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Campaigners against global warming have drawn on an arsenal of visually startling tactics over the years, from posing nude on a Swiss glacier to scaling smokestacks at coal-fired power plants. On Saturday, they tried something new with the goal of prodding countries to get serious about reaching an international climate accord: a synchronized burst of more than 4,300 demonstrations, from the Himalayas to the Great Barrier Reef, all centered on the number 350.For some prominent climate scientists, that is the upper limit for heat-trapping carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, measured in parts per million. If the gas concentration exceeds that...

Well ok, I'll put in another link HERE.

Originally called geoengineering, this approach used to be dismissed as science fiction fantasies: cooling the planet with sun-blocking particles or shades; tinkering with clouds to make them more reflective; removing vast quantities of carbon from the atmosphere. climate engineering and it is looking more practical. Several recent reviews of these ideas conclude that cooling the planet would be technically feasible and economically affordable. There are still plenty of skeptics, but even they have started calling for more research into climate engineering. The skeptics understandably fear the unintended consequences of tampering with the planet’s thermostat, but they also fear the possibility...

TOKYO (Reuters) - Proposals by Japan's new ruling party to slash greenhouse gas emissions may trigger a shake-out in smokestack industries like paper, cement and steel, but boost firms investing in solar and other green technologies. A Democratic Party (DPJ) pledge to cut emissions by 25 percent from 1990 levels by 2020 is one of several proposals causing a stir across businesses. Another is a plan aimed at banning most temporary factory workers. Corporate executives say that could hit profits and push more investment overseas.

SOLAR MINIMUM VS. GLOBAL WARMING: From 2002 to 2008, decreasing solar irradiance has countered much anthropogenic warming of Earth's surface. That's the conclusion of researchers Judith Lean (NRL) and David Rind (NASA/GISS), who have just published a new analysis of global temperatures in the Geophysical Research Letters. Lean and Rind considered four drivers of climate change: solar activity, volcanic eruptions, ENSO (El Nino), and the accumulation of greenhouse gases. The following plot shows how much each has contributed to the changing temperature of Earth's surface since 1980: Volcanic aerosols are a source of cooling; ENSO and greenhouse gases cause heating;...

It's time to take a bit of a break from coverage of the Atlantic hurricane season of 2009, and report on some important climate news. The past decade was the warmest decade in the Arctic for the past 2,000 years, according to a study called "Recent Warming Reverses Long-Term Arctic Cooling" published today in the journal Science. Furthermore, four of the five warmest decades in the past 2,000 years occurred between 1950 - 2000, despite the fact that summertime solar radiation in the Arctic has been steadily declining for the past 2,000 years. Previous efforts to reconstruct past climate in...

ESTES PARK, Colo. (AP) — Global warming is threatening America's national parks. But there is no consensus about how to prevent the harm. Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona and Democratic Sen. Mark Udall of Colorado toured Rocky Mountain National Park Monday then heard testimony from parks officials and scientists about how global warming is harming the park system. . . . . . Both senators said confronting climate change is paramount. "A common misperception is that this is a crisis that is down the road," McCain said. "Climate change is real. It's happening now."However, there was no discussion at...

Link only, per FR copyright and excerpt rules

Gov. Charlie Crist said he wasn't sure if he would host another climate-change summit and is backing away from his cap-and-trade energy policy. BY MARC CAPUTO TALLAHASSEE -- Gov. Charlie Crist is cooling to global warming. Under mounting criticism from fellow Republicans, Crist looks ready to cancel his climate-change summit and is backing away from advocating a "cap-and-trade" energy policy. At his well-publicized climate summit last summer, Crist pushed a number of energy plans to encourage renewable energy development and establish a cap-and-trade market that would penalize fossil-fuel use. But Crist's plans were shredded by the Republican Legislature and his...

