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Although I am a believer, not a skeptic, I’m a thinking believer. I’m not impressed with the “discovery” of the face of Jesus in a piece of wood. Or the map of America appearing in a bowl of melting ice cream.

The first time I laid eyes on climate science pioneer Fred Singer was in a scenic elevator at the Marriot Marquis in NYC, in March of 2008. The hotel was hosting the premiere International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC), and I was there to cover the event for American Thinker. Dr. Singer was there not only to dazzle the crowd of noted skeptical climate scientists, economists and policy experts from around the world, but also to launch his new Non-IPCC report, a rebuttal to the agenda-driven propaganda of the then recent IPCC Fourth Assessment (AR4). Singer’s unique, soft-spoken wit was...

It's been floated for years and there's growing momentum for the criminalization of thought for anyone who dares not give full allegiance to the climate change religion. Because we all know that throwing political opposition in jail is a tried-and-true tactic used by socialists, and that's far preferable and easier to actually having to be knowledgeable on the topic at hand.

The class was languid, most kids were on their phones, or surfing Facebook on their laptops. I sat with my notebook open in front of me, empty except for the lecture title at the top of the page. The professor put a slide up on the projector showing a chart relating CO2 and temperature over the course of a few million years, the one we’ve all seen by now. The CO2 curve lags after the Temperature one, and anyone’s first reading of the chart would probably be that temperature is driving the CO2 changes, not the other way around, if...

Dr. Wie-Hock “Willie” Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics addressed a gathering of the American Freedom Alliance on Thursday night at the Luxe Hotel, describing the current state of debate about climate change as “spitting science in the face” and “treating science like a piece of rubbish.” Mixing humor and science, he entertained the gathering as he made the case for skepticism about climate change. He began by mocking the degree to which carbon dioxide was treated like a toxic gas by proponents of radical policies on climate change. “Next it will be oxygen, it will be anything that...

Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry told Fox News host Tucker Carlson she was so sick of politicization of global warming in academia she resigned from her tenured position at Georgia Tech. “I’ve been vilified by some of my colleagues who are activists and don’t like anybody challenging their big story,” Curry told Carlson Friday night. “I walk around with knives sticking out of my back,” she said. “In the university environment I felt like I was just beating my head against the wall.”

I receive many e-mails, and a recurring complaint is that many of my posts are too technical to understand. This morning’s installment arrived with the subject line, “Please Talk to Us”, and suggested I provide short, concise, easily understood summaries and explanations “for dummies”. So, here’s a list of basic climate change questions, and brief answers based upon what I know today. I might update them as I receive suggestions and comments. I will also be adding links to other sources, and some visual aids, as appropriate.

Freeman Dyson is a physicist who has been teaching at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton since Albert Einstein was there. When Einstein died in 1955, there was an opening for the title of “most brilliant physicist on the planet.” Dyson has filled it. So when the global-warming movement came along, a lot of people wondered why he didn’t come along with it. The reason he’s a skeptic is simple, the 89-year-old Dyson said when I phoned him. “I think any good scientist ought to be a skeptic,” Dyson said. ------------------------------------------------------ Dyson said his skepticism about those computer models...

The Internet is a dangerous place. It's full of resources, both good and bad; full of citations linking one to another, sometimes helpfully, sometimes not. Today we're going to point the skeptical eye at ten of the worst web sites in terms of quality of science information that they promote. To make this list, they not only need to have bad information, they also need to be popular enough to warrant our attention. Many of these sites promote some particular ideology, but I want to be clear that that's not why they're here. Sites that make this list are only...

It seems that the world governments are escalating cliamtegate to the next level. Tallbloke a fellow recipient blog of the climategate emails, and linked on the right, was raided today in what seems to be a coordinated effort by Metropolitan Police, the Norfolk Constabulary and the Computer Crime division and the U.S. Department of Justice Criminal Division. His home was raided and computers were taken for ‘examination’. Updates are coming shortly which will explain further. The same is coming to a blogger near you. Perhaps this post should be titled - “The Empire Strikes Back”

(Newser) – Mitt Romney's views on global warming are back in the news. This week, he reaffirmed his skepticism about humans contributing to climate change. CBS News detects a "rightward shift" as the campaign goes on, and both Democrats and Rick Perry agree, notes CNN. Judge for yourself, as Politico rounds up some of his statements on the subject: * Thursday: "My view is that we don’t know what’s causing climate change on this planet. And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us." * August:...

