Free Republic

People have known for 200 years that there’s some link between sunspots and our climate.  In 1800, the astronomer William Herschel didn’t need a climate model, he didn’t even have a calculator — yet he could see that wheat prices rose and fell in time with the sunspot cycle. Since then, people have noticed that rainfall patterns are also linked to sunspots.Sunspots themselves don’t make much difference to us, but they are a sign of how weak or strong the sun’s magnetic field is. This massive solar magnetic field reaches out around the Earth, and it shields us from...

PARIS (AFP) – An iceberg the size of Luxembourg knocked loose from the Antarctic continent earlier this month could disrupt the ocean currents driving weather patterns around the globe, researchers said Thursday. While the impact would not be felt for decades or longer, a slowdown in the production of colder, dense water could result in less temperate winters in the north Atlantic, they said. The 2550 square-kilometre (985 square-mile) block broke off on February 12 or 13 from the Mertz Glacier Tongue, a 160-kilometer spit of floating ice protruding into the Southern Ocean from East Antarctica due south of Melbourne,...

Private industry and governments around the world have spent trillions of dollars in the name of saving our planet from manmade global warming. Academic institutions, think tanks and schools have altered their curricula and agenda to accommodate what was seen as the global warming "consensus." Mounting evidence suggests that claims of manmade global warming might turn out to be the greatest hoax in mankind's history. Immune and hostile to the evidence, President Barack Obama's administration and most of the U.S. Congress sides with Climate Czar Carol Browner, who says, "I'm sticking with the 2,500 scientists. These people have been studying...

The long, hard winter looks like dragging on into March. And if the bitter winds carry on for the next two weeks, there is a very good chance that this winter will turn out to be the coldest across the UK since 1929. The National Trust reports that spring flowers have been set back by up to four weeks compared with recent years, although they expect that when some decent warmth arrives it could unleash a huge burst of flowering. In the latest outbreak of wintry weather, heavy snow swamped much of the South West, Wales, the Midlands and parts...

On the very same day that the EPW minority released a report [PDF] citing “unethical and potentially illegal behavior by some the world's leading climate scientists,” the ruling majority promised “to make policy based on [the same discredited] science.” It was like watching shopkeepers wading through knee-deep water to tape a handwritten “open for business” sign to their cracked and filthy front windows after days of devastating storms. Only the storms in this story carried unusual names. Like Climategate and Glaciergate and Amazongate. And the shopkeepers were named Boxer and Sanders and Whitehouse and Jackson. And what they were selling...

More trouble looms for the IPCC. The body may need to revise statements made in its Fourth Assessment Report on hurricanes and global warming. A statistical analysis of the raw data shows that the claims that global hurricane activity has increased cannot be supported.

It’s been called the “biggest scientific scandal in history.” It has everything to earn Pulitzer consideration: lies and misconduct in high places, political implications, even massive financial transactions that may or may not be legitimate or even legal. It’s big news … as long as you read the Telegraph, the Guardian, the London Times, or even major Indian papers. Read more: http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/climategate-the-worlds-biggest-story-everywhere-but-here/

A few weeks ago, I noted that a trio of House Democrats proposed legislation to curtail the EPA’s war on carbon.Now, Senate Democrats are jumping on the bandwagon. Amazing what an election year, double-digit unemployment, and the Climategate-induced collapse of the global warming cult can do to turn the eco-hysteria tide: Eight Democratic senators from industrial states are challenging the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate pollution blamed for global warming.In a letter written by Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, the lawmakers said the agency lacks the power to restrict greenhouse gases from stationary sources such as power plants,...

Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) today asked the Obama administration to investigate what he called “the greatest scientific scandal of our generation” — the actions of climate scientists revealed by the Climategate Files, and the subsequent admissions by the editors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). Senator Inhofe also called for former Vice President Al Gore to be called back to the Senate to testify. “In [Gore's] science fiction movie, every assertion has been rebutted,” Inhofe said. He believes Vice President Gore should defend himself and his movie before Congress. Just prior to a hearing...

From Fox News, word that the Met Office has circulated a proposal that intends to completely start over with raw surface temperature data in a transparent process. Here’s the proposal from the Met Office metoffice_proposal_022410 (PDF). Unfortunately it is not searchable, as they still seem to be living in the typewriter age, having photoscanned the printed document.I’d feel better about it though if they hadn’t used the word “robust”. Every time I see that word in the context of climate data it makes me laugh. It seems though they already have concluded the effort will find no new information. Given...

How long until the Warmer's admit it's all been big fat LIE?It was just a week ago that I posted on the near total collapse of global warming hysteria. No warming, no increase in hurricanes fury or frequency, no melting Himalayan glaciers or destruction of the Amazon rain forest. The last few months have seen one domino after another dropping to expose the fallacy of man made global warming. Now, the latest, coming to us from the left wing Guardian newspaper in Britain: Climate scientists withdraw journal claims of rising sea levelsStudy claimed in 2009 that sea levels would rise...