Before the Senate takes its summer break, a handful of Senators are taking a chance to trash the climate bill. A group of moderate Senators wrote a letter to Barack Obama telling him that they cannot support the climate bill unless it's further weakend ease the burden of cap and trade policies. Seperately, John McCain ripped the bill while talking to Stephen Moore at the Wall Street Journal. . . . . . Over at the Wall Street Journal, John McCain takes a harder stance, saying, "this 1,400-page bill is a farce. They bought every industry off—steel mills, agriculture, utilities...I...

LOS ANGELES – A piece of rocket hardware failed to separate during the launch of a NASA climate satellite earlier this year, causing it crash back to Earth, according to an accident summary released Friday. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory splashed into the ocean near Antarctica on Feb. 24, minutes after lifting off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California aboard a Taurus rocket. A team of space experts appointed by NASA to investigate the mishap said the nose cone that protects the satellite did not come off as planned. Although the investigators could not pinpoint the exact cause for the...

Next year's elections are going to produce a political earthquake. That is because we currently suffer the most left-wing government in our nation's history. After just 6 months in office, the flower children that rule Washington in overwhelming numbers are already smashing through all records regarding federal taxes, spending, deficits, and debt. Obama and his ultra-left Democrats adopted a so-called stimulus bill raising spending a trillion dollars that never had a prayer of actually creating jobs and promoting long-term economic growth, because it was based entirely on old-fashioned, brain dead, proven to fail, Keynesian economics. Though we would have to...

“Combative Start to Senate Climate Hearings” – “Climate Fight: The Senate Tackles Global Warming Bill” – “Dem: Long Battle Ahead of Us” – “Senators Draw Battle Lines on Cap-and-Trade” News Round-Up: EPW Kicks Off Latest Global Warming Debate    Watch: Democrat Senator: "Long Battle Ahead of Us" on Global Warming Bill  Link Bond: The American People Deserve Answers on the Costs of Democrats’ Cap and Trade Bill to Family Budgets, Lost Jobs, Press Release, July 07, 2009: U.S. Senator Kit Bond today called on Democrats to tell the American people the truth about the cost of their cap and trade legislation to...

AN UNUSUALLY cold winter (it snowed in Saudi Arabia and Iraq; temperatures fell to minus 80 degrees in Siberia) has been followed by an unusually cool spring (it snowed in North Dakota in June for the first time in 60 years). This may be why only 42 percent of respondents in a June Rasmussen poll published think human activity is causing global warming, and many who do don't see it as a serious problem. In a Gallup poll in March, warming ranked last among eight environmental concerns. To combat a problem which probably doesn't exist, the House narrowly passed last...

A team of scientists with years of expertise in climate issues has written an open letter to Congress, warning members that, "The sky is not falling," and global warming alarmism is unproven. The letter was signed by physics professors Robert H. Austin and William Happer of Princeton, environmental sciences professor S. Fred Singer of the University of Virginia, retired manager for strategic planning at ExxonMobil Roger Cohen, physics professor (emeritus) Harold W. Lewis at UC-Santa Barbara and others. Their names trail long lists of initials including APS or the American Physical Society, AAAS or the American Association for the Advancement...

The current push for the climate control policy by this administration will destroy America as we know it. In a sense, this effort appears quite like the effort that Nimrod of old tried in building the tower of Babel. The efforts by the climate change people are actually trying to determine their own destiny apart from God. The Bible says this earth is headed for an end someday. It will be replaced by a new heaven and a new earth. Yet, these folks act like they will decide if that can happen. They act as if their monumental effort will...

THE cap-and-trade bill passed the House of Representatives shrouded in a fog of willful ignorance and calculated irrationality. No one could be sure what he was voting for -- not after the 1,200-page bill had a 300-page amendment added at 3:09 a.m. the day of its passage. The bill is so complex and jerry-built that even its supporters can't know how, or if, it will work. And it's impossible for someone to know whether the motivating crisis, impending planetary doom, will ever materialize. Other than that, it's a model exercise in thoughtful lawmaking. The so-called Waxman-Markey bill's formulation was less...

