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Arctic freeze and snow wreak havoc across the planet Snowfall in Kufri, India Arctic air and record snow falls gripped the northern hemisphere today, inflicting hardship and havoc from China, across Russia to Western Europe and over the US plains. There were few precedents for the global sweep of extreme cold and ice that killed dozens in India, paralysed life in Beijing and threatened the Florida orange crop. Chicagoans sheltered from a potentially killer freeze, Paris endured sunny Siberian cold, Italy dug itself out of snowdrifts and Poland counted at least 13 deaths in record low temperatures of about minus...

The Watts Up With That website has a scary story about our melting polar ice caps. John Lockwood from Washington D.C. found an interesting article from the Washington Post. Here are some excerpts: The Arctic seems to be warming up. Reports ... all point to a radical change in climatic conditions, and hitherto unheard of high temperatures in that part of the earth's surface. Ice conditions were exceptional. In fact, so little ice has never before been noted. Dr. Hoel reports that he made a section of the Gulf Stream at 81 degrees north latitude and took soundings to a...

World leaders participated in a scandalous conference in Copenhagen. Officially it was Conference of the Parties (COP) 15 to monitor progress on climate change begun in 1995 at COP 1 in Berlin. They’ve consistently and blindly accepted the false claim human CO2 is causing climate change. COP 3 produced the Kyoto Accord to punish developed nations and redistribute wealth. It’s due to expire in 2012 and COP 15 was to keep the process going. Few supported it more than Obama so he had to salvage the process. Don’t Confuse Me With Facts World leaders pursued policies while refusing to understand...

A downtown protest of the climate change talks in Copenhagen became a victim of Wednesday's snowstorm. "Not many people showed up because of the blizzard conditions," said organizer Clea Major, an international studies student at the University of Utah. It didn't take long for the six friends to pack up a bullhorn and posters they'd planned to use for their "scream-in," an outlet for their frustration about the failure of the Copenhagen climate talks earlier this month to curb the pollution blamed for climate change.

Remember that Roger Revelle, Al Gore's mentor, originated the CO2-to-Global Warming theory, and later RETRACTED IT! Al Gore then called him senile! Watch the John Coleman video and bring this up when you talk with "AGW Believers."

The battle over the science of global warming has long been a street fight between mainstream researchers and skeptics. But never have the scientists received such a deep wound as when, in late November, a large trove of e-mails and documents stolen from the Climatic Research Unit at Britain's University of East Anglia were released onto the Web. In the ensuing "Climategate" scandal, scientists were accused of withholding information, suppressing dissent, manipulating data and more. But while the controversy has receded, it may have done lasting damage to science's reputation: Last month, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 40...

ScienceDaily (Dec. 31, 2009) — Most of the carbon dioxide emitted by human activity does not remain in the atmosphere, but is instead absorbed by the oceans and terrestrial ecosystems. In fact, only about 45 percent of emitted carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere.

It could take less of the greenhouse gas to reach a particular level of warming. Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels may have been lower in warm eras of the Earth's distant past than once believed, scientists reported this week. The finding raises concern that carbon dioxide levels from fossil fuel burning may, in the near future, be closer to those associated with ancient hothouse climates. More immediately, the work brings one line of palaeoclimate evidence — that deduced from ancient soils — into agreement with other techniques for studying past climate. "It makes a major revision to one of the most...

Agriculture: Already buffeted by rising food prices due to biofuels, consumers face a bigger hike if climate-change legislation is passed. Farming costs will rise, and it may be more profitable to plant trees than crops. If the cap-and-trade provisions of the Waxman-Markey bill become law, you can wave goodbye to those amber waves of grain as America's heartland falls victim to a perverse set of incentives and a process called "afforestation." Soybeans and wheat will give way to elms and oaks. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack wants a review of what amounts to an agricultural impact study of HR 2454, which...

THE Copenhagen climate change summit closed two weeks ago in confusion, disagreement and, for some, disillusionment. When the political process shows such a lack of unanimity, it is pertinent to ask whether the science behind the politics is as settled as some participants maintain. Earlier this month (The Australian, December 9) I commented on recently published results showing huge swings in atmospheric carbon dioxide, both up and down, at a time of global cooling 33.6 million years ago. Paul Pearson and co-authors in a letter (The Weekend Australian, December 11) took exception to my use of their data and claimed...

29 12 2009 This new French carbon tax was scheduled to go into law on Jan1, 2010. The tax was steep: 17 euros per ton of carbon dioxide (USD $24.40). In a stunning move, and surely a blow to warmists everywhere, the tax has been found unconstitutional and thrown out. Originally found here (Google Translation). Lord Monckton was kind enough to assist me in deciphering the meaning of the ruling and writes: In France, if at least 60 Deputies of the House and 60 Senators appeal to the Constitutional Council, it has the power to pronounce on the constitutionality of...

