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June 09, 2003Disease DustupDust clouds may carry infectious organisms across oceans By Otto Pohl> Image: ORBITAL IMAGING CORPORATION Photo Researchers, Inc. SANDSTORM blows particulates out from the Sahara Desert in Africa (landmass at right) over the Canary Islands in the Atlantic Ocean. The storm occurred in February 2001. On February 11, 2001, an enormous cloud of dust whipped out of the Sahara Desert and moved north across the Atlantic, reaching the U.K. two days later. A few days afterward, counties across the island began reporting simultaneous outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease, a viral sickness of livestock (sometimes confused with mad cow...

Scott Walker is killing it with Republicans. The Wisconsin governor is one of his party's rising stars—thanks to his ongoing and largely successful war against his state's labor unions, a fight that culminated Monday with the signing of a controversial "right-to-work" bill. Now (for the moment, anyway), he's a leading contender for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. At the Conservative Political Action Conference a couple weeks ago, he polled a close second to three-time winner Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.), beating the likes of Sen. Ted Cruz (Texas) and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush by a significant margin. It probably won't...

Swiss voters Sunday overwhelmingly rejected an initiative that would have scrapped the Alpine country’s value-added-tax system and replaced it with a carbon tax. Roughly 92% of voters opposed the initiative while 8% supported the measure. The initiative would have encouraged Swiss households to use renewable energy sources, including solar and wind, which would have been exempt from taxes. The initiative, which was introduced by the Green Liberal Party of Switzerland, was designed to help lower carbon emissions and reduce global warming. A proposal replacing the main consumer tax with a new levy on non-renewable energy has suffered a blistering defeat...

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid helped steer billions of federal tax dollars to companies supporting a green energy group run by two of his former staff members and a current campaign operative.The Nevada Democrat pushed for millions of dollars in grants and billions more in federal loan guarantees for corporations that donated to the Clean Energy Project, a nonprofit founded by a pair of former staffers with close ties to both Reid and to a major Democratic PAC associated with the senator, Lachlan Markay of the Washington Free Beacon reported.One such company, California-based Fulcrum Bioenergy, received a hefty federal grant...

EU ministers agreed on Friday to send their formal promise on how much they will cut greenhouse gas emissions to the United Nations ahead of climate change talks starting in November. The European Union is the first bloc to agree its position before the talks in Paris aimed at seeking a new worldwide deal on global warming. It has called on other big polluters also to deliver early pledges to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. …

Biden: Denying Climate Change ‘Almost Like Denying Gravity’ By Phillip Swarts -March 7, 2015 Vice President Joe Biden slammed those who question climate change, saying that ignoring the scientific evidence is “almost like denying gravity now.” “I think it’s close to mindless,” Mr. Biden said in a preview clip for the upcoming season of HBO’s Vice. The vice president pointed specifically to 2012’s Hurricane Sandy as an example of how climate change is making the world’s weather patterns more severe. “All of a sudden people who were saying it couldn’t happen; they’re now knowing they have to plan for another...

limate Change: Gina McCarthy, head of the EPA, can't answer basic questions about global temperatures, climate models or numbers of hurricanes. She didn't know being a global warming zealot requires knowledge of math. If the science of climate change was "settled," you'd think one of the generals in the war on global warming would have memorized the numbers that point to our planetary doom from a menace the administration says is a greater threat than terrorism. But McCarthy was asked some pretty simple questions Wednesday at a Senate hearing Wednesday on her request for $8.6 billion to help fight the...

The “brutal” winter is on the attack again, bringing sleet and heavy snow to the mid-Atlantic region. Previous storms targeted the deep south including Dallas, Texas, and several hammered New England. By March 4, Boston was just 2 inches away from hitting an all-time record for snow, Boston.com reported. It’s a reality more in keeping with media warnings from the 1970s than today’s arguments about global warming. NBC Nightly News reported Feb. 23, that Dallas was paralyzed “after an entire season’s worth of sleet and freezing rain, up to two inches, fell in a single day” causing massive traffic problems....

A winter storm warning is in effect for the Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa summits through 6 a.m. Thursday. National Weather Service forecasters in Honolulu say up to 10 to 15 inches of snow could fall above the 12,000-foot elevation of both Big Island mountains. The service also expects southwest winds around 15 to 25 mph. Temperatures are expected to be in the upper 20s.

