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Geologists have found evidence that sea ice extended to the equator 716.5 million years ago, bringing new precision to a "snowball Earth" event long suspected to have taken place around that time.In this photo from Canada's Yukon Territory, an iron-rich layer of 716.5-million-year-old glacial deposits (maroon in color) is seen atop an older carbonate reef (gray in color) that formed in the tropics. (Credit: Francis A. Macdonald/Harvard University)Led by scientists at Harvard University, the team reports on its work in the journal Science. The new findings -- based on an analysis of ancient tropical rocks that are now found in...

Focusing on a controversial hypothesis that ice existed at the equator some 300 million years ago during the late Paleozoic Period, two University of Oklahoma researchers originated a project in search of clues to Earth's climate system. "The Paleozoic Period was a rare time in history," says Gerilyn Soreghan, OU professor of geology. "Broadly speaking, it was the last time our planet experienced the type of climate system we have today and in the recent past." Soreghan believes comparing more modern systems in a range of different climates might help support her hypothesis.Soreghan and Elwood Madden, assistant professor of geochemistry,...

Global Warming The Anthropocentric Crisis Politics / Climate Change Feb 16, 2010 - 01:18 AM By: Arnold Bock The global climate warming fuss is not principally an environmental issue but, rather, it is a manufactured crisis supported by copious amounts of manipulated science, reinforced by opinion leaders and promulgated by the cheerleading of the mass media. Global warming has become the mother of all politically correct issues.Various components of the warming cause, which are only tangentially related to the environment, have been outlined at some length in Part 1 (Global Warming: The Man-Made Crisis), Part 2 (U.S. and Canada Are...

Geoscientists have long presumed that, like today, the tropics remained warm throughout Earth's last major glaciation 300 million years ago. New evidence, however, indicates that cold temperatures in fact episodically gripped these equatorial latitudes at that time. Geologist Gerilyn Soreghan of Oklahoma University found evidence for this conclusion in the preservation of an ancient glacial landscape in the Rocky Mountains of western Colorado. Three hundred million years ago, the region was part of the tropics. The continents then were assembled into the supercontinent Pangaea.Soreghan and colleagues published their results in the August 2008, issue of the journal Geology.Climate model simulations...

At the end of the last interglacial epoch, around 115,000 years ago, there were significant climate fluctuations. In Central and Eastern Europe, the slow transition from the Eemian Interglacial to the Weichselian Glacial was marked by a growing instability in vegetation trends with possibly at least two warming events. This is the finding of German and Russian climate researchers who have evaluated geochemical and pollen analyses of lake sediments in Saxony-Anhalt, Brandenburg and Russia.Writing in Quaternary International, scientists from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ), the Saxon Academy of Sciences (SAW) in Leipzig and the Russian Academy of Sciences...

Will need to scroll down to the Video section of this march 3 Newsletter and then view the video as shown in the Title....Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Interglacial WarmthI do not have a source for the statements made in the video....

It is increasingly clear that the leak of the internal emails and documents of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in November has done for the climate change debate what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war debate 40 years ago—changed the narrative decisively. Additional revelations of unethical behavior, errors, and serial exaggeration in climate science are rolling out on an almost daily basis, and there is good reason to expect more.The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), hitherto the gold standard in climate science, is under fire for shoddy work and facing...

From an emailed PRESS RELEASE on March 5, 2010 Climate scientist delivers false statement in parliament enquiryIt has come to our attention, that last Monday (March 1), Dr. Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (CRU), in a hearing with the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee made a statement in regards to the alleged non-availability for disclosure of Swedish climate data. Dr. Jones asserted that the weather services of several countries, including Sweden, Canada and Poland, had refused to allow their data to be released, to explain his reluctance to comply...

Richard North has picked up the ABC Drum article “The Money Trail” and wonders about the total value of financial contributions towards carbon related research or PR from the UK and EU. I’ve wondered the same thing. Indeed I tried to find answers for other nations and to add to the USA figures I put into Climate Money, but rapidly discovered, as he has, that it’s a hideously complex task. It’s a PhD size project, and there are no grants available to fund that kind of PhD. Five times the cost of the Manhattan Project Spending is hugely fragmented, between...

Joanne Nova gets an airing in the Australian media, taking on board the canard about the "deniers" getting big money funding. Relying on her previous work, Joanne notes that the US government spent $79 billion on climate research and technology since 1989. Some of that funding paid for things like satellites and studies, but it's 3,500 times as much as anything offered to sceptics, she says. It is self-evident that this "buys a bandwagon of support, a repetitive rain of press releases," and for the money you get the PR departments of institutions like NOAA, NASA, the Climate Change Science...

