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Perpetuating his country's unfortunate association with internet scams, a Nigerian man has turned to a new source for ill-gotten money: home renters. No tall tales of fake Nigerian royalty or bogus inheritances this time; the latest scam simply solicits deposit and rent money from unsuspecting renters. The catch? The "landlord" doesn't own the home. Memphis, Tenn., resident Howard French found that out that hard way when he wired $1,200 to a man in Nigeria who had advertised a house for rent on Craigslist. The "owner" claimed to be in Africa on humanitarian work, and an unsuspecting French took him at...

Climate Chief Dismisses E-Mail Outrage By Hilary Whiteman, CNN December 8, 2009 (Video) IPCC chairman talks to CNNSTORY HIGHLIGHTS (CNN) -- One of the world's leading authorities on climate change has dismissed the contents of controversial e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia as nothing more than friends and colleagues "letting off steam." "Well, I can tell you, privately when I talk to my friends, I use language much worse than that. This was purely private communications between friends, between, colleagues, they were letting off steam. I think we should see it as nothing more than that," Rajendra Pachauri,...

Because it's FUN to pretend! "Nothing that has come out in the public as a result of the recent email hackings has cast doubt on the basic scientific message on climate change and that message is quite clear -- that climate change is happening much, much faster than we realized and we human beings are the primary cause," Having just endured a rare forty degree West L.A. night with a broken heater, my AGW anxiety isn't really ratcheting up today. The climate commies are trying to have it both ways. They've been attempting to make their case for years on...

Here's a quiz. What's the worst thing on the table at the UN Climate Control Conference in Copenhagen December 7-18? If you guessed cap-and-tax, you would be wrong. The reparations could be much, much worse. The draft of the treaty encompasses 181 pages and recites that it shall be the obligation of the developed countries (Europe, United States, Japan, Australia, etc.) to pay the developing countries (China, India, Africa, etc.) huge reparations, annual sums to erase poverty and to share technology with them. Australian lawyer Janet Albrechtsen explains the most recent draft of the treaty: Clause after complicated clause sets...

Opening speech: Let's get it done07-12-2009 Connie Hedegaard's speech At the COP15 opening session: “Let´s get it done! This is the time to deliver! THIS is the place to commit. And yes there are still many obstacles. But it is up to us to overcome them. And it is do-able." Thank you for the election. I promise you, as president I will do my very best to listen and ensure transparency. Thank you also very much minister Nowicki for your personal strong commitment. It has been a pleasure to work with you. For a long time, Copenhagen was the name...

Global warming is a religion, not a science. The prospect of governing every action of every individual on the planet in the name of staving off “catastrophic climate change,� and charging especially the U.S. a fee for impoverishing it, makes belief in global warming as tenacious and anti-reason as the literal interpretation of the Bible is to a fundamentalist or evangelical holly-roller. The fraudsters have come too close to their goal of “world governance� to concede not only error, but the lies that sustained that error, as well. They want to rule, or at least see men ruled by others....

EPA’ s Lisa Jackson panders to Copenhagen on opening day. Planned for months of course, with public comment ignored. It is now the people -vs- the EPA, coming to a courtroom near you. Video at site

Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue is a wanted man -- at least according to the liberal activist group that's put a de facto bounty on his head. A network of liberal groups known as Velvet Revolution started an ad campaign offering $200,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the man whose trade organization has become a thorn in the side of the Obama administration and congressional Democrats. The group is not leveling any specific charges of criminal behavior. Rather, it is casting a wide net, fishing for any whistleblowers from Donohue's past who might come forward...

What's become known as "Climategate" may be about to explode on this side of the pond as well. Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has threatened a lawsuit against NASA if by year-end the agency doesn't honor his Freedom of Information (FOI) requests for information on how and why its climate numbers have been consistently adjusted for errors. "I assume that what is there is highly damaging," says Horner, who suspects, based on the public record, the same type of data fudging, manipulation and suppression that has occurred at Britain's East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU)....

LONDON (Reuters) – Humanity faces a profound emergency and unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, a joint editorial published in newspapers in 45 countries said on Monday. The 56 newspapers said they were taking the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice to implore world leaders to "make the right choice" at U.N. climate talks in Copenhagen. "The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history's judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw a calamity coming but did not...