Senate Democrats will face a problem when they return in January every bit as tough as crafting the healthcare bill: Assembling a climate and energy package that can be shoehorned into the election-year calendar. Imposing limits on greenhouse gases is a White House and Democratic priority, but it’s stuck in line behind health care, Wall Street reform and jobs legislation. It’s also become increasingly apparent since the Copenhagen climate summit that the Senate will go forward in a dramatically different direction than the House, which approved its own climate bill last summer. Environmentalists familiar with Democratic plans say party leaders...

Today is my last day as a staff reporter for The New York Times. After spending more than a quarter of a century writing about science and the environment, more than half of that time here, I am switching gears for the second half of my professional life. I’ll be continuing to blog, write and work with video. And I’ll certainly keep contributing to this remarkable newspaper as it works to sustain a reliable view of the fast-changing planet while straddling the uncertain interface between the front page and home page. But my prime focus now will be education and...

Check this entry: Naughty: Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), a vacuum for oil industry political contributions whose nonsensical denials of climate-change science in the face of vanishing ice sheets and decaying coral reefs make him Earth's Public Enemy No. 1. Nice: Sens. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), who are working diligently to craft a bipartisan climate bill despite obstructionism from the likes of Inhofe.

It is crucial that scientists are factually accurate when they do speak out, that they ignore media hype and maintain a clinical detachment from social or other agendas. There are facts and data that are ignored in the maelstrom of social and economic agendas swirling about Copenhagen. Greenhouse gases and their effects are well-known. Here are some of things we know: • The most effective greenhouse gas is water vapor, comprising approximately 95 percent of the total greenhouse effect. • Carbon dioxide concentration has been continually rising for nearly 100 years. It continues to rise, but carbon dioxide concentrations at...

I found this on one of the blogs I read ( The Energy Collective). Richard Alley is a noted glaciologist, at Penn State, peripherally associated with Michael Mann. Feel free to ignore this if that bugs you. In the lecture, he explains how CO2 is linked to climate throughout paleohistory -- feel free to ignore that if it bugs you, too. The science is true if it bugs you or not. He pokes fun of climate change skeptics -- another reason to ignore this. I.e., it will take people with a real interest in the subject, who don't care about...

At face value, it seems harmless enough. According to ABC "Good Morning America" co-host Robin Roberts, every Christmas the show features various "spiritual leaders" to talk about the role of faith in their lives. And this year's Christmas Day broadcast was no exception. "And now, it is a ‘GMA' tradition on Christmas Day, to talk about the role of faith in all of our lives," Roberts said. "We gathered a group of spiritual leaders from different traditions to talk about the importance of belief, in good times and belief in bad times, too." Roberts' panel featured Father Edward Beck, an...

Climate Change: A peer-reviewed study by a respected Canadian physicist blames the interplay of cosmic rays and chlorofluorocarbons for 20th-century warming. The CFCs are now gone, and so is warming — perhaps for the next 50 years. Much of the nation got a white Christmas this year, some in unprecedented quantities. A record-breaking storm deposited 12 to 30 inches of snow in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C. Many places set records for the most snow in a single December day as more than 50% of the U.S. was covered by the white stuff. Scientists (and here we use the word...

The global warming jamboree in Copenhagen was surely the most outlandish foray into intellectual fantasizing since the fourth-century Christian bishops assembled in 325 AD for the Council of Nicaea to debate whether God the Father was supreme or had to share equal status in the pecking order of eternity with his Son and the Holy Ghost. Shortly before the Copenhagen summit, the proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) were embarrassed by a whistleblower who put on the Web more than a thousand e-mails either sent from or received at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, headed by Dr....

When Will Global Warming Expert Al Gore Stop Eating Animal Flesh? TO PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA, ALL UNITED STATES SENATORS AND REPRESENTATIVES AND AL GORE!! YOU MUST HAVE 20/20 VISION IN 2010 Together you have the power and worldwide influence to save the lives of billions of animals, subsequently creating a multitude of everlasting monumental benefits for humans, the earth, and the earth’s atmosphere. Together your revolutionary profound efforts could be responsible for shutting down most or all animal factory farms and slaughterhouses in the world. Carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide together cause the vast majority of global warming. Raising...

