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I am quoted in today’s NYT on a new report issued by the Global Humanitarian Forum which makes the absurd claim that 315,000 deaths a year can be attributed to the effects of rising greenhouse gas concentrations. Here is what I said: Roger A. Pielke Jr., a political scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, who studies disaster trends, said the forum’s report was “a methodological embarrassment� because there was no way to distinguish deaths or economic losses related to human-driven global warming amid the much larger losses resulting from the growth in populations and economic development in vulnerable regions....

WASHINGTON — Cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells, once hailed by President George W. Bush as a pollution-free solution for reducing the nation’s dependence on foreign oil, will not be practical over the next 10 to 20 years, the energy secretary said Thursday, and the government will cut off funds for the vehicles’ development. Developing those cells and coming up with a way to transport the hydrogen is a big challenge, Energy Secretary Steven Chu said in releasing energy-related details of the administration’s budget for the year beginning Oct. 1. Dr. Chu said the government preferred to focus on projects...

Don't worry, this shouldn't hurt. In fact, you won't feel a thing. So goes the refrain of those pushing for passage of a climate bill regulating greenhouse gas emissions. Just what do they think we're smoking? A crackdown on greenhouse gases should involve "no cost to the consumer," declared House Speaker Nancy Pelosi the other day — this from a leading supporter of the legislation. As if one fanciful pledge weren't enough, the California Democrat also insisted that it would be wrong to pass a bill "that was a penalty to some states." Meanwhile, Energy Secretary Steven Chu told a...

Senator John Kerry stressed that the economy cannot be a scapegoat for not implementing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas reductions. He went so far as to call doing nothing a “suicide pact”.Forget cost and forget the recession, says Kerry: “Climate change is not governed by a recession, it’s governed by scientific facts about what’s happening to Earth. And you either accept the realities of the science or you don’t. You don’t enter a mutual suicide pact because the economy is having a hard time right now.” Senator Kerry has one thing right; it should be governed by scientific facts....

Enlarge ImageDry so long. Models call for Dust Bowl-like dryness (purples and reds) around the globe and to the end of the millennium. Credit: S. Solomon et al., PNAS Early Edition (January 2009) Climate scientists have painted an unpleasant picture of the end of this century if humankind keeps spewing climate-changing gases into the atmosphere. Now they are pointing out that the ill effects won't be going away for a long, long time. The carbon dioxide we're emitting this century is so slow to disappear and climate so slow to respond, they say, that the effects felt in a...

fool’s par·a·dise: “a state of happiness that is temporary and insubstantial because it is based on illusions or unrealistic hopes” - Encarta® World English Dictionary [North American Edition] © & (P)2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Developed for Microsoft by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. I am struck by the diversity of risk analyses being carried out by investors in today’s climate change market place.  Whether it’s ‘carbon’* market conferences and publications, ‘ethical investments’, insurance company projects or the activities of financial, legal and engineering institutions, it seems at first glance that they have it all covered.  Many financial, political, procedural, legal...

We can expect a proliferation of new regulations that will reach into every area of American life and commerce. What do President-elect Barack Obama’s leadership picks tell us about the kinds of energy and environmental policies we can expect in the next four to eight years? On balance, they suggest we are in for a radical shift away from George W. Bush’s pro-market policies and back to the aggressive regulatory approach favored by the Clinton administration. Let’s take a look at Obama’s prospective appointees.Lisa P. Jackson Obama’s pick for administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will be the first African...

Just as class struggle forms the nucleus of Marxism, so does it sit at the very core of the Left's climate alarmism. At a glance, the regressive nature of fiscal Carbon control schemes, be they taxation or cap-and-trade, would appear to be antithetical to liberal thinking. But beneath the veneer of both the domestic and international green agenda lies a devious wealth-redistribution plan compared to which all predecessors pale...

Proposed fuel efficiency standards in both the US and EU will not reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions from cars and light trucks over the long term, according to a report released today by the World Resources Institute. Light-duty vehicle fleet fuel consumption in US, Japan and European countries, in liters gasoline equivalent/100km. The report finds that industry has held fuel efficiency almost constant while increasing weight and power. Standards currently proposed in the US and Europe would lead to a 33% increase in fuel efficiency—defined as distance traveled per volume of fuel—in the US and about 25% in Europe once...

