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Posted on May 26, 2012 by Anthony Watts Al Gore, is his usual incompetent persona, is bloviating weapons grade nonsense again.A few prior examples: On TV, Earth’s core is millions of degrees, in AIT, snows of Mt. Kilimanjaro will gone due to global warming, except the snows are growing, and Gore’s 24  hours of Climate Reality “high school science” that is so solid it has to be faked in post production.Gore’s got a new schtick, he is now complaining about “dirty energy” making “dirty weather”.From the Daily Caller there’s this: Former Vice President Al Gore showed that he isn’t giving...

This post will be a sticky top post for a day or two, new stories will appear below this one.Climategate ContinuesBy Andrew Montford & Harold AmblerMay 24, 2012 4:00 A.M. in the National Review – reposted here with permissionClimategate, 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...

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...

Many thanks for the invitation and for giving me the opportunity to address this distinguished audience. I am not for the first time in Chicago. It is also not for the first time that I am attending a conference organized by the Heartland Institute. But it is for the first time I am with Heartland here in Chicago.Some of you know that I came to Chicago for the NATO summit. Yesterday and today I was supposed to speak about what to do in Afghanistan, how to keep NATO going in an era of overall indebtedness and budgetary cuts, and about...

This will be a top sticky post for a day or two, new stories will appear below this one. At the Heartland Conference in Chicago this morning, four of the forty-nine signers of the March letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden (discussed at WUWT here, here, and here) appeared to discuss their reasons for signing that letter and to announce a second letter responding to NASA’s response.The text of that letter is reproduced below: May 11, 2012The Honorable Charles Bolden, Jr. 
NASA AdministratorNASA HeadquartersWashington, D.C. 20546-0001Dear Charlie: In our letter of March 28, 2012, we, the undersigned, respectfully requested that...

HELP WANTED: Seeking a go-getter able to thwart sea level rise, reduce polluting fossil fuel emissions and protect strained drinking water supplies. Must have lobbying skills to convince local government and residents to invest in preparing for climate change. Al Gore-style PowerPoint abilities a plus. Palm Beach County is in the market for a climate change czar. While the actual job title and day-to-day duties for this new county post remain in flux, the far-reaching goal is to get a county with more than one million people ready for climate change. That includes promoting "environmental sustainability" efforts such as recycling...

Extremist green campaigning group WWF - endorsed by no less a body than the European Space Agency - has stated that economic growth should be abandoned, that citizens of the world's wealthy nations should prepare for poverty and that all the human race's energy should be produced as renewable electricity within 38 years from now. Most astonishingly of all, the green hardliners demand that the enormous numbers of wind farms, tidal barriers and solar powerplants required under their plans should somehow be built while at the same time severely rationing supplies of concrete, steel, copper and glass. The WWF presents...

A new paper published May 15th in the the journal The Cryosphere utilizes 12 years worth of RADARSAT data to determine the rate at which some well known ice shelves in Antarctica have been moving and changing, and the answer is: “not much”. In fact it appears there has been a slowing down. First a map of Antarctica and the most worrisome Ross Ice Shelf (marked by the red x) is in order: If you follow the alarmosphere and MSM related to the Ross Ice Shelf and others, you get these kinds of stories: West Antarctic ice sheet collapse even...

Remember the fear of global warming is falling because skeptics are well organized and well funded by vested interests and, after all, the US government is only spending ten thousand times more than Heartland. How could they compete? 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 Daily Caller Hello to all the fans...

Almost six years ago, I was the editor of a single-topic issue on energy for Scientific American that set out a plan for how to keep atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations below a planet-livable threshold of 560 ppm. If I had it to do over, I would scale back on the nuclear fusion and clean coal, instead devoting at least half of the available space for feature articles on psychology, sociology, economics and political science. Since doing that issue, I’ve come to the conclusion that the technical details are the easy part. It’s the social engineering that’s the killer. Moon shots...

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...

Over at Climate Depot, Marc Morano wonders why Andrew Revkin is calling attention to an article linking Holocaust denial to “climate denial”. He writes: What’s up with NYT’s Revkin? He touts essay: ‘A look at denial, from Holocaust to climate fight’ by a survivor of Bergen-Belsen & a warmist physics prof. at Brooklyn College Read the Full ArticleIs featuring an essay linking Holocaust denial to climate ‘denial’, worthy of a shout out on Revkin’s blog? Excerpt: ‘Denying the Holocaust today, with all the available factual information, requires denying of all of history… But most of our history is based on...

