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Bureaucrats at the American Physical Society (APS) have issued a curious warning to their members about an article in one of their own publications. Don't read this, they say - we don't agree with it. But what is it about the piece that is so terrible, that like Medusa, it could make men go blind? It's an article that examines the calculation central to climate models. As the editor of the APS's newsletter American Physics Jeffrey Marque explains, the global warming debate must be re-opened. "There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not...

New research into inheritance shows we can alter family traits for better or for worse. Jonathan Leake reports For Beatrix Zwart being young means having fun. She works hard, and out of hours she plays hard — including plenty of nights on the town with her friends. “I lead a similar lifestyle to a lot of young professionals in Britain and I don’t intend to have any children until I’m well into my thirties,” said Zwart, a 25-year-old Belgian who lives in London. “I’ve never really thought my lifestyle now could have any effect on my future children or grandchildren.”...

Al Gore today called for replacing all carbon based electric power generation with alternative forms, primarily wind, solar, and geothermal in the next ten years...I pulled up these Intellicast wind maps a few hours after he delivered his speech. They cover the entire eastern portion of the country at 10PM EDT. Seems to be a problem. It’s night (no solar) and there’s no wind. It happens!

Here's something unlikely to make the cover of Time. From the Science & Public Policy Institute: WASHINGTON (7-15-08) — Mathematical proof that there is no "climate crisis" appears today in a major, peer-reviewed paper in Physics and Society, a learned journal of the 10,000-strong American Physical Society, SPPI reports. Christopher Monckton, who once advised Margaret Thatcher, demonstrates via 30 equations that computer models used by the UN's climate panel (IPCC) were pre-programmed with overstated values for the three variables whose product is "climate sensitivity" (temperature increase in response to greenhouse-gas increase), resulting in a 500-2000% overstatement of CO2's effect on...

CAIR’s Medical School Grievance Theater   By Patrick PooleFrontPageMagazine.com | Thursday, July 17, 2008 When Iram Qureshi of Dublin, Ohio was dismissed from the West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine last month after having to repeat her first year and then failing two “systems” in her second year after she stopped attending classes, she did what any normal American Muslim woman would seem to do these days – she called the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and sued.Tragically, perhaps fatally one day for one of her future patients, a Kanawha County Circuit Court judge has granted her a...

Researchers say industry manipulates the ingredient to recruit new generation of users Tobacco companies are manipulating menthol levels in cigarettes to appeal to newer, younger smokers, part of a deliberate strategy to get younger people, particularly African-Americans, hooked, a new study contends. Menthol makes cigarettes more palatable to the novice smoker. "If anything, menthol is being used as a candy to help the toxin go down," said Dr. Gregory Connolly, senior author of a paper being published in the September issue of the American Journal of Public Health. "If we let the industry go ahead and willy-nilly design the product...

It was supposed to be a healthy snack. But a bunch of cut-price supermarket grapes became poisonous after they were infested by a pair of false widow spiders. Ceri and Rose Williams suffered numbness, head aches and high blood pressure after eating the fruit they purchased in Tesco. Mr Williams, 52, and his 45-year-old wife had already started munching on the two £1 bags of fruit when they noticed that something was moving inside. A quick rummage revealed that two spiders, one alive and one dead, had already made a meal out of the Moroccan-grown grapes. Mr Williams also spotted...

While others criticized the Bush administration's inaction on greenhouse gases, U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe warned Friday that it has put in place a scenario that will bankrupt the U.S. economy. A key player in the years-long debate over climate change, the Oklahoma Republican agreed that using the Clean Air Act to put new regulations in place would be an unprecedented expansion of the Environmental Protection Agency's authority that would impact every household. "Obviously the concept of regulating carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act is flawed and the act must be amended by Congress," Inhofe said. "Today's notice should concern...

July 08, 2008, 6:00 a.m. WikipropagandaSpinning green. By Lawrence Solomon Ever wonder how Al Gore, the United Nations, and company continue to get away with their claim of a “scientific consensus” confirming their doomsday view of global warming? Look no farther than Wikipedia for a stunning example of how the global-warming propaganda machine works. As you (or your kids) probably know, Wikipedia is now the most widely used and influential reference source on the Internet and therefore in the world, with more than 50 million unique visitors a month. In theory Wikipedia is a “people’s encyclopedia” written and edited...

Imagine what life would be like floating around the world on a giant island capable of holding 50,000 people and completely sustaining itself. Well, welcome to "Lilypad City." Designed like a lily pad, the innovation by award-winning Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut could be used as a permanent refuge for those whose homes have been covered by water in the future. "I think trying to accommodate the millions of people left homeless by environmental changes will prove to be one of the great challenges of the 21st century," he told the Daily Mail. "Some countries spend billions of pounds working on...

