Free Republic

  Al Gore Al Gore deserves an Oscar for hypocrisy to go along with the two Academy Awards his movie won last night, contends a think tank from his home state Tennessee. The former vice president's mansion in the posh Belle Meade area of Nashville consumes more electricity every month than the average American household uses in an entire year, says the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, citing data from the Nashville Electric Service. Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth, a 95-minute film warning of a coming cataclysm due to man-made "global warming," won the award for best documentary feature and best...

Skeptics are winning: “The carbon market is dead” The collapse of the Man-Made Myth continues apace. You may not read headlines as such (at least not in major dailies) but all the signs are there.People who we never would have imagined speaking against the Big Scare Campaign are now doing so. Key glaciers are not melting and corals are happy. Governments won’t tell you it’s over, but they are behaving that way (the Australian one excepted, due to an election fluke that gave the Greens the balance of power). The Catholic Herald headlined it: Is the ‘anthropogenic global warming’ consensus...

As the European cold front is about to enter its third week, the Danube River and Black Sea have frozen over in many countries, with La Repubblica reporting that 420 have died across Europe. ... The Black Sea waters around the Ukrainian port city of Odessa were completely frozen for the first time since 1977, and Ukrainian ports will remain closed until at least Feb. 15. Russia's Novorossiysk port, usually an ice-free port all year round, was closed for two days last week because of ice. In the Romanian Black Sea port of Constanța, the waters were frozen for up...

taking the Obama administration to task over the forthcoming decision to pull the plug on the U.S.-Canadian oil pipeline: Newt Gingrich, who frequently talks about the Keystone Pipeline in his stump speech, railed on the news that President Obama is rejecting the permit. Speaking to a standing-room only crowd of about 350 people in Warrenville, S.C., “boos” erupted when Gingrich said the pipeline had been “vetoed.” “Now, this is a stunningly,” Gingrich began until he was interuppted by a crowd members shouting “stupid mistake.” After pausing for a moment Gingrich responded, “This is a stunningly stupid thing to do.”

China's biggest airlines warned on Thursday they will refuse to pay a new EU tax aimed at cutting carbon emissions. Beijing said it has deep concerns over the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which came into force on New year's Day and demands all airlines pay a green duty to offset carbon emissions. "China opposes the European Union's unilateral legislation. China has expressed to the EU our deep concern and opposition many times on a bilateral level," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said. … "The CATA, on behalf of Chinese airlines, is strongly against the EU's improper practice of...

Former Cuban leader Fidel Castro said on Thursday the world was on an "inexorable march toward the abyss," which he blamed in part on the discovery and exploitation of vast reserves of so-called "shale gas" around the world. Shale gas is natural gas locked in rock formations that in the past decade has been found in great abundance around the world and is now considered a top source of future energy. Castro, 85, wrote in one of his occasional columns published in Cuban state media that "numerous dangers threaten us, but two of them—nuclear war and climate change—are decisive and...

Report says global climate deal hinges on Obama reelectionBy Ben Geman - 01/05/12 11:55 AM ET Prospects for striking a binding global climate deal by 2015 are probably toast if President Obama loses in November. That’s among the conclusions in a wide-ranging, new climate and green energy outlook from banking giant HSBC’s research branch. A major outcome from the United Nations climate talks in December was a plan to craft a deal by 2015 — one that would include big, developing nations such as China — and have it come into force by 2020. But Obama’s main Republican White House...

This guy (Headmaster Rob Benzie) has become Scrooge in England, except he doesn’t provide even one lump of coal, because, well that would mess up his “carbon footprint”. This is just too bizarre not to pass on, thanks to The Daily Bayonet who writes: A headmaster at a British school decided a great lesson in sustainability would be to turn off the heat for a day. In December: Pupils at Ansford Academy in Castle Cary, Somerset, were forced to grip their pens through thick gloves and wear their coats and hats in class as temperatures dropped to 1C. The school’s...

