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Barack Obama has vowed to tackle climate change in his second term, but so far has not acted to strengthen a tool that does not require backing from Congress - the National Environmental Policy Act. NEPA, a statute that dates to the Nixon administration, calls on officials to weigh whether projects such as highways, dams or oil drilling could harm the environment. While it does not have the power to block development, NEPA forces officials to consider the environment before approving federal projects, and the White House has proposed that climate change should rank high among those concerns. Former White...

A pair of fundraisers just 90 minutes apart in the San Francisco Bay area last week laid bare the competing forces of politics and policy that President Obama is grappling with as he prepares to unveil a slate of major initiatives on global warming in late June or July. In public comments at the beginning of the first session, Obama made clear that he considered climate change “one of the most important decisions we make as a nation,” according to a transcript released by the White House. But during the second event, according to several people familiar with his private...

Between 1989 and 2008, clean-air rules in California virtually halved the concentrations of black-carbon soot in the state's skies, in effect reducing the state's carbon footprint by the equivalent of cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 21 million tons a year, according to new analysis. Though the data have yet to be fed into global climate models to see if California's results can be replicated elsewhere, they bolster the hope that focusing on black-carbon soot could be an effective way to begin to address global warming. Estimates of how large an effect soot controls could have on global warming will have...

Governments around the world have just received one of the most important scientific reports ever written. It provides the starkest assessment yet of how the earth's climate is responding to rising levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and creating risks for billions of people from extreme weather events and rising sea levels. Compiled for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change by 255 scientific experts from universities and research institutes in 38 countries, the report provides an up-to-date overview of the findings of thousands of recent peer-reviewed research papers. Most important, the latest IPCC report includes an analysis of new...

As downpours and tornadoes hit the country, actor and conservation activist Robert Redford had weather on his mind and urged President Obama to follow suit. Redford challenged the president to strike at pollution and singled out coal-fired power plants as the root cause of the problem. “Four months ago, President Obama spoke of our obligation to combat climate change, saying failure to do so would betray our children and future generations,” Redford was quoted as saying in a news release. “I just hope he has the courage of his convictions.” Although the president continues to voice his commitment to cutting...

Climatism, the belief that man-made greenhouse gases are destroying Earth’s climate, is on the wane. Once riding high, the ideology of man-made climate change is losing its influence in governments across the world. Climategate, the release of e-mails from the University of East Anglia, called the science of dangerous warming into question and turned the tide of global opinion. Background On November 19, 2009, and unidentified hacker or internal whistle-blower downloaded more than 1,000 documents and e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University in the United Kingdom and posted them on a server in Russia. Within...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Yeah, here we are, great to be back here, folks. The news just isn't the news when I'm not here to tell you about it. I had so many people send me e-mails last week and the first couple days this week: "You know, Rush, there's a lot going on but it just doesn't seem like it's actually going on without you here." Folks, trust me, it was going on. It was happening. And I know it just doesn't seem the same, but the news isn't the news when I'm away. Because there isn't any news anymore....

Mayor Michael Bloomberg cursed out the chief executive officer of a taxi company who won a court case against the city and pledged a post-mayoral revenge against the entire industry, the CEO and one witness said. “[I will] destroy your [expletive] industry,” Mr. Bloomberg said to Taxi Club Management CEO Gene Freidman, The New York Post reported. He made the comments during last Thursday’s game at Madison Square Garden during an impromptu meet at the 1879 Club, a witness told The Post. Mr. Friedman subsequently confirmed the exchange to The Post and added that Mr. Bloomberg also said that come...

NEW DELHI: Sartorial inequality between the genders is a cause for climate change. When it comes to formal dressing, women tend to cover themselves lightly, if not minimally, while men feel obliged to wear a jacket and a tie, even in the summer warmth of tropical India. When they share the same air-conditioned room, another sort of gender inequality ensures the temperature is kept at a level that makes suited men comfortable, even if it leaves the fairer sex covered with goosebumps. If the men were to shed a few layers of clothing, the room temperature could be raised by...

