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The dangerous rise in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere may be troubling scientists and world leaders but it could prove to be a boon for plants, German researchers said Tuesday. Increasing exposure to carbon dioxide appears to boost crop yields, Hans-Joachim Weigel of the Johann Heinrich von Thuenen Institute for rural areas, forestry and fisheries in the central city of Brunswick told AFP. "Output increased by about 10 percent for barley, beets and wheat" when the plants were subjected to higher levels of carbon dioxide, Weigel said. The Thuenen Institute, which has been monitoring the phenomenon in fields since 1999,...

Research: Wind power pricier, emits more CO2 than thought'Windfarm output is never zero. Sometimes it's less' By Lewis Page Published Thursday 3rd July 2008 10:02 GMT Fresh contenders have entered the UK wind power debate, as a turbines expert funded by the Renewable Energy Foundation publishes an investigation into a hotly-disputed subject - the variability in output to be expected of a large UK windfarm base. In a just-released article for the journal Energy Policy, titled Will British weather provide reliable electricity?, consulting engineer Jim Oswald and his co-authors model the output to be expected from a large, 25+ gigawatt...

While American politicians mull a carbon cap-and-trade system for industry, the British are already contemplating the next step: personal CO2 rations. And you thought the talk about a "war" on global warming was just rhetoric, says the Wall Street Journal. According to a Parliamentary committee proposal: All British adults would be given "carbon allowances" that they would be required to spend when buying gasoline, airline tickets, electricity or natural gas. Britons who wanted more credits than they were issued could try to buy them from those who hadn't spent their allotment. It would cost a country like Britain billions of...

Study finds Arctic seabed afire with lava-spewing volcanoes The Arctic seabed is as explosive geologically as it is politically judging by the "fountains" of gas and molten lava that have been blasting out of underwater volcanoes near the North Pole. "Explosive volatile discharge has clearly been a widespread, and ongoing, process," according to an international team that sent unmanned probes to the strange fiery world beneath the Arctic ice. They returned with images and data showing that red-hot magma has been rising from deep inside the earth and blown the tops off dozens of submarine volcanoes, four kilometres below the...

James Hansen, one of the world's leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer. Hansen will use the symbolically charged 20th anniversary of his groundbreaking speech to the US Congress - in which he was among the first to sound the alarm over the reality of global warming - to argue that radical steps need to be taken...

Vast Peat Fire May Burn for Months in North CarolinaWillie Drye for National Geographic NewsJune 13, 2008 About 450 firefighters are battling a 40,000-acre (16,000-hectare) blaze in northeastern North Carolina that could burn for months unless the drought-stricken region gets a downpour. The fire, which was sparked by a lightning strike on June 1, is currently the largest active wildfire in the United States. Containing and extinguishing the fire is posing a unique challenge, because it is burning in highly flammable peatland. Peat is partially decomposed plant matter formed in wetlands that can be harvested as fuel. It can be...

Environment: Al Gore has conned a world into thinking that carbon dioxide is harmful, and the Supreme Court has ordered the federal government to classify it as a pollutant. Gee, why are they so anti-green?From all the hype, you'd think CO2 is an environmental toxin on the level of nuclear fallout, a big threat to our existence. It's not. As any fourth-grader knows, carbon dioxide is necessary for life on Earth. Without it, there's no plant life, and hence no animals and no humans — exactly what some of the more radical misanthropic eco-activists want. CO2's importance has become obvious...

Capture your car's CO2 and use it to re-power your vehicle - and your home A new technology that can capture the carbon emissions from your car is about to be unveiled to the world for the first time. Origo Industries has developed a system that captures the CO2 from your vehicle’s engine and then allows you to turn these emissions into fuel at your own home to re-power your car. The same fuel could also be used to power your house. The system uses a revolutionary new approach where CO2 is regenerated through algae in a home unit, allowing...

