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The most widely feared consequence of global warming appears to be sea level rise (SLR). Environmental advocacy groups are polluting the airwaves and internet with lurid images of flooding of Bangladesh and Pacific islands, and raising the specter of hundreds of millions of environmental refugees. Even sober scientists... --snip-- The first clue that there might be something amiss with the IPCC logic comes from the IPCC report itself. According to this authoritative source, the contribution to SLR of the past century comes mainly from three sources: (i) thermal expansion of the warming ocean contributed about 4 cm; (ii) the melting...

Ernest Moniz, Barack Obama’s new Secretary of Energy, is making it clear there is no room for dissent regarding climate change. Speaking to his department’s employees after he was sworn in, Moniz said, “Let me make it very clear that there is no ambiguity in terms of the scientific basis calling for a prudent response on climate change. I am not interested in debating what is not debatable. There is plenty to debate as we try and move forward on our climate agenda.”

Urgent action is needed to boost carbon prices to €150 per tonne ($215.65/ton)—2,250% higher than current levels—if the EU is to meet its decarbonization goals by 2050, the former secretary-general of the UNFCCC has told EurActiv in an interview. “We very quickly need to see a carbon price in the order of €150 a tonne because that’s the kind of level that drives the price signals that we really need,” Yvo de Boer said on a phone line from Manila, in the Philippines. EU carbon allowances are currently trading at €6.60 per tonne ($9.49/ton), but a price of around €150...

Virginia, Massachusetts and Rhode Island will be the first three states to sell leases for the right to develop offshore wind farms, U.S. government officials said Friday. The leases will be auctioned online, probably in the first half of 2013, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior, the federal agency overseeing the sales. The auctions will determine which energy company, utility or entrepreneur gets to build huge wind turbines and reap clean electricity from them in designated areas in the Atlantic Ocean. Costs are expected to be in the billions.No offshore wind farms exist today in the United States,...

URGENT - WEATHER MESSAGE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE MEDFORD OR 210 PM PDT WED AUG 22 2012 ...WIDESPREAD FREEZING TEMPERATURES POSSIBLE FRIDAY MORNING... .COOL HIGH PRESSURE WILL MOVE OVER THE AREA THURSDAY NIGHT AND FRIDAY MORNING. CLEAR SKIES AND LIGHT WINDS WILL LEAD TO ADDITIONAL COOLING WITH FREEZING TEMPERATURES POSSIBLE OVER MUCH OF NORTHERN KLAMATH AND LAKE COUNTIES FRIDAY MORNING. ORZ029>031-231100- /O.NEW.KMFR.FZ.A.0011.120824T1000Z-120824T1500Z/ KLAMATH BASIN- NORTHERN AND EASTERN KLAMATH COUNTY AND WESTERN LAKE COUNTY- CENTRAL AND EASTERN LAKE COUNTY- INCLUDING THE CITIES OF...BEATTY...CHEMULT...CRESCENT... GILCHRIST...SPRAGUE RIVER 210 PM PDT WED AUG 22 2012 ...FREEZE WATCH IN EFFECT FOR FRIDAY MORNING... THE NATIONAL WEATHER...

Droughts in southern and eastern Europe are contributing to the global decline in grain production while also elevating concern about the long-term impact on freshwater supplies. The European Commission, which has declared 2012 the Year of Water, is preparing a review some of Europe’s water legislation partly with climate change and extreme weather events in mind.Food security and how the EU safeguards its liquid resources are among the topics due to be discussed during World Water Week events that begin in Stockholm on 26 August. The UN Food and Agricultural Organization reports that food prices rose 6% overall in July,...

Gov. Jerry Brown said today that "humanity is getting dangerously close to the point of no return" on climate change, and he launched a website criticizing conservatives who dispute its significance. The website "Climate Change: Just the Facts," is hosted by Brown's Office of Planning and Research. It devotes one page to "the denialists" and another to rebutting "common denialist arguments." [Snip] "Global warming's impact on Lake Tahoe is well documented. It is just one example of how, after decades of pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, humanity is getting dangerously close to the point of no return," Brown...

The mainstream media is celebrating a physicist who allegedly did a U-turn on his global warming views and now says humans are the cause. Except Richard Muller had already said in 2008 that man was a cause of global warming. Nonetheless, the San Francisco Chronicle, for example, reported July 31: “The hot issue of global warming got hotter Monday when a UC Berkeley physicist, once a loud skeptic of human-caused climate change, agreed not only that the Earth is heating up, but also that people are the cause of it all.” Never mind that in an interview almost four years...

So eager are the shills at the George Soros-funded far-left website Think Progress to find evidence of global warming that on Thursday they falsely blamed melting street lights in Stillwater, Oklahoma, on the heat. As originally reported by TP's Stephen Lacey:… Even as residents swelter in the relentless heat, Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe continued his tirade about man-made global warming during a Senate hearing yesterday, saying the science had “collapsed.” It appears the only thing collapsing are the street lights.Way down at the bottom is this:UPDATE: After we published this piece, we saw reports from people on the ground in...