Representatives from nearly 200 countries are gathering in Durban, South Africa, to negotiate strategies for dealing with climate change, including how to extend the soon-to-expire Kyoto Protocol. Efforts to negotiate a successor to the Kyoto pact, which committed industrialized nations to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by a set amount by 2012, have been on hold since the failure of the climate conference in Copenhagen two years ago. Previous debates have focused on how to balance the responsibilities of developed nations with those of emerging and still-developing countries, and few believe this conference, which begins Monday, will result in a new...

California plan(s) to launch their long-promised cap and trade program to fight global warming starting tomorrow (Oct. 20, 2011). (Not coincidentally) Tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal will include these two headlines that are up already online: Japan Reconsiders Plan to Cut Carbon Emissions And, EU Weighs Pullback on Cutting Emissions

There seems little possibility that next month's climate summit in Durban will produce an emissions reduction agreement -- meaning the world will soon lack any binding CO2 targets. Europe may soon find itself alone in the fight against global warming. A climate catastrophe descended on the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin early last week. Politicians and diplomats from around the world were attending a conference to discuss how global warming will affect the world. They examined scenarios depicting how millions of people living in coastal areas could escape flooding, what will happen to the fishing and mineral rights of island...

Depopulation of Americas may have cooled climate MINNEAPOLIS — By sailing to the New World, Christopher Columbus and the other explorers who followed may have set off a chain of events that cooled Europe’s climate for centuries. The European conquest of the Americas decimated the people living there, leaving large areas of cleared land untended. Trees that filled in this territory pulled billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, diminishing the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere and cooling climate, says Richard Nevle, a geochemist at Stanford University. “We have a massive reforestation event that’s sequestering carbon … coincident...

Earth's temperatures will likely stabilize for a period as deep ocean waters absorb enough heat to mask the effects of global warming for up to a decade, a new study indicates. Earth's "missing heat" has long been a mystery for climate scientists as the last decade saw an incessant growth in greenhouse gas emissions did not elevate surface temperature as much as expected. The joint U.S.-Australian study, based on computer simulations of global climate, points to ocean layers deeper than 1,000 feet (300 meters) as the main location of the "missing heat" during periods such as the past decade when...

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...

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...

The climate change summit in Copenhagen was in jeopardy tonight with the complex negotiations falling far behind schedule as the climate secretary, Ed Miliband, warned of a "farce". With just two days remaining, the inability to overcome disagreements about the shape of a deal to combat global warming led to hours of inaction today , while outside the negotiations police clashed with protesters who broke through a security cordon but failed in an attempt to storm the conference centre. "We have made no progress" said a source close to the talks. "What people don't realise is that we are now...

Walkout heightens failure fears for climate marathon2009-12-14 COPENHAGEN (AFP) - Negotiators worked through the night Tuesday to prevent a UN climate summit from ending in catastrophic failure after developing nations staged a five-hour walkout and China accused the West of trickery. As the White House said Barack Obama wants a deal that imposes "meaningful steps" to combat global warming, ministers admitted they had to start making giant strides before 120 heads of state arrived for the summit's climax Friday. But their hopes were hit when Africa led a boycott by developing nations of working groups, only returning after securing guarantees...

Junk Science: The Environmental Protection Agency's sneak attack on the U.S. economy and our freedoms, curiously timed for the opening day of the Copenhagen climate charade, won't go unchallenged. Nor should it. (snip) EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, in a conversation with Sen. James Inhofe, ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, has in effect admitted the finding was based on the junk science and data manipulation practiced at Britain's East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU). "She told me that EPA accepted those findings without any serious independent analysis to see whether they were true," Inhofe said. Dr....

Climate Chief Dismisses E-Mail Outrage By Hilary Whiteman, CNN December 8, 2009 (Video) IPCC chairman talks to CNNSTORY HIGHLIGHTS (CNN) -- One of the world's leading authorities on climate change has dismissed the contents of controversial e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia as nothing more than friends and colleagues "letting off steam." "Well, I can tell you, privately when I talk to my friends, I use language much worse than that. This was purely private communications between friends, between, colleagues, they were letting off steam. I think we should see it as nothing more than that," Rajendra Pachauri,...

