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How hot was it? The National Weather Service's thermometer downtown reached 113 degrees for the first time since records began being kept in 1877 — and then stopped working. The record highs follow a summer of record lows. It was so hot Monday that it broke the all-time record — and the weatherman's thermometer. The National Weather Service's thermometer for downtown Los Angeles headed into uncharted territory at 12:15 p.m. Monday, reaching 113 degrees for the first time since records began being kept in 1877. Shortly after that banner moment, the temperature dipped back to 111, and then climbed back...

THE United Nations was set today to appoint an obscure Malaysian astrophysicist to act as Earth�s first contact for any aliens that may come visiting. Mazlan Othman, the head of the UN's little-known Office for Outer Space Affairs (Unoosa), is to describe her potential new role next week at a scientific conference at the Royal Society’s Kavli conference centre in Buckinghamshire. She is scheduled to tell delegates that the recent discovery of hundreds of planets around other stars has made the detection of extraterrestrial life more likely than ever before - and that means the UN must be ready...

John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, says that the term "global warming" is "a dangerous misnomer” that should be replaced with “global climate disruption." At the Environmental Protection Agency's 40th celebration of the Clean Air Act on Tuesday, Holdren said, "I think one of the failures of the scientific community was in embracing the term 'global warming'. Global warming is in fact a dangerous misnomer." And in a speech last week in Norway, echoing remarks he made at a 2007 speech at Harvard University, Holdren said the

Report reveals all bar one of party's 48 mid-term election candidates are sceptical about climate changeAll but one of the 48 Republican hopefuls for the Senate mid-term elections in November deny the existence of climate change or oppose action on global warming, according to a report released today.The strong Republican front against established science includes entrenched Senate leaders as well as the new wave of radical conservatives endorsed by the Tea Party activists, says a report by the Centre for American Progress.

EAST LANSING, Mich. — Women tend to accept the scientific consensus on global warming more than men, according to a study by a Michigan State University researcher. The findings ('The effects of gender on climate change knowledge and concern in the American public', Population & Environment, 2010, Volume 32, Number 1, Pages 66-87), challenge common perceptions that men are more scientifically literate, said sociologist Aaron M. McCright. "Men still claim they have a better understanding of global warming than women, even though women's beliefs align much more closely with the scientific consensus," said McCright, an associate professor with appointments in...

New research challenges idea that global warming will drive civil unrest. The idea that climate change might be a trigger for social disorder, population migration and conflict has an impressive pedigree. The link was mooted in a 2003 report for the Pentagon on the national-security implications of climate change; by the Stern review on the economics of climate change, prepared for the UK government in 2006; and in the United Nations' post-conflict environmental assessment of Sudan in 2007, which suggested that climate change was an aggravating factor in the Darfur conflict. But is there real proof of a link between...

It challenges previous assumptions that environmental disasters, such as drought and prolonged heat waves, had played a part in triggering unrest. Instead, it says, traditional factors - such as poverty and social tensions - were often the main factors behind the outbreak of conflicts.

H2O: Dangerous Chemical! A student at Eagle Rock Junior High won first prize at the Greater Idaho Falls Science Fair, April 26. He was attempting to show how conditioned we have become to alarmists practicing junk science and spreading fear of everything in our environment. In his project he urged people to sign a petition demanding strict control or total elimination of the chemical "dihydrogen monoxide." And for plenty of good reasons, since: it can cause excessive sweating and vomiting it is a major component in acid rain it can cause severe burns in its gaseous state accidental inhalation can...

Mass extinctions have served as huge reset buttons that dramatically changed the diversity of species found in oceans all over the world, according to a comprehensive study of fossil records. The findings suggest humans will live in a very different future if they drive animals to extinction, because the loss of each species can alter entire ecosystems. Some scientists have speculated that effects of humans - from hunting to climate change - are fueling another great mass extinction. A few go so far as to say we are entering a new geologic epoch, leaving the 10,000-year-old Holocene Epoch behind and...

[James Lee Demands as posted at http://www.savetheplanetprotest.com/] The Discovery Channel MUST broadcast to the world their commitment to save the planet and to do the following IMMEDIATELY:1. The Discovery Channel and it's affiliate channels MUST have daily television programs at prime time slots based on Daniel Quinn's "My Ishmael" pages 207-212 where solutions to save the planet would be done in the same way as the Industrial Revolution was done, by people building on each other's inventive ideas. Focus must be given on how people can live WITHOUT giving birth to more filthy human children since those new additions continue...

