Free Republic

Global Warming: A European Union official is threatening reprisals if the U.S. doesn't lead on a carbon emissions treaty. It probably doesn't matter to him that the climate change argument is falling apart. Karl Falkenberg is just director general for environment at the European Union's executive body. But the way he's talking, he sounds more like a mafia don. "It will be more than an embarrassment" for the U.S. administration, he said Wednesday, if the American contingent arrives at Copenhagen in December for treaty talks and has to admit it's "not ready" to lead other nations toward a deal. Exactly...

Well ok, I'll put in another link HERE.

Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming ******************************************************World Temperatures according to the Hadley Center for Climate Prediction. Note the steep drop over the last year.******************************************************************* Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list...

Weather reports made by famous explorers such as Captain James Cook and Charles Darwin are helping scientists to study climate change. Although there are numerous weather reports from the 18th and 19th century covering entire continents the oceans have largely been uncharted territory. Now a new project has transcribed and digitised nearly 300 ships' logbooks dating back to the 1760s to help scientists fill in the gaps in the world's recent climate history. Until now they have been an untapped resource of scientific data. Some ship logs have already revealed evidence that climate change may not be as rapid as...

Chilly reception for theory on global warming David A. Fahrenthold, Washington Post Sunday, October 4, 2009 Has climate change been around as long as the pyramids? It is an odd-sounding idea, because the problem is usually assumed to be a modern one, the product of a world created by the Industrial Revolution and powered by high-polluting fossil fuels. But a professor emeritus at the University of Virginia has suggested that people began altering the climate thousands of years ago, as primitive farmers burned forests and built methane-bubbling rice paddies. The practices produced enough greenhouse gases, he says, to warm the...

In their global warming bill, Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) have delivered to Congress an incomplete script. It’s like “Hamlet” without the prince. The 821-page aggregation of environmentalist dreams, rhetoric and directives would mandate grants and demonstration projects galore, and set up targets right and left. It would even grant a few unrelated favors, such as authority for cities to set their own mileage standards for taxicabs. (That the bill wouldn’t solve the cabbies’ basic problem of having to buy and insure new hybrids seems not to bother the senators.) The cap-and-trade scheme by which large emitters...

COPENHAGEN, Sept 30 (Reuters) - Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara warned on Wednesday the 2016 Olympics could be the last Games, with global warming an immediate threat to mankind. Tokyo is bidding to host the 2016 summer Olympics with Chicago, Rio de Janeiro and Madrid also in the running. The International Olympic Committee will elect the winning candidate during its session on Oct. 2 in the Danish capital. "It could be that the 2016 Games are the last Olympics in the history of mankind," Ishihara told reporters at a Tokyo 2016 press event ahead of the vote. "Global warming is getting...

Earth's self-anointed global warming czar, Al Gore, has teamed up with his business partners at Google (he's an Advisory Board member) to make the latest pitch for a planet that is about to burst into a bag of Flamin' Hot Cheetos. Together they have created an internet video which heralds Google's entrance into the world of climate forecasting. The video champions Google's new mapping tool which simulates a 3D map of the world predicting the effects of climate change through the year 2100. They claim their data is provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. According to Google, the...

My attention has been drawn to a comment by Steve McIntyre on the Climate Audit website relating to the pattern of radial tree growth displayed in the ring-width chronology "Yamal" that I first published in Briffa (2000). The substantive implication of McIntyre's comment (made explicitly in subsequent postings by others) is that the recent data that make up this chronology (i.e. the ring-width measurements from living trees) were purposely selected by me from among a larger available data set, specifically because they exhibited recent growth increases. This is not the case. The Yamal tree-ring chronology (see also Briffa and Osborn...

Increase means NASA may need to rethink astronauts’ radiation shielding Galactic cosmic rays have just hit a Space Age high, new data from a NASA spacecraft indicates. "In 2009, cosmic ray intensities have increased 19 percent beyond anything we've seen in the past 50 years," said Richard Mewaldt of Caltech. "The increase is significant, and it could mean we need to re-think how much radiation shielding astronauts take with them on deep-space missions." The surge, which poses no threat to Earth, was detected by NASA's ACE (Advanced Composition Explorer) spacecraft. The cause of the surge is solar minimum, a deep...

A big news day. It appears Steve McIntyre (volunteer unpaid auditor of Big-Government-Science) has killed the Hockey Stick a second time. The details are on the last three days of Steve McIntyre’s site Climate Audit, and summed up beautifully on Watts Up. The sheer effrontery and gall appears to be breathtaking. The Briffa temperature graphs have been widely cited as evidence by the IPCC, yet it appears they were based on a very carefully selected set of data, so select, that the shape of the graph would have been totally transformed if the rest of the data had been included....