Dumping iron into the sea can bury carbon dioxide for centuries, potentially helping reduce the impact of climate change, according to a major new study. The work shows for the first time that much of the algae that blooms when iron filings are added dies and falls into the deep ocean. Geoengineering—technologies aimed at alleviating global warming—are controversial, with critics warning of unintended environmental side effects or encouraging complacency in global deals to cut carbon emissions. But Professor Victor Smetacek, at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, who led the new research, said: "The time...

UPDATE: less than 24 hours after posting this, we already have an end of the world prediction naming global warming, see below. New end of the world book treats climate change just like many other end of times worries that have not come to pass. Weston, FL — (SBWIRE) — 07/16/2012 — The end of the world is not going to happen within our lifetimes. That’s the word from Justin Deering, author of The End of the World Delusion: How Doomsayers Endanger Society. “We’re bombarded with end-of-the-world scares practically everywhere you look,” Deering explains. “You hear about it in church, on...

The head of Iran’s cultural heritage and tourism organization believes that in addition to economic sanctions, the West is launching another kind of “soft war” on the Islamic republic. Speaking at a ceremony to introduce the nation’s new meteorological department chief, Hassan Mousavi, said that he was “suspicious about the drought in the southern part of the country.” He went on to accuse the West as using “technology” to influence the nation’s climate, saying sand storms, droughts, and other extreme weather were the result of an unspecified method of war. … Last year, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accused Western countries...

Ministers have delayed plans to axe Government subsidies for wind farms after another disagreement between the Conservatives and their coalition partners Liberal Democrats. Chris Huhne, the former Climate Change Secretary, had blocked any subsidy cuts The Government was poised to announce a 25 per cent cut in wind farm subsidies today after warnings from George Osborne that the taxpayer support was too generous. The planned deal, phased in over several years, also involved a system of community grants to encourage wind farm development in some areas as part of a “complex package”. Sources claim that Ed Davey, the Climate Change...

New cars and vans in the European Union will produce one-third less carbon dioxide within eight years, under proposed new rules set out on Wednesday (11 July) in Brussels. By 2020, the average emissions from new cars will have to be no more than 95 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometer driven (5.4 oz/mile), a cut of more than 40 grams from today's levels and of 35 grams per kilometer compared with the 2015 target, if the proposed new regulations are accepted. Connie Hedegaard, climate chief of the European commission, said the goals were "ambitious but achievable" and would benefit...

The German engineering giant Siemens is researching the idea of using overhead electricity lines to power truck traffic. But the state-supported project makes no sense. It would cost billions to implement—and only lead to higher fuel consumption and more pollution. … Germany's Ministry for the Environment (BMU) saw enough green potential in this hybrid truck to channel over €2 million ($2.5 million) in federal funding to the project. Siemens used the funds to help set up its first test track at an obsolete military airport north of Berlin. … In any case, electrifying Germany's roads is not going to bring...

Fears about climate change are overblown and shifting weather patterns and rising sea levels should be considered an engineering problem, said the head of the world's largest oil refiner, ExxonMobil. "The fear factor that people want to throw out there to say 'we just have to stop this,' I do not accept," Rex Tillerson, ExxonMobil's chief executive, said in a speech on Wednesday (June 27). Tackling global poverty should have a higher international priority than reducing carbon emissions, because it would give billions of the world’s energy poor access to oil and gas supplies, in his view. "They'd love to...

The earth is running out of natural resources like land, water and minerals so quickly that if nothing is done, some predictions say that by 2030 humankind will need the equivalent of two planets to sustain our current lifestyle. Those chilling figures come from a famous World Wildlife Fund ‘Living Planet’ report in 2008, but what exactly can we do to reduce our environmental impact—which has got worse since then—and how should we go about doing it? People “desperately” need a means of putting the environmental impact of their products into context, according to Martin Barrow, a senior consultant at...

From the University of California – Santa BarbaraThese are views of vegetation in summer and winter of suburban Minneapolis landscapes from the 500 foot tall KUOM radio tower where measurements for the study were made. In what might be the first study to report continuous measurements of net CO2 exchange of urban vegetation and soils over a full year or more, scientists from UC Santa Barbara and the University of Minnesota conclude that not only is vegetation important in the uptake of the greenhouse gas, but also that different types of vegetation play different roles. Their findings will be published...

The broad theory of man-made global warming is acceptable in the purely qualitative sense. If humans continue to fill the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, there can be little doubt that the average temperature of the world will increase above what it would have been otherwise. The argument about the science is, and always has been, whether the increase would be big enough to be noticed among all the other natural variations of climate. The economic and social argument is whether the increase, even if it were noticeable, would change the overall welfare of mankind for the worse.

The economist Thorstein Veblen once quipped that "invention is the mother of necessity." That was before the age of air-conditioning, but no technology better illustrates Veblen's point. Having developed efficient cooling, we've designed homes, businesses and transportation systems that are completely dependent on it, while the resulting greenhouse emissions create the need for even more air-conditioning. (snip) We must break this feedback loop, but what does one say to someone living in one of the tropical nations where much of the increase in cooling demand is expected? Surely not that Americans are addicted to air-conditioning and can’t give it up,...