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Josh from CartoonsbyJosh.com writes: Another ‘Gate’ – but this one turned round and bit the owner.Leo Hickman and co at the Guardian thought they had a bona fide leak of incriminating information on the funding of climate skeptics by the Heartland Institute.Two problems, the funding turns out to be rather small beer, especially in comparison to the vast sums of money paid to promote Climate Change Alarmism. Secondly it looked like the funds were going to fund scientists and with another trenche for a website to explain climate science research.Hardly a surprise, and not exactly incriminating. It is what the...

Link only per posting rules: http://content.usatoday.com/communities/greenhouse/post/2012/02/obama-bypasses-congress-on-climate-change/1#.Tz6MF8mF_9I

Yesterday afternoon, two advocacy groups posted online several documents they claimed were The Heartland Institute’s 2012 budget, fundraising, and strategy plans. Some of these documents were stolen, at least one is a fake, and some may have been altered.The stolen documents appear to have been written by Heartland’s president for a board meeting that took place on January 17. He was traveling at the time this story broke yesterday afternoon and still has not had the opportunity to read them all to see if they were altered. Therefore, the authenticity of those documents has not been confirmed.Since then, the documents...

Major embarrassment for Joe Romm, and DeSmog and their unthinking fans.In the hours after the ClimateGate emails were released, skeptics asked about their authenticity (as we are want to do). In the hours after the Heartland Documents (including at least one complete fake) were released, the commentators on the other side did not even ask (just as they uncritically accept any weak report in favour of their pet theory).They leapt to their defamatory conclusions in a smear-fest. At least one person out there has probably committed a criminal act. The rest are guilty of small brained unskeptical blind hatred, defamation,...

Villages buried under 4-5 meters of snow . … and MSN writes of “Wacky & Wonderful Weather Phenomena.” 140,000 trapped by snow – Death toll rises past 550, people tunneling through 15 feet of snow to get out of their homes, hundreds of barns collapse in Italy … and MSN writes of “Wacky & Wonderful Weather Phenomena.” Unbelievable.

Snowfall in the Sierra Nevada has remained consistent for 130 years, with no evidence that anything has changed as a result of climate change, according to a study released Tuesday. The analysis of snowfall data in the Sierra going back to 1878 found no more or less snow overall - a result that, on the surface, appears to contradict aspects of recent climate change models. John Christy, the Alabama state climatologist who authored the study, said the amount of snow in the mountains has not decreased in the past 50 years, a period when greenhouse gases were supposed to have...

Update: The Heartland Institute says the documents were obtained through "pretexting," in which a person posing as a board member sent an e-mail asking a staffer to "re-send" documents from board meetings. The Institute says one of the documents, a "climate strategy" memo, "is a total fake," and the institute says it has not had a chance to reach its president, who is traveling, to determine whether any of the other documents were altered. See the full statement from Heartland below. Internal documents have been leaked from the Heartland Institute, a Chicago nonprofit think tank, showing its funding of leading...

Feb 13, 2012 The Global Warming Hoax is Now Killing People and Media in the US is ignoring the inconvenient truth By Alan Caruba By Friday, February 10th, an estimated 500 Europeans had died from the freezing weather gripping the continent. This is the price they and British citizens are paying for embracing the global warming hoax, spending billions for wind power when they should have been building coal-fired and other sources of energy to heat their homes and businesses. As the British daily, The Telegraph, reported on Friday, “Serbia has started implementing power cuts in a desperate bid to...

You would be forgiven for thinking these stunning vistas lay deep in the heart of Antarctica. But they are, in fact, what has become of the European landscape as temperatures plummet to nearly -40C - the coldest snap in decades. Rivers, lakes, beaches and even seas have been iced over by a Siberian freeze, creating some incredible sights, but also more tales of tragedy. ... But in southern Kosovo, nine people were killed when an avalanche hit the village of Restelica, officials said on Sunday, adding to more than 500 killed in snow and bitter cold across the Continent in...

If true, it suggests periods of reduced Arctic sea ice during that time that made this feat possible.Reposted from the blog Ecotretas with permission A graphical comparison between the North East Passage (blue) and an alternative route through Suez Canal (red) David Melgueiro, a Portuguese navigator, might have been the first to navigate the Northeast Passage (known now as Northern Sea Route), between 1660 and 1662, more than 200 years before Adolf Erik Nordenskjöld, who did it ​​in 1878. One of the most detailed accounts for this voyage is given by Eduardo Brazão in The Corte-Real family and the New...

