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Jim Inhofe had some harsh words for the Obama administrations energy policy. | AP PhotoClose By MJ LEE | 4/26/12 7:38 AM EDT Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) on Thursday blasted an Environmental Protection Agency official’s claim that the agency was using a “crucify them” strategy against oil and gas companies, calling it a part of President Barack Obama’s “war on domestic energy.”“Let’s keep in mind, this is all a part of Obama’s war on domestic energy,” Inhofe said on “Fox & Friends.” “He’s the one who said that we have good natural gas and it’s plentiful and all of...

Report says 40 percent of the public breathes unhealthy airBy Andrew Restuccia - 04/25/12 02:53 PM ET More than 40 percent of the public lives in regions with unhealthy levels of air pollution, a new report from the American Lung Association says. The public health group, in its annual State of the Air report, said air quality has dramatically improved in recent decades as a result of the Clean Air Act. But it warned that more action is needed to better protect the public from air pollution like smog or soot. The report finds that more than 127.2 million people,...

Obama vows to fight for climate action, make global warming a key 2012 issueBy Ben Geman - 04/25/12 10:40 AM ET President Obama is vowing to make the case for action on global warming during the 2012 campaign. “I suspect that over the next six months, this is going to be a debate that will become part of the campaign, and I will be very clear in voicing my belief that we're going to have to take further steps to deal with climate change in a serious way,” Obama told Rolling Stone magazine in a newly published interview. Obama’s comments...

Over the past decade, alarmists have repeatedly made claims that the Great Lakes were drying up. However, month after month Great Lakes water levels were higher in the 2000s than low level records set in previous decades. Humans have only been keeping consistent Great Lakes water level records for 94 years. In 1918 the Army Corps of Engineers began measuring and recording the lake levels on a monthly basis. This is a very short period in terms of natural history. Yet, with the exception of two summer months on Lake Superior, the monthly measurements of the 2000s didn't even hit...

The sun may be entering a period of reduced activity that could result in lower temperatures on Earth, according to Japanese researchers. Officials of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan and the Riken research foundation said on April 19 that the activity of sunspots appeared to resemble a 70-year period in the 17th century in which London’s Thames froze over and cherry blossoms bloomed later than usual in Kyoto. In that era, known as the Maunder Minimum, temperatures are estimated to have been about 2.5 degrees lower than in the second half of the 20th century. The Japanese study found...

Early on in the 2012 campaign Mitt Romney expressed support for global warming in various ways, the typical comment being this: “I believe the world is getting warmer, and I believe that humans have contributed to that.” He holds this belief despite the growing body of evidence that global warming theory is based upon false assumptions and despite the last two winters being among the coldest in recent history. Romney has also called for the Federal government to “reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases,” which is code, of course, for creating massive new government programs despite America’s air...

It’s time for our periodic check up on the sinking global warming alarmism movement. Let’s begin by noting the fading popularity of this eco-obsessive notion. “Earth Day stands up to the rain,” the Washington Post blared, putting as good a face on as lousy a turn-out as we can remember. The rain “didn’t stop the die-hards,” the report says. The Post didn’t give a crowd count. But Examiner.com, did . . .

James Lovelock, the maverick scientist who became a guru to the environmental movement with his “Gaia” theory of the Earth as a single organism, has admitted to being “alarmist” about climate change and says other environmental commentators, such as Al Gore, were too. Lovelock, 92, is writing a new book in which he will say climate change is still happening, but not as quickly as he once feared. He previously painted some of the direst visions of the effects of climate change. In 2006, in an article in the U.K.’s Independent newspaper, he wrote that “before this century is over...

Let’s take a page from those Tennessee firemen we heard about a few times last year – the ones who stood idly by as houses burned to the ground because their owners had refused to pay a measly $75 fee. We can apply this same logic to climate change. We know who the active denialists are – not the people who buy the lies, mind you, but the people who create the lies. Let’s start keeping track of them now, and when the famines come, let’s make them pay. Let’s let their houses burn until the innocent are rescued*. Let’s...

WASHINGTON— The Obama administration announced today that it is reissuing a Bush-era regulation that sharply limits protections for polar bears under the Endangered Species Act. Both the current proposal and the previous Bush rule exclude activities occurring outside the range of polar bears — such as the greenhouse gas emissions of industrial polluters like coal plants — from regulations that could help stop the bear’s extinction. Today’s announcement comes as a result of a court order that struck down the Bush rule in October 2011. “If polar bears are to survive we have to directly confront the greatest threat to...

