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It’s all a grand charade — the matinee show put on by the Theater of Science was merely being used for the Grand Extravaganza called the Theater of Politics.Wikileaks, not surprisingly, turned up some not-so-diplomatic and not-so-scientific goings-on in the political race to steer power and dollars.From The Guardian The US diplomatic cables reveal how the US seeks dirt on nations opposed to its approach to tackling global warming; how financial and other aid is used by countries to gain political backing; how distrust, broken promises and creative accounting dog negotiations; and how the US mounted a secret global diplomatic...

The following report is from Benny Peiser’s blog The Global Warming Policy Foundation:It is a year since the so-called Climategate e-mails were leaked. Since then, we have had freezing winters in Europe and the US, and revelations of gross misrepresentations from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The lasting impression is of massive corruption of science.Leaked from the Climate Research Unit in England, the e-mails showed the scientists behind the climate scare plotting to: hide, delete and manipulate data; to denigrate scientists presenting different views; to force journals to publish only papers promoting climate alarm; to subvert “peer review”...

Written by Karl Burkart There’s no doubt United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change delegates are feeling a great deal of pressure to make some tangible progress here at the COP16 climate conference in Cancun. But that pressure may be ratcheted up a notch after the Dec. 3 release of the Climate Vulnerability Monitor, the first definitive study of the impacts of climate change on human health. The report was prepared by DARA, a leading humanitarian research organization in conjunction with the CVF (Climate Vulnerable Forum) an alliance of 11 nations* that are experiencing the most direct impacts of climate...

Blam! Kapow! Smack! The bell has rung for the latest round of climate talks, but the battle continues among climate scientists too, making only one thing truly clear -- the science of global warming simply isn't settled. Climate science suffered a black eye over the past 12 months, following revelations that the latest report from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) contained numerous errors and relied too heavily on questionable sources. At the latest climate conference in Cancun, the group will stress that its research must continue.  But while governments try to push through an accord, the fighting...

Boehner spokesman: "The Select Committee on Global Warming is unnecessary and taxpayers will not have to fund it in the 112th Congress" thecaucus Members of the House of Representatives will not be pondering global warming on Speaker John A. Boehner’s watch. Republicans plan to eliminate the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, which was created by the current speaker, Nancy Pelosi, in 2007 to examine climate change and press for possible caps on carbon dioxide emissions. Climate change matters are overseen by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, as well as the Natural Resources Committee; the select...

PARIS (AFP) – Men whose index fingers are longer than their ring, or fourth, fingers run a significantly lower risk of prostate cancer, according to a study published Wednesday in the British Journal of Cancer. The chances of developing the disease drop by a third, and even more in younger men, the study found. "Our results show that relative finger length could be used as a simple test for prostate cancer risk, particularly in men aged under 60," said Ros Eeles, a professor at the Institute of Cancer Research in Britain and co-author of the study. Finger pattern could help...

In Greece earlier this month, Al Gore made a startling admission: "First-generation ethanol, I think, was a mistake." Unfortunately, Americans have Gore to thank for ethanol subsidies. In 1994, then-Vice President Al Gore ended a 50-50 tie in the Senate by voting in favor of an ethanol tax credit that added almost $5 billion to the federal deficit last year. And that number doesn't factor the many ways in which corn-based ethanol mandates drive up the price of food and livestock feed. Sure, he meant well, but as Reuters reported, Gore also said, "One of the reasons I made that...

Narcissistic personality disorder, characterized by an inflated sense of self-importance and the need for constant attention, has been eliminated from the upcoming manual of mental disorders, which psychiatrists use to diagnose mental illness. As Charles Zanor reports in today’s Science Times, the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — due out in 2013 and known as D.S.M.-5 — has eliminated five of the 10 personality disorders that are listed in the current edition. The best known of these is narcissistic personality disorder. It is a puzzle why the manual’s committee on personality disorders has decided...

Evidence from Disneyland suggests that human creativity may have evolved not in response to sexual selection as some scientists believe but as a way to help parents bond with their children and to pass on traditions and cultural knowledge, a new study published in the inaugural issue of the International Journal of Tourism Anthropology suggests.

Watching the raft of newly elected GOP lawmakers converge on Washington, I couldn't help thinking about an issue I hope our party will better address. I call on my fellow Republicans to open their minds to rethinking what has largely become our party's line: denying that climate change and global warming are occurring and that they are largely due to human activities. National Journal reported last month that 19 of the 20 serious GOP Senate challengers declared that the science of climate change is either inconclusive or flat-out wrong.