Some years ago when I was investigating the climate change issue in my spare time, I ran across a short article by James Hansen on the GISS website under “Education Resource Materials”, dated January, 1999. James Hansen is arguably the father of modern Anthropogenic Global Warming dogma. So I saved the web page for future reference because of some of the predictions contained within it, as well as the incredibly balanced and well-reasoned attitude expressed regarding the philosophy of scientific investigation. We could all benefit from Dr. Hansen’s wisdom. For example, “Skepticism thus plays an essential role in scientific research,...

As many readers are probably aware, there has been an important new posting at Climate Audit about the Yamal affair. This posting is an attempt to set out the whole story of Yamal. It reworks an article I did in 2009 and incorporates new developments since that time. I hope readers find it useful. I have also prepared a Kindle version of the post, for which there is a small charge - click here:Please also consider hitting the tip jar.The story of Michael Mann's Hockey Stick reconstruction, its statistical bias and the influence of the bristlecone pines is well known....

Industrial Nations Threaten Globe Again A new menace to the planet has been discovered and validated by a consensus of politically reliable scientists: Anthropogenic Continental Drift (ACD) will result in catastrophic damage and untold suffering, unless immediate indemnity payments from the United Sates, Europe, and Australia be made to the governments of non-industrial nations, to counteract this man-made threat to the world's habitats. Science is Unquestionable The continents rest on massive tectonic plates. Until the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the mid 18th century, these plates were fixed in place and immobile. However, drilling for oil and mining for...

Phil Jones’ first instinct on learning about Climategate was that it was linked to the Yamal controversy that was in the air in the weeks leading up to Climategate. I had speculated that CRU must have done calculations for Yamal along the lines of the regional chronology for Taimyr published in Briffa et al 2008. CRU was offended and issued sweeping denials, but my surmise was confirmed by an email in the Climategate dossier. Unfortunately neither Muir Russell nor Oxburgh investigated the circumstances of the withheld regional chronology, despite my submission drawing attention to this battleground issue. I subsequently submitted...

This will be a top sticky post for a day or two – new stories appear below this one.In the over 7,000 published stories here on WUWT, I have never used the word “liar” in the headline to refer to CRU and the Yamal affair. That changes with this story.I’ve always thought that with CRU, simple incompetence is a more likely explanation than malice and/or deception. For example, Phil Jones can’t even plot trends in Excel. In this particular case, I don’t think incompetence is the plausible explanation anymore. As one commenter on CA (Andy) said “I suspect the cause...

It has finally happened: The Heartland Institute, an anti-science front group that used to focus on downplaying the dangers of smoking on behalf of Phillip Morris but now spends much of its time denying the scientific consensus on climate change, has decided to stop even trying to be credible in order to attract publicity. In the vernacular: It has gone all PETA on us. "I still believe in global warming. Do you?" reads a caption written in bright red on a billboard recently mounted in Chicago by the Heartland folks, next to a wild-eyed mugshot of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski....

Dinosaurs may be partly to blame for a change in climate because they created so much flatulence, according to leading scientists. Professor Graeme Ruxton of St Andrews University, Scotland, said the giant animals spent 150 years emitting the potent global warming gas, methane. ... Read more: http://times247.com/articles/scientists-suggest-dinosaurs-tooted-a-new-climate#ixzz1uCGVTUeC

FARMINGTON -- Maine is going to look a lot different in 100 years if climate change trends continue on the same upward trajectory. Moose may all but disappear from the forests, replaced by migrations of white-tail deer. The forests themselves will probably be taken over by trees found today as far south as Maryland, rather than the red spruce that make Maine's woods unique. Even black-capped chickadees, the state bird, may start to head farther north for cooler climes. These are just a few of the potential changes in store for Maine according to many scientists, who have been predicting...

U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Steven Chu contributed a statement to an announced breakthrough in research into tapping the vast fuel resource of methane hydrates that could eventually bolster already massive U.S. natural gas reserves.As Al Fin pointed out yesterday natural gas is priced to a barrel of oil equivalent at about $10-$11 per the estimable Geoffrey Styles view, something less than 10% of the cost of oil. For North Americans adding a viable and hopefully low cost means to make use of gas hydrates could be giant boost to low cost fuel sources and a massive kick to...

Methane hydrates represent the largest source of hydrocarbons in the earth’s crust.Methane clathrate (CH4•5.75H2O), also called methane hydrate, hydromethane, methane ice, fire ice, natural gas hydrate, or gas hydrate is a solid clathrate compound (more specifically, a clathrate hydrate) in which a large amount of methane is trapped within a crystal structure of water, forming a solid similar to ice. Originally thought to occur only in the outer regions of the Solar System where temperatures are low and water ice is common, significant deposits of methane clathrate have been found under sediments on the ocean floors of Earth. The worldwide...