When it comes to climate change denial, not all human beings are created equal. As a recent study shows, conservative white males are less likely to believe in climate change. "It's not surprising," said Aaron McCright, sociology professor at Michigan State University, who is a white male himself. But anecdotal evidence is not scientific, he said. "You really don't know what's going on until you crunch the numbers and find out." Besides the trend amongst skeptics, the study also found that conservative white men who self-report a high understanding of global warming -- dubbed "confident" conservative males -- are even...

A source on the Rick Perry campaign tells Hot Air that the Texas governor conducted some Texas-size fundraising in the third quarter. Coming in just a little over halfway through, Perry raised $17.1 million. That number would put Perry somewhere between $4-6 million ahead of Mitt Romney’s rumored total for Q3, according to this report last week from the Boston Globe. It’s also likely to far outpace Herman Cain’s fundraising or that of the other Republicans currently in the race. The pace is even more impressive. Perry had 49 days in which to raise funds, rather than the full 92...

Beware the Unveiling of the 1 MW Reactor in October For months those of us watching the E-Cat story unfold have been eagerly looking forward to the last week in October and the unveiling of the first 1 megawatt thermal reactor at Defkalion's factory in Greece. Andrea Rossi has steadfastly refused to provide more public evidence for the reality of the E-cat, pointing instead to the 1 MW reactor operation as the proof everyone should be waiting for. Skeptics and believers alike have cited this date as well, indicating that we will all know by the end of October whether...

I am a global warming skeptic. Politically, I land somewhere in the libertarian/conservative camp. If liberal still meant what it did sixty years ago I’d probably be one of those. Whatever my label, I am not a progressive/socialist kind of guy. I wrote on my own blog a long time ago that I needed to be convinced that warming was happening at all, then that people were causing it, and then that it was actually a bad thing...

The Heartland Institute knows all about global warming skepticism. Indeed, you could say we wrote the book. So we were surprised that a play about global warming skepticism called "The Heretic" is now running in London — and that the left-wing Guardian newspaper gave it favorable notice. A quick summary of the play: [It] starts from a promising premise: the isolation of Dr Diane Cassell, a leading light in the earth sciences department of a Yorkshire university. Her speciality is measuring sea levels in the Maldives, and her pragmatism leads her to conclude they have not risen in 20 years. Inevitably her...

<p>A group of 40 auditors -- including scientists and public policy experts from across the globe -- have released a shocking report card on the U.N.'s landmark climate-change research report. And they gave 21 of the report's 44 chapters a grade of "F." The team, recruited by the climate-change skeptics behind the website NoConsensus.org, found that 5,600 of the 18,500 sources in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Nobel Prize-winning 2007 report were not peer reviewed. "We've been told this report is the gold standard," said Canadian global-warming skeptic Donna Laframboise, who runs the NoConsensus.org site and who organized the online effort to examine the U.N.'s references in the report, commonly known as the AR4. We've been told it's 100 percent peer-reviewed science. But thousands of sources cited by this report have been nowhere near a scientific journal." Based on the grading system used in American schools, 21 chapters in the IPCC report received an F for citing peer-reviewed sources less than 60 percent of the time. Four chapters received a D, and six received a C.</p>

On Tuesday night about 1,100 people participated in a sold-out global warming debate that, in the end, turned downtown Toronto's new concert hall at the Royal Conservatory of Music into a microcosm of a larger tranformation that is sweeping the world. The debate pitted two well known global warming activists of international repute against two well-known skeptics. The skeptics won, shifting the audience's support away from the drastic global warming action demanded by activists and toward the moderate reponse of the skeptics, a move that is rapidly becoming a trend everywhere. If global warming is a problem -- and many...

First paragraph (links omitted): A new study by a team of political scientists and sociologists at the journal Environmental Politics concludes that 9 out of 10 books published since 1972 that have disputed the seriousness of environmental problems and mainstream science can be linked to a conservative think tank (CTT). Following on earlier work by co-author Riley Dunlap and colleagues, the study examines the ability of conservative think tanks to use the media and other communication strategies to successfully challenge mainstream expert agreement on environmental problems.

A Layman's Guide to Man-Made Global Warming The purpose of this paper is to provide a layman’s critique of the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory, and in particular to challenge the fairly widespread notion that the science and projected consequences of AGW currently justify massive spending and government intervention into the world’s economies. This paper will show that despite good evidence that global temperatures are rising and that CO2 can act as a greenhouse gas and help to warm the Earth, we are a long way from attributing all or much of current warming to man-made CO2. We are even...