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Agencies: Scrap biofuel support to curb food costs | Green Tech - CNET NewsGovernments should scrap policies to support biofuels because they are forcing up global food prices, according to a report by 10 international agencies including the World Bank and World Trade Organization.
Debate on Consensus in Science[Rush Limbaugh] The global warming crowd is trying to say that manmade global warming is true because of consensus of human beings (disguised as scientists) say it's happening! What I'm telling you is those people have no more right to proclaim something to be scientifically true simply because they agree with each other or are scientists. Something is true in science or not independent of what anybody thinks about it. I don't know what's so hard to understand about this. There's nothing "democratic" about science. A majority in anything has zilch to do with it. The sun... Let me put it this way: The Earth does not revolve around the sun because of the consensus of people says so.
Mitt Romney Wins Over Media by Opposing Rush on Climate ChangeRUSH: You know, folks, belief in manmade global warming is a lot like believing in Santa Claus. It's fun. It's fun to believe in it for a while when you're a kid, when you're a child, but it's a costly myth to continue believing in as you grow older -- and it's certainly not the kind of thing any serious political candidate ought to believe in. I continue to be struck by just how imprisoned the so-called informed and educated and smart people among us are. All the people in this sound bite montage that we just played? Some leftist somewhere one day said, "There's global warming," and there is. Don't even question it. It just is. Don't even challenge it as a journalist. You don't even have any curiosity about it. Somebody comes along and asks, "Is it true," and they're an automatic crackpot oddball.
Harsh winter strands antelope at Montana reservoir | Reuters(Reuters) - A harsh winter has stranded more than 2,500 pronghorn antelope at Montana's Fort Peck Reservoir and nearly all are expected to die this summer, wildlife managers said.
Big game animals in many parts of the West are recovering from an unusually cold winter that killed many and left several hundred frozen antelope carcasses in open fields.
Pronghorn antelope have been hit hard in eastern and northeastern Montana, where wildlife managers have said this season's die-off looks to be the worst in 30-plus years.
Labor out if carbon tax hits fuel: surveyNearly two-thirds of voters will not support a political party that proposes a carbon tax that will result in higher fuel prices, a motoring organisation survey has found.
Instapundit » Blog Archive » BLOG COMMENT OF THE DAYBLOG COMMENT OF THE DAY: “The Washington Post thinks it’s ‘harassment’ to request Michael Mann’s files from the University of Virginia (their Memorial Day editorial) but it’s cool with requesting and obtaining and asking for citizen-journalists to go through 24,000 of the State of Alaska’s emails involving Sarah Palin.”
IPCC’s new, improved “world leading authority on climate change” speaks « The View From HereWell, apart from Stocker’s stepping out of line (not to mention well beyond his area of experise), I’m sure that tripling or quadrupling gas prices would go a very long way towards eliminating poverty, disease and all the other scourges afflicting people on our planet.
How Much Harm to Humans is OK? « NoFrakkingConsensusSo what I want to know is this: how much harm is Stocker prepared to inflict on Canadians in pursuit of his larger goal – that of saving the planet?
Where does he draw the line? How many casualties are, in his view, acceptable? Really, I want to know.
The science behind tricking the public | thetelegraph.com.auThe future of the planet is not in doubt, but the opportunities for your children and grandchildren are being threatened by the unbridled zealotry of these anti-science barbarians.
COLUMN: Hard evidence needed on climate change"Climate is a pattern. One event is weather," Sauchyn said. "But if you get a bunch of these (weather incidents) from across the Prairies and it happens again and again, we say, 'Something is going on.' And it's probably climate change."
Sounds a bit like witchcraft reasoning to me.
Look: If there's a clear pattern of global warming - sorry, "climate change" - that can be proven without skullduggery or obfuscation, most of us will be willing to do what it takes to rectify things. But increasingly, it seems, "experts" are claiming wacky weather simply to advance an agenda.
Boost in pension to offset [climate swindle] costsTHE federal government will permanently boost pensions for 3.4 million Australians to compensate them for the carbon tax - potentially leaving the opposition with a political minefield.
Articles: Are the Mainstream Media Enameling Sarah Palin With Teflon®?The fact that the Times and Post both begged their readers for help in going through to documents says much about the essentially tribal nature of their audiences. The goal of both publications now is obviously the advancement of a political agenda, not the publication of significant news.
The contrast with the studied disinterest in the many lacunae in the documentation of Barack Obama's political career could not be more blatant. Stanley Kurtz, scholar and journalist, spent much time studying archives in Illinois to paint a picture of Obama's early career, but the former state senator made sure to destroy his own files from his service in Springfield (unlike other contemporary Illinois state senators, whose archives Kurtz was able to examine). Not only did mainstream media outlets decline to make an issue of Obama destroying his paper trail, they did not report what Kurtz was able to find.
How Celebrities Are Ruining Our Lives: A Conversation With Lisa Bloom | JohnJohnSaidIt.com ...there are actually very significant consequences. When we fill our brains with fluff, no one cares about what’s going on around them.
One is climate change. the scientific evidence grows stronger and stronger every year, and yet the statistics show that Americans become more ignorant and apathetic about climate change with each passing year. Climate change is shaping up to be the worst environmental disaster ever. most countries are taking significant steps while Americans do nothing. There couldn’t be a more dire consequence than that.
Lisa Bloom - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaBloom received a bachelor's degree from UCLA and a Juris Doctor (J.D.) from Yale Law School. She unsuccessfully sued the Boy Scouts of America for sex discrimination on behalf of Katrina Yeaw, a girl who wanted to join the organization
JPL News Release - NASA Research Offers Explanation for Earth's Bulging WaistlineA team of researchers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., and the Royal Observatory of Belgium has apparently solved a recently observed mystery regarding changes to the physical shape of Earth and its gravity field. The answer, they found, appears to lie in the melting of sub-polar glaciers and mass shifts in the Southern, Pacific and Indian Oceans associated with global-scale climate changes.
The team of researchers sought to find a climatic reason for the dramatic changes in Earth's gravity field observed since 1997.
When top scientists take 2 years to publish, it’s time to give up on old “Peer” review « JoNova: Science, carbon, climate and taxIt’s time for scientists to step outside the system and stop paying homage to the dogma of the old rules. It slows down research because the all-too-human gatekeepers can keep a topic away from public view for month after month, while people pay money for schemes that are not necessary and government reviewers can ignore results that are inconvenient.
In this day of electronic publication where space is no limit, and results can be discussed widely, transparently and easily, why bow to a system that has strict limits on words?
