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Full Show: Ending the Silence on Climate Change | BillMoyers.com
[Moyers] Meanwhile, another reality beckons and there’s a menace more threatening than the fiscal cliff ever was. What should really be scaring the daylights out of us -- the crisis which could make all the others irrelevant -- is global warming. Get this one wrong and it’s over -- not just for the USA, but for planet Earth. That’s the message delivered by Hurricane Sandy, and by almost all the extreme weather of the past two years.
And here in the first month of the New Year, it’s the message from the most informed scientists in the world. They’re scared, for real. And they say that unless we slow the release of global emissions from fossil fuels, slow it enough to keep the planet’s temperature from rising by two degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the earth’s polar ice sheets will melt away -- with catastrophic consequences.
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BILL MOYERS: Assume that I'm a skeptic. Not only a skeptic but a Tea Party Republican who goes to church every Sunday where my beloved pastor tells me that, reassures me that God created the earth 6,000 years ago and that if God wants to end the earth God will on God's terms, that this is out of our control. If you were sitting across from a good, disciplined believer like that, what argument would you make to me? [Hey Bill, can you flesh out this stereotype a little more for me? Do I and my wife/cousin drive to church in a Hummer with assault rifles on our laps, then attend KKK rallies on the way home?]
Straight talk on Kyoto | Toronto SunSo the real story on Kyoto is this.
Yes, we failed to meet our targets. But that’s in the context of 154 of 191 nations, including China, not having to cut their emissions at all.
Add to that the U.S., which never ratified Kyoto, going back to the Bill Clinton/Al Gore administration.
Given all this, the idea Canada should have wrecked its economy while spending billions of tax dollars vainly attempting to comply with the protocol is absurd.
By constantly vilifying Canada as if it is the major impediment to a global emissions treaty, opposition MPs and environmentalists are misleading Canadians.
Climate Skeptics and Climate Fools | RedStateNatural gas is the logical bridge to a nuclear future. Fortunately, we have an abundant domestic supply which can be profitably exploited for a century or more. We ignore nuclear energy, and focus on the losing bet on wind and solar at the peril of future generations. Frittering away resources on non-solutions will cost our prosperity first; later on, the cost of our folly will be measured in lives. Until the Green community is willing to acknowledge this reality, I see no reason to take their environmental hand-wringing seriously.
Americans Know Little About Global Warming, Survey Saysonly 45% understood the effects of carbon dioxide.
Dr. David Kass » Notes From 2012 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting(12) Audience: MidAmerican has a large investment in wind and solar power. How important are subsidies in this area?
Buffett: With respect to wind power, they receive 2.2 cents subsidy per kilowatt hour for 10 years. That makes wind projects work. They would not work without it. Neither wind nor solar projects would be working without their subsidies. You cannot count on wind for the base load. It works and it is clean, but if the wind is not blowing, people do not want the risk of having their lights go off. Therefore, it is only for supplemental generation.
Al Gore, friend of the petro-state | Full Comment | National PostAt the pinnacle of Al Gore’s fame and influence, he was a much jet-travelling man, going from continent to continent, earning huge fees, to give his explosive and exaggerated Powerpoint presentation about the threat of apocalyptic global warming.
Pawlenty and Steger kick off climate talks in Ely"With a doubling of [carbon dioxide], our forests will shift 200 to 400 miles northward," University of Minnesota forest ecologist Lee Frelich told about 250 people who crowded into the auditorium at Vermilion Community College. "There would be a tsunami of grass from the west. Minnesota would end up without much forest at all."
Climate change threatens Tahoe's snow levels, lake clarityClimate change could profoundly affect the Tahoe area, scientists say, taking the snow out of the mountains and the blue out of the water.
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Although last winter's ski season was hard on the resorts, the previous season boasted early heavy snow -- and skiing lasted until the Fourth of July.
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This season is off to a great start, the state's first Sierra Nevada water survey revealed this past week. Homewood opened before Halloween, thanks to early snowstorms.
AGU Honors Gleick « Climate AuditBut the most surprising, even astonishing, appearance was by Peter Gleick himself. Gleick did not simply return, but was honored by an invitation to speak at a prestigious Union session. I hadn’t even thought to look for Gleick on the program, but noticed him outside a session.
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Gleick’s welcome back to AGU prominence – without serving even the equivalent of a game’s suspension – was pretty startling, given his admitted identity fraud and distribution (and probable fabrication) of a forged document. Last year, then AGU President Mike McPhadren, a colleague of Eric Steig’s at the University of Washington, had stated on behalf of AGU that Gleick had “compromised AGU’s credibility as a scientific society” and that his “transgression cannot be condoned”. McPhadren stated that AGU‘s “guiding core value” was “excellence and integrity in everything we do” – values that would seem to be inconsistent with identity fraud and distribution and/or fabrication of forged documents, even by the relaxed standards of academic institutions.
