I've got some tests which log to stdout, and I'd like to change the log level in my test script based on the verbosity that nose is running on. 
How can I access the verbosity of the running nose instance, from within one of the tests being run?
It looks like the expected way to handle this in nose is to use the logger framework within your tests, and then control the level to be captured with the --logging-level option.
By default nose will capture all logs made by the tests, but a filter can be specified using --logging-filter config parameter.
Accessing nose verbosity programmatically