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Senate Budget Committee Chairman Patty Murray (D-Wash.) is sending a memo Friday to her Democratic colleagues urging them to start talking about how climate change will hurt the federal budget. The memo, obtained by The Washington Post, details how global warming impacts will affect four key sectors of the federal budget: disaster relief; transportation and infrastructure; national security and agriculture. It comes three days after the Budget Committee held a hearing on the subject, and the White House published an economic analysis saying that delaying carbon emissions cuts will cost the U.S. billions.Warning that it "is not just an environmental issue,"...

For at least 114 120 years, climate “scientists” have been claiming that the climate was going to kill us…but they have kept switching whether it was a coming ice age, or global warming. (A timeline of claims follows, updated to 2014)

Republican Senate candidate Ed Gillespie said he thinks there is enough evidence to support climate change after being pressed on the issue during a debate with incumbent Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.). "I believe there is ample scientific evidence that contributes to climate change but I'm not entirely dismissive of those who have a different point of view," Gillespie said. Gillespie added, "Norfolk is dealing with rising sea levels but people can debate what contributes to that or not." Still, Gillespie said he thinks the administration's new carbon pollution rules "go to far."

Power stations that burn biomass are worse for the environment than those that burn coal, new analysis suggests. According to David MacKay, the government’s chief scientific advisor on energy, burning wood imported from North America in British power stations produces more greenhouse gases than burning coal.As previously reported on Breitbart London, American scientists wrote a letter to the British government in May to protest the policy of subsidising power firms to import wooden pellets from the U.S. They said that this was anything but carbon neutral as the forests from which the pellets are taken act as a “carbon sink”, taking carbon dioxide...

Here in southeastern Virginia, our biggest city, Norfolk, is saddled with an unwanted claim to fame. Norfolk is the place "where normal tides have risen 1.5 feet over the past century and the sea is rising faster than anywhere else on the East Coast." NPR notes that the Norfolk area "is particularly vulnerable because the land is sinking as sea levels are rising." As we frequently discuss here at 13.7, human-caused (anthropogenic) climate change is a global problem. Surprisingly, at least to me, the evidence points to a narrative of universal blame, instead of one in which the "big countries"...

Here in southeastern Virginia, our biggest city, Norfolk, is saddled with an unwanted claim to fame. As The Washington Post has reported, Norfolk is the place "where normal tides have risen 1.5 feet over the past century and the sea is rising faster than anywhere else on the East Coast." NPR notes that the Norfolk area "is particularly vulnerable because the land is sinking as sea levels are rising." Scientists from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science here at the College of William and Mary predict, according to the Post article, that "if current trends hold, by the end of...

A new poll offers details on the way citizens of the world think about climate change, and U.S. participants are looking particularly ignorant to the risks of global warming. Only one in four Americans said climate change was a "major threat," making the U.S. the least concerned nation.

... In a study published earlier this month in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, Tasian and his collaborators reported that higher average daily temperatures increased the relative risk of forming kidney stones. The results indicate that the changing climate can directly affect human physiology. "We were looking at what is the risk of a patient presenting with stones after daily temperatures rose," he said. The researchers in this case looked at a database of insurance claims from 60,433 patients from Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles and Philadelphia between 2005 and 2011. They assessed the relative risk of kidney stone formation...

The presence of John D. Podesta, former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton and now counselor to President Obama, at the recent United States-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue in Beijing was a surprise. He is not a China expert. But the Chinese like old hands, aides with proximity to the Oval Office, and Mr. Podesta fills that bill. In addition, Mr. Podesta is passionate about climate change. He returned to the White House this year to help Mr. Obama fulfill his ambitious agenda to reduce coal consumption in the United States, and to shape a new global climate treaty...

SAN FRANCISCO — Already locked in its third dry year, an ongoing drought could complicate California's battle against global warming and make it more expensive, officials said. For years, dams have been one of California's main sources of clean energy, generating power without spewing greenhouse gases into the air. "If there's less hydro, the power has to come from somewhere," said Victor Niemeyer of the Electric Power Research Institute. "You have to burn more gas, and that costs more money." A power plant operator that uses more natural gas, raising its emissions, must make up by buying "allowances" under the...