Although McPhadren had stated that Gleick’s “transgression” would not be “condoned”, AGU’s warm welcome to Gleick shows that McPhadren’s words meant nothing, because AGU has in fact condoned Gleick’s actions.
The Climate Conundrum | The Lukewarmer's Way[Tom Fuller] Now, the very probable reason that Real Climate has published two posts on climate sensitivity at this time is that conflicting work has recently seen the light of day that points at lower levels of sensitivity. (This is the way the political fight around climate change works–the activists have a ‘rapid response team’ that springs into action when questions arise or conflicting data is published. There in all honesty appears to be a coordinated campaign to drive an agenda, something that they in turn accuse skeptics of doing.)
Hypocrisy Alert: Radical Green to Enjoy 84-degree Wash. State Indoor Water Park | JunkScience.comMaybe the Nuremberg-style skeptic trials David Roberts called for can be held there as well?
Grist.org’s Dave Roberts — who infamously suggested Nuremberg-style trials for skeptics, linked the Newtown shooting to global warming and wrote that skeptics “won’t change, but they will die” — tweeted today that his kids got a “mystery trip” for Christmas — to a Washington State indoor water park (56,000 square feet heated to 83 degrees, see below)
2 die as cold snap hits North, Northeast - ThailandHis Royal Highness Crown Prince Maha Vajiralongkorn and his Royal Consort, Her Royal Highness Princess Srirasmi, yesterday had their representative give 2,000 sets of blankets and clothes to Lampang residents affected by the cold.
St. Louis Zoo rethinks how to address climate change : Entertainment“Talking about the crisis doesn’t work; just ask Al Gore,” said zoo education chief Louise Bradshaw. “If it’s all ‘crisis, crisis, crisis,’ people will just stop there. It will be just too big and scary for them.”
Blow To Big Wind In The Power-Market Stakes THE stark backdrop to the UN’s uneventful climate change negotiations in Doha last month that left environment groups smoking with disappointment is the long-running meltdown on global green-energy markets.
Epa: Administrator confirmation on collision course with carbon [dioxide hoax scam], gasoline rules -- 01/04/2013 -- www.eenews.netU.S. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson's announcement last week of her resignation in late January could force the agency into a tough confirmation fight as it's proposing or finalizing controversial air regulations that would limit sulfur in gasoline and greenhouse gas emissions from new power plants.
E-mail Scandal at the EPA - John Fund - National Review OnlineWhen the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a free-market group, came up empty on its FOIA requests for Jackson’s e-mails relating to her anti-coal efforts, it was told by an EPA whistleblower that she was using “Richard Windsor” and other aliases to coordinate with outside anti-coal groups and engage in other activity she wouldn’t want to come to light.
...When cutting deals to ensure the health-care industry’s support of Obamacare and provide $500 million in green-energy loan guarantees to the now-bankrupt Solyndra solar company, senior administration officials used private e-mail accounts that fell outside federal record-keeping laws. The Solyndra loans were coordinated on 14 separate private e-mail accounts. ABC News reported that Jim Messina, who in 2009 was Obama’s deputy White House chief of staff, coordinated with drug companies a $150 million advertising campaign in support of Obamacare using his private AOL account.
The White House arranged for a privately owned computer server to handle discussions about a controversial United Nations initiative, presumably to ensure that FOIA requests wouldn’t uncover them.
Massive Cold Blast Forecast For The US | Real ScienceTemperatures have been running far below normal this winter in most of the US, and are forecast to get much colder in about a week.
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The forecast is another 10 degree drop in temperature – towards historic lows.
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Last winter we were told that mild temperatures US were “extreme” and proof of global warming.
Climate change won't wait - Weepy Bill McKibben - latimes.comObama appears unwilling or unable to take the tough steps to deal with global warming. In Washington over Presidents Day weekend, the largest environmental demonstration in years will try to prod him.
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With climate change, however, there simply isn't time to waste. It's not a fight, like gay marriage, between conflicting groups with conflicting opinions. It's a fight between human beings and physics. And physics is entirely uninterested in human timetables. Physics couldn't care less if precipitous action raises gas prices or damages the coal industry in swing states. It couldn't care less whether putting a price on carbon slowed the pace of development in China or made agribusiness less profitable.
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Physics is implacable. It takes the carbon dioxide we produce and translates it into heat, which causes ice to melt and oceans to rise and storms to gather.
...God knows [Obama] had his chances in 2012: the hottest year in the history of the continental United States, the deepest drought of his lifetime, and a melt of the Arctic so severe that the federal government's premier climate scientist [James Hansen] declared it a "planetary emergency."
In fact, he didn't even appear to notice those phenomena, even as people in the crowds greeting him along the campaign trail were fainting from the heat.