As long as we pay respect to anachronistic rituals, and establishment procedures, the prevailing system can be a stranglehold on the ideas that the community can discuss. Formal peer review has proven to be as corruptible as any human process, as the Climategate emails show. There is a point where we must ask, why bother?
Fracking actors « The Daily BayonetYou can thank Ethan Hawke, Mark Ruffalo et al for your skyrocketing energy bills. That will come as a surprise to them, because I guarantee not a single celebrity in the first clip has a clue what the frak they’re talking about, and what the implications of their feelgood activism will be for ordinary people.
What’s to Be Done With 15 Feet of Snow in June? Utah Knows - NYTimes.comAt this northern Utah resort, it is still winter. There is hardly a bare spot on the mountain. Piles of snow line the vast parking lot. With much of the country in the grip of record-high temperatures, it was 31 degrees here Friday morning. Snowbird has announced that it will be open for snow sports three days a week until July 4. And it could stay open even later.
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“We even got 20 inches of powder over Memorial Day weekend, and our current average base is more than 15 feet,” Bonar said. “The holiday may not even be the end. We may stay open a few weekends longer if the snow stays good.”
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“I have skied for 72 years, and I’ve never skied snow like this in June,” said Eric Jucker, 75, a Swiss citizen who travels back and forth from Laguna Beach, Calif., to Salt Lake City.
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“The snowpack we have right now is 525 percent of normal,” said Brian McInerney, the hydrologist for the National Weather Service in Utah.
Hot time for graduation At Stanford, Noah S. Diffenbaugh and Martin Scherer analyzed global climate computer models and concluded that by midcentury, large areas of the world could face unprecedented heat. They said the coolest summers will be hotter than the hottest ones of the 1900s.
Global warming in recent years has been blamed on increasing concentrations of gases such as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The permanent shift to extreme heat would occur first in the tropics and reach North America, South America and Eurasia by 2060, the scientists report in a paper that will be published in the journal Climatic Change Letters.
Noah Diffenbaugh | School of Earth SciencesI serve on the Executive Committee of the Atmospheric Sciences Section of the American Geophysical Union, as an Editor of Geophysical Research Letters, and as a Lead Author for Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Stanford climate scientists forecast permanently hotter summers beginning in 20 yearsDiffenbaugh was surprised to see how quickly the new, potentially destructive heat regimes are likely to emerge
Scientists race to avoid a bitter climate change harvest - Sci-TechIt is going to get much worse for the hungry because global food prices will more than double within 20 years, aid agency Oxfam International said in a June 1 report. Flat-lining yields, a scramble for fertile land and water, and environmental crises are reversing decades of progress against hunger, it said.
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"What we expect in the future is there will be much more unexpected events, much more extreme climate change," said Concepcion Calpe, a senior economist with the FAO in Rome.
NYT's Timothy Egan Admires GOP's Moderate Jon Huntsman, Unlike 'Wackos' in 'Sea of Craziness' | NewsBusters.orgTimothy Egan, liberal reporter turned leftist online columnist for the New York Times, gave a potential kiss-of-death endorsement Thursday evening to a Republican presidential candidate -- moderate former Utah governor (and Obama ambassador to China) Jon Huntsman, in "The G.O.P.'s Jon Huntsman, the Reluctant Mormon." You see, unlike the "fact-denial chorus" who throw "red meat to the wackos" in a "sea of craziness" (now those are some seriously mixed metaphors) Huntsman is a thoughtful skeptic (i.e., he believes in manmade global warming and gay civil unions).
Kakagon Sloughs Climate Change [Hoax] Project Receives Funding | Ashland CurrentA climate change monitoring program in the Kakagon-Bad River Sloughs will be supported by a grant of $199,985 from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
The grant will help pay for the development of a Comprehensive Climate Change Monitoring Plan dedicated to the Kakagon-Bad River Sloughs area, considered a vital cultural and ecological resource by the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians.
Murdoch-Gore war unplugs Current - Entertainment News, TV News, Media - VarietyThe two are basically calling each other liars. Gore says Current's ratings surged 550% year on year in primetime. Sky Italia says the ratings were down 40%. Each side claims the other's numbers are distorted or fabricated.
Mockridge points out that the original three-year contract carried a two-year extension if the channel hit a 4,500-viewer average in a 24-hour period. "If it had achieved that number, it would have automatically renewed and, again, we wouldn't have been sitting here having this conversation."
Profits prove a tough crop to grow for B.C.'s conventional farmersB.C. farmers also pay the carbon tax, which has pushed their energy costs up by $30 million, a cost other provinces don't face. The carbon tax will take another $10-million bite out of farm revenues when it goes up July 1.
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they didn't expect to lose their entire potato crop to rain last fall and then face a wet, cold spring. Planting was delayed by a month.
Academics fear climate change hate mail might deter future researchersA marine scientist at the University of Queensland, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, said it was not unusual to get 10 to 20 libellous emails a day as part of a campaign that is widely targeted.
''It is clearly to unsettle people,'' he said.
Living In The Century Of Disasters : NPRFLATOW: On the other hand, we're seeing hurricanes of unprecedented strength. We're seeing floods of - you know, that are huge and that they haven't seen in the history of the Mississippi. We're seeing tornadoes that are a mile wide. I mean, it's hard to say that, you know, that we have not entered an era of bigger, greater, giant disasters.
ACHENBACH: Well, climate change is arguably a huge disaster in and of itself.
Historic Hurricanes--Some Of The Most Powerful Storms On Record.To give you an idea of the strength and devastation associated with these storms, below is a listing of some of the most memorable hurricanes since pre-colonial times.
Brendan Smith: Are Progressives in Denial About Climate Change?But climate change is not just another "issue." The earth is in the midst of a radical shift that will affect our country and society more severely than other great upheavals such as the Civil War, the Great Depression, or World War II. It represents an existential threat to every human and every community on the planet. It threatens every job, every economy in the world. It threatens the health of our children. It threatens our food and water supply.
Brendan SmithBrendan Smith is an oysterman and co-founder of the Labor Network for Sustainability.
YouTube - "Climate Change Movies Trailer" UMass Lowell Student Film for Climate Change ClassThis video was produced by students as part of the UMass Lowell course, "Climate Change: Science, Communication, and Solutions."
After spending most of the semester learning about climate change science, technological solutions, and policy, students participated in a three-day, NASA-sponsored workshop to create one-minute film shorts about climate change. They hope to bring needed attention to climate change in a creative and attention-grabbing way.
