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The financial crisis and a deepening economic downturn are threatening to delay efforts to deal with another pressing global crisis: climate change. Hopes for action had been running high since both Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama had pledged to make cutting U.S. greenhouse gas emissions a top priority. But environmentalists now fear that the next president may be more focused on reviving a flat-lining economy, and Congress could be wary of supporting any measures that might slow growth or raise energy prices for consumers. "The truth is there is a very large question mark hanging over the idea...

The intensity of the sun's million-mile-per-hour solar wind has dropped to its lowest levels since accurate records began half a century ago, scientists say. Measurements of the cosmic blasts of radiation, ejected from the sun's upper atmosphere, were made with the Ulysses spacecraft, a joint mission between NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA). The solar wind "inflates a protective bubble, or heliosphere, around the solar system," which protects the inner planets against the radiation from other stars, said Dave McComas, Ulysses' solar wind principal investigator and senior executive director at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. "With...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Nobel Peace Prize winner and environmental crusader Al Gore urged young people on Wednesday to engage in civil disobedience to stop the construction of coal plants without the ability to store carbon. The former U.S. vice president, whose climate change documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" won an Academy Award, told a philanthropic meeting in New York City that "the world has lost ground to the climate crisis." "If you're a young person looking at the future of this planet and looking at what is being done right now, and not done, I believe we have reached the...

Need another reason to feel guilty about feeding your children that Happy Meal — aside from the fat, the calories and that voice in your head asking why you can't be bothered to actually cook a well-balanced meal now and then? Rajendra Pachauri would like to offer you one. The head of the U.N.'s Nobel Prize–winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Pachauri on Monday urged people around the world to cut back on meat in order to combat climate change. "Give up meat for one day [per week] at least initially, and decrease it from there," Pachauri told Britain's Observer...

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin will eventually have to defend "some fairly extreme views" on climate change when she starts granting interviews as Republican presidential hopeful John McCain's running mate, her Democratic rival Joe Biden said Monday. "Her views on everything from global warming to a host of other things, if they are as presented, they are pretty far out there," said Biden, Democrat Barack Obama's running mate, during a town hall-style meeting. "She's going to have to defend those positions." Palin has expressed doubt over whether human activity has contributed to global warming and has clashed with environmentalists over classifying...

DHAKA (AFP) - New data shows that Bangladesh's landmass is increasing, contradicting forecasts that the South Asian nation will be under the waves by the end of the century, experts say. Scientists from the Dhaka-based Center for Environment and Geographic Information Services (CEGIS) have studied 32 years of satellite images and say Bangladesh's landmass has increased by 20 square kilometres (eight square miles) annually. < > The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has predicted that impoverished Bangladesh, criss-crossed by a network of more than 200 rivers, will lose 17 percent of its land by 2050 because of...

Love 'em or hate 'em, the American land yacht is rumbling into the sunset. Rejoice? Let us, first and foremost, be perfectly clear: it ain't over yet. Millions of dinosaurs still roam the Earth, the giant meteor of merciful annihilation has yet to strike, complete and total upheaval is still merely pending. But it's coming fast. You can sense the shadow, the darkening, the imminent and oily doom. The dinosaurs are trembling, scribbling out their wills as fast as possible. They know the end is near, the signs are all in place, as that giant $63K Toyota Land Cruiser V8...

SAN FRANCISCO -- A federal appeals court dealt a setback to California and environmental groups today in their battle with the Bush administration over the state's efforts to restrict vehicle emissions of gases that contribute to global warming. The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco dismissed a lawsuit filed by California and 15 other states in January over the Environmental Protection Agency's refusal to let the state enforce its limits on greenhouse gas emissions from new cars and trucks. The court said the suit was premature because the EPA hadn't yet taken formal action to deny the...

In a Washington speech last week, former Vice President Al Gore argued that America can produce "affordable" 100 percent carbon-free electricity within 10 years. My question: Why not five years? As long as Gore sees virtue in proposing completely unrealistic solutions - as in moving America from getting 3 percent to all of its electricity from renewable energy sources in a mere decade - wouldn't five years be twice as good? And it matters that Gore is all wet - because the longer Washington pols live in energy la-la land, the loonier and more costly America's energy situation becomes. For...

At Hearing, Official EIB Clown Attacks Official EIB ClimatologistJuly 22, 2008 BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: The official climatologist of the EIB Network, Dr. Roy Spencer, a brilliant independent climatologist and scientist, former NASA, he's now at University of Alabama at Huntsville, testified before Senator Boxer's committee on climate change research, and they had the following exchange. SPENCER: In conclusion, I am predicting today that the theory that mankind is mostly responsible for global warming will slowly fade away in the coming years, as will the warming itself, and I trust you would agree, Madam Chair, that such a result deserves to...