WELLINGTON: The United Nations urged the world on Thursday to kick an all-consuming addiction to carbon dioxide and said everyone must take steps to fight climate change. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said global warming was becoming the defining issue of the era and will hurt rich and poor alike. "Our world is in the grip of a dangerous carbon habit," Ban said in a statement to mark World Environment Day, which is being marked by events around the globe and hosted by the New Zealand city of Wellington. "Addiction is a terrible thing. It consumes and controls us, makes us...

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said global warming was becoming the era's defining issue and would hurt rich and poor."Our world is in the grip of a dangerous carbon habit," Ban said in a statement on World Environment Day, which is being marked by events around the globe and hosted by the New Zealand city of Wellington."Addiction is a terrible thing. It consumes and controls us, makes us deny important truths and blinds us to the consequences of our actions," he said in the speech to reinforce this year's World Environment Day theme of "CO2 Kick the Habit."World Environment Day, conceived...

The misanthropic movement known as environmentalism doesn't mind the military killing people, but God forbid if an instrument of warfare generates carbon dioxide! According to this LiveScience article, Environmentally Friendly Bombs Planned: TNT, RDX and other explosives commonly used in military and industrial applications often generate toxic gases upon detonation that pollute the environment. Moreover, the explosives themselves are toxic and can find their way into the environment due to incomplete detonation and as unexploded ordnance. They are also extremely dangerous to handle, as they are highly sensitive to physical shock, such as hard impacts and electric sparks. To make...

Strapping a queen-size mattress to a bike trailer with bungee cords and straps Saturday morning, Colin Stevens says not to worry. It looks like a giant stingray perched on a deck of cards, its wingspan hovering above thin air. But he's done this before -- moving his own bed by bicycle -- so he knows it works. "I've acquired a nickname from some people - 'Haulin' Colin,'" said Stevens, a car-free welder who tows salvaged material behind him on his bike. That was just one of the human-powered vehicles Central Area residents Joe Goldberg and Venessa Brown used to ferry...

Billions of pounds are being wasted in paying industries in developing countries to reduce climate change emissions, according to two analyses of the UN's carbon offsetting programme. Leading academics and watchdog groups allege that the UN's main offset fund is being routinely abused by chemical, wind, gas and hydro companies who are claiming emission reduction credits for projects that should not qualify. The result is that no genuine pollution cuts are being made, undermining assurances by the UK government and others that carbon markets are dramatically reducing greenhouse gases, the researchers say.

OTTAWA -The cash-strapped Liberal party plans to spend a precious chunk of its election reserve to advertise their carbon tax when the scheme is unveiled next month. Imagine that. The first election-revving pitch by an official opposition boxed about the ears for more than a year by bare-knuckle Conservative attack ads will be to sell Canadians on higher energy taxes. Some insiders suggest the plan should be launched with defiant fanfare at the Calgary Petroleum Club. Those Liberals sure have a warped sense of humour. Wherever it's launched, there will be no mention of a "carbon tax". They'll call it...

The Great Liberal Carbon Tax is apparently still in gestation, delivery date unknown. Energy prices are already through the roof, up to $1.33 for a litre of gasoline, but the Liberals believe Canadians could use a little more bad news on the cost of heating their homes, running air conditioners and driving to work. Oops. Sorry, not driving to work. The Dion Liberals are deeply, deeply committed to the use of green carbon taxes to bring the power of market forces to bear on transforming the way we live and thereby thwart the ravaging monster of man-made climate change, but...

Every adult should be forced to use a 'carbon ration card' when they pay for petrol, airline tickets or household energy, MPs say. The influential Environmental Audit Committee says a personal carbon trading scheme is the best and fairest way of cutting Britain's CO2 emissions without penalising the poor. Under the scheme, everyone would be given an annual carbon allowance to use when buying oil, gas, electricity and flights. Anyone who exceeds their entitlement would have to buy top-up credits from individuals who haven't used up their allowance. The amount paid would be driven by market forces and the deal...