The Reference Frame: Editors, reviewers, and biasClimatology has entered a vicious cycle because the percentage of dishonest and fanatical members of the climatological community has exceeded a certain critical mass. Above this critical mass, the mechanisms guarantee that what the research is converging to is not the truth as reflected by the empirical evidence but rather the perfect partisanship and universal parroting of the Gore-style lies about a coming judgement day.
- Bishop Hill blog - Greens trash national parksTony at Harmless Sky is highlighting a new planning document introduced by the Welsh Assembly, which will allow windfarms to be built in national parks. There is a petition afoot to try to stop it.
Nigel Lawson says the Coalition's absurd energy policy is damaging industry and adding hundreds of pounds to every family's fuel bills | Mail OnlineThe Coalition’s obsession with climate change is damaging Britain’s recovery from recession, former Tory chancellor Nigel Lawson warns today.
Writing in the Daily Mail, Lord Lawson delivers a scathing assessment of David Cameron’s so-called ‘green agenda’ and says it is ‘time this Government grew up’.
Articles: Is Perry the One?The recent comments by Mitt Romney accepting manmade global warming as scientific fact must cause conservatives to cross him off their list of presidential candidates.
EU Referendum: The wheels groan on my wagon"Why vote blue, go green doesn't sound quite so clever any more", is the headline under which the Great Charles Moore writes in the Failygraph today, telling us, "It is time for Britain to walk away from its ridiculously stringent renewable energy plan". I do love the smell of a bandwagon in the morning ... and it is so good to see the great and the good catching up, at last.
But the truth is, it never did sound clever to "vote blue, go green", and it was five years ago that we should have been talking about walking away from the ridiculously stringent renewable energy plan, instead of sucking up to the "green tosser", as so many, so aptly, call the Boy Cameron.
Weasel Zippers » Blog Archive » Rush Limbaugh Slams Media’s Slobbering Over the Palin Emails, but Complete Disinterest in Digging into ObamaThe New York Times and the Washington Post both are begging readers to help them sift through 24,000 e mails of Sarah Palin’s from her time as governor of Alaska. Now, they’re not going to let these people into their newsrooms. They’ll have to do this from home in their pajamas. But they’re soliciting help from their readers to pore through these Palin e mails.
I don’t recall this happening when we had that e mail release from the Hadley Climate Center at the University of East Anglia that demoed the hoax — that illustrated, that foretold the hoax — that is manmade global warming there was an effort to bury those e mails. But now, the New York Times and Washington Post want their readers to help them sift through these 24,000 e mails. This is an obsession. It is an obsession — and I’ll tell you, this is all going to end up backfiring on these people.
Small Boat, Big Mission: An Arctic Whale Survey - NYTimes.comThe crew hopes to end up in Lancaster Sound, the eastern portal of the Northwest Passage, just as thousands of whales and seals and millions of seabirds are arriving from their winter homes.
Wait a minute: If bitter cold and thick ice are so wonderful, shouldn't these animals and birds spend their winters in the Arctic?
Bluescope Steel Chairman speaks out against the Carbon TaxIt is encouraging to see leading people from Australian industry speaking out – but we can only hope that the millions of workers that will be adversely affected by the Carbon Tax will not vote for it in 2012.
NASA: [Our current salinity measurements are not good, and we don't understand what's going on, but we think something big is happening, and we think it's bad, and we think it's caused by carbon dioxide]When NASA's Aquarius mission launches, its radiometer instruments will take a "skin" reading of the oceans' salt content at the surface. From these data of salinity in the top 0.4 inch (1 centimeter) of the ocean surface, Aquarius will create weekly and monthly maps of ocean surface salinity all over the globe for at least three years.
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"Salinity has never been measured to the level of detail that SPURS is planning," Chao said.
The questions Chao, Schmitt and others hope to begin to answer with SPURS range from the smallest to the largest scale. For one, what are the physical processes that determine the location and magnitude of the high-salinity region in the Atlantic being studied? What is the salinity balance on monthly and seasonal time scales, plus regional and larger spatial scales?
Larger questions include how the ocean will respond to temperature and freshwater changes likely to come with a warming climate. How will the meridional overturning circulation -- the "global ocean conveyor belt," which has such a dominant effect on the planet's climate -- change?
"We can see in the patterns of salinity change that something big is going on with the water cycle," Schmitt said. "Eighty percent of the water cycle happens over the ocean. We need to document and understand how the ocean is responding."
Gotta Admire The Chutzpah | Watts Up With That?According to both their figures and the SNOTEL figures, there’s no “late twentieth century decline” in snowfall in either the Northern or the Southern Cordillera. That’s hype, and their own data says so. This is particularly true when the more recent data is included (blue line). For unspecified reasons their data ends in 2006. Since then, the snowfalls have generally increased.
Once again, the AGW proponents haven’t even begun to show that anything out of the usual is occurring. Instead they’ve jumped directly to explaining the cause of something that they haven’t yet shown to exist.
In other words, another day, another alarmist exaggeration. Don’t you love how well peer review is working at Science Magazine for climate articles? Oh, well, I suppose the good news is that it results in a target-rich environment, makes my job easy … but the bad news is that we all lose when this kind of alarmism is published as though it were science.
Proof That Venice Is Sinking And Not Sinking Due To Climate Change « The Unbearable Nakedness of CLIMATE CHANGE Venice is not sinking
It is not sinking because storm surges are expected to happen less often
Such expectations are due to climate change.
QED: Venice is not sinking…due to climate change.
Deaths: Organic Food Deaths 29 – Fukushima 0Now that we have so many deaths and hundreds ill, we ask: is the German government moving to shut down all organic farms in Germany, to protect the public, in a move similar to the shut-down of nuclear power plants in the wake of Fukushima? The answer is “no”.
Website photos have been replaced
Indeed news reports this morning say that the organic “plant” where the bacteria originated will be allowed to remain open!…citing “excellent hygiene standards”. I’m not convinced. A few days ago the Gärtnerhof Bienenbüttel organic farm showed workers in the food processing plant handling raw vegetables with their bare hands. The “bare hands” photos have since been taken down and replaced with scenic outdoorsy nature photos, see here. Hiding something? Noooooo.
RWE boss warns of industrial decline from nuclear phaseout - The LocalA quick phaseout of nuclear power could lead to blackouts and threaten Germany's key industrial sector, the head of energy giant RWE said on Friday.
In Her Own Words: My Imaginary Interview with Sarah Palin | ThinkProgressOur guest blogger is long-time commenter Richard Brenne. He teaches a NASA-sponsored on-line Global Climate Change class and serves on the American Meteorological Society’s Committee to Improve Climate Change Communication.