All new vehicles on sale in California will soon have to display their green credentials. This is a new scheme implemented by the California Air Resources Board (CARB). From January 1, 2009, stickers like the one seen here will carry information about the environmental performance of every vehicle they’re pasted into. There will be a ‘Global Warming Score’ (based on greenhouse gas emissions from driving and fuel production) and a ‘Smog Score’ (pretty much self-explanatory), both rated on a one-to-ten scale, with ten being the cleanest. And, similar to warnings on cigarette packets, they will say: ‘Protect the environment, choose...

White House Blocks EPA Emissions Draft Document Outlines Keys To Regulating Greenhouse Gases By IAN TALLEY and SIOBHAN HUGHES June 30, 2008 WASHINGTON -- The White House is trying to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from publishing a document that could become the legal roadmap for regulating greenhouse-gas emissions in the U.S., said people close to the matter. The fight over the document is the latest development in a long-running conflict between the EPA and the White House over climate-change policy. It will likely intensify ongoing Congressional investigations into the Bush administration's involvement in the agency's policymaking. The draft document,...

The chief practical argument coming from those who oppose opening our continental shelf and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling is that it will take ten years to get the oil so it will not have any impact on current oil prices. The response is that is factual and analytical hogwash, insofar as the whole point of futures markets is to discount the impact of changes in future supply. It is also, by the way, reasoning that many on the left would not want applied to their own pet project: My response to those who say that increased drilling...

As gay couples race to the altar in California this week, scientists may have found an answer to the so-called gay paradox. Studies suggest that homosexuality is at least partly genetic. And although homosexuals have far fewer children than heterosexuals, so-called gay genes apparently survive in the population. A new study bolsters support for an intriguing idea: These same genes may increase fertility in women. Despite some tantalizing leads over the past 2 decades, researchers have yet to isolate any genes directly linked to homosexuality. Nevertheless, a number of studies have shown that male homosexuals have more gay male relatives...

Almost every day a news report comes out linking something to climate change – obesity, food riots or a century of wildfires. Some of the claims seem especially outlandish. Sometimes they are. On June 18, CBS.com posted a story claiming that global seismic activity on Earth is now five times more energetic than it was just 20 years ago because of global warming. The story had no byline, but was attributed to the Associated Press. The story was identical to a June 17 Market Wire press release attributed to Tom Chalko, the scientist that made the claim of the earthquake/global...

Boulder, Colo. -- The Earth has about 16.2 million square miles of forests but scientists say research is needed to understand the forests' impact on climate change. "As politicians and the general public become more aware of climate change, there will be greater interest in legislative policies to mitigate global warming," said atmospheric scientist Gordon Bonan of the National Science Foundation's National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. "Forests have been proposed as a possible solution, so it is imperative that we understand fully how forests influence climate." The complex relationships within forests both add and subtract from the...

MT BEST, AUSTRALIA--(Marketwire - June 17, 2008) - New research compiled by Australian scientist Dr Tom Chalko shows that global seismic activity on Earth is now five times more energetic than it was just 20 years ago. The research proves that destructive ability of earthquakes on Earth increases alarmingly fast and that this trend is set to continue, unless the problem of "global warming" is comprehensively and urgently addressed. The analysis of more than 386,000 earthquakes between 1973 and 2007 recorded on the US Geological Survey database proved that the global annual energy of earthquakes on Earth began increasing very...

The pesticide report that nobody read No major media picked up the story, even though it demolished every health and environmental claim devised by scaremongersBy Terence CorcoranWelcome to the 10th Annual FP Comment Junk Science Week event, which begins today with a somewhat tedious and dry look at a classic, the pesticide scare. For more than a decade, the likes of Greenpeace, the Ontario College of Family Physicians, The Globe and Mail and scores of activists and city politicians have waged a relentless campaign against pesticide use. It’s easy to generate a junk science scare. You make stuff up, exaggerate...

In Charles Krauthammer's May 30 must-read column, "Carbon Chastity," he rightly lambastes environmentalists as resurrected communists/socialists who have latched on to the environment and climate change as a means to advance their anti-people social agenda. The specific occasion for his justifiable outrage is a recent proposal by a British parliamentary committee to institute a personal carbon ration card for every citizen. The plan would place limits on food and energy consumption in the form of credits not to be exceeded — except through the potential for heavy-carbon users, often the wealthy, to purchase credits from lower-carbon users, often the less...

The deniers of global warming are about to latch on to a new argument. The world is cooling. And they are right - well, slightly. Globally, this year is likely to be the coolest for some time - back to the average of the early 90s, according to some unpublished forecasts. This is no refutation of man-made global warming. It is the inevitable consequence of one of nature's climatic cycles. The La Niña, the cold phase of the El Niño cycle in the Pacific, has sent average global temperatures plunging this year. And there is more. Longer term climate cycles...