<p>Conveyor of a super-Einsteinian theory of gravitation that explains, among many other post-Einstein-effects, the Sun-Earth-Connection and the true cause of the global climate changes.</p> <p>As the glaciological and tree ring evidence shows, climate change is a natural phenomenon that has occurred many times in the past, both with the magnitude as well as with the time rate of temperature change that have occurred in the recent decades. The following facts prove that the recent global warming is not man-made but is a natural phenomenon.</p>

Britain pumped out more greenhouse gases last year under the EU carbon trading scheme designed to cut emissions, according to figures released in Brussels. The British increase was 2.2 per cent. There was an overall increase across Europe of 0.68 per cent, or 16million tonnes of CO2. Emissions rose in ten of the EU's 27 countries, including Germany and Spain, despite the scheme's target to cut CO2 by a fifth by 2020. Ministers argued that the extra 5.4 million tonnes of CO2 produced in Britain could be more than explained by 59 organisations joining the trading scheme, in which polluters...

Ok, this is about a news item I heard on KRAK radio out of Sacramento, Ca. Roseville is a town linked to Sac and actually part of it physically but is a separate township. Roseville is paying people to eliminate their grass because of water considerations, either take up your grass and put down mulch(which the city will supply if you wish)or artificial turf. I didn't hear all the details but I think it is laughable that they are screaming about CO2(and the Sacramento Bee is one of the biggest screamers)causing global warming but at the same time you are...

If the ‘progressives’ get their way on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it will be ordinary Americans who suffer, says John Entine Let’s call it the black box syndrome: making revolutionary changes or new products without any real handle on what has actually been created or the potential impact. No-one really knew what the risks were when the wizards of Wall Street launched the inscrutable credit products that led to the current financial bubble that is now imploding, rocking the world economy. Now we have something akin to that bubble building in the environmental arena, in the inflated rhetoric on...

The ice core boring at Dome C in Antarctica shows that the curves for the temperature and the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane follow each other over the past 800,000 years -- with few deviations. (See arrows) Credit: Professor Thomas Blunier, Centre for Ice and Climate, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen The newest analysis of trace gases trapped in Antarctic ice cores now provide a reasonable view of greenhouse gas concentrations as much as 800,000 years into the past, and are further confirming the link between greenhouse gas levels and global warming, scientists reported today in the...

5 hours ago ROME (AFP) — The Etna volcano in Sicily rumbled back to life on Tuesday with a "seismic event" followed by a burst of ash, volcanologists said three days after minor eruptions shook the cone. A "seismic event provoking a strong explosion was recorded Tuesday at 0424 GMT (6:42 am local) in parts of the peak of the volcano," the National Geophysics and Vulcanology Institute in Sicily's Catania region said in a statement. The explosion on Etna, Europe's tallest active volcano at 3,295 metres (10,810 feet), was followed by a rain of ash on the southeast crater, "where...

Stephen Wilde has been a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society since 1968. The first two article's from Mr Wilde were received with a great deal of interest throughout the Co2 Sceptic community. In Stephen Wilde's third and exclusive article for CO2Sceptics.Com, he explores the mechanics and mechanism involved that are attributed to the Earth's Warming and Cooling, needless to say the presence of CO2 is not part of the process. Global Warming and Cooling - The Reality. It’s all very well doing what alarmists do which is to say that Co2 is rising and temperatures are rising so in...

OSLO – Greenpeace and more than 100 other environmental groups denounced projects for burying industrial greenhouse gases on Monday, exposing splits in the green movement about whether such schemes can slow global warming. Many governments and some environmental organisations such as the WWF want companies to capture heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the exhausts of power plants and factories and then entomb them in porous rocks as one way to curb climate change. But Greenpeace issued a 44-page report about the technology entitled 'False Hope'. 'Carbon capture and storage is a scam. It is the ultimate coal industry pipe dream,' said...

Breaking News: Scientists call on UN Climate Committee to admit they are wrong and renounce Global Warming claims and policies This was sent by Lars Larson . Yesterday, one of the scientists involved was on his radio show with news of this new information. Please pass it around! Tell the president and McCain, since they seem to be out of the loop! The UN's Climate Committee leadership and policies were today challenged by four scientists, including one Nobel Peace Prize winner, from around the world to admit that CO2 centred Global Warming theories are now disproved by observations and to...

