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WASHINGTON — President Obama signed an executive order on Thursday to set new goals for reducing the greenhouse gas emissions of federal agencies, his latest use of his executive authority to address the root causes of climate change and press private companies and foreign governments to follow suit. Mr. Obama’s directive orders federal agencies over the next decade to cut their emissions by an average of 40 percent compared with their levels when he won office in 2008, and to increase their use of electricity from renewable sources by 30 percent. The goals are in line with a commitment that...

A scholarly paper explaining why predictions made by climate computer models used by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) tend to exaggerate global warming has ignited a political firestorm. Dr. Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon, a solar physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, came under attack by environmentalists after co-authoring a peer-reviewed paper explaining “the widening discrepancy between prediction and observation” in climate change models, and members of Congress soon took sides. The scientific paper, entitled “Why Models Run Hot,” concludes that the computer models overstated the impact of CO2 on the climate: “The impact of anthropogenic global...

For the nation’s left-leaning entertainers, the most interesting thing about Texas Sen. Ted Cruz this week is his callous willingness to scare toddlers for fleeting political gain. In fact, beyond Cruz’s apparent intention to run for the White House in 2016, this latest craze was of singular interest to Late Night host Seth Meyers. Meyers welcomed Cruz on to the show on Tuesday night, and the pair had a rather jovial exchange. Things got a little tense, though, when Meyers engaged in a tortured and contrived effort to put Cruz in a corner on the issue of global warming (starting...

National Geographic claims creationists are at war with science by Lita Cosner and Keaton Halley Published: 19 March 2015 (GMT+10) National Geographic (NG) is a respected popular science magazine with millions of subscribers. So it is unfortunate when they use that platform to promote anti-creation propaganda under the guise of science. The cover of the March 2015 issue is “The War on Science”, and the featured article by science writer Joel Achenbach, “The age of disbelief”, intends to explain why so many people doubt the scientific establishment on a range of issues—from global warming to vaccines to the Apollo moon...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK) Scientists have raised concerns about a large, rapidly thinning glacier in Antarctica, warning it could contribute significantly to rising sea levels. They say they've discovered two openings that could channel warm seawater to the base of the huge Totten Glacier and bring the threat of potentially disastrous melting. The glacier is bigger and thinning faster than all the others in East Antarctica. It contains enough ice to raise the global sea level by at least 11 feet (3.4 meters), according to researchers from the University of Texas at Austin who were among the authors of a new study published...

In 2014, American households saw the largest electricity price increases in 6 years, according to government data, as utilities are forced to use more green energy and invest in energy efficiency and grid improvements. Energy Information Administration data shows that U.S. residential electricity prices “experienced large increases in retail electricity prices during 2014, with the average U.S. residential price increasing 3.1% over the previous year.” Last year’s price increase was the highest of any year since 2008 when prices rose 5.7 percent. “Residential electricity rate increases during 2014 ranged from 1.3% in the Pacific Coast states to 9.9% in New...

One gallon of jet fuel burned creates about 19 pounds of C02. A 747 burns about 25,000 pounds of fuel per hour. A round trip from Washington DC to LA would take about 11- 11 1/2 hours. That comes to about 287,000 pounds of fuel. And that results in the production of about 5,462,500 pounds of CO2. A 757 burns about 6,000 pounds of jet fuel per hour. A similar round trip to LA would burn about 69,000 pounds of fuel and create about 1,310,000 pounds of CO2. Barack Obama and Michelle Obama both traveled to Los Angeles on the...

Take a lesson, climate deniers and Fox News know-nothings Here's a history of knowledge and science that far too many Tea Partyers need to grapple with now The origins of the Royal Society lie in a so-called invisible college of natural philosophers who began meeting in the mid-1640s for discussions of the new methods of seeking knowledge of the natural world through observation and experiment. On November 28, 1660, twelve men met at Gresham College after a lecture by Christopher Wren, then the Gresham Professor of Astronomy, and decided to found “a Colledge for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning.”...

Science could be in decay as there are simply too many new studies, a new study has found The research, dubbed 'Attention decay in science,' was recently published online by professors from universities in Finland and California. They concluded scholars can't keep pace with scientific literature.

ISIL and other Islamist jihad movements continue to round up and silence all who oppose them or refuse to convert to their extreme religious tenets. They are inspiring thousands to join them. Their intolerance, vicious tactics and growing power seem to have inspired others, as well.After years of claiming the science is settled and unprecedented manmade catastrophes are occurring right now, Climate Crisis, Inc. has gotten desperate. Repeated polls put climate change at the bottom of every list of public concerns. China and India refuse to cut energy production or emissions. Real-world weather and climate totally contradict their dire models...