Boehner: Climate bill a 'pile of s--t' By Molly K. Hooper Posted: 06/27/09 09:22 PM [ET] Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) had a few choice words about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-Calif.) landmark climate-change bill after its passage Friday. When asked why he read portions of the cap-and-trade bill on the floor Friday night, Boehner told The Hill, "Hey, people deserve to know what's in this pile of s--t." Using his privilege as leader to speak for an unlimited time on the House floor, Boehner spent an hour reading from the 1200-plus page bill that was amended 20 hours before...

By Richard Morrison Washington, D.C., June 26, 2009—The Competitive Enterprise Institute is today making public an internal study on climate science which was suppressed by the Environmental Protection Agency. Internal EPA email messages, released by CEI earlier in the week, indicate that the report was kept under wraps and its author silenced because of pressure to support the Administration’s agenda of regulating carbon dioxide. The report finds that EPA, by adopting the United Nations’ 2007 “Fourth Assessment” report, is relying on outdated research and is ignoring major new developments. Those developments include a continued decline in global temperatures, a new...

The House of Representatives will vote Friday(Today) on the so-called “American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009” -- a.k.a the “Waxman-Markey” global warming bill. But whatever you want to call this legislative atrocity, if enacted into law, it will go down in history as the death knell of the American standard of living and way of life. If you hate America, this bill is for you. After decades of fierce battling between rabid greens -- that is, left-wingers masquerading as “environmentalists” -- and the global warming skeptics, few Americans seem to have bought into the bill’s premise ­ that...

It appears that years of debate about climate change and energy may now come down to a vote on an actual bill, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACES). As I write this, the vote is scheduled for Friday. If it occurs, you will be asked to vote to implement carbon rationing in the United States.   Without regard to party or ideology, I believe that the evidence is clear that this law would be contrary to the public interest. Here is why, in a nutshell: 1.  It would be a terrible deal for American taxpayers. According to the...

Last week, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released their analysis of the Waxman-Markey climate change bill that had proponents of the bill claiming Americans could save the planet for just $175 per household. That was the figure CBO estimated cap and trade would cost households in 2020 alone.[1]Both the CBO's analysis and the subsequent legislation are troubled: The analysis grossly underestimates economic costs while the legislation will have virtually no impact on climate. Overall, there are a number of basic problems with CBO's analysis: Their allowance cost numbers do not add up; They ignore economic costs such as the decrease...

WASHINGTON – America’s third largest party urged the U.S. House Tuesday to defeat plans for a $1.9 trillion energy tax hike over eight years. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is attempting to rush H.R. 2454, the Waxman-Markey energy tax bill, to a vote this week. “With unemployment rising above and beyond what President Obama said it would be with the multi-hundred billion dollar stimulus bill, now is not the time to dismantle our economy with a multi-hundred billion dollar energy tax hike,” said William Redpath, Libertarian National Committee Chairman. “Libertarians urge House members to defeat this job-killing tax hike on Americans,”...

ABSTRACT: Democratic leaders in the House have scheduled a Friday vote on a climate change bill that would establish a complex cap-and-trade system to limit the nation's greenhouse gas emissions, a priority for President Obama. The House Rules Committee unveiled the latest version of the bill, which weighs in at 1,201 pages. It features new items such as $7.5 billion in "green bonds" for a new federal financing agency called the Clean Energy Deployment Administration, extra emission allowances for politically powerful rural electric cooperatives, greater flexibility for states that want to use free allowances for mass transit, and tweaks benefiting...

Is an imperfect climate bill (Waxman-Markey) better than no bill at all? Al Gore says yes.To bring environment supporters together, Gore will host a nationwide conference call on June 23 at 8 p.m. ET. The purpose, according to his Repower America e-mail sent to a selected audience, is “to build urgency around this bill and make sure it passes. We have to go to the grassroots – we have to continue building support in communities across the nation.”“As this climate legislation moves before the full Congress this summer, we have an opportunity unlike anything we’ve seen yet,” the e-mail concludes.Gore...

