and it’s caused by humans.

His team pulled work written by 29,083 authors in nearly 2000 journals across two decades. ”People who say there must be some conspiracy to keep climate deniers out of the peer reviewed literature, that is one hell of a conspiracy,” he said via Skype from Australia (watch the video above). That would make the moon landing cover-up look, ”like an amateur conspiracy compared to the scale involved here.”

Cook is hoping to capitalize on the simplicity of his findings: ”All people need to understand is that 97 out of 100 climate scientists agree. All they need to know is that one number: 97 percent.”

California and Texas might be leading the nation’s rollout of solar and wind power, respectively, but Washington, where hydroelectric dams provide over 60 percent of the state’s energy, was the country’s biggest user of renewable power in 2011, according to new statistics released last week by the federal Energy Information Administration.

Hydro continued to be the overwhelmingly dominant source of renewable power consumed nationwide, accounting for 67 percent of the total, followed by wind with 25 percent, geothermal with 4.5 percent, and solar with 3.5 percent. The new EIA data is the latest official snapshot of how states nationwide make use of renewable power, from industrial-scale generation to rooftop solar panels, and reveals an incredible gulf between leaders like Washington, California, and Oregon, and states like Rhode Island and Mississippi that use hardly any.

The gap is partly explained by the relative size of states’ energy markets, but not entirely: Washington uses less power overall than New York, for example, but far outstrips it on renewables (the exact proportions won’t be available until EIA releases total state consumption figures later this month). Still, the actual availability of resources—how much sun shines or wind blows—is far less important than the marching orders passed down from statehouses to electric utilities, says Rhone Resch, head of the Solar Energy Industries Association.

“Without some carrot or stick, there’s little reason to pick [renewables] up” in many states, he says; even given the quickly falling price of clean energy technology, natural gas made cheap by fracking is still an attractive option for many utilities.

More than half of the 29 states that require utilities to purchase renewable power are currently considering legislation to pare back those mandates, in many cases pushed by (surprise, suprise) the American Legislative Exchange Council. “We’re opposed to these mandates, and 2013 will be the most active year ever in terms of efforts to repeal them,” ALEC energy task force director Todd Wynn recently told Bloomberg.

But so far the tide seems to be turning against that campaign: This week the Minnesota legislature will consider two versions of a bill passed by the House and Senate that would require utilities to get 1-4 percent of their power from solar by 2025 (solar made up less than one percent of Minnesota’s renewable power in 2011); last month North Carolina, the same state that outlawed talking about sea level rise, surprised green energy advocates by voting down a proposal to ax the state’s renewable mandates, followed a few days later by a vote in Colorado to increase rural communities’ access to renewables. But challenges remain ahead in some of the very states that already rank relatively low for renewables consumption, including Connecticut, Missouri, and Ohio.

Karin Wadsack, director of a Northern Arizona University-based project to monitor these legislative battles, says the time is now for states to start mixing in more clean energy.

“If you have all these utilities sticking with gas, coal, and nuclear, then you create a situation where 20 years from now they aren’t prepared to deal with the increased climate risk,” she says. “Electricity is a huge piece of the climate puzzle, so [utilities] need to be learning what to do with renewables.”

There’s always the option that Congress could set a renewables standard on the national level—a group of senators took a failed stab at one in 2010 only a few months after Republicans killed the infamous cap-and-trade bill. But don’t hold your breath, Wadsack says: “I don’t know that I would call it a pipe dream. But I wouldn’t see it happening in our current set of national priorities.”

One of the chief scientists behind the famous “hockey stick” graph, Michael Mann is among the most influential climate researchers in the United States.

He’s also, perhaps, the most regularly attacked.

It started with swipes at the hockey stick—the graph seemed to show global warming so unequivocally that skeptics made it their number one target. The furor became even more intense when some of Mann’s emails were exposed in the “ClimateGate” pseudo-scandal. Now, Mann receives regular threats and has found his personal emails pursued by Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli.

And all of this has only made Michael Mann more outspoken.

At the next Climate Desk Live event, Mann and host Chris Mooney will discuss new research that reaffirms the validity of the hockey stick. They’ll also talk about public opinion on climate change—and why Mann believes it’s changing.

Please join us:

Wednesday, May 15, 2013, 6:30 p.m. at the University of California Washington Center, 1608 Rhode Island Ave NW, Washington, DC 20036. To attend, please RSVP to cdl@climatedesk.org

Dept of Energy Solar Decathlon/Flickr

Charles C. Mann is a great storyteller, but “What If We Never Run Out of Oil?” tells the wrong story and is marred by bloopers.

