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LACK OF RAIN CAUSED BY NATURAL PATTERNS, REPORT SAYS (NEWSER) – Is humanity off the hook for California's record-breaking drought? A new federal report says the drought, "while extreme, is not an uncommon occurrence for the state," and is the result of natural weather patterns instead of man-made climate change, reports USA Today. NOAA researchers say a major cause of the drought has been a warm, dry, high-pressure ridge over the eastern Pacific and western US that has blocked precipitation—and climate models say greenhouse gases should have the opposite effect, causing slightly more precipitation in the region instead of blocking...

House Speaker John Boehner warned that President Barack Obama was waging a "crusade" against affordable energy after the United States and China reached agreement Wednesday on curbing greenhouse gas emissions. "This announcement is yet another sign that the president intends to double down on his job-crushing policies no matter how devastating the impact for America's heartland and the country as a whole," Boehner said after Obama and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping inked a landmark agreement at a summit in Beijing. "It is the latest example of the president's crusade against affordable, reliable energy that is already hurting jobs and...

The climate change movement has gained such unstoppable momentum in the past decade that it comes as a surprise when anyone prominent has the guts to stand up against it. It is even more surprising when that someone is the co-founder of the Weather Channel. John Coleman, though, has decided that the theory of man-made global warming is no longer scientifically viable. Having closely studied the topic of climate change for years, Coleman insists that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has it all wrong. “There is no significant man-made global warming at this time, there has been none in...

Although not designed to map changes in Earth's gravity over time, ESA's extraordinary satellite has shown that the ice lost from West Antarctica over the last few years has left its signature. More than doubling its planned life in orbit, GOCE spent four years measuring Earth's gravity in unprecedented detail. Scientists are now armed with the most accurate gravity model ever produced. This is leading to a much better understanding of many facets of our planet – from the boundary between Earth's crust and upper mantle to the density of the upper atmosphere. The strength of gravity at Earth's surface...

Should the U.S. and other nations commit to a major international effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? yes. no.

Bear with me for a moment. It’s college football Saturday and there are some really big games which will have national implications. The State of Michigan will see the Wolverines and Spartans line up against two formidable foes, Notre Dame and Oregon respectively, and they travel to both venues. As well, out west there’s another pretty big game between USC (the other one, Southern California, not South Carolina) and Stanford. And up in the ‘Shoe, Ohio State will face the challenge of the Hokies from Virginia Tech. My own Tennessee Volunteers have Arkansas State coming to Knoxville — before they’ll...

Global warming isn’t happening. The climate really isn’t changing that much. This inconvenient fact was marginalized by describing it as a “pause” or “temporary lull” in global warming – which might have been a defensible position in the early days of the “pause,” but is a very tough sell when that “temporary lull” has been running for eighteen years.

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK - The world’s authority on Yellowstone’s Super Volcano says it’s more than twice as big as scientists once thought. Does that mean it’s more likely to blow up soon? Penny Preston found Dr. Robert Smith at his home near Grand Teton, and found the answer. Millions of people visit Yellowstone each year to see its geysers, fumeroles, hot springs, and mud pots. It’s the largest concentration of thermal features in the world. The park sits on top of the world’s largest active volcano. The Super Volcano. Its most recent eruption was more than 600,000 years ago. All...

When President Obama announced an unprecedented effort by the EPA to strong-arm states into adopting cap-and-trade, he made the announcement not by focusing on the benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but rather on the so-called co-benefits that closing coal plants will have on particulate matter, which is already tightly regulated. These purported co-benefits are based on two secret studies that have never been publicly validated. Amazingly, the architect of this co-benefits strategy is a long-time EPA staffer named John Beale, now known as federal inmate number 33005-016 and locked up for fraud at Cumberland Federal Correctional Institution. For nearly...

The President has said that anyone who doesn’t believe in man caused global warming, and that we can do unilaterally something about it by curbing the carbon emissions of the United States, is putting partisanship over national interest, and is ignoring the indisputable scientific evidence. In his speech he was a bit short on the evidence, and had nothing to say about the obvious questions. Alas, I haven’t heard any discussion of the obvious questions from the True Believers – and oddly enough, the few who do now talk about the obvious questions have left the ranks of True Believers...