- Bishop Hill blog - On biasIn the UK, the forces that environmentalism is able to deploy in support of its cause are pretty overwhelming. The government, the universities, the civil service, the schools, 90% of the print media, all of the BBC, including the comedy and drama departments, the army, the navy, the airforce, most big businesses, parts of the judiciary etc etc. Whole government departments are given over to propaganda in favour of environmentalism.
In the light of this, I think I do an important service in highlighting bits of information that don't fit the narrative.
Keith Kloor, on the other hand, thinks I should be a bit more even-handed.
I'll bear his concerns in mind.
Twitter / RichardTol: Biofuels have higher greenhouse ...Biofuels have higher greenhouse gas emissions See also Crutzen et al. 2008 ACP
Mongolia suffers cold snap -- Shanghai Daily | 上海日报 -- English Window to China NewULAN BATOR, Jan. 5 (Xinhua) -- Mongolia has been gripped by an extreme cold snap coupled with heavy snows, which have disrupted the life of herders in rural areas, local media reported Saturday.
Strong winds and a dramatic fall in temperatures have hit a large part of Mongolia. In some areas, the lowest temperature has plunged to minus 50 degrees Celcius, the reports said.
Skeptic's Corner: Stuart Varney goes off on Al Gore
The Climate Scientist’s Story: Part 2 | The Lukewarmer's Way...There was so much money, universities were scrambling to see how much they could grab. Whole departments were born just to study this one effect. They were recruiting believers, not thinkers. Careers were being made. Most of today’s climate scientists came from departments that were born in this rush. If you could tie your research to global warning, you could get funded. (I was in the money race at this time.) Older research was abandoned.
During the beginning of this period, I worked for NASA’s Technology Utilization office and got a good overview of what was happening. During the mid 80′s, I was a fellow and worked at a DOD atmospheric lab. What few people realize is that the military jumped on the CAGW bandwagon very early. They also thought that nuclearizing the economy had geopolitical and strategic advantages. I remember my debriefing officer’s comments on global warming, “Of course it’s nonsense, but it’s a great way to scare hippies into letting us build nukes.” [Via DB]
Brrr! China's coldest winter in decades at new low | Nation & World | The Seattle TimesChina is experiencing unusual chills this winter with its national average temperature hitting the lowest in 28 years, and snow and ice have closed highways, canceled flights, stranded tourists and knocked out power in several provinces.
China Meteorological Administration on Friday said the national average was -3.8 degrees Celsius (25 degrees Fahrenheit) since late November, the coldest in nearly three decades.
2012: the year Britain's weather turned dangerous | The GuardianRecord rainfall led to widespread flooding, killing nine people, ruining crops and costing the country billions
Britain's worst storms - Telegraph26 November 1703 - A catastrophic 80 mph hurricane ripped across East Anglia, decimating villages from Northamptonshire to Suffolk and killing between 8,000 and 15,000 people. Hundreds of vessels were sunk, homes destroyed and animals drowned in floodwater. It has since become known as the worst storm in British history.
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31 January and 1 February 1953 - Hurricane-force winds combined with high spring tides to cause a disastrous storm surge along the east coast. More than 300 people died, including 133 who were forced to abandon the Princess Victoria ferry east of Belfast. Nearly 24,000 houses were damaged and 72,845 hectares (180,000 acres) flooded, while thousands of trees were blown down in Scotland.
- Bishop Hill blog - Society rejects action on climateClimategate is cited as a key factor in the fall in support. And rightly so - the Russell panel noted that CRU and IPCC had both been guilty of misleading policymakers over the "hide the decline" episode, and there has been no no meaningful investigation into allegations of journal nobbling.
Cokie and Steven Roberts: Shifting views on climate change | Battle Creek EnquirerAt the front lines in the climate change war, there’s no argument about whether weather disasters come more frequently and ferociously.
...The little Hmong children in the mountains of Vietnam know that more is needed. They can tell visiting Americans what happens when too many trees are cut or when a manufacturer spews pollution, and they’re educating their parents as well.
Too bad those kids can’t come here. Maybe they could educate our politicians to take action on the home front about a situation threatening us all.
Cokie Roberts - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaCokie Roberts is the third child and youngest daughter of former ambassador and long-time Democratic Congresswoman from Louisiana Lindy Boggs and of the late Hale Boggs, also a Democratic Congressman from Louisiana who was Majority Leader of the House of Representatives. Her sister, the late Barbara Boggs Sigmund, was mayor of Princeton, New Jersey and a candidate for U.S. Senate from New Jersey. Her brother Tommy Boggs is a prominent Washington, D.C. attorney and lobbyist.
Roberts attended ... Wellesley College in 1964 where she received a BA in Political Science.