Mann’s story is entirely about quantity of supply, not price nor the more-efficient use it encourages. Yet mainstream analysts see “peak oil” emerging not in supply but in demand: OECD oil use peaked in 2005, U.S. gasoline use peaked in 2007, and some analysts think world oil use may peak in this decade. Why? Modern technologies to save or displace oil cost far less than oil. The 2011 study Reinventing Fire found that an uncompromised, oil-free U.S. automobile fleet would cost $18 per saved barrel, rising to about $25 per barrel for all transpor­tation. That’s manyfold cheaper than any source of oil Mann describes, yet he doesn’t discuss efficient use or price. That’s the big story: Like whale oil in the 1860s, oil has become uncompetitive even at low prices, long before becoming unavailable even at high prices.

This comparison doesn’t even consider hidden or external costs. Just the economic and military costs of U.S. oil dependence, if paid at the pump rather than through taxes and reduced wealth, would triple the price of oil — plus any costs to health, safety, environment, climate, global stability and development, or our nation’s independence and reputation.

To keep reading, click here.

Richard Sprenger/The Guardian

Sabrina Warner keeps having the same nightmare: a huge wave rearing up out of the water and crashing over her home, forcing her to swim for her life with her toddler son.

“I dream about the water coming in,” she said. The landscape in winter on the Bering Sea coast seems peaceful, the tidal wave of Warner’s nightmare trapped by snow and several feet of ice. But the calm is deceptive. Spring break-up will soon restore the Ninglick River to its full violent force.

In the dream, Warner climbs on to the roof of her small house. As the waters rise, she swims for higher ground: the village school which sits on 20-foot pilings.

Even that isn’t high enough. By the time Warner wakes, she is clinging to the roof of the school, desperate to be saved.

To keep reading, click here.

NOAA’s Mauna Loa Observatory after a snowstorm. Courtesy of Mary Miller, Exploratorium

Over the last couple weeks, scientists and environmentalists have been keeping a particularly close eye on the Hawaii-based monitoring station that tracks how much carbon dioxide is in the atmosphere, as the count tiptoed closer to a record-smashing 400 parts per million. Yesterday, we finally got there: The daily mean concentration was higher than at any time in human history, NOAA reported today.

Don’t worry: The earth is not about to go up in a ball of flame. The 400 ppm mark is only a milestone, 50 ppm over what legendary NASA scientist James Hansen has since 1988 called the safe zone for avoiding the worst impacts of climate change, and yet only halfway to what the IPCC predicts we’ll reach by the end of the century.

“Somehow in the last 50 ppm we melted the Arctic,” said environmentalist and founder of activist group 350.org Bill McKibben, who called today’s news a “grim but predictable milestone” and has long used the symbolic number as a rallying call for climate action. “We’ll see what happens in the next 50.”

We could find out soon enough: With the East Coast still recovering from Superstorm Sandy and the West gearing up for what promises to be a nasty fire season, University of California ecologist Max Moritz says milestones like these are “an excuse for us to take a good hard look at where we are,” especially as the carbon concentration shows no signs of reversing course.

Scientists first saw the carbon scale tip past 400 ppm last summer, but only briefly; the record reported today by NOAA is the first time a daily average has surpassed that point. For the last several years concentrations have hovered in the 390s, and we’re still not to the point where the carbon concentration will stay above the 400 ppm threshold permanently. But that’s just around the corner, said J. Marshall Shepherd, president of the American Meteorological Society.

“It’s clear that sometime next year we’ll see 400 consistently,” he said. “Avoiding the future warming will require a large and rapid reduction in greenhouse gases.”

Most scientists, environmentalists, and climate-conscious policymakers agree this will require, at a minimum, slashing the use of fossil fuels, and in the meantime, taking steps to adapt for a world with higher temperatures, higher seas, and more extreme weather. For example, according to Hansen, the world will need to completely stop burning coal by 2030 if returning to 350 ppm is to remain possible. What’s the holdup? Texas Tech climatologist Katherine Hayhoe blames “the inertia of our economic system, and the inertia of our political system.” But she, like most of her peers, believe it can—and must—be done: “We have to change how we get our energy and how we use our energy.”

Some progress is being made on that front: Thanks to energy efficiency gains, increased use of renewable power, and policies to cut emissions from cars and power plants, carbon emissions in the US have fallen 13 percent in the last seven years. But they’re expected to begin climbing again soon, and worldwide, 2012 saw the most carbon emissions ever. Today’s milestone underscores the reality that if we’re serious about addressing climate change, there’s still a long road ahead.

