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Explanation: Who guards the north? Judging from the above photograph, possibly giant trees covered in snow and ice. The picture was taken last winter in Finnish Lapland where weather can include sub-freezing temperatures and driving snow. Surreal landscapes sometimes result, where common trees become cloaked in white and so appear, to some, as watchful aliens. Far in the distance, behind this uncommon Earthly vista, is a more common sight -- a Belt of Venus that divided a darkened from sunlit sky as the Sun rose behind the photographer. Of course, in the spring, the trees have thawed and Lapland looks...

Is it possible for a Right-wing government to freeze spending and cut the deficit while remaining popular? As they say in New Zealand, ‘yih’. I’ve remarked before that, while no country is physically further from Britain, none is temperamentally closer. Yet there is a difference when it comes to public expenditure. A slowing of the rate of increase in the UK – there have, as yet, been no net cuts – is howled down as an assault on the poor directed by a clique of ancien régime aristocrats. In New Zealand, by contrast, ‘zero budgets’ are seen as prudent and...

The mysterious fall of the largest of the world's earliest urban civilizations nearly 4,000 years ago in what is now India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh now appears to have a key culprit — ancient climate change, researchers say. Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia may be the best known of the first great urban cultures, but the largest was the Indus or Harappan civilization. This culture once extended over more than 386,000 square miles (1 million square kilometers) across the plains of the Indus River from the Arabian Seato the Ganges, and at its peak may have accounted for 10 percent of...

With so much information about Climate Science, are we really get the full information, or just parts of it that leave out other aspects of what we are told is the 'Great Debate' of our time. Either way, we are only getting one side of that debate. Here, Doctor David Evans explains with three videos some of the information we are not being told, from the other side of the debate. Joanne Nova, who runs the popular Australian Science site JoNova also adds a video explaining the other side of Climate.

A recent Yale University study funded by the National Science Foundation found that those with opposing views on climate change don’t hold those views because of insufficient scientific understanding, but because of “opposing sets of cultural values.” To be specific, people have a rather solid foundation in science and mathematics, but they use scientific evidence to fit their cultural group’s values. In other words, global warming deniers aren’t stupid, they just want to fit in. “In effect, ordinary members of the public credit or dismiss scientific information on disputed issues based on whether the information strengthens or weakens their ties...

A group called the Tombstone Shovel Brigade is planning an event in the Huachuca Mountains in June in an effort to make additional repairs to the cityÂ’s water supply. The City of TombstoneÂ’s waterlines and reservoirs in the Coronado National Forest were damaged by mudslides after last yearÂ’s Monument Fire, and the U.S. Forest Service refused to let the city use heavy machinery in some areas, citing the Wilderness Act. Tombstone filed a lawsuit to prevent the Forest Service from interfering with its ability to adequately access the water, but a federal judge recently ruled against the city. According to...

Washington (CNN) -- The director of the National Weather Service announced his sudden retirement last week after an audit of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that found $43.8 million in performance awards to contractors granted without proper justification. Jack Hayes, a veteran meteorologist who headed the weather service since 2007, announced his retirement Friday and will be succeeded by an acting assistant administrator Tuesday, according to a statement by Jane Lubchenco, the undersecretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere who also is NOAA administrator. The weather service is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Lubchenco's statement made...

The heaviest polar ice in more than a decade could postpone the start of offshore oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean until the beginning of August, a delay of up to two weeks, Shell Alaska officials said. Unveiling a newly refurbished ice-class rig that is poised to begin drilling two exploratory wells this summer in the Beaufort Sea, Shell executives said Friday that the unusually robust sea ice would further narrow what already is a tight window for operations. The company's $4-billion program is designed to measure the extent of what could be the United States' most important new inventory...

After a year of erratic weather, a large majority of New Jersey residents consider climate change and global warming a real concern — and they also expect government to start taking a bigger role in protecting the environment, according to a Kean University/NJ Speaks poll released today. The possible effects of climate change and global warming were a concern for 71 percent of respondents in the poll, and nearly all of those, 69 percent, said human activity has contributed to global warming and other environmental problems.