Robert Redford: Another Looming Cliff of Grave ConsequenceWith extreme weather taking its toll on communities all over America, we can't afford another major dirty energy project such as the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.
Robert Redford - Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaHe has described himself as having been a "bad" student, finding inspiration outside the classroom, and being interested in art and sports...After being asked to leave the University of Colorado, he traveled in Europe, living in France, Spain, and Italy.[8] He later studied painting at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and took classes at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City
AlGorjeera -- It's Official: Al Gore is by far the most lavishly funded fossil fuel player in the global warming debate today'Gore's massive personal cash influx from oil-backed Al Jazeera makes him by far the most lavishly funded fossil fuel player in the global warming debate today. Will the media now accurately label Gore an industry funded activist every time they report on him?'
New York Green Weenies Almost Out of Gas | Power LineAs a friend remarked to me today, “For years how to revive the economy of rural New York has been a top-of-the-agenda item for politicians. Now that something comes along that could do it, they say, ‘Well, maybe not. . .’
RIP Seymour Laxon, who allegedly started the "No ice means no polar bears" memeI last saw Seymour and Fiona several years ago at a party at Duncan and Ivana’s flat in Islington. In conversation I mentioned that I was surprised to see a spate of stories in the press headlining with global warming and the plight of Polar bears. Seymour laughed. It turned out that he was interviewed by a journalist following the publication of a paper concerning the seasonal extent of arctic ice. The paper, which was the culmination of a meticulous analysis of data from three satellites spanning 25 years, pointed to the potential disappearance of arctic ice in the summer months. A stark conclusion. The journalist, not fully appreciating the importance of this finding, quizzically remarked ‘so, no more arctic ice’, and in true laconic style Seymour replied ‘No ice means no polar bears!’. And since that day every time I see the media headline with global warming and the plight of polar bears I say to myself ‘Seymour started that’.
Arctic To Be Ice Free Before 2013 | Real Science
Scientists link global warming to England’s rainiest year on record“It is not just Britain but many other parts of northern Europe and north America that are getting wetter and there is a climate change component to it,” Kevin Trenberth told EurActiv over a phone line from the US National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.
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“The overall pattern has been that middle to high latitudes [have] an increase in precipitation that goes with a warming climate, and the fact that the air can hold more moisture so the hydrological cycle speeds up,” he said.
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“If you draw a line around the globe starting with the UK, this whole region is expected to become wetter,” [Gabriele Hegerl] said, “the wet regions become wetter and the dry regions drier.”
The best solution for climate change is a carbon tax | The Great DebateGlobal warming is happening, whether or not lawmakers on Capitol Hill want to acknowledge it. Unfortunately for the rest of us, the consequences of ignoring it are dire.
Given the already lackluster recovery, the future economic devastation from global warming looms many times larger than any “fiscal cliff.” A 2006 report from British economist Nicholas Stern estimated that if global temperatures increase 2-3 degrees Celsius in the next 50 years we risk losing up to 20 percent of global GDP – a loss similar to that of the Great Depression.
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According to the world authority on the subject, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a carbon tax on GHGs of $50 per metric ton of CO2 equivalents would be a good first step. With annual emissions of 6.8 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalents, the United States would collect $340 billion each year.
With revenue like that, a carbon tax could be used to help balance the budget.
Solar Neutrons and the 1970s cooling period | Watts Up With That?"...Early in the 1970s a series of adverse climatic anomalies occurred:
The world’s snow and ice cover had increased by at least 10 to 15 percent.
In the eastern Canadian area of the Arctic Greenland (sic), below normal temperatures were recorded for 19 consecutive months. Nothing like this had happened in the last 100 years.
The Moscow region suffered its worst drought in three to five hundred years.
Drought occurred in Central America, the sub-Sahara, South Asia, China and Australia.
Massive floods took place in the Midwestern United States.
Within a single year, adversity had visited almost every nation on the globe.”
There was a 1970s cooling period – the CIA left a record of it, and by some measures, the 1970s was the coldest decade of the 20th Century.
Cold snap — temperature in Boise gets down to 3 degrees Friday morning The National Weather Service got a temperature reading of 3 degrees at the Boise Airport overnight, making Friday the coldest day in Idaho’s capital city since 2010.
El Paso receives up to eight inches of snow | kvue.com AustinEL PASO -- Much of West Texas was blanketed with up to eight inches of snow. Commuters woke up Friday in El Paso to dangerous ice on the roads.
There were several crashes Thursday night which shut down Interstate 10.
America: Doomed by Scarcity, Doomed by Plenty, Doomed, Doomed! | Via MeadiaAmerica, once doomed because it had no more oil, is now even more doomed because it has too much
Twitter / RogerPielkeJr: Q for @MunichRe @MunichRe_US ...Q for Was there really only 2 US thunderstorm disasters 1975-1990!? .. -typo fixed
Twitter / RogerPielkeJr: Record surplus $584B! "Insurance ...