The climate campaign, built step-by-step over the last 20 years, has reached its Waterloo. The Copenhagen conference that ended Friday was an exercise in political theater. It not only failed to produce a binding agreement, but the potential emissions curbs it endorsed fall far below what climate orthodoxy demands, while the proposed wealth transfer from rich nations to poor nations is a political nonstarter. Back home, cap and trade legislation remains on life support, even though it has been significantly watered down so as to postpone real costs to consumers for a decade or more. In the midst of this...

One to 3 feet of snow fell in the western Plains yesterday, while up to 1/2 inch of freezing rain fell in the central Plains. The precipitation was in response to a potent upper low in the Southern Plains and an associated surface low, which caused upslope flow conditions. The heaviest snowfall amounts were observed in the Colorado Front Range and in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of New Mexico. Strong surface winds in these areas caused much blowing and drifting snow. Most of the snowpack across the West and western Plains is cool, with cold conditions at the lower...

Do As I Say proves that Al Gore is a phony and a fraud that does not practice what he preaches, as well as uncovering blatant hypocrisy and double standards of so many other leading liberals. Al Gore won a Nobel Prize and an Oscar warning us about the catastrophe we will cause if we don't reduce our carbon footprints - but he travels the world in his private jet and racks up $30,000 in energy bills every year at his Nashville mansion. Al Gore parades around the globe condemning humans for causing global warming and destroying the earth. He...

The best summation of the UN climate circus in Denmark comes from Andrew Bolt of Australia's Herald Sun: "Nothing is real in Copenhagen – not the temperature record, not the predictions, not the agenda, not the 'solution'." Just so. Reuters, for example, carried a moving account of the speech by Ian Fry, lead negotiator for Tuvalu, the beleaguered Pacific island nation soon to be under water because of a planet-devastating combination of your SUV and unsustainable bovine flatulence from Vermont farms.

Russian analysts accuse Britain’s Meteorological Office of cherry-picking Russian temperature data to “hide the decline” in global temperatures. Is Copenhagen rooted in a single tree in Siberia? Michael Mann, a Penn State meteorologist, wrote in Friday’s Washington Post that “stolen” e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit still don’t alter the evidence for climate change. Mann, a creator of the discredited hockey-stick graph used in reports from the U.N.‘s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to show man-made warming, attacks climate skeptics, including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, saying they “confuse the public.”

Everyone readily admits that things aren’t always what they seem. But are we really applying this knowledge in our daily dealings? Are we consciously ferreting out the illusory from the reality? I think not. For instance, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we aren’t really being run by pandering politicians, self-serving lobbyists, fanatical environmentalists, and greedy Wall Street manipulators. They are the illusion. There is another even more powerful (but much less visible) agent behind all of these puppets. The person behind the screen is the computer programmer. And, just like in the Wizard of OZ, they do not want...

Back in the days when war was a form of romance, there was a tactic called the "forlorn hope". When an army reached the end of its string while laying siege to a fortress or walled city, a single unit of several hundred men would be selected for a final attempt at overcoming the walls. Artillery would fire one last series of rounds to make a breach, and the forlorn hope would make its mad dash toward the walls, to try to overcome through muscle and will what months of patient strategy had failed to do. As for the level...

The Northeast began digging out on Sunday from a massive snowstorm that buried cities from Washington to Boston under as much as 2 feet of snow, creating travel chaos and hampering Christmas shopping.Nearly 2 feet of snow piled up in the Baltimore-Washington area on Saturday in the largest snowstorm to hit the region since February 2003, while New York City saw totals of up to a foot before the monster storm churned into New England. Boston, Cape Cod and southeastern Massachusetts areas saw as much as 2 feet of snow before the storm moved out to sea. Areas of eastern...

I am not a historian or a statistician. Nonetheless I had been skimming Climate Audit for a couple of years and knew enough to write, in January 2009, "Michael Mann should be in prison." I continue to enthusiastically endorse this view. I also do know a bit about the past. And the past has sent me its report on Climategate. It is a short message - quite pithy - full of punch. I transcribed it this week from my favorite Ouija board. At the planchette: me and my 2-year-old daughter, Sibyl. After data corrections, the text reads: Your entire system...

“(…) the spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.” — P.B. Medawar So what’s next? A series of essays by Sarah Palin about the Large Hadron Collider and the mysteries of dark matter? An MIT lecture series by Rush Limbaugh regarding the thermodynamics of black holes? A Festschrift of Sean Hannity’s scholarly articles on plate tectonics and volcano formation? Glenn Beck performing live heart-lung transplants on Fox News? Everybody understands that these things couldn’t...

