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“The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka CRU) and released 61 megabytes of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That).”

In a speech before 1,500 of the world’s top climate scientists, Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University, Germany warned that “the recent cooling trend should not be allowed to divert attention from our main purpose. Temperatures rise, temperatures fall, sometimes catastrophically. Amidst these fluctuations, though, it is imperative that funding for climate research be maintained.” “Many governments are looking for ways to reduce expenditures during the current recession,” Latif ominously observed. “Consequently, a perception that climatic dangers may be easing or that there may be plenty of time to respond to trends that take...

In a first-of-its-kind litigation, the Ecological Rights Foundation ("ERF") has alleged in a Complaint brought in federal district court in San Francisco that Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E) is in violation of the Clean Water Act ("CWA") and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act ("RCRA"). ERF alleges that the treatment of PG&E's utility poles treated with pentachlorophenol ("penta"), a wood preservative, has resulted in contamination of groundwater and surface water throughout four counties in Northern California -- Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, and San Francisco, including San Francisco Bay. The suit implicates all of the estimated 300,000 utility poles that...

Greeting fellow freepers. I am looking for any advice you can offer as I plan a family vacation to southern Germany. Looking at the end of November or first part of December. Not a lot of time to plan so I am open to all your input

Fellow Freepers, I feel almost stupid posting this but I'm having an annoying back-and-forth with a liberal Facebook friend who "can't help but notice" all the OLD WHITE people at today's rally. Can anyone who was there share any shots of -- God help us -- non-white people?

The maples and other showy trees are done now. The weather has turned dour again and the maple leaves are falling fast. These are pictures taken (mostly) around town near the end of the high season. Most are maples, but there are other trees, including a cherry and a willow oak.

Halloween is upon us and many of the Little Punkins will be seeking the treasure of candy and goods Saturday evening. But will they be able to do so with just their costume and bag at hand or will they need coat/jacket and or rain gear?

A vigorous storm system moving through the center of the nation has delivered feet of snow to Colorado including the Denver metro area and is also delivering strong to severe storms across portions of SE Oklahoma/NE Texas/Western AR/Western LA. As of 2 PM CT, 3 tornado watches were in effect.

A powerful early winter season storm is spinning up across the 4-corners with a surface low across southeast Colorado. The surface system will gradually lift north-northeastward through Saturday while the upper level support will be slowly track eastward into the lower Mississippi Valley. What does this mean?

Crops such as Corn, Cotton and Soybeans Affected If it has seemed like it has been raining unusually often and by quite a bit, you are right. The months during harvest time (August/September/October) are traditionally the driest of year for most locations east of the Rockies, especially across the corn and cotton belts. This season, though, has been an exception. Here is a slide show that shows how the precipitation of these months has compared to normal.

Inconvenient Truths Allie Winegar Duzett, October 27, 2009 Ann McElhinney was not always a conservative; in fact, she was once quite liberal. She told the story of her conversion at Accuracy in Media’s 40th Anniversary Conference on October 23, 2009. McElhinney was a journalist called to cover a story about a Canadian mining company in Romania. “What was really bizarre about this,” McElhinney said, “was that the BBC, CNN, the New York Times covered this story of this evil mining company; evil Canadians were going to destroy Transylvania and bring nothing but bad things, and two heroic, wonderful women—two environmentalists…were...

Global Warming Cools Off Allie Winegar Duzett, October 27, 2009 No matter if the crisis is global warming or global cooling, the environmental left always provides the same answers to the world’s woes, Marc Morano of Climate Depot noted at Accuracy in Media’s 40th Anniversary Conference: more government control. In a panel on climate change, Morano stated, “Rainforest destruction, global cooling—whatever the eco-scare of the day is, they’ll… call for the same solutions, which inevitably involve more government control and a whole environmental-left wish list.” Morano pointed out that we are now in the middle of a cooling trend globally,...

We live on the western edge of the Ridge and Valley Province of the Appalachian Mountains, where the landscape is defined by long ridge mountains, with coves nestled in higher elevations and river valleys in the limestone and shale formations below. The Autumn turning of the leaves this year has been slow, giving us a long season of fall color. The images in this article are from the past week.