Romania digs out from 15 feet of snow The Associated Press reports: Snow as deep as 15 feet (4.5 meters) isolated areas in Romania, Moldova and Albania on Tuesday and turned a power plant in Kosovo into a park of dazzling ice sculptures. In a winter harsher than many can remember, energy workers struggled mightily Tuesday to break the ice that has encapsulated Kosovo's main power station in Obilic. Steam from the plant's vents coated its pipes and buildings with ice and snow, turning them into unworldly, unrecognizable objects of art.

And who wants Global Warming when you can face avalanches, deep snow, and record cold?How much fun can you have with 2 meters of snow on your house, and none of that evil coal powered electricity?What’s happening in Europe and Russia over the last two weeks is not just your average cold-snap. Temperatures reached -28C in Moscow. One point in Russia hit -52.8C (-68F) on Monday. MOSCOW — Some 215 Russians have died this year in a prolonged period of abnormally cold winter weather, the health ministry said Monday as the overall death toll for Europe rose to well over...

People who claim that “the science is settled” on global warming have to be pretty unsettled by the science news in the last week.“Setttled science”, of course, means that we are inevitably headed toward a disastrous warming of surface temperatures as forecast by some computer models, and we therefore need an international carbon tax or cap-and-trade system, pronto.Settled science would know all of the important “forcings” and “feedbacks” in the climate system, such as the sensitivity of surface temperature to changes in carbon dioxide (a forcing) and the behavior of clouds, which could either enhance or counter warming (a feedback).Now...

“We can expect the onset of a deep bicentennial minimum of total solar irradiance (TSI) in approximately 2042±11 and the 19th deep minimum of global temperature in the past 7500 years – in 2055±11. After the maximum of solar cycle 24, from approximately 2014 we can expect the start of deep cooling with a Little Ice Age in 2055±11.” –Habibullo I. Abdussamatov, Russian Academy of Science, 1 February 2012

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Anthony Watts Foreword: Dr Sebastian Lüning and Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt, authors of a new controversial skeptic book now hitting German bookstores, have asked me to post their response to comments made by climate scientist Georg Feulner of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in an interview by NTV television. Feulner insists that CO2 plays the major role in climate change and that the sun has little impact.You can read about the new book just published in Germany that is causing an uproar in the German green establishment here. The response is so vitriolic...

Do Latest Solar Studies Confirm Upcoming Global Cooling? Posted on February 13, 2012 by Anthony Watts Guest post by Matti VooroImage via Wikipedia I fully support the findings of  Jan –Erik Solheim , Kjell Stordahl and Ole Humlum and their very recent paper called The long sunspot cycle 23 predicts a significant temperature decrease in cycle 24  dated February 2012. The abstract reads: Relations between the length of a sunspot cycle and the average temperature in the same and the next cycle are calculated for a number of meteorological stations in Norway and in the North Atlantic region. No significant trend...

Global warming: Been there, done that. Forward-looking folks are adjusting their fretting machinery now to something called Cycle 25. Button up your overcoats. Ice is on the way. Global warming, which was mostly a scam invented by researchers looking for government grants, is over. The great warming phenomenon, which was supposed to have sent polar bears to vacation in Miami Beach by now, ended in 1997. Britain’s Met Office, which tracks weather and makes forecasts, and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, the source of much global warming research (some of it faked, some of it not), agree,...

Humans may have been causing climate change for much longer than we’ve been burning fossil fuels. In fact, the agrarian revolution may have started human-induced climate changes long before the industrial revolution began to sully the skies. How? Through the clearing of forests, which still remains the second-largest source of greenhouse gas emissions from human activity. Sediment cores from the mouth of the Congo River—the deepest river in the world—suggest that humans may have played a significant role in changing the landscapes of Central Africa. That river curves through the world’s second-biggest lingering tropical forest, but it and its tributaries...

“THE CO2 LIES … pure fear-mongering … should we blindly trust the experts?” That’s what Germany’s leading daily Bild (see photo) wrote in its print and online editions today, on the very day that renowned publisher Hoffmann & Campe officially released a skeptic book – one written by a prominent socialist and environmental figure.This is huge. More than I ever could have possibly imagined. And more is coming in the days ahead! The Bild piece was just the first of a series.Mark this as the date that Germany’s global warming movement took a massive body blow.Today, not one, but two of...

... A new mini-report from the environmental group Climate Nexus points out that climate change is poised to wreck Valentine’s Day, or at least change it significantly, by threatening chocolate production. That’s right. Global warming is very bad for chocolate. Research from the International Center for Tropical Agriculture found last year that as temperatures rise, the principal growing regions for cocoa could shrink. Other elements of the Climate Nexus report say similar changes are already affecting the best sugar cane areas of the world, and are partially responsible for a 30% decrease in sugar production in Indonesia in 2011. Also,...

