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For the 21st consecutive quarter the US economy has failed to live up to the Obama Administration’s promised improvement. The revised GDP for the January-March period of 2014 showed a 1% decline. The vaunted recovery from the “Great Recession” remains elusive. Jason Furman, Chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers, attributed the decline in GDP to “bad weather,” which he blamed on “GOP resistance to the President’s efforts to curb global climate change.” “In one sense, bad weather can just be bad luck,” Furman suggested. “The Soviet economy was hammered year-after-year by an incredible streak of bad weather from...

President Obama warned Friday that storms like Hurricane Sandy will become more frequent as climate change intensifies. While being briefed by emergency response officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) headquarters, Obama urged the public to prepare now for this year's hurricane season. "The changes we’re seeing in our climate means that, unfortunately, storms like Sandy could end up being more common and more devastating," Obama said. "And that’s why we’re also going to be doing more to deal with the dangers of carbon pollution that help to cause this climate change and global warming. And that’s why we’re...

Joe talks about the "flip" of the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation from warm to cold, the increasing artic ice as a result, and what occurs during that transition. Also he covers droughts past and present.

Seattle broke its record for rainfall from February through July last Sunday — with more than two months to spare, according to the National Weather Service. As of Sunday, 22.87 inches of rain had fallen at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport since Feb. 1, surpassing the record set in 1972 when 22.81 inches of rain fell from Feb. 1 to July 31, weather-service meteorologist Josh Smith said Tuesday. Fifteen inches is the average rainfall from February through July at the airport, which is where Seattle’s official weather data are recorded. “Basically, we are well ahead of normal rainfall for February to July,” Smith...

This one-for-the-ages video is a companion piece to an article Joe Bastardi wrote and posted on Patriot Post: The Coming Nine Months: Mud in the Eye of the So-Called 'Permanent' Drought? http://patriotpost.us/opinion/25957 Things are looking up for Texas even as I type, and the future looks even better, and for California, too. In fact, Joe says 2014 is going to be a great year for California red wines.

Becky Oskin May 22, 2014, 12:56 PM The forecast for a drought-busting El Niño this winter has Californians as giddy as kids at Christmas. An El Niño is the warm phase of a natural Pacific Ocean climate cycle driven by sea surface temperatures. The redistribution of hotter versus colder surface water triggers changes in atmospheric circulation that influences rainfall and storm patterns around the world. Warm water is piling up in the equatorial eastern Pacific Ocean right now, similar to the pattern that preceded the strong 1997-1998 El Niño, when California was drenched by a series of winter storms. The...

"I am on this 'kick' to expose before the fact some of the nonsense being spewed and accepted by what I see as an increasingly desperate AGW crowd. It’s now or never for them, though to their credit, they have the political will backing their interests in the form of the EPA that could care less about the fact the department’s lines of evidence have nothing to do with reality." Joe Bastardi

A phenomenal shot of a massive cloud Sunday near Clareton, Wyo., has been making the rounds on social media. The photo was taken by the Basehunters storm chasers group, who are "committed to capturing the most unique and close-up tornado footage on the market," according to their Facebook page. It shows the rotating updraft of a supercell thunderstorm over eastern Wyoming, according to Weather Channel meteorologist Jon Erdman. Supercells are the largest, strongest and longest-lasting thunderstorms. They are most common on the Great Plains. Known as a "low-precipitation" supercell, these types of storms seldom produce heavy rain or tornadoes, though...

[Snip]...Not only is the North Polar cap not melted away – global warming is not happening either. There has been no global warming in 17 years and 9 months.

On Sunday May 19th, storm chasers captured a low precipitation (LP) supercell near Newcastle, Wyoming. A supercell is a thunderstorm that is associated with a mesocyclone, which is a deep, persistently rotating updraft. Supercell thunderstorms can persist for many hours and are responsible for nearly all of the significant tornadoes produced in the U.S.

Who knew holding the World Cup in Islamist hell would be a bad idea? Some mistakes are minor. Others are really big. It’s estimated that as many as 3,000 foreign workers will die in Qatar working in preparation for the totalitarian Islamist country’s big event. Most of the workers who have died already, died of heart attacks. And they probably won’t be the only ones because aside from being an Islamic dictatorship that sponsors terrorism, Qatar is also really hot. Blatter had earlier suggested that gay people just shouldn’t do gay stuff, which is illegal under Islamic law. Maybe now...

