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From the safety of the political sidelines, former Vice President Al Gore is venturing into a touchy topic, presenting his holistic view of how to curb the buildup of greenhouse gases warming the planet. Besides improving technology to reduce fossil fuel emissions, he is advocating "educating and empowering girls and women." "That's the most powerful leveraging factor," Gore said in a speech Monday in New York. "When that happens, then the population begins to stabilize and societies begin to make better choices." Although not entirely spelled out in the speech, Gore's thinking goes this way: If women are confident their...

Gun ownership, carrying a gun linked to heavy alcohol use Large, multi-state study shows certain gun owners more likely to drink excessively June 14, 2011 (SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — Gun owners who carry concealed weapons or have confronted another person with a gun are more than twice as likely to drink heavily as people who do not own guns, according to a study by UC Davis researchers. Binge drinking, chronic heavy alcohol use, and drinking and driving were all more common among gun owners generally than among non-owners, even after adjusting for factors such as age, sex, race, and state of...

Texas and 14 other states clearly want to deep-six the endangerment finding. "Overturning the endangerment finding would mean finding that EPA did not have a solid basis" for its decision, said Gerrard, director of the university's Center for Climate Change Law, in an interview. "EPA has heaped up enormous volumes of evidence on one side. The evidence on the other side is exceedingly thin. "EPA is the agency that has the scientists with the expertise," he continued. Before issuing the endangerment finding they "looked at it, relooked at it and re-relooked at it. They seriously examined critiques and still ended...

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) papers, leaked ahead of a key meeting in Peru next week, outline the series of techniques in which scientists hope will manipulate the world’s climate to reduce carbon emissions. Among the ideas proposed by a group of 60 leading scientists from around the world, including Britain, include producing “lighter coloured” crops to reflect sunlight, blasting aerosol “mirrors” into the stratosphere and suppressing cirus clouds.

BOSTON (Reuters) – A mountain lion was killed just 70 miles from New York City early on Saturday morning, and officials were trying to determine if it was the same big cat spotted a week ago roaming the posh suburb of Greenwich, Connecticut. The 140-pound mountain lion was hit by a small SUV on a highway in Milford, Connecticut, early Saturday morning, and died from its injuries. The driver was unhurt, officials said. With no native mountain lion population in the state, "it's possible and even likely" it is the same enormous cat with a long tail spotted last weekend...

Global greenhouse gas emissions have risen even faster during the past decade than predicted by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other international agencies. According to alarmist groups, this proves global warming is much worse than previously feared. The increase in emissions “should shock even the most jaded negotiators” at international climate talks currently taking place in Bonn, Germany, the UK Guardian reports. But there’s only one problem with this storyline; global temperatures have not increased at all during the past decade. The evidence is powerful, straightforward, and damning. NASA satellite instruments precisely measuring global temperatures...

From the Tropics north, warmer summers - and their almost certainly disastrous consequences - within the next few decades are close to being an irreversible consequence of global warming says a new study from Stanford University in the United States of America. The research is published in the new edition of the journal Climate Change and says warmer summers are on the way unless greenhouse gas concentrations stop increasing. The change will be felt first closest to the Equator, where, say the scientists there will be a "permanent emergence of unprecedented summer heat" within 20 years. The warming trend will...

Mauna Kea, the highest island mountain in the world, is cloaked with snow--a sight you don't normally see during the early summer months. Video at the link

Video explaining that it is 'winter type' weather responsible for a dramatic increase in the number of lightning storms. It has been unusually cool for months. This is the current radar/satellite image. Kailua is drowning!

I was disappointed upon seeing a Global Warming “science” pitch recently published in Politico. Cold shoulder for climate change was written by sports writer turned outdoors, travel and entertainment reporter turned environmental journalist Darren Samuelsohn. I won't pick apart details of the entire article. It's based on the old propaganda template: warmers are scientists, skeptics are right-wing ideologues. No mention of the much larger number of professional scientists and engineers who have gone from skeptical to calling the whole thing a fraud. In Samuelsohn's world, warmers and their climate theories have been “exonerated” and the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on...

(Reuters) - The U.N. committee of climate scientists will fix any future errors "within a week or so", its head said on Wednesday, after coming under fire last year for bungling a forecast of when Himalayan glaciers would thaw. "I think we now have a firm procedure by which we are going to deal with errors, or alleged errors," Rajendra Pachauri told Reuters during a visit to Oslo, referring to a set of reforms agreed at a meeting in Abu Dhabi on May 17.