BUT WILL THEY RESPECT HIM IN THE MORNING?July 23, 2008 Back before the Republican Party was saddled with John McCain as its nominee, The New York Times called him "the only Republican who promises to end the George Bush style of governing from and on behalf of a small, angry fringe." The paper praised him for "working across the aisle to develop sound bipartisan legislation" and predicted that he would appeal to "a broader range of Americans than the rest of the Republican field." At the same time, the Times denounced "the real" Rudy Giuliani as "a narrow, obsessively secretive,...

You can consider Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio) as definitely not enthused by former Vice President Al Gore's speech Thursday on U.S. energy policy. Voinovich had an initial one-word response — "ridiculous" — to Gore's speech at Washington's Constitution Hall, in which the Democrat called for the United States to end its dependence on carbon-based fuels and begin using renewable energy to produce electricity within the next 10 years. Voinovich elaborated that ruling out carbon-based fuels such as coal would be unreasonable because of the country's vast energy and economic needs. Instead, he said the country should take a multi-pronged approach...

A poll taken by Investor's Business Daily, shows Americans are cooling to Big Al's enviro-lunacy in the face of high gas prices. Contrary to claims by Al Gore and others that global warming is the greatest challenge of our time, Americans by better than 3-to-1 say the price of gasoline is a bigger problem now, according to the latest IBD/TIPP Poll. The poll of 920 adults taken last week shows that 73% think "fuel prices at the pump" are a bigger problem for the country than climate change, the new term for global warming.Only 23% say climate change is more...

The American Physical Society, an organization representing nearly 10,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on climate change and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in human-induced global warming. The APS is also sponsoring public debate on the validity of global warming science. The leadership of the society had previously called the evidence for global warming "incontrovertible." In a posting to the APS forum, editor Jeffrey Marquis explains...

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration on Friday rejected regulating greenhouse gases blamed for global warming, saying it would cause too many job losses. In a 588-page federal notice, the Environmental Protection made no finding on whether global warming poses a threat to people's health, reversing an earlier conclusion at the insistence of the White House and officially kicking any decision on a solution to the next president and Congress. The White House on Thursday rejected EPA's conclusion three weeks earlier that the 1970 Clean Air Act "can be both workable and effective for addressing global climate change." Instead, EPA said...

GOODBYE air pollution and smoky chimneys, hello brighter days. That's been the trend in Europe for the past three decades - but unfortunately cleaning up the skies has allowed more of the sun's rays to pierce the atmosphere, contributing to at least half the warming that has occurred. Since 1980, average air temperatures in Europe have risen 1 °C: much more than expected from greenhouse-gas warming alone.

Global warming causing California glacier to grow, scientists say Last Updated: Wednesday, July 9, 2008 | 2:40 PM ET CBC News The glaciers on Mount Shasta in California are growing because of global warming, experts say. "When people look at glaciers around the world, the majority of them are shrinking," said Slawek Tulaczyk, a University of California, Santa Cruz, professor who studied the glaciers. But the seven glaciers on Shasta, part of the Cascade mountains in northern California, "seem to be benefiting from the warming ocean," he said. As the ocean warms, more moisture evaporates. As moisture moves inland, it...

Climate Change: A study on the impact of rising CO2 levels finds a future world of thriving agriculture and lush vegetation. Carbon dioxide, the gas some see as a threat, is indeed the key to life on Earth.Even as the G-8 Summit announced plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2050, researchers at the Johann Heinrich von Theunen Institute in Germany find the rise in carbon dioxide levels may in fact be a boon to plant life on Earth. The Theunen Institute, which has been monitoring the phenomenon since 1999, trained CO2 jets on plants, raising CO2 concentrations...

The U.S. Climate Change Science Program and the Subcommittee on Global Change Research today released a scientific assessment that provides the first comprehensive analysis of observed and projected changes in weather and climate extremes in North America and U.S. territories. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change previously evaluated extreme weather and climate events on a global basis in this same context. However, there has not been a specific assessment across North America prior to this report. Among the major findings reported in this assessment are that droughts, heavy downpours, excessive heat, and intense hurricanes are likely to become more commonplace...