Hyperion Power Generation today has no product or service. It certainly doesn't have a plant. Yet, the Denver company is valued at an astonishing $100 million by investors, and its books boast a whopping 70 orders for what it plans to manufacture — small nuclear reactors. Unlike large reactors in nuclear power plants that cost billions of dollars, Hyperion's reactors will sport a relatively modest price tag of $25 million to $30 million apiece. "We are four years away from putting the first reactor in the ground," said Hyperion CEO John "Grizz" Deal, sporting the optimism of many chief executives....

Obama/Waxman push $3,100 per-family tax by Memorial Day! From the Desk of: Steve Elliott, President, Grassfire.org Alliance Our sources are telling me that President Obama and Rep. Henry Waxman are pushing for a key vote on the Carbon Tax BEFORE Memorial Day -- a tax that studies show will cost each family $3,100 each and every year. Last week, Obama met behind closed doors with House Democrats to pressure them to pass the Carbon Tax. Now, Waxman is even contemplating skipping the Subcommittee hearing on the $2 trillion Carbon Cap and Trade Tax and fast-tracking this new tax straight to...

The official record of temperatures in the continental United States comes from a network of 1,221 climate-monitoring stations overseen by the National Weather Service, a department of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Until now, no one had ever conducted a comprehensive review of the quality of the measurement environment of those stations. During the past few years I recruited a team of more than 650 volunteers to visually inspect and photographically document more than 860 of these temperature stations. We were shocked by what we found. We found stations located next to the exhaust fans of air conditioning...

Maybe a cute polar bear can do what all the good green intentions in the world can’t: Get people to consistently conserve energy. That’s what the Brooks School, a North Andover boarding school for grades 9-12, is counting on with an animated animal that lets students “see” their energy consumption in real time. Instead of showing students what energy they are collectively using in each of the school’s ten dorms with graphs or digital numbers, a “bear-o-meter” displays it more visually on a public screen with the bear’s well-being tied to how well students are conserving.

The United States suffered through an unusually severe winter, with snow falling in such unlikely destinations as New Orleans, Las Vegas, Alabama, and Georgia. On Dec. 25, every Canadian province celebrated a white Christmas, something that hadn't happened in 37 years. At one point during the winter Europe had such a killing cold wave that trains were shut down in the French Riviera and chimpanzees in the Rome Zoo had to be plied with hot tea.Three of the Great Lakes - Erie, Superior, and Huron - almost completely froze over. More bad news for the Church of Global Warming happened...

Democratic centrists are pressing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to set aside a flagging climate change bill to focus on what they think is a more achievable goal: overhauling the nation’s healthcare system. But those close to Pelosi (D-Calif.) say she is charging forward on cap-and-trade legislation, despite the potential defections of Democrats who represent states with industries that would be adversely affected by the bill. Pelosi views the bill’s troubles as predictable and solvable aspects of the legislative process. Rep. Artur Davis (D-Ala.), a leader of the centrist New Democrat Coalition, sees healthcare as a more productive use of time....

He has called global warming a hoax, compared the Environmental Protection Agency with the Gestapo, and over the years dismissed Al Gore as desperate and "full of crap". So it was startling when America's arch climate change denier came out ahead of the green curve in the fight to save the Arctic and other icy regions. Could James Inhofe, a conservative Republican senator from Oklahoma, be the newest recruit to Barack Obama's green revolution? Inhofe, in a surprise move, joined Democratic senators in putting forward a bill for an official review of the dangers of soot or "black carbon" to...

According to the University of Illinois (and my wife has a B.S. and M.S. from the Univ. of Illinois at Champaign and sheÂ’s pretty smart, so IÂ’d believe them) Antarctic sea ice is nearly 1,000,000 square kilometers above the 1979-2000 normal. That means that the excess sea ice would cover an area about the size of Michigan and California combined! According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, CO - Antarctic sea ice has grown at the rate of over 4% per decade over the past 30 years and reached an all-time maximum in 2008. You havenÂ’t...