Signs are showing that November will be turning warmer than normal, at least for the first half of so of the month for the Eastern U.S. with the opposite being true for the West. However,

Globe Cools to Warming Allie Winegar Duzett, October 22, 2009 Ever since it came out in 2006, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth has been something of a cult classic. Despite its numerous scientific mistakes and exaggerations, the movie has risen to must-see status, even being required viewing in many public schools. Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney teamed up earlier this year to create a rebuttal film, Not Evil, Just Wrong to discuss the scientific inaccuracies and the hidden agendas of Al Gore’s smash hit. Not Evil, Just Wrong points out some of the grossest scientific problems with An Inconvenient Truth;...

This week Earth will be passing through a debris field left behind by Halley’s Comet, the Orionids. Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office says, “Flakes of comet dust hitting the atmosphere should give us dozens of meteors per hour. Since 2006, Orionids have been one of the showers of the year, with counts of 60 or more meteors per hour.”

It’s hard to be thinking about severe weather after the very cool weather many of us have been experiencing, especially where it has recently snowed. However, we are heading into another severe weather season that generally runs from late October through November. Now, this season is predominately found in the southern United States from Texas to Georgia.

A large trough is in place over the eastern U.S. and will remain so through this weekend allowing for it to be quite cold for this time of year. Temperatures will be averaging between 15 and 25 degrees below normal!

As you are aware, I released my initial winter outlook on September 1, 2009 (you can read the full post here) and I followed that up with some specific details for key locations with this post. On October 14, 2009, one of the nation’s largest private weather companies, AccuWeather, released their 2009-10 Winter Outlook (viewable by clicking provided link) and today, October 15, 2009, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released the official U.S. Government 2009-10 Winter Outlook. I would like to compare my forecast with the other two and to see if we are thinking in similar ways...

Rains have already soaked much of Northeast Texas and Arkansas and it now spreading into the MidSouth and heading towards the TN Valley as of 3 PM Tuesday. Over the past week, it has been cloudy and dreary with periods of rain, some of which has been heavy for much of the South from Northeast Texas-Northern Georgia. This area has seen an estimated 2”-6” of rainfall during this time with some isolated higher amounts. This has saturated the ground and unfortunately, more rain, some heavy, is on the way.

An early season cold spell across the Upper Midwest and northern Plains this past weekend and into the start of this week mixed with available moisture has set up for early season snow. Some of this snow has been quite heavy and has been record breaking. Here are some of those records:

Folks, I need to find a coat / jacket / cape that I saw at a high school football game. The weather was really cold and the players on the sidelines had a cape / jacket type cover. It did not appear to be just a XXXL type jacket. Rather it seemed to be DESIGNED to go over the pads. I've done a Google search but don't really know what I'm looking for search word wise. Can anyone offer some insight or point me to a vendor? Thanks

To begin know it is said amongst the knowledgeable North Carolina is sprinkled with a number of “sweet spots” where a fellow can stand in an open field and box the compass in four opposite directions (North,East,South and West) for a few hundred yards and find himself under four conflicting sets of hunting regulations........... The leading (current) contender for complete Alice-In-Wonderland-Mad-Hatter “the law is ours to know and yours to find out” bureaucracy is DUPLIN COUNTY.......

Have you noticed that Governor Palin has not been removed from the hit list of the far left? I mean besides the left over jokes and reruns from the 2008 Presidential campaign…during which she did a damn good job…for someone never on the national scene before…but even now when she has resigned as Governor of Alaska, and is just plain old “Sarah Palin Citizen of the United States of America.” Why is the left so afraid of a staunch Christian Republican who is articulate, a fast learner, who happens to be a women, married with children, and damn good looking...

While surfing, I found these pix and couldn't ID what kind of a larvae they are. At first, I thought they were heads of rattlesnakes someone had harvested. Any help would be appreciated, or ping to an entomologist you may know.

