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Muslims around the world could be setting their watches to a new time soon when the world's largest clock begins ticking atop a soaring skyscraper in Islam's holiest city of Mecca. Saudi Arabia hopes the four faces of the new clock, which will loom over Mecca's Grand Mosque from what is expected to be the world's second tallest building, will establish Mecca as an alternate time standard to the Greenwich median. The clock is targeted to enter service with a three-month trial period in the first week of the holy month of Ramadan on or about August 12, according to...

COLLEGE STATION, Aug. 10, 2010 — Taken very literally, not all students are created equal—especially in their math learning skills, say Texas A&M University researchers who have found that not fully understanding the “equal sign” in a math problem could be a key to why U.S. students underperform their peers from other countries in math. “About 70 percent of middle grades students in the United States exhibit misconceptions, but nearly none of the international students in Korea and China have a misunderstanding about the equal sign, and Turkish students exhibited far less incidence of the misconception than the U.S. students,”...

Government officials are pointing to the drought and wildfires in Russia, and the floods across Central and East Asia as consistent with climate change predictions. While climatologists say that a single weather event cannot be linked directly to a warming planet, patterns of worsening storms, severer droughts, and disasters brought on by extreme weather are expected as the planet warms.

The Obama administration told Congress to find a way to regulate greenhouse gases -- or else. Last month, Congress refused: Democratic leaders in the Senate declined to take up climate legislation before their August break, which means it looks effectively dead for this session. Now the White House is stuck with "or else." The Environmental Protection Agency will soon begin regulating greenhouse gases factory by factory, power plant by power plant. That could be unwieldy, expensive and unpopular -- even President Obama has said it's not his preferred solution. But for now, it's his only option. The next few months...

WASHINGTON — Five environmental groups want the EPA to ban lead in ammunition and fishing tackle, arguing that millions of animals are dying from eating lead-shot pellets or carcasses contaminated by lead.

Meteorologists have determined exactly how much carbon dioxide humans can emit into the atmosphere while ensuring that the earth does not heat up by more than two degrees The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) calculated projected temperature changes for various scenarios in 2007 and researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg have now gone one step further: they have developed a new model that specifies the maximum volumes of carbon dioxide that humans may emit to remain below the critical threshold for climate warming of two degrees Celsius. To do this, the scientists incorporated into their...

The Environmental Protection Agency Thursday rejected an effort to keep it from regulating greenhouse gas emissions, saying that e-mails released in last fall’s “Climategate” scandal gave it no reason to reconsider the science of global warming. In a sternly written opinion, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said she didn’t agree with requests from the GOP attorneys general from Texas and Virginia, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other conservative groups that questioned the underlying science linking humans to global warming and also warned of the potential economic burdens from new climate rules. Jackson said the groups’ arguments lack merit. “These petitions...

The 2009 State of the Climate report released today draws on data for 10 key climate indicators that all point to the same finding: the scientific evidence that our world is warming is unmistakable. More than 300 scientists from 160 research groups in 48 countries contributed to the report, which confirms that the past decade was the warmest on record and that the Earth has been growing warmer over the last 50 years. Based on comprehensive data from multiple sources, the report defines 10 measurable planet-wide features used to gauge global temperature changes. The relative movement of each of these...

New York Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo announced a 13-state coalition has filed a motion in Washington, D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals defending a new environmental regulation limiting greenhouse gases. Starting in January 2011, pollution control requirements under the federal CAA will apply for the first time to new or modified facilities that emit global warming pollution. A new rule from the EPA focuses these requirements on the largest facilities, such as power plants, cement kilns, and oil refineries. These large facilities account for 70% of the greenhouse gases from stationary sources. In response, interest groups representing some of these...

Transiting through SFO the other day, I noticed a number of kiosks where one can purchase carbon offsets for one’s flight. To feel good if you are crossing the country costs @ $12.00, or 30x the actual going rate. To feel good for a Transpac flight might cost as much as $20. Somehow, I think Al Gore is lurking somewhere in the background. Of course, that nasty carbon will probably just blow right back across the Pacific from China in a couple of days.

New federal regulations issued this week stipulate that the electronic health records--that all Americans are supposed to have by 2014 under the terms of the stimulus law that President Barack Obama signed last year--must record not only the traditional measures of height and weight, but also the Body Mass Index: a measure of obesity. The obesity-rating regulation states that every American's electronic health record must: “Calculate body mass index. Automatically calculate and display body mass index (BMI) based on a patient’s height and weight.” The law also requires that these electronic health records be available--with appropriate security measures--on a national...