Canadian reporter Ezra Levant explains how global warming skeptics are demonized by the left and mainstream media even though surveys show regular citizens aren’t so concerned.

Climategate, the 2009 exposure of misconduct at the University of East Anglia, was a terrible blow to the reputation of climatology, and indeed to that of British and American science. Although that story hasn’t been in the news in recent months, new evidence of similar scientific wrongdoing continues to emerge, with a new scandal hitting the climate blogosphere just a few days ago.And central to the newest story is one of the Climategate scientists: Keith Briffa, an expert in reconstructing historical temperature records from tree rings. More particularly, the recent scandal involves a tree-ring record Briffa prepared for a...

Human use of water contributes markedly to rising tides. Climate change, with its associated melting ice caps and shrinking glaciers, is the usual suspect when it comes to explaining rising sea levels. But a recent study now shows that human water use has a major impact on sea-level change that has been overlooked. During the latter half of the twentieth century, global sea level rose by about 1.8 millimetres per year, according to data from tide gauges. The combined contribution from heating of the oceans, which makes the water expand, along with melting of ice caps and glaciers, is estimated...

Challenged to probe under Greenland's glaciers, NASA robotics expert Alberto Behar wondered what mechanism might endure sub-zero cold, the pressure of mile-thick ice and currents that sometimes exceed the flow rate of Niagara Falls. As Dr. Behar at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory soon discovered, though, there isn't much money for global-warming experiments in Greenland... Unfazed, he thought of one device that might survive such extremes at a cost his field expedition could readily afford — a two-dollar rubber duck. Each duck was imprinted with an e-mail address and, in three languages, the offer of a reward.

Thousands of rubber ducks to land on British shores after 15 year journeyBy BEN CLERKIN - More by this author »Last updated at 22:00pm on 27th June 2007 Comments (9)They were toys destined only to bob up and down in nothing bigger than a child's bath - but so far they have floated halfway around the world. The armada of 29,000 plastic yellow ducks, blue turtles and green frogs broke free from a cargo ship 15 years ago. Since then they have travelled 17,000 miles, floating over the site where the Titanic sank, landing in Hawaii and even spending years...

The first reference found outside of the bible mentioning this darkness which fell over the land during the crucifixion of Christ, comes from a Samaritan historian named Thallus, who wrote around 52 A.D. His work was quoted by another early historian by the name of Julius Africanus who researched the topic of this darkness and wrote the following: "Upon the whole world there came a most fearful darkness. Many rocks were split in two by an earthquake, and many places in Judea and other districts were thrown down. It seems very unreasonable to me that Thallus, in the third book...

The Congressional Research Service estimates that since 2008 the federal government has spent nearly $70 billion on “climate change activities.” Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Inhofe presented the new CRS report on the Senate Floor Thursday to make the point that the Obama administration has been focused on “green” defense projects to the detriment of the military. The report revealed that from fiscal years 2008 through 2012 the federal government spent $68.4 billion to combat climate change. The Department of Defense also spent $4 billion of its budget, the report adds, on climate change and energy efficiency activities in that same...

Aspiring apparatchiks of the coming world dictatorship, tiring of the hopeless race against facts in their anti-industrial carbon dioxide hoax, have finally given up the pretense of science in favor of pure, old-fashioned doomsday preaching. Having been outlasted by reality in the pseudo-science of "global cooling," undone once again in the pseudo-science of "global warming," and ultimately laughed off the stage in the unfalsifiable quackery of "global climate change," it is apparently time at last for the advocates of tyranny in the name of Gaia to play their last card: global mass hysteria. Consider a recent New York Times editorial...

Explanation: How much of planet Earth is made of water? Very little, actually. Although oceans of water cover about 70 percent of Earth's surface, these oceans are shallow compared to the Earth's radius. The above illustration shows what would happen is all of the water on or near the surface of the Earth were bunched up into a ball. The radius of this ball would be only about 700 kilometers, less than half the radius of the Earth's Moon, but slightly larger than Saturn's moon Rhea which, like many moons in our outer Solar System, is mostly water ice. How...