The UN Copenhagen climate talks are in disarray today after developing countries reacted furiously to leaked documents that show world leaders will next week be asked to sign an agreement that hands more power to rich countries and sidelines the UN's role in all future climate change negotiations.

What's become known as "Climategate" may be about to explode on this side of the pond as well. Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has threatened a lawsuit against NASA if by year-end the agency doesn't honor his Freedom of Information (FOI) requests for information on how and why its climate numbers have been consistently adjusted for errors. "I assume that what is there is highly damaging," says Horner, who suspects, based on the public record, the same type of data fudging, manipulation and suppression that has occurred at Britain's East Anglia Climate Research Unit (CRU)....

Hot air and high-minded speeches might be the most obvious emissions from the Copenhagen climate talks, skeptics say. But behind the scenes Russia will play an old card from communism's fall that could tip the odds even higher against ever meeting the summit's goals. Russia's greenhouse gas emissions plunged in the 1990s as its economy collapsed. Moscow now sits on a potential treasure trove of unused carbon emission permits it could sell to other countries. Those permits expire in 2012 along with the original Kyoto Treaty. Russia has signaled that it wants them rolled forward if it is going to...

The Environment Agency will argue today that carbon rationing is the fairest and most effective way for the UK to meet its legally binding targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions. The Agency’s chairman, Lord Smith, will propose at the organisation's annual conference in London that every citizen be provided with a "carbon account" and unique number that they submit when buying carbon-intensive items such as petrol, electricity or airline tickets. Individuals would then periodically receive statements that show the carbon impact of each purchase and how much of their annual ration has been used up. If they exceeded this ration,...

For 20 years, as this crowded planet grew warmer, nations have gathered annually to try to do something about it. History now brings them to this chilly northern capital, and to a crossroads. The world looks to Copenhagen "to witness what I believe will be an historic turning point in the fight against climate change," says Yvo de Boer, United Nations organizer of the two weeks of talks opening Monday. It may witness, instead, history put on hold. The change in US administrations a year ago had aroused hopes the long-running climate talks might finally produce an all-encompassing package in...

Leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit show how the world's weightiest climate data has been distorted.

Even the BBC didn't let this scoop get away. A segment on the Dec. 3 broadcast of BBC's "Newsnight," showed the implications of the story behind the so-called "ClimateGate" scandal are more than just e-mails concealing data, but an incompetence analyzing the data by way of faulty computer code. John Graham-Cumming, a British programmer known for the open source "POPFile email filtering program" explained how the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) had wholesale problems with its computer programming analyzing climate change data, with billion, if not even trillions of dollars, on the line. ...more (w/video)...

Bill reported earlier about a Global Warming/Hitler video which was released (10/3/2009) before the climategate scandal broke out: More Global Warming Fraud HumorA new improved video has been released to incorporate the climategate scandal. Version 2, is much better, imho.Hitler was behind global warming-climategateAlso, FoxNews reports:Comedy Central Scoops Network News on Climate-Gate Scandal Comedy Central Scoops Network News on Climate-Gate ScandalABC didn’t cover it. CBS didn’t either. And NBC apparently wouldn’t go near it.The network news broadcasts have ignored a growing scandal over evidence of a potential climate cover-up — and now they’ve even been scooped by the fake news...

California Sen. Barbara Boxer has taken an odd position in regards to the latest developments in climate science. The publication of hundreds of e-mails between some of the world's leading climate researchers is proving to be an embarrassment to the proponents of man-made global warming.In the emails, scientists appear to be encouraging each other to keep their stories straight about global warming while discussing strategies to discredit opposing views and deal with data points that inconveniently fail to support the correct conclusion: that human activity have caused a permanent increase in the world's temperatures.You might think that the embarrassment accompanying...

The map, which demonstrates the devastating effects of global warming in just a century, shows how San Francisco Airport would be completely underwater if sea levels were to rise by ...60in. The coastline on the map was also coloured, highlighting how nearly half a million Californians are at risk from rising sea levels. The map, named CalAdapt, which was revealed at a press conference on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay by Mr Schwarzenegger and Google CEO Eric Schmidt, was created as part of a plan for the state to adapt to global warming. 'Within a century, Treasure Island, this...