WASHINGTON -- A NASA-led modeling study provides new evidence that global warming may increase the risk for extreme rainfall and drought. The study shows for the first time how rising carbon dioxide concentrations could affect the entire range of rainfall types on Earth. Analysis of computer simulations from 14 climate models indicates wet regions of the world, such as the equatorial Pacific Ocean and Asian monsoon regions, will see increases in heavy precipitation because of warming resulting from projected increases in carbon dioxide levels. Arid land areas outside the tropics and many regions with moderate rainfall could become drier. The...

Allergy sufferers know it's spring when they start sneezing, getting itchy eyes and other symptoms. Now experts say that climate change is only making things worse. The changing climate has brought early spring, late-ending fall and large amounts of rain and snow, which are some of the contributing factors that prolong pollen seasons, according to allergists. “The planet is getting warmer,” said Melrose Park allergist and immunologist Dr. Rachna Shah. “Allergy season has been longer than usual, as plants are stronger and are able to produce more pollen. It’s a trend that we can’t deny.” “Due to tree season starting...

Our democracy has been hacked. The operating system has been taken over." That was the message former Vice President Al Gore brought to Stanford Tuesday night. The 65-year-old paced the stage as he rattled off a litany of dark news from climate change-related superstorms and droughts to the U.S. Senate's failure to pass meaningful gun safety legislation. He offered blunt assessments of the Iraq War, saying it was about "a country that just happens to have a lot of oil." He spoke of the interest in energy-intensive Canadian tar sands oil extraction, the driving force behind plans for the controversial...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Last week on this program a young man of 13 years old called. A young boy called from Wilmington, Indiana. He was a very, very bright, articulate guy who called here to tell me that he finally had proven to himself that global warming was a hoax. He'd gone to his local library. He'd researched it and he had found it, and he told me why he thought the left and liberals don't recognize it as a hoax is because they don't want to. So I offered the young man an iPad. I said, "Somebody like you...

Climate Change: The man who once compared coal trains to Nazi boxcars headed to crematoria leaves government service to fight what he calls the "pipeline to disaster" and promote his brand of climate quackery. In 2007, Dr. James Hansen testified before the Iowa Utilities Board not in his capacity as a government employee but, in his words, "as a private citizen, a resident of Kintnersville, Pa., on behalf of the planet, of life on Earth, including all species." Hansen told the board, "If we cannot stop the building of more coal-fired power plants, those coal trains will be death trains...

World's most vulnerable people need protection from huge and unintended impacts of radical geoengineering projects. … The dangers arose in projects that cooled the planet unevenly. In some cases these caused devastating droughts across Africa; in others they increased rainfall in the region but left huge areas of Brazil parched. "The massive complexities associated with geoengineering, and the potential for winners and losers, means that some form of global governance is essential,"

Last summer, when Louis J. Freeh’s commission came out with a withering report on Penn State’s failure to protect children from Jerry Sandusky, most commentators wrote about the effects on the school’s football program, or about child abuse. But a few drew a direct parallel between Sandusky and a Penn State meteorology and geosciences professor, Michael E. Mann ’98PhD. Mann has never been accused of child abuse. He studies, among other things, the way the climate has behaved for the last 2,000 years. “Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science,” wrote Rand Simberg in a...

FOIA – the anonymous leaker who brought the Climategate and Climategate II emails to light has emerged briefly from the shadows. He has released to selected parties (not me) the password to the cache of Climategate II emails in the hope that someone will have the time and energy to sift through them in search of exciting new revelations about the ongoing "Climate Change" scam. No doubt we'll hear much more in the coming weeks. In the meantime, I think it's worth dwelling on some of the clues he offers as to his identity and motivation. (I'm assuming it is...

