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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...

The e-book published to accompany Al Gore’s new climate change film is ranked #51,031 for purchases in the Kindle Store, according to Amazon.com. Meanwhile, Climatologist Roy Spencer’s rebuttal e-book, “An Inconvenient Deception,” is ranked #1,201 for Kindle Store purchases. Spencer’s book critiques the “bad science, bad policy and some outright falsehoods” in Gore’s latest movie and book, which were released in August, The Daily Caller reported in its sales analysis on Monday. …

Calif. governor going to Russia to discuss climate SACRAMENTO - California's governor is traveling to Russia next week to discuss collaborating with Pacific nations on climate change at an economic forum hosted by the Russian government and featuring a talk by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown's Thursday announcement of his pending trip came on the same day the United States forced Russia to close its consulate in San Francisco amid escalating diplomatic tensions.

Does Hurricane Harvey prove the man-made Global Warming threat? Yes - Human activity is to blame for the destruction No - Harvey was the first Category 3+ hurricane to reach the U.S. in almost 12 years I'm not sure

All of this raises critical questions for climate change law and policy. Here, the team of lawyers at the Sabin Center offers a brief primer on eleven key climate law issues highlighted by and likely to arise due to Hurricane Harvey: 1. Disaster Recovery Legislation... 2. Flood Insurance Reform... 3. Flood Maps 4. Flood Protection for Federal Projects 5. Controlling Air Emissions from Damaged Facilities 6. Handling Toxic Pollutants and Discharges of Toxic Water Pollution 7. Chemical Safety 8. Damage to Superfund Sites 9. Zoning and Building Codes 10. Public utilities 11. Climate Change Attribution and Hurricanes: Numerous scientists have...

MUSELLA, Georgia — Georgia’s peach industry suffered staggering losses this year — 85 percent of the crop wiped out by a winter that never get cold enough for the fruit to grow and ripen properly. The lingering question: was this a harbinger of climate change and many warmer winters to come? Or was it just the sort of bad luck that Georgia farmers have seen come and go ever since people began tilling the soils here? Robert Lee “Mr. Bob” Dickey, the patriarch of a family that grows a thousand acres of peaches in Middle Georgia, doesn’t hold with this...

Democratic Sen. Bernie Sanders said Thursday that the unprecedented rainfall and resulting flooding from Hurricane Harvey should spark a discussion about climate change. "I think it is pretty dumb not to ask some hard questions about why more rain is now falling, and has fallen in the Houston area, as I understand it, than any time that people can have measured," Sanders told CNN's Chris Cuomo. The first priority in responding to Harvey's devastation should be saving lives and ensuring people affected have adequate and safe housing, Sanders said, but he added that the issue of climate change should also...

VATICAN CITY - Pope Francis and Orthodox Christian leader Patriarch Bartholomew called on Friday for a collective response from world leaders to climate change, saying the planet was deteriorating and vulnerable people were the first to be affected. The appeal comes three months after U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew from a global agreement, struck in Paris, to limit greenhouse gas emissions. “We urgently appeal to those in positions of social and economic, as well as political and cultural, responsibility to hear the cry of the earth and to attend to the needs of the marginalized,” Francis and Bartholomew said in...

The pope’s statements on climate change read like press releases from the Sierra Club. Even the pantheism of modern environmentalism creeps into his comments. “Listen to the cry of the Earth,” he lectured leaders this week. The pope is still miffed that Donald Trump blew off his counsel on the Paris climate accord. Trump had responded to the pope’s lobbying with the wonderfully neutral comment, “He is something.” Socialists, meanwhile, sing the praises of the pope. The socialist Brazilian sociologist Michael Lowy gushes about the pope’s use of environmentalism to try and undermine the free market and empower statist pols:...

Scientists have been trying to come up with ways to weaken hurricanes since the 1940s. Nothing that has been tried so far has worked, but that hasn't stopped a virtual cottage industry of researchers from hatching the next big, bold proposal. The latest idea, published in the August issue of the journal Atmospheric Science Letters, comes at it from a new angle and at an opportune moment: A study published last week in the National Academy of Sciences concluded that large, damaging hurricanes will happen with greater frequency as global temperatures climb. Early efforts at hurricane modification involved "seeding" clouds...