Many of us had just the grandest time conducting worthless research for the old monopolistic phone companies.  Dr. Steven Chu, our Secretary of Energy was one of the typical products of that era of unfocused industrial research.  He nurtured his career in what had become the most arrogant and unfocused lab of them all, Bell Laboratories.   If you landed one of those storied jobs as a newly minted Member of Technical Staff, you could expect to conduct research indistinguishable from that of any academic scientist supported by government agencies like the National Science Foundation. That a once glorious Bell Labs...

Climate: As alternate-energy champ Spain's green economy slides into recession, a German professor says if American "climate illiterates" don't follow, the Copenhagen climate conference will fail. And the bad news is? King Canute, the Viking king of England, Norway and Denmark, was the legendary king whose sycophantic followers praised his power and wisdom. As the story goes, he once stood on the shore and commanded the waves to halt. Rather than exercising his ego, he in fact was giving his followers a lesson in reality — the power of man over nature is finite and inconsequential. In December, the world's...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Republican Senator John McCain, a leading voice for reducing carbon emissions, said on Tuesday he will not support the climate change bill being introduced by Senate Democrats, illustrating the lack of bipartisan support for the bill. Democratic Senators Barbara Boxer and John Kerry are expected on Wednesday to unveil their plan for cutting smokestack emissions and building vehicles that pollute less. It calls for a 20 percent cut in U.S. carbon emissions from 2005 levels by 2020 and an 83 percent reduction by 2050, according to Senate Republican aides familiar with the Democratic bill. But the legislation...

Two metre sea level rise unstoppable-experts 29 Sep 2009 17:39:53 GMT Source: Reuters * Several metres sea level rise almost unstoppable * Coast protection would save much land, homes, assets * Cost up to $215 billion a year by 2100 By Gerard Wynn OXFORD, England, Sept 29 (Reuters) - A rise of at least two metres in the world's sea levels is now almost unstoppable, experts told a climate conference at Oxford University on Tuesday. "The crux of the sea level issue is that it starts very slowly but once it gets going it is practically unstoppable," said Stefan Rahmstorf,...

Click link to youtube to see video.

The United Nations is pulling out the "big guns" in an attempt to create a climate of urgency about climate change so that the meeting of over one hundred world leaders in Copenhagen some 75 days from now can produce an agreement to replace to failed Kyoto accord.Nature, however, is not co-operating. Average global temperature is rising at 1.40C per century, not the 3.90C indicated by the IPPC models. We are in the seventh year of global cooling. Sea levels, despite messages to the contrary, are rising at normal rates - eight inches per century - much less than the...

Ending some nine months of closed-door deliberations, Sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.) will release global warming legislation Wednesday that they hope will be the vehicle for broader Senate negotiations and an eventual conference with the House. The bill's authors said last week that they expect to start hearings early next month on the bill, with a markup in Boxer's Environment and Public Works Committee to follow soon thereafter. They also acknowledged that their legislation is just a "starting point" in a bid to win over moderate and conservative Democrats, as well as Republicans. "I hope what we've...

WASHINGTON - U.S. Rep. Bob Inglis is paying the price for independent thinking. Inglis, a Travelers Rest Republican, might have been the only Republican lawmaker in the country booed lustily by his own constituents at town hall meetings last month.Inglis was shouted down when he asked listeners why they're afraid of President Barack Obama - and then suggested they stop watching conservative TV commentator Glenn Beck."He's trading on fear," Inglis advised one group, setting off loud catcalls. Despite a broadly conservative voting record, Inglis has angered many GOP activists with his contrarian stands on a handful of high-profile issues. In...

The world leaders who met at the United Nations to discuss climate change on Tuesday are faced with an intricate challenge: building momentum for an international climate treaty at a time when global temperatures have been relatively stable for a decade and may even drop in the next few years. The plateau in temperatures has been seized upon by skeptics as evidence that the threat of global warming is overblown. And some climate experts worry that it could hamper treaty negotiations and slow the progress of legislation to curb carbon dioxide emissions in the United States. Scientists say the pattern...

Sen. James Inhofe (R., Okla.), ranking member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works (EPW), tells NRO that he plans to “lead a truth squad” at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this December. The Oklahoman predicts that he probably will not be welcomed with open arms. Inhofe, as you may remember, led a similar group of conservative legislators in 2003, during the U.N.’s climate-change negotiations in Milan, Italy. “I was the outcast at that time,” recalls Inhofe. “Now, I want to make sure that those attending the Copenhagen conference know what is really happening in...

