I’m getting really sick of all these complaints about how the presidential candidates in the 2012 elections won’t mention the dreaded words climate change. It just isn’t true; they’ve been talking about it all year, regardless of their politics — whether those are liberal, conservative, or veering to the center at the last minute to capture undecided voters.

Everywhere, that is, but here.

via Update: Revised North Carolina Sea Level Rise Bill Goes to Governor – ScienceInsider.

Same as it ever was. After a 3-year hiatus, a key U.S. Senate committee today once again examined the science of climate change, sparking feisty and predictably partisan sparring over the reality of climate change and what, if anything, the United States should do about it…

Opponents of expanded gas drilling have coined the term “frackademia” for university research on the potential impacts of the boom in shale gas drilling that involves industry money or experts with industry ties. The effort, of course, is aimed at conveying that industry money or relationships leads to bad science…

CALL me a converted skeptic. Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause…

UCLA researchers have developed a new transparent solar cell that is an advance toward giving windows in homes and other buildings the ability to generate electricity while still allowing people to see outside. Their study appears in the journal ACS Nano.

CLIMATE CHANGE is staring us in the face. The science is clear, and the need to reduce planet-warming emissions has grown urgent. So why, collectively, are we doing so little about it?

Yes, there are political and economic barriers, as well as some strong ideological opposition, to going green. But researchers in the burgeoning field of climate psychology have identified another obstacle, one rooted in the very ways our brains work. The mental habits that help us navigate the local, practical demands of day-to-day life, they say, make it difficult to engage with the more abstract, global dangers posed by climate change.