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Chris Mooney | The Politics of Ice and Fire The time to act on global warming is clearly now—right now. In a sane world, Congress would immediately take up carbon cap legislation, and President Obama would be giving a big speech on the issue—and pressing Mitt Romney to explain why he flip-flopped into climate skeptic land, moving in precisely the wrong direction on one of the most important issues to afflict humanity.Moreover, President Obama would recognize this as a smart political move, because the hard-core deniers notwithstanding, public opinion on global warming follows the weather. It always does. Now, with the...

It was for a moment the clash of the Nobel Prize winners on climate changeÂ… just barely, but nothing like this has happened before in the debate-that-isnÂ’t. Normally this is not a show the heavyweights turn up too. But there were three Nobel winners in the room at the same time., Mario Molina and Sherwood Rowland won the 1995 Nobel for work on Ozone. Both of the first two are fans of the man-made global warming theory and they both spoke just prior to notable skeptic Ivar Giaever (who won a Nobel for tunneling in superconductors in 1972). [UPDATE: Watch...

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- Good news: The Waldo Canyon fire, which forced 32,000 residents (including our family) to flee, claimed two lives and destroyed 347 homes, is now 100 percent contained. Bad news: Radical environmentalists won't stop blowing hot air about this year's infernal season across the West. Al Gore slithered out of the political morgue to bemoan nationwide heat records and pimp his new "Climate Reality Project," which blames global warming for the wildfire outbreak. NBC meteorologist Doug Kammerer asserted: "If we did not have global warming, we wouldn't see this." Agriculture Department Undersecretary Harris Sherman, who oversees...

Napolitano on weird weather and climate change: 'There's a pattern here' By Zack Colman - 07/05/12 04:02 PM ET Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano this week linked climate change with the wildfires hitting Colorado. Napolitano said “there’s a pattern here” as she noted the summer wildfires as well as the East Coast heat wave and the high-velocity winds that whipped through the mid-Atlantic late last week. Thousands of people remain without electricity because of the wind storm. Asked point blank if the wildfires were caused by climate change, Napolitano responded, “It could be a lot of different things.” But then...

The ads are really obnoxious about how "big corporations" oppose limits on mercury and how Claire McCaskill "stood tall" against them. And, I kid you not, they ended with "For the Children." I am absolutely certain this is not a legitimate religious group, but a bunch of Lefties running a false-flag operation. Does anybody know anything about these goons?

Note: See also the 1997 regime change in global climate data by the same method, hereI’m happy to report that something I recognized and reported back in 2008 related to solar data has been independently confirmed by another source, and was a surprise when it showed up in my inbox two days ago.Readers may recall that for some time I’ve been pointing out a strange anomaly in the Solar Geomagnetic Index that occurred in October 2005. In a story I wrote on Feb 13th, 2008 titled Where have all the sunspots gone? I plotted the Ap data and pointed out...

This is ten different kinds of glorious.Greenies are always lamenting that we need big government to force humanity to treat the planet with their idea of respect, and bemoaning the toll that prosperity ostensibly takes on the environment. It’s a darn shame that they’re stuck on one speed in that line of argument, because in reality, a thriving economy and environmental quality are not mutually exclusive forces: rather, economic growth often means increasing environmental quality. Case in point: John Hanger points out on his energy blog that energy-related carbon dioxide emissions have fallen so sharply in the first three months...

Derechoes have been in the news in Washington as of late. No, that’s not some new breed of super bureaucrat, but it is something from a supercell sized thunderstorm that crossed several states during its lifetime. You may have seen this NOAA image already on a  few news websites:That’s a time lapse radar image capture as the storm progressed from near Chicago to Chesapeake Bay.They’ve been known over a century, and around far longer than that. Wikipedia says that Derecho comes from the Spanish word for “straight”.The word was first used in the American Meteorological Journal in 1888 by Gustavus...

As many people fall down in the sweltering heat, because of the loss of power to air conditioners, there are others jumping up and down, because the excessively hot weather seems be to punishing those naughty Americans, known around the world to use more than their "fair share" of energy. Coupled with the severe storms knocking out power lines, to an environmentalist, it may, indeed, be a perfect storm. In the past several years, American power generating companies have been diverted from upgrading their existing equipment, including coal generating plants, transmission lines, substations, etc. on the Grid, by the incessant...

Posted on July 2, 2012 by Anthony Watts Umbrella Thorn Acacia, Lake Nakuru National Park, Kenyaby Adam Jones – click to order a photo or posterI’ve covered this before, such as when NASA posted satellite data showing that the biosphere is booming thanks to CO2 fertilization. This new study from Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany suggests that the Umbrella Thorn Acacia trees will make a comeback. Tree trumps grass to rule the savannasA new study published today in “Nature” by authors from the Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre and the Goethe University Frankfurt suggests that large parts of Africa’s savannas...