Miami will likely be underwater before the Senate can muster enough votes to meaningfully confront climate change. And probably Tampa and Charleston, too—two other cities that last week's National Climate Assessment placed at maximum risk from rising sea levels. Even as studies proliferate on the dangers of a changing climate, the issue's underlying politics virtually ensure that Congress will remain paralyzed over it indefinitely. That means the U.S. response for the foreseeable future is likely to come through executive-branch actions, such as the regulations on carbon emissions from power plants that the Environmental Protection Agency is due to propose next...

Residents of the north suburbs woke up to light snow on Friday, the first time it has snowed in Chicago in May in nearly 10 years. Snow was falling in Hoffman Estates and Deerfield around 7:30 a.m. Snow was also reported on cars in the western suburbs.

Professor Lennart Bengtsson, 79, a leading academic from the University of Reading, left the high-profile Global Warming Policy Foundation as a result of the threats, which he described as ‘virtually unbearable’. The group was set up by former Tory Chancellor Lord Lawson and are sceptical about radical policy changes aimed at combating global warming. The Swedish climatologist, who has published more than 200 papers, said he received hundreds of emails from colleagues criticising his decision to switch to the organisation. His ‘defection’ was described as the biggest switch from the pro-climate change lobby to the sceptic camp to date. He...

Two days ago, I wrote that for me the real issue in the upcoming Mann vs Steyn trial is not so much my own personal freedom of speech but the broader freedom to speak given "the climate of fear that Mann and his fellow ayatollahs of alarmism have succeeded in imposing on an important scientific field": If you're older, tenured, sufficiently eminent and can stand his acolytes jumping you in the parking lot and taking the hockey stick to you, you'll acknowledge that his greatest achievement is distinguished mainly for its "misrepresentations" and "falsifications". But, if you're a younger scientist,...

Half Of The US Is In A Drought Mike Carlowicz, NASA Earth ObservatoryMay 14, 2014 Drought - NASA Earth Observatory U.S. Drought Monitor. As of May 6, 2014, half of the United States was experiencing some level of drought. Nearly 15 percent of the nation was gripped by extreme to exceptional drought. For the Plains and the Southwest, it's a pattern that has been persistent for much of the past several years. The map above was developed by the U.S. National Drought Monitor, a partnership of U.S. Department of Agriculture, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the University of...

Hard facts often trump breezy liberal logic supporting renewable energy. Parade Magazine columnist Marilyn Vos Savant, once considered the smartest person in the world, wrote on May 11 that wind power may actually disrupt local weather. While this information contradicts climate alarmist attempts to reduce extreme weather to a consequence of global warming, it adds to the list of environmental problems with wind turbines. Vos Savant claimed that wind turbines “will have an impact on the weather,” in addition to causing “ground warming and drying.” She pointed out that wind turbines “remove energy from the wind” which logically has an...

A slow-motion and irreversible collapse of a massive cluster of glaciers in Antarctica has begun, and could cause sea levels to rise across the planet by another 4 feet within 200 years, scientists concluded in two studies released Monday. Researchers had previously estimated that the cluster in the Amundsen Sea region of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would last for thousands of years despite global climate change. But the new studies found that the loss is underway now as warming ocean water melts away the base of the ice shelf, and is occurring far more rapidly than scientists expected.

Replacing fossil fuels with renewables as the world’s primary source of energy will not only save the planet from dangerous levels of warming – it will also save the global economy US$ 71trillion by 2050. This is the finding of a report, Energy Technology Perspectives 2014, released today by the International Energy Agency, which looks at the direction of the energy sector over the next 40 years. The changes needed to keep the world within 2C of warming— a widely agreed target in efforts to tackle climate change – will benefit the global economy, confirms the report, although a “coordinated...

Denver officials plan to deploy as many as 70 snowplows to prepare for the Monday commute. A powerful spring storm dropped more than a foot of sloppy, wet snow in parts of Colorado and Wyoming on Mother’s Day, causing crashes and leading to road closures, and forecasters warned that conditions could get worse as temperatures plummeted overnight.