Are radical environmentalists members of a political movement or more like the devotees of a religious cult, one that might dubbed the Branch Carbonians? Truespeak.org’s Jim Guirardi suggests the label and offers an illuminating case for the latter in this post from the American Thinker. There is much more to Guirardi’s piece, but as a sample, here are his 10 reasons these fanatical devotees qualify as participants in a cult. If these sound somehow familiar, they are based on the criteria elaborated upon in the 2003 book, “Kingdom of the Cults,� by Walter Martin and Ravi Zacharia:     1....

Enlarge ImageTiny bubbles. Ancient air samples trapped in ice cores helped solve a CO2 mystery. Credit: British Antarctic Survey/EPICA There's no doubt that the burning of fossil fuels over the past 2 centuries has caused a huge spike in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But CO2 levels increased gradually over the preceding millennia, too, and scientists did not know how much of that rise was caused by human activity. Now, an isotopic analysis of ancient air trapped in Antarctic ice shows that humans caused little if any of the preindustrial buildup of CO2. The findings negate...

New Analysis Brings Dire Forecast Of 6.3-Degree Temperature Increase By Juliet Eilperin Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, September 25, 2009 Climate researchers now predict the planet will warm by 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century even if the world's leaders fulfill their most ambitious climate pledges, a much faster and broader scale of change than forecast just two years ago, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations Environment Program. The new overview of global warming research, aimed at marshaling political support for a new international climate pact by the end of the year, highlights...

If Jesus raised the dead tomorrow, our science czar probably would be too busy calculating the carbon footprint to find salvation. But who needs Christ when the flock is blessed with sound moral guidance from men and women whose lifework has been cajoling 50 percent plus one to push a button? From our extravagant health care choices to our risky financial behavior to our ill-conceived love of profit to, most tragically, our immoral penchant for air-conditioning our homes, we need help. I need help. This week, prepping for the upcoming Copenhagen climate change talks, Dr. Steven Chu, our erstwhile energy...

September 24, 2009, 0:00 a.m. Authority ComplexSome issues are too important to leave to politicians. By Clifford D. May In 1996, Vice President Al Gore was named by Pres. Bill Clinton to chair the White House Commission on Aviation Safety. Over the months that followed, he and an impressive list of commissioners — including senior law-enforcement and military officers, government officials, and academics — conducted “an intensive inquiry into civil aviation safety, security and air traffic control modernization.� In early 1997, they issued a final report, including a set of recommendations which, Vice President Gore stated confidently, “will serve...

President Bush favored cap and trade, one of this former speechwriters claims in a new book. In fact, Matt Latimer writes in "Speechless," the President actually ENDORSED the policy in a speech, but no one in the press could figure out what he meant. Cap-and-trade, which would put a limit on businesses' carbon emissions, barely passed the House this year but has yet to make headway in the Senate. Most Republicans are vocally opposed to it.

September 23, 2009, 4:00 a.m. The Dog Ate Global WarmingInterpreting climate data can be hard enough. What if some key data have been fiddled? By Patrick J. Michaels Imagine if there were no reliable records of global surface temperature. Raucous policy debates such as cap-and-trade would have no scientific basis, Al Gore would at this point be little more than a historical footnote, and President Obama would not be spending this U.N. session talking up a (likely unattainable) international climate deal in Copenhagen in December. Steel yourself for the new reality, because the data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom...

Advocates of global warming are being stymied by cooler temperatures as the president pushes for climate change legislation. From the New York Times The world leaders who met at the United Nations to discuss climate change on Tuesday are faced with an intricate challenge: building momentum for an international climate treaty at a time when global temperatures have been relatively stable for a decade and may even drop in the next few years.

President Obama yesterday did his best impression of a high-school soph omore participating in his first Model UN meeting, retailing pious clichés he learned from his pony-tailed social studies teacher. Even Woodrow Wilson might have blanched at the mushy-headed exhortations to world peace and collective action better suited to a college dorm-room bull session or a holiday-season Coca-Cola commercial. "No nation can or should try to dominate another nation," Obama intoned. "No world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will succeed. No balance of power among nations will hold."

New satellite information shows that ice sheets in Greenland and western Antarctica continue to shrink faster than scientists thought and in some places are already in runaway melt mode. British scientists for the first time calculated changes in the height of the vulnerable but massive ice sheets and found them especially worse at their edges. That is where warmer water eats away from below. In some parts of Antarctica, ice sheets have been losing 30 feet a year in thickness since 2003, according to a paper published online Thursday in the journal Nature.