Climate Change: While the media scream that man-made global warming is making the North Pole ice-free, another possible cause is as old as the Earth itself. They just have to look deeper.To the delight of Al Gore and the rest of the Gaia groupies, scientists at the National Snow & Ice Data Center in Colorado are predicting that the North Pole will be completely free of ice this summer. The apocalyptic headlines already are starting to appear. "From the viewpoint of science, the North Pole is just another point on the globe, but symbolically it is hugely important," says the...

Just because we all sin against the environment doesn't mean we should believe every "green" idea To get a sense of how well-intentioned people can lose their bearings in the sea of green hype, consider the case of Fiji Water. With its bottles featuring images of pristine tropical flowers, the Fiji company started to worry when critics began bashing the environmental impact of water bottles, which will pile up in landfills for thousands of years. It got more worried when it became fashionable for consumers to calculate the carbon footprint of the products they buy—the amount of greenhouse gas emitted...

An important mechanism for sucking ozone and methane out of the atmosphere has been discovered over the tropical Atlantic. The finding reveals how the two greenhouse gasses are kept in check by natural chemical reactions. The data collected in Cape Verde, off the western coast of Africa, suggests that 50% more ozone is being destroyed above the tropical Atlantic Ocean than previously thought, because of halogens released by the seawater. The process also increases the amount of methane pumped out of the lower atmosphere by up to 12% each day. It could occur in tropical oceans worldwide and could considerably...

The majority of the British public is still not convinced that climate change is caused by humans - and many others believe scientists are exaggerating the problem, according to an exclusive poll for The Observer. The results have shocked campaigners who hoped that doubts would have been silenced by a report last year by more than 2,500 scientists for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which found a 90 per cent chance that humans were the main cause of climate change and warned that drastic action was needed to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The findings come just before...

CBS News sinks to new low; publishes crackpot global warming story, attributes it to Associated Press, kills it with no retraction Yesterday I posted a story from CBS News: Quake n’ Bake: Global Warming Causes More Energetic Earthquakes? The main headline was this: Seismic Activity 5 Times More Energetic Than 20 Years Ago Because Of Global Warming This drew a lot of attention because of the total lack of verifiable science associated with it. I posted some graphs of USGS data showing that the opposite was true, that recent earthquake energy was actually less that in the early 1900’s, and...

The late Natalie Grant Wraga once wrote, "Protection of the environment has become the principal tool for attack against the West and all it stands for. Protection of the environment may be used as a pretext to adopt a series of measures designed to undermine the industrial base of developed nations. It may also serve to introduce malaise by lowering their standard of living and implanting communist values." And who was this person? Natalie Grant Wraga (who died in 2002 at age 101) was an internationally-recognized expert on the art of disinformation. In her Washington Post obituary, Herbert Romerstein —...

Let me say this for Our Betters in Europe: Not only do they pay obscenely high gasoline taxes, and hence prices at the pump, but also, at least until recently, they've seemed happy to do so. Don't think that Europeans didn't get a kick out of the outrage that followed after prices at American pumps surpassed $4 per gallon. When European visitors fill tanks for rented cars in America, they feel like they hit the jackpot. In May, thanks to high taxes, gasoline prices hit $8.49 per gallon in the United Kingdom and a whopping $9.89 per gallon in the...

TOKYO - The world needs to invest $45 trillion in energy in coming decades, build some 1,400 nuclear power plants and vastly expand wind power in order to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, according to an energy study released Friday. The report by the Paris-based International Energy Agency envisions a "energy revolution" that would greatly reduce the world's dependence on fossil fuels while maintaining steady economic growth. "Meeting this target of 50 percent cut in emissions represents a formidable challenge, and we would require immediate policy action and technological transition on an unprecedented scale," IEA Executive Director Nobuo Tanaka...

WASHINGTON, (AP) -- A Senate bill to cut greenhouse gases and address climate change is heading toward almost certain defeat after nearly a week of stalemate and partisan bickering. Both sides are charging the other with blocking action. The Associated Press has learned that senators close to the issue privately say there is virtually no chance to get the 60 votes they need to break a Republican filibuster. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has set a vote for noon on Friday. If the vote falls short, he will pull the measure off the floor.

McConnell has essentially shut down the Senate floor this afternoon by forcing the Senate clerk to read aloud the entire 500 page global warming bill. So if legislative language is your thing, turn on C-SPAN and watch the Senate at its best, or worst, depending on your perspective. McConnell (R-Ky.) believes Reid (D-Nev.) has backtracked on a promise to clear a significant number of Republican judicial nominees, but Democrats are becoming more and more hesitant to give Bush judges a lifelong appointment to the federal bench in the waning months of this White House. "The Democratic majority has refused to...

