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The unbearable sadness of climate activism: Nicole Thornton remembers the exact moment her curious case of depression became too real to ignore. It was five years ago and the environmental scientist – a trained biologist and ecologist – was writing a rather dry PhD on responsible household water use. Fair enough. That would make anyone depressed. Thornton had always been easily upset by apathy towards, and denial of, environmental issues. But now she began to notice an oddly powerful personal reaction to "the small stuff" – like people littering, or neighbours chopping down an old tree. So, she's a bossy...

Tropical depression perhaps turning into storm in southern east coast, looks likely to veer out to sea. September forecast. Dry from Texas to New England in September. Cool in west prairie states. PDO and AMO influence on weather systems long term (long rant).

Bay Area billionaire Tom Steyer's blitz against candidates who are soft on climate change is underway in seven states, but some prominent fact-checking groups say he's emitting enough hot air to melt a few glaciers. Negative reviews from watchdogs like PolitiFact, FactCheck.org and the Washington Post are dogging one of the nation's biggest political donors, a former hedge fund manager who ditched his ties to fossil fuels and presented himself as a transparent antidote to the conservative Koch brothers' semi-clandestine funding network.

Following rapid warming in the late 20th century, this century has so far seen surprisingly little increase in the average temperature at the Earth’s surface. At first this was a blip, then a trend, then a puzzle for the climate science community. More than a dozen theories have now been proposed for the so-called global warming hiatus, ranging from air pollution to volcanoes to sunspots. New research from the University of Washington shows that the heat absent from the surface is plunging deep in the north and south Atlantic Ocean, and is part of a naturally occurring cycle. The study...

The Atlantic ocean could be contributing to the 'pause' in global warming by drawing down heat by nearly a mile, according to a new study. The research from the University of Washington shows that heat from the surface is plunging deep in the north and south Atlantic, affecting the balance between incoming heat and heat radiated back into the atmosphere. The study is published in Science. Recent measurements of ocean temperature made by thousands of buoys and observations of Earth's radiative energy by satellite instruments have shown that the Earth is warming up. In fact, Earth's heating rate increased between...

The Old Farmer's Almanac, the familiar, 223-year-old chronicler of climate, folksy advice and fun facts, is predicting a colder winter and warmer summer for much of the nation. Published Wednesday, the New Hampshire-based almanac predicts a "super-cold" winter in the eastern two-thirds of the country. The west will remain a little bit warmer than normal. "Colder is just almost too familiar a term," Editor Janice Stillman said. "Think of it as a refriger-nation." More bad news for those who can't stand snow: Most of the Northeast is expected to get more snowfall than normal, though it will be below normal...

Congress should use the appropriations process to reassert its authority over the Environmental Protection Agency, according to a Heritage Foundation issue brief released Tuesday.The report, written by scholar Daren Bakst, identifies three issues on which the EPA has proposed rules and regulations that exceed its authority. In all three cases, Bakst recommends that Congress prohibit the agency from using its funding to implement the proposals. (RELATED: EPA Overrides Congress, Hands Over Town to Indian Tribes)According to the report, “the EPA is using the regulatory process to require greenhouse gas emission reductions even as Congress has been unwilling to take such...

In 2011, President Barack Obama famously called for “shared sacrifice” in America. Three years later, his wish might just become the Environmental Protection Agency’s command. In the coming months, Obama’s EPA will decide whether to further tighten air quality requirements, known as the National Ambient Air Quality Standards. If the EPA gets its way (to which it is accustomed), the vast majority of the country, including Las Vegas and nearly all of Nevada, would fall into so-called “non-attainment” — when the EPA deems air pollution levels “persistently exceed” limits. This is up from a few isolated regions just five years...

Extraterrestrials are conveniently global warming believers Only Paul Hellyer, Canada’s Defence Minister from 1963-67 under Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson who rose to Deputy Prime Minister under Pierre Elliott Trudeau, would tell you that not only do extraterrestrials exist, but they are getting ticked off with those earthlings who don’t buy into Al Gore,/Maurice Strong man-mad global warming. And only Russian Television would be the first to break the ‘scoop’. It’s not enough that earthbound worries like the far left jumping into bed with the expanding Islamic State-Caliphate; that Marxism is on the march in the U.S.A.; or that the...

Billionaire hedge-fund manager Tom Steyer attempted to explain why there is still a sizable portion of Americans that do not buy in to global warming alarmism by, basically, generalizing virtually all of America as not “super sophisticated.”Speaking at a climate conference hosted by the American Renewable Energy Institute, Steyer said: “I think if you were to go around to most of the — what I would think of as super-sophisticated people who think about politics and policy more than five minutes a month — we are doing really well.” … “And the question in the United States of America is...