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Brenne: ...if we want to survive as a civilization and species, then more cooling would be a good idea.
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Brenne: The best climate scientists are getting their e-mails illegally hacked and they’ve been exonerated by every pertinent institution in the U.S. and UK. Scientists in Australia and the U.S. have had death threats to themselves and their children. You’ve fanned the flames of this ignorance, fear and hatred as much as anyone.
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Brenne: Scientists have looked at all the natural cycles from 413,000 year Milankovich orbital to 11-year solar cycles and there’s no explanation for the warming we’re seeing except human activities, primarily CO2 from burning fossil fuels. Do you have explanations that are hidden to thousands of the world’s best scientists who have devoted their lives to this?
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Brenne:...Is there anything you do that doesn’t involve making sure peak oil and climate change cripple civilization and kill billions in all future generations?
Palin: No! I love that smell of the emissions!
Brenne: Does ingesting all those emissions give you any digestive tract issues?
Palin: I think my problem is that I do have the fire in my belly.
Brenne: I can tell. (Cough. Cough.) Could we open a window?
Palin: Oh it would be a blast if they were all this loud and if they smelled this good!
A defense of flip-floppery - The Washington PostNever mind that Romney couched his comments with enough disclaimers to leave a T. rex wiggle room, even saying that he didn’t know the degree of human contribution, the crux of the debate. The mere mention of a human role (vs., presumably, a divine plan) was enough to bestir the guardians of scientific inquiry at Conservatives4Palin, who averred that Romney is “simpatico” with Obama and that he “totally bought into the man-made global warming hoax.”
Ah, yes, Romney the tree-hugging, flip-flopping Obamaphile. Isn’t he a Muslim, too?
On the issue of global warming, it is worth mentioning that the conservatives’ anti-global warming golden boy, Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish author, professor and environmental writer, has adjusted his thinking on the matter.
A climate change wave of hateAfter 25 years writing this column, I've had my first experience of an internet hate campaign. So far, more than 2400 people, nearly all American, have emailed me.
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On Saturday and Sunday, the piece never made it to the Herald's list of ''most read'' opinion pieces. I had nine emails - four of them saying they agreed, five against, but all expressed pleasantly. No one thought the piece was offensive or even that remarkable. The comic hyperbole was seen as, well, comic hyperbole.
Then - sometime Sunday night - a link to the piece was put on a right-wing website in the US, offering me up as another communist trying to ruin the world through the ''hoax'' of climate change. The piece started multiplying in cyberspace, mainly on websites dedicated to exposing the leftist conspiracy about climate change.
Suddenly I was the toast of town: about 300,000 people read the piece on smh.com.au between Sunday night and Tuesday morning. I had more readers than anyone else in the Herald. Only problem was: many of them wanted to kill me.
Review & Outlook: A Gulf Drilling Revival - WSJ.comThe great energy irony of recent years is that governments have thrown hundreds of billions of dollars at wind, solar, ethanol and other alternative fuels, yet the major breakthroughs have taken place in the traditional oil and natural gas business. Hydraulic fracturing in shale, horizontal drilling and new seismic techniques are only the best known examples.
Private companies must innovate to survive, and they have the profit incentive to do so, while government cash is usually steered to politically favored companies that may or may not know what they're doing. If you live off federal grants, you need to work the corridors of power more than the technology. Federal grants for cellulosic ethanol are rife with political earmarks, for example. This is why these columns have argued that the political fad of alternative energy has misallocated scarce capital when the economy can least afford it.
Need a Light Bulb? Uncle Sam Gets to Choose: Virginia Postrel - BloombergOne serious technophile, University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds, spent much of 2007 flogging compact fluorescents on his popular Instapundit blog, eventually persuading more than 1,900 readers to swap 19,871 incandescent bulbs for CFLs. To this day, the Instapundit group is by far the largest participant at OneBillionBulbs.com, a bulb-switching campaign organized by the consulting firm Symmetric Technologies. But Reynolds himself has changed his mind.
“I’m deeply, deeply disappointed with CFL bulbs,” he wrote last month on his blog. “I replaced pretty much every regular bulb in the house with CFLs, but they’ve been failing at about the same rate as ordinary long-life bulbs, despite the promises of multiyear service. And I can’t tell any difference in my electric bill. Plus, the Insta-Wife hates the light.”
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The bulb ban makes sense only one of two ways: either as an expression of cultural sanctimony, with a little technophilia thrown in for added glamour, or as a roundabout way to transfer wealth from the general public to the few businesses with the know-how to produce the light bulbs consumers don’t really want to buy.
Or, of course, as both.
Vote Blue, Go Green, Ruin Britain. – Telegraph Blogswhat I felt instead was the sort of detached, sardonic amusement an alien might feel on viewing from outer space a once-great civilisation destroying itself over an issue of immeasurable triviality.
That issue, of course, is “Climate Change”. Never before in history, I doubt, has so much money ever been squandered, so much suffering and poverty exascerbated, so much economic damage been inflicted, so many lies promulgated and so much environmental destruction wrought in order to deal with a problem so microscopically miniscule. Really, if Barack Obama were to declare war on Belgium because he’d always found Tintin Au Congo offensively racist, or if David Cameron were to launch a nuclear strike on Mykonos because all those white-painted buildings were “way too gay”, you still wouldn’t be even half way close to equalling the quite breathtaking stupidity, purblind ignorance and suicidal wrongheadedness of the disasters currently being inflicted on the world by our boneheaded political and administrative classes on their holy mission to “combat climate change.”
Green cronyism in the Northwest under one party ruleHere is a good example of how government functions in the Pacific Northwest. Democratic Washington State Senator Phil Rockefeller resigns/retires from his elected seat and is appointed by Governor Gregoire to a $95,000/year job managing the Global Warming agenda on the Northwest Power and Conservation Council funded by the Bonneville Power Administration.
Does Senator Rockefeller have any technical background that might help him understand our power grid or our climate? No.
» The Pickens Plan and Crony Capitalism - Big GovernmentBut where the Pickens Plan starts to go awry is when you look at the nuts and bolts of how the Plan would work. First, as many know, American cars and big rigs don’t currently run on natural gas, so there would have to be a massive overhaul of vehicles.
The plan calls for each big rig to get a $64,000 subsidy for the conversion from diesel to natural gas. With around 8 million large trucks on American highways right now, you can do the math and figure out what the price tag is. It’s one thing to convert big rigs to natural gas. Once that happens, you then have to overhaul thousands of fuel stations across the country that would need to have natural gas available. But don’t worry: the Plan gives a $100,000 tax credit for every station that converts to natural gas. I won’t even really touch on the conversion of cars to natural gas, but there are provisions in the plan that have, by the time it’s all added up, a $11,500 subsidy for every natural gas car.