The sun is moving through the Milky Way slower than previously thought, according to new data from a NASA spacecraft. From its orbit around Earth, the Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) satellite measured the speeds of interstellar particles entering at the fringes of our solar system, 9 billion miles (14.5 billion kilometers) from the sun. Plugging the new data into computer models, the IBEX team calculates that the sun is moving at about 52,000 miles (83,700 kilometers) an hour -- about 7,000 miles (11,000 kilometers) slower than thought. The discovery suggests that the protective boundary separating our solar system from the...

07 May 2012: Analysis Could a Changing Climate Set Off Volcanoes and Quakes? A British scientist argues that global warming could lead to a future of more intense volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. And while some dismiss his views as preposterous, he points to a body of recent research that shows a troubling link between climate change and the Earth’s most destructive geological events. by Fred Pearce Geological disasters might influence climate, for instance when volcanic debris blots out the sun. But climate cannot disrupt geology. Right? Well, actually no, says a British geologist Bill McGuire, in a troubling new...

Like huge cows, the mighty sauropods would have generated enormous quantities of methane. Sauropods, recognisable by their long necks and tails, were widespread around 150 million years ago. They included some of the largest animals to walk the Earth, such as Diplodocus, which measured 150 feet and weighed up to 45 tonnes. <---Snip

Enlarge Image Slow flow.Satellite observations of glacial flow in Greenland reveal that many of the island's glaciers have slowed in recent years, a sign that ice loss during the 21st century could be less dire than in the worst-case scenarios. Credit: Science/AAAS For lumbering hunks of ice, glaciers have a surprising amount of personality. A new study reveals that not all of Greenland's glaciers behave alike, with some slowing their advance seaward in recent years, whereas others have surged in their forward march. Sea levels will continue to rise during the 21st century, as many studies have predicted, but...

There's a great scoop in The Australian today about more lying climate scientists making stuff up. "CLAIMS that some of Australia's leading climate change scientists were subjected to death threats as part of a vicious and unrelenting email campaign have been debunked by the Privacy Commissioner. Timothy Pilgrim was called in to adjudicate on a Freedom of Information application in relation to Fairfax and ABC reports last June alleging that Australian National University climate change researchers were facing the ongoing campaign and had been moved to "more secure buildings" following explicit threats." Needless to say the University did everything it...

PUBLIC INFORMATION STATEMENT NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE ANCHORAGE AK 215 PM AKDT THU MAY 3 2012 ...RECORD SEA ICE AT PRIBILOF ISLANDS... THIS HAS BEEN AN EXTREME WINTER FOR SEA ICE IN THE BERING SEA AND NOW WE HAVE BROKEN THE RECORDS FOR MOST NUMBER OF DAYS WITH ICE AT BOTH SAINT PAUL ISLAND AND SAINT GEORGE ISLAND. AS OF TODAY SEA ICE HAS BEEN AT SAINT PAUL ISLAND FOR 103 DAYS THIS WINTER BREAKING THE PREVIOUS RECORD OF 100 DAYS SET IN 2010. THE NUMBER OF DAYS WITH SEA ICE AT SAINT GEORGE ISLAND TOTALED 79 WHEN THE ICE RETREATED...

Nearly 20 years ago Canadian Maurice Strong served as secretary general of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio De Janeiro. Today he is meeting the Citizen’s editorial board to discuss the upcoming Rio Plus-20 gathering in Brazil next month. Joining him are Brice Lalonde, executive co-ordinator of the Rio +20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development, and David Runnalls, executive director of Sustainable Prosperity in Ottawa.

Scientists may hesitate to link some of the weather extremes of recent years to global warming — but the public, it seems, is already there. A poll due for release on Wednesday shows that a large majority of Americans believe that this year’s unusually warm winter, last year’s blistering summer and some other weather disasters were probably made worse by global warming. And by a 2-to-1 margin, the public says the weather has been getting worse, rather than better, in recent years. The survey, the most detailed to date on the public response to weather extremes, comes atop other polling...