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...

...Were this a story in any field other than "Climate Science" it would be given massive play by both the BBC and in the print media – for what has happened here is a national scandal. An institution which was manifestly good has now been made bad, for no other reason than the arrogance and egotism of three blinkered men who took it upon themselves to behave like political activists rather than scientists. You don't even need to be a climate sceptic to understand that what May, Rees and Nurse have done is wrong. All you need is a rudimentary...

N. Korea's largest port frozen for 2 straight winters SEOUL, Feb. 10 (Yonhap) -- North Korea's largest port of Nampo has frozen for the second winter in a row due to a severe cold spell, an environmental research institute said Friday. The trade port, the marine gateway of the country's capital Pyongyang, is believed to have been frozen since Jan. 6, according to the Korea Center for Atmospheric Environment Research, citing satellite images. Chung Yong-seung, head of the research institute, said it is rare for the port to freeze two winters in a row, a development he said could have...

Chu: Expect more loan guarantee failuresBy Ben Geman - 02/10/12 05:47 PM ET Energy Secretary Steven Chu again warned Friday that more recipients of Energy Department green technology loan guarantees will likely collapse even as he touted the strength of the program overall. The warning comes as many Republicans are continuing to assail the green energy loan program as a risky use of taxpayer dollars. “We have always known that there were inherent risks in backing innovative technologies at full commercial scale, and it is very likely that there will be other companies in the portfolio that won’t succeed,” Chu...

Hoaxes: New research shows that the world's greatest snow-capped peaks have lost no ice in the last decade and that polar ice is melting at a much lower rate than warm-mongers say. The new study was conducted by scientists at the University of Colorado, Boulder, published in the journal Nature and based on satellite observations from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellite. GRACE, which was launched as a joint project between NASA and Germany in 2002, orbits the earth at an altitude of 500 kilometers (315 miles), so it sees everything from the highest peaks down to the mouths...

An overview: Understanding the Global Warming Debate Posted on February 9, 2012 by Anthony Watts Guest post by Warren MeyerLikely you have heard the sound bite that “97% of climate scientists” accept the global warming “consensus”. Which is what gives global warming advocates the confidence to call climate skeptics “deniers,” hoping to evoke a parallel with “Holocaust Deniers,” a case where most of us would agree that a small group are denying a well-accepted reality. So why do these “deniers” stand athwart of the 97%? Is it just politics? Oil money? Perversity? Ignorance?We are going to cover a lot of...

The red line in this image shows the long-term increase in global sea level since satellite altimeters began measuring it in the early 1990s. Since then, sea level has risen by a little more than an inch each decade, or about 3 millimeters per year. While most years have recorded a rise in global sea level, the recent drop of nearly a quarter of an inch, or half a centimeter, is attributable to the switch from El Niño to La Niña conditions in the Pacific. The insets show sea level changes in the Pacific Ocean caused by the recent...

Professor Ross McKitrick has just released a new paper on UHI, after reading it, it reminds me of this video from the space station. Weather stations exist in the points of light that define humanity at night, even in rural out of the way places, like the Arctic, where there’s a point of light, indicating humanity and energy use, you’ll likely find a weather station used to monitor climate. Like the dark, humans don’t like the cold either, so where there’s light, there’s heat.Video Link Ross McKitrick writes: I have released a new discussion paper addressing some ongoing issues in...

We enjoyed the letter to the Wall Street Journal last week from 16 scientists who said there’s “no need to panic about global warming,” and of course it drew a response from a warming faction of scientists saying essentially, “yes there is.” Adding some perspective to this they-said/they-said back and forth is yet another letter we saw today from Martin Hertzberg . . .

See the UVA Facebook site: https://www.facebook.com/UniversityofVirginia and the YouTube link to Mann's lecture: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPWff2L25E0&feature=share

A small group of leading climate scientists, financially supported by billionaires including Bill Gates, are lobbying governments and international bodies to back experiments into manipulating the climate on a global scale to avoid catastrophic climate change. The scientists, who advocate geoengineering methods such as spraying millions of tonnes of reflective particles of sulphur dioxide 30 miles above earth, argue that a "plan B" for climate change will be needed if the UN and politicians cannot agree to making the necessary cuts in greenhouse gases, and say the US government and others should pay for a major programme of international research....

