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On Tuesday I published a short post about the key arguments of climate-change skeptics while also pointing out that some 98 percent of published scientists in the field believe human-caused climate change is indeed happening and must be addressed. For years the two sides have been talking - or yelling - past one another, which benefits none of us. As expected, the post brought forth a wave of comments from readers. Many lambasted me for providing a forum for the "lunatics" who deny human-caused climate change. Climate skeptics, on the other hand, chastised me for only presenting their more simplistic...

Climate records back to Viking times show the 20th century was unexceptional for rainfall and droughts despite assumptions that global warming would trigger more wet and dry extremes, a study showed on Wednesday. Stretching back 1,200 years, written accounts of climate indicated that variations in the extremes in the 20th century were less than in some past centuries. "Several other centuries show stronger and more widespread extremes," lead author Fredrik Ljungqvist of Stockholm University told Reuters. "We can't say it's more extreme now." Ljungqvist said many existing scientific models of climate change over-estimated assumptions that rising temperatures would make dry...

SunEdison, which bills itself as the world’s largest green energy company, may soon file for bankruptcy protection, according to a recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing, as the company faces “liquidity difficulties” despite getting millions in government subsidies.

U.S. solar energy company SunEdison Inc, whose aggressive acquisition strategy has saddled it with almost $12 billion of debt, is at "substantial risk" of bankruptcy, one of its two publicly listed units warned on Tuesday. A bankruptcy would rank among the largest involving a non-financial company in the past 10 years, according to bankruptcydata.com. SunEdison declined to comment. SunEdison's shares - already reeling from a Wall Street Journal report on Monday that the company was being investigated for overstating its cash position - fell as much as 60 percent to a record low of 50 cents.

California regulators may force a massive solar thermal power plant in the Mojave Desert to shut down after years of under-producing electricity — not to mention the plant was blinding pilots flying over the area and incinerating birds.

The first chunk of a $3bn commitment made at the Paris climate talks ‘shows the US stands squarely behind climate commitments’, the State Department said. The Obama administration has made a first installment on its $3bn pledge to help poor countries fight climate change – defying Republican opposition to the resident’s environmental plan. The $500m payment to the Green Climate Fund was seen as critical to shoring up international confidence in Barack Obama’s ability to deliver on the pledges made at the United Nations’ climate change conference in Paris in late 2015. Obama is expected to announce a number of...

House lawmakers sharply criticized the head of the Department of Energy’s green energy loan program for not releasing documents requested by a committee looking into companies that have received taxpayer dollars. “It is disconcerting that the executive director of a major government program is unwilling to commit — to actually commit — to providing all the documents that an investigation committee of the Congress has requested,” California Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher .. told Mark McCall, the head of the DOE’s loan office, in a hearing Thursday, “and that the answer being given is using weasel words ... House committee members...

Miami (AFP) - As glaciers melt due to climate change, the increasingly hot and parched Earth is absorbing some of that water inland, slowing sea level rise, NASA experts said Thursday. Satellite measurements over the past decade show for the first time that the Earth's continents have soaked up and stored an extra 3.2 trillion tons of water in soils, lakes and underground aquifers, the experts said in a study in the journal Science. This has temporarily slowed the rate of sea level rise by about 20 percent, it said. "We always assumed that people's increased reliance on groundwater for...

I have no clue how many climate science denial myths a Republican presidential candidate can fit onto the head of a pin, but given these zingers are generally huge it's probably not that many. But we do now have some clue how many myths one of those candidates, Senator Ted Cruz, can fit into an eight-minute diatribe. At least six. When asked about climate change at recent hustings, Cruz has been delivering a stock set of answers from the Little Book of Climate Change Denial (not a real book). At one such event in New Hampshire, the representative from Texas...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17xh_VRrnMU Do electric cars really help the environment? President Obama thinks so. So does Leonardo DiCaprio. And many others. The argument goes like this: Regular cars run on gasoline, a fossil fuel that pumps CO2 straight out of the tailpipe and into the atmosphere. Electric cars run on electricity. They don't burn any gasoline at all. No gas; no CO2. In fact, electric cars are often advertised as creating "zero emissions." But do they really? Let's take a closer look. First, there's the energy needed to produce the car. More than a third of the lifetime carbon-dioxide emissions from an...

Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign Tuesday rolled out a plan to increase building energy efficiency standards as a way to cut emissions and save on energy costs. The plan, her campaign said Tuesday, looks to improve building codes, provide more information about buildings' energy usage and expand appliance energy labeling as ways to reduce energy consumption. The proposal would save households and businesses $70 billion, or $600 per household, annually if implemented, Clinton's campaign said, and reduce taxpayer spending on energy in federal buildings by $8 billion. Its goal is a one-third reduction in energy waste within ten years. The far-reaching...

Politicians and environmentalists concerned about global warming are pushing policies to cut carbon dioxide emissions from the energy sector. It's too bad they are pushing costly green energy technologies. ExxonMobil's annual energy report shows just how expensive it is to use green energy to cut CO2 emissions. Replacing coal power, for example, with wind or solar energy costs upwards of $100 and $200, respectively, per ton of CO2 reduced. That’s much more expensive than replacing coal with natural gas or simply improving vehicle engine efficiency. Pushing electric cars, however, is the most expensive way to reduce CO2 emissions, costing $800...

Cruz tries for a respectable showing in Iowa with Trump and the governor against him There are few things that energy-policy experts of all political stripes can agree on - but one of them is that mandates and subsidies to promote the use of corn ethanol (a policy first implemented by Jimmy Carter) are wasteful boondoggles that harm our environment and food supply while imposing billions of dollars of hidden costs on consumers. However, most energy-policy experts are not running for president in the Iowa caucuses. Ted Cruz, however, is running in the Iowa caucuses, and this week he found...

In classrooms across the country, high school students are taught the scientific method. It consists of constructing a doubtful hypothesis and designing a series of experiments to test the hypothesis with the observable facts. After a number of tests prove positive. The student can then take the facts and reach a conclusion. When a conclusion is constantly verified,it is enshrined in what might be called "established" science.There is a second kind of science that uses methods very different from those of "established" science. In fact,this science,if indeed it might be called such, uses the exact opposite method. It consists of...

The perils of climate change are well known, but rising sea levels could also alter human evolution, scientists have claimed. Rising sea levels could force communities to live in underwater or semi-aquatic towns which could change out physiology. Dr Matthew Skinner a paleoanthropologist from the University of Kent, claims that humans could evolve to have webbed hands and feet and less body hair so they could move quickly through the water. Our eyes would even become more like cats, so we could see in the murky gloom of seas and rivers and our lungs would shrink as we became used...

Ever since the EU restricted sales of traditional incandescent light bulbs, homeowners have complained about the shortcomings of their energy-efficient replacements. The clinical white beam of LEDs and frustrating time-delay of 'green' lighting has left many hankering after the instant, bright warm glow of traditional filament bulbs. But now scientists in the US believe they have come up with a solution which could see a reprieve for incandescent bulbs. Researchers at MIT have shown that by surrounding the filament with a special crystal structure in the glass they can bounce back the energy which is usually lost in heat, while...

A Frightening History of the Militant Greens Robert Zubrin’s book, Merchants of Despair, shows how some of the most tragic events of the 19th and 20th centuries were inspired by radical environmentalists who used the “green” agenda to mask scary ambitions.

Apple has been claiming, to great public acclaim, that it uses 100% renewable sources of energy such as solar and wind for many of its power needs, including its data centers. From Apple’s website: "Since 2012, all our data centers have been powered by 100 percent renewable energy sources. That means no matter how much data they handle, there is a zero greenhouse gas impact on the environment from their energy use." This is a lie. Apple, like nearly every other international technology company in the world, gets the overwhelming percentage of its power from cheap, plentiful, reliable coal and...

.........."Everyone by now is familiar with the 'pause' or 'slowdown' in the rate of global warming that has taken place over the past 20 years of so, but few realize is that the observed warming rate has been beneath the model mean expectation for periods extending back to the mid-20th century-60+ years," Patrick Michaels and Chip Knappenberger, climate scientists at the libertarian Cato Institute, write in a working paper released in December. Michaels and Knappenberger compared observed global surface temperature warming rates since 1950 to what was predicted by 108 climate models used by government climate scientists to predict how...

The Department of Energy recently turned over more than 1,200 pages of heavily redacted documents in response to a records request about a subsidized biofuels company from The Daily Caller News Foundation. In October, TheDCNF filed a FOIA request with the Energy Department, asking for email records from government officials regarding federal loan guarantees given to Abengoa, a Spanish-based green energy company. The request came on the heels of reports Abengoa was running into big financial problems, despite being given generous taxpayer-backed loans. The DOE gave TheDCNF the records it requested Dec. 18, and after spending time reviewing the documents,...