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin acknowledged Tuesday that global warming was harming her state but said stepped-up natural gas production could mitigate its effects. Speaking at a hearing before Interior Secretary Ken Salazar — the third of several he is holding across the country to consider renewed oil and gas leasing on the outer continental shelf — Palin said that relatively clean-burning natural gas could supplant dirtier fuels and slow the discharge of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. “We Alaskans are living with the changes that you are observing in Washington,” she said. “The dramatic decreases in the extent of summer...

THE current global financial crisis is "nothing" compared to the impact of climate change, Prince Charles warned as he called for urgent environmental protection measures. "We are, I fear, at a defining moment in the world's history," he told a meeting of Brazilian business leaders and officials in Rio de Janeiro halfway through a Latin America tour. "The global recession is far worse than any seen for generations," he said, adding that growing demand for energy and food created the potential for "political uncertainty in every continent". But, worse, he said, was that "the threat of catastrophic climate change calls...

EPA is seeking public comment on the annual Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks: 1990-2007 Draft Report. This report will be open for public comment for 30 days after the Federal Register notice is published. The draft report shows that overall emissions during 2007 increased by 1.4% from the previous year. This trend was due primarily to an increase in carbon dioxide emissions associated with fuel and electricity consumption. The total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions were about 7,125 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent. Overall, emissions have grown by 17.1% from 1990 to 2007. The inventory tracks annual...

President Obama today today announced the signing of a memorandum instructing the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to “develop a strategy for restoring scientific integrity to government decision-making.” He promised to “base our public policies on the soundest science” and to “appoint scientific advisors based on their credentials and experience, not their politics or ideology.” [...] I was interested to see that this new memorandum instructs agency administrators to “have appropriate rules and procedures to ensure the integrity of the scientific process within the agency, including whistleblower protection.” Do you suppose this protection will inspire any government...

As Congress continues to deliberate energy and global warming bills, President Bush’s new climate initiative has altered the debate, at least at the international level. Clearheaded analysis and accurate information is essential – or narrow political and economic interests could run roughshod over consumers. The recent “Coal is filthy” ad campaign underscores this danger. Featuring misleading claims about pollution from coal-fired electrical generating plants, it urged citizens to tell government officials, “No more filthy coal plants.” But the Coalition wasn’t another gaggle of environmental pressure groups, like those listed on its CleanSkyCoalition.com website. It was a cabal of natural gas...

"Climate refugees." It's a term we should get used to, researchers warned on Thursday, predicting a flood of new residents driven north by heat waves, fires and other calamitous effects of global warming. With one speaker raising the specter of a new migration on the scale of the Great Depression, state and county officials admitted they have barely started getting ready. The warnings came at a conference of planners, scientists and government officials drilling into the results of a study released this week examining what Washington faces -- for our food supply, our forests, our drinking-water supplies and public health,...

Antarctic warming isn't evidence of climate change – despite what scientists would have us believe Just about every major outlet has jumped on the news: Antarctica is warming up. Most previous science had indicated that, despite a warming of global temperatures, readings from Antarctica were either staying the same or even going down. The problem with Antarctic temperature measurement is that all but three longstanding weather stations are on or very near the coast. Antarctica is a big place, about one-and-a-half times the size of the US. Imagine trying to infer our national temperature only with stations along the Atlantic...

It has certainly been flame grilled but this extraordinary cow is still standing. The poor creature was struck by lightening and left with blistering burns. You would expect it to have been cooked alive. But the cow miraculously survived, apparently unperturbed by the ordeal, and is already back roaming the meadows.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - In a pre-emptive strike against the expected effects of climate change, a U.S. advisory panel on Thursday urged a ban on commercial fishing across a wide swath of the Arctic Sea off the Alaskan coast. The North Pacific Fishery Management Council voted to prohibit fishing in nearly 200,000 square nautical miles of Arctic waters in the so-called U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone, which stretches from 3 miles offshore to 200 miles offshore, starting at the Bering Strait and extending north and east to the U.S.-Canada border. This area includes the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, home to polar bears...