This post will be a top “sticky” post for some time, new essays will appear below this one – AnthonyA number of climate skeptic bloggers (myself included) have received this message yesterday. While I had planned to defer announcing this until a reasonable scan could be completed, some other bloggers have let the cat out of the bag. I provide this introductory email sent by “FOIA” without editing or comment. I do have one email, which I found quite humorous, which I will add at the end so that our friends know that this is valid. Update – the first...

Earlier this week in his State of the Union address President Obama made some observations on climate change so brimming with falsehoods I'm surprised his nose didn't fall off. It really doesn't matter where he himself was deliberately lying or whether he was merely lending the gravitas of his office to the deliberate lies of others. The point is that the President of the USA has access to any number of fact checkers and advisers and if he stands up and addresses the nation with a farrago of complete untruths then the buck stops with him. This dissembling and mendacity...

Glaring inconsistencies found between State of the Climate (SOTC) reports sent to the press and public and the “official” climate database record for the United States.First, I should point out that I didn’t go looking for this problem, it was a serendipitous discovery that came from me looking up the month-to-month average temperature for the Continental United States (CONUS) for another project which you’ll see a report on in a  couple of days. What started as an oddity noted for a single month now seems clearly to be systemic over a two-year period. On the eve of what will likely...

President Obama and key members of his cabinet were among the top ten most corrupt politicians in Washington for 2012, according to an annual list compiled by Judicial Watch. Top 10 "Most Corrupt" List Dominated by Obama Administration The New American 03 January 2013 President Obama and key members of his Democrat cabinet like Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, disgraced Attorney General Eric Holder, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, and UN Ambassador Susan Rice were all among the top ten most corrupt politicians in Washington for 2012, according to an annual...

Lord Christopher Monckton was escorted from the UN Conference of the Parties (COP18) by the organization’s security after telling delegates that there has been no global warming for the last 16 years. After Educating Delegates, Lord Monckton Booted From UN Climate Summit The New American 09 December 2012 Lord Christopher Monckton had an opportunity to educate representatives of governments and dictatorships at the United Nations climate change summit in Doha, Qatar, about the fact that there has been no global warming for the last 16 years. However, after pretending to be a delegate from the regime ruling Burma to...

Posing as a delegate from Myanmar, the climate skeptic, Lord Monckton, spoke at the UN climate negotiations in Doha, Qatar. The imposter was later expelled from the conference...

UNICEF, UNESCO, and other UN agencies and NGOs have teamed up to flood classrooms with an ongoing tsunami of global-warming indoctrination. UN Summit: Transforming Your Kids into "Climate Change Agents" The New American 06 December 2012 Do your children (or grandchildren) have nightmares about the Earth melting or exploding due to human-caused global warming? Do they believe they have no future because our planet is dying, the icecaps and glaciers are melting, the sea levels are rising, islands and coastal areas are disappearing, polar bears and children are drowning, plant and animal species are rapidly going extinct, and extreme...

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is using the UN's Doha Climate Summit as the latest pretext for global government. CFR Pushes End to Sovereignty at UN's Doha Climate Summit The New American 04 December 2012 The UN Climate Summit in Doha, Qatar, (see here and here) is in its second week, headed for completion on Friday, December 7. Most analysts and observers expect little in the way of major developments or breakthrough agreements to come out of it. With the world economy in shambles, and nearly all national governments awash in debt, there is diminishing incentive for politicians...

Despite clear facts arguing against global warming, alarmists and government representatives are still assembled at the climate summit in Qatar. Climate Facts Ignored Amid Hysteria at UN Summit in Doha The New American 03 December 2012 To coincide with the United Nations global warming summit in Doha, Qatar, the usual flurry of hysterical press releases repackaged as “news” and a barrage of dubious “studies” from tax-funded climate alarmists have made headlines in the establishment media — all of it, critics say, aimed at creating at least the perception of support for UN goals. Notably absent from the shrill warnings...