Global warming isn't to blame for the recent jump in hurricanes in the Atlantic, concludes a study by a prominent federal scientist whose position has shifted on the subject. Not only that, warmer temperatures will actually reduce the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic and those making landfall, meteorologist Tom Knutson reported in a study released Sunday. In the past, Knutson has raised concerns about the effects of climate change on storms. His new paper has the potential to heat up the debate among meteorologists about current and future effects of global warming in the Atlantic. Ever since Hurricane Katrina...

Cornflakes in cereal killer warning By Rosemary Desmond May 13, 2008 03:28pm Article from: AAP CLIMATE change could lead to "killer cornflakes" with the most potent liver toxin ever recorded, an environmental health conference has been told. The effects of the toxins, known as mycotoxins, have been known since the Middle Ages when rye bread contaminated with ergot fungus was a staple part of the European diet, environmental health researcher Lisa Bricknell of Central Queensland University (CQU) said. "People started suffering mass hallucinations, manic depression, gangrene, abortions, reduced fertility and painful, convulsive death," Ms Bricknell told the 10th World Congress...

Thousands of buoys and floats worldwide are equipped with Argos transmitters, sending regular information via the Argos system to help scientists understand and predict climate change. Nearly 6,000 drifting buoys, deep floats, moored buoys and fixed stations fitted with Argos transmitters measure ocean currents and send millions of measurements including atmospheric pressure, wind speed and direction, sea temperature and more to follow climate evolution. These Argos transmitters are important components of the World Climate Research Program (WCRP) programs, through TOGA, WOCE and now GOOS/GCOS, CLIVAR and GODAE programs and experiments.

Last night, Al Gore preached to the choir. The polar ice caps are melting at an alarming rate, droughts are dragging on, floods are getting stronger and today alone, an additional 170 million tons of carbon dioxide has been dumped into the Earth's atmosphere, he told a crowd of believers at Value City Arena. "The planet has a fever," he said. It needs to be saved, to be fixed immediately. "This is our home. We don't have another planet to go to. Don't let anybody tell you we're going to get on rocket ships and go to a new planet....

With evidence (that global warming is a hoax) finally starting to percolate into the MSM, eventually someone is going to break and admit that it's all been a fraud. Who do you think will be the first prominent Warmist to 'fess up to the Big Lie? Someone in the public eye -- politician, Hollywood-type, media whore, etc.

Last week, Time magazine featured on its cover the iconic photograph of U.S. Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima. But with one difference: The flag has been replaced by a tree. The managing editor of Time, Rick Stengel, was very pleased with the lads in graphics for cooking up this cute image and was all over the TV sofas, talking up this ingenious visual shorthand for what he regards as the greatest challenge facing mankind: "How To Win The War On Global Warming." Where to begin? For the past 10 years, we all have, in fact, been not warming...

DENVER — An outbreak of mountain pine beetles in British Columbia is doing more than destroying millions of trees: By 2020, the beetles will have done so much damage that the forest is expected to release more carbon dioxide than it absorbs, according to new research. The study, led by Werner Kurz of the Canadian Forest Service, estimates that over 21 years, trees killed by the beetle outbreak could release 990 megatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere — roughly equivalent to five years of emissions from Canada's transportation sector. The outbreak has affected about 33 million acres, or about...

AL GORE wants to make a sequel to his Oscar-winning documentary on global warming – and despite Earth’s “rising fever” he is still hopeful for a happy ending. We are, he says, all players in deciding the outcome. Despite the success of his film An Inconvenient Truth and last year’s Live Earth concerts in raising awareness, the former US Vice President believes little has changed where it counts and the situation is even more urgent. And he warns that while individual efforts such as changing to low-energy lightbulbs are important, it is more significant for world leaders to change laws...

We are doomed, say climate change scientists associated with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body that is organizing most of the climate change research occurring in the world today. Carbon dioxide from man-made sources rises to the atmosphere and then stays there for 50, 100, or even 200 years. This unprecedented buildup of CO2 then traps heat that would otherwise escape our atmosphere, threatening us all."This is nonsense," says Tom V. Segalstad, head of the Geological Museum at the University of Oslo and formerly an expert reviewer with the same IPCC. He laments...

