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Better go out and buy a gas fireplace and stove soon before federal regulations make them more expensive. Federal officials are looking to regulate the energy usage of fake fireplaces as part of the Obama administration’s effort to fight global warming.The Energy Department has proposed new regulations that would mandate that “gas-fired hearth products” like decorative fireplaces and stoves be more energy efficient and produce fewer carbon dioxide emissions. DOE says its rule would save $165 over the lifespan of the average hearth and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 11.1 million metric tons through 2030.The major change DOE demands is...

... I can deal with cold, because I can just add a new layer, it’s all the snow that becomes the real problem and it’s about to get worse. All this after the snowiest 5 days on record in Boston (29.7") and Worcester 40.7"). Monday Snowstorm We have another storm coming and many areas will see a foot or more of snow...For much of the storm, temperatures are going to be very cold and this is mostly a good thing.... Notice, the colder the air the more snow the exact same amount of moisture creates. In other words, if you...

the town of Karasjok, in Finnmark County, temperatures dropped to minus 45.2 degrees Celcius on Sunday. On Monday it was still minus 42 in the morning. Although all school buses stopped running, schools were still open for those who were able to get there. - Outside temperatures will have to be much lower before we close the schools, says school administrator Petter Asbjørn Balto to NRK. - If it is 50 below or colder, the students may choose whether or not they want to go to school, Balto says

Give climate change credit for one thing: it’s endlessly versatile. There was a time we called it global warming, which meant what it said: the globe would get warmer. It was only later that we appreciated that a planet running a fever is just like a person running a fever, which is to say it has a whole lot of other symptoms: in this case, droughts, floods, wildfires, habitat disruption, sea level rise, species loss, crop death and more. Now, you can add yet another problem to the climate change hit list: volcanoes. That’s the word from a new study...

The Keystone XL pipeline is closer than it’s ever been to approval after the Senate overcame a Democrat-led filibuster Thursday and was headed for a final passage vote later in the day — setting up an eventual showdown with President Obama, who has promised a veto. Nine Democrats bucked Mr. Obama’s threat and voted with 53 Republicans to approve the pipeline, which has taken on a political significance far beyond the 830,000 barrels per day of tar sands oil that it is projected to carry if it ever gets built. It marks the first major legislation to clear the Senate...

Between a President who lies about global warming, climate change, a Congress composed mostly of lawyers who are clueless about the actual science, the best we can hope for is a Republican Party determined to rein in the EPA I made a promise to myself that I would not write about President Obama’s State of the Union speech because that would require me to watch him deliver it. Like many others I can barely watch him under any circumstance because, to my mind, that means having to watch a psychopathic liar. The problem with that is that he is the...

Seattle to Fine Residents for Throwing Food in the Garbage In an attempt to shame residents of their city, a new Seattle law will levy a fine on homes that do not properly sort food out of their garbage. Emblazoned with a red citation tag, violators will start to be fined anywhere from $1-$50 in July. For now, Seattle residents will be publicly shamed by the ‘Scarlet Letter’-like tags. US Food Waste Food waste is a big, and still growing, problem. (Charles Krupa/AP Photo) "I'm sure neighbors are going to see these on their other neighbors' cans," says Rodney Watkins,...

If you own Apple stock, you can vote today for the Board of Directors. Please take the time to vote against Al Gore.

As the first major snowstorm of 2015 bears down on the Northeast, many pundits have taken the opportunity to mock the idea that humans are changing the climate. After all, it's very difficult to think "global warming" when your car is buried in snow. Still, all this doesn't necessarily mean that this particular blizzard was caused by, or made more intense by, human activity. Spotting the fingerprints of climate change in the middle of a blizzard is no easy task. But here's one thing we do know: As the climate continues to change, we can expect more weather like this.

EPA chief headed to Vatican to talk climate change Brian Roewe  |  Jan. 27, 2015 Eco Catholic The head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is scheduled to make a brief Vatican visit at the end of the week on the topic of addressing climate change. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy will meet there Friday with senior officials, among them Cardinal Peter Turkson, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. She is also slated to meet with Catholic journalists Friday morning and business leaders in Rome that afternoon. The agency initiated the meeting through U.S. Ambassador to the Holy...

Here we are alive to tell the tale. Nobody perished, nobody died despite Mayor de Blasio's warning that few would survive this historic snowfall. I told you yesterday. You know, and, by the way, I hope everybody listens to the way I'm gonna analyze this today, because this is a key thing people are going to have to realize. They're going to have to learn why this happened. Why was this presented, this forecast -- and, even at its worst, it was gonna be 24 inches, which New York has survived countless times. Yet this was presented as a life-threatening...