The amount of floating ice in the Arctic's Bering Sea - which had long been expected to retreat disastrously by climate-Cassandra organisations such as Greenpeace - reached all-time record high levels last month, according to US researchers monitoring the area using satellites. The US National Snow and Ice Data Center announced last week that ice extent in the Bering for the month of March has now been collated and compared, and is the highest seen since records began.

NASA is swiping back at a group of nearly 50 of its former scientists and astronauts who wrote to accuse the space agency of advocating the “extreme” position that global warming is the result of man-made carbon dioxide.In a March 28 letter addressed to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, 49 former employees said the “unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change is unbecoming of NASA’s history of making an objective assessment of all available scientific data prior to making decisions or public statements.” But NASA responded on Wednesday by saying they don’t “draw conclusions and issue ‘claims’...

UPDATE: 11:30AM 4/12/12 Predictably, Andrew Revkin from the New York Times joins in with the poo-pooing consensus saying it is “utterly unremarkable ” (yet he writes a article about it – go figure). From Revkin’s shuttered in world of living in the woods (he didn’t even know what the TV show Seinfeld was until I brought it to his attention in Climategate2), that’s probably true, but Andy, here is one of your favorite consensus buzzphrases that can be applied: it is an unprecedented letter. There’s no denying that. – Anthony ==========From the Daily Caller, in my opinion, a load of...

The Obama administration was more vocal about the supposedly dire need to combat climate change toward the beginning of their oh-so-eminent reign, with President Obama out championing the cause at such august events as the U.N. climate conference in 2009. There’s been a bit of a lull in their alarmist-enthusiasm rhetoric in the past year or so (maybe they’ve figured out that concern for climate change is a luxury good during times of economic recession), but it looks like they may be thinking about bringing back the meme to help sell their horrendous energy polices in the run-up to November....

The 85th Congress and President Eisenhower set up the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to explore space. Government bureaucrat James Hansen has used his position and NASA’s reputation to advance an unscientific agenda that calls for government restrictions on all major industries and any other human activity in the bane of controlling carbon dioxide production. This junk science has made him a millionaire through income outside the government. He is a rogue government agent who no one seems able to supervise. Now 50 top former and current astronauts and NASA scientists and engineers have had enough. They want this crackpot...

Joint Post by Tony Cox and Jo Nova Clouds cool the planet as it warms Clouds cover an enormous 65% of the planet and are responsible for about half of the sunlight that is reflected back out to space.[i] The effects of clouds are so strong that most of the differences between IPCC-favoured-models comes from the assumptions the models make about clouds. Cloud feedbacks are the “largest source of uncertainty”.[ii] Numerous studies show models project wildly different results for clouds, and yet few could correctly simulate clouds as recorded by satellites.[iii] One researcher described our understanding of cloud parameters as...

Given the high profile story today about the 49 NASA astronauts, engineers, and scientists who wrote a scathing letter to NASA director Charles Bolden, Jr. saying Jim Hansen and NASA GISS are exemplifying the “wrong stuff”, I thought I’d share this poster contributed by WUWT reader NickFromNYC:

According to WWJ Detroit, there was an explosion at the General Motors Tech Center in Warren, Mich., on Wednesday morning. Deputy Fire Chief Gary Wilkinson said the explosion most likely was related to a lithium battery. Wilkinson told Autoweek that a responder notified the HAZMAT team via radio that the explosion involved lithium batteries in the research facility's Alternative Energy Center. The fire was extinguished and portions of the facility were evacuated, but responders were still on the scene. Two people were taken to the hospital with nonlife-threatening injuries. Check out WWJ CBS Detroit for up-to-the-minute information. Read more: http://www.autoweek.com/article/20120411/CARNEWS/120419982#ixzz1rkOFfaeg

Copper -- the stuff of pennies and tea kettles -- is also one of the few metals that can turn carbon dioxide into hydrocarbon fuels with relatively little energy. When fashioned into an electrode and stimulated with voltage, copper acts as a strong catalyst, setting off an electrochemical reaction with carbon dioxide that reduces the greenhouse gas to methane or methanol. Various researchers around the world have studied copper’s potential as an energy-efficient means of recycling carbon dioxide emissions in powerplants: Instead of being released into the atmosphere, carbon dioxide would be circulated through a copper catalyst and turned into...