Science: For two years, our space agency has refused Freedom of Information requests on why it has repeatedly corrected its climate figures. A leading researcher threatens to sue to find more inconvenient truths. What's become known as "Climate-Gate" may be about to explode on this side of the pond as well. Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has threatened a lawsuit against NASA if by year-end the agency doesn't honor his FOI requests for information on how and why its climate numbers have been consistently adjusted for errors. "I assume that what is there is highly...

Al Gore apparently has canceled a high-priced speaking engagement during the upcoming climate change conference in Copenhagen. As NewsBusters reported Tuesday, the Nobel Laureate was slated to lecture about his new book "Our Choice" where attendees could pay over $1,200 a ticket for the right to meet the Global Warmingist-in-Chief and have their picture taken with him. According to Danish newspaper Berlingske, this has been canceled due to "unforeseen changes" to Gore's schedule (rough translation follows, h/t Marc Morano):

A map of how California will be affected by climate change in the future was unveiled yesterday by state governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. The map, which demonstrates the devastating effects of global warming in just a century, shows how San Francisco Airport would be completely underwater if sea levels were to rise by 150cm (60in).

The Telegraph is reporting that Professor Micharl Mann of notorious hockey stick fame has thrown CRU's Phil Jones under the bus: "One of the scientists to whom the emails were addressed, Professor Michael Mann, the Director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University has moved to distance himself from some of the comments in the emails that suggest scientists did not want the IPCC, the UN body charged with monitoring climate change, to consider studies that challenged the view global warming was genuine and man-made. Speaking to BBC Radio 4's The World Tonight, Prof Mann said: 'I...

Copenhagen Mayor Ritt Bjerregaard sent postcards to city hotels warning summit guests not to patronize Danish sex workers during the upcoming conference. Now, the prostitutes have struck back, offering free sex to anyone who produces one of the warnings. Copenhagen's city council in conjunction with Lord Mayor Ritt Bjerregaard sent postcards out to 160 Copenhagen hotels urging COP15 guests and delegates to 'Be sustainable - don't buy sex'.

LONDON (AFP) – A top UN panel is to probe claims that British scientists sought to suppress data backing climate change sceptics' views, its head said on Friday ahead of the landmark Copenhagen summit. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said the claims -- which led a top expert to leave his post temporarily this week -- were serious and needed to be investigated. Professor Phil Jones has stood aside as head of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, after emails allegedly calling into question the scientific basis for climate change...

In May 2009, a remarkably well-preserved extinct primate, nicknamed “Ida,” was hailed as one of the most important fossil finds ever. It had features that some interpreted as a link between two primate body forms. At the time, ICR News suggested that its evolutionary significance was far overblown, predicting that the scientific consensus would offer retractions. Those retractions came three months later, confirming that the fossil―called Darwinius―was really just an extinct lemur variety...

What's $200 billion annually, or roughly $1,761 per family per year, if it means lowering by 10 percent the chance that the world is going to end? It's a pittance to New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Friedman made an appearance on CNN's Dec. 3 "Campbell Brown" to promote the paperback release of his book, "Hot, Flat, and Crowded." Brown asked Friedman for his take on the ClimateGate scandal, and he insisted there should be transparency as far as the data is concerned. "Well, these were hacked e-mails from one of the important climate research centers over in the U.K.,"...

We've now discovered, however, that it isn't settled, because it isn't science. Internal emails from the most prominent global warming scientists reveal that they destroyed the raw temperature data upon which their predictive computer models are based.

US President Barack Obama has changed his plans to attend the UN summit on climate change in Copenhagen next week, the White House has announced. He will arrive later than initially planned, moving his appearance from 9 December to 18 December. The White House said he believed "that continued US leadership can be most productive through his participation at the end of the Copenhagen conference". The summit aims to draw up a treaty to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The president had changed his plans after talks with other leaders and after seeing "the progress that has already been made...

