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'Frozen Gore' sculpture fuels debate in Alaska Posted: Wednesday, January 6, 2010 12:55 pm Another two-ton ice sculpture of former Vice President Al Gore is back in front of a Fairbanks liquor store. "Frozen Gore" is a dig at Gore's beliefs about climate change. The first statue went on display last year. This year's version is hooked up to the exhaust of a pickup truck to make it appear Gore is spouting hot air. The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reports the smoke drew laughs from a crowd Tuesday as a Gore speech on climate change played over a loudspeaker. The sculpture...

Here are the top weather stories around the world from Drudge Report today: Winter Could Be Worst in 25 Years for USA 3 Deaths Due To Cold in Memphis PAPER: Gas Supplies Running out in UK Vermont sets ‘all-time record for one snowstorm’ Iowa temps ‘a solid 30 degrees below normal’ Seoul buried in heaviest snowfall in 70 years Historic ice build-up shuts down NJ nuclear power plant Beijing — coldest in 40 years Miami shivers from coldest weather in decade

Frankfurt, Germany, December 6 -- A rather bizarre study carried out by German researchers suggests that staring at women's breasts is good for men's health and increases their life expectancy. According to Dr. Karen Weatherby, a gerontologist and author of the study, gawking at women’s breasts is a healthy practice, almost at par with an intense exercise regime, that prolongs the lifespan of a man by five years. She added, "Just 10 minutes of staring at the charms of a well-endowed female, is roughly equivalent to a 30-minute aerobics work-out." A five-year research on 500 men Researchers at three hospitals...

Second of two parts. The pending federal effort to lessen carbon emissions, especially from coal-fired power plants – called the “cap-and-trade program” – has one single goal: To improve air quality and slow down global warming – if, that is, global warming actually exists. As environmentalists favor cap-and-trade as an incentive to decrease harmful emissions, while the bill moves from the House of Representatives to the U.S. Senate, opponents say it will cause nothing but an economic disaster, especially for Pennsylvania’s coal industries. And there are two extreme views on global warming. From the National Geographic: “Glaciers are melting. “Sea...

Climate Change: A peer-reviewed study by a respected Canadian physicist blames the interplay of cosmic rays and chlorofluorocarbons for 20th-century warming. The CFCs are now gone, and so is warming — perhaps for the next 50 years. Much of the nation got a white Christmas this year, some in unprecedented quantities. A record-breaking storm deposited 12 to 30 inches of snow in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C. Many places set records for the most snow in a single December day as more than 50% of the U.S. was covered by the white stuff. Scientists (and here we use the word...

You've heard it before, how the pharmaceutical industry has a giant "revolving door" through which corporations and government agencies frequently exchange key employees. That reality was driven home in a huge way today when news broke that Dr. Julie Gerberding, who headed the CDC from 2002 through 2009, landed a top job with Merck, one of the largest drug companies in the world. Her job there? She's the new president of the vaccine division. How convenient. That means the former head of the CDC was very likely cultivating a relationship with Merck all these years, and now comes the big...

During the 70 years that the communists controlled the Soviet Union, they had a peculiar way of teaching history to the people. They would teach things as historical fact that never happened. If you were one of those who took umbrage with their revisionist history lessons, you would soon find yourself living in a tiny apartment in a part of the country where they laugh at anyone who claims the world is getting warmer. In a communist country this is the only way to convince the masses that they are actually better off than anyone in the history of...

California: While Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger worries about rising seas, his state sinks below the waves. Don't mess with Texas, they say. But California and the nation could follow its lead. Last Wednesday, Gov. Schwarzenegger released a new report based on research compiled by the California Energy Commission claiming that by 2100 San Francisco Bay would be more bay than San Francisco, with Fisherman's Wharf and Treasure Island under the rising waters of climate change. His show-and-tell, which included a new Google Earth application the commission spent $150,000 to help develop, goes a long way toward explaining the once-Golden State's slide...

South Florida is America's most vulnerable community to climate change. While Miami-Dade County, a pioneer and national leader, has made strides in addressing climate-change mitigation and adaptation, we now are moving toward a more resilient and sustainable future. Miami-Dade County is developing a community-sustainability plan called GreenPrint to achieve aggressive energy- and greenhouse-gas reduction goals. This community plan, which does not know city or county boundaries, is being developed to reaffirm and synchronize our government and community goals, initiatives and measures. It will leverage existing sustainability goals and initiatives and develop new ones where needed. In September, I convened the...

Global Warming: Russian analysts accuse Britain's Meteorological Office of cherry-picking Russian temperature data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures. Is Copenhagen rooted in a single tree in Siberia? Michael Mann, a Penn State meteorologist, wrote in Friday's Washington Post that "stolen" e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit still don't alter the evidence for climate change. Mann, a creator of the discredited hockey-stick graph used in reports from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to show man-made warming, attacks climate skeptics, including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, saying they "confuse the public." Chutzpah has been...