The Senate’s top Republican is telling states to ignore a central part of President Barack Obama’s plans to curb the pollution blamed for global warming. In an op-ed published Tuesday in the Lexington Herald-Leader, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky says states should reject Obama’s proposed requirements for power plants to reduce carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas. The rule, expected to be final this summer, would require states to submit plans as soon as 2016, or risk being forced to comply with a federal substitute. …

A drought from 2006 to 2010 was among the triggers for the current uprising in Syria, according to a new study. And climate models and the observational record suggest that the drought was amplified by a century-long, human-forced warming and drying trend.

I'm a little under the weather (which is not as chronic as being under the climate), but I wanted to add something to what I said the other day about thug operator Raúl Grijalva, Democrat Representative from Arizona and Ranking Member of the House UnEnvironmental Activities Committee. It is not a small thing when even a jumped-up twerp hack announces that the national legislature of the world's superpower is targeting seven private citizens for disagreeing with him. In this case Commissar Grijalva is clamping the electrodes to various climate scientists - Robert Balling, John Christy, Judith Curry, Steven Hayward, David...

For more than 2 million years our earth has cycled in and out of Ice Ages, accompanied by massive ice sheets accumulating over polar landmasses and a cold, desert-like global climate. Although the tropics during the Ice Age were still tropical, the temperate regions and sub-tropical regions were markedly different than they are today. There is a strong correlation between temperature and CO2 concentrations during this time. Historically, glacial cycles of about 100,000 years are interupted by brief warm interglacial periods-- like the one we enjoy today. Changes in both temperatures and CO2 are considerable and generally synchronized, according to...

ULUTH, Minn. – Research by a University of Minnesota Duluth professor that separates Earth’s natural climate variability from outside factors points in particular to greenhouse gas-induced climate change as the likely cause of the warming planet. The study found that natural climate variability probably has helped keep things cooler in recent years than they otherwise would have been due to the outside factors. The research, published Sunday in Science Magazine, was headed by the University of Minnesota Duluth’s Byron Steinman, an assistant professor of geological sciences with the Large Lakes Observatory and the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences.

Somewhere along the line of modern history, the idea has taken root, spread, and become commonly held among seculars that religious people hold to a Faith that is separate from, and at odds with, natural reason. Modern science, following the lead of modern philosophy and modern secularized religion, has fallen for the heretical notion that there are two separate tracks of history: a material track, which many assume to be the true one and to which many attach all their trust, and the spiritual one, which is reduced by many to mere fantasy; a delusion held by believers to bring...

Greatest threat is the scores of environmental organizations that have been exaggerating and distorting their alleged “science” in order to thwart development here and around the world that would enhance everyone’s life It is a sure sign that the advocates of the “global warming” and “climate change” hoaxes know that the public no longer believes that the former is occurring or that the latter represents an immediate, global threat. Even though the “climate skeptics”, scientists who have produced research proving false methodology and the conclusions based on it are quite few in number, an effort to silence them by smearing...

Parts of the Southwest dealt with a second day of snow Saturday, while a storm moved across areas of California and brought much-needed precipitation. Sections of central and northern New Mexico received a record-breaking snowfall Friday and Saturday with more expected throughout the weekend, weather officials said. More snow and rain is expected in the state’s north-central and northwest areas, with the impact hitting the northern mountains, meteorologist Todd Shoemake said. …

Even as the eastern U.S. freezes, there’s less cold air in winter than ever before Yet, in what may seem like a paradox, the amount of wintertime cold air circulating around the Northern Hemisphere is shrinking to record low levels. This winter (2014-2015) is on track to see the most depleted cold air supply ever measured. “We are still on pace to break the all-time record — no question about it,” says Jonathan Martin, a professor of meteorology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Despite the brutal cold in the eastern U.S., the whole hemisphere is warmer this winter than it...

Since 1880, when global temperatures began to be systematically collected, no year has been warmer than 2014. The 15 warmest years, with one single exception, have come during the first 15 years of the new millennium. Indeed, it has become an open question as to whether global warming can be stopped anymore—or at least limited as policymakers have called for. Is capitalism ultimately responsible for the problem, or could it actually help to solve it? […] Following the Copenhagen fiasco, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Yvo de Boer of the Netherlands, resigned in...

Pope Francis launched a fresh attack on economic injustice on Saturday, condemning the "throw-away culture" of globalization and calling for new ways of thinking about poverty, welfare, employment and society. In a speech to the association of Italian cooperative movements, he pointed to the "dizzying rise in unemployment" and the problems that existing welfare systems had in meeting healthcare needs. For those living "at the existential margins" the current social and political system "seems fatally destined to suffocate hope and increase risks and threats," he said. The Argentinian-born pope, who has often criticized orthodox market economics for fostering unfairness and...