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A new experiment in California aims to solve two problems with one program. A pilot program backed by the California Air Resource Board is offering some big kick backs for residents of the Greater Los Angeles area and San Joaquin Valley if they turn in old gas guzzling vehicles for more energy efficient ones. The lower their income the more money could be coming their way. In fact, in the right situations, residents could get an electric or hybrid car for nothing. Literally $0. According to the press release from the Air Resource Board: The program works by providing increasingly...

This column originally appeared in the January 27th print edition of National Review: America is a land of acronyms, and, useful as they are, acronyms can quickly curdle into jargon. SLAPP stands for "strategic lawsuit against public participation" — i.e., using legal action to cow an opponent into silence, and withdrawal from the public square. It was coined in the Eighties by Penelope Canan and George W. Pring at the University of Denver, and in the Nineties they turned it into a book: SLAPPs: Getting Sued for Speaking Out. And it proved so influential that by the Oughts various jurisdictions...

Surface cooling in equatorial Pacific drives decade-long pause in global temperature rise. A new study adds to mounting evidence that cooling in the tropical Pacific Ocean is the cause of the global warming hiatus, a slow-down in the rise of average temperatures that began around 1998. The eastern equatorial Pacific is well known to have an outsize influence on global weather. Years-long ocean trends such as El Niño and La Niña cause alternate warming and cooling of the sea surface there, with effects on monsoons and temperatures around the world. Now a modelling study by researchers at the Scripps Institution...

Jon Huntsman gave a relatively brief interview to Time, but it’s likely to create longer term problems for his rumored presidential run in the GOP. Huntsman says he opposes cap-and-trade proposals because “this isn’t the moment,” but he buys the climate change argument because “90% of the scientists” say it’s happening. If 90% of oncologists identified a carcinogen, Huntsman says, he’d believe them too (via Taegan Goddard): You also believe in climate change, right?This is an issue that ought to be answered by the scientific community; I’m not a meteorologist. All I know is 90 percent of the scientists say...

GLOBAL WARMING JUNK SCIENCE PROVEN A CONSPIRACY—- ManBearPig Is Finally Dead! I’m serial! Recently “discovered” classified emails and files prove that the junk scientists behind the global warming movement knowingly perpetrated a fraud on the global community. The files were posted on the internet– HERE. The Telegraph reported: If you own any shares in alternative energy companies I should start dumping them NOW. The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW; aka ManBearPig) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka...

Lol...

The Prince of Wales has warned that the world faces a series of natural disasters within 18 months unless urgent action is taken to save the rainforests. In one of his most out-spoken interventions in the climate change debate, he said a £15 billion annual programme was required to halt deforestation or the world would have to live with the dire consequences. "We will end up seeing more drought and starvation on a grand scale. Weather patterns will become even more terrifying and there will be less and less rainfall," he said. "We are asking for something pretty dreadful unless...

The German government is about to trigger a new crisis in Europe's flagship climate change policy, the European Emissions Trading Scheme. BBC News understands the German cabinet is likely to agree a deal under the ETS that will result in a carbon reduction from its industry of only 0.6% by 2012. Kyoto targets require Germany to cut greenhouse emissions in total by 21%. The decision will influence other EU countries, including the UK, which still have to settle their own caps. Environmentalists and climate analysts fear a meltdown of EU climate leadership. Regina Gunther from WWF Deutschland said: "These figures...

Europe this year experienced its hottest summer for at least 500 years, providing further evidence of man-made global warming (news - web sites), Swiss university researchers said. During the crushing heat wave between June and August this year, which triggered several thousand more deaths than usual, average temperatures eclipsed the previous record set in 1757, according to a study by the University of Bern's geography department. The average temperature in Europe was 19.5 degrees Celsius (67 degrees Fahrenheit), two degrees higher than the average summer temperatures recorded on the continent between 1901 and 1995. Central Europe and the Alps region...