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Japan PM to draft 'Green New Deal' 8 Feb 2009 TOKYO: Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso will order his ministries to draft a "Green New Deal" this week to counter the twin threats of climate change and the economic downturn, a report said on Sunday. Aso will order a stimulus package focusing on slashing greenhouse gases at a meeting of his global warming advisory panel on Wednesday, the business daily Nikkei said citing unnamed government sources. The report came as new US President Barack Obama vowed to lead the world on climate change as he set about shredding his predecessor's...

Glenn Beck interviews 12 year old who recorded Al Gore telling teens and pre-teens to ignore their parents.Click here for video.

Any doubts about just how serious the Obama administration would treat global warming were obliterated when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton named Todd Stern Climate Envoy for the State Department. In the June 2007 issue of the American Interest, Washington lawyer Todd Stern and think tank executive William Antholis wrote a memo to the next president. Addressed from the "United States Department of Brainstorms" to "The 44th President of the United States," the action memorandum laid out the case for "creating the E-8" -- a novel international group uniting leading developed nations and developing ones for an annual gathering focused...

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Monday appointed a special envoy for climate change, vowing that the Obama administration would restore U.S. credentials and leadership in shaping environmental policy. Pledging that the United States would play a primary role in international efforts to stem global warming, Clinton named Todd Stern, a former White House assistant who was the chief U.S. negotiator at the Kyoto Protocol talks in her husband's administration, to the post. "American leadership is essential to meeting the challenges of the 21st century, and chief among those is the complex, urgent and global threat of climate change,"...

After eight years of Republican rule, environmentalists believe they have a keen ally moving into the White House Tuesday, and Canada's oil sands are high on their list of targets. But they'll have to deal with Gen. James Jones. As a monumental battle over energy policy shapes up within the new administration of president-elect Barack Obama, Jones, a former NATO supreme commander who retired from the U.S. Marine Corps, may turn out to be Canada's best ally. After Tuesday's historic presidential inauguration in Washington, D.C., he will be the new president's national security adviser, and has sent clear signals that...

The rise in sea level since the last ice age has prevented us from feeling the full impact of man-made global warming. The sea level rise has resulted in more harmful greenhouse gases being absorbed by the seas. So argue Bangor University scientists in the latest issue of Geophysical Research Letters (23/12/08), an influential US scientific journal publishing scientific advances that are likely to have immediate influence on the research of other investigators. Over the last 22,000 years, since the last ice age, global sea level has risen by 130 m. Research by Bangor scientists Tom Rippeth and James Scourse...

Treasury Department Can Help Fight Global Warming, Says Paulson Tuesday, January 13, 2009 By Josiah Ryan, Staff Writer (CNSNews.com) – The U.S. Treasury and other finance ministries around the world should play a major role in fixing climate change, outgoing Bush administration Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said Monday at an event sponsored by the environmental group Resources For the Future. The discussion was titled, "How Markets Can Help Address Climate Change and Other Major Environmental Problems." Paulson, who once served as chairman of the Nature Conservancy and co-chair of the environmental group Asia-Pacific Council, has long been involved in fighting...

Kick-off Barack Obama’s historic journey to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue at an environmentally-friendly pre-Inaugural celebration. With millions of supporters expected to make their way to our Nation’s capital for the Inauguration, the impact of travel and the Inaugural celebrations on the environment is significant. You can reduce your impact on our environment by choosing to attend The Green Ball. This fantastic event, including live entertainment on the main stage, is guaranteed to be an unforgettable evening. CLICK HERE TO BUY YOUR INAUGURAL BALL TICKETS!

Change we can all believe in? How about the same song and dance, but just a different day? In opening remarks at her confirmation hearing on Jan. 13, President-elect Barack Obama’s Secretary of State designate Hillary Clinton told the Senate Foreign Relations committee she would use the office to shape foreign policy that would fight climate change “You Mr. Chairman [Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.] were among the very first in a growing chorus from both parties to recognize that climate change is an unambiguous security threat,” Clinton said. “At the extreme it threatens our very existence. But well before that...

The purpose of my letter today is to express my view on global warming, a view that is in opposition to contemporary thought and one many readers will find disagreeable. However, before rendering a judgment on my view, I'd like the reader to stay with me to the end because you may be pleasantly surprised where I land. I don't believe that the human use of carbons to fuel our energy needs is the cause of global warming, if global warming even exists. That's my opinion, straight and simple. The context of this letter makes it unnecessary to explain how...