FRIDAY, May 20 (HealthDay News) -- For the average listener, the vowel sounds in an unfamiliar voice quickly give away the speaker's sexual orientation, a new study finds."I'm not sure what exactly the listeners are responding to in the vowel," study lead author Erik C. Tracy, a cognitive psychologist at Ohio State University, said in a news release from the American Institute of Physics. "Other researchers have done various acoustic analyses to understand why gay and heterosexual men produce vowels differently. Whatever this difference is, it seems that listeners are using it to make this sexual orientation decision." When hearing...

In his commencement speech at Hamilton College on Sunday, former Vice President Al Gore told the graduates that global warming is “the most serious challenge our civilization has ever faced.” But as an undergraduate at Harvard University in the late 1960s, Gore--one of the most prominent spokesmen on climate change today--earned a “D” in Natural Sciences. Gore’s transcript documents that during his sophomore year at Harvard he earned a "D" in Natural Sciences 6 (Man’s Place in Nature). Also, as a senior at Harvard, he earned a C-plus in Natural Sciences 118. Gore, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate...

Former Utah Republican Gov. Jon Huntsman made national news this week when he told Time Magazine that he was inclined to believe that public policy decisions over what to do about global warming should be left to the 90 percent of climate change scientists that he believes are concerned about serious damage resulting from global warming. Huntsman is often mentioned as a possible GOP Presidential candidate in 2012. From the Q&A: TIME: You also believe in climate change, right? HUNTSMAN: This is an issue that ought to be answered by the scientific community; I’m not a meteorologist. All I know...

(CNSNews.com) – Next year on Earth Day, the Obama administration plans to announce which U.S. schools have been selected as “Green Ribbon Schools,” a designation that will “honor” schools for “creating healthy and sustainable learning environments” and for “teaching environmental literacy.” The Green Ribbon Schools program was announced in late April, but details on how schools will be picked or what the honor entails have not been released. Jo Ann Webb, spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Education, told CNSNews.com that the program is still under development. “The criteria have not been developed yet,” Webb said. “The plan is for...

Boulder, CO (PRWEB) May 11, 2011 The discovery that poor siting of many weather stations used to monitor national temperature trends has led to inaccuracies in the recorded information, says a new study coauthored by climatologist Roger Pielke Sr., of the Cooperative Institute of Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) with colleagues from Purdue, Texas A&M, Tuskegee Institute and IntelliWeather. As summarized by Pielke: "The interpretation of multi-decadal surface temperature trends over the United States has been found to be more complex than has been previously assumed as a result of the use of poorly sited climate reference stations in the...

Prominent Japanese Geologist Dr. Shigenori Maruyama, a professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences who has authored more than 125 scientific publications, said in March 2009 that “there was widespread skepticism among his colleagues about the IPCC's fourth and latest assessment report that most of the observed global temperature increase since the mid-20th century ‘is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.” Maruyama noted that when this question was raised at a Japan Geoscience Union symposium last year, ‘the result showed 90 per cent of the participants do not...

Oh boy, government idiocy at its finest. Not only is the original claim bogus, the attempts to disappear it are hilariously inept. Apparently, they’ve never heard of Google Cache at the UN. Rather than simply saying “we were wrong,” they’ve now brought even more distrust onto the UN.

...Antarctic clams, snails and brittle stars, because of adaptation to their environment, have soft shells and have never had to fight shell-crushing predators. “You can take an Antarctic clam and crush it with your hands,” McClintock said. They could be the main prey for these crabs, he said. Loss of unique mollusks could jeopardize organisms with disease-fighting compounds, McClintock said. Sea squirts, for example, produce an agent that fights skin cancer. If the crabs eat them, it could bring McClintock’s research with that organism to a halt...

n 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme predicted that climate change would create 50 million climate refugees by 2010. These people, it was said, would flee a range of disasters including sea level rise, increases in the numbers and severity of hurricanes, and disruption to food production. The UNEP even provided a handy map. The map shows us the places most at risk including the very sensitive low lying islands of the Pacific and Caribbean. It so happens that just a few of these islands and other places most at risk have since had censuses, so it should be possible...