Grid Problems Curb India's Electric-Vehicle Appetite - NYTimes.comThen, in May, an acute power shortage took hold in Ampere’s home state, Tamil Nadu. The supply of rationed electricity in most of the state dropped from 13 or 14 hours a day to 8. Almost immediately, said the company’s co-founder, Pachyappa Bala, the company’s monthly sales dropped from 600 bikes to 60.
Ampere’s plight highlights an unexpected consequence of the worsening power shortages in India. The fledgling market for electric vehicles, which might help clean up the polluted air, is losing traction because customers aren’t confident they can fill up the battery.
Resignation of EPA's Jackson is "serious warning" that climate in danger from Obama White HouseJill Stein, the recent Green Party presidential candidate, said today that the resignation of Lisa Jackson as head of the Environmental Protection Agency underscores the resistance of the Obama administration to dealing with climate change and the environment.
Gore Went to Bat for Al Jazeera, and Himself, in Current TV Deal - NYTimes.com“We were not allowed to the table,” [Glenn Beck] said. “He didn’t sell to the highest bidder. He looked for, Who do I ideologically align with?” Mr. Beck’s producer Stu Burguiere added, “The guy who was vice president of the United States and was 537 votes away from being president during 9/11 is ideologically aligned, by his own definition, with the network that Osama bin Laden went to every time he wanted to get a message out.”
Climate Change and Obesity? | [If you don't ride a bicycle, you'll cause hurricanes and get fat]You see, NCDs and Climate Change do in fact share the same causes and largely require the same solutions. Carbon-intensive and labour-conserving lifestyles; highly-processed food requiring large energy inputs; larger portions of meat and higher calorie diets; increasing air pollution…
Twitter / BigJoeBastardi: This has got to be the coldest ...This has got to be the coldest start to Jan in history in parts of Nevada. Amazing how far below normal it is.
The Dr. David Viner moment we’ve all been waiting for…a new snow record | Watts Up With That?It seems despite the sage advice from that East Anglia CRU scientist, a new record for snowfall has been set for the month of December.
An Antidote for Climate Contrarianism - NYTimes.com
I would guess a few Green readers had the experience, over the holidays, of arguing yet again about global warming with a parent or brother-in-law who thinks it’s all a big hoax. Maybe there’s some undiscovered substance in roast turkey that makes people want to pick fights around the dinner table.
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The book is dead accurate, not only presenting scientifically what we know, but also leveling with readers about what we don’t.
I bought the Kindle version of Emanuel's book, spent a few minutes skimming it, and highlighted the quotes below:
During the early part of the Eocene era, around 50 million years ago, the earth was free of ice, and giant trees grew on islands near the North Pole, where the annual mean temperature was about 60°F, far warmer than today’s mean of about 30°F.
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Even if the changes we are bringing about are larger than the globe has experienced in the last few thousand years, they are smaller than the big natural swings between ice ages and interglacial periods, which the earth and indeed human beings survived.
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My own work has shown that hurricanes are responding to warming sea surface temperatures faster than we originally expected, especially in the North Atlantic, where the total power output by tropical cyclones has nearly doubled since the 1970s. The 2005 hurricane season was the most active in the 150 years on record, corresponding to record warmth of the tropical Atlantic.
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the twin perils of flood and drought both increase substantially in a warming world.
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we should also be wary of our own collective ignorance of how the climate system works.
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we do not understand the sudden climate jumps revealed by the ice core record and are worried that similar jumps might be part of our future.
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it takes thousands of years for CO2 levels to return to normal once emissions cease.
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countries such as Russia and Canada might profit from a warmer climate.
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Climate research has been a victim of a disturbing phenomenon: the use of advanced marketing techniques to discredit scientific findings that may lead to consumer and regulatory behavior unfavorable to certain business interests.
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Most people, when it comes to their personal health, would never ignore the advice of 97 doctors in favor of three. But through the wondrous alchemy of marketing, it is possible to get some people to do just that in the realm of climate science
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As long as we continue to elect scientific illiterates such as James Inhofe, who believes global warming to be a hoax, we will be discouraged from engaging in intelligent debate at the policy level.
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The hockey-stick shape of the temperature curve over the past few thousand years has become something of an icon of anthropogenic climate change and has been strongly criticized from many quarters. But repeated reanalyses of the underlying proxy data have verified the basic shape of the temperature curve and show the last century of warming to be anomalously pronounced.
Iceland bets on oil to boost fragile economy | ReutersOSLO, Jan 4 (Reuters) - Iceland is opening its waters for exploration to energy firms, and involving the help of oil-rich Norway in the process, as it looks to make use of its energy resources and boost its fragile economy.