The Energy and Climate Change Secretary says politicians face a "huge challenge" to convince people that action on global warming should be a priority, ahead of crunch UN talks in Copenhagen. Ed Miliband said voters needed persuading that action would be good for the economy and be fair to vulnerable people, admitting: "There is a mountain to climb on this, globally and nationally." But he said there was "as close to a scientific consensus as possible" that global warming is happening and is man-made. Ahead of the fortnight of negotiations, which will culminate in a summit attended by dozens of...

Almost half of Britons do not believe human behaviour is the main cause of global warming, a new poll showed Sunday, a day before world leaders begin crunch climate talks in Copenhagen. The ICM survey for The Sunday Telegraph newspaper found 52 percent of respondents thought humans were largely responsible for modern day rises in temperatures, but 39 percent said climate change had not yet been proven to be man-made. A further seven percent did not believe climate change was happening at all. Meanwhile, 23 percent thought climate change was "the most serious problem faced by man", with 58 percent...

WASHINGTON - The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will early next week, possibly as soon as Monday, officially declare carbon dioxide a public danger, a trigger that could mean regulation for emitters across the economy, according to several people close to the matter.

Break-in targets climate scientistNew incident raises fears of a smear campaign Robin McKie The Observer, Sunday 6 December 2009 Attempts have been made to break into the offices of one of Canada's leading climate scientists, it was revealed yesterday. The victim was Andrew Weaver, a University of Victoria scientist and a key contributor to the work of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In one incident, an old computer was stolen and papers were disturbed. In addition, individuals have attempted to impersonate technicians in a bid to access data from his office, said Weaver. The attempted breaches, on top...

An alleged series of attempted security breaches at the University of Victoria in the run-up to next week's Copenhagen summit on climate change is evidence of a larger effort to discredit climate science, says a renowned B.C. researcher. Andrew Weaver, a University of Victoria scientist and key contributor to the Nobel prize-winning work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says there have been a number of attempted breaches in recent months, including two successful break-ins at his campus office in which a dead computer was stolen and papers were rummaged through. "The key thing is to try to find...

When the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming held a hearing on the state of climate science on December 2, the Republicans were ready to focus it on the Climategate fraud scandal. And the first witness, President Obama’s science adviser, Dr. John P. Holdren, was ready to respond. Instead of summarizing his written testimony in his oral remarks, Holdren read a prepared statement on Climategate. He said that the controversy involved a “small group of scientists” and was primarily about one temperature dataset. He said that such controversies were not unusual in all branches of science and...

Republican foes of President Obama's bailouts of automakers and Wall Street, global warming proposals, and healthcare reform are eagerly considering investigating those programs should the GOP retake control of the House, according to several involved in the discussions. Topping the list is global warming and the controversy over whether supporters of curbing carbon dioxide output used "tricks" to promote their claims of disastrous climate change. "Just imagine 13 months from now when we have subpoena power," said one Republican involved. Others are interested in looking into the president's healthcare reform plans and whether there are ties to industry or special...

Climate change summit host embarrassed as criminals make most of lax laws to pocket VAT on emissions tradingEurope's flagship carbon trading scheme suffered a blow today as the Danish government was forced to rush an emergency law through parliament to clamp down on a virulent form of VAT fraud. On the eve of the Copenhagen climate talks, which will attract world attention to emissions trading schemes, police and tax investigators across Europe are believed to be investigating hundreds of millions of euros worth of fraud involving carbon quotas originating in Denmark. Since British, French and Dutch governments took similar action...

It's a little easier to understand why a man who claimed to have thwarted a potential terrorist attack on a plane has not answered repeated requests to tell his story. He was not on the plane, according to AirTran Airways. "After conducting additional research into this situation, we have verified, according to flight manifests (legally binding documents) that the individual that allegedly created a first-hand account of events on-board AirTran Airways Flight 297, a Theodore Petruna, was never actually on-board the flight," AirTran said in a statement, which the AJC was the first to obtain. An e-mail from a Tedd...

President Barack Obama on Friday abruptly altered the timing of his appearance at an international climate summit in Copenhagen, hoping to capitalize on steps by India and China and an emerging plan to help developing countries mitigate impacts with $10 billion a year. The move means Obama will be at the summit on Dec. 18, considered a crucial period when more leaders will be in attendance, as opposed to his original plan to be in Denmark next Wednesday on his way to Oslo to receive his Nobel Peace Prize. It also means that Obama will be squeezing in a separate,...

