What a weekend for the climate change beat.

I didn’t go to the Society of Environmental Journalists meeting in Madison so I missed Al Gore’s talk and his confrontation Friday with Phelim McAleer, the co-director/producer of an independent film Not Evil, Just Wrong. McAleer’s film points out errors in Gore’s film and after Gore talked he joined the line of journalists asking questions.

He challenged Gore, who responded, and then the two got into an exchange until SEJ folks running the meeting asked McAleer to sit down and allow others to ask questions. When he refused they cut off his mic, prompting a wild internet frenzy about the society and environmental journalists.

The same day BBC weatherman and climate Paul Hudson wrote a piece What happened to global warming? that examines the recent literature on how ocean cycles like the Pacific Decadal Oscillation made be affecting global temperatures.

Meanwhile, Democratic Sen. John Kerry and Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham wrote an editorial in the New York Times urging Congress to move climate legislation forward in part by ensuring nuclear power is helped.

Finally, the UK's Telegraph reports breakthroughs in natural gas exploration and oil shale extraction technology unleash a massive new energy sources, especially for the American West.
When you add these breakthroughs to wind and solar power, smart grid technology and a switch to electric cars, the nation could go back to an era of energy self-sufficiency

“This has currency implications,” Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reports. “If you strip out the energy deficit, America's vaulting savings rate may soon bring the current account back into surplus – and that is going to come at somebody else's expense, chiefly Japan, Germany and, up to a point, China.”