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WASHINGTON (AP) — The global output of heat-trapping carbon dioxide jumped by the biggest amount on record, the U.S. Department of Energy calculated, a sign of how feeble the world's efforts are at slowing man-made global warming. The new figures for 2010 mean that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago. "The more we talk about the need to control emissions, the more they are growing," said John Reilly, co-director of MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. The world pumped about 564 million...

The first trials of controversial sunshielding technology are being planned after the United Nations failed to secure agreement on cutting greenhouse gases. Bill Gates, the Microsoft billionaire, is funding research into machines to suck up ten tonnes of seawater every second and spray it upwards. This would seed vast banks of white clouds to reflect the Sun’s rays away from Earth.The British and American scientists involved do not intend to wait for international rules on technology that deliberately alters the climate. They believe that the weak outcome of December’s climate summit in Copenhagen means that emissions will continue to rise...

Virginia joined a growing list of opponents to the Environmental Protection Agency's plan to regulate greenhouse gases. Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli II petitioned a federal court Tuesday to reconsider EPA's decision that greenhouse gases, which are linked to global warming, are a public health threat. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Texas filed similar suits. Cuccinelli will argue, among other things, that EPA failed to consider how regulations will affect the state's economy, particularly in the coal-mining towns of southwest Virginia, spokesman Daniel Dodds said. "We're asking them to reconvene because it did not take in to account the economic...

U.S. Bill Moves a Step Closer, but a Global Deal on Climate Change Presents a Bigger Challenge for Obama Administration WASHINGTON -- A landmark proposal to curb U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions cleared a key congressional panel, bolstering prospects that the government will put a price on carbon for the first time and portending a major shift in how the U.S. uses energy. At the same time, China's government asserted a new, tougher stance in the face of pressure to cut its emissions, underscoring the challenge that the Obama administration will face in trying to forge a global deal to combat climate...

As those following the insanity in the Oregon Legislature know, House Bill 2186 A Engrossed is scheduled for a floor debate and vote today. According to the House Clerks Office, and a glance at the floor schedule reveal, it is unlikely that the bill will be heard today. There are a total of 27 House Bills that were carried over from May 6th to today, and those bills will be considered first. The Clerk's office reports that the House Bill Schedule will be cleared tomorrow, meaning that they will hear and vote upon every bill to clear this legislative schedule...

Link only - 3rd UPDATE: EPA Cleared To Declare Greenhouse Gases A Danger

President Barack Obama's first budget includes $15 billion a year for renewable energy programs and an ambitious plan to raise $646 billion from a carbon reduction proposal. "Because our future depends on our ability to break free from oil that's controlled by foreign dictators, we need to make clean, renewable energy the profitable kind of energy," Mr. Obama said Thursday morning. "That's why we'll be working with Congress on legislation that places a market-based cap on carbon pollution and drives the production of more renewable energy." The plan uses money from a cap-and-trade program — which would allow companies to...

Barack Hussein Obama will propose a massive business tax on greenhouse gases in his FY 2010 federal budget to be presented this week.The massive tax increase and power grab was buried at the end on article on Obama's forthcoming budget proposal in The New York Times:On energy policy, Mr. Obama’s budget will show new revenues by 2012 from his proposal to require companies to buy permits from the government for greenhouse gas emissions above a certain cap. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the permits would raise up to $300 billion a year by 2020. Since companies would pass their...

Former Vice President Al Gore brought a stark message to the Senate on Wednesday: A new climate change treaty is critical to continuing human life on Earth. The Nobel Peace Prize winner urged the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to push for a U.S.-brokered treaty in December in Copenhagen, Denmark, where the United Nations will host a climate change conference. Only the United States can lead such an effort, he said. “This is the one challenge that could completely end human civilization, and it is rushing at us with such speed and force,” said Gore, who won an Oscar for the...

Jim Hansen is the 'grandfather of climate change' and one of the world's leading climatologists. In this rare interview in New York, he explains why President Obama's administration is the last chance to avoid flooded cities, species extinction and climate catastropheRobin McKie, science editor The Observer, Sunday 18 January 2009 Article historyAlong one wall of Jim Hansen's wood-panelled office in upper Manhattan, the distinguished climatologist has pinned 10 A4-sized photographs of his three grandchildren: Sophie, Connor and Jake. They are the only personal items on display in an office otherwise dominated by stacks of manila folders, bundles of papers and...

<p>NEW ORLEANS (AP) - Snow is falling in the New Orleans area.</p> <p>The National Weather Service says a mixture of sleet and snow is falling Thursday morning from Baton Rouge east across much of southeastern Louisiana.</p> <p>The winter weather closed some schools and created hazardous driving conditions.</p>

Kimberley Strassel's If the Cap Fits: Why our CEOs are warming to Kyoto shows that the U.S. Climate Action Partnership (USCAP or CAP for short) includes many companies that seek corporate welfare in the form of government-mandated purchases of their services or products. Many of USCAP's members do not, in fact, even claim to produce a product or service, and are dependent on donations or grants. The recent performance of USCAP's portfolio also suggests that the Climate Action Partnership is Wall Street's Oscar the Cat: a harbinger of bankruptcy, desperate mergers, and generally poor business performance. ...While several of CAP's...