What is really being discussed with the Pickens Plan is a complete overhaul of our transportation system, which will cost hundreds of billions of dollars, as National Review has pointed out, for very minimal profit; $4 billion by one estimate. And the person who just happens to benefit the most? Someone heavily invested in the natural gas business by the name of T. Boone Pickens.
Getting Cool On Global Warming ClaimsThe fact is that there has been some small degree of warming during the last century, and CO2 and other trace greenhouse gases play some role in atmospheric warming. It is also a fact that there have been varying degrees of warming and cooling in past centuries when there were little if any man-made CO2 emissions occurring. There is growing evidence that the alarmist predictions of the IPCC and other agencies regarding catastrophic climate change are not being reflected in the temperature record.
The earth is a fascinatingly complex ecosystem. Some 70 percent of its surface is covered by water, and those oceans have a significant impact on temperature. (Compare average temperatures in San Francisco and San Diego to Las Vegas.) The sun has a tremendous effect on the Earth’s climate as well. Clouds and the absence of clouds play a huge role in heating and cooling of the earth. What we know about climate science is dwarfed by what we don’t know at this juncture. Yet governments worldwide are rushing to impose costly regulations on businesses and individuals, regulations they justify by scientific models that as of yet are not matching their predictions with reality.
by Dan Juneau, President and CEO of Louisiana Business and Industry (LABI)
[Mr David "Climate Nuremberg" Roberts jets to Brazil] | GristLast week, I attended the C40 summit in Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Obama Goes Green and Detroit Goes Black - By Henry Payne - Planet Gore - National Review OnlineIs there a better metaphor for the Obama administration’s utopian transformation of America than the Detroit power blackout of 2011?
Like Obama nationally, Michigan has ignored its biggest city’s power infrastructure and instead poured money into quixotic wind projects on Lake Michigan and Lake Huron to feed the state’s Renewable Power Standard and the ideological demands of Washington.
Dengue Fever Creeps Back Into the U.S. — and Climate Change Isn’t Helping – TIME Warmist Bryan WalshBut it would be a mistake to assume that climate change is the only risk factor behind dengue and other mosquito-borne diseases — or even the most important one. Proper public health measures — spraying to kill mosquitoes, clearing out stagnant water, even using mosquito-eating fish — can stop the spread of the disease even in tropical areas that are welcoming to the insects.
That's why wealth may be as important as temperature; dengue and malaria are relatively rare in tropical Singapore, thanks to the government's military mindset on the disease, but the disease is far more common in nearby Kuala Lumpur, which is much poorer. Malaria was a hazard of living in Florida through the middle of the 20th century, but pesticides and public health effectively eliminated the disease.
[Unsettled science]: NASA Launches Satellite For Climate Mission WASHINGTON (CNN) -- NASA launched a satellite Friday, starting a three-year mission to help better understand climate change.
NASA sent the Aquarius/SAC-D Sea Surface Salinity satellite into orbit from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
For the next three years, the Aquarius satellite will look back at Earth and generate monthly maps of sea salt movements, data that are crucial to the understanding of global climate change and ocean currents.
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The $287 million satellite will provide insights into water circulation and changes around the globe by measuring the microwave energy emitted from the ocean during weekly scans.
Global Warming Will Require Changes, Oregonians Say · OPB NewsSouthern Oregon waiter and actor, Jesse Lawson, is among the majority.
"We definitely need to be more green and try to be world conscious. And I think we're getting steps forward. But we can't just keep what we're doing with the carbon monoxide and all the crappy stuff we're putting in the air," Lawson said.
Father of LEED: Humans ‘blissfully unaware’ of coming climate crisis | SmartPlanetNEW YORK — Rob Watson stood up, strode toward the podium, turned 180 degrees on his heels, scanned the audience, let out a deep sigh, and said:
“We’re a little bit in denial about how bad things are.”
His voice, normally booming, trailed off, as his upper lip raised up in disgust with the words he just uttered. His gaze dropped to the row of people immediately in front of him. He let out another sigh.
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But if politics and the status quo continue to trump science, humans are in for a rude awakening, he said.
“We’re going to be a bad biological experiment..."
YouTube - Rob Watson, Father of LEED, Talks Green[Watson: "Buildings are literally the worst things that humans do to the planet"]
Skeleton Closet - Al Gore, The Dark SideAt the Democratic national convention in 1996, Gore gaving a moving speech about his only sister's painful death from lung cancer. And since then he has pushed the administration's aggressive anti-smoking campaign.
What Gore didn't mention is that he grew up on a tobacco farm, worked on it, and continued to accept checks from that farm for years after his sister died.
The Great Global Warming FarceMuch of the Gore family wealth came from petroleum and tobacco farming! [2] He has pocketed nearly a million dollars in royalties from zinc mining operations that have dumped millions of pounds of potentially toxic substances into the pristine Tennessee ecosystem yet demands we buy “credits” to compensate for theoretical planetary damage from the substance I exhale?
PressTV - Beware of US 'mission creep' in Libya Al Gore's father, Al Gore Sr., was a lobbyist for Occidental Petroleum.
Tears and whisky to fuel the North Pole adventure - WharfFaced with unbearably freezing conditions, feats of mammoth physical strength and unbelievable mental strain, explorer Jock Wishart has one coping mechanism.
"You cry," he said. "A bit like Ben Fogle, you have to cry."
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Wishart, 59, who has set the world record for circumnavigation of the globe in a powered vessel, is leading a team which aims to become the first to row to the North Magnetic Pole - a feat only achievable due to global warming.
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But, even with his huge experience and courage, he is not convinced of success in the journey which aims to see them row - and carry in places - a boat 450 miles from Canada in August.
Wishart sees the six-week challenge as akin to "Ernest Shackleton's exploration of the South Pole" and judges the team's chances across the treacherous broken ice as merely 60/40 in their favour.
Bonn Climate Change Talks: Developing Countries Fight With Rich Nations In Stalled NegotiationsAMSTERDAM -- Developing countries said Friday that rich nations are refusing to negotiate an extension of their commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, charging that they sought to "maintain their privileges and levels of consumption" at the expense of the poor.
Two-week climate negotiations among 183 nations in Bonn, Germany, which reached their halfway point Friday, were stalled for three days this week in a fight over the agenda. Structured in four bodies, formal talks only began in two of them on Thursday as countries haggled over what should be discussed.
