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A Charlotte, N.C., man says he was arrested unfairly on a traffic violation because police were worried he would organize protests during the Democratic National Convention. ... Tyson's lawyer, Derek Fletcher, says a police report of the arrest claimed his client was on a terrorist watch list and should be held until the convention ends Thursday. Tyson says he's an activist with the Rainforest Action Network. He thinks he was targeted by police to stop him from organizing protests

Ridding the U.S. of oil-based energy and avoiding the catastrophic consequences of climate change are the primary goals of the Democratic Party platform released this week that labeled the planet’s temperature variations as a national security crisis. “We must end the tyranny of oil in our time,” the platform said. “This immediate danger is eclipsed only by the longer-term threat from climate change, which will lead to devastating weather patterns, terrible storms, drought, conflict, and famine. That means people competing for food and water in the next fifty years in the very places that have known horrific violence in the...

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — In 2008, Al Gore strode onto the stage at Denver's Invesco Field to a hero's welcome, throwing his support behind Barack Obama to take on the "global climate crisis." When Obama takes the stage this week, Gore will be nowhere in sight. He isn't coming to the Democratic National Convention but is spending the week in New York City, anchoring coverage of the event for his network Current TV. [SNIP] While many Democrats in Charlotte were reluctant to talk about Gore for attribution, some said Gore's diminished profile — and the environmental movement's more broadly — is...

Perhaps greens just aren't the good guysAnalysis "Why should we sacrifice 10 per cent of our income today to make Bill Gates better off?" asked an MP. "As the world's [second] richest man, he doesn't need our sacrifice." The second richest man in the world, Bill Gates, is a proxy in this rhetorical question. The MP, a former Cabinet minister, is raising a fascinating and rarely asked moral question. Should we make ourselves poorer to save the rich of the future some insignificant amount of money: an amount so small, it will be a rounding error? The argument he builds...

.....More may be revealed this week as the Democrats meet in Charlotte, N.C., when the president will be formally nominated as their candidate. Some of the possible second-term goals are ones he set aside in the first when they were too difficult or politically costly. They include a rewrite of immigration laws, efforts to combat global warming and a sweeping change in the tax code beyond the year-to-year extensions of Bush-era tax cuts.... The government faces a “fiscal cliff” of scheduled tax increases and spending cuts at the end of this year. If he and Congress can’t reach a permanent...

A sudden blast of cold polar air accompanied by heavy precipitation led to heavy snowfall in the Alps at levels below 1600 meters.

An important new paper published today in Global and Planetary Change finds that changes in CO2 follow rather than lead global air surface temperature and that "CO2 released from use of fossil fuels have little influence on the observed changes in the amount of atmospheric CO2" The paper finds the "overall global temperature change sequence of events appears to be from 1) the ocean surface to 2) the land surface to 3) the lower troposphere," in other words, the opposite of claims by global warming alarmists that CO2 in the atmosphere drives land and ocean temperatures. Instead, just as in...

Reposted from the Hockey SchtickA new paper published in Nature Geoscience finds “From about 50,000 to 11,000 years ago, the central Arctic Basin from 1,000 to 2,500 meters deep was … 1–2°C warmer than modern Arctic Intermediate Water.” This finding is particularly surprising because it occurred during the last major ice age. Horizontal axis is thousands of years ago with modern temperatures at the left and 50,000 years ago at the right. Temperature proxy of the Intermediate Water Layer of the Arctic Ocean is shown in top graph with degrees C anomaly noted at the upper right vertical axis. Note...

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama issued an executive order on Thursday that would increase the number of cogeneration plants in the U.S. by 50 percent by 2020, a move that would boost U.S. industrial energy efficiency and slash carbon emissions by 150 million tons per year. The order is the administration's latest effort to deploy cleaner and more efficient energy production in the country by working around political resistance to climate change and "green" energy legislation on Capitol Hill. The measure aims to accelerate investments to help manufacturers expand their use of combined heat and power (CHP) facilities,

The upcoming election battles may be unique in offering for the first time a debate about global warming. Neither Bush-Gore nor McCain-Obama chose to discuss the issue -- maybe because they were not really that far apart. By contrast, Barack Obama has already announced that, if re-elected, he will make climate change an important priority -- while Paul Ryan is an assertive skeptic on AGW (anthropogenic global warming). The science of climate change is not just of academic interest, but has been leading to policies for large-scale changes in energy use and supply -- with important economic consequences. The burden...