Global Warming: President Obama warns of planetary doom at the U.N. if we fail to pass cap-and-trade legislation. Meanwhile, a former warm-monger predicts decades of cooling as the sun stays nearly "spotless."The president had hoped to address Tuesday's United Nations climate change summit in New York with a finished cap-and-trade bill. Failing that, he hoped he'd at least have a version of the Waxman-Markey bill that has passed the House on his desk before the Copenhagen talks in December to cobble together a follow-up to the failed Kyoto Protocol. Not only did that not happen in the cool summer of...

When it comes to greenhouse-gas emissions, Energy Secretary Steven Chu sees Americans as unruly teenagers and the Administration as the parent that will have to teach them a few lessons. Speaking on the sidelines of a smart grid conference in Washington, Dr. Chu said he didn’t think average folks had the know-how or will to to change their behavior enough to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. “The American public…just like your teenage kids, aren’t acting in a way that they should act,” Dr. Chu said. “The American public has to really understand in their core how important this issue is.” (In that...

Manhattan will be a dangerous place this week for President Obama, where the terminally envious of the world are waiting at the United Nations with envy, arrogance and outstretched begging bowls. The diplomats representing the envious countries, some of them little more than tribes with flags and an embassy in a rooming house on a side street in Washington, have cooked up an interesting week to blunt the skepticism of a growing number of scientists who are finding the courage to say what they believed all along, even as Ban Ki-moon, the secretary-general of the United Nations, and others insist...

The Democratic National Committee said Mitt Romney's appearance on Fox News Channel this morning was "vintage Romney" -- and it didn't mean it in a nice way. . . . . . But the DNC asserted that Romney supported a similar Northeast regional cap-and-trade system -- limiting carbon emissions and creating a market for pollution credits -- as governor. . . . . . The DNC, however, failed to acknowledge that while Romney initially supported the Northeast plan, called the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, he backed out in December 2005, citing concerns over the cost to consumers. . . ....

The general public are resentful, cynical and resigned when it comes to the issue of climate change, according to an IPPR report. Unless they can be persuaded to adopt lower-carbon lifestyles, it will be impossible to meet new emissions targets, says the report. An approach based on saving the public money, and giving them greater control over energy bills and independence from suppliers would be more effective, say report researchers. ‘Success will lie in convincing consumers that in adopting lower-carbon lifestyles they can save money and have control in a chaotic world, and they can do the right thing and...

Imagine if the Pope suddenly announced that the Catholic Church had been wrong for centuries about prohibiting priests from marrying. Would that be considered big news? Of course. And yet something like that has happened in the field of global warming in which a major scientist has announced that the world, in contrast to his previous belief, is actually cooling. This was the analogy made by columnist Lorne Gunter in the Calgary Herald: Imagine if Pope Benedict gave a speech saying the Catholic Church has had it wrong all these centuries; there is no reason priests shouldn't marry. That might...

From the NSIDC, Sea ice reaches it’s annual minimum extent growing by 370,000 square miles over 2007. An area 1 1/2 times the size of Texas. The recovery is 220,000 sq miles above last year alone yet the NSIDC claims below that the scientists don’t consider this a recovery. They cite younger thinner ice again and a lower level than the 30 year mean as the reasons this is not a recovery. I have difficulty ignoring a near 400,000 sq mile increase in ice level. So I hope they don’t mind if I do consider it at least a partial...

The United States has an opportunity to learn from Saskatchewan's leading work in carbon-capture technology, a prominent U.S. politician said Friday, as he offered support to a Saskatchewan-Montana project seeking American government funding. Saskatchewan, like the U.S., relies heavily on burning coal for power. But U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (Republican-South Carolina) said the province appears to be "ahead of, quite frankly, the world" with carbon sequestration, the process of capturing the gas and storing the CO2 underground. "What we want to try and do is find out what is working in the area of carbon sequestration, because when you look...

'The Age of Stupid': a wakeup call on climateby Jerome Cartillier – 36 mins ago PARIS (AFP) – Could we, the human race, really miss an ever-narrowing chance to save the planet from the ravages of global warming? "The Age of Stupid," which will be screened in hundreds of venues around the world next week, contemplates this grim scenario with the open aim of galvanising a collective effort to prevent it. Former UN chief Kofi Annan is expected to attend a special "green carpet" showing in New York Monday, on the eve of the world's first United Nation's climate summit....