On Climate Change, GOP Candidates Race to the Fringe - Conor Friedersdorf - Politics - The AtlanticThe issue demonstrates how Republicans are encouraged to take needlessly extreme positions with little real world benefit
iCloud = iCoal | Greenpeace InternationalOn Monday Steve Jobs announced Apple's latest offering, "the new way to store and access your content" no less. The company's new service, iCloud, may be an ambitious step forward for Apple in computing terms, but look closer and you'll find that it's tarnished by that Victorian-era power supply (and source of global warming pollution!) we know too well -- coal.
Simply Madness - Opinion - PatriotPost.USEither way, the problem becomes clear: When people start talking about capping or halting or managing economic growth, what they really mean is capping, halting and managing freedom. Hence Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist and avowed envier of China's authoritarian regime, declares that "The Earth is Full" and we must therefore embrace a version of the steady-state economy.
Economic growth is an enemy of all central planners for the simple reason that growth jumps the guardrails of The Plan; it changes the aesthetically appealing flatline of the steady state and makes it jagged. Growth creates new products, destroys old ones and allows people to behave in ways that render PowerPoint projections dismayingly obsolete. Worse, it takes power from the planners.
UK climate projects evaporate : Nature NewsBritish Council axes climate-change work to balance books.
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David Viner, who heads the council's climate programme, says that funding will not be continued for most work past the end of this month, and that all current climate-change programmes will be ended by March 2012. Nearly all staff specifically working on climate-change projects are either set to leave or have left, he says.
Senate to Vote on Ending Ethanol Tax IncentivesEven if he gets the necessary votes in the Senate, it seems unlikely that both the House passes similar legislation that President Obama then signs. However, if this gets a significant number of votes, it could spell doom for the future of the industry.
- Bishop Hill blog - Jones: post 1995 warming "significant"Phil Jones has announced that post-1995 warming is now "significant", with new data changing the picture he had previously reported to Roger Harrabin.
Collide-a-scape » Blog Archive » Collide-a-scape >> Is Friedman No Longer in Love with His Lexus?Is Thomas Friedman, the influential, globe-trotting NYT columnist, undergoing a metamorphosis? Because I think the guy who was a champion of economic globalization a decade ago is not the same guy who wrote this column earlier in the week, which is mostly a platform for Paul Gilding, author of a new book called, “The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World.”
[Does CO2 prevent murder?] » Murders In America’s 33 Largest CitiesMost cities saw their murders drop.
1000 Days | Real ScienceIt has now been 1000 days since any hurricane hit the US, the longest spell since before the Civil War.
Lindzen’s PNAS Reviews « Climate AuditCompare these reviews to Jones’ puffball reviews, which were some of the most important Climategate documents. Prior to Climategate, people may have suspected that close collaborators were reviewing one another’s work (as Wegman had hypothesized), but no one knew for sure. People may have suspected that pals gave one another soft reviews, but no one knew for sure. Jones’ reviews of submissions by Mann, by Schmidt, by Santer were proof.
Climate Change Dispatch -Even More Evidence Disproving the Great Global Warming HoaxThe best microcosm of the globe can be represented by the Mall of America located in Minneapolis , MN. It is the second largest mall in the world. The temperatures routinely get down to 20 below zero in the wintertime. Now the Mall has no heating apparatus or furnaces of any kind. In spite of this, it stays a comfortable 68 degrees F in the winter time. That is an increase of 88 degrees F from outside ambient temperature. How is this possible. All of the heat from the lights in the mall plus the aggregate body heat from all of the visitors.
We have increased the world population by billions of people. Isn’t it possible that the increase population and all of the other heat causing factors mentioned in the article could result in the one degree increase in world wide temperatures. Does this not make more sense than CO2 which is a heavier than air gas that sinks to the ground when it is released. There is a principle in science called Occam’s Razor. The gist of Occam’s Razor is that the simplest explanation is usually correct. Does not my explanation make more sense than CO2? You decide and let me know what you think.
Stop hiding green fuel tax, firms told as pressure to come clean on global warming levies intensifies | Mail OnlinePower companies were under mounting pressure last night to come clean about the green ‘stealth levies’ secretly added to fuel bills – and tell customers exactly how much they are paying for Britain’s climate change revolution.
Consumer groups and MPs say energy suppliers should be forced to lay out on household bills how much customers are paying to subsidise green power and to end the UK’s dependence on coal, oil and gas.
The call for greater transparency follows claims that global warming policies are adding up to £200 a year to the electricity and gas bills of millions of cash-strapped families.
U.K. Cuts Subsidized Power Rates to Stem Solar-Farm Boom - BloombergThe U.K. cut subsidized rates for electricity from solar panels by as much as 71 percent, trying to avoid a proliferation of commercial solar farms that would compete with homes for the funding.
The above-market price paid for power from photovoltaic panels was reduced to 8.5 pence (14 U.S. cents) from 29.3 pence for the largest projects, while the smallest rooftop systems for homes or small businesses were spared cuts, the Department for Energy and Climate Change said today in a statement.
Climate science mired in politics: Jairam - Indian ExpressDeclaring that “science is politics in climate change; climate science is politics”, Union Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh on Wednesday urged Indian scientists to undertake more studies and publish them vigorously to prevent India and other developing countries from being “led by our noses by Western (climate) scientists who have less of a scientific agenda and more of a political agenda”.
The minister’s remarks evoked a loud applause from over 100 Indian scientists who had gathered on the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) premises in Ahmedabad, where a study of 2,190 Himalayan glaciers undertaken by 15 institutes and organisations in India was released.
Ramesh also took on the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), chaired by Nobel Peace Prize winner R K Pachauri, and the retracted projections that said the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035.
The ISRO study shows the glaciers will be there “for the next 400 years”, he joked, adding “400 years is as bogus a number as 2035.”
[Via Benny Peiser]
BT hires new sustainability chief - ComputerworldUK.comChief executive of BT Retail, Gavin Patterson, said: “Niall will support myself, chairman Mike Rake and chief executive Ian Livingston, advising on the science and impact of climate change, on sustainable development and strategy, and our public policy dialogue with governments in these areas.”
Niall Dunne - CSR, Sustainability, Innovation & Change Keynote Speaker - Speakers CornerMost recently, Niall spent a few years leading a marketing revolution through his role as Managing Director of Saatchi & Saatchi S, shaping it into the next generation advertising agency by combining the forensic business and industry insight of a consultancy together with leading edge full service ad agency capabilities.