If you thought last winter was bad, get ready for a potentially worse winter in parts of the country this year. But another record-setting winter could mean more than higher heating bills and snow fights. Harsh winter weather combined with coal-fired power plant closings could spell trouble for many households across the country who will desperately need to keep the lights and heat on this winter. Joe Bastardi, chief meteorologist at WeatherBELL Analytics, told the Wall Street Journal Live that current weather patterns are “flowing along right now into the type of El Niño situation that is notorious for giving...

... In a study published in 2012, researchers asked national infectious disease experts in 30 different countries whether or not they thought climate change would affect infectious disease patterns in their countries. The majority agreed. Nevertheless, it’s unclear whether these beliefs are driven by good science, or, as Malcolm Gladwank argued way back in 1995, a guilt-driven “idea of disease as a punishment for wickedness.” It’s true that West Africa, where the latest and most catastrophic Ebola outbreak is currently raging, has faced unequivocal environmental changes in recent years. The International Food Policy Research Institute published a report in 2013,...

Wherever Hillary Clinton is going, she needs at least a Gulfstream G450 to get there. The once nearly “dead broke” former First Lady now makes steep demands when she gives speeches to corporations, groups and universities, according to emails between Clinton’s agent and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where Clinton will earn $225,000 for a 90-minute speech in October. The school received a bit of a break from the $300,000 Clinton requested during initial negotiations, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which obtained the emails that were sent last year. The correspondence showed that Clinton normally requires “round-trip transportation...

A long report. A more active hurricane period. Warm water in the Gulf of Mexico may attract hurricanes. Late starting El Nino. Relationship of temperature of Pacific to multivariate ENSO index. (Bob Tisdale update here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/08/12/the-201415-el-nino-part-15-august-2014-update-an-el-nino-mulligan/) 1-15 days out same pattern that has held most of the summer with cool upper Midwest. Texas getting warmer. While California will get some rain this winter, it won't make up for the shortfall, and the Pacific is cooling again, which means more drought ahead. Sea ice swinging toward "normal" in the north, and heading toward overall record in the south.

the insane ways that the VA focused on solar energy and wind towers over vets. Three years before Secretary of Veterans Affairs Eric Shinseki would be forced out of his job because of the veterans who had died under him, he visited the Massachusetts National Cemetery. He wasn’t there to see the men and women who had died because of him. While vets were dying, Obama and Shinseki had turned their attention to something truly important; seeing to it that all the cemeteries where they were being buried had wind or solar power. ... The cemetery turbine had cost $533,000....

US Secretary of State John Kerry continues to baffle observers by insisting that "global warming is, by far, the greatest threat mankind faces in the 21st century." "The reason should be obvious from the term 'global' warming," Kerry said. "This means that it affects everyone. This has to put it ahead of dangers that afflict necessarily narrower categories of victims. The beheading of innocent children by ISIS in Iraq, for example, only affects thousands of people." "The threat to wipe Israel off the map and exterminate the Jews, at worst, would entail the deaths of only a few million," Kerry...

BWAHAHAHAHA - Al Gore Sues Al Jazeera

Many scientists and non-scientists are discussing "Global Warming" (or as it is increasingly being called "Anthropogenic Climate Change" or ACC). ACC would simply be an interesting topic for discussion if it were not for the politicization, polarization, and sensationalism that have accompanied the science.

Diplomacy: Great leadership isn't necessarily about intelligence, expertise or background. It's more about wisdom and judgment. Based on this, Americans should be very concerned about Secretary of State John Kerry. As the world melts into chaos and threats to the U.S. homeland multiply, America's top foreign policy official seems bizarrely, even dangerously, fixated on ... global warming. In remarks at the East-West Center in Honolulu on Wednesday, Kerry repeated his claim that climate change is "the biggest challenge ... we face right now." To which we respond: Can he be serious? In recent days, we've seen the establishment of a...

WASHINGTON – News outlets, advocacy groups and fellow think tanks are jumping to the defense of a conservative-leaning D.C. policy center and publication being sued for libel by a scientist who didn't like what they had to say about his work on global warming. Michael Mann, a prominent professor of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University, has long been a target of climate change skeptics for his work claiming temperatures have risen dramatically in recent decades, and has sued before when groups tried to debunk his data. But this time, Mann is being accused of going too far with his case...