December 04, 2009, 0:00 a.m. Assessing Pre-Blame for Climate-Change SummitIt’s time to start over, beginning with the science. By Jonah Goldberg Next week’s Copenhagen summit on climate change already seems doomed to failure, and voices on both sides of the global-warming debate are trying to pin the blame on Climategate. Republicans on Capitol Hill are trying to use Climategate to scuttle the Democrats’ cap-and-trade legislation. Even the Saudis — who like fossil fuels even more than Tiger Woods likes the ladies — are getting in on the act, saying the scandal casts the entire case for global warming in...

CNN finally mentioned climategate today. All is well, the world is saved.

One of the favorite put-downs from people who think they have the moral high ground in the climate debate is to accuse skeptics with this phrase: “You are nothing but a shill for Big Oil” Who amongst us hasn’t seen variants of that pointed finger repeated thousands of times? The paradigm has shifted. Now it appears CRU is the one looking for “big oil” money. See the email:

The big international summit on climate change is taking place in a large European city with some, shall we say, "libertine proclivities." As if the scandal-plagued global warming alarmists in Copenhagen didn't have enough to be embarrassed about, there's this: Copenhagen’s city council in conjunction with Lord Mayor Ritt Bjerregaard sent postcards out to 160 Copenhagen hotels urging COP15 guests and delegates to ‘Be sustainable – don’t buy sex’. “Dear hotel owner, we would like to urge you not to arrange contacts between hotel guests and prostitutes,” the approach to hotels says.Now, Copenhagen prostitutes are up in arms, saying that...

"CLIMATEGATE: It won't go away. So report it, CBC."

You call it ‘Climategate,’ I call it ‘E-mail-theft-gate. ...This is a crime.” —Senator Barbara Boxer Well, Barbara “Call Me Senator” Boxer, at least got the crime part right. The Lame Stream Media (LSM) are doing their best to ignore Climategate...(snip) This isn’t just the biggest story of the 21st century. This is the biggest fraud in world history. Good luck spinning this one away. The LSM is practicing CYA, by either (like Boxer) building a “strawman” to attack, or trying to dismiss it as something beneath their notice—some inconsequential blip on the radar screen. The LSM are not covering Climategate...

Day Fourteen and Counting December 04, 2009 08:45 ET Bozell Defends Networks’ Silence on ClimateGate: “Maybe They Just Don’t Know” Alexandria, VA – For the fourteenth straight day, the three broadcast networks have failed to report on the great and growing ClimateGate scandal on their weekday morning or evening news programs. How to explain this? Perhaps it is that ABC, NBC and CBS have not yet heard of the story, despite two weeks of non-stop reporting on and discussion of ClimateGate in a whole host of media outlets. Perhaps the broadcast networks only trust their fellow liberal press outlets, like...

The UN has announced it will open an investigation into climate research as a result of the CRU e-mails and documents that became public last week. The UN said it is luanching the probe because some of the research in question touches on related work either completed or promoted by its own Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). --snip-- “The very integrity of the report that the Obama administration has predicated much of its climate change policy has been called into question and it is unconscionable that this administration and Congress is willing to abdicate responsibility of uncovering the truth...

Dec 3, 2009 — In the previous entry, Darwin inspired some geologists, even though he was wrong. Here are some news stories showing nature inspiring engineers with wonders right under their noses...

New Zealand Climate Scientists Faked Data, Too. From Anthony Watts at Watts Up With That The New Zealand Government’s chief climate advisory unit NIWA is under fire for allegedly massaging raw climate data to show a global warming trend that wasn’t there. The scandal breaks as fears grow worldwide that corruption of climate science is not confined to just Britain’s CRU climate research centre. In New Zealand’s case, the figures published on NIWA’s [the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric research] website suggest a strong warming trend in New Zealand over the past century [go to the link to see...

Answering critics questioning the integrity of his research he says shows planetary temperatures are rising, Penn State University's Michael Mann said Wednesday he never manipulated data. "Any attempt to accuse me of this is false and a deliberate smear," said Mann, a meteorology professor and director of the university's Earth System Science Center. He was a co-winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize -- with several hundred scientists -- for work on the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Critics last month began attacking Mann for e-mails he received and wrote during at least a 10-year period with Phil...