Sept 2012: Iceland's president weighs in on impact of rapidly disappearing Arctic ice | PRI.ORGGrimsson said he believes before the end of this decade, China will become "the leading clean energy country in the world."
"Unless Europe and the United States get their act together in the field of clean energy, the question before the end of this decade will be: when will Europe and when will the U.S. catch up with China," he added.
..."What happens to the ice in the arctic, in the Himalayas, and in Antarctica will have a profound effect on every nation, on every continent," Grimsson said. "And the melting of the ice in the last four years has been much more dramatic than anybody predicted ten years ago. And therefore, we need all to be gravely concerned about the effect and the impact of this for everybody on planet earth."
Al-Jazeera seen as using Al Gore to bolster network's legitimacy in United States | The Daily Caller[Middle East scholar Barry Rubin] said Al-Jazeera is a “radical media outlet run by people who are anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and anti-Western.”
“[I]t is an instrument of extremist revolutionary movements,” he added. “On a number of occasions it has lent itself to promote and be used by violent terrorist groups.”
Rubin said by lending his imprimatur to Al-Jazeera – and potentially personally reaping a sum of $100 million, according to reports — Gore is acting “disgracefully.”
“In former, sane, times, doing something like this would have finished Gore’s credibility forever,” Rubin said. “Needless to say, sanity has long since jumped out the window.”
Gore Takes $100 Million Of Big Oil From Anti-Semitic Al Jazeera - Investors.comMark it up as a three-fer in greedy hypocrisy for Gore. He gives anti-Semitic Islamists more influence in America, takes $100 million in cash from Big Oil (after making a lucrative living by claiming that it's destroying the planet), and gives those same greenhouse gasbags a foothold in the U.S. media.
Some Chevy dealers ceasing Volt sales due to costly toolsA recent report says that a few discontented dealers have stopped carrying the innovative sedan because General Motors is requiring a more significant investment in the near future, and the specialized costs (in excess of $5,000) aren't offset by the model's slow sales at those establishments.
The New Nostradamus of the North: New study: There will be less - not more - tropical cyclones in the futureIn spite of Sandy, the "new normal" is LESS, not more tropical storms:
A new study by Masato Sugi, Japan Agency for Marine Earth Science and Jun Yoshimura, Meteorological Research Institute of Japan, published in the Geophysical Letters (Vol 39, Issue 19), shows that the frequency of tropical storms has decreased since 1872 - and that this decrease will continue also in the future
Yes, in My Backyard: Why Richmond Should Value Its Oil Refinery — MasterResourceOil refineries transform oil, an essentially useless natural substance made largely of dead plants, into fuel and synthetic materials–into the fuel that drives a firetruck to your home, intro the hose that allows the firefighter to save your home, into the flame-retardant jacket that allows him to live to fight many more fires.
Unfortunately, our educational system does not teach the value of oil refineries.
Twitter / RichardTol: ‘Global warming is to blame’ ...‘Global warming is to blame’ for the lightning strike that killed Ian McKeever says veteran climber Pat Falvey
baggythecrust @RichardTol People used to blame the gods.
@RichardTol @baggythecrust They still do. The gods have changed names, that's all. Odin and Shiva are now called Climate Change.
A Match Made In Heaven? | Power LineIt is interesting that conservative Americans like Glenn Beck are anathema to the likes of Al Gore, whereas the rulers of Qatar, the world’s richest country, fit right in. Where, exactly, do Gore and Hyatt see ideological compatibility with al Jazeera? Do they think al Jazeera America will promote gay marriage? Or women’s rights? Or is it the fact that al Jazeera is owned by a monarchy that assures it will be “aligned with [Gore and Hyatt's] point of view?” Perhaps so.
Carbon compensation scheme may benefit companies already enjoying windfalls, say MPs - TelegraphA £250m Government scheme to help heavy industries manage the costs of green policies could “nonsensically” benefit companies that are already enjoying a “windfall” from one of the same policies, MPs have warned.
Twitter / RogerPielkeJr: Too much capital or not enough ...Too much capital or not enough disasters: Reinsurance supply and demand gap grows – Aon Benfield report
For your own good, someone else needs to decide whether you should buy a bottle of water!
Presumably selling similar bottles is just fine if some combination of artificial flavoring, sugar, and/or carbon dioxide is added. Cigarettes and hard liquor are also probably still available.Ban plastic water bottle sales? One U.S. town just did - The Globe and MailConcord, Mass., has banned the sale of single-serving plastic water bottles, the Boston Herald reports. The bylaw, posted on the Town of Concord’s website, states: “It shall be unlawful to sell non-sparkling, unflavored drinking water in single-serving polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles of 1 litre (34 ounces) or less in the Town of Concord on or after Jan. 1, 2013.”