WASHINGTON - A last-ditch attempt at passing a climate change bill begins in the Senate this week with senators mindful that time is running short and that approaches to the legislation still vary widely, according to sources. "We will present senators with a number of options when they get back from recess," said one Senate aide knowledgeable of the compromise legislation that is being developed. The goal is to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases that scientists say threaten Earth. The options will be presented to three senators -- Democrat John Kerry, independent Joseph Lieberman and Republican...

The scientist who has been put in charge of the Commerce Department's new climate change office is coming under attack from both sides of the global warming debate over his handling of what they say is contradictory scientific data related to the subject. Thomas Karl, 58, was appointed to oversee the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Climatic Data Center, an ambitious new office that will collect climate change data and disseminate it to businesses and communities. According to Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, the office will "help tackle head-on the challenges of mitigating and adapting to climate change. In...

Climate scientists are losing ground against deniers' disinformationThe IPCC and scientific community urgently need to focus on rebuilding trust and could learn a few tactics from Barack Obama Joss Garman guardian.co.uk, Monday 15 February 2010 11.54 GMT There's an incredibly powerful movement opposed to action on climate change. Without doubt it had more influence on the outcome of the climate negotiations in Copenhagen than many of the world's countries combined. Obama knew if he signed up to something that would truly deliver significant cuts in global warming pollution, he'd suffer a serious blow from this movement's army of activists and...

Despite his steady hands at the helm of climate talks, de Boer was losing his touch and navigated into rancorous territoryUN climate chief Yvo de Boer at a news conference on the eve of the Copenhagen conference which ultimately ended in disappointment. Photograph: Bob Strong/ReutersHow can everything have gone so wrong so quickly? A year ago, the prospects for successful climate change regulation were bright: a new US president promised positive re-engagement with the international community on the issue, civil society everywhere was enthusiastically mobilising to demand that world leaders "seal the deal" at Copenhagen, and the climate denial crowd...

We must not be distracted from science's urgent message: we are fuelling dangerous changes in Earth's climate*********************photo at website...******************Critics of climate change science are few in number but their attacks are aggressive. Photograph: CorbisIn the weeks before and after the Copenhagen climate change conference last December, the science of climate change came under harsh attack by critics who contend that climate scientists have deliberately suppressed evidence — and that the science itself is severely flawed. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the global group of experts charged with assessing the state of climate science, has been accused of bias.The...

On December 18, the Copenhagen climate change conference collapsed. Heads of state from about 120 countries had flocked to the Danish capital, anticipating a historic photo op that would lead future generations to lionize them as visionary saviors who rescued the planet from the menace of man-made global warming. Instead the world’s leaders participated in an embarrassing diplomatic flop. Officially, a Copenhagen Accord was reached, but the three-page document largely consists of vague promises expressing the “political will” to combat global warming. Many leaders were already fleeing to the airport before the conference officially closed. This fiasco could spell the...

“No nation, however large or small, wealthy or poor, can escape the impact of climate change. Rising sea levels threaten every coastline,” Said President Obama at the G20 summit in Pittsburgh last year. The President forgot to mention that ever since the last ice-age 10,000 years ago, sea levels have been rising. So unless the Neanderthals imitating Al Gore and flying private jets and driving gas guzzlers, rising sea levels are not caused by global warming but by natural phenomena. Last year two scientists published a paper which said the ocean rise was accelerating and unless we did something about...

23 comments The world’s largest private sector coal business, the Peabody Energy Company (PEC) has filed a mammoth 240-page “Petition for Reconsideration,” a full-blown legal challenge against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The petition must be answered and covers the entire body of leaked emails from ‘Climategate’ as well as those other ‘gate’ revelations including the frauds allegedly perpetrated under such sub-headings as ‘Himalayan Glaciers,’ ‘African Agricultural Production,’ ‘Amazon Rain Forests,’ ‘Melting Mountain Ice,’ ‘Netherlands Below Sea Level’ as well as those much-publicized abuses of the peer-review literature and so called ‘gray literature.’ These powerful litigants also draw attention to...

New Work on the Recent Warming of Northern Hemispheric Land AreasINTRODUCTIONArguably the most important data used for documenting global warming are surface station observations of temperature, with some stations providing records back 100 years or more. By far the most complete data available are for Northern Hemisphere land areas; the Southern Hemisphere is chronically short of data since it is mostly oceans.But few stations around the world have complete records extending back more than a century, and even some remote land areas are devoid of measurements. For these and other reasons, analysis of “global” temperatures has required some creative data...