National Weather Service experts misjudged the path and impact of the blizzard that struck the Northeast on Monday and Tuesday, in large part because they trusted the wrong forecasting model, several independent meteorologists said. Rather than rely on their own forecasting system—upgraded in recent weeks—the federal experts placed their faith instead on a well-regarded European computer model that predicted the worst of this storm would squarely hit New York City. That system earlier had outperformed the U.S. forecasting system in predicting the path of superstorm Sandy. This time, the European forecasting model was wrong, several commercial forecasters said. That model,...

A federal appeals court has agreed to hear arguments in a pair of cases challenging the Obama administration’s climate rule proposal for power plants. The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said Tuesday that it will hear oral arguments from the various sides in the cases on the morning of April 16. Twelve states, led by West Virginia, along with coal mining company Murray Energy Corp., filed separate lawsuits last year asking the court to overturn the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) proposed rule to cut carbon pollution from power plants by 30 percent by 2030. In briefs...

Big news today out of the Interior Department: much of the Atlantic coastline from Virginia to South Carolina will soon be opened up for oil and natural gas drilling. In 2010, Interior proposed opening parts of the Virginia coast to drilling, but pulled back after the Deepwater Horizon incident in the Gulf of Mexico. At the recent States and Nation Policy Summit this past December, ALEC’s Energy, Environment and Agriculture Task Force adopted a resolution calling upon the Obama Administration to expand access to additional offshore resources in its 2017-2022 Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) oil and natural gas leasing program...

Over-reaction of meteorologists and politicians Dateline: January 27, 2015 - 3 to 4 AM, New York City and Tri-State area. There was no climate change where I live in a suburb of Newark, N.J. if by “climate change” you meant a dramatic blizzard with high winds and several feet of snow. It’s winter and you get the occasional, rare blizzard every few years, but more often you get snowstorms. That’s not “change” by any definition. Listening to WABC radio follow events with callers from around the Tri-State area calling in with far more accurate reports than the meteorologists was an...

In politics, much as with a Broadway chorus line, timing is everything. That’s a lesson that current EPA Director, Gina McCarthy will probably take to heart after this one. As the northeast braces for what is being described as a potentially historic snowstorm, Ms. McCarthy spent the beginning of her weekend huddling with environmental activists with a clear message. These climate change deniers will ruin the ski industry because we’re going to run out of snow. The Environmental Protection Agency, Aspen Skiing Co., and a pair of Olympic snowboarders teamed up Thursday to help spread the word about climate...

Near-term global warming projections (brick-red region) on[0.13, 0.50] K decade-1, compared with observations (green region)that fall on [0.0, 0.11] K decade-1, and the simple model's 21stcentury warming projections (yellow arrow), falling on 0.09 [0.06,0.12] K decade-1. Credit: Science China PressA major peer-reviewed climate physics paper in the first issue (January 2015: vol. 60 no. 1) of the prestigious Science Bulletin (formerly Chinese Science Bulletin), the journal of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, exposes elementary but serious errors in the general-circulation models relied on by the UN's climate panel, the IPCC. The errors were the reason for concern about Man's effect...

Blizzard Warning for NYC and Southern NY State Active for next 1 day, 23 hours · National Weather Service This alert has been updated. Posted 3 hours, 18 minutes ago Crippling and potentially historic blizzard to impact the area from late Monday into Tuesday.Blizzard Warning remains in effect from 1 pm Monday to midnight EST Tuesday night. Locations: New York City and surrounding immediate suburbs. Long Island, and most of southern Connecticut.Hazard types: Heavy snow and blowing snow, with blizzard conditions.Accumulations: snow accumulation of 20 to 30 inches, with locally higher amounts possible. Snowfall rates of 2 to 4...

Panic-buyers flood grocery stores and commuters are begged to stay home ahead of 'historic' blizzard that threatens to drop THREE FEET of snow on New York City and up to 57million on East CoastHuge lines were pictured in food stores and warnings flooded in to stay home amid snow falling at 4inches per hour Bill de Blasio warned New Yorkers not to 'underestimate' the storm, which could drop 36inches in places Snowfall expected to be accompanied by hurricane-strength winds blowing at up to 65 miles per hour New York governor Andrew Cuomo warned commuters to go home early as roads...

A double dose of snow makes its way toward NYC Driver miraculously survives pileup between two big rigs Motorists angry over alternative-side parking rules during snowfall New York braced for one of the biggest blizzards in “the city’s history,” with over 24 inches of snow expected to blanket Gotham on Monday and Tuesday, authorities said. “We are facing one of the largest storms in the city’s history,” Mayor de Blasio said. “This could be a storm…the likes of which we have never seen before.” Snow is expected to begin falling just before sunrise on Monday before the serious blizzard kicks...