From the Weather is not climate unless we say it is department: Over at Climate Progress, paid propagandist Joe Romm wails about “journalistic malpractice” from Michael Mann’s words in a tweet: The wailing (Jan 31st and again Feb 4th) was because the LA Times didn’t use the words “global warming” or “climate change” in a story about the mild winter in the USA. But Romm and Mann both ignore the much bigger story of a bitterly cold winter in Europe with snow reaching into northern Africa which has caused nearly three hundred deaths. Conversely, there doesn’t seem to be any...

Cold, snow headed to Greece, Germany and Belgium, forecasters sayReuters Vehicles drive through blizzards near the Lehliu railway station, 45 miles east of Bucharest.The storm, which swept in from Siberia, has killed more than 200 people.. NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Unusually cold weather, plunging temperatures to 31 degrees below zero in some areas, is expected to continue sweeping across Europe in coming days after causing hundreds of deaths in Eastern Europe and air-traffic delays in London and elsewhere. January has been the ninth-snowiest month since 1966 for Europe and Asia, though for the entire northern hemisphere, it’s been about average...

Environmentalists are torn over the high cost of breaking reliance on fossil fuels. Industrial-scale solar development is well underway in California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah. The federal government has furnished more public property to this cause than it has for oil and gas exploration over the last decade — 21 million acres. In the fight against climate change, the Mojave Desert is about to take one for the team. "I have spent my entire career thinking of myself as an advocate on behalf of public lands and acting for their protection," said Johanna Wald, a veteran environmental...

From Tom NelsonEmail 600, Sept 2007: Watts expose makes NOAA want to change entire USA method Email 600 [Tom Karl, Director of the National Climatic Data Center] We are getting blogged all over for a cover-up of poor global station and US stations we use. They claim NCDC is in a scandal by not providing observer’s addresses. In any case Anthony Watts has photographed about 350 stations and finds using our criteria that about 15% are acceptable. I am trying to get some our folks to develop a method to switchover to using the CRN sites, at least in the...

A recent study suggests that the arrival of primitive moss-like plants 470 million years ago could have triggered a series of mini ice ages on Earth. Researchers at the Universities of Exeter and Oxford tried to explain how the first land plants could affect the climate about 450 million years ago during the Ordovician Period. During the Ordovician Period, the planet witnessed a gradually cooling climate that led to a series of mini ice ages. Scientists believe that the global cooling was a result of a reduction in carbon levels in the atmosphere. The findings published in Nature Geoscience show...

Cooking the booksBy Christopher Monckton of BrenchleyMr. John Cook, who runs a website puzzlingly entitled Skeptical Science” (for he is not in the least sceptical of the “official” position) seems annoyed that I won the 2011 televised debate with Dr. Denniss of the Australia Institute, and has published a commentary on what I said. It has been suggested that I should reply to the commentary. So, seriatim, I shall consider the points made. Mr. Cook’s comments are in Roman face: my replies are in bold face. Since Mr. Cook accuses me of lying, I have asked him to be good...

Freezing weather has hit transport hubs across Europe, closing airports, blocking roads and halting trains.London's Heathrow cancelled 30% of Sunday's flights, and dozens of flights were delayed at Amsterdam's Schiphol.Transport hubs in Central and Eastern Europe have been forced to close amid the biggest freeze in decades, which has claimed more than 200 lives. Bosnian officials have declared a state of emergency in Sarajevo, where snow has paralysed the city.In Serbia, a state of emergency is in place across much of the country.Thousands of people are said to be trapped in their homes across both countries, and many travellers have...

Normally I don’t go for anonymous guest posters, but this one is from the famous “zombie” of zombietime.com whose identity remains hidden so that he/she may continue to record the anarchy and socially bereft behavior that permeates the McKibbenesque protestor culture of America. Zombie wrote to me yesterday asking that I bring attention to the post, and I’m happy to do so. The text is below, but please follow the link to the evidence (dozens of scanned pages) presented. The Coming of the New Ice Age: End of the Global Warming Era? Guest post by “Zombie”I just finished reading a...

Concerned that too many “deniers” are in the meteorology business, global warming activists this month launched a campaign to recruit local weathermen to hop aboard the alarmism bandwagon and expose those who are not fully convinced that the world is facing man-made doom. The Forecast the Facts campaign — led by 350.org, the League of Conservation Voters and the Citizen Engagement Lab — is pushing for more of a focus on global warming in weather forecasts, and is highlighting the many meteorologists who do not share their beliefs. “Our goal is nothing short of changing how the entire profession of...

It seems much of the world is wising up to the Global Warming Alarmism that has driven so much foolish and costly taxation and regulation, subsidies and profiteering. Well, much but not all of the world. Here’s a quick overview, courtesy of the British Global Warming Policy Foundation: . . .