Environmental activists are pressing the Obama administration to ban the manufacture, processing and distribution lead shot, bullets, and fishing sinkers under the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976, but hunting and Second Amendment groups say the EPA lacks the authority to do so, for starters. A petition submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency on Aug. 3 says ammunition and tackle manufacturers are now marketing a wide variety of non-lead, nontoxic bullets, shotgun pellets and fishing tackle, which can and should be used instead of lead projectiles and weights. “There is no technological or commercial reason why nontoxic ammunition and fishing...

One hurricane, two tropical storms and five tropical depressions. That describes the 2010 Atlantic hurricane season so far. But, don't let your guard down. All signs point to a rapid increase in hurricane activity in the next two to three weeks. Above normal temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean would tend to favor hurricane growth and strength. This, plus the fact that water temperatures in the Equatorial Pacific Ocean are cooling. It's called La Nina and it means less wind shear in the Atlantic Ocean. Less wind shear gives Atlantic Hurricanes a favorable environment for rapid growth....

Plant growth that had been spurred by global warming has reversed, despite temperatures that continue to rise. Researchers say the change could affect food security and development of biofuels. The amount of carbon taken up by growing plants increased from 1982 through 1999 as temperatures rose and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased. But a new study in Friday's edition of the journal Science found a drought-related decline in such plant growth from 2000 to 2009, even though temperatures continued to climb. As drought caused by warming reduces the land's ability to take up carbon, the result...

There's no way the AGW hoax could have gone on for so long unless its shills, etc. had use of some potent mind games. I'm starting this as a kind of voter-protection thread, to help figure out how they pulled the wool over so many eyes and how to spot the next attempt much earlier. Let me start with this one: "deniers." It means skeptics, or doubters. The users of it managed to outrage normally gentle skeptics - in the sense of outraged innocence - which confused people who use emotionality to tell who the dogmatist is. From that ploy,...

One may think that someone as well connected as long-time Washington correspondent and MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell might also connect the dots. After an unseasonably rough DC winter occurring right in the midst of the ClimateGate scandal, she would be aware of doubt being cast over the idea of manmade global warming. But if you want evidence her mind is made up regardless of any of this, you could detect from her reaction to a report from Politco's Jim VandeHei that some Republican candidates are using the climate change debate to advance their campaigns. (Snip) ''"It just seems that I

Just when you think it’s too dead to kill: along comes a new paper in a top ranking statistics journal by McShane and Wyner. It’s worth taking stock. It’s a damning paper: …we conclude unequivocally that the evidence for a ”long-handled” hockey stick (where the shaft of the hockey stick extends to the year 1000 AD) is lacking in the data.…But in the big scheme of things the Hockey Stick Graph was already dead. Each one of these points is enough to cast grave doubts on the Hockey Stick. The Hockey Stick uses the wrong type of proxy – tree...

There is an open secret in the oil industry that dare not speak its name: peak oil. Well, two did speak its name and gained no acclaim for it. One, M. King Hubbert, died years ago. The other and the most controversial, Matthew Simmons, died at his Maine summer home Aug. 8. The peak oil idea is simple: Oil is a finite commodity, and one day we are going to use up all of it. Hubbert, a geologist, began speculating on the effects of the gradual decline in worldwide production in the 1950s. He expressed this in a simple graph,...

Nation's battered satellite environmental monitoring program Top Climate Scientists Speak out on the Satellitegate Scandal By John O'Sullivan Monday, August 16, 2010 US Government admits global warming satellite sensors “degraded” - temperatures may be out by 10-15 degrees. Now five satellites in controversy. Top scientists speak out. In an escalating row dubbed ‘Satellitegate’ further evidence proves NOAA knew of these faults for years. World’s top climate scientists and even prior governmental reports cite underfunding and misallocation as the trigger for spiraling satellite data calamities. Key flaws with five satellites undermines global data. Most disturbing of all is that it took...

Hungarian atmospheric physicist Dr. Ferenc Miskolczi, says he has found and proven that the IPCC and their experts are wrong in their theory about how the greenhouse effect works. (snip) Working with a number of sets of temperature and humidity data from all over the world, Miskolczi has found that the greenhouse effect is a balance of energy dependent primarily on the sun. This is something reasonable people have recognized for some time but haven’t been able to prove without the same sort of heavy science and math the IPCC experts have been using. Those who disagree with the IPCC’s...

For centuries, an astronomy observatory in Greenwich, London -- the namesake of Greenwich Mean Time -- has been the reference point for lines of longitude, ships' navigation on the world's seas and the time zones used today. But Saudi Arabia wants to change that. It's building what it calls the largest clock in the world, atop the second-largest skyscraper in the world, in the Islamic holy city of Mecca -- in hopes of replacing GMT with "Mecca Time." The clock dwarfs London's Big Ben, with four huge faces each about 130 feet in diameter and inscribed with the Arabic words...