Follow up on: New Pope Arrives 3-13-13: Bergoglio Anagram and "Last Pope Prophecy", A21, Purpose Driven, Seagull Symbolism 3-13-13 "This post...in general, [is] to look at the result of the selection of the new pope to try and determine whether what happened fits the basic scenario with regard to the "Zionist global agenda"... Three things are apparent right of the bat. They are (1) the name of the selected pope, (2) the papal name chosen by the selected pope, and (3) the meaning of that name as indicative of what his mission will be and the significance of that "mission"...First...

It’s not fossil fuels causing global warming, it’s man-made adjustments. Stop the adjustments! In South America, there are hardly any rural land thermometers. GISS tells us the area is warming (see the map below). Paul Homewood looked at the raw data. There are only three rural stations currently operating in the area, Puerto Casado, Mariscal, and San Juan, and they all show a raw trend that falls. As in so many other situations, after adjustments, all three show a rising trend. The changes are breathtaking. In Mariscal raw temperatures of 25.5C turned out to be “really” 22.5C. (Those 1950...

We were told in October, before 2014 was over, that it was heading toward being the warmest year on record (Figure 1). The visual link of Polar Bears underscored the message. In fact, 2014 was among the coldest 3 percent of years of the last 10,000, but that doesn’t suit the political agenda.Figure 1We know the headline referred to NOAA’s projection, but the public only remember “warmest year”. It is a routine of manipulation of headlines practiced by bureaucrats and supporters of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC), from the start. The claim was not surprising, because NOAA was...

It was bound to happen eventually. We could see it coming – a feeding frenzy from “really, it is still getting warmer” to “we told you so: this is proof positive that the science is settled and we will all boil or fry!” The latest numbers are in and they show the “hottest” year since temperature data has become available depending on which data you look at. The cheerleader this time around seems to have been AP science correspondent Seth Borenstein. Various versions of his essay on the topic have permeated most of America’s newspapers including my own hometown...

NOAA says that the first 10 months of the calendar have been the warmest in more than 130 years. The weather outside has been frightful, but not because it’s cold. According to a new report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, this year is shaping up to be the hottest since scientists began keeping record more than 130 years ago. The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature from January to October was 1.22 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the 20th century average of 57.4 degrees Fahrenheit. “Record warmth for the year-to-date was particularly notable across much of northern...

We skeptics get excited about unusual things. The Australian published Michael Asten today in the Op-Ed pages, and took the extremely rare step of publishing a scientific graph (!) with a few error bars and everything. Newspapers publish economic graphs all the time, so it’s nice to see the scientific debate getting a bit more sophisticated than just the usual “deniers are evil, government climate scientists speak the word of God” type of stuff. (In the Enlightenment, data was a greater source of authority than any human; how we pine for those days.) The only thing the story should have...

A hundred years from now, if we're all dead because of global warming, scientists have my permission to spit on my grave. But that's 100 years in the future. So why did the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists move their iconic Doomsday Clock 2 minutes closer to midnight and cite global warming as a major reason? The proliferation and modernization of nukes I can understand. Human civilization can be destroyed in half an hour if there was a large scale nuclear exchange. But by the time the terrible effects of global warming are supposedly to be felt to the fullest, you...

The U.S. has caused more global warming than any other country. Here’s how the Earth will get its revenge.Last year, we learned what is probably the worst global warming news yet — that we may have irrevocably destabilized the massive ice sheet of West Antarctica, which contains the equivalent of nearly 11 feet of sea level rise. The rate of West Antarctic ice loss has been ominously increasing, and there are fears that if too much goes, the slow and long-term process of ice sheet disintegration could accelerate. Humans have a hard time conceiving of the incredible scale of an...

It is time for liberals to cheer Mitt Romney. Not because his possible entry into the 2016 Republican presidential contest could cause chaos for the GOP. But because Romney, apparently seeing the error of his "severely conservative" ways, has become a progressive crusader. Initial news reports noted that Romney was telling Republicans privately that should he mount a third presidential bid he would run to the right of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, an all-but-announced contender. Yet in public remarks, Romney has been sounding like a born-again lefty. At an investment management conference in Utah this week, Romney told the...