FrontPage Magazine » Why I’m a Global Warming SkepticNo matter how you look at the issue – which is why the alarmists are so determined to never allow you to actually look at the issue – anyone who thinks must be skeptical of the claims of the hysterics. The science is new, its models based on utterly unverifiable numbers (i.e. the temperature in Guam in the year 8), the accuracy of its long term predictions obviously impossible to know, its short-term predictions having utterly failed to come to be (e.g. that decade-and-a-half long hiatus in global warming.) The behaviors of the hysterical scientists are unscientific, the behavior of the hysteric’s favorite celebrities contradictory to those someone who truly believed would be engaging in. If you follow the money it is almost entirely into the pockets of the hysterics while the proposed “remedy” does not seem to be those that would be proposed by people who believed the end is near. In fact, what the remedy does suggest – what the entire industry of the hysterics suggests – is that “manmade global warming” is a leftist farce being perpetrated by cynics who recognize there’s riches to be had, along with power and fame.
James Lovelock wins Observer lifetime achievement at ethical awards | Environment | guardian.co.ukHe has been at the forefront of dire predictions about the consequences of global warming. "Before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate is tolerable," he wrote in 2006.
Obama's audacity of incompetence: GOP must sieze on his dismal recordEven the failed attempt at cap-and-trade - government control of energy pricing - shows Obama's determination to fundamentally transform America. And he is sure to try again to complete his coveted European-style social-democratic project if you give him four more years.
Rick Santorum Doesn’t Drink AGW KoolaidI like people who can think for themselves. I like a person who can look at the evidence for AGW (composed of guesswork, circumstantial evidence and fudged computer models) on one hand, and look at the mountainous evidence pointing to natural and cyclic climate change on the other, and have the courage to face the obvious conclusion.
Brazil Coffee Areas to Escape Frost in Next 15 Days, Somar Says - BloombergFrost in Brazilian growing regions can damage trees bearing the following year’s crop. Coffee futures soared to a record $3.375 a pound in 1977 after damage from frosts in Brazil two years earlier, according to Bloomberg data. Frost in 1994 damaged 35 percent of the crop by 1997, according to Somar, sending prices up to $3.18 a pound that year.
In brief: Showers, warming after record low - Spokesman.com - June 10, 2011Spokane’s early morning temperature on Thursday dropped to 39 degrees at 3:20 a.m., breaking a record that dates back to 1999.
[Warmist Joel] Connelly: Greed of radical Greens threat to environment - seattlepi.com...there is a threat to Babbitt's sage advice -- arrogant, insular, radical greens who wage war on the automobile and try to block public access to our great outdoors.
We see it in Seattle with the my-way-and-no-highway policies of Mayor Mike McGinn, a former local Sierra Club leader. We saw it last week in the Suiattle River of Snohomish County: A lawsuit blocked repair of an historic road that leads to trailheads used by generations.
The suit has outraged Dan Evans, Washington's greatest "green" governor and, as a U.S. Senator, architect of the million-acre Washington Wilderness Act and the Columbia Gorge National Scenic Area.
"I get mad every time I read about these sanctimonious hard-liners using the marbled murrelet and spotted owl for every road washout they want to avoid rebuilding," said Evans, still hiking in his 80s.
"They want good trail access for their own current abilities (someday they will be 85!) but want to limit access so much that eventually there will be no support in Congress to fund maintenance of wilderness areas."
Triple price of gas to save planet, climate expert arguesThe Swiss climatologist [Thomas Stocker] is a key player with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
He and the IPCC say there is no question the climate is changing because of the huge amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases wafting into the atmosphere through the burning of oil, gas and other fossil fuels.
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Stocker said there are still unknowns in our understanding of how climate works, but the ominous projections are "not crystal ball readings" but are based on facts and well-established scientific laws.
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Stocker co-chairs the IPCC working group of 250 scientists exploring the scientific aspects of climate change.
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The IPCC's last report in 2007 stated "warming of the climate system is unequivocal" — a "fact" that Stocker said has not been challenged despite the IPCC recent troubles.
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There is speculation that climate change is already causing more extreme weather, but Stocker said there is still no proof that the number of tornadoes — like the ones which have been tearing across the U.S. this spring — is increasing. "But we can say with confidence that it fits the picture," he said.
Research shows snowpack decline in West | Great Falls Tribune | greatfallstribune.com"I think the findings are pretty significant," said author Greg Pederson, with the U.S. Geological Survey. "It means trees are telling the same stories as computer models and instrument records — that human greenhouse gas emissions are contributing to the loss of snowpack. It's kind of hard to argue that warmer temperatures don't melt snow and ice."
Large amounts of snowpack still sit in mountains | Great Falls Tribune | greatfallstribune.comIf all the snow still sitting in the headwaters of the Sun River drainage melted at once, it would equal 2 to 4 feet of water.
"There is just tons and tons of water up in the mountains," said Ben Schott, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Great Falls.
The Reference Frame: Shoot camels to earn carbon creditsAccording to the IPCC figures, complete extermination of 1.2 million camels in Australia will cool the globe by 0.00001 °C (mean value).
Editorial: U.S. Goes On An Energy Starvation Diet - Investors.comOverregulation: The Environmental Protection Agency has two new rules it wants to impose on utilities that use coal. But the rules make sense only if you want less energy, higher prices and fewer jobs.
Remember then-candidate Barack Obama's comment in January 2008 that the price of electricity would "necessarily skyrocket" once his policies went into effect?
It's now coming to pass
Look out Portland, “climate disruption” sending waves of refugees your way | Watts Up With That?So far, the only climate refugees I’ve ever seen in reality are the ones that travel from NYC, Boston, Minneapolis, and other cold winter locations to escape to Florida and Arizona during November-March.
I have to laugh at this though:
Climate disruption will be the defining issue of this century and probably for centuries to come. No famine, no war, no plague, not even natural disasters will compare with the impacts of this event on human civilization.
- Bishop Hill blog - More climate gatekeepingOne prominent mainstream climate scientist told me that I knew "perfectly well" that accusations of climate gatekeeping were baseless. It doesn't really look that way to me.
Green fuel tax: The answer, my friend, ain't blowing' in the wind | Mail OnlineFollowing the revelation that we’re all paying a secret stealth tax to subsidise so-called renewable energy sources, it seems like a good time to check out exactly what we are getting for our money.
At midday yesterday, wind power was contributing just 2.2 per cent of all the electricity in the National Grid. You might think that’s a pretty poor return on the billions of pounds spent already on Britain’s standing army of windmills.