The only conclusion to draw from a year like this one is that Mother Nature is not always kind. Never waste a good crisis, at least when it comes to the op-ed section. On the subject of this year’s historic drought, the chattering classes have certainly obliged. William Moseley contributed a sermon for the New York Times, pinning the scarlet A on corn and damning it for all that is wrong with agriculture. The author informs us that because corn is particularly vulnerable to a hot, dry period during the crucial week of pollination, no sensible farmer should grow it....

In a nearly full-page op-ed appearing in the business section of the August 25 New York Times, Cornell professor Robert H. Frank lays out the new green agenda for tax policy.According to Professor Frank, stopping global warming may require carbon taxes of about $300 per ton of carbon dioxide emitted, and by implementing such taxes, we can also balance the federal budget. “If such a tax were phased in,” Frank says, “the prices of goods would rise gradually in proportion to the amount of carbon dioxide their production or use entailed. The price of gasoline, for example, would slowly...

Today I'm launching a fund and I wonder whether anyone would like to contribute. Please, I implore you all, PLEASE chip in to help finance Professor Michael Mann's suit for defamation against sinister, right-wing Canadian climate-change denier Mark Steyn and the fascist-denialist organ for which Steyn writes, National Review Online! I don't think Mann is going to win his case, not for one fraction of a millisecond. That's why I think it's so important that we give him all the financial encouragement we can at this sensitive early stage. There's a danger that Mann may yet take advice from his...

Mackinac Center analysts have long been critical of the way consultants — and frequently their clients — misuse economic modeling software. We were reminded why with the recent publication of two papers purporting to show large job creation, if only state voters would approve a renewable energy mandate on the statewide November ballot. The initiative, commonly known as the Michigan Renewable Energy Amendment, would mandate that 25 percent of Michigan's energy usage be provided by renewable sources by the year 2025. There is at least one major problem with each study, however: costs. The study authors' did not include the...

Posted on August 23, 2012 by Anthony Watts From the British Antarctic SurveyWordie Ice Shelf location within Antarctic Peninsula (Photo credit: Wikipedia) New climate history adds to understanding of recent Antarctic Peninsula warmingResults published this week by a team of polar scientists from Britain, Australia and France adds a new dimension to our understanding of Antarctic Peninsula climate change and the likely causes of the break-up of its ice shelves.The first comprehensive reconstruction of a 15,000 year climate history from an ice core collected from James Ross Island in the Antarctic Peninsula region is reported this week in the journal...

Came from an underwater volcano. The New Zealand Navy announced today that they have found a patch of floating volcanic pumice from an underwater volcano floating about 600 miles off the shore of New Zealand. “The rock looked to be sitting two foot (half a meter) above the surface of the waves and lit up a brilliant while colour in the spotlight. It looked exactly like the edge of an ice shelf,” said Lieutenant Tim Oscar aboard the ship the HMNZS Canterbury.Scientists aboard the ship said the white pumice – which covers 10,000 square miles ( 26,000 sq km) –...

Climate Fraud: In an attempt to defend his role in the greatest scam of modern times, Climate-gate's poster child threatens to defend his tarnished reputation in court. First, hide the decline, then hide the deceit. 'Get lost" was National Review editor Rich Lowry's appropriate response to a threatened lawsuit by Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann. NR printed a post by the great Mark Steyn, who graces these pages as well, calling Mann's famous hockey-stick graph "fraudulent." That it is indeed a fraud has been documented by many, including us. Mann was at the heart of the Climate-gate scandal in...

25 May 10 – The revamped cap-and-trade (control-and-tax) bill that Senators Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.) are trying to foist on the American public is predicated on a flat-out lie. The control-and-tax proponents would have you believe that our planet has been enduring unprecedented global warming (now coyly referred to as “climate change”), but the facts do not bear that out. Facts. Oh, those damnable facts... ...You’ll see that today’s benign climate is not even close to being the warmest on record. Not even close. Temperatures have been warmer than today for almost all of the past 10,000...

The funniest thing about the r/K divide within our species is how pervasive it is. Everywhere I look, I see aspects of it manifesting in our culture, our behavior, our history, and even our future. Here is a free abstract from an interesting study examining the “balancing selection hypothesis” of homosexuality. Let me rephrase this, so it makes more sense. There may be a gene which produces women who are more fertile, have more offspring, and want to deal with children less. At the same time it makes men more feminine (and more promiscuous, since that correlates with homosexuality). (There...

President Vaclav Klaus delivered the keynote address this year to the World Federation of Scientists: This brings me to the topic of my speech. I will try to argue that current as well as realistically foreseeable global warming, and especially Man’s contribution to it, is not a planetary emergency which should bother us. I am not a climatologist, but the IPCC and its leading spokespersons are not climatologists either. I am content to be a consumer of climatology and its related scientific disciplines. In this respect, I am located – in the economic jargon – on the demand side...