Delegates representing almost 200 governments are gathering in Doha, Qatar, in a desperate bid to keep climate change alarmism alive long enough to create a UN-run planetary carbon regime. UN Seeking Global Carbon Regime at Climate Summit in Doha The New American 26 November 2012 Thousands of delegates representing almost 200 governments and dictatorships are gathering in Doha, Qatar, in a desperate bid to keep climate change alarmism alive long enough to create a United Nations-run planetary carbon regime. However, as the climate hysteria continues its march toward irrelevance following the spectacular implosion of UN global warming theories and...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Climate change is suddenly a hot topic again. The issue is resurfacing in talks about a once radical idea: a possible carbon tax. The idea was considered so radical that in 2009, when President Barack Obama tried to pass a bill on global warming, that he instead opted for the more moderate approach of capping power plant emissions and trading credits that allowed utilities to pollute more. That idea, after passing the House, stalled in the Senate in 2010 and has been considered dead since.

The California Chamber of Commerce sued the state today in a last-minute protest against the historic "cap and trade" greenhouse gas auction set for Wednesday. In a suit filed in Sacramento Superior Court, the chamber said the auction is really "an unconstitutional tax" on businesses that are affected by the state's global warming act, AB 32.

In light of horrific wildfires, a historic drought and now the destruction wrought by Hurricane Sandy, the political understatement of the year has to be President Barack Obama's recent comment to MTV. Asked about climate change's absence from all presidential debates for the first time in a generation, he said, "I am surprised it didn't come up." Instead of "surprised" he should have said "appalled" -- because that's what he and most Americans should be. As Scientific American reports, while no one weather event can be blamed on climate change, science now definitively "link(s) climate change directly to intense storms...

The post-superstorm endorsement of Barack Obama by NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg as "a president that can lead on climate change" could be globally significant. Could the backing of Barack Obama by the mayor of New York City Michael Bloomberg be "the most important news story of all time"? Was the "Frankenstorm" Sandy the disaster some, including David Attenborough this week, believed was unfortunately necessary to wake the US and the world from its slumber over global warming? It has certainly resurrected the issue in the US, as my colleague there Suzanne Goldenberg reports, and has broken the extraordinary climate silence...

There are two main ways to respond to climate change. First, we can try to slow the rate of global warming by curbing our greenhouse-gas emissions. But there’s also “adaptation”—we can try to reshape our existing infrastructure to make ourselves more resilient in the face of climate disasters. Many experts say we’ll need to do both. The fallout from Hurricane Sandy has provoked at least a few politicians into taking adaptation more seriously. “It is something we’re going to have to start thinking about,” said New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo after surveying the flooding in lower Manhattan. “The construction of...

TOKYO — With Japan’s oil and gas plants firing at full capacity, officials here say there is little chance of meeting a pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions significantly over the next decade, a startling retreat for a country that once spearheaded an international agreement on climate change. The centerpiece of Japan’s efforts to combat global warming was nuclear power. But since last year’s Fukushima nuclear complex disaster, this resource-poor country has been forced to sharply increase its use of dirtier fossil fuels. The earlier, ambitious target to slash emissions 25 percent from 1990 levels by 2020 has been overrun...

(CNSNews.com) – The financial contribution that the United States makes to the United Nations has increased sharply over the past decade, rising by $4.5 billion between 2001 and 2010 – a 142 percent rise -- according to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Since 2006, the OMB has presented Congress with an annual report detailing the U.S. contributions to the U.N. system for each fiscal year, which runs from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30. The total money contributed from all federal agencies to the United Nations, as reported by OMB, since 2001 are as follows: FY 2001 -- $...