EPA: 2010 U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions Increased 3.2 PercentBy Rachel Bogart | Yahoo! Contributor Network – Mon, Apr 16, 2012 According to Reuters, the Environmental Protection Agency announced today that greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. increased 3.2 percent in 2010 over the previous year, most likely due to economic growth in the country and electricity demands during the stifling summer. Here are some facts about greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. and steps being taken to reduce its emission levels. * Fossil fuel combustion contributes to a major portion of greenhouse gas emissions and in 2010 it contributed about...

The European Union—or at least its feisty climate commissioner Connie Hedegaard—seems determined to take on the whole world by demanding that all airlines pay a carbon tribute for the privilege of crossing EU airspace and landing at EU airports. The tax, which will start being collected in 2013, would be levied not just on the miles flown over EU territory but for the entire length of the trip—thus, Indian or Korean airlines that traverse only a few hundred miles over the EU when traveling from Mumbai or Seoul would have to fork over taxes based on the entire trek...

Apparently, the magnetic shifts in the Sun mimic those that occurred during the mini-Ice Ages of the 17th century, reports the Japanese Astronomical society. They also claim that this is the reason for the "halting" in the progress of global warming. Basically the sun's magnetic field has shifted from a straight N-S configuration - to a N-Equator Equator-S, 4 pole configuration This supposedly occurred during the 17/18th century and was responsible for the mini Ice Age.

The Salem witch tragedy of 1692 took less than two years to play out. Yet 300 years later, explanations for how and why it happened are still coming. One theory recently gaining exposure thanks to bloggers comes from a 2004 college thesis that places the blame on something we think of as a strictly modern phenomenon: climate change. Proposed in a Harvard thesis, the paper by economist Emily Oster has earned attention due to the modern swirl of controversy surrounding the possibility that human interaction has altered world temperatures. Currently an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, Oster linked...

Apple's pretty products do a good job distracting from the bleak reality of how they're made. As we've learned from the Foxconn debacle, that means sub-standard working conditions. But it's not just people that are affected, but also the environment. Built to support iCloud, Apple's new billion-dollar data center in Maiden, North Carolina is another strike against the world's most valuable company. In fact, the behemoth, which is one of the largest such facilities on the planet, is powered mostly by coal, through Duke Energy. Even though Cupertino is building a solar farm down the road from the data center,...

Sea Ice extent still greater than average (third consecutive week) http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg

Barack Obama has been promising a green future since before he was president. While we might one day be powered by renewable energy, there's no reason to rush it. Fossil fuels are still abundant, reliable and cheap. Roughly 85% of our domestic energy is provided by fossil fuels. They generate more than 96% of the energy used in transportation and about 67% of the electricity we consume. Despite promises and commands from the Obama administration — the president pledged in 2009 to cut oil consumption 35% by 2030, for instance — these ratios aren't going to change much in coming...

Meteorologist Brian Sussman blows whistle on president's scheme The environmentalist movement isn’t about protecting the environment at all, according to meteorologist-turned-journalist Brian Sussman. It’s about destroying private property, controlling behavior, and expanding government – and the Obama administration has a secret plan to further all of it, he says. Sussman is now blowing the whistle on the real nature of environmentalism in his explosive brand-new book, “Eco-Tyranny.” He reveals secret memos from inside Obama’s Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, outlining a covert plan “to pursue a program of land consolidation” for the federal government to secure tens of millions...

Australian government endorses Report banning publication of all but government approved science; proof if it were needed that Australian politics and post-normal science is in crisis. In a shocking story If It Can Happen Down Under by Hal G.P.Colebatch (American Spectator, April 4, 2012) citizens are gearing up for a “head-on assault on Australia’s entire political culture of liberty and democracy.” In effect, the Australian Labor Party and extreme leftist Greens are preparing to make law the 470-page Finkelstein Report to ban from it’s borders those scientists and free-thinkers that are increasingly congregating to the maverick independent global science community,...

Photos taken by a French satellite show glaciers in a mountain range west of the Himalayas have grown during the last decade. The growing glaciers were found in the Karakoram range, which spans the borders between Pakistan, India and China and is home to the world's second highest peak, K2. The startling find has baffled scientists ... French scientists from the National Centre for Scientific Research and the University of Grenoble, were forced to rely on satellite images, to study the region - because much of the Karakoram range is inaccessible. They compared observations made in 1999 and 2008 and...

Guest post by Dr. Roy Spencer PhD. Since NOAA encourages the use the USHCN station network as the official U.S. climate record, I have analyzed the average [(Tmax+Tmin)/2] USHCN version 2 dataset in the same way I analyzed the CRUTem3 and International Surface Hourly (ISH) data. ------------------------------------- Virtually all of the USHCN warming since 1973 appears to be the result of adjustments NOAA has made to the data, mainly in the 1995-97 timeframe. -------------------------------------- Given the amount of work NOAA has put into the USHCN dataset to increase the agreement between neighboring stations, I don’t have an explanation for this...