According to the San Francisco Chromicle, the SFO airport has now installed carbon offset purchase kiosks so that you can remove the guilt from your flight. Only one problem. The carbon offsets sold by kiosk sell at a rate that is about 60 times what carbon credits are actually selling for on the market now. There’s no frequent flyer polluter discount either..... If I chose the medium range flight at 2000 miles, the cost would be 11.44 for 1869 pounds of CO2 that is estimated to be emitted on my behalf. That works out to about $12.24 per ton of...

LONDON – Giving contraceptives to people in developing countries could help fight climate change by slowing population growth, experts said Friday. More than 200 million women worldwide want contraceptives, but don't have access to them, according to an editorial published in the British medical journal, Lancet. That results in 76 million unintended pregnancies every year. If those women had access to free condoms or other birth control methods, that could slow rates of population growth, possibly easing the pressure on the environment, the editors say. "There is now an emerging debate and interest about the links between population dynamics, sexual...

Geologists are desperately trying to gather data in an attempt to understand how global warming will affect violent geological activity. As increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels warm the planet, the problems associated with melting ice won't just raise sea-levels; they will also uncap volcanoes. But just when and how these unstable magmatic beasts will blow in a warmer world is hard to predict.

The global warming narrative - that mankind's addiction to burning fossil fuels is rapidly changing the climate - may be about to go seriously off message. Far from suggesting the planet will get warmer, one of the world's leading climate modellers says the latest data indicates we could be in for a significant period of steady temperatures and possibly even a little global cooling. Professor Mojib Latif, from the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University in Germany, has been looking at the influence of cyclical changes to ocean currents and temperatures in the Atlantic, a feature known as...

ETS – Bias or blindness in the Beehive? Thursday, 17 September 2009, 9:11 am Press Release: University of Auckland ETS – Bias or blindness in the Beehive about carbon dioxide emissions? A charge that there is not one government scientist in New Zealand associated with climate issues who is willing to speak out on global warming alarmism with some sense of balance or with an appearance of an open mind has been made by Associate Professor Chris de Freitas, a climate scientist and Associate Professor in the School of Geography, Geology and Environmental Science at the University of Auckland, writing...

GENEVA | Western nations that spent the past several years slamming the Bush administration for not doing enough to deal with climate change were conspicuously absent from a recent global climate conference. The Obama administration sent a large entourage to the third World Climate Conference in Geneva earlier this month, trumpeting the return of the United States to the climate change debate. But representatives from Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Canada and Australia were nowhere to be found. The European Commission, the executive arm of the 27-member European Union, also failed to send a commissioner. In contrast, the United States sent...

The second big bill before Congress is also in difficulties. New York & Houston. Compared with the argy-bargy over health-care reform, this summer’s public conversation about controlling carbon emissions has been a model of restraint. In August, a Zogby poll commissioned by the National Wildlife Federation found that 71% of likely voters in America support the Waxman-Markey bill, a proposal to create a cap-and-trade mechanism for carbon dioxide that cleared the House of Representatives in June. But the bill still faces an uphill climb in the Senate, which resumed work on September 8th.

As climate change reemerges as an issue in the national policy debate, it may help define the legislative legacies of two men who once vied for the White House: Sens. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.). Both men have championed the issue of global warming for years, including when they served as their party's presidential nominees in 2004 and 2008, respectively. But, for the moment, McCain is barely engaged in the issue beyond criticizing the climate bill passed by the House, while Kerry has emerged as one of the chamber's leading dealmakers. The fact that the two no...

Scientists have used a new approach to sharpen the understanding of one of the most uncertain of mankind's influences on climate - the effects of atmospheric "haze," the tiny airborne particles from pollution, biomass burning, and other sources. High resolution (Credit: NOAA) The new observations-based study led by NOAA confirms that the particles ("aerosols") have the net effect of cooling the planet - in agreement with previous understanding - but arrives at the answer in a completely new way that is more straightforward, and has narrowed the uncertainties of the estimate. The findings appear in this week's Journal of Geophysical...

[Each month, Heartland Institute Science Director Jay Lehr, Ph.D. presents evidence that mankind has no significant impact on the Earth’s climate.—Ed.] The National Aeronautic and Space Agency (NASA) has determined Mars, Pluto, Jupiter, and the largest moon of Neptune warmed at the same time the Earth recently warmed. Two hundred million years ago, when dinosaurs walked the Earth, the average carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere was 1800 ppm, five times higher than today. All four major global temperature-tracking outlets (Hadley UK, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, University of Alabama-Huntsville, and Remote Sensing Systems Santa Rosa) have released updated...