Professor Michael Mann is perhaps best known among climate change skeptics for his appropriately dubbed “nature trick,” as described by Phil Jones in the ClimateGate emails. An advocacy group, the American Tradition Institute (ATI), lost a court battle this Monday to look into Professor Mann’s conduct at the University of Virginia. Michael Mann will have his emails exempted from a Freedom Of Information Act request made by the American Tradition Institute, reports Lizzy Turner for the University of Virginia’s Cavalier Daily today. ATI had submitted a FOIA request asking for access to Mann’s emails following the Climategate scandal. “Should the...

Following up on his 2008 promise that “This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow, and our planet began to heal,� President Obama has promised to do something about droughts, which are caused — in his opinion — by the dreaded global warming.Obama gets a lot of his climate information from NASA’s Jim Hansen, an astrophysicist who heads the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. A federal employee, Hansen endorsed John Kerry for president in hotly contested Iowa ten days before the 2004 election. This year, he has been all over the media blaming the...

Climate Fraud: In an attempt to defend his role in the greatest scam of modern times, Climate-gate's poster child threatens to defend his tarnished reputation in court. First, hide the decline, then hide the deceit. 'Get lost" was National Review editor Rich Lowry's appropriate response to a threatened lawsuit by Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann. NR printed a post by the great Mark Steyn, who graces these pages as well, calling Mann's famous hockey-stick graph "fraudulent." That it is indeed a fraud has been documented by many, including us. Mann was at the heart of the Climate-gate scandal in...

Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine isn’t pulling any punches with his quotes as the frontman dropped some heavy thoughts on fans during a recent show in Singapore During the August 7 performance, the heavy metal singer/guitarist went on a rant telling audience members, "Back in my country, my president is trying to pass a gun ban so he's staging all of these murders,” The Huffington Post reported.

Ray Evans writes a review below of  Robert Manne’s essay in The Monthly entitled A Dark Victory: How vested interests defeated climate science. (Forgive me Ray for slipping in one or two thoughts of my own below).   Ray Evans is the secretary of The Lavoisier Group one of the first original skeptical groups in Australia (I’ve put a few notes on that at the base of the article). It was Graham Readfearns review (ABC Drum) that apparently brought the Manne article to Ray’s attention.Dear All,Readfearn’s review was a lamentation of defeat and disappointment. So I immediately bought a copy of The...

I decided to do myself something that so far NOAA has refused to do: give a CONUS average temperature for the United States from the new ‘state of the art’ United States Climate Reference Network (USCRN). After spending millions of dollars to put in this new network from 2002 to 2008, they are still giving us data from the old one when they report a U.S. national average temperature. As readers may recall, I have demonstrated that old COOP/USHCN network used to monitor U.S. climate is a mishmash of urban, semi-urban, rural, airport and non-airport stations, some of which are...

Uh oh.Steve McIntyre has written an eviscerating essay about a secret letter circulated by the IPCC to UEA/CRU, which they are refusing to divulge, because: there would be an adverse effect on international relations between IPCC WG1 and academic institutions within the United Kingdom because it would force is to reconsider our working arrangements with those experts who have been selected for an active role in WG1 AR5 from your institution and others in the UK”. McIntyre writes: On Feb 26, 2010, as part of their first response to Climategate, Thomas Stocker, a Climategate correspondent of Phil Jones and by...

Forget the Olympics. Want to watch records being broken? Turn on the weather report. Everywhere you look, Mother Nature is grumpy. Even skeptics are starting to come around. While no hurricane or heat wave is direct proof of warming, the worldwide pattern of record-breaking weather extremes most certainly is. Accepting climate change as fact isn’t an inconsequential choice. Extremes in heat and cold are buckling highways, railroads and runways. Floods routinely overwhelm drains and streams. Sea levels could rise a foot by 2050, threatening coastlines worldwide. Adapting our infrastructure to new weather realities requires a committed population. Retrofits will take...