Posted on February 2, 2012 by Anthony Watts UAH Global Temperature Update for January 2012: -0.09 deg. CBy Dr. Roy Spencer PERSONAL NOTE: I’ve been unavailable for a while…my oldest daughter was in a bad car accident, will be OK eventually, but won’t walk for about 3 months. So, I might not be answering queries.The global average lower tropospheric temperature anomaly for January, 2012 took a precipitous plunge, not totally unexpected for a La Nina January (click on the image for the full-size version):The 3rd order polynomial fit to the data (courtesy of Excel) is for entertainment purposes only, and...

Hand back your science degrees Trenberth et al. Thirty eight of the worlds top, most consequential climate scientists sought to slap down the Nobel prize winner, astronaut and glitterati of science, and all they could come up with was a logical fallacy and a single paragraph of incohate, innumerate, and improbable evidence. It’s hand-waving on stilts.Is that the best they can do?Trenberth and co try to rebut No Need to Panic About Global Warming, but those 16 eminent scientists quoted evidence and pointed out major flaws in the assumptions of the theory. They described forms of scientific malpractice, and called...

The Earth's temperature hasn't increased significantly in about 15 years, which wouldn't be big news except global warming extremists had predicted temperatures would soar during that time because of manmade greenhouse-gas emissions. That forecast would be just another failed hypothesis, except governments around the world used the threatened overheating as an excuse to regulate, tax and subsidize in order to curb greenhouse gases and, of course, to save the Earth. . . .

Actual title is : It’s baaack! The plan to kill talk radio. Group advising White House wants to restore controversial policy An organization that helped to craft President Obama’s environmental policies has recommended the reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine, purportedly as a method of silencing critics of the theory of global warming. The Presidential Climate Action Project, or PCAP, last year released an extensive list of recommendations for the White House in a 75-page paper entitled, “Building the Obama Administration’s Climate Legacy.” Primary among the PCAP’s recommendations is that the Department of Energy should join the U.S. Department of Housing...

That letter signed by 16 scientists saying there’s “No Need to Panic About Global Warming” to the Wall Street Journal has caused a great disturbance in the farce. At last count there were no less than  19 blog rebuttals plus one new WSJ op ed piece trying to convince the alliance that all is well. It didn’t work. But, they know the AGW Alliance Death Star has been compromised before its mission can be completed, the Rebellion has seen the plans and the Alliance knows it is only a matter of time before “the consensus” blows apart. Reports are that “Michael...

Jim River, AK closed in on the all time record coldest temperature of -80°F set in 1971, which is not only the Alaska all-time record, but the record for the entire United States. Unfortunately, it seems the battery died in the weather station just at the critical moment.Image from hamweather.com While the continental USA has a mild winter and has set a number of high temperature records in the last week and pundits ponder whether they will be blaming the dreaded “global warming” for those temperatures, Alaska and Canada have been suffering through some of the coldest temperatures on record...

Green Politics: Golden State regulators have passed sweeping emission standards requiring one in seven new cars sold in the state in 2025 be an electric or other zero-emission vehicle. What can go wrong? Plenty, for if we've learned anything in recent years, it's that industrial policy and telling consumers what they need and must have vs. what they want and find useful doesn't work. Only the marketplace can accurately pick winners and losers. The government, having no competition, usually picks losers. We have also learned that climate change is an overhyped fantasy based on ideology rather than science. Yet the...

From National Geographic:Clouds of charged particles stretch a quarter the way to the moon, experts say.Clouds of “cold plasma” reach from the top of Earth’s atmosphere to at least a quarter the distance to the moon, according to new data from a cluster of European satellites.Earth generates cold plasma—slow-moving charged particles—at the edge of space, where sunlight strips electrons from gas atoms, leaving only their positively charged cores, or nuclei.(Find out how cold plasma might also help explain why Mars is missing its atmosphere.)Researchers had suspected these hard-to-detect particles might influence incoming space weather, such as this week’s solar flare...

Global warming activists seek to purge ‘deniers’ among local weathermen By Caroline May - The Daily Caller 11:23 AM 01/30/2012 ADVERTISEMENT Concerned that too many “deniers” are in the meteorology business, global warming activists this month launched a campaign to recruit local weathermen to hop aboard the alarmism bandwagon and expose those who are not fully convinced that the world is facing man-made doom. The Forecast the Facts campaign — led by 350.org, the League of Conservation Voters and the Citizen Engagement Lab — is pushing for more of a focus on global warming in weather forecasts, and is highlighting...