China has already overtaken the US as the world's "biggest polluter", a report to be published next month says. The research suggests the country's greenhouse gas emissions have been underestimated, and probably passed those of the US in 2006-2007. The University of California team will report their work in the Journal of Environment Economics and Management. They warn that unchecked future growth will dwarf any emissions cuts made by rich nations under the Kyoto Protocol. The team admit there is some uncertainty over the date when China may have become the biggest emitter of CO2, as their analysis is based...

WILMINGTON, Delaware (AFP) - Global warming has plunged the planet into a crisis and the fossil fuel industries are trying to hide the extent of the problem from the public, NASA's top climate scientist says. "We've already reached the dangerous level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere," James Hansen, 67, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, told AFP here. "But there are ways to solve the problem" of heat-trapping greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, which Hansen said has reached the "tipping point" of 385 parts per million. In a paper he was submitting to Science...

Almost everyone's breasts look good in Hollywood. From Anne Hathaway and Victoria Beckham to Catherine Zeta-Jones, it doesn't matter if you're 20 or 50; when you get on that red carpet in your designer dress, you've got to get it right. C02 TREATMENTSSaid to be the biggest breakthrough since Botox, carboxy therapy can eradicate wrinkles and stretch marks on your de colletage and take years off your skin. It has recently been made available in Britain by Parisian doctor Jules-Jacques Nabet, who says: "Nothing else works like it for loose skin and stretch marks. It means there is no need...

The Australian reports a few inconvenient truths regarding global climate change that have yet to receive much attention from a media sold on global warming. Not only has the Earth cooled since its peak year in 1998, not only are oceans cooler than predicted, but new NASA data shows that the computer models that predicted runaway global warming were based on a fundamental error. Rather than having clouds and water vapor amplifying the warming effect of carbon in the atmosphere, it turns out that they compensate for it (via Memeorandum): Last Monday - on ABC Radio National, of all places...

I am now considering replacing my vehicle and I was doing an ROI/Break even analysis on a conventional power vs a hybrid to see if the additional cost was worth the effort. So I built the table below in Excel and have come to the conclusion that even with today's gas prices ... it simply is not a smart move. My assumptions and math is below. If I'm wrong would someone point out my error?

The first question that comes to mind is certainly: but what about human emissions? There is no mention of them in the model. That is because the system is taken as a whole, and not as a sum of detailed fluxes that individually vary on a monthly, annual, or decadal basis. One does not necessarily need to know where the CO2 comes from to restore the equilibrium. Because of the highly dynamic nature of the carbon cycle, the system takes the CO2 wherever it can to attempt to restore the equilibrium. Since, as has been noted, human emissions are but...

"I am afraid there are people who want to stop the economic growth, the rise in the standard of living (though not their own) and the ability of man to use the expanding wealth, science and technology for solving the actual pressing problems of mankind, especially of the developing countries." "I am also afraid that the same people, imprisoned in the Malthusian tenets and in their own megalomaniacal ambitions, want to regulate and constrain demographic development, which is something only the totalitarian regimes have until now dared to experiment with."

In Religion News today, we learn that there’s nothing we can do – except perhaps getting naked and dancing around an Oak tree worshipping Gaia – to save the planet from rapacious capitalists, gas hungry gear heads, electrical power gluttons, and lawnmower fanatics. Basically, we’re toast: The task of cutting greenhouse gas emissions enough to avert a dangerous rise in global temperatures may be far more difficult than previous research suggested, say scientists who have just published studies indicating that it would require the world to cease carbon emissions altogether within a matter of decades. Their findings, published in separate...

New derivation of equations governing the greenhouse effect reveals "runaway warming" impossible Miklós Zágoni isn't just a physicist and environmental researcher. He is also a global warming activist and Hungary's most outspoken supporter of the Kyoto Protocol. Or was. That was until he learned the details of a new theory of the greenhouse effect, one that not only gave far more accurate climate predictions here on Earth, but Mars too. The theory was developed by another Hungarian scientist, Ferenc Miskolczi, an atmospheric physicist with 30 years of experience and a former researcher with NASA's Ames Research Center. After studying it,...