I cannot condone some things that colleagues of mine wrote or requested in the e-mails recently stolen from a climate research unit at a British university. But the messages do not undermine the scientific case that human-caused climate change is real. The hacked e-mails have been mined for words and phrases that can be distorted to misrepresent what the scientists were discussing. In a Dec. 9 op-ed, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin argued that "The e-mails reveal that leading climate 'experts' . . . manipulated data to 'hide the decline' in global temperatures." Yet the e-mail she cites was written...

MONTEREY BAY NATIONAL MARINE SANCTUARY, Calif. – Far from Copenhagen's turbulent climate talks, the sea lions, harbor seals and sea otters reposing along the shoreline and kelp forests of this protected marine area stand to gain from any global deal to cut greenhouse gases. These foragers of the sanctuary's frigid waters, flipping in and out of sight of California's coastal kayakers, may not seem like obvious beneficiaries of a climate treaty crafted in the Danish capital. But reducing carbon emissions worldwide also would help mend a lesser-known environmental problem: ocean acidification. "We're having a change in water chemistry, so 20...

While I appreciate the efforts of the President, Al Gore, and all of Hollywood to save Earth from its “fever,” I do have one question: What SHOULD the Earth’s temperature be?

"...First and foremost -- contrary to what you’ve likely read elsewhere in the blogosphere or heard from the few policymakers and pundits actually addressing the issue, it was not the temperature decline the planet has been experiencing since 1998 that Jones and friends conspired to hide. Certainly, the simple fact that the e-mail was sent in November of 1999 should allay any such confusion. In fact, the decline Jones so urgently sought to hide was not one of measured temperatures at all, but rather figures infinitely more important to climate alarmists -- those determined by proxy reconstructions. As this scandal...

Leadership: Alaska's ex-governor asks a question we'd like answered: Why is California's current governor pushing the same policies in Copenhagen that helped drive his state into record deficits and unemployment? The movie series that made Arnold Schwarzenegger a household name involved cyborgs traveling through time to alternately try to destroy or save one John Connor, who would grow up to be the leader of the resistance against a race of machines that ruled the planet. Prominent in the series was his tough cookie of a mom, Sarah Connor. Another Sarah has taken the lead in another resistance against another group...

Millions of high school and college biology textbooks teach that research scientist Stanley Miller, in the 1950’s, showed how life could have arisen by chance. Nothing could be further from the truth. Miller, in his famous experiment in 1953, showed that individual amino acids (the building blocks of life) could come into existence by chance. But, it’s not enough just to have amino acids. The various amino acids that make-up life must link together in a precise sequence, just like the letters in a sentence, to form functioning protein molecules. If they’re not in the right sequence the protein molecules...

If you've seen an Internet ad for capacitor-type power factor correction devices, you might be led to believe that using one can save you money on your residential electricity bill. However, a team including specialists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have recently explained* why the devices actually provide no savings by discussing the underlying physics. The devices—sometimes referred to as Amp Reduction Units or KVARs**—are touted as good investments because they reduce the amount of current drawn from power lines while simultaneously providing the necessary amount of current to appliances inside the house. Though engineers elsewhere...

...As Alan I. Leshner, who heads the American Association for the Advancement of Science, wrote in The Washington Post recently: "It is wrong to suggest that apparently stolen e-mails ... somehow refute a century of evidence based on thousands of studies. ... Doubters insist that the Earth is not warming. This is in stark contrast to the consensus of 18 of the world's most respected scientific organizations, who strongly stated in an Oct. 21 letter to the U.S. Senate that human-induced climate change is real. Still, the doubters try to leverage any remaining points of scientific uncertainty about the details...

Global Warming: The Alaskan governor who knew polar bears weren't endangered says the planet isn't either and challenges the oracle of climate change. Al Gore says despite the CRU e-mails, the situation is of the utmost gravity. In a Dec. 9 Washington Post op-ed, Sarah Palin noted that the Climate-gate e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia "reveal that leading climate 'experts' deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to 'hide the decline' in global temperatures and tried to silence their critics from publishing in peer-reviewed journals." This did not sit well with Gore. "The entire North...

Inuit communities need funds to adapt to climate change in the Arctic, including measures to build communal deep freezers to store game, an Inuit leader said on Friday. The Inuit, the indigenous people of Greenland, Canada, Alaska and Russia, have traditionally hunted for Arctic species from seal to polar bear, whale to caribou. The Inuit Circumpolar Council's (ICC) Violet Ford says she sees climate changes "on a daily basis". Ms Ford, who was born and raised in the Inuit community of Makkovik, says more funds are needed for adaptation and response to climate change in the Arctic. "That should also...