GOP elites want Americans to think the party's boring and safe again. Maybe someone should notify the Tea Party. If you’re understandably perplexed by the Republican Party’s apparent decision to enter the post-Obama era by nominating either another member of the Bush dynasty, or another version of Mitt Romney, there’s at least one way to think about it that might help explain the seemingly inexplicable. Put simply, the leaders of the GOP, the people who tend to be referred to as “the establishment,” fervently believe that in order to win in 2016, Republicans will have to convince voters that the...

If this is the best liberals can do to disparage Ted Cruz, the Texas Senator has a great chance of being our next President. Adam Estes at Gizmodo.com fired off a salvo that simply begs a little asterisking.** Estes writes: “Even though Cruz is from Houston, home of Johnson Space Center, there’s reason to believe that he’ll continue his pursuit of trying to deflate the space agency. Heck, just look at all the dumb things he’s said about science in recent years.” “Net Neutrality’ is Obamacare for the Internet; the Internet should not operate at the speed of government.” –...

When the temperature dips below freezing, reliable electricity becomes more than a matter of convenience but a matter of life and death. Unfortunately, the reliability of our electric grid is at-risk due to EPA regulations that are shutting down America’s coal plants.Existing EPA regulations already have led to the scheduled shutdown of nearly 20 percent of the U.S. coal fleet. EPA’s newest carbon regulations being finalized this summer will lead to even more shutdowns. With coal responsible for generating nearly 40 percent of America’s electricity, these shutdowns will further strain our nation’s electricity grid and could leave many Americans in...

RUSH: Now, I have to share with you, folks: I'm like many of you. When I saw yesterday, last night, that the Senate voted 98-1 to essentially accept the notion and affirm the idea that climate change is real, I about flipped my gourd. It's 98-1? I found out the one vote against it was James Inhofe of Oklahoma. Which would make perfect sense, because he does have his head on straight about global warming. But Ted Cruz, all these guys that we talk about? What's the deal here? So I had to come in and investigate this, and The...

Mitt Romney: Climate Change Is Real, Human-Induced, And We Must Tackle It

"In January 2013, Lake Michigan hit its lowest water mark ever. Just two years later, the big lake has seen what some are calling an unparalleled turnaround. “We’re up almost two feet from there. Last fall, we had an unprecedented event where lake levels continued to rise through the fall. It has not rebounded this quickly I think in any recorded history that we have,” said Chris Schropp of the U.S Army Corps of Engineers."

Here's one way to solve global warming: Spend $90 trillion (£59 trillion) over the next few years to redesign all the cities — as in all the cities on earth — so people live in more densely packed neighborhoods and don't need cars.

A new Congress means change—change in the way that votes swing, legislature is pushed past, and committees are formed. With the 2014 midterm elections, the Republican Party took control of Congress, and subsequently, new senators were named to positions in congressional committees. Recently, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R.) was named chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Science and Space, while Fla Sen. Marco Rubio (R.) was named chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries, and Coast Guard. Interestingly enough, neither seem to have the education or beliefs necessary to head such influential positions. Cruz is infamous for his...

The GOP accepts the notion of climate change - but not the way Democrats wanted them to.Senate Republicans head-faked Democrats on climate change Wednesday, agreeing in a floor vote that the planet’s climate was changing, but blocking language that would have blamed human activity. In a complicated maneuver that was the first politically perilous test for Senate Republicans, the new majority party split up the votes that Democrats had hoped would force the GOP into an awkward roll call on whether they believed in the science behind climate change — just hours after President Barack Obama slammed Republicans in his...

An MIT professor of meteorology is dismissing global-warming alarmists as a discredited “cult” whose members are becoming more hysterical as emerging evidence continues to contradict their beliefs. During an appearance on this writer’s radio show Monday, MIT Professor emeritus Richard Lindzen discussed the religious nature of the movement. “As with any cult, once the mythology of the cult begins falling apart, instead of saying, oh, we were wrong, they get more and more fanatical. I think that’s what’s happening here. Think about it,” he said. “You’ve led an unpleasant life, you haven’t led a very virtuous life, but now you’re...

The United States Senate voted Wednesday to agree that climate change "is real and not a hoax." That was it, the full extent of the amendment to the Senate's slow-moving Keystone XL pipeline bill. Final tally: 98 to 1.This was one of two traps set up by Democrats to get their opponents on the record as disputing the authenticity of human-caused global warming, a phenomenon nearly universally accepted by the scientific community. But it didn't go as expected.Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) co-sponsored the amendment with Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who introduced it. Inhofe can claim credit as a primary inspiration...