A good example of just how treacherous modern hunting has become. Regulation trumps common sense and everyone is guilty until proven innocent. Two fathers and their sons went hunting in Brinnon on Saturday, but after legally downing an elk with a muzzleloading rifle, they found themselves staring down the barrels of guns pointed at them by uniformed officers of the Port Gamble S'Klallam Tribe. "The whole thing was handled way wrong," said Don Phipps, who shot the elk. "I've never had anyone pull a gun on me in my whole life. I didn't understand it."

Harvesting an alligator that's 20 times your size is a piece of cake, according to 5-year-old Simon Hughes. "Well, its pretty much simple," said Simon who caught the alligator. Simon's father said Simon is a natural born hunter, so an 800 pound alligator was no match for him. "Well I my got my gun out and shot him," the 5 year old said laughingly. Pictures and video HERE

Why So Harsh? by: Brittany Fortier, September 30, 2009 At a time when the United States needs to focus on economic growth, “cap-and-trade” legislation proposed by Congressional Democrats has the potential to stifle job creation and unduly burden American businesses. A panel hosted by the Cato Institute discussed these issues at a Capitol Hill briefing on September 10, 2009. Sallie James, a trade policy analyst at the Cato Institute and author of the paper “A Harsh Climate For Trade: How Climate Change Proposals Threaten Global Commerce,” discussed the trade provisions of the Waxman-Markey bill that was passed by the House...

The weather so far this week has been relatively pleasant for most of us along and east of the Rockies and it looks like a terrific weekend is setting up, too, for some. The next in a series of Fall storm systems will be moving out of the Plains and into the center of the nation tonight through Thursday. This will aid in firing some storms, some strong to severe

Cap & Trade-off by: Allie Winegar Duzett, September 29, 2009 Sallie James of the Cato Institute’s Center for Trade Policy Studies examines climate change’s effect on international trade in her recent article, A Harsh Climate for Trade: How Climate Change Proposals Threaten Global Commerce. The article was published in the Center for Trade Policy Studies newsletter on September 9, 2009. James makes the point clear in her article that if climate change is indeed anthropogenic (a man-made phenomenon), then it is an international problem, and United States environmental policy cannot make a difference. She points out that “U.S. [greenhouse gas]...

A one, two punch is on its WAAY to the Heartland of the nation. A system that has been cut-off from the main flow over the Plains and central Rockies will finally get bumped and move eastward into the Great Lakes and Ohio Valley through this weekend.

The snow is flying across the portions of the Colorado Rockies above 6,500 feet. The National Weather Service has issued a Winter Storm Watch for tonight into Wednesday afternoon. Snowfall

The Care Bears Project by: Sarah Carlsruh, September 22, 2009 Is global warming killing the polar bears? In May 2008, the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA) list listed the polar bear as a threatened species. However, “some scientists argue that polar bear populations actually have increased since hunting restrictions were initiated in the early 1970s,” reported CNSNews on September 16th. According to the World Wildlife Fund, an international organization that works to protect endangered species, the population patterns of the approximately 20 distinct polar bear populations in existence do not show a necessarily temperature-linked decline. American Enterprise Institute (AEI) hosted...

The weather pattern over the eastern U.S. the past week has been dominated by a cut-off low pressure system that has brought torrential rains to some in the South and Southeast. That system has now been lifted northward and has weekend and a second system is becoming the new player on the field

Citing environmental and energy-conservation rationales, the California Energy Commission has served notice that it will ban big screen televisions beginning in the year 2011. “These large screen TVs consume an inordinate amount of energy,” said Commission Chairwoman Karen Douglas. “No one needs their own personal big screen. Generations of Americans got along fine with smaller TVs. In fact, while many alive today may find it hard to believe, there were no TVs in American homes 70 years ago. So, I think our action is far less draconian than it might have been.” Douglas pointed out that “those who still need...

The Value Voters Summit is underway in Washington this weekend, and many political animals are looking forward to the straw poll which will be taken Saturday at the conference. While it's just a straw poll, and the 2012 presidential race is still pretty far down the campaign trail, some pundits think they will be able to read something significant in the tea leaves. One of those is Bernie Quigley of The Hill's Pundits Blog: It should be useful in cutting through the ambiguity and denial about the various grassroots movements around the country. In a poll six months ago, Palin...