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts we can’t stop the impact of rising seas and flooded cities, and demands radical cuts to carbon emissions or Doomsday will be worse. The loudest climate alarmists demand energy options that produce zero carbon, and show it by supporting the continued river of tax dollars washing toward promises of producing lots of our power from pleasant breezes and rays of sunshine: wind and solar. It would be easier to take this all more seriously if they’d propose realistic solutions. Skeptics of the Doomsday scenarios are constantly beat about the head regarding the...

The debate over climate change is often a contentious one, and key players in the discussion only rarely switch sides. But late last month, Lennart Bengtsson, the former director of the Hamburg-based Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, one of the world's leading climate research centers, announced he would join the academic advisory council of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). GWPF, based in Britain, is a non-profit organization and self-described think tank. Conservative politician Nigel Lawson founded the organization in 2009 in order to counteract what he considered to be an exaggerated concern about global warming. The organization uses aggressive...

Want to know why the president and his team are stampeding to talk about global warming despite increasing public disinterest in the topic, a bitterly cold and snowy winter and deepening skepticism about the costs of clamping down on industry as the economy again falters? It turns out that money talks. From the NYT: “A billionaire retired investor is forging plans to spend as much as $100 million during the 2014 election, seeking to pressure federal and state officials to enact climate change measures through a hard-edge campaign of attack ads against governors and lawmakers. The donor, Tom Steyer, a...

Gina McCarthy, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), asked scientists at a climate change conference on Thursday in Arlington, Va., to explain the science of climate change. She also said that the EPA looks at climate change as an opportunity to grow the economy and create jobs. […] Obama referenced climate change in his State of the Union address while talking about “cleaner energy.” “The shift to a cleaner energy economy won’t happen overnight, and it will require tough choices along the way,” Obama said. “But the debate is settled. Climate change is a fact. And when our children’s...

MSNBC’s Al Sharpton dressed in a lab coat and stood behind fake test tubes in front of a cartoon setting on Friday and lectured everyone from Republicans to Fox News about the “facts” of “global waming.” Sharpton used part of his “Politics Nation: Science Lab” segment on MSNBC on Friday to exploit the arctic winter freeze hitting much of the country this weekend: “These right wingers are boiling over with denial. Just because it snows in winter doesn’t mean the planet isn’t getting warmer. Remember a UN panel said there’s a 90 percent probability that humans are the primary cause...

How do you feel about Global Warming? We must stop it before it's too late. It's too late. It's caused by the sun. I like it warm. It's a hoax.

2013 was a big year for ice with global sea ice hitting or nearing record highs. A dramatic example caught the attention of the world Christmas morning, when a vessel hired by group of global warming scientists radioed for help after becoming trapped in ice off Antarctica. The Russian m/v Akademik Shokalskiy has 74 researchers and crew aboard and they managed to celebrate Christmas despite their frozen predicament. The Chinese ice breaker Snow Dragon steamed to the rescue and was last reported six nautical miles away, but has now found itself blocked by the ice. Its captain said, “the current...

The Obama administration announced last Friday that it will grant industrial wind farm operators 30-year permits to kill legally protected bald eagles and golden eagles without fear of legal repercussions. U.S. wind turbines already kill 1.4 million birds and bats each year, including many endangered, threatened and protected species such as California condors, bald eagles and Indiana bats. The Obama administration claims this annual bird and bat slaughter is necessary to fight global warming. Sources very close to the President have leaked to me the text of the following presidential speech on the topic, which President Obama will deliver later...

Happy holidays from the Obama administration. Federal agencies are currently working on rolling out hundreds of environmental regulations, including major regulations that would limit emissions from power plants and expand the agency’s authority to bodies of water on private property. On Tuesday, the White House released its regulatory agenda for the fall of 2013. It lists hundreds of pending energy and environmental regulations being crafting by executive branch agencies, including 134 regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency alone. The EPA is currently crafting 134 major and minor regulations, according to the White House’s regulatory agenda. Seventy-six of the EPA’s pending...

Jimmy asks Al Gore if he really is a boring guy. Is global warming real?