Posted on April 10, 2012 by Anthony Watts Taken at the Energy Crossroads conference in Denmark on 12 March 2009. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)Though, he still thinks we are all funded by some sort of “machine”. It never occurs to him that he’s fight a guerrilla war and that most skeptics are self motivated.Update: the UK telegraph has a similar story hereScientist hits climate change skepticism – UPI.com EDINBURGH,Scotland,April 9 (UPI) –Environmentalists and climate scientists,facing public skepticism,are losing the debate on global warming,a U.S. scientist who first raised the issue says.James Hansen,director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies,who issued...

BrightSource Energy of Oakland, a solar power-plant developer whose first project won $1.6 billion in federal backing, abruptly canceled its initial public stock offering Wednesday night, just hours before trading was scheduled to begin. The surprise move killed what had been the most hotly anticipated clean-tech IPO this spring. It casts doubt on investor appetite for similar offerings in the future. The cancellation could also revive the debate over federal support for renewable power companies. Solar-module maker Solyndra of Fremont, which received $528 million from the same government program that funded BrightSource's first power plant, also canceled a planned IPO...

Just as the Department of Energy gave A123 Systems a vote of confidence by extending a deadline until 2014 to spend down its $249 million stimulus grant, the deeply troubled electric vehicle supplier experienced another setback. One of their batteries caused an explosion. The blast occurred yesterday morning in Warren, Mich. at General Motors’ Alternative Energy Center – a research facility – while performing on an A123 battery “intensive tests designed to make it fail,” the Detroit News reported. GM confirmed to Crain’s Detroit Business that chemical gases released by the battery caused the explosion. One employee was sent...

The government spent at least $205,075 in 2010 to “translocate” a single bush in San Francisco that stood in the path of a $1.045 billion highway-renovation project that was partially funded by the economic stimulus legislation President Barack Obama signed in 2009. “In October 2009, an ecologist identified a plant growing in a concrete-bound median strip along Doyle Drive in the Presidio as Arctostaphylos franciscana,” the U.S. Department of Interior reported in the Aug. 10, 2010 edition of the Federal Register. The bush—a Franciscan manzanita—was a specimen of a commercially cultivated species of shrub that can be purchased from nurseries...

From the earliest days of the Wild West, water rights have always been a bone of contention and, no doubt, the cause of more than one gunfight. It’s still an issue to this day. But instead of being a dispute between farmer and rancher or cattleman and sheepherder, it’s now a battle between people and fish. Two years ago, the Delta smelt, a tiny, minnow-like fish, caused a brouhaha. In an effort to save this fish (which has no commercial value whatsoever), water supplies to California’s Central Valley were severely limited. As a direct result, this fertile agricultural center was...

There is a way to stop the EPA's abuse of science and prevent their continued aggressive regulatory activity that destroys the economy and causes harm to Americans. Primarily, we have to hold the EPA to good scientific principles and stop the EPA's overreaching and panic-mongering. The method that will work is a well-established judicial and legal demand for good scientific evidence as described in the Daubert supreme court opinion, explained in the book by the Federal Judicial Center -- the Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence. The Supreme Court opinion in Daubert v. Merrell Dow, 509 U.S. 579 (1993) set out...

With the ongoing media coverage of a well-known scientist lying to get confidential documents from the Heartland Institute regarding global warming, there’s been consistent reporting in the media about the “scientific consensus” that climate change is manmade. Numerous articles on blogs and news sites cite that scientific “consensus” of man-made global warming without citing any reference. The phrase may be a reference to the body of work done over the years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which involves work done by thousands of scientists from more than 120 governments. John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center...