PARIS - President Bush has finally set a target date for reining in U.S. emissions of greenhouse gases but the plan is falling flat in the international arena, where critics have long accused him of not moving quickly enough on tackling global warming. "Losership instead of leadership," Germany's environment minister said Thursday of Bush's new strategy. A major disappointment, South Africa said. Too little and too late, a Chinese official added. Bush's speech Wednesday, in which he said the United States must stop the growth of its emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases by 2025, dominated U.S.-sponsored climate...

Despite the anti-forestry scare tactics of celebrity movies, trees are the most powerful concentrators of carbon on Earth. Dr. Patrick Moore is a co-founder of Greenpeace and chairman and chief scientist of Greenspirit Strategies Ltd. in Vancouver. It seems like there's a new doomsday documentary every month. But seldom does one receive the coverage that Hollywood activist Leonardo DiCaprio's latest climate-change rant, The 11th Hour, is getting. When we're bombarded anew with theatrical images of our earth's ecosystems when the film opens across B.C. this Friday, I'm concerned that we're losing sight of some indisputable facts. Here's a key piece...

Caption: Design student Olivia Ong '07 hugs two garments, treated with metallic nanoparticles through a collaboration with fiber scientists Juan Hinestroza and Hong Dong, that she designed as part of her fashion line, "Glitterati." Fashion designers and fiber scientists at Cornell have taken "functional clothing" to a whole new level. They have designed a garment that can prevent colds and flu and never needs washing, and another that destroys harmful gases and protects the wearer from smog and air pollution. The two-toned gold dress and metallic denim jacket, featured at the April 21 Cornell Design League fashion show, contain...

BRUSSELS, Belgium - European Union leaders on Friday endorsed binding targets to cut greenhouse gases and ensure a fifth of the bloc's energy comes from green power such as wind turbines and solar panels. The deal also noted the role nuclear power could play in tackling greenhouse gas emissions, an inclusion not welcomed by all leaders. "We have time still to reduce global warming to below 2 degrees," Merkel said as she announced the plan that would require greenhouse gas emissions to be cut by at least 20 percent from 1990 levels by 2020 and ensure 20 percent of its...

Thunder eggs are spherical objects which form in some types of silica-rich volcanic rocks (e.g. rhyolites). As the volcanic lava cooled, trapped steam and other gases formed an expanding bubble. Silica and feldspar minerals often crystallise around the bubble or grow crystal fibres which radiate outwards from the its centre. These mineral-filled bubbles with a radiating structure are called spherulites. Internal gas pressure forces the spherulite apart to form a central hollow, later filled with more minerals. Adjacent wedge-shaped segments of the cracked and expanding spherule move outwards and away from each other, helping form the typical star-shaped interior. Silica...

Climate changes such as global warming may be due to changes in the sun rather than to the release of greenhouse gases on Earth. Climatologists and astronomers speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Philadelphia say the present warming may be unusual - but a mini ice age could soon follow. The sun provides all the energy that drives our climate, but it is not the constant star it might seem. Careful studies over the last 20 years show that its overall brightness and energy output increases slightly as sunspot activity rises to the peak...

The year 2005 was likely the hottest year in more than a century. According to a study by the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) examining temperatures around the world, 2005 was either the warmest or tied for the warmest ever recorded. According to the GISS team, global warming is now 0.6°C (about 1°F) over the past 30 years, and 0.8°C (about 1.4°F) over the past 100 years. The GISS team measured temperatures using records from land-based weather stations, and ship and satellite measurements of sea-surface temperature. This image shows temperature anomalies relative to the 1951-1980 mean. Areas of...

Two new studies of gases trapped in Antarctic ice cores have extended the record of Earth's past climate almost 50 percent further, adding another 210,000 years of definitive data about the makeup of the Earth's atmosphere and providing more evidence of current atmospheric change. The research is being published in the journal Science by participants in the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica. It's "an amazing accomplishment we would not have thought possible" as recently as 10 years ago, said Ed Brook, a professor of geosciences at Oregon State University, who analyzed the studies in the same issue of...

Scientists aboard the Scripps research vessel Roger Revelle have solved a 45-year-old geological mystery. In 1960, Scripps oceanographer Dale Krause reported the discovery of extraordinary deep-sea volcanic rocks in waters off Mexico, near Guadalupe Island, approximately 200 miles south of San Diego. When brought to the surface, the rocks spontaneously exploded "with a sharp snapping sound," according to Krause. Since then, only a few other sites, mostly along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, have been reported with similar "popping rocks." An attempt by the late Scripps Professor Harmon Craig to locate the site in 1984 proved unsuccessful, largely because the location of...

WASHINGTON - The chief U.S. negotiator on global warming acknowledged Wednesday the nation's glacial pace in reducing greenhouse gases and said even that might not continue in the future. "One can argue whether it's slowing down fast enough, but it is slowing down," Harlan Watson, a State Department special envoy, told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. "We're doing better than business as usual. That's the president's goal." Business as usual allows the United States to release into the air each year about 6.6 million tons of carbon dioxide, methane and other gases scientists blame for heating the atmosphere...