Oh the humanity! Lumumba Di-Aping, chief negotiator for the G77 group of 130 developing countries, said the deal had "the lowest level of ambition you can imagine. It's nothing short of climate change scepticism in action. It locks countries into a cycle of poverty for ever. Obama has eliminated any difference between him and Bush." John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK, said: "The city of Copenhagen is a crime scene tonight, with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport. Ed Miliband [UK climate change secretary] is among the very few that come out of this summit with...

Who is Sarah Palin? Her vice presidential nomination acceptance speech in 2008 was written by Republican Party speechwriter Matthew Scully. In the subsequent campaign, her op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal on Sept. 9 was plagiarized from a McCain speech given nearly six months earlier (spokesperson Ashley Huston said the Journal would "decline comment" when I questioned her). Palin's autobiography, "Going Rogue" was penned by ghostwriter Lynn Vincent. So how should an audience assess this week's Washington Post op-ed with Palin's byline? In view of this history of words ascribed to Palin being written by someone else, it remains...

WASHINGTON — It was almost unthinkable. The president of the United States walked into a meeting of fellow world leaders and there wasn't a chair for him, a sure sign he was not expected, maybe not even wanted. Barack Obama didn't pause, however. "I'm going to sit by my friend Lula," he said, moving toward Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. A Brazilian aide gave the U.S. president his chair, and Obama spent the next 80 minutes helping craft new requirements for disclosing efforts to fight global warming. Along with India, South Africa and Brazil, the key member in...

In a late night posting on her Twitter feed, Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin continued to blast climate change believers Friday, calling the talks in Copenhagen, Denmark a representation of man's "arrogance," for believing people have an impact on nature. "Arrogant&Naive2say man overpwers nature," Palin tweeted. "Earth saw clmate chnge4 ions;will cont 2 c chnges.R duty2responsbly devlop resorces4humankind/not pollute&destroy;but cant alter naturl chng," the former Republican vice presidential nominee wrote. Palin's latest comments come after weeks of tangling over climate change with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, former vice president Al Gore, and President Obama. In an op-ed in the Washington...

People in sunny, outdoorsy states — Louisiana, Hawaii, Florida — say they're the happiest Americans, and researchers think they know why. The happiness ratings were based on a survey of 1.3 million people across the country by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It used data collected over four years that included a question asking people how satisfied they are with their lives. Economists Andrew J. Oswald of the University of Warwick in England and Stephen Wu of Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., compared the happiness ranking with studies that rated states on a variety of criteria ranging from...

The Heritage Foundation’s Steven Groves and Ben Lieberman are live at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference reporting from a conservative perspective. Follow their reports on The Foundry and at the Copenhagen Consequences Web site.“Collapsing in chaos” is a phrase the media is using to describe the Copenhagen climate conference, and that certainly is the feeling among many here at the Bella Center. Little has gone right, and indeed many registered participants were never even let in. The Danish minister in charge has resigned. Now, those of us who managed to make it in may get turned away for the crucial...

An Irish company, Steorn, today began public demonstrations of an ‘over-unity’ device powered by rotating magnets. Developed over a six year period, the Orbo technology provides a new energy source to power electrical devices and cars. It is claimed to produce more energy than it consumes at a ratio of 3:1, which has led to considerable skepticism from the scientific community. In a Press Release, Steorn announced a six week period for public examination and evaluation in Dublin Ireland from December 15 to January 31, 2010. Plans exist to develop the Orbo technology for commercial production and distribution. If the...

An Edina woman in Copenhagen for the U.N. climate conference as part of a youth group joined 30 others in shaving their heads outside the conference center on Friday, the last scheduled day of the gathering. Valida Prentice, 24, who traveled to Copenhagen two weeks ago as an accredited observer, and the others each held a sign outside the conference center that explained why they made this symbolic gesture. "Shaving my head can symbolize a lot," Prentice said in a prepared statement, "the ugly negotiating process, the bad decisions made by negotiators, or the catastrophic changes that unabated climate change...

Global Warming: Russian analysts accuse Britain's Meteorological Office of cherry-picking Russian temperature data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures. Is Copenhagen rooted in a single tree in Siberia? Michael Mann, a Penn State meteorologist, wrote in Friday's Washington Post that "stolen" e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit still don't alter the evidence for climate change. Mann, a creator of the discredited hockey-stick graph used in reports from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to show man-made warming, attacks climate skeptics, including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, saying they "confuse the public." Chutzpah has been...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Sen. Lindsey Graham makes an unlikely champion for action on climate change. The South Carolina Republican has joined forces with Democrat John Kerry of Massachusetts and independent Joe Lieberman of Connecticut to drum up support for a bill that would put a price on heat-trapping pollution. Graham's position has irked just about everybody. (snip) Q: How did you get involved in this issue? A: It was a slow evolution. I started traveling with Sen. (John) McCain, who has been a climate change advocate for a long time, and I went to the Arctic region with him and...