Article by Thomas Sowell, National Review Online Sunday, March 2, 2008 (For some reason I could not find the this article on National Review Online) It has almost become something of a joke when some “global warming” conference has to be cancelled because of a snowstorm or bitterly cold weather. But stampedes and hysteria are no joke - and creating stampedes and hysteria has become a major activity of those hyping a global-warming “crisis.” They mobilize like-minded people from a variety of occupations, call them all “scientists” and then claim that “all” the experts agree on a global-warming crisis. Their...

MONTEREY, California (AFP) - A scientist who mapped his genome and the genetic diversity of the oceans said Thursday he is creating a life form that feeds on climate-ruining carbon dioxide to produce fuel. Geneticist Craig Venter disclosed his potentially world-changing "fourth-generation fuel" project at an elite Technology, Entertainment and Design conference in Monterey, California. "We have modest goals of replacing the whole petrochemical industry and becoming a major source of energy," Venter told an audience that included global warming fighter Al Gore and Google co-founder Larry Page. "We think we will have fourth-generation fuels in about 18 months, with...

 Editor's Note: Our charter to report on clean technology and the status of species and ecosystems seems to always bring us back to one overriding distraction - global warming alarm - and small wonder. We are in the midst of one of the most dramatic transformations of political economy in the history of the world - and nobody is watching. "The debate is over on global warming," goes the consensus, and even if that were a healthy or accurate notion, why has this consensus translated into hardly any vigorous debate over what would be a rational response? Despite ongoing rhetoric...

Joe Daleo, the number one guy over at Icecap.us, recently sent me CO2 data from Beck (2007) and asked me what I made of it. Now, this data has been poured over by the great and small, so should we expect any revelations along the lines of “Has CO2 actually decreased?” Well…see below. I don’t often see this data pictured in one particular way that I find instructive, so I wanted to show it to you. You’re probably used to seeing CO2 through time in plots very much like this cartoon. CO2 through time The black line is the actual...

LONDON (Reuters) - The patio heaters warming drinkers and diners on the pavements of northern Europe are also warming the planet's climate and should be banned, according to a European Parliament report that could be adopted on Thursday. Environmentalists argue that heaters not only pump heat directly into the atmosphere but also climate-damaging CO2, while owners of pubs and bars say they need them to help retain customers driven outside by smoking bans. "Patio heaters are scandalous because they are burning fossil fuels in the open sky, so producing vast quantities of CO2 with very little heat benefit," said European...

Russian scientist says Earth could soon face new Ice Age 14:31 | 22/ 01/ 2008 ST. PETERSBURG, January 22 (RIA Novosti) - Temperatures on Earth have stabilized in the past decade, and the planet should brace itself for a new Ice Age rather than global warming, a Russian scientist said in an interview with RIA Novosti Tuesday. "Russian and foreign research data confirm that global temperatures in 2007 were practically similar to those in 2006, and, in general, identical to 1998-2006 temperatures, which, basically, means that the Earth passed the peak of global warming in 1998-2005," said Khabibullo Abdusamatov, head...

WASHINGTON — The nation’s leading effort to build a coal-fired electric plant that will capture and store its carbon emissions will take a shaky step forward on Tuesday, when the consortium building it announces a location for the $1.5 billion plant. But choosing a location may be the least of the problems for the builders, with the Energy Department making ambiguous statements about its commitment to the project. The department, which is supposed to pay for most of the work, called the announcement on a location “inadvisable” and seemed to distance itself from the plans, saying in a letter last...

Proposed fuel efficiency standards in both the US and EU will not reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions from cars and light trucks over the long term, according to a report released today by the World Resources Institute. Light-duty vehicle fleet fuel consumption in US, Japan and European countries, in liters gasoline equivalent/100km. The report finds that industry has held fuel efficiency almost constant while increasing weight and power. Standards currently proposed in the US and Europe would lead to a 33% increase in fuel efficiency—defined as distance traveled per volume of fuel—in the US and about 25% in Europe once...