The Obama administration was more vocal about the supposedly dire need to combat climate change toward the beginning of their oh-so-eminent reign, with President Obama out championing the cause at such august events as the U.N. climate conference in 2009. There’s been a bit of a lull in their alarmist-enthusiasm rhetoric in the past year or so (maybe they’ve figured out that concern for climate change is a luxury good during times of economic recession), but it looks like they may be thinking about bringing back the meme to help sell their horrendous energy polices in the run-up to November....

NASA is swiping back at a group of nearly 50 of its former scientists and astronauts who wrote to accuse the space agency of advocating the “extreme” position that global warming is the result of man-made carbon dioxide.In a March 28 letter addressed to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, 49 former employees said the “unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change is unbecoming of NASA’s history of making an objective assessment of all available scientific data prior to making decisions or public statements.” But NASA responded on Wednesday by saying they don’t “draw conclusions and issue ‘claims’...

UPDATE: 11:30AM 4/12/12 Predictably, Andrew Revkin from the New York Times joins in with the poo-pooing consensus saying it is “utterly unremarkable ” (yet he writes a article about it – go figure). From Revkin’s shuttered in world of living in the woods (he didn’t even know what the TV show Seinfeld was until I brought it to his attention in Climategate2), that’s probably true, but Andy, here is one of your favorite consensus buzzphrases that can be applied: it is an unprecedented letter. There’s no denying that. – Anthony ==========From the Daily Caller, in my opinion, a load of...

California Declares War on Detached Homes WRITTEN BY RAVEN CLABOUGH WEDNESDAY, 11 APRIL 2012 15:36 In its ongoing move to establish a full nanny state, the state of California has passed laws intended to minimize car use and carbon dioxide emissions. Those laws are now leading to policies that permit the state to mandate that up to 30 homes may be built on a single acre of land, in an effort to assuage concerns by climate-change advocates that humans are taking up too much space. “Metropolitan area governments are adopting plans that would require most new housing to be built...

BrightSource Energy of Oakland, a solar power-plant developer whose first project won $1.6 billion in federal backing, abruptly canceled its initial public stock offering Wednesday night, just hours before trading was scheduled to begin. The surprise move killed what had been the most hotly anticipated clean-tech IPO this spring. It casts doubt on investor appetite for similar offerings in the future. The cancellation could also revive the debate over federal support for renewable power companies. Solar-module maker Solyndra of Fremont, which received $528 million from the same government program that funded BrightSource's first power plant, also canceled a planned IPO...

Given the high profile story today about the 49 NASA astronauts, engineers, and scientists who wrote a scathing letter to NASA director Charles Bolden, Jr. saying Jim Hansen and NASA GISS are exemplifying the “wrong stuff”, I thought I’d share this poster contributed by WUWT reader NickFromNYC:

Joint Post by Tony Cox and Jo Nova Clouds cool the planet as it warms Clouds cover an enormous 65% of the planet and are responsible for about half of the sunlight that is reflected back out to space.[i] The effects of clouds are so strong that most of the differences between IPCC-favoured-models comes from the assumptions the models make about clouds. Cloud feedbacks are the “largest source of uncertainty”.[ii] Numerous studies show models project wildly different results for clouds, and yet few could correctly simulate clouds as recorded by satellites.[iii] One researcher described our understanding of cloud parameters as...

The 85th Congress and President Eisenhower set up the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to explore space. Government bureaucrat James Hansen has used his position and NASA’s reputation to advance an unscientific agenda that calls for government restrictions on all major industries and any other human activity in the bane of controlling carbon dioxide production. This junk science has made him a millionaire through income outside the government. He is a rogue government agent who no one seems able to supervise. Now 50 top former and current astronauts and NASA scientists and engineers have had enough. They want this crackpot...

How depressing. Conservatives remain divided this election cycle while the most liberal candidate for the GOP nomination in decades continues to pile up delegates. Meanwhile, the evidence continues to mount that Romney will govern to the left of George Bush – either one. Romney’s effort to portray himself as a conservative has had great success, primarily due to a black out on Romney’s record not only by the mainstream press but also by much of the conservative media. Moreover, much of America’s conservative “leadership” has decided to give Romney a pass. I posted a piece here a few weeks ago...