But it’s actually a significant improvement on the last time I checked the wholesale electricity industry’s official website.
- Bishop Hill blog - More Nursean interesting picture emerges of Nurse the activist who used to sell Socialist Worker
CAGW – the pessimists choice | Watts Up With That?The debate between advocates of CAGW and ‘sceptics’ is a rerun of an old argument between those who take a pessimistic and those who take an optimistic view of humanity. Following the collapse of communism – an extreme version of the pessimists’ creed – those who took that position had to regroup around a new agenda. This post, which is an opinion piece, argues that in searching for their new Trojan Horse the pessimists discovered, in climatology, the ideal opportunity to bring together science, political expediency and social uncertainty in a way that would enable them to capture the political high ground. – Professor Bob Ryan
Thinning Snows In Rockies Tied To Global Warming : NPR"Here in the western U.S., where we rely really heavily on snowmelt for summer water supply, anything that impacts the snowpack can also cause a drought," says Phil Mote, a climate scientist at Oregon State University. "And what this paper shows is the warming of the 20th century and beyond is already affecting and will profoundly affect the frequency of droughts in the West, simply by whittling away at the snowpack."
He finds the new report persuasive in its link to global warming.
"It's sort of ironic to be talking about this this year, when the Columbia River is at flood stage in Portland," Mote says.
But that underscores the fact that you can't judge the climate by a single year, or even a few decades.
Climate [Scam] Talks Floundering without MinistersNegotiations meant to avert dangerous climate change are stuck over future emissions restrictions in wrangling at meetings below the ministerial level, undermining the U.N.-backed process.
The pace of talks has slowed since a two-year campaign for a binding deal ending at a Copenhagen summit in 2009, when world leaders failed to deliver, and acrimony lingers.
Developed countries have yet to decide whether to fund additional sessions before an annual ministerial conference in Durban in South Africa in November, pinning this on more progress at a June 6-17 meeting in Bonn, Germany.
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“I’m a little sad participating in these negotiations because the atmosphere is so confrontational,” said Akira Yamada, head of the Japanese delegation.
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The talks can only proceed by consensus, and in Bonn were stuck not only on a new round of Kyoto, but also a proposal from the world’s biggest oil exporter, Saudi Arabia, for compensation in case increased climate action cuts revenues of oil producers.
Debate over the agenda made some countries doubt the value of extra meetings before Durban. “Without progress in these two weeks there’s no point having another session in the fall,” the Colombian delegation told the launch of the Bonn session.
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“We’re not prepared to move if the obligations just point only to those in the developed world,” said Jonathan Pershing, the U.S. head of delegation in Bonn.
Sun-powered high speed rail rises in Europe | SmartPlanetBelgium’s $22.6 million (15.6 million euros) installation can reportedly power the equivalent of 4,000 train trips on Infrabel’s HSL4 line and cut the railway’s carbon dioxide input by 2,400 tons annually...wind power is also on the agenda for Belgium’s high speed rail network.
At a nickel per ton on the (now-defunct) Chicago Climate Hoax Exchange, those 2,400 tons are a $120 value!!
Will Sen. Inhofe's New Energy Adviser Moderate the Raging Climate Skeptic? - NYTimes.com Myron Ebell, director of Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which recommended Banks to Inhofe, said his CEQ experience made him a good choice. He said he could not testify to Banks' personal politics and declined to share details of the recommendation he offered Inhofe.
Banks "is a very professional staffer, and I'm sure he will be a very loyal staffer to Senator Inhofe, who does not have a hard time making up his mind on these issues," Ebell said.
Will the GOP base really demand a crazy GOP 2012 nominee? - The Plum Line - The Washington PostThe conventional wisdom right now on the left is that due to an irrational hatred of Obama and all things liberal, the only way a Republican can win the nomination is by embracing the most extreme positions possible. Yet Mitt Romney, widely perceived as a weak frontrunner, is still polling well in primary states like South Carolina and New Hampshire (though he seems to have given up on Iowa). That’s despite his record on health reform and his refusal to embrace the absurd conservative idea that global warming is a hoax.
Quadrant Online - Crazy Climate WeekThe insanity progresses unabated. This Sunday the Discovery Channel (UK) will present a TV series called “Ways to Save the Planet” — apparently from catastrophic global warming. And apparently totally unimpressed with Julia Gillard’s carbon dioxide tax, the Discovery Channel has rounded up eight “geo-engineering” scientists who have ideas to interfere with the world’s “delicate ecosystems”. Emmmm! Sounds like a thoroughly bad idea, but with what we have experienced in the last decade with rampant science stormtroopers pounding our brains with guilt-bombs, what else can you expect. Well…plenty!
One scientist in the Discovery Channel show, glaciologist Dr Jason Box, suggests we wrap up Greenland in a gigantic blanket to slow ice-melt. Another scientist, Dr Brian von Herzen suggests that using giant wave-powered pumps to mix cold deep ocean water with warmer surface water, we can create plankton blooms to absorbs atmospheric carbon dioxide. Professor Roger Angel wants to place a 100,000 square mile sunshade in space. The sun-shade would contain trillions of lenses that would reduce the sun’s power by 2%.
Scientists Considered Pouring Soot Over the Arctic in the 1970s to Help Melt the Ice - In Order to Prevent Another Ice Age → Washington's BlogOn April 28, 1975, Newsweek wrote an article stating:
Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Snowpack declines in the Rocky Mountains over the last 30 years are more significant than during any other period in past centuries
Snowpack decline threatens water supplies - UPI.comWASHINGTON, June 9 (UPI) -- A U.S. study suggests snowpack declines in the Rocky Mountains measured over the last 30 years are unusual compared with data going back the past few centuries.
A study by the U.S. Geological Survey says the decline can be linked to unusual springtime warming and changes in rainfall patterns.
The warming and snowpack decline are projected to worsen through the 21st century, threatening to put a strain on water supplies.
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Since the 1980s there have been declines in snowpack along the entire length of the Rocky Mountains with unusually severe declines in the north, the study found.
"Over most of the 20th century, and especially since the 1980s, the northern Rockies have borne the brunt of the snowpack losses," said USGS scientist Gregory Pederson, the lead author of the study.
[May 22, 2011]: Record Snowpack Across The West | Real Science
Carbon tax will spell end of coal: AbbottMr Abbott said the tax would reduce the competitiveness of Australia's export industry and that was why other coal exporting countries were staying away from a carbon tax.
"In the end you can't do without coal and the carbon tax ultimately spells death for the coal industry, which is why other coal countries aren't having a carbon tax," he said.
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