United States senators are now on the record on the question of whether climate change is "a hoax." The Senate on Wednesday passed a measure stating that "climate change is real and is not a hoax" by a margin of 98-1. The amendment was designed in part as a jab at GOP Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who has questioned the science of climate change. Inhofe voted for the measure, arguing that the true "hoax" is that climate change is the result of human activity. "Climate is changing, and climate has always changed, and always will, there's archeological evidence of...

Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Inhofe criticized President Barack Obama’s doubling down on fighting global warming Tuesday night, arguing that the president’s planned climate regulations was simply “a wealth redistribution scheme.” “Why the pain for no gain?” Inhofe asked in a rebuttal to Obama’s State of the Union speech. ”As The Wall Street Journal put it when reporting on just one of the president’s many climate regulations, this is a wealth redistribution scheme being imposed by the president through the EPA.” “This is the real climate agenda the president chose not to address tonight. It is no wonder because it would...

Last year, government scientists tell us, was the hottest year on record. This news is terribly — what's the word? — inconvenient. No, not for polar bears or drought victims or coastal dwellers. It's inconvenient for politicians across the country who, despite whatever data or overwhelming scientific consensus might be proffered, insist on denying global warming. In recent weeks, West Virginia has snatched national headlines for its attempts to doctor school science standards to discredit climate change. The sixth-grade science curriculum, for example, was amended so that, rather than having students "clarify evidence of the factors that have caused the...

Last week the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced major new regulations on the emissions of methane into the air from oil and gas production. It calls methane a “potent” pollutant and its new rules would require a 45 percent reduction by 2025 from 2012 levels. Most Americans support these new rules, according to polling from environmental groups. This isn’t surprising. Methane sounds like a dirty and dangerous pollutant and even deadly if leaked into water or the air. However, methane is just another term for the main component of natural gas. Drillers have a powerful motive to stop leakage on...

The U.S. ocean, atmospheric and space agencies affirmed on Friday what the planet has been telling us every way it knows how: 2014 was the hottest year since record keeping began in 1880. That means average land and sea temperatures, worldwide, have never been hotter in modern times, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (the gold standard for global climate data) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (the guys who put a man on the moon). This isn't about whether we believe in science: It's about whether we believe the thermometer. In fact, the 16 hottest years...

OR: Why I Should Have Been an Engineer Rather than a Climate Scientist I’ve been inundated with requests this past week to comment on the NOAA and NASA reports that 2014 was the “hottest” year on record. Since I was busy with a Japan space agency meeting in Tokyo, it has been difficult for me to formulate a quick response. Of course, I’ve addressed the “hottest year” claim before it ever came out, both here on October 21, and here on Dec. 4. In the three decades I’ve been in the climate research business, it’s been clear that politics have...

Miami-Dade County’s task force on rising seas wants the county mayor to take the reins on the mounting problem and will propose a suite of resolutions before commissioners on Wednesday to address the issue. The measures will serve as “marching orders” to increase the county’s response to sea rise, County Commissioner Rebeca Sosa said during a meeting with Miami Herald editors last week. She sponsored the legislation carrying out the task force recommendations as one of her last acts as commission chairwoman. The resolutions ask Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez to take formal oversight and dedicate staff and resources to shepherd...

We were recently informed by the blaring of progressive trumpets and flapping of angelic wings that evil energy users had set a new record, with 2014 being the warmest year in recorded history. The end is clearly near, so you should all begin getting your affairs in order unless President Obama can rail through his new methane regulations. It is, as Mother Jones described it, a moment of truth. Well folks, what can I say? We had a good run.But wait! The phrase “moment of truth� ends with a rather important word. How “true� is this claim? The folks...

The global warming establishment and the media are crowing about 2010 being in a tie for the “hottest year” ever. The UK Guardian headline sums up the media’s promotion: UK Guardian: ‘Hottest Year’ Claim: 2014 officially the ‘hottest year’ on record US government scientists say - ‘Nasa and Noaa scientists report 2014 was 0.07F (0.04C) higher than previous records…The global average temperatures over land and sea surface for the year was 1.24F (0.69C) above the 20th century average, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) and Nasa reported. The scientists said 2014 was 0.07F (0.04C) higher than the previous records...

Pope Francis is in the news for speaking out on the alleged dangers of man-made Climate Change. Unfortunately, Francis is outside his field in making comments on this topic, and seems to have accepted uncritically the unproven pop-science of the moment. Francis himself is not a climatologist, and no one would expect a Pope to be so. Francis, however, is also not a theologian, (no Doctorate, that is) but was a teacher of literature in Argentina, who went on to become Novice Master, Jesuit Provincial and then Rector of the Jesuit Collegio Maximo, prior to his elevation to the episcopacy....