Science: For two years, our space agency has refused Freedom of Information requests on why it has repeatedly corrected its climate figures. A leading researcher threatens to sue to find more inconvenient truths. What's become known as "Climate-Gate" may be about to explode on this side of the pond as well. Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has threatened a lawsuit against NASA if by year-end the agency doesn't honor his FOI requests for information on how and why its climate numbers have been consistently adjusted for errors. "I assume that what is there is highly...

Global warming was an academic Ponzi scheme. Its leading proponents were mini-Madoffs, peddling a vision of global catastrophe to gullible activists, bureaucrats and policymakers. The vision was so vast, the fear it inspired so pervasive, that it seized popular imagination, aided ably by hucksters like former Vice President Al Gore and his science-fiction feature film "An Inconvenient Truth." But like any Ponzi scheme, global warming only worked if everyone kept investing and no one looked at the books. Once the truth came out - of manipulated findings, phony data, rigged peer-review processes and intimidation of skeptics - the scheme began...

Warming Scandal: Despite the incriminating e-mails, administration science adviser John Holdren still thinks man causes global warming. And Sen. Barbara Boxer thinks it's the whistle-blowers who should be arrested. Time was when Barbara Boxer thought it was just fine for the New York Times and Washington Post to spill national military secrets and war plans on their front pages. The people had a right to know where and how they were being led. But we are not dealing here with the Pentagon Papers, the location of terrorist prisons or the surveillance of al-Qaida and its operatives. Boxer, top Democrat on...

The US has said it is disappointed by the Honduran Congress's decision not to reinstate President Manuel Zelaya for his remaining two months in office. Honduran lawmakers voted overwhelmingly against allowing ousted President Manuel Zelaya, who was removed from office in June, to serve out his term. Conservative politician Porfirio Lobo won presidential elections on Sunday. Several neighbouring countries say they will not restore ties unless Mr Zelaya is allowed to finish his term. Following the vote in Congress, Mr Zelaya told the BBC: "This decision ratifies a coup and condemns Honduras to continue living in illegality." Of the 125...

Man sentenced for racist Facebook threats by Michael Luke / Eyewitness News Posted on December 3, 2009 at 10:16 AM Updated today at 10:18 AM NEW ORLEANS - A federal judge handed down three years of probation for a Mississippi man who, after the election of President Barack Obama, threatened to kill African Americans through a Facebook account, according to U.S. Attorney Jim Letten. Dyron Hart, 20, who is black and a student at Nicholls State University, of Popularville, Miss., was sentenced for communicating threats in interstate commerce, said Letten. In August, “Hart created a fictitious name and used the...

For this is the way the holy women of the past who put their HOPE in God used to make themselves beautiful. They were submissive to their own husbands, 1 Peter 3:5 The largest fraud in the histoir of the Planet has been exposed as just that. We have now found that the Worlds most respected scientists have been polishing this massive Turd to a mirror finish. Now we find out, the Skeptics were absolutely right that these corrupted scientists were cooking their books worse than Madeoff. There never was any Global Warming, it was nothing more than a fraud...

Where is the drastic climate change we keep hearing about? It's the science scandal of the year. A thousand e-mails and 2,000 other documents were swiped from the server of Britain's Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University and posted on the Web. Many were truly embarrassing to the writers, while others have been quoted out of context and falsely used as "proof" that global warming is "a hoax." But in one e-mail, a top "warmist" researcher admits it's a "travesty" that "we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment." (Emphasis added.) Further, "any consideration of geoengineering...

ABC didn't cover it. CBS didn't either. And NBC apparently wouldn't go near it. The network news broadcasts have ignored a growing scandal over evidence of a potential climate cover-up — and now they've even been scooped by the fake news at Comedy Central. "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" produced its "reporting" on Climate-gate Tuesday night, when Stewart quipped, “Poor Al Gore. Global warming completely debunked via the very Internet you invented. Oh, oh, the irony!”

Surely there must have been serious men and women in the hard sciences who at some point worried that their colleagues in the global warming movement were putting at risk the credibility of everyone in science. The nature of that risk has been twofold: First, that the claims of the climate scientists might buckle beneath the weight of their breathtaking complexity. Second, that the crudeness of modern politics, once in motion, would trample the traditions and culture of science to achieve its own policy goals. With the scandal at the East Anglia Climate Research Unit, both have happened at once....