It has been so warm in the United States this year, especially in March, that national records were not just broken, they were deep-fried. Temperatures in the lower 48 states were 8.6 degrees (4.8 degrees Celsius) above normal for March and 6 degrees (3.3 degrees Celsius) higher than average for the first three months of the year, according to calculations by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That far exceeds the old records.

Green campaigners and climate scientists are losing the public debate over global warming, one of the movement's leading proponents has admitted. Dr James Hansen, director of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies Photo: PA Dr James Hansen, director of the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who first made warnings about climate change in the 1980s, said that public scepticism about the threat of man-made climate change has increased despite the growing scientific consensus. Speaking ahead of a public lecture in Edinburgh this week, he admitted that without public support it will be impossible to make the changes...

Posted on April 10, 2012 by Anthony Watts Taken at the Energy Crossroads conference in Denmark on 12 March 2009. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)Though, he still thinks we are all funded by some sort of “machine”. It never occurs to him that he’s fight a guerrilla war and that most skeptics are self motivated.Update: the UK telegraph has a similar story hereScientist hits climate change skepticism – UPI.com EDINBURGH,Scotland,April 9 (UPI) –Environmentalists and climate scientists,facing public skepticism,are losing the debate on global warming,a U.S. scientist who first raised the issue says.James Hansen,director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies,who issued...

Posted on April 10, 2012 by Anthony Watts An embarrasing image for NASA: James Hansen, arrested in front of the White House in Keystone pipeline protest. Image: via Wonk RoomLooks like another GISS miss, more than a few people are getting fed up with Jim Hansen and Gavin Schmidt and their shenanigans. Some prominent NASA voices speak out.Former NASA scientists, astronauts admonish agency on climate change positionFOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEContact: Blanquita Cullum 703-307-9510 bqview at mac.comJoint letter to NASA Administrator blasts agency’s policy of ignoring empirical evidence HOUSTON, TX – April 10, 2012.49 former NASA scientists and astronauts sent a letter...

A new paper in Quaternary Science Reviews titled: Combined dendro-documentary evidence of Central European hydroclimatic springtime extremes over the last millennium…demonstrates that there is evidence for extreme weather during both the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age, in fact it was seen as common according to the tree ring records examined. Unlike the Yamal debacle, it seems they did a much broader sampling of trees, both living and historical fir (Abies alba Mill.), and sampled across France, Switzerland, Germany, and the Czech Republic. Even better, unlike the irascible Dr. Mann, they didn’t have to truncate the tree samples...

In a new study reported in Nature, climate scientist Rob DeConto of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and colleagues elsewhere propose a simple new mechanism to explain the source of carbon that fed a series of extreme warming events about 55 million years ago, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), and a sequence of similar, smaller warming events afterward. "The standard hypothesis has been that the source of carbon was in the ocean, in the form of frozen methane gas in ocean-floor sediments," DeConto says. "We are instead ascribing the carbon source to the continents, in polar latitudes where permafrost can...

China will accelerate the use of new-energy sources such as nuclear energy and put an end to blind expansion in industries such as solar energy and wind power in 2012, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao says in a government report published on March 5.China will instead develop nuclear power in 2012, actively develop hydroelectric power, tackle key problems more quickly in the exploration and development of shale gas, and increase the share of new energy and renewable energy in total energy consumption.The guidance indicates a new trend for new-energy and renewable energy development in China from 2012. Analysts believe that the...

Let’s be as generous as we can. The IPCC say feedbacks amplify CO2′s warming by a factor of about three. Without the amplification from positive feedback there is no crisis So being nice people, let’s assume it’s warmed since 1979 and assume that it was all due to carbon dioxide. If so, that means feedbacks are …. zero. There goes that prediction of 3.3ºC. Feedbacks are the name of the game. If carbon dioxide doesn’t trigger off powerful positive feedbacks, there was and is no crisis. Even James Hansen would agree — inasmuch as he himself said that CO2 would...

No Global Warming For 15 Years New UK Met Office global temperature data confirms that the world has not warmed in the past 15 years. Analysis by the GWPF of the newly released HadCRUT4 global temperature database shows that there has been no global warming in the past 15 years - a timescale that challenges current models of global warming. Whether the global temperature standstill of the past 15 years continues or is replaced by warming, as the IPCC predicts, only future data will tell. In the meantime the length of the standstill means that the challenge it offers for...

Previous research could not accurately date the sea-level rise but now an Aix-Marseille University-led team, including Oxford University scientists Alex Thomas and Gideon Henderson, has confirmed that the event occurred 14,650-14,310 years ago at the same time as a period of rapid climate change known as the Bølling warming... During the Bølling warming high latitudes of the Northern hemisphere warmed as much as 15 degrees Celsius in a few tens of decades. The team has used dating evidence from Tahitian corals to constrain the sea level rise to within a period of 350 years, although the actual rise may well...