Through the Royal Astronomical Society in London the Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark released new scientific evidence in the last week that has not yet hit the mass media. This new examination could revolutionize the way that we view our world’s climate and even the history of life on Earth. Professor Svensmark examined the history of how supernova’s close to our solar system occurred over the last 500 million years. He compared this supernova history to our well known history of the number of different species on Earth over that same time period and found a remarkable correlation.

LAMONT, Okla. — For decades, a small group of scientific dissenters has been trying to shoot holes in the prevailing science of climate change, offering one reason after another why the outlook simply must be wrong. Over time, nearly every one of their arguments has been knocked down by accumulating evidence, and polls say 97 percent of working climate scientists now see global warming as a serious risk. Yet in recent years, the climate change skeptics have seized on one last argument that cannot be so readily dismissed. Their theory is that clouds will save us. They acknowledge that the...

Public confidence in scientific “consensus” regarding the theory of manmade climate change is threatening the believing scientists’ confidence. While polls show that taking action to fight climate change is off the radar of most Americans, the behavior of the theory’s advocates is even more telling. They are behaving like "cornered rats"—taking extreme actions to protect their turf.

UPDATE: Forecast humor on steroids, hereYou can’t make up FAIL like this. First this story in the BBC Today:Now let’s have a look at the official Met Office forecast for April, issued on March 23rd, 2012: Met Office 3-month Outlook Period: April – June 2012 Issue date: 23.03.12SUMMARY – PRECIPITATION: The forecast for average UK rainfall slightly favours drier than average conditions for April-May-June as a whole, and also slightly favours April being the driest of the 3 months. With this forecast, the water resources situation in southern, eastern and central England is likely to deteriorate further during the April-May-June...

Gov. Rick Perry took to Twitter this afternoon to say that a U.S. Environmental Protection Agencyadministrator's wisecrack likening enforcement actions to crucifixion is "unacceptable & offensive," one more reason to rein the agency in.The governor was reacting to comments from Al Armendariz , the EPA's administrator for Region 6 (which covers Texas and the surrounding states). In the video, from 2010, Armendariz talks about enforcing EPA rules by making an example out of companies caught in violation."I was in a meeting once and I gave an analogy to my staff about my philosophy of enforcement, and I think it was...

And they cried out again, Crucify him. Then Pilate said unto them, Why, what evil hath he done? And they cried out the more exceedingly, Crucify him.Mark 15:13-14 (KJV) In a less-than-shocking piece of news this week, we have learned that the EPA is in fact the New Praetorian Guard. You thought their job was protecting the trees and the butterflies? Unfortunately not. A high-level manager has given the game away. Their job is crucifixion of the capitalists. Prior to falling on his sword today to protect "the cause", ordinary EPA manager Al Armendariz related the following: "I was in...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration's top environmental official in the oil-rich South and Southwest region has resigned after Republicans targeted him over remarks made two years ago when he used the word "crucify" to describe his approach to enforcement. In a letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson sent Sunday, Al Armendariz says he regrets his words and stresses that they do not reflect his work as administrator of the five-state region including Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana.

Last week we finished some YouTube versions explaining the skeptical case. These grew out of the interview we did with Nick Minchin and Anna Rose for the ABC documentary I Can Change Your Mind. They are what we would have said, if we’d been editing the documentary . In the interview we were on a mission to show the evidence the ABC won’t show — and of course, true to form, the ABC did exactly that, and didn’t show it. As David often points out, the mainstream media have never shown this data anywhere in the world, ever, even though...

One bit of Barack Obama’s recent interview with Rolling Stone has caused a little stir: He talked about climate change! After not mentioning it once in the 2011 State of the Union, nor in his recent Earth Day proclamation, Obama had this to say when the magazine brought up the issue: “I suspect that over the next six months, this is going to be a debate that will become part of the campaign, and I will be very clear in voicing my belief that we’re going to have to take further steps to deal with climate change in a serious...

While greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane warm the Earth's surface, tiny particles in the air can have the reverse effect on regional scales. "What we've shown is that particulate pollution over the eastern United States has delayed the warming that we would expect to see from increasing greenhouse gases," says lead author Eric Leibensperger (Ph.D. '11), who completed the work as a graduate student in applied physics at SEAS. "For the sake of protecting human health and reducing acid rain, we've now cut the emissions that lead to particulate pollution," he adds, "but these cuts have caused the...