CHERSKY, Russia – The Russian scientist shuffles across the frozen lake, scuffing aside ankle-deep snow until he finds a cluster of bubbles trapped under the ice. With a cigarette lighter in one hand and a knife in the other, he lances the ice like a blister. Methane whooshes out and bursts into a thin blue flame. Gas locked inside Siberia's frozen soil and under its lakes has been seeping out since the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago. But in the past few decades, as the Earth has warmed, the icy ground has begun thawing more rapidly,...

Just because the motives of many climate change advocates are questionable, even evil, does that mean the entire global warming proposition is a fraud? It is an article of faith among many conservatives that climate change is sham science. Even worse, it is the nexus of a vast conspiracy involving governments, the UN, and climate scientists that is seeking to destroy the industrial economies of the West, create a one world government, and enrich people like Al Gore who have bet a bundle on a reduced carbon emissions future. They believe that either the earth is not warming at all,...

One year ago today, after returning from a conference in Brussels, I sat down in Dulles airport, connected to WiFi, researched and wrote this article, called two people, CEI’s Chris Horner to check legality issues, and Marc Morano (who was traveling in car on the PCH in California) to give him a heads up, and pressed the “publish” button just seconds before they closed the door to my flight back to Sacramento. When I landed five hours later, I immediately got back on WiFi and found the the story had exploded, and we lived in a different world. I...

The Global Warming hearing today on C-SPAN included Dr. Richard Lindzen, Dr Judth  Curry, Dr. Pat Michaels, Dr. Ben Santer, and Dr. Heidi Cullen, among others. Many didn’t get a chance to watch (to see if Ben Santer “beat the crap out of Pat Michaels“) but we have the video here. C-SPAN: House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment heard from a dozen witnesses about how the public and private sectors are approaching climate change. Washington, DC : 3 hr. 47 min.It is now online and can be watched in full at this link:http://www.c-span.org/Watch/Media/2010/11/17/HP/A/40918/House+Science+Technology+Subcommittee+Hearing+on+Climate+Change+Science.aspxh/t to WUWT reader Rational Debate

Dr. Bradley Schaeffer is a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. This video of his "astronomy class", which is actually an indoctrination session on global warming, was posted to YouTube Monday.

http://www.grist.org/article/2010-09-20-why-is-the-fda-about-to-rubber-stamp-ge-salmon Gregory Jaffe: Last and perhaps most concerning, the committee’s supposed consumer advocate is a lawyer (not a scientist) representing the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an organization that favors the use of agricultural biotechnology. Like Van Eeenennaam, he has served on AC21, from 2004 to 2008. His views can be seen in a paper he wrote called “Creating the Proper Environment for Acceptance of Agricultural Biotechnology.” In it he states CSPI’s unequivocal support for agricultural biology and his belief that genetically engineered crops have increased productivity and farmer income while reducing pesticide use, and that GE crops...

Researchers working on the longest-running study of American lesbian families asked children of lesbian mothers if they had ever been physically or sexually abused by a parent and the answer was never in all cases. . . . Researchers interviewed only 78 children, and participants volunteered to be in the study. . . . The U.S. National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study (NLLFS) is in its 24th year at the the Williams Institute, a research center on sexual orientation law and public policy at UCLA School of Law.

(PhysOrg.com) -- A software developer has created a "chatbot" program for Twitter to automatically detect set phrases associated with arguments put forward by those skeptical of anthropogenic global warming, and to send automated replies of set phrases debunking their arguments. Nigel Leck’s creation is @AI_AGW (also known as Turing Test), and the script searches the Twitter site for hundreds of phrases he believes tend to be used by those who think global warming is not occurring, or who think it is occurring but is not anthropogenic or entirely anthropogenic. When the script finds one of the phrases it then "tweets"...

The 2008 Climate Change Act commits Britain to cutting its CO2 emissions by 80 percent by 2050 at a cost of £18.3 billion every year for the next four decades (according to the Department for Energy and Climate Change website). This is being funded by top slicing the cash from your energy bills. The figure does not include other costs, such as the losses incurred due to the economic damage and opportunity costs of these measures. And obviously the law only seeks only to address CO2 emissions from the UK.

Al Gore: Tea Party making climate science a ‘political football’ By Ben Geman - 10/27/10 03:31 PM ET Al Gore is on the political offensive against global warming skepticism in the Tea Party movement. “Unfortunately the Tea Party movement seems to want to make belief in science a political football,” the former vice president wrote on his website Tuesday afternoon (and tweeted about today). Gore, a longtime advocate of capping greenhouse gases, points to a New York Times story this month that said, “Skepticism and outright denial of global warming are among the articles of faith of the Tea Party...