More on this tonight at 5pm on Fox News.. The audio is from the inauguration. Gore was speaking to a group of young children about Global warming and told them not to listen to their parents. AUDIO AT LINK

Democratic members of the House Environmental and Public Works Committee have pledged to “follow science” in their quest to quell the effects of global warming, even as some reports suggest that belief in the environmental threat is waning. Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), the committee chair, told reporters at a Capitol Hill news conference Tuesday that Democrats on the committee are writing a global warming bill that she says will not only preserve the environment, but also help remedy the nation’s economic problems. “Don’t allow talk of an economic recession to stop our work,” Boxer said. “The surest way to create...

The founder of the Weather Channel is ridiculing Al Gore over his calls for action on global climate change, saying in a column that global warming is a "hoax" and "bad science." John Coleman, now a weatherman at San Diego's KUSI, wrote on his station's Web site Wednesday that Gore refuses to acknowledge the faulty research on which the idea of global warming is based. Coleman's lengthy scolding came as the former vice president and Nobel Peace Prize winner addressed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and urged lawmakers to pass a bill that would put caps on heat-trapping gases and...

From FoxNews.com:How Birds Can Down a Jet Airplane January 16, 2009 "More than 200 people have been killed worldwide as a result of wildlife strikes with aircraft since 1988, according to Bird Strike Committee USA, and more than 5,000 bird strikes were reported by the U.S. Air Force in 2007. Bird strikes, or the collision of an aircraft with an airborne bird, tend to happen when aircraft are close to the ground, which means just before landing or after take-off, when jet engines are turning at top speeds. The incidents are serious particularly when the birds, usually gulls, raptors and...

SAGINAW — Of all the problems on president-elect Barack Obama's plate, add this one: Beef. The Environmental Protection Agency is considering rules to regulate cow emissions as a cause of global warming. Methane, a potent greenhouse gas, comes from the manure of large animals like cattle. Pete Bonds is a veteran rancher in Saginaw. He's one of many ranchers fighting the "cow tax" proposal, which is still in a early phase. By some estimates, a methane permit could cost as much as $175 dollars per animal. And that could place a premium price on favorite foods like hamburgers and steaks....

COPENHAGEN (AFP) -- The earth's climate has been significantly affected by the planet's magnetic field, according to a Danish study published Monday that could challenge the notion that human emissions are responsible for global warming. ""Our results show a strong correlation between the strength of the earth's magnetic field and the amount of precipitation in the tropics,"" one of the two Danish geophysicists behind the study, Mads Faurschou Knudsen of the geology department at Aarhus University in western Denmark, told the Videnskab journal. He and his colleague Peter Riisager, of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), compared a...

In a new research, it has been observed that “mountain waves” in the atmosphere above Antarctica create rare clouds that are helping destroy the ozone layer. Over the last two decades, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) released by human activity have opened a hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica. Key chemical reactions that lead to ozone depletion happen on the surface of rare polar stratospheric clouds (PSCs), which form high up in the atmosphere. Here, sunlight breaks down the CFCs into products that react to produce chlorine, which in turn decomposes ozone. “The question was: how are these clouds generated?” said Lars...

A new research has suggested that the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica may be impairing the Southern Ocean’s ability to mop up carbon dioxide (CO2) from Earth’s atmosphere. Earth’s oceans are the largest sink of carbon dioxide, with the Southern Ocean accounting for more than 40 percent of the annual uptake of the greenhouse gas, Andrew Lenton, a marine biochemist at the Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris, told Nature News. In theory, seas should soak up more carbon dioxide as levels of the gas in the atmosphere rise. But, recent measurements have showed that the Southern...