Hurricane Harvey presented a golden opportunity to global warming hysterics who are trying mightily to connect the storm's intensity to climate change. What's truly remarkable is that reporting that is pushing this meme always start out the same way: they deny they are trying to connect hurricanes to global warming: WaPo editorial: Scientists are habitually cautious about attributing a single weather event to the long-term increase in global temperature that human beings have begun, and they cannot say with reasonable certainty that climate change caused Hurricane Harvey. In fact, they are still sorting out exactly how global warming affects...

Most of the United States’ special envoys will be abolished and their responsibilities reassigned as part of the State Department overhaul, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told Congress on Monday, including envoys for climate change and the Iran deal. Special envoys for Afghanistan-Pakistan, disability rights and closing the Guantanamo Bay detention center will be eliminated under the plan. But President Donald Trump’s administration plans to keep envoys for religious freedom, fighting anti-Semitism and LGBT rights, despite speculation from critics that it would seek to downgrade those priorities. Lawmakers of both parties, think tanks and even the diplomats’ association have long...

With rising sea levels and increased rainfall, experts agree, climate change made the flooding from Hurricane Harvey far worse than it would have been even a decade ago. The Texas legislature had multiple opportunities to create a “climate adaptation plan” that could have resulted in preparations, but the bills were killed every time. The sponsor of the legislation told International Business Times that former Texas Gov. Rick Perry made sure that the climate adaptation bills would not pass. “When I filed that legislation, then-Governor Perry’s legislative staff told me that no legislation that had climate change in it would get out...

RUSH: Man, I tell you, I don’t care what’s happening in Houston, the Trump hate is ongoing. The anti-Trump thinking, actions, the protests, the apparent desire to rip this country apart and eventually destroy it goes on unabated, as does the meteorological disaster taking place in southeastern Texas. We’ll start with the meteorological disaster in southeastern Texas first. We can get through that fairly — well, in a little less time than it will take to document the Trump hate today and the actions of the worldwide and American left, led by the media to continue to destroy Trump. It’s...

While there have been only a smattering of climate change references since Hurricane Harvey took over news cycles, CNN and MSNBC featured more shameful exploitations of the hurricane on Monday to promote climate change as thousands were in need of help from rising flood waters. Perhaps most notably, one New York Times writer on MSNBC knocked the President, questioning his motives for recovery efforts, and used climate change to make a class argument that the poor and especially poor Trump voters are disproportionately going to be targeted by it. CNN, MSNBC Shamefully Blame Climate Change for Harvey, Knock Poor Trump...

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Damages from Hurricane Harvey's ravaging of Houston and the Texas Gulf Coast are estimated to be well below those from the major storms that hit New Orleans and New York in recent years, insurance executives have said. The early assessment of damage from Harvey, made while rain continued to pelt the fourth-largest city in the United States, came as a scientist from the world's largest reinsurer predicted that climate change is likely to result in more intense storms in the future. "There are more thunder storms in parts of Europe and the United States than in past...

We can’t say that Hurricane Harvey was caused by climate change. But it was certainly worsened by it. What can we say about the role of climate change in the unprecedented disaster that is unfolding in Houston with Hurricane Harvey? There are certain climate change-related factors that we can, with great confidence, say worsened the flooding. Sea level rise attributable to climate change – some of which is due to coastal subsidence caused by human disturbance such as oil drilling – is more than half a foot over the past few decades. That means the storm surge was half a...

Switzerland's environmental protection office says the effects of climate change are partially to blame for a mudslide through a southeastern village that left eight people missing after a massive chunk of rock broke off an Alpine mountainside. Federal Office for the Environment director Marc Chardonnens said Switzerland must do more to brace for climate change. It said climate change effects include "urban heat islands" in Swiss cities, localized water shortages, and the instability of mountain flanks.

Switching to diesel from gasoline, the monumental regulatory effort launched by the European Union in the late 1990s, ended up delivering only thimbles-full of avoided greenhouse pollution compared to competing gasoline engines. But it made the air in European cities significantly less breathable thanks to diesel particulates and nitrogen oxides.

The year 2016 turned out to be disastrous for the global-warming Doomsday Lobby. This year is shaping up as one that will deliver an even bigger setback — politically, scientifically, economically, and socially — to the forces of climate alarmism. The big political blow last year came, of course, with the election of Donald Trump. His announcement earlier this year of his decision to pull the United States out of the UN’s Paris climate accord sent climate activists across the globe into an apoplectic fury that continues unabated. President Trump’s move on the Paris deal represents not only a tectonic...