ETN received information from an air traffic controller in Kiev on Malaysia Airlines flight MH17. This Kiev air traffic controller is a citizen of Spain and was working in the Ukraine. He was taken off duty as a civil air-traffic controller along with other foreigners immediately after a Malaysia Airlines passenger aircraft was shot down over the Eastern Ukraine killing 295 passengers and crew on board. The air traffic controller suggested in a private evaluation and basing it on military sources in Kiev, that the Ukrainian military was behind this shoot down. Radar records were immediately confiscated after it became...

The Earth got its annual checkup, and according to climate scientists around the globe, it looks as though its fever is continuing to rise. NOAA released the 24th annual State of the Climate report, on July 17 2014, including data compiled by 425 scientists in 57 countries. According to Thomas Karl, director of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center, "The climate is changing more rapidly in today's world than at any time in modern civilization." When asked how he would rate the health of the planet, he compared it to how a person might look at unwanted weight gain over time....

Harsher storms, worsening flooding and rising seas threaten the public's safety and health across the country, President Barack Obama warned Wednesday as he urged local communities to prepare for the effects of climate change. Joined by top federal officials and local, state and tribal leaders at the White House, Obama said communities experiencing negative effects firsthand know that climate change is already upon us. He said boosting the nation's resilience and fighting climate change shouldn't be a partisan issue for lawmakers in Washington. "Climate change poses a direct threat to the infrastructure of America," Obama said. To help communities prepare,...

MISSOULA, Mont. — President Obama will announce a series of climate change initiatives on Wednesday. The actions, involving a variety of federal agencies, were among the recommendations of the president’s State, Local and Tribal Leaders Task Force on Climate Preparedness, a group of 26 officials who have worked since November to develop the proposals. One of the projects involves shoring up the power supply during climate catastrophes, and the Department of Agriculture on Wednesday will award $236.3 million. The United States Geological Survey and other federal agencies will spend $13.1 million to develop advanced three-dimensional mapping data. The new initiatives...

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama here, says he remembers the morning he spotted a well-known colleague at a gathering of climate experts. “I walked over and held out my hand to greet him,” Dr. Christy recalled. “He looked me in the eye and he said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Come on, shake hands with me.’ And he said, ‘No.'  ” Dr. Christy is an outlier on what the vast majority of his colleagues consider to be a matter of consensus: that global warming is both settled science and a dire threat. He...

People who claim to worry about climate change use more electricity than those who do not, a Government study has found. Those who say they are concerned about the prospect of climate change consume more energy than those who say it is “too far into the future to worry about,” the study commissioned by the Department for Energy and Climate Change found. That is in part due to age, as people over 65 are more frugal with electricity but much less concerned about global warming. However, even when pensioners are discounted, there is only a “weak trend” to show that...

I received an email concerning a speech by Binyamin Netanyahu. As I read it I had my doubts about its authenticity. It's a hoax. Here is part of the hoax letter: "I give you formal notice that our tanks are massed at the Gaza border, with artillery and air support at the ready. We have already dropped leaflets over the northern parts of the Gaza strip, warning civilians of our impending arrival, and that they should evacuate southward, forthwith. If you fail to meet our ultimatum, we are coming in, and, with God's help, this time we will not leave....

Microsoft will end free mainstream support for Windows 7 on January 13, 2015. That means no more security patches if hackers find holes, no more updated features or performance improvements. This move will mostly affect consumers. Businesses that pay for extended Windows 7 support, as most of them do, will be supported for another five years, until January 14, 2020. That's important, because many businesses are right now are in the process of upgrading their old Windows XP PCs, but they're moving to Windows 7, not Windows 8. There's some speculation that, given the popularity of Windows 7, Microsoft might...

Children of same-sex parents have above average health and well-being, research by the University of Melbourne shows. The research was based on data from the Australian Study of Child Health in Same-Sex Families, which involved input from 315 same-sex parents and a total of 500 children. Of these participating families, 80 percent had female parents while 18 percent had male partners. "It appears that same-sex parent families get along well and this has a positive impact on health," said Dr Simon Crouch from the Jack Brockhoff Child Health and Wellbeing Program, Centre for Health Equity at the University of Melbourne....

A top federal wildlife official said there's too much uncertainty about climate change to prove it threatens the snow-loving wolverine — overruling agency scientists who warned of impending habitat loss for the so-called "mountain devil." There's no doubt that the high-elevation range of wolverines is getting warmer, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Regional Director Noreen Walsh said. But any assumption about how that will change snowfall patterns is "speculation," Walsh said. She told her staff to prepare to withdraw a proposal to protect the animals under the Endangered Species Act. Walsh's comments were contained in a May 30 memo obtained...