It's odd how little we've heard lately from the skeptics who deny that climate change is real. What's the matter, people? Heat stroke? The Venus-like heat that much of the country has been suffering this summer is almost enough to make anybody a believer in global warming. Almost, but not quite: Honesty compels me to acknowledge that a few weeks of record-setting temperatures do not constitute proof of anything. Climate scientists have to analyze data covering decades and centuries to discern what's really going on. Of course, the unusually heavy snowstorms that buried Washington and other East Coast cities last...

A delegation of 20 black mayors representing the National Conference of Black Mayors arrived in Washington, DC to lobby congress to pass legislation to promote “clean energy.” According to the delegation’s press release, they want “a national plan to move their cities to become more energy efficient, reduce pollution and create new clean energy jobs and businesses.” But is black unemployment twice the national unemployment rate because of carbon emissions? Are the budgets of state and local governments running in the red because of the kind of energy Americans burn? One visit that the delegation of black mayors did not...

This is a truly remarkable video found at Powerline of NASA administrator Charles Bolden telling al-Jazeera that NASA is now tasked "to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with predominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering." The agency that sent a man to the moon has been enlisted to improve the self-esteem of Muslims.

NOTE The following text is a quote: Navy Official Discusses Climate Change Investment Strategy By Bob Freeman Office of the Oceanographer of the Navy WASHINGTON, June 21, 2010 – A number of recent strategic Defense Department documents have recognized that the changing climate may affect national security and military operations later in the century. This is particularly true for the globally deployed U.S. Navy, and investments to address climate challenges may need to be made, the service’s oceanographer said in a June 18 “DoD Live” bloggers roundtable. “We're going to have to fold these challenges into a tight fiscal budget,”...

A new analysis of 1372 climate scientists who have participated in major climate science reviews or have signed statements in support or opposition to their main conclusions confirms what many researchers have said for years: Those who believe in anthropogenic climate change rank much higher on the scientific pecking order than do those who take issue with the idea. The paper shows that "the vast majority of working [climate] research scientists are in agreement" on climate change, says climate science historian Naomi Oreskes of the University of California, San Diego. "Those who don't agree, are, unfortunately—and this is hard to...

Senator claims GOP follows Beck and Limbaugh, not science, on climate By Ben Geman - 06/17/10 01:57 PM ET Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said Thursday that strong global warming legislation lacks 60 votes and claimed Republicans are paying attention to conservative media pundits rather than climate science. "It is absolutely incredible and very, very sad — and I say this not from a political point of view — that a lot of very bright Republicans no longer pay attention to science and are much more interested in the rhetoric of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck," he said. Sanders spoke with...

SAN FRANCISCO – Lawyers for two couples challenging California's ban on same-sex marriage plan to wrap up their case Friday following the incendiary testimony of a proponent who said he thinks gays are more likely to be pedophiles and that allowing them to wed would lead to the legalization of polygamy and incest. Hak-Shing William Tam of San Francisco spent five hours testifying Thursday as a hostile plaintiffs' witness to prove that bias toward gays fueled the 2008 campaign to pass the voter-approved measure, known as Proposition 8. Tam, who was one of five people who signed on as official...

A new report, published today, which features input from 13 universities and 12 research bodies, including the University of East Anglia, urges the new government to break this country's “fossil fuel addiction”. Switching from petrol or diesel powered vehicles and cutting the number of short haul flights are key policies together with cutting livestock numbers, which generates 82 percent of green house gases in the agricultural sector. But Brian Finnerty, regional spokesman for the National Farmers' Union (NFU), said while they support the view that farming has a part to play in carbon reduction, they take exception to the assumption...

Senate authors of a controversial climate change bill heralded EPA modeling results unveiled Tuesday as proof that their plan would have a limited pinch on Americans’ pocketbooks. Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) found many reasons to gloat after getting the 74-page study that showed the overall costs from their legislation’s major global warming provisions would cost an average household between $80 to $150 per year. “There’ll be some people who will want to demagogue that politically, but that’s less than $1 a day,” Lieberman told reporters. “Is the American household willing to pay less than $1 so...