A large upper level low pressure system is spinning across the ArkLaTex and will likely continue to do so until late this week and possibly into the beginning of next. This keeps things very unsettled with waves of rain from northeast Texas to Georgia.

First, sorry for the delay in this post. What a couple of weeks I have had and that has kept me away from the computer and being able to complete things I promised. The last post showed graphically my Fall and Winter Outlook. Today, I provide you with some specifics for a few key cities in the eastern half of the U.S.

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game has released its 2008-2009 predation management summary showing that moose and caribou herds in six predator control areas have increased: The agency points to two areas in particular as examples of where the program is showing strong results: the Nelchina Basin area and the southern Alaska Peninsula. The program is getting substantive results in the McGrath area, where it began in December 2003. Last winter and spring, 28 wolves were killed in the McGrath area. Nineteen were taken under the program and nine were hunted and trapped. The agency said the moose population...

The Old Farmer's Almanac has joined its competitor, the Farmer's Almanac, in predicting a cold 2009-2010 winter. For sunspot theory mavens and and global warming doubters, its on - - time to unpack the sweaters and toboggans.

This is a phenominal video. Would not have believed it unless I had seen it. Makes me want to take a trip over there and spend some time with these old boys to experience it in person. HUNTING WOLVES WITH GOLDEN EAGLES IN MONGOLIA Big birds those. Wouldn't want a couple of those sic'ed on me I will tell you. Look at the size of those talons. Looks like in many cases they go after the throat and then hold them there...and in a couple of cases when it looked like the wolf might get the upper hand...another Eagle quickly...

EPA will also pursue a ban on the manufacture and distribution of lead tire weights in response to a 2009 petition from the Ecology Center, the Sierra Club and other NGOs requesting that the agency establish regulations prohibiting the manufacture, processing, and distribution of lead tire weights.

Which of the following two people do you believe? Levi Johnston... "She says she goes hunting and lives off animal meat -- I've never seen it. I've never seen her touch a fishing pole. She had a gun in her bedroom and one day she asked me to show her how to shoot it. I asked her what kind of gun it was, and she said she didn't know, because it was in a box under her bed."... or Chuck Heath? "She started shooting a gun when she was eight and shot her first animal when she was ten. It...

When people who should know better adopt the language ( and underlying premise) of their mortal enemies they have lost the battle even as they win the debate. When George Sullivan created the original prototype AR-10 which later became the M-16 he chambered it in .308 and field tested it by HUNTING. YES! So the original Prototype MODULAR COMPONENT RIFLE was used TO HUNT GAME.

As promised, today's post provides you with the official Doppler Dale 2009 Fall Forecast and a look at the preliminary 2009-10 Winter Forecast.

This guy should be on an outdoor channel. He has many more serious videos with reviews of different guns. Especially Glocks.

You like living out in the country. Living away from smog, noise, and crowded streets suits you just fine. But there's no reason to forgo some of the nicer things associated with civilization. This gadget guide for country folks offers some nifty items for off the grid living, or for those just outside the city limits. There's enough here to whet the gadget lust in any survivalist's heart. So let's take a look at some technology that will make that little cabin in the woods a lot more fun.

The late Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass) had requested that he be buried at sea. While such requests normally are honored, this one was vetoed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The key sticking point was the Senators request that his “coffin” be a “1967 Oldsmobile Delmont 88.” Those familiar with the Chappaquiddick incident may recognize this as the car that the Senator drove off a bridge in 1969 on the way to an extramarital tryst with a young campaign volunteer named Mary Jo Kopechne in the car with him. Ms. Kopechne was trapped in the submerged car for several hours...

Last weekend a nice cool shot sank southward out of Canada and encompassed much of the eastern half of the nation. Looks like another and likely stronger surge of early autumn air will sink through the Eastern U.S. through much of the next 7-days.

As of 10 AM CT, T.S. Danny was located about 320 miles northeast of Nassau and had max winds near 60 mph. Danny is not moving consistently to the northwest but that is the overall general direction of movement at about 13 mph. A general northwest motion is likely for the next 24-hours and then a more northerly turn is anticipated with an increase in forward speed.