An international team of researchers has discovered a methane-consuming microorganism that lives in extremely acidic conditions. The bacterium could one day be used to reduce methane gas emissions from landfills. It could also help to cut methane emissions from geothermal power stations. Aerobic methanotrophic bacteria (methanotrophs) consume methane diffusing away from methane-producing zones of soil and sediment. Some environments with active methane cycles—such as marshes and peat bogs—are very acidic; however, no cultured methanotroph grows optimally below pH 5. By contrast, the new bacterium is extremely acidophilic, and grows optimally at pH 2.0-2.5. Unlike known methanotrophs, which belong to the...

Finger-pointing critics often vilify Americans as the sole cause of global warming. But the typical image of SUV-driving, energy-hogging Yankees may be bogus -- a new analysis of U.N. data reveals that U.S. efforts to reduce greenhouse gases actually beat European policies. "Despite constant criticism from environmental activists at home and across Europe claiming the U.S. government is doing nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, new evidence suggests America's efforts are more effective than those of Europe's," according to a study by H. Sterling Burnett of the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research institute. The United...

SAN FRANCISCO – Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed legislation yesterday that imposes the nation's first cap on greenhouse gas emissions and challenges Californians to temper energy consumption. The measure, aimed at curbing global warming, is expected to have political and practical implications, from increasing pressure for federal action from the Bush administration to accelerating new technologies that could deliver fuel-saving cars, power plants, refineries and factories. “It will begin a bold new era of environmental protection in California that will change the course of history,” the Republican governor said during a bill-signing ceremony in San Francisco. It was attended by a...

California to cut gas emissions Schwarzenegger thinks the federal government will follow suit California's Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has signed a law which sets targets to reduce the state's greenhouse gas emissions.Becoming the first US state to impose such limits, California is aiming to reduce its emissions by 25% by 2020. Details on how the state will achieve the cut have not been worked out, but it seems inevitable that businesses will face tougher emissions limits. While good news for the environment, critics argue that firms may relocate. In addition to companies simply moving outside California, opponents of the Global...

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Wednesday signed the nation's first statewide cap on greenhouse gas emissions. It was one of several bills related to global warming that was approved by the Democrat-controlled Legislature this year. A universal cap will have the greatest effect on industries such as power plants, refineries and cement makers. Here's what the law, authored by Assemblywoman Fran Pavley, D-Agoura Hills, would do: - Mandate that California cut its greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, about a 25 percent reduction. - Require the California Air Resources Board to devise a plan by 2009 outlining the...

Yesterday evening, I received a call from my column syndicate, Creators Syndicate. The Associated Press had phoned my editor to inform her that it would be sending a response to my column yesterday about detained AP photographer Bilal Hussein. (Funny how quickly they respond now. Where have they been the past five months? Oh, right: Busy covering up the news about Hussein's April 12 capture by the military at a Ramadi apartment with an alleged al Qaeda leader and a weapons cache.) The AP last night asked my editor to supply its corporate communications office with my newspaper client list...

IT'S bad enough that friends of Hezbollah terrorists could trick so many journalists with just a tall story and a rusty Lebanese ambulance. Worse is that some of those journalists seemed so eager to believe this ambulance was indeed wickedly blown up by an Israeli missile fired straight through the big red cross on its roof -- leaving not even a scorch mark. But worst is that even now that this hoax has been exposed, none of the countless writers and commentators who fell for it have admitted to passing on as fact the propaganda of terrorists. It is this...

The media war against Israel Early in the recent Lebanon war, the blogosphere revealed the fabrication of images by Reuters, whose reputation is now in shreds among those dwindling numbers in the western mainstream media who still acknowledge there is such a thing as the truth. Since then, the nature and scale of the various frauds perpetrated by the media during that war put those doctored Reuters pictures into the shade. The western media are no longer merely producing questionable professional practices in reporting a war. They are now active participants in it — and on the wrong side of...

International journalists discuss Lebanon war coverage; NYT bureau chief: Israel 'not interested in Lebanese deaths' A number of journalists claimed during a convention in Jerusalem Monday evening that Israel and the IDF were mostly to blame for the way the foreign media covered the Lebanon war. The panel of journalists, largely from the international media, convened to discuss their coverage of the war, at a conference arranged by the Media Line agency's Mideast Press Club. "Journalists' access to the battlefield is controlled exclusively by the IDF," said Simon McGregor-Wood, Chairman of the Foreign Press Association, and Bureau Chief of ABC...