Early on in the 2012 campaign Mitt Romney expressed support for global warming in various ways, the typical comment being this: “I believe the world is getting warmer, and I believe that humans have contributed to that.” He holds this belief despite the growing body of evidence that global warming theory is based upon false assumptions and despite the last two winters being among the coldest in recent history. Romney has also called for the Federal government to “reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases,” which is code, of course, for creating massive new government programs despite America’s air...

Clean energy technology has grown robustly and come down in price in recent years, driven by hefty government stimulus spending, expectations of future regulation and substantial private investment. But that technology is going to fall off a cliff unless government steps in quickly to revitalize the solar, wind, nuclear, battery and clean vehicle sectors with new spending and federal policy, according to a new study from three research groups. The study notes that the tens of billions of dollars from President Obama’s stimulus program are drying up, even as tax breaks that have supported wind and solar power generation are...

WASHINGTON— The Obama administration announced today that it is reissuing a Bush-era regulation that sharply limits protections for polar bears under the Endangered Species Act. Both the current proposal and the previous Bush rule exclude activities occurring outside the range of polar bears — such as the greenhouse gas emissions of industrial polluters like coal plants — from regulations that could help stop the bear’s extinction. Today’s announcement comes as a result of a court order that struck down the Bush rule in October 2011. “If polar bears are to survive we have to directly confront the greatest threat to...

(Reuters) - A new Tennessee law protects teachers who explore the "scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses" of evolution and climate change, a move science education advocates say could make it easier for creationism and global warming denial to enter U.S. classrooms. The measure, which became law Tuesday, made Tennessee the second state, after Louisiana, to enable teachers to more easily teach alternative theories to the widely accepted scientific concepts of evolution and human-caused climate change. At least five other states considered similar legislation this year. The heart of the law is protection for teachers who "help students understand, analyze, critique,...

A new study says one of the best ways to curb greenhouse gas emissions is to eat less meat. In fact, the study says meat consumption in the developed should be cut by 50 percent per person by 2050. Dr. Eric Davidson said changing how people eat can have a dramatic effect on greenhouse gas emissions. People in developed countries, he said, already eat much more protein than the daily minimum requirement. Davidson looked for ways to ease the effects of climate change that would support an aggressive strategy laid out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In particular,...

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....

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...

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...

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:

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...

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...

It has been so warm in the United States this year, especially in March, that national records were not just broken, they were deep-fried. Temperatures in the lower 48 states were 8.6 degrees (4.8 degrees Celsius) above normal for March and 6 degrees (3.3 degrees Celsius) higher than average for the first three months of the year, according to calculations by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That far exceeds the old records.

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...

Posted on April 10, 2012 by Anthony Watts An embarrasing image for NASA: James Hansen, arrested in front of the White House in Keystone pipeline protest. Image: via Wonk RoomLooks like another GISS miss, more than a few people are getting fed up with Jim Hansen and Gavin Schmidt and their shenanigans. Some prominent NASA voices speak out.Former NASA scientists, astronauts admonish agency on climate change positionFOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEContact: Blanquita Cullum 703-307-9510 bqview at mac.comJoint letter to NASA Administrator blasts agency’s policy of ignoring empirical evidence HOUSTON, TX – April 10, 2012.49 former NASA scientists and astronauts sent a letter...

A new paper in Quaternary Science Reviews titled: Combined dendro-documentary evidence of Central European hydroclimatic springtime extremes over the last millennium…demonstrates that there is evidence for extreme weather during both the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age, in fact it was seen as common according to the tree ring records examined. Unlike the Yamal debacle, it seems they did a much broader sampling of trees, both living and historical fir (Abies alba Mill.), and sampled across France, Switzerland, Germany, and the Czech Republic. Even better, unlike the irascible Dr. Mann, they didn’t have to truncate the tree samples...

China will accelerate the use of new-energy sources such as nuclear energy and put an end to blind expansion in industries such as solar energy and wind power in 2012, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao says in a government report published on March 5.China will instead develop nuclear power in 2012, actively develop hydroelectric power, tackle key problems more quickly in the exploration and development of shale gas, and increase the share of new energy and renewable energy in total energy consumption.The guidance indicates a new trend for new-energy and renewable energy development in China from 2012. Analysts believe that the...

Let’s be as generous as we can. The IPCC say feedbacks amplify CO2′s warming by a factor of about three. Without the amplification from positive feedback there is no crisis So being nice people, let’s assume it’s warmed since 1979 and assume that it was all due to carbon dioxide. If so, that means feedbacks are …. zero. There goes that prediction of 3.3ºC. Feedbacks are the name of the game. If carbon dioxide doesn’t trigger off powerful positive feedbacks, there was and is no crisis. Even James Hansen would agree — inasmuch as he himself said that CO2 would...