STAVANGER, Norway, Dec. 10 (UPI) -- Former U.S. Vice President and Nobel Peace laureate Al Gore consented to casts of his bare feet being taken to decorate a peace pathway in Norway. Sunday, Gore had the castings taken in Stavanger, from which bronze footprints will be made for a Path of Peace created by the human rights foundation, Point of Peace, the Stavanger Aftenblad newspaper reported. "Funny and nice, a very good idea. I have never heard of this, but I think it is a very good idea," Gore told the newspaper.

Fifty years ago the U.S. Weather Bureau, predecessor of NOAA’s National Weather Service, helped sponsor a young scientist from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography to begin tracking carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere at two of the planet’s most remote and pristine sites: the South Pole and the summit of the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii. This week NOAA, Scripps, the World Meteorological Organization, and other organizations will celebrate the half-century anniversary of the global record of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere—often referred to as the “Keeling Curve” in honor of that young scientist, Charles David Keeling. Science, business, and policy...

The 2007 Human Development Report says Iceland now leads annual United Nations Index. Iceland has narrowly passed Norway to take the top spot on the Human Development Index (HDI), according to the 2007/2008 Human Development Report (HDR) released by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) today. Norway had held the number one ranking for the previous six years. This change in ranking is a result of new estimates of life expectancy and updated GDP per capita figures, stress the Report authors. Introduced with the first HDR in 1990, the HDI assesses the state of human development through life expectancy, adult...

Conjuring gemstones from thin air sounds like one of the alchemist's more ambitious projects. But that is what a team of chemists from China is claiming to have achieved by making small diamonds from carbon dioxide. "We are changing a waste gas into gems," claims Qianwang Chen, head of the team producing the diamonds at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei, Anhui province. The team claims its method could be cheaper and more efficient than some existing methods of synthesising diamonds, which require pressures of up five million atmospheres and temperatures that reach 1400 °C. Chen...

UN climate circus rolls in on CO2 cloud Nicola Smith and Jonathan Leake IT HAS been billed as the summit that could help save the planet, but the latest United Nations climate change conference on the paradise island of Bali has itself become a major contributor to global warming. Calculations suggest flying the 15,000 politicians, civil servants, green campaigners and television crews into Indonesia will generate the equivalent of 100,000 tonnes of extra CO2. That is similar to the entire annual emissions of the African state of Chad. When it was first conceived, only a few thousand politicians civil servants...

Ocean Plankton Reducing Greenhouse Gases By Using More Carbon DioxideMicroalgae under the microscope: CO2-feeders in the ocean. (Credit: A. Stuhr/ IFM-GEOMAR) ScienceDaily (Nov. 17, 2007) — Microscopically tiny marine organisms known as plankton increase their carbon uptake in response to increased concentrations of dissolved CO2 and thereby contribute to a dampening of the greenhouse effect on a global scale. An international group of scientists led by the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, Germany documented this biological mechanism in a natural plankton community for the first time. In simulations of the future ocean, they measured an increased CO2 uptake...

'WE have turned out the lights in the studio," NBC's Bob Costas told viewers of Sunday's Dallas Cowboys-Philadelphia Eagles game, "to kick off a week that will include more than 150 hours of programming designed to raise awareness about environmental issues." Discerning viewers with eyes keen enough to pierce the sanctimonious glare of Costas' candlelit silhouette may have noticed that the stadium's klieg lights still shone brightly. On a typical game day, a large football stadium burns about 65,000 kilowatt hours of electricity and 35,000 cubic feet of natural gas. The cars driving to the game spew about 200 metric...

China will this year surpass the US in terms of carbon dioxide emissions and will become the world's biggest oil consumer by 2010, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said. Speaking at the release of the agency's World Energy Outlook report here, Nobuo Tanaka, IEA executive director said that China needs to invest about 3.7 trln usd in energy supply infrastructure to meet demand. 'The sustained high economic growth of both China and India are the drivers behind rising global energy demand,' Tanaka said. He noted that rising oil and gas prices are making coal a more competitive fuel and rising...