Fauxtography Defender's Faux News Turns out that Greg Mitchell, the Editor & Publisher editor who has been attacking the blogosphere like a rabid ferret for pointing out the bogus news from the Middle East, has first-hand experience with staging news. (Hat tip: Confederate Yankee.) Since the press seems to be in full-disclosure mode these days, I want to finally come clean. Back when I worked for the Niagara Falls (N.Y.) Gazette (now the Niagara Gazette), our city editor asked me to find out what tourists thought about an amazing local event: Engineers had literally “turned off” the famous cataracts,...

All Your Fakes Are Belong to Us A jawa video spoof on Beirut Fauxtography.

Amid the controversy over certain pictures from Lebanon, a longtime student of war photography asks, "I'm not sure if the craft I love is being murdered, committing suicide, or both." By David D. Perlmutter (August 18, 2006) -- The Israeli-Hezbollah war has left many dead bodies, ruined towns, and wobbling politicians in its wake, but the media historian of the future may also count as one more victim the profession of photojournalism. In twenty years of researching and teaching about the art and trade and doing photo-documentary work, I have never witnessed or heard of such a wave of attacks...

It's the story that the journalistic elite would rather just go away. In the aftermath of Reuters' admission that one of its photographers, Adnan Hajj, had manipulated two war images from Lebanon after bloggers smoked out his crude Photoshop alterations, and all 920 of his Reuters photos were pulled, evidence of far more troubling photo staging and media deception in the Middle East continues to pour in. Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs (littlegreenfootballs.com) calls it "fauxtography." Reuters on Sunday withdrew an image of smoke rising from burning buildings after an Israeli air strike on the suburbs of Beirut on...

The first Photoshop war Lebanon war's doctored photos could be harbinger of photojournalism crisis Gal Mor The photo of an apparently new Mickey Mouse doll, resting on a ruined street in the Lebanese town of Tyre following an Israeli Air Force attack, took me back to a British TV show called "Drop the Dead Monkey," which aired in Israel about 15 years ago. One of the journalists in Channel 4's satirical show used to hang around battle zones with a teddy bear in his trunk and place it at disaster zones a short time before cameras began shooting, in order...

Many of the mainstream media apologists have conceded – and they had little choice but to do so – that many of the photographs of the Israelis’ response to Hez b’Allah’s act of war, were staged. The evidence of staging and Photoshopping is too public. The media allowed itself to be used to defame Israel, stir up sympathy for Lebanon and halt the advance into Lebanon. But the concessions of wrongdoing stop short with digital alterations. Media spokesmen are still in denial about the biggest media fraud of all: the dramatic dead baby display at Qana. EUreferendum has not given...

When Reuters was forced to sever ties with free-lance photographer Adnan Hajj and remove more than 900 of his photos from its database earlier this month, long-whispered questions about the reliability of Arab stringers and freelancers came to the forefront. But while the widespread use of Arab locals in covering the Middle East raises many legitimate concerns, the Palestinian propaganda machine has enjoyed tremendous success over the years hoodwinking supposedly sophisticated Western journalists. And Hezbollah appears to have done the same over the past month. In short, almost nothing that is purported to happen in the Arab world can automatically...

Thanks to some intrepid digging from commenters Lancelot and Harris at EU Referendum, another video of the events at Qana has been found. This is one that I have never seen before and really shows what was going on that day. It is truly a must see for anyone that believes that the photos at Qana were staged. It completely debunks the "our photographers do not set up photos" and "the rescuers were not holding up the children for photos" claims. Believe it or not, it is a link from Wikipedia of all places. Here's the direct link to the...

Lebanese rescuer 'Green Helmet' injured A civil defense worker who has drawn controversy for holding up the bodies of children killed in Lebanon said Tuesday he was lightly injured fighting a weekend fire sparked by an Israeli bomb. Salam Daher, dubbed the Green Helmet for the color of his civil defense headgear, said he was hit by debris Sunday when a bomb or missile fell on a building while he was helping to battle a fire at a gas station in the port city of Tyre. "I fell over when the bomb hit, and I got some scratches from debris...