America, it's time to meet your newest top-secret government employee: a professional cover-up artist with a radical agenda. Graham Spanier is the former Penn State University president who was fired during the Jerry Sandusky investigation for failing to properly investigate Sandusky when the pedophilia allegations first surfaced.Spanier's "investigation" of Jerry Sandusky was so thoroughly inept that it got him fired. When it was completed, Spanier stated that he had "complete confidence in how they have handled the allegations against Sandusky," and he was fired very shortly thereafter. The recent Freeh report indicates that the investigation was conducted for the purpose...

Operation Cabin Q&As (from the Norfolk Police here PDF) The following questions and answers are an abridged version of Norfolk Constabulary’s Operation Cabin media briefing held on Thursday 19 July 2012.How do you know it was an external hack?In outline terms, we know it came via the internet from a number of different IP addresses, in various countries, which may have been proxy servers. The attack was, first of all, into the web server (CRUweb8) in the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the UEA. From there, a link was established to a CRU back-up server (CRUback3).It’s fair to say, the...

Rising temperatures caused by climate change may lead to reduced milk production among cows in the southern United States, a new study suggests. University of Washington researchers analyzed climate and dairy industry data and concluded that the effects of climate change on milk production by Holstein cows through 2080 will vary across the United States due to major regional differences in humidity and swings between day and night temperatures. The study concluded that "regions that are currently experiencing the greatest losses [in milk production] are also the most susceptible: They are projected to be impacted the most by climate change."...

XINING - Every summer, Tibetan antelopes in China's remote northwest follow a certain pattern of migration that is key to the endangered species' survival. Normally, around 30,000 pregnant gazelles migrate, some travel for thousands of miles, in June and July to the heart of Hoh Xil nature reserve on the eastern edge of Qinghai-Tibetan plateau to deliver calves. Scientists have not been able to explain why the gazelles favor this place to give birth. But there are worrying signs that this pattern might change before they even have another calf -- due to climate change. In recent months, melting glaciers...

Twenty years ago, Republican President George Herbert Walker Bush gathered the nations of the world in Rio to confront the challenge of global climate change. Two decades later, the challenge is more real, and the damage of climate change more pervasive, but we are further behind than ever in addressing the issue. With each passing day, the danger and the urgency only grow. Promises of action from both political parties have been replaced by a conspiracy of silence. Conventional wisdom tells us that the chances of Congress acting on this issue is rapidly approaching zero. How dramatic and sad that...

The collusion of the climate crowd Posted on July 7, 2012 by Anthony Watts Union of Concerned Scientists (Photo credit: Wikipedia) By Christopher C. HornerFirst published in the Washington Examiner, reposted here with permissionNot long ago, the American Tradition Institute initiated a transparency campaign using federal and state freedom of information laws to learn more about how taxpayer-funded academics use their positions to advance a particular agenda. On its face, this should have been welcomed by the Left, which often lays claim to the “transparency” mantle. It is instead causing great angst.Our project would compile the context to the “Climategate” scandal,...

Full Title:******************************************************************** Mann at Orange County Water Conference – emotional presentation, polar bears threatened, still thinks snows of Kilimanjaro are receding due to ‘climate change’****************************************************************Readers may recall: The question put to Dr. Mann at Disneyland today where WUWT regular Roger Sowell was one of the rare skeptics that got to ask Dr. Mann a question.The video is now online of the event.Sowell’s question starts at around 59:35 minutes, Mann’s answer ends about 1:03:10 UPDATE:Dr. Mann’s slide presentation is available at this link. Note the polar bear on the ice floe.http://www.ocwatersummit.com/   backup link: MichaelMann_OCWS  (PDF 24mb)I find it fascinating that Mann...

For the past two weeks, representatives from around the world met here for Rio+20, the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development, to define a global plan of action that would take humanity toward a cleaner, greener future. They failed. We are living way beyond our means. We are using 50 percent more resources than the Earth can provide; if we all lived like Americans or Europeans, we would need three planets to support us. We needed to see a commitment to ensure that everyone has access to modern energy, and that it is produced from renewable sources that are clean and...