Free Republic

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

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...

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,...

DeSmogBlog thoroughly investigates the academic and industry backgrounds of those involved in the PR spin campaigns that are confusing the public and stalling action on global warming. If there's anyone or any organization, ( i.e. scientist, self-professed "expert," think tank, industry association, company) that you would like to see researched and reported on DeSmogBlog, please contact us here.

When it comes to dealing with climate change—and reducing carbon emissions, the top man-made cause of warming—the international community is doing a crap job. The U.N. process is bogged down, with ambitions that seem to shrink each year even as the summits themselves grow longer and longer. So with the front door locked on climate action, it might be time to try the back. That’s why the U.S.—as well as representatives from the U.N. and several other countries—is getting behind a new initiative to reduce black carbon, methane and other “short-lived” greenhouse gases, so called because they remain in the...

WASHINGTON — Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced Thursday the formation of a new global coalition to fight emissions other than carbon dioxide that contribute to climate change. The coalition—which includes Sweden, Mexico, Canada, Bangladesh and the U.S. will be funded with $15 million, mostly from the U.S. It hasn't yet determined which actions it will take to reduce the emissions, nor has it identified specific reduction targets. The administration is also putting up federal dollars for clean-energy investments, unveiling a 2013 budget plan this week that sets aside hundreds of millions of dollars for wind, solar and other clean-energy...

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,...

“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...

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...

... 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,...

Professor Ian Clark just does not see any evidence of oil sands contributing to global warming. That’s quite a stand to take in the face of a global environmental community that considers the development of the Canadian heavy oil industry tantamount to hastening the end of the world.But Prof. Clark can claim to know a bit more about the science behind climate change than the average person. As a professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Ottawa, he focuses on paleoclimatology — the study of changes in climate taken on the scale of the entire history...

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...

STOCKTON - The city has a tentative plan to combat climate change, more than three years after reaching a legal settlement with the Sierra Club and then-Attorney General Jerry Brown. It wouldn't be cheap. If adopted by the Stockton City Council later this year, the plan could cost the city $28.5 million and could cost the private sector $240 million, the document says. The plan itself acknowledges it would require "substantial effort on the part of the entire Stockton community" at a time when people are struggling to pay their bills and keep businesses open.

A team of scientists say that sprawling seagrass in the shallows of the Mediterranean may be the oldest living organisms on Earth, far older than humanity itself. Working off of DNA samples, a team of scientists say clumps of seagrass between Spain and Cyprus could be as old as hundred of thousands of years old. The study comes as scientists have sought to increase studies concerning how various organisms will face the changes from global warming. The team of scientists studying the seagrass say that the organism is facing threats from higher than normal sea temperatures and pollutants introduced by...

LONDON -- Meteorologists say ice-free seas in the arctic caused by global warming could explain a chill wind covering much of Europe that has killed more than 300 people. Experts said they believe complex wind patterns are being affected as melting arctic sea ice has exposes huge areas of normally frozen ocean to the atmosphere above, bringing bitterly cold weather to Britain and the rest of Europe. The loss of arctic sea ice could be influencing high-pressure weather systems over northern Russia that bring very cold winds from the arctic and Siberia to Western Europe and the British Isles, scientists...