Nearly 200 countries may sign a modest Kyoto II climate treaty, say December 2014 media reports from Lima, Peru. But will they agree to stop using coal to generate electricity? No. Curtail their economic growth? No. Cease emitting carbon dioxide? Maybe, but only a little, sometime in the future, when it is more convenient to do so, without any binding commitments. Then why would they sign a treaty?Primarily because they expect to get free energy technology transfers, and billions of dollars a year in climate “mitigation, adaptation and reparation” money from Western nations that they blame (and which blame themselves)...

A hundred years from now, humans may remember 2014 as the year that we first learned that we may have irreversibly destabilized the great ice sheet of West Antarctica, and thus set in motion more than 10 feet of sea level rise. Meanwhile, 2015 could be the year of the double whammy — when we learned the same about one gigantic glacier of East Antarctica, which could set in motion roughly the same amount all over again. Northern hemisphere residents and Americans in particular should take note — when the bottom of the world loses vast amounts of ice, those...

Every year, Al Gore pauses from his overscheduled itinerary of making a fool of himself at climate change speeches around the world to pause at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, where he drops by to make a fool of himself in front of hipsters, activists and a sizable jumble of uninterested partiers. This year, the rhetoric got harsh — as in “punish-the-deniers” harsh. While Gore was talking specifically about politicians who reject the idea that government should divert public funds to combat the effects of a changing climate, his tone toward anyone who thinks the jury’s still...

Is Climate Change/global warming/global cooling real? Our government says it is all settled science. But if that is the case, why did Patrick Moore, an environmentalist from Canada and one of the founders of Greenpeace, decide to leave the organization nearly 30 years ago, in response to “extreme, anti-scientific anti-capitalistic processes within the climate change community?" “It fails the most basic principles of the scientific method,” said Moore, claiming that the “science” of climate change has been derived from climate models based on unsound theory and computer models based on subjectively assigned values. Naturally there are points that the climate...

The debate over climate science has taken a nasty turn. Vice President Biden painted skeptics of climate change as stupid in a recent interview. "I Ihink it’s close to mindless,” he said of skeptics on the HBO program “Vice.” “I think it’s like, you know, almost like denying gravity now.” This is a stunning development, that the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, who should know more than anybody else in the world, who’s proposing hundreds of billions of dollars in costs to prevent this climate and temperature increases, doesn’t know whether their projections have been right or wrong,” Sessions...

Gov. Jerry Brown says he has a message for Republican governors planning to visit California to woo business from the state: Welcome. Florida Gov. Rick Scott is the latest governor to say he’s planning a recruiting trip to California. A letter he sent to shipping companies in California takes shots at Brown’s “tax and spend administration.” […] Brown says California has done the opposite of what Republicans advocate. He says the state is tackling climate change, immigration reform and taxing high-income people, and the state is prospering. …

The Environmental Protection Agency has its eyes on pollution from backyard barbecues. The agency announced that it is funding a University of California project to limit emissions resulting in grease drippings with a special tray to catch them and a "catalytic" filtration system. The $15,000 project has the "potential for global application," said the school. The school said that the technology they will study with the EPA grant is intended to reduce air pollution and cut the health hazards to BBQ "pit masters" from propane-fueled cookers. Charged with keeping America's air, water and soil clean, the EPA has been increasingly looking at...

While 1492 may have been the year Columbus sailed the ocean blue, it also marks the start of a mass swapping of species between the Old World and the New World as Europe began colonizing the Americas. Research published Wednesday from University College of London (UCL) and Leeds University Professor Simon Lewis and UCL Professor Mark Maslin argues that just over 100 years later -- 1610 -- is when those actions dramatically changed the planet Earth. As a result, they say, 1610 deserves to be designated as the start of the Anthropocene Epoch.

For generations, books, films, and TV have warned us of the danger of mummies. In their crypts they are relatively harmless, but when they rise from the dead and start strangling people, as they did in the Cotswolds of south central England in “Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars,” they become a much greater threat. But this problem may shortly be solved, thanks to global warming. The world’s oldest mummies are at risk of disappearing because of man-made climate change, according to a group of Harvard University scientists. Bodies mummified about 7,000 years ago in Chile are starting to...