I graphed the EIA data, shown below. What is most interesting is that this is market driven, not mandate driven.Amazing Shale: US CO2 Emissions Plummet Towards 1990 Levelsby John Hanger (via The GWPF)America’s carbon emissions may drop back close to 1990 levels this year. That result would have been thought impossible, even at the end of 2011. But the shale gas revolution makes a reality of many things recently thought impossible. Shale gas production has slashed carbon emissions and saved consumers more than $100 billion per year. Truly astonishing!For US energy-related carbon emissions, fuel switching to gas is back to...

July 2012Over the past nine months I have been writing extensively about how the United States is on the verge of a major positive development.  Late last year, Goldman Sachs jumped on board with a special report to investors.  In the past few months, institutional finance magazines began reporting this major development.  In June, I noticed a handful of television journalists start to talk about it. Newspapers are beginning to write about it as well. What is it?   "It" is the United States becoming energy self-sufficient.  This means that the United States is very close to not needing energy,...

Meteorologist Dr. Wolfgang Thüne Calls Potsdam Institute’s Science “Pure Voodoo Magic For Spreading Fear Among The Public” By P Gosselin on 29. Juni 2012 Dr. Wolfgand Thüne As the science of the warmists gets exposed as woefully inadequate, slipshod and flawed, all they can do now is give each other awards in pompous ceremonies in an effort to generate a (fake) sense of achievement and contribution. They’ve been reduced to a pretend world.One example is the Technical University of Berlin recently awarding Prof. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber an honorary doctorate. Schellnhuber is Director of the infamously über-alarmist Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact...

Well, I warned everybody yesterday. That briefing was put together by Climate Nexus, an advocacy and communications group. An accompanying report on heat waves and climate change was released simultaneously at climatecommunication.orgThe usual suspects put that document together. See below.Expert Reviewers: Kevin Trenberth, National Center for Atmospheric ResearchJerry Meehl, National Center for Atmospheric ResearchJeff Masters, Weather UndergroundRichard Somerville, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego Now with a telephone press conference, Climate Nexus seer Michael Oppenheimer says he knows “what global warming looks like”, and it apparently is a hazy yellow-orange.“It looks like heat, it looks like fires,...

It’s time to give all mankind a real chance to enjoy genuine developmentGuest post by Dr. Kelvin KemmThe Rio+20 World Environmental Conference has come and gone. The “Plus 20” comes from the fact that it took place twenty years after the first such conference, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992. Between these dates, I was a delegate at the 2002 world environment conference in Johannesburg, South Africa. Ever since 1992 I have watched the eco-evolution taking place.There is a good side and a bad side. The good side is that general world environmental awareness has been enhanced. That...

The Arabunna people live in the area around Lake Eyre in Southern Australia. It is a hot, hostile desert region, which is no surprise, because … well … it’s in Australia. ------------------------ (Lake Eyre region in South Australia.) ------------------------ A new report from the University of Everybody-Panic is a study of the horrendous future faced by these poor folks: "The first stage of University of Adelaide research released today shows that South Australia’s Arabunna country, which includes Lake Eyre in the far north, is likely to get both drier and hotter in decades to come. “'Temperatures could increase up to...

In a move that put local high school teachers back in the student seats, CSU Channel Islands teamed with experts from NASA to educate youths through their teachers. About 15 teachers from schools in the Oxnard Union High School District spent the week of June 18 with science experts in the Promoting Educational Leadership Climate Science Summer Institute. Organizers hope to educate teachers on the issues surrounding climate change and ultimately to reach youths, according to Bill Patzert, a research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Watching green ideology crash and burn Twenty years ago the first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro marked the ascension of environmentalism as a political force in international affairs. That conference in 1992 produced the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Convention on Biological Diversity. At the time, Chris Flavin of the Worldwatch Institute crowed, “You cannot go to any corner of the globe and not find some degree of environmental awareness and some amount of environmental politics.” Flavin added that with socialism in disrepute, environmentalism is now the “most powerful political ideal today.” At the conclusion...

Last week, just before the opening of the U.N.’s Earth Summit meeting in Rio de Janeiro, the New York Times ran an op-ed that decried the rapid rise in carbon dioxide emissions during the two decades since a similar meeting was held in Rio.The authors of the article — Christian Azar, a professor at Sweden’s Chalmers University of Technology, and two economists from the Environmental Defense Fund, Thomas Sterner and Gernot Wagner — claimed that the world needs to “kick its addiction to fossil fuels” and that renewable energy provides the road to salvation because “the seeds of an...

From the University of California – Santa BarbaraThese are views of vegetation in summer and winter of suburban Minneapolis landscapes from the 500 foot tall KUOM radio tower where measurements for the study were made. In what might be the first study to report continuous measurements of net CO2 exchange of urban vegetation and soils over a full year or more, scientists from UC Santa Barbara and the University of Minnesota conclude that not only is vegetation important in the uptake of the greenhouse gas, but also that different types of vegetation play different roles. Their findings will be published...