Easter is still a great day for worship, candy in baskets, pagan equinox rituals and running around the yard finding eggs, but every year it gets quite a bit worse for bunnies. And no, not because the kids like to pull their ears. The culprit is climate change, and the folks at Climate Nexus found that rising temperatures are having adverse effects on at least five species of rabbit in the U.S.

Why would Dr. Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, and chairman of an American Geophysical Union task force on "scientific ethics and integrity," break the law to engage in a smear campaign against a small think-tank called The Heartland Institute that resulted in "Fakegate"? As Alan Caruba related in the opening paragraph of his article published on Tuesday, April 3rd, titled "Fatetgate: The War on Science," "[g]enerations of Americans have been raised to venerate science and those who have enhanced and extended our lives through its application. The rise of environmentalism, however, has generated a...

Sen. Dick Durbin reacts to the tornadoes in Dallas, Texas earlier this week. Durbin calls for more laws regulating carbon output while he sends a dire warning that we must convert to hybrid cars or lose our life. Durbin says we must spend money now to fix the problem. "It's your money or your life," he said a press conference. "We are either going to dedicate ourselves to a cleaner, more livable planet and accept the initial investment necessary or we're going to pay a heavier price in terms of loss of human life, damage and costs associated with it."

Hey, take a look at what I found on the EPA's website (Yes, I have a life. Really. I do. Promise.): ********************************** "Environmental Justice is the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies. Fair treatment means that no group of people should bear a disproportionate share of the negative environmental consequences resulting from industrial, governmental and commercial operations or policies. Meaningful involvement means that: (1) people have an opportunity to participate in decisions about activities that may...

As a climate scientist, I am quite familiar with the background facts that Prof Michael E. Mann (now at Penn State U) so shamelessly distorts in his new book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines. Mann's claim to fame derives from his contentious (and now thoroughly discredited) "hockeystick" research papers (in Nature 1998 and Geophysical Research Letters 1999).

Bill Flax Popular in Opinion 1 PETA vs. people ... and animals 2 EPA's new farcical carbon mandate 3 Manhattan Moment: One word hurting growth: Zero 4 Examiner Editorial: Obama's budget, not Ryan's, is 'antithetical' to history 5 How many incumbents voted themselves a pay raise this year? Last week the Environmental Protection Agency issued new standards for carbon dioxide requiring that fewer than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide be released per megawatt-hour of electricity. Plants running on natural gas already average below 850 pounds. Coal-fired plants, which emit on average 1,768 pounds per megawatt-hour, cannot achieve this without prohibitively...

Posted on April 5, 2012 by Anthony Watts From the Daily Globe and Mail in Canada:Healthy polar bear count confounds doomsayers The debate about climate change and its impact on polar bears has intensified with the release of a survey that shows the bear population in a key part of northern Canada is far larger than many scientists thought, and might be growing.The number of bears along the western shore of Hudson Bay, believed to be among the most threatened bear subpopulations, stands at 1,013 and could be even higher, according to the results of an aerial survey released Wednesday...

Get rid of hippies, save the planetThe Green movement needs to rethink its philosophy from the ground-up. That's according to Peter Kareiva, a leading conservation expert and chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy, the world's biggest environmental group.It must abandon the idea that nature is "feminine" and in particular that it's "fragile", he said, because not only is this artificial, it's wrong, and so many bad ideas follow.When people believe that a fragile "Mother Nature" is harmed by anything humans do, it's actually the humans who suffer, Kareiva argues in the co-written essay Conservation in the Anthropocene. It's little wonder...

The Planet Under Pressure conference has brought out the clawing powermongers. The Commentator.com team who were brave enough to attend, tell us that no one got very excited about the science, but the word “regulation” was received, well… ecstatically. The conference was largely focused on how scientists and activists can coalesce to deconstruct the Western way of living and moving to something entirely different, where economic growth and wealth creation is abandoned and replaced, instead, with sustainability targets, trade barriers, regulation and taxation. Indeed there were numerous occasions during the main sessions whereby even the mention of the word ‘regulation’...

Recently, various media outlets have reported on Romney’s statement in which he expressed support for global warming: “I believe the world is getting warmer, and I believe that humans have contributed to that.” This despite the last two winters being among the coldest in recent history and the recent evidence revealing pro-global warming scientists to have made fraudulent claims and suppressed contrary views. Romney also called for America to “reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases,” which, will, of course entail massive new government programs despite air quality in the United States being among the cleanest in the world....