Talk about a civics lesson: A high-school senior has raised questions about political bias in a popular textbook on U.S. government, and legal scholars and top scientists say the teen's criticism is well-founded. They say "American Government" by conservatives James Wilson and John Dilulio presents a skewed view of topics from global warming to separation of church and state. The publisher now says it will review the book, as will the College Board, which oversees college-level Advanced Placement courses used in high schools. Student Matthew LaClair of Kearny, N.J., recently brought his concerns to the attention of the Center for...

The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, which was held at the Marriott Marquise Hotel in New York City, concluded Tuesday. It got very little coverage in the dinosaur press, even though it was a gathering of some of the most prestigious and most learned experts on climatology from around the world. The conference didn’t attract much attention from the dieing dinosaur media because it didn’t have any of the falderal that attracts the “journalists” and management of faltering old media. Plus, the scientists presented facts and scientific research that debunks the global warming hoax the dinosaur media helped create...

WASHINGTON, (AP) -- The Environmental Protection Agency has released long-awaited scientific justification for its controversial decision blocking California and other states from reducing greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks. A 48-page decision document argues that California doesn't have "compelling and extraordinary conditions" required under the Clean Air Act because the rest of the nation also suffers . . .

I’m at a surprise session at Davos '08 with Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and the Google Foundation’s Larry Brilliant, moderated by Tom Friedman. Liveblogging: The key difference between this and the Gore-Bono panel prior to this is that Gore concentrated on the things we must stop doing — as the movement does — while the Google team concentrates on what we can start doing, thanks to technology. Brilliant says after the Bono and Gore session earlier: “It’s true that climate change takes the oxygen out of the room.” In other words, it takes attention and effort away from poverty and...

Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile -- the list goes on and on. No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has...

When I got into Taipei last night it was downright cold. I expected it to be cool, but it is cold. The heat in the hotel was non existant. Most of the buildings do not have conditioned air and office workers are working in jackets. A fellow engineer in Taipei told me that snow is showing up in the nearby mountains and that fish are dying because of the cold weather. There have been deaths in Southern China due to the cold. In the north, it is so cold, it cannot snow since the cold air is drying up the...

Calm Sun, Cold Earth By Alan Caruba CNSNews.com Commentary from the National Anxiety Center February 18, 2008 I can understand why people believe that global warming is real and that all the things Greens say are true. One cannot read a newspaper or magazine, turn on the television or radio, without getting the Green message. Since switching their message in the 1970s that an Ice Age was coming to the complete fiction of a massive, dramatic global warming due to greenhouse gases, the Greens have been able to influence policy at the international and national level. They have been utterly...

Lorne Gunter, National Post Published: Monday, February 25, 2008 Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966. The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average." China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and...

The Best Global Warming Videos on the Internet Some people have asked me for copies of, or links to videos that provide an alternative view to Gore’s “consensus” on anthropogenic (i.e., man caused) global warming (AGW). A few of these videos have been broadcast in the United States (e.g., Glenn Beck, John Stossel), but most have not and probably will not be seen. Fortunately, we have the Internet to make these available. Part I: Documentaries Great Global Warming Swindle (1:13:32)If there’s only one video to watch, this is it. The Great Global Warming Swindle was a documentary aired on British...

It could be the first species to be listed as threatened with extinction primarily because of global warming. Associated Press A polar bear mother and her two cubs are shown in Wapusk National Park on the shore of Hudson Bay near Churchill, Manitoba, Canada in this Nov. 6, 2007 file photo.********************************************** The Bush administration is nearing a decision that would officially acknowledge the environmental damage of global warming, and name its first potential victim: the polar bear. The Interior Department may act as soon as this week on its year-old proposal to make the polar bear the first species to...

Another factor might be contributing to the thinning of some of the Antarctica's glaciers -- volcanoes, according to the authors of an article published on the Web site of the journal Nature Geoscience. According to Hugh Corr and David Vaughan of the British Antarctic Survey: Volcanically, Antarctica is a fairly quiet place; but sometime around 325 B.C., a hidden and still active volcano erupted, puncturing several hundred yards of ice above it. Ash and shards from the volcano carried through the air and settled onto the surrounding landscape; that layer is now out of sight, hidden beneath the snows that...

PARIS (AFP) - A powerful volcano erupted under the icesheet of West Antarctica around 2,000 years ago and it might still be active today, a finding that prompts questions about ice loss from the white continent, British scientists report on Sunday. The explosive event -- rated "severe" to "cataclysmic" on an international scale of volcanic force -- punched a massive breach in the icesheet and spat out a plume some 12,000 metres (eight miles) into the sky, they calculate. Most of Antarctica is seismically stable. But its western part lies on a rift in Earth's crust that gives rise to...