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(Reuters) - A new Tennessee law protects teachers who explore the "scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses" of evolution and climate change, a move science education advocates say could make it easier for creationism and global warming denial to enter U.S. classrooms. The measure, which became law Tuesday, made Tennessee the second state, after Louisiana, to enable teachers to more easily teach alternative theories to the widely accepted scientific concepts of evolution and human-caused climate change. At least five other states considered similar legislation this year. The heart of the law is protection for teachers who "help students understand, analyze, critique,...

A new study says one of the best ways to curb greenhouse gas emissions is to eat less meat. In fact, the study says meat consumption in the developed should be cut by 50 percent per person by 2050. Dr. Eric Davidson said changing how people eat can have a dramatic effect on greenhouse gas emissions. People in developed countries, he said, already eat much more protein than the daily minimum requirement. Davidson looked for ways to ease the effects of climate change that would support an aggressive strategy laid out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In particular,...

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...

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...

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.

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...

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...

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. First, the scientific background: Mann's claim to fame derives from his contentious (and now thoroughly discredited) "hockeystick" research papers (in Nature 1998 and Geophysical Research Letters 1999). His idiosyncratic analysis of proxy (non-thermometer) data from sources like tree rings, ice cores, ocean sediments, etc. did away with the well-documented Medieval Warm Period (MWP - 900-1200AD) and Little Ice Age...

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."

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).