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NASA finally mentions the Maunder Minimum in its discussion of the current prolonged solar minimum, but it STILL does not mention that the Maunder Minimum coincided with the onset of the Little Ice Age, or that the Dalton Minimum in the early 1800’s was also cold, as was the unnamed fin-de-the-1800’s minimum. Thar she blows, the Maunder Minimum of sunspot activity: As it has done for two years now, NASA is predicting that solar cycle 24 will ramp up tomorrow. Should that broken-clock prediction hits its hour, then NASA is also predicting that solar cycle 24 will have the modest...

Climate Change: A peer-reviewed study by a respected Canadian physicist blames the interplay of cosmic rays and chlorofluorocarbons for 20th-century warming. The CFCs are now gone, and so is warming — perhaps for the next 50 years. Much of the nation got a white Christmas this year, some in unprecedented quantities. A record-breaking storm deposited 12 to 30 inches of snow in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C. Many places set records for the most snow in a single December day as more than 50% of the U.S. was covered by the white stuff. Scientists (and here we use the word...

Mohib Ebrahim has created professional timelines for exhibitions, so it must have seemed only natural to him to want to visually piece together the full timeline of ClimateGate, laying out the analysis, graphs, emails and history of the scandal as revealed by dozens of researchers over the past weeks, months and years. Download The PDF (788k)There’s a gif version of the poster if you don’t like pdf’s (1.7Mb)The PDF chart is available in different sizes, each also with the 10  pages of cited references. The full chart is over 2 meters wide (94″x34″, or 2 A0  landscape pages) and best...

The global warming jamboree in Copenhagen was surely the most outlandish foray into intellectual fantasizing since the fourth-century Christian bishops assembled in 325 AD for the Council of Nicaea to debate whether God the Father was supreme or had to share equal status in the pecking order of eternity with his Son and the Holy Ghost. Shortly before the Copenhagen summit, the proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) were embarrassed by a whistleblower who put on the Web more than a thousand e-mails either sent from or received at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, headed by Dr....

Copenhagen was much worse than just another bad deal, because it illustrated a profound shift in global geopolitics. This is fast becoming China's century, yet its leadership has displayed that multilateral environmental governance is not only not a priority, but is viewed as a hindrance to the new superpower's freedom of action. I left Copenhagen more despondent than I have felt in a long time. After all the hope and all the hype, the mobilisation of thousands, a wave of optimism crashed against the rock of global power politics, fell back, and drained away.

The UK Meteorological Office released what it described as temperature data for over a century and a half from more than 1500 land weather stations throughout the world, along with what the Met Office described as the code used to plot temperature trends for the time frame in question. But the data are apparently not the raw data, and questions remain as to the validity of the adjustment of the data, an inconsistency in reporting a lack of valid temperature measurements in one year, and the accuracy of the source code. John Graham-Cummings... That's a bit odd, but not serious....

Last week, PolitiFact.com announced its “Lie of the Year”: Sarah Palin’s claim that the health care bill might create “death panels” that would kill elderly or disabled Americans. It was a lie, the editors pointed out, because Palin’s claim was based on a mangling (by Michele Bachmann) of false claims by Betsey McCaughey — that the bill would mandate end-of-life counseling, and that rationing would deny care based on “level of productivity in society.” That phrase was Palin’s invention. Palin responded to the PolitiFact article with a post on her Facebook page, claiming that, actually, the CBO’s assessment that it...

When Will Global Warming Expert Al Gore Stop Eating Animal Flesh? TO PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA, ALL UNITED STATES SENATORS AND REPRESENTATIVES AND AL GORE!! YOU MUST HAVE 20/20 VISION IN 2010 Together you have the power and worldwide influence to save the lives of billions of animals, subsequently creating a multitude of everlasting monumental benefits for humans, the earth, and the earth’s atmosphere. Together your revolutionary profound efforts could be responsible for shutting down most or all animal factory farms and slaughterhouses in the world. Carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide together cause the vast majority of global warming. Raising...

Nathan Myhrvold is a former technology officer for Microsoft who has found his own company, Intellectual Ventures, which is involved in a number of technology development programs, including new forms of energy generation. Nathan Myhrvold also thinks that he has found a cheap and reliable way to solve global warming, which does not involve upending and perhaps destroying the world's economy. The global warming solution proposed by Nathan Myhvold involves Nathan Myhrvold's Anti Global Warming Scheme running a hose up to the stratosphere with balloons and using that hose to pump out enough sulfur particles to dim the sun's heat...

For scientists to remain credible, they have to have a certain detachment from their work.  At the very least, they have to have no vested interests in any particular outcome, or they risk biasing their work to produce outcomes favorable to themselves.  On anthropogenic global warming, we already have advocates like Al Gore who stand to make billions of dollars by convincing governments to impose cap-and-trade systems that will rely on their businesses for the service — but advocates aren’t scientists.  However, the Telegraph reports today that Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change...