“So far we have failed miserably in tackling this problem,” NOAA scientist Pieter Tans, who oversees the monitoring program, told the Times.

For McKibben, the real date to mark in the history books has yet to arrive: “I don’t think this will be the turning point. The turning point will be when we do something about it.”

Back in 1998, a little known  climate scientist named Michael Mann and two colleagues published a paper that sought to reconstruct the planet’s past temperatures going back half a millennium before the era of thermometers—thereby showing just how out of whack recent warming has been. The finding: Recent northern hemisphere temperatures had been “warmer than any other year since (at least) AD 1400.” The graph depicting this result looked rather like a hockey stick: After a long period of relatively minor temperature variations (the “shaft”), it showed a sharp mercury upswing during the last century or so (“the blade”).

The report moved quickly through climate science circles. Mann and a colleague soon lengthened the shaft of the hockey stick back to the year 1000 AD—and then, in 2001, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change prominently featured the hockey stick in its Third Assessment Report. Based on this evidence, the IPCC proclaimed that “the increase in temperature in the 20th century is likely to have been the largest of any century during the past 1,000 years.”

And then all hell broke loose.

IPCC Third Assessment Report / Wikipedia

Mann tells the full story of the hockey stick—and the myriad unsuccessful attacks on it—in his 2012 book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines; Mann will appear at a Climate Desk Live event on May 15 to discuss this saga. But to summarize a very complex history of scientific and political skirmishes in a few paragraphs:

The hockey stick was repeatedly attacked, and so was Mann himself. Congress got involved, with demands for Mann’s data and other information, including a computer code used in his research. Then the National Academy of Sciences weighed in in 2006, vindicating the hockey stick as good science and noting:

“The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes both additional large-scale surface temperature reconstructions and pronounced changes in a variety of local proxy indicators, such as melting on ice caps and the retreat of glaciers around the world.”

It didn’t change the minds of the deniers, though—and soon Mann and his colleagues were drawn into the 2009 “Climategate” pseudo-scandal, which purported to reveal internal emails that (among other things) seemingly undermined the hockey stick. Only, they didn’t.

In the meantime, those wacky scientists kept doing what they do best—finding out what’s true. As Mann relates, over the years other researchers were able to test his work using “more extensive datasets, and more sophisticated methods. And the bottom line conclusion doesn’t change.” Thus the single hockey stick gradually became what Mann calls a “hockey team.” “If you look at all the different groups, there are literally about two dozen” hockey sticks now, he says.

Mother Jones‘ Jaeah Lee traced the strange evolution of the hockey stick story in this video:

Indeed, two just-published studies support the hockey stick more powerfully than ever. One, just out in Nature Geoscience, featuring more than 80 authors, showed with extensive global data on past temperatures that the hockey stick’s shaft seems to extend back reliably for at least 1,400 years. Recently in Science, meanwhile, Shaun Marcott of Oregon State University and his colleagues extended the original hockey stick shaft back 11,000 years. “There’s now at least tentative evidence that the warming is unprecedented over the entire period of the Holocene, the entire period since the last ice age,” says Mann.

So what does it all mean? Well, here’s the millennial scale irony: Climate deniers threw everything they had at the hockey stick. They focused immense resources on what they thought was the Achilles Heel of global warming research—and even then, they couldn’t hobble it. (Though they certainly sowed plenty of doubt in the mind of the public.)

What’s more, even if they’d succeeded, in a scientific sense it wouldn’t have even mattered.

“Climate deniers like to make it seem like the entire weight of evidence for climate change rests on the hockey stick,” explains Mann. “And that’s not the case. We could get rid of all these reconstructions, and we could still know that climate change is a threat, and that we’re causing it.” The basic case for global warming caused by humans rests on basic physics—and, basic thermometer readings from around the globe. The hockey stick, in contrast, is the result of a field of research called paleoclimatology (the study of past climates) that, while fascinating, only provides one thread of evidence among many for what we’re doing to the planet.

Center for American Progress

Meanwhile, the hockey stick’s blade doesn’t just stop rising of its own accord. It’s just going to go up, and up, and up, as the image above, combining the Marcott hockey stick with projections of where temperatures are headed by 2100, plainly shows.

When he shows that graph to audiences, says Mann, “I often hear an audible gasp.” In this sense, the hockey stick does indeed matter—for it dramatizes just how much human irresponsibility, in a relatively short period of time, can devastate the only home we have.