US President-elect Barack Obama met privately Monday with Mexico President Felipe Calderon to discuss energy policy, global climate change and a host of other issues. Speaking to reporters after the closed-door meeting at the Mexican Cultural Institute in Washington, Obama praised Calderon for the "leadership" he has shown on energy issues. He did not elaborate. Obama also sounded a somewhat dire warning about the need to reduce industrial greenhouse gas emissions, saying, "I believe that the future of the economy is going to rest on how we're able to adapt to a potential crisis with climate change." He has called...

COPENHAGEN (AFP) – The earth's climate has been significantly affected by the planet's magnetic field, according to a Danish study published Monday that could challenge the notion that human emissions are responsible for global warming. "Our results show a strong correlation between the strength of the earth's magnetic field and the amount of precipitation in the tropics," one of the two Danish geophysicists behind the study, Mads Faurschou Knudsen of the geology department at Aarhus University in western Denmark, told the Videnskab journal. He and his colleague Peter Riisager, of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), compared a...

Arctic Air Floods Chicago to New York City Arctic air bottled up over Alaska will soon be unleashed over the Midwest and East. The cold air will arrive in two waves this week. The second surge threatens to be the harshest and farthest reaching. The first shot of arctic air will plunge into the northern Plains behind a clipper system today. The bitterly cold air will spread across the Midwest and Deep South on Tuesday and the Northeast on Wednesday. The second blast of cold will come from even deeper in the arctic. It will follow close behind the first,...

COLUMBUS, Ohio - Blizzard warnings were posted across the Northern Plains early Monday as a bitterly cold wallop of snow threatens the region, while residents of the Midwest and Northeast dug out after their own tussles with weekend storms. Arctic air was to dip down from Canada and spread snow into Montana, the Dakotas and Minnesota before marching into the Midwest, South and Northeast by the end of the week. Parts of the Midwest and Northeast were already trying to handle up to a foot of snow that caused two large vehicle pileups - a 59-vehicle crash in New Hampshire...

I as I write this, I look outside and think where are the man-made global warming theorists right now? Are they sitting in some cozy location thinking of ways to cover their butts on new data that contradicts the theory that oceans will rise, the gates of weather hell will be unleashed and we will all be wearing some triple numbered SPF lotion? What is interesting is a new study that came out and was published in Science on January 2nd, 2009, has not made the rounds in the media. The meat of the study: A paper published by Science...

Researchers debate each other in new study; most disagree greenhouse gases are the cause. The Japanese Society of Energy and Resources (JSER) published a new study on the causes of Global Warming. Entitled, "Global warming: What is the scientific truth?”, the report highlights the differing views of five prominent Japanese scientists. All but one of the scientists disagreed that global warming is the result of human activity.Contributing to the report were Syunichi Akasofu, professor emeritus at the University of Alaska, and former director of the Fairbanks Geophysical Institute and the International Arctic Research Center, Shigenori Maruyama, professor of Earth and...

Unprecedented heat will trigger global food crisisMARTIN MITTELSTAEDT From Friday's Globe and Mail January 8, 2009 at 10:18 PM EST TORONTO — The world faces a “perpetual food crisis” because global warming will likely lead to massive and simultaneous crop failures in many regions, possibly as early as the period from 2040 to 2060, a new study says. The finding, appearing in the journal Science, is based on climate models that suggest the worst heat waves of the past – such as the one in Europe in 2003 that killed at least 30,000 people – are likely to become the...

Scientists at the GKSS Research Centre of Geesthacht and the University of Bern have investigated the frequency of warmer than average years between 1880 and 2006 for the first time. The result: the observed increase of warm years after 1990 is not a statistical accident. Between 1880 and 2006 the average global annual temperature was about 15°C. However, in the years after 1990 the frequency of years when this average value was exceeded increased. The GKSS Research Centre asks: is it an accident that the warmest 13 years were observed after 1990, or does this increased frequency indicate an external...

PARIS (AFP) – A cold front is sweeping across Europe after gripping swathes of North America last month, but the deep freeze does not mean the threat of global warming has abated, caution scientists. "The major trend is unmistakably one of warming," Michel Jarraud, secretary general of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), told AFP. "If we look at the trajectory over the last 160 years, it overlays a large natural variability, and that's what causes confusion." The cooler weather that was a hallmark of 2008 can be explained partly by La Nina, a reversal of the phenomenon by which warm...

On his program on Monday evening, CNN anchor Lou Dobbs criticized the proponents of the theory of manmade global warming in response to a report by correspondent Ines Ferre about the latest climate data: “[T]hey bring this thing to a personal belief system. It’s almost a religion, without any question...” He went on to criticize the “crowding out of facts and objective assessment of those facts...there’s such selective choices of data as one discusses and tries to understand the reality of the issues that make up global warming.” Dobbs set the tone early as he introduced Ferre’s report, which began...