WASHINGTON - The effect of greenhouse gases on the Earth's atmosphere has increased 20 percent since 1990, a new government index says. The Annual Greenhouse Gas Index was released Tuesday by the Climate Monitoring and Diagnostics Laboratory in Boulder, Colo. Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide accumulate in the atmosphere as a result of industrial and other processes. They can help trap solar heat, somewhat like a greenhouse, resulting in a gradual warming of the Earth's atmosphere. The Earth's average temperature increased about 1 degree Fahrenheit during the 20th century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that continuing increases...

Wish I could post the whole thing. Here's three excerpts to capture the flavor: "Almost a decade ago I suggested that global warming would become a "gushing" source of political hypocrisy. So it has. Politicians and scientists constantly warn of the grim outlook, and the subject is on the agenda of the upcoming Group of Eight summit of world economic leaders. But all this sound and fury is mainly exhibitionism -- politicians pretending they're saving the planet. The truth is that, barring major technological advances, they can't (and won't) do much about global warming. It would be nice if they...

Earth's reflectivity a great unknown in gauging climate change impactsEarth's climate is being changed substantially by a buildup of atmospheric greenhouse gases, but a group of leading climate scientists contends the overall impact is not understood as well as it should be because data are too scarce on how much energy the planet reflects into space. Reflectivity, or albedo, is largely governed by clouds and atmospheric particles called aerosols, but it is one of Earth's least-understood properties, said Robert Charlson, a University of Washington atmospheric scientist. Yet research aimed at quantifying the effects of albedo and helping scientists understand how...

Michael Crichton has written that rarest of books, an ­intellectually dishonest novel. Crichton has made a fortune exploiting the public’s fears: Prey (fear of nanotechnology), Rising Sun (fear of Japanese technological supremacy), and Jurassic Park (fear of biotechnology). These books attack the hubris of those who use technology without wisdom. In Prey, he warns, “The total system we call the biosphere is so complicated that we cannot know in advance the consequences of anything that we do.” Given the author’s past, one might expect that a Crichton book on global warming would warn about the risk of catastrophic climate change—the...

WASHINGTON - A coalition of 12 states and several cities asked a federal appeals court Friday to make the Environmental Protection Agency reconsider its decision not to regulate heat-trapping greenhouse gases as air pollutants. The case has big potential implications for numerous federal and state programs under the Clean Air Act, as well as for the auto industry. Along with other forms of transportation, motor vehicles account for about a third of all U.S. energy-related carbon dioxide emissions — the chief gas scientists blame for global warming. In a courtroom packed with auto industry representatives, environmentalists and government employees, three...

SACRAMENTO (AP) - Even as four western states agreed this week to help string electric transmission lines to power-starved Southern California from the coal fields of Wyoming, California energy regulators began Wednesday considering new ways to force the state's utilities to switch to cleaner energy. The California Energy Commission's Climate Change Advisory Committee is eying "cap-and-trade" proposals, similar to what has worked to limit everything from smog to acid rain. This time it would go to limit so-called "greenhouse gases" that contribute to global warming. Advocates say such a move by California would again lead the way for other states....

Climate-change analysis shifts blameHumans, not increased solar radiation, are more at fault for global warming, a Boulder researcher reports. For decades, researchers have been trying to divvy up blame for Earth's warming temperatures on a variety of factors. Fossil-fuel burning, changes in the sun's energy output, and shifting ocean currents have all been considered suspect. But a new analysis suggests scientists can't pin as much blame on the sun as previously thought. Some had estimated that the sun, by spitting out more radiation, was responsible for as much as 30 percent of the last century's warming, said Tom Wigley, a...

MERCED, Calif. - The deaths of two dairy workers who were asphyxiated by gases rising from a fetid stew of cow manure could have been prevented if the farmer responsible for their safety had given them the proper training and equipment, prosecutors said Monday during opening statements in a case against the farmer. Patrick Joseph Faria, from the small farming town of Gustine, has been charged with two counts of involuntary manslaughter in connection with the 2001 deaths of Enrique Araisa and Jose Alatorre. Prosecutors said Faria failed his workers in a number of ways, including failing to warn the...

Bush shifts stance on warming Report backs science on greenhouse gases NEW YORK In a striking shift in the way the Bush administration has portrayed the science of climate change, a new report to Congress focuses on federal research indicating that emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases are the only likely explanation for global warming over the past three decades. . In delivering the report to Congress, an administration official, James Mahoney, said on Wednesday that it reflected "the best possible scientific information" on climate change. . Previously, President George W. Bush and other officials had stressed uncertainties...

<p>SACRAMENTO (AP) - Gov. Gray Davis said Friday he will join other states in suing the federal Environmental Protection Agency to make sure the agency can't interfere with California's efforts to control greenhouse gases. The announcement comes the week after Davis and his Democratic counterparts from Washington and Oregon laid out a plan to combat global warming, and after the federal agency in August said it lacks authority to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases from motor vehicles.</p>