Mister Gibbs was recently asked whether President Obama was going to attend the climate meeting in Copenhagen in light of the leaked emails. Gibbs replied, “I think there’s no real scientific basis for the dispute of this.” Mister Gibbs, there are several problems with this statement, that you offered in such a cavalier manner. To accept your statement, we must assume that you think and that is becoming increasingly hard to imagine when you deny the growing pool of evidence that condemns Global Warming as a Fraudulent Science. However, your intelligence is of minimal importance. You see the real question...

Warming Scandal: The architect of climate fraud steps down, the creator of the infamous "hockey stick" is investigated, and Australia's parliament defeats cap-and-trade. We love the smell of truth in the morning. As the high priests of what Czech President Vaclav Klaus has called a "religion" prepare their pilgrimage to worship the earth goddess Gaia in Copenhagen, complete with humanity being sacrificed, the heresy of climate truth is finally being heard. The gospel of climate change, once expressed with the messianic fervor of an Elmer Gantry by Al Gore, is now expressed with the stammering incoherence of an Elmer Fudd...

Climatologists under pressureStolen e-mails have revealed no scientific conspiracy, but do highlight ways in which climate researchers could be better supported in the face of public scrutiny. The e-mail archives stolen last month from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK, have been greeted by the climate-change-denialist fringe as a propaganda windfall (see page 551). To these denialists, the scientists' scathing remarks about certain controversial palaeoclimate reconstructions qualify as the proverbial 'smoking gun': proof that mainstream climate researchers have systematically conspired to suppress evidence contradicting their doctrine that humans are warming the globe. This paranoid...

WASHINGTON -- Top White House science officials defended the validity of global warming research against repeated Republican attacks Wednesday that cited leaked e-mails from some climate researchers. The e-mails from a British university's climate center, were obtained by computer hackers and released last month. Climate change skeptics contend the messages reveal that researchers manipulated and suppressed data and stifled dissent. In the first Capitol Hill airing of the issue, House Republicans read excerpts from at least eight of the e-mails, saying they showed the world needs to re-examine experts' claims that the science is settled. One e-mail from 2003 was...

Copenhagen climate change talks must fail, says top scientistExclusive: World's leading climate change expert says summit talks so flawed that deal would be a disaster Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 2 December 2009 20.54 GMT The scientist who convinced the world to take notice of the looming danger of global warming says it would be better for the planet and for future generations if next week's Copenhagen climate change summit ended in collapse. In an interview with the Guardian, James Hansen, the world's pre-eminent climate scientist, said any agreement likely to emerge from the negotiations would be so...

It just does not get any better than this...

The emails and computer files from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in Great Britain may prove to be of some importance to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) current attempts to control greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act. This is because the EPA — perhaps at the urging of others in the Obama administration — has proposed to regulate GHG emissions on the basis of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports … and reports primarily based on the IPCC reports. This is highly unusual for the EPA. I cannot think of any instance where the EPA depended so...

Jon Stewart on ClimateGate: 'Poor Al Gore - Global Warming Debunked Via Internet You Invented' By Noel Sheppard Created 2009-12-02 10:43 If people around the world needed any more assurances the growing ClimateGate [0] scandal is far more significant than America's media has been portraying, they got it Tuesday night from Comedy Central's Jon Stewart. Somewhat surprisingly, "The Daily Show" host in his opening sketch tore apart the scientists involved in sending the obtained e-mail messages involved for showing "a clear effort to raise fears about global warming, and hide evidence against it." Stewart even mocked the man responsible for...

Your humble correspondent has been checking the Huffington Post Green section every day since the ClimateGate scandal exploded. After all, that Green section is pretty much predicated on the theory that the earth is warming dangerously and that Man is the cause of it. At first, the Green section had a few relatively minor stories attempting to dispute the revelations of the ClimateGate scandal. However, today the Huffington Post went into a complete panic mode on this topic. Bigtime. The Green section now features a huge story at the top of the page by Katherine Goldstein which features a slideshow...

<p>LONDON — Britain's University of East Anglia says the director of its prestigious Climatic Research Unit is stepping down pending an investigation into allegations that he overstated the case for man-made climate change.</p> <p>The university says Phil Jones will relinquish his position until the completion of an independent review into allegations that he worked to alter the way in which global temperature data was presented.</p>

Senate votes down Australian cap-and-trade billClimate bill defeated in 41-33 vote, as government insists it will put the bill before the Senate for a third time on Friday James Murray, BusinessGreen, 02 Dec 2009 Australia's plans for transitioning to a low carbon economy were thrown into turmoil today when the opposition successfully blocked the government's flagship emission cap-and-trade bill for the second time this year. The vote, which follows a dramatic week that saw opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull ousted over his decision to reach a compromise with the government over the bill, resulted in the bill being defeated by 41...