Reconstructions of temperature over the past 1000 years have been an highly visible part of IPCC presentations to the public. CRU has been extremely influential in IPCC reconstructions through: coauthorship, the use of CRU chronologies, peer review and IPCC participation. To my knowledge, there are no 1000-year reconstructions which are truly “independent” of CRU influence. In my opinion, CRU has manipulated and/or withheld data with an effect on the research record. The manipulation includes (but is not limited to) arbitrary adjustment (“bodging”), cherry picking and deletion of adverse data. The problem is deeply rooted in the sense that some forms...

Climate scientists are not the least bit happy. They feel that none of the calamities that have befallen them over the past few months, are their faults. Climate-Gate, the IPCC mistakes, Michael Mann's broken hockey stick, all of it has been debunked, not because of the lousy science or the broke protocols etc, but thanks to the over zealousness of the global warming skeptics who would rather see the world destroyed than redistribute income from the wealthy nations to the third world. On the other hand, these scientists do believe in the Al Gore hoax, so can you really listen...

EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, in testimony before the Environment and Public Works Committee, made it a point to declare that the agency was not using the IPCC report to develop policy. Charlie Martin at PJ Media reports: During the review of the Environmental Protection Agency budget in today's Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing, both Senator Barbara Boxer - the chair of the committee - and EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson distanced themselves from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). Boxer and Jackson's statements, in addition to being a striking change in policy, are problematic...

House Republicans are pushing a resolution that would block the EPA's regulation of greenhouse gases, throwing a wrench in the Obama administration's attempts to bypass Congress and regulate carbon emissions. The announcement comes as a growing chorus of lawmakers—mostly Republicans, but some coal state Democrats as well— have criticized the EPA’s decision to move forward on carbon regulations. Last year, the EPA issued a finding that the heat-trapping gases were harmful to the public, paving way for regulation under the Clean Air Act. Republicans say they’re concerned the regulations will hurt the economy. “The last thing we need in this...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The idea of imposing a broad cap-and-trade system to cut America's greenhouse gas emissions is dead and will be replaced with a new approach, an influential Republican senator said on Tuesday. Lindsey Graham, one of three senators working against daunting odds to produce a compromise climate bill, has recently turned against imposing the kind of cap-and-trade system used in Europe, which involves companies buying and selling pollution permits.Graham did not specify whether another mechanism or some sort of cap-and-trade would be used more narrowly, such as to control emissions in the power utility sector. "The cap-and-trade bills...

WASHINGTON, March 4 (Reuters) - U.S. Senator John Rockefeller introduced legislation on Thursday to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from cracking down on carbon dioxide pollution from coal-fired power plants and other stationary sources for two years. The Obama administration has long maintained that the EPA would move independently to reduce greenhouse gases blamed for global warming if Congress failed to produce its own climate legislation. Rockefeller, who represents the coal-producing state of West Virginia, said he introduced the bill to "safeguard jobs, the coal industry and the entire economy as we move toward clean-coal technology." It was not yet...

Somehow the tables have turned. For all the smears of big money funding the “deniers”, the numbers reveal that the sceptics are actually the true grassroots campaigners, while Greenpeace defends Wall St. How times have changed. Sceptics are fighting a billion dollar industry aligned with a trillion dollar trading scheme. Big Oil’s supposed evil influence has been vastly outdone by Big Government, and even those taxpayer billions are trumped by Big-Banking. The big-money side of this debate has fostered a myth that sceptics write what they write because they are funded by oil profits. They say, follow the money? So...

On his very first full day in office, President Obama sent a memorandum to his executive agencies extolling the virtues of transparency and open government and directing them to facilitate public access to information. To further that directive, Obama issued a second memorandum encouraging agencies to “adopt a presumption in favor of disclosure” when responding to public requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA):

By now everyone knows that the threat of global warming is hanging over all our heads. In as little as five years the ice caps will have completely melted causing polar bears to grow flippers. In ten years the oceans will start boiling. The entire catastrophic failure will be complete by 2035, rendering the habitat unsuitable for even the mythic twinkie. This is all fact by the way. It has to be. Al Gore said so! Or is it? Could it be that the Left’s Holy Grail could be nothing more than a highly varnished, eco-friendly Dixie cup? I, for...

Tuesday, February 23, 2010 Contact: Matt Dempsey Matt_Dempsey@epw.senate.gov (202) 224-9797 David Lungren David_Lungren@epw.senate.gov (202) 224-5642 SENATE EPW MINORITY RELEASESREPORT ON CRU CONTROVERSYShows Scientists Violated Ethics, Reveals Major Disagreements on Climate Science WATCH: Inhofe Releases Climategate Report During EPW HearingLink to Press ReleaseLink to EPW Minority Report on CRU ControversyLink to a Sampling of CRU EmailsLink: IPCC Gets the Science WrongLink: Endangerment Finding Based on Flawed Science Washington, D.C.-The Minority Staff of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works released a report today titled, "‘Consensus' Exposed: The CRU Controversy." The report covers the controversy surrounding emails and documents released from...