Violators face up to a $50 (U.S.) fine, with Concord’s Health Division responsible for enforcing the ban.
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“It’s kind of dumb,” Concord resident Camille Galejs told local news organization WHDH. But how smart is it to pay through the nose for a commodity that’s practically free?
Twitter / CHedegaardEU [EU commissioner for Climate Action displays lots of cool, refreshing, illegal-to-sell-in-Concord bottled water on her Twitter page]
New paper finds another mechanism by which the Sun controls climateA paper published today in Geophysical Research Letters finds that short-term changes in solar activity over the 11 year solar cycle have a significant influence on the North Atlantic Oscillation [NAO] and Arctic Oscillation [AO]. According to the authors, "Variability in solar irradiance has been connected to changes in surface climate in the North Atlantic through both observational and climate modelling studies." Using new satellite data demonstrating that solar UV varies by a factor that is 4 to 6 times larger than typical previous estimates, the authors find a mechanism to explain the solar effect on these climate oscillations via increased production of ozone in the atmosphere. The authors conclude that these large changes in solar UV can have amplified effects on regional climate and may be useful for predicting seasonal and long term climate change in Europe.
New Year snow in South Canterbury, mid-summer New ZealandI am sure it is not unknown – Cold snap brings snow to Sth Canterbury.
Bitter People Who Cling To Fear Of Guns And Global Warming Religion | Real ScienceObama had it backwards (as always.) The bitter people are the ones who worship the false religion of global warming, and fear guns. The rest of us are having a great time.
Turn Off Your Electricity And Gas And Stop Driving Your Car, Stupid | Real ScienceAmerica is in a deep freeze and fossil fuels are keeping millions of people alive. McKitten is all excited at the idea of cutting off everybody else from this essential commodity.
Bill should travel on wind powered aircraft and tweet on a wood-burning Internet.
Kyoto Has Saved The World! « sunshine hoursLets connect the dots. Warming stopped in 1997. Kyoto was adopted in 1997. CO2 is up 58%. Signing the Kyoto has stopped global warming. More CO2 is irrelevant. The very act of creating a treaty stopped the warming.
I'm sure that if Trenberth finds that any of his prize dollars came from the oil industry, he'll refuse the prize. He'll also probably refuse to travel to Riyadh for the awards ceremony unless he can do so without burning any fossil fuel.
Climate Communication | Science Advisor Kevin Trenberth Wins Surface Water Prize
A team led by Dr. Kevin Trenberth has been awarded the Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Surface Water. The prize is awarded for “ground-breaking work that provides a powerful estimate of the effects of climate change on the global hydrological cycle, with a clear explanation of the global water budget.”
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The awards ceremony will be held in Riyadh on 6 January 2013,
Current Award (6th) 2014
[I think Trenberth's team won the 2013 prize--I don't know the dollar value] Each of the four Specialized prizes is worth US$ 133,000. Researchers, research teams, and organizations nominate themselves for these Prizes:
Geoscientists sail to Antarctica to study plate tectonics, glaciology and climate change
Dr. Richard Alley is a professor of glaciology from Pennsylvania State. “Carbon dioxide is the biggest control knob on the global warming dial,” said Alley who described how geoscientists use satellites and other geophysical tools to measure the changing thickness of Antarctica’s ice sheets, with an accuracy of “one-third of a potato chip.” [Hey Richard: How do you manage such astounding accuracy when you don't always know where the ice ends and the land begins? Are you just assuming that the land down there somewhere below the ice isn't rising or falling?]
July 2012: 'Grand Canyon' Discovered Beneath Antarctic Ice : Discovery News
During a surveying trip across Antarctica, scientists discovered a rift six miles across and a mile deep.
So what is the size of the carbon dioxide control knob, and what are the relative sizes of the next 100 biggest control knobs?
Making Sense of the Science Wars : Collide-a-ScapeDS: I don’t take a dim view of mixing science and politics at all. I take a dim view of pretending that you’re not mixing them when you really are. I’m a Democrat, probably far left of much of the party, and I think it’s great for scientists to participate in politics. Just like it’s great for other citizens. What I don’t think is that one can legitimately hide behind one’s identity as a scientist in taking a position that is fundamentally a political one.
NASA - Snow-Covered DesertSnow-covered deserts are rare, but that’s exactly what the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite observed as it passed over the Taklimakan Desert in western China on Jan. 2, 2013. Snow has covered much of the desert since a storm blew through the area on Dec. 26. The day after the storm, Chinese Central Television (CNTV) reported that the Xinjian Uygyr autonomous region was one of the areas hardest hit.
The Taklimakan is one of the world’s largest—and hottest—sandy deserts.