With a week to go before key climate talks in Copenhagen there is another dire warning about how our environment is changing. New evidence suggests sea levels could rise by 1.4m which would be a potential disaster for some countries. However, opinion polls show large numbers of people are still unconvinced that man is to blame for climate change. David Shukman has been finding out why. READ MORE: Antarctic to feed major sea rise

I'd rather not know: the psychology of climate denialPARIS, Dec 1 (AFP) Dec 01, 2009 If the evidence is overwhelming that man-made climate change is already upon us and set to wreak planetary havoc, why do so many people refuse to believe it? The UN's panel of climate scientists, in a landmark report, described the proof of global warming as "unequivocal." That was two years ago, and since then hundreds of other studies have pointed to an ever-bleaker future, with a potential loss of life numbering in the tens of millions, if not more. Yet survey after survey from around...

Confident predictions of catastrophe are unwarranted.Is there a reason to be alarmed by the prospect of global warming? Consider that the measurement used, the globally averaged temperature anomaly (GATA), is always changing. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes down, and occasionally—such as for the last dozen years or so—it does little that can be discerned. Claims that climate change is accelerating are bizarre. There is general support for the assertion that GATA has increased about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the 19th century. The quality of the data is poor, though, and because the changes are small, it is...

LONDON (Reuters) - Melting ice in West Antarctica could add tens of centimeters to rising sea levels over the next century, according to a report by the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) on Tuesday. Global sea levels are estimated to rise by a total of 1.4 meters (4 feet 7 inches) by 2100. "We can see the West Antarctic glaciers are shrinking at a rate fast enough to contribute to a sea level rise of 1.4 m by 2100 but it will be no more than that," SCAR executive director Colin Summerhayes told reporters at a media briefing in...

Seventy-one percent (71%) of voters nationwide say they’re at least somewhat angry about the current policies of the federal government. That figure includes 46% who are Very Angry. The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that only 27% are not angry about the government's policies, including 10% who are Not at All Angry........ The data suggests that the level of anger is growing. The 71% who are angry at federal government policies today is up five percentage points since September. Even more stunning, the 46% who are Very Angry is up 10 percentage points from September.

They are researching the coverage of climategate, why still no coverage themselves. Incredible!

Wetlands from Bangladesh to Florida submerged. Drought and devastating heat in important granaries such as the Yangtze floodplain in China or Ukraine. Rains that come too often or too hard in India or the U.S. Northeast. The list of potentially devastating impacts from climate change is a long one. But with greenhouse gas emissions continuing to climb and concentrations in the atmosphere rising by roughly two parts per million (ppm) a year, climate catastrophes are looking more and more imminent. So how do we keep global average temperatures from warming more than two degrees Celsius? Scientists have begun to turn...

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Tibet's exiled Buddhist spiritual leader the Dalai Lama entered the climate change debate on Monday, urging governments to take serious action and put global interests ahead of domestic concerns. "In my own case I never use bathtub, only shower. Whenever I leave my room I always put off my light," the Dalai Lama told a news conference. "The elected government, sometimes their number one ... priority is national interest, national economy interest, then global issues are sometimes secondary," said the Dalai Lama. "That, I think, should change. The global issue should be number one. In some cases...

Environmentalism should be regarded on the same level with religion "as the only compelling, value-based narrative available to humanity," according to a paper written two years ago to influence the future strategy of the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), the world's would-be environmental watchdog. The purpose of the paper, put together after an unpublicized day-long session in Switzerland by some of the world's top environmental bureaucrats: to argue for a new and unprecedented effort to move environmental concerns to "the center of political and economic decision-making" around the world — and perhaps not coincidentally, expand the influence and reach of...

CANBERRA (Reuters) - Australia's major rivers are shrinking and farms are gripped by drought as scientists warn of climate change, but that has not convinced some skeptical politicians to back carbon-trade laws. "For the extreme left it [AGW] has provided the opportunity to do what they've always wanted to do, to sort of de-industrialize the Western world," Minchin recently told Australian television. "The collapse of communism was a disaster for the left. They embraced environmentalism as their new religion," Minchin said, sparking a blizzard of controversy. Minchin's climate skeptic views are being echoed in other countries, like the United States,...