Costs of Algae Biofuel* By: Larry Walker, Jr. *Detective Thorn: It's people. Soylent Green is made out of people. They're making our food out of people. Next thing they'll be breeding us like cattle for food. You've gotta tell them. You've gotta tell them! ~ Memorable quotes from Soylent Green * The U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), reported that gasoline prices have risen from an average price of $1.61, in the week ending December 29, 2008, to $3.72, as of the week ending February 27, 2012 (see chart above). So with gasoline prices on a tear having risen by 131%...

Over at Bishop Hill there is a post titled A Study in Groupthink that looks at an exchange of Twitter comments between Maurizio Morabito ( @Omnologos ) and Bora Zivkovic ( @BoraZ ), the blogs editor at Scientific American. The author of the Bishop Hill blog, Andrew Montford, explains in his post that Zivkovic is clearly very much out of the same mould as Peter Gleick, which I take to mean an unswerving true believer, a rigid in his views who sees anyone dissenting from what he chooses to believe in and argue for as ultimately evil or corrupted by...

On one issue, President Barack Obama is depressingly consistent. Just this week, he once again sounded the alarm about the dangers of fossil fuels and the need to pursue alternative sources of energy. He is also determined to purse “green” energy projects, despite some well publicized disasters such as Solyndra. In spite of $535 million in federal government loans, the solar panel manufacturer went bankrupt. The administration was able to stage some nice photo opportunities, but the public’s money was wasted.

California Democrat Insurance Commissioner Dave Jones along with his union oriented brothers and sisters now require California Insurance companies that wrote over $300M in business last year to respond to the a questionnaire concerning how their business and operations are impacted by and addressing disproven climate change faux science. This may be just another strategy for Jones to drive insurers from California so he can be first in line to be Obamacare Czar in California.The Workers Comp Executive wonders, “Next we expect the Department to make inquiries as regards carrier preparation for the coming zombie apocalypse or even the invasion...

Scotland, one of Barack Obama’s models for his bogus wind power scam has literally seen the wind go out of her socialist politically correct sails. Scotland is the poster boy for the failure of wind power as a genuine source of energy. All of the high and mighty talk about wind as a viable alternative source of energy is now gone, not in the strong productive winds of the drawing board, but with the gentle breezes that are Scotland’s reality. The Scottish government’s ill-advised but politically correct “wind; not fossil fuel” scheme has so devastated the average Scottish household’s economy...

Obama's first big energy-policy speech was to the United Nations in 2009 when he boldly told the entire world that it had to get off of fossil fuels because: "the threat from climate change is serious, it is urgent, and it is growing." "Rising sea levels threaten every coastline," blah, blah, blah, but to the true believers, it was lines from a psalm: More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent. More frequent drought and crop failures breed hunger and conflict. All the largest emitters of greenhouse gas pollution [must] act together. Wind turbines and solar panels and batteries for...

You might have noticed the blaring headlines of doom: (Reuters) – The world is close to reaching tipping points that will make it irreversibly hotter, making this decade critical in efforts to contain global warming, scientists warned on Monday. Of course, this alarmism lives in a computer projection of how things will be in the future. Not in reality. They rely on a theoretic CO2 cause-and-effect all out of proportion to reality. So, how has that global warming phenomenon actually been going? There’s a different headline for that . . .

1,306,375,000,000 gallons of oil used per year worldwide A partial list of products made from Petroleum (144 of 6000 items) One 42-gallon barrel of oil creates 19.4 gallons of gasoline. The rest (over half) is used to make things like: Solvents Diesel fuel Motor Oil Bearing Grease Ink Floor Wax Ballpoint Pens Football Cleats Upholstery Sweaters Boats Insecticides Bicycle Tires Sports Car Bodies Nail Polish Fishing lures Dresses Tires Golf Bags Perfumes Cassettes Dishwasher parts Tool Boxes Shoe Polish Motorcycle Helmet Caulking Petroleum Jelly Transparent Tape CD Player Faucet Washers Antiseptics Clothesline Curtains Food Preservatives Basketballs Soap Vitamin Capsules Antihistamines...