Al-Jazeera buys Current TVIt’s the story that gets funnier and funnier as each new detail is revealed
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Current rejected a buyout offer from Glenn Beck, on the grounds that “the legacy of who the network goes to is important to us, and we are sensitive to networks not aligned with our point of view.” But they were cool with the idea of selling to Al-Jazeera. Not cool with the idea: Time Warner Cable, which swiftly announced it would not carry the new network.
...the Pope of Global Warming just lined his pockets with $100 million of… oil money.
Less than half of the new “Al-Jazeera America” channel’s programming will be produced in the United States, which means Bill Clinton’s Vice-President just outsourced a bunch of jobs to a foreign company.
And the deal had to be completed in a hurry… because Al Gore wanted to avoid Barack Obama’s tax increases.
Carbon tax unpopular, Environment Canada discoversOne of the questions gauged perceptions of a carbon tax by asking respondents how strongly they agreed or disagreed with the following statement, on a scale from one to 10:
"Canada needs to implement a federal carbon tax to promote energy efficiency and protect the environment, even though it means increasing the cost of things like gas and groceries for consumers," the statement read.
The results showed 43.5 per cent of respondents leaned toward the "strongly disagree" end of the spectrum, 19.1 per cent were on the "strongly agree" end and the rest fell somewhere in between.
Bitter cold grips northern New England - Times UnionThe temperatures fell far below zero on Wednesday night. The National Weather Service says some locations in northern New Hampshire and Maine fell to 20 degrees below zero overnight as arctic high pressure was centered over the region.
India Bone-Chilling Cold Weather Surprises Northern Parts Without Heating Systems | The Guardian ExpressCall it Global Warming, Climate Change or just a historical anomaly, India’s recent bone-chilling cold weather wave has caught many residents in the north without adequate central heating systems.
Experts and officials alike are viewing events as coldest winter in a generation.
Bay Area cold snap drives homeless indoors | www.ktvu.comLIVERMORE, Calif. — The new year is starting off with a cold snap in the Bay Area and freezing temperatures are beginning to take a toll on pipes, plants and people.
Record cold snap grips Korean Peninsula | YONHAP NEWSSEOUL, Jan. 3 (Yonhap) -- A prolonged cold spell sent the mercury plummeting nationwide on Thursday, with temperatures dropping to their lowest levels in decades, the country's weather agency said.
The South Korean capital city of Seoul recorded a temperature of minus 16.5 C in the morning, the lowest in 27 years since a minus 16.9 C was recorded in 1986, the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) said.
Mercury drops to record low in much of China|Holiday China|chinadaily.com.cnPeople in many parts of China welcomed the new year in record-low temperatures, and the cold weather is expected to move farther south, the National Meteorological Center said on Wednesday.
...The winter in northern and northeastern China is the coldest in the past 27 years, the administration said.
Left Hand: UK to face Drought until 2013: Right Hand: Extreme rainfall increasing! | Climate RealistsDuring April 2012 the UK Environment Agency warned of an impending drought to hit 32 million people in the UK and it would last until 2013.
Today in a report from Roger Harrabin at the BBC the Met Office have now made a startling analysis:
"The frequency of extreme rainfall in the UK may be increasing, according to analysis by the Met Office. Statistics show that days of particularly heavy rainfall have become more common since 1960
You have to then ask what data was used in April last year with the Environment Agency/Met Office, did they not also have the same trend or data set from 1960?
Carbon traders deliver record activity during 2012, but market value plummets - 03 Jan 2013 - News from BusinessGreenThe value of the global carbon market contracted for the first time last year, according to new figures from Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) that show market activity only reached €61bn in 2012, a decline of more than a third on the previous year.
Twitter / [Gavin Schmidt]MT agreed. This is never even defined. : CAGW theory exists only in the minds of climate contrarians
Flashback: July 18, 2007: Is this the single most insane thing that fraudster Al Gore ever said?Starting around the 13:20 mark in the audio below, Gore argues that trace amounts of CO2 could "absolutely" lead to the "complete collapse of human civilization".
Flashback: Hansen stands by coal train/death train analogy | ThinkProgressIn his final testimony submitted to the Iowa Utilities Board on the proposed coal-fired power plant in Iowa, NASA’s James Hansen used a very provocative metaphor about the trains that deliver coal:
If we cannot stop the building of more coal-fired power plants, those coal trains will be death trains — no less gruesome than if they were boxcars headed to crematoria, loaded with uncountable irreplaceable species.
Wind farms vs wildlife » The SpectatorWind turbines only last for ‘half as long as previously thought’, according to a new study. But even in their short lifespans, those turbines can do a lot of damage. Wind farms are devastating populations of rare birds and bats across the world, driving some to the point of extinction. Most environmentalists just don’t want to know. Because they’re so desperate to believe in renewable energy, they’re in a state of denial. But the evidence suggests that, this century at least, renewables pose a far greater threat to wildlife than climate change.
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