Ray Robison has yet another example of staged photojournalism from Lebanon, a car with verses from the Koran strategically placed for propaganda effect: Al-AP at it again with staged photos. Ray comments: Notice this car has a wall-hanging positioned on the door. An Arabic reader tells me this board has verses from the Koran on it. Because Islam does not allow for images of the Prophet Mohammed, Muslims use verses to adorn their homes the same way some Christians use paintings of Jesus. If you want to make the argument that this wall-hanging got where it is by chance, then...

Fox is now showing the German TV video of Qana showing Green Helmet Guy posing a dead child Click here to watch the Fox News video Here is the original FR post Here is the original video on YouTube: Green Helmet the movie director [Germany's NDR busts him in the act]

The recent discovery that a Lebanese freelance photographer, Adnan Hajj, had manipulated pictures he took for Reuters has raised questions about the standards of photojournalism at a time of widespread digital photography. The case also increased pressure on news photo editors, who select and edit thousands of photographs under deadline pressure each day, to detect digital alterations. "The Soviets had to have a whole department to doctor pictures," said David Friend, an editor at Vanity Fair and a former director of photography for Life magazine. "Now all it takes is a swipe of a mouse, and the kid down the...

AP Circles the Wagons Around Green Helmet Guy It’s utterly surreal. The Associated Press does a full court press, supporting the man they now call Salam Daher with a multimedia presentation packed full of distortions and outright lies: A Grueling Task in Lebanon. Watch the AP presentation here: A Grueling Task in Lebanon

Kopel: Were front-page photos staged? Images from Qana raise issue of whether media were manipulated. If you see a news photograph of the war in Lebanon, shot from within Hezbollah territory, can you be confident the picture and caption are accurate? Unfortunately, the answer is no. Earlier this week, Reuters fired photographer Adnan Hajj and withdrew his portfolio of 920 pictures after Little Green Footballs, The Jawa Report, and many other weblogs provided evidence that Hajj had used digital editing and other techniques to fake numerous photos of the Lebanon war. On July 31, the News and Post ran the...

DAY 2 - THIS IS OUR 'TOP' POST UNTIL WE GET A RESPONSE FROM AP Page views since posting: 10,411 - First posted: 7.25 PM 10 August 2006. New post underneath this one. They hunt in packs, they film in packs and they lie in packs. And their bosses, sitting in their air-conditioned offices, thousands of miles from the action, back up their lies. And the liar-in-chief is Kathleen Carroll, senior vice president and executive editor for Associated Press. Unlike Reuters' who have at least admitted their photo-fraud and started their own internal investigation, Carroll's hastily-produced "rebuttal" of the staged...

A woman has made two appearances in photographs used by the Associated Press and Reuters, allegedly wailing over the destruction of her Beirut home. US bloggers have however noticed that photographs were taken two weeks apart from each other, according to times stamps on the images, and that the photographs were taken in different locations. "Either this woman is the unluckiest multiple home owner in Beirut, or something isn't quite right," noted the author of the Drinking From Home blog.

It was the shot seen round the world: shocking, disturbing, heartrending and intentionally so. [Graphic content appears below and in links.] A man dressed up as a rescue worker held up a dead infant, purportedly killed in the basement of a building that supposedly collapsed after it was allegedly hit by Israeli ordnance. The AP wire story begins: "Abu Shadi Jradi pulled bodies out of wreckage for hours - two toddler girls wearing tiny gold earrings, a small boy whose pale blue pacifier still hung from his neck [sic]. Somewhere in the middle, Jradi slumped beneath a tree and wept."...

SAN FRANCISCO, United States (AFP) - California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declared war on global warming by imposing bold new greenhouse gas targets emissions on the most populous US state. The former action star used the UN World Environment Day conference, attended by mayors from the world's most populous cities, to announce the plan that comes despite Washington's refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on the environment. He formally launched the gathering with a signing of an executive order mandating that greenhouse gas emissions in California be cut to year 2000 levels in the next five years, and that they be...

Update from the Governor's OfficeJune 6, 2005California Leading the Way on Fight Against Global Warming Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger today announced greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction targets for California at the United Nations World Environment Day in San Francisco. The Governor signed Executive Order S-3-05 which establishes these GHG targets and charges the California Environmental Protection Agency secretary with the coordination of the oversight of efforts to achieve them. “California will continue to be a leader in the fight against global warming and protecting our environment. Today I am establishing clear and ambitious targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in...