This week, the nations of the world are wrapping up a massive global conference on climate change in Copenhagen, Denmark. During the opening ceremony, a powerful video was presented to the conference delegates. In it, a young girl has a horrifying nightmare. In her dream, she awakes to a dusty, deserted, barren wasteland. As she explores, she comes upon an abandoned swing set. Suddenly, the ground cracks beneath her feet. She drops her stuffed animal as she sprints from a burgeoning earthquake, only to turn and see the sky covered in darkness, and a swirling tornado heading her way. She...

Earth's Polar Ice Sheets Vulnerable to Even Moderate Global Warming; New Orleans, Much of Southern Florida, Expected to Be Permanently Submerged ScienceDaily (Dec. 18, 2009) — A new analysis of the geological record of the Earth's sea level, carried out by scientists at Princeton and Harvard universities and published in the Dec. 16 issue of Nature, employs a novel statistical approach that reveals the planet's polar ice sheets are vulnerable to large-scale melting even under moderate global warming scenarios. Such melting would lead to a large and relatively rapid rise in global sea level. According to the analysis, an additional...

Russia confirms that the global warming scientists excluded temperature data provided to them from over 40% of Russian territory.

Oh, where, oh where have all the sunspots gone? The fiery orange ball overhead has quieted during the past three years. Quiet in the sense that there have been very few sunspots – those black blotches on the sun’s surface caused by intense magnetic activity. But just how quiet is quiet? Well, so far during the recent solar minimum (a period of low activity during the sun’s typical 11-year solar cycle), we’ve seen 183 sun-spotless days in 2007, 266 in 2008 and 259 in 2009 (as of Dec. 16 2009). Earth hasn’t witnessed a similar three-year stretch (1911, 192, 1913)...

Bolivian President Evo Morales on Thursday proposed a world referendum on climate change during his speech at the 15th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change that is underway in Copenhagen, Denmark. Speaking to the plenary of the summit, Morales said that discussing the effects of global warming and not the causes is hypocritical. Prensa Latina news agency reports that the new initiative of the Bolivian leader includes five questions that all citizens of the world should answer to determine the steps that governments should take. The questions suggested by Evo Morales are the...

Climategate just got much, much bigger. And all thanks to the Russians who, with perfect timing, dropped this bombshell just as the world’s leaders are gathering in Copenhagen to discuss ways of carbon-taxing us all back to the dark ages. Feast your eyes on this news release from Rionovosta, via the Ria Novosti agency, posted on Icecap. (Hat Tip: Richard North) A discussion of the November 2009 Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident, referred to by some sources as “Climategate,” continues against the backdrop of the abortive UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen (COP15) discussing alternative agreements to replace the 1997...

The Obama administration’s EPA ruling is an attempt to force Congress’s hand.Typically, when a law is passed or a regulation proposed, its champions believe that the action will be beneficial to society. But that’s not the case when it comes to steps that the Obama administration took last week, when Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson issued an “endangerment” finding that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide are harmful pollutants and therefore subject to EPA regulation under the Clean Air Act. Jackson issued the finding largely because the Obama team believes—or at least thinks that Congress believes—that EPA regulation of CO2...

THEME: Preserving Environment: Islamic Order "Introduction Whether we realize or not the environmental damage and pollution produced by humans, disrupt the natural balance of the earth. This slowly threatens the life of creatures on this earth. If the issue persists, it will be disastrous. This calls for good natural resource management based on the teachings of Islam. The main objective of this seminar is to sustain the nature which will benefit mankind and future generations." (UNISSA) Call for papers.

Leadership: Alaska's ex-governor asks a question we'd like answered: Why is California's current governor pushing the same policies in Copenhagen that helped drive his state into record deficits and unemployment? The movie series that made Arnold Schwarzenegger a household name involved cyborgs traveling through time to alternately try to destroy or save one John Connor, who would grow up to be the leader of the resistance against a race of machines that ruled the planet. Prominent in the series was his tough cookie of a mom, Sarah Connor. Another Sarah has taken the lead in another resistance against another group...

When President Obama shows up in Copenhagen to take part in the greatest fraud perpetrated worldwide in the modern era, there is only one thing you need to know. It is all a lie. It was a lie from the first moment a scientist like James Hansen told Congress on June 23, 1988 that the planet was going to be roasted by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and it was a lie when Al Gore wrote "Earth in the Balance" and there were still more lies in his Oscar-winning documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth."A British court banned the documentary from being...