Without a scintilla of evidence that rising temperatures threaten the extinction of life on the planet, anyone who expresses common sense doubts about the Doomsday prophecies of climate alarmists is dismissed as a "skeptic," an "extremist," or a heretic in the religion of environmentalism. No one needs to apologize for being a scientific ignoramus on climate change when the world's leading publicist for global warming, Al Gore, is not a scientist either. Yet some blindly accept Gore's claim in An Inconvenient Truth that melting ice caps and rising sea levels will drown New York City and Shanghai under 15 feet...

Prices drop as European Union sticks to 2020 emissions targetLONDON (MarketWatch) -- The price of European carbon emission permits dropped nearly 9% Monday after climate talks in Copenhagen resulted in an accord that fell short of initial expectations.Emission allowances for December 2010 delivery fell to 12.77 euros a ton Monday, from Friday's settlement price of 13.58 euros. The contract earlier dropped as much as 8.7% to 12.40 euros a ton. Emission allowances haven't traded that low in more than six months. The decline came after the United Nation's Copenhagen summit acknowledged a U.S.-led accord to combat climate change and prevent...

"Oh, you are all here. I had some things to discuss with all of you so it’s good that you are together in the same room,” US President Barack Obama said as he strode into the room where the BASIC countries — Brazil, South Africa, India and China — were holding their last, intensive meetings in Copenhagen. “We really need a deal,” he said. “It’s better that we take one step forward rather than two steps back. I’m willing to be flexible.” And he rolled up his sleeves and sat down. Obama had come to meet China’s Wen Jiabao, in...

“(…) the spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.” — P.B. Medawar So what’s next? A series of essays by Sarah Palin about the Large Hadron Collider and the mysteries of dark matter? An MIT lecture series by Rush Limbaugh regarding the thermodynamics of black holes? A Festschrift of Sean Hannity’s scholarly articles on plate tectonics and volcano formation? Glenn Beck performing live heart-lung transplants on Fox News? Everybody understands that these things couldn’t...

Just after midnight, Copenhagen time, Gordon Brown appeared in front of the Sky News camera. "I feel I've played a part in bringing countries together," said the Prime Minister, in a line clearly prepared long before the disaster unfolding around him. Mr Brown had, in fact, played little part in the final deal that emerged in the early hours of Saturday, and would be well advised to make that abundantly clear. For even as he spoke, international unity was falling apart – and the emotional temperature inside the conference centre was already rising to levels beyond even the most doom-laden...

In a late night posting on her Twitter feed, Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin continued to blast climate change believers Friday, calling the talks in Copenhagen, Denmark a representation of man's "arrogance," for believing people have an impact on nature. "Arrogant&Naive2say man overpwers nature," Palin tweeted. "Earth saw clmate chnge4 ions;will cont 2 c chnges.R duty2responsbly devlop resorces4humankind/not pollute&destroy;but cant alter naturl chng," the former Republican vice presidential nominee wrote. Palin's latest comments come after weeks of tangling over climate change with California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, former vice president Al Gore, and President Obama. In an op-ed in the Washington...

The Heritage Foundation’s Steven Groves and Ben Lieberman are live at the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference reporting from a conservative perspective. Follow their reports on The Foundry and at the Copenhagen Consequences Web site.“Collapsing in chaos” is a phrase the media is using to describe the Copenhagen climate conference, and that certainly is the feeling among many here at the Bella Center. Little has gone right, and indeed many registered participants were never even let in. The Danish minister in charge has resigned. Now, those of us who managed to make it in may get turned away for the crucial...

A major storm was expected to bury the Washington region Saturday with what forecasters said could be the largest snowfall to hit the area in six years and the greatest December accumulation in more than 70 years. Accumulations of 15 inches or more in the city and up to 24 inches in parts of the Blue Ridge Mountains were possible, according to the National Weather Service. The snow was expected to cause significant disruptions for shoppers, travelers and revelers on the last weekend -- and biggest shopping day -- before Christmas. Especially large amounts of snow could accumulate southeast of...

Global Warming: Russian analysts accuse Britain's Meteorological Office of cherry-picking Russian temperature data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures. Is Copenhagen rooted in a single tree in Siberia? Michael Mann, a Penn State meteorologist, wrote in Friday's Washington Post that "stolen" e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit still don't alter the evidence for climate change. Mann, a creator of the discredited hockey-stick graph used in reports from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to show man-made warming, attacks climate skeptics, including former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, saying they "confuse the public." Chutzpah has been...

While I appreciate the efforts of the President, Al Gore, and all of Hollywood to save Earth from its “fever,” I do have one question: What SHOULD the Earth’s temperature be?

Climategate just got much, much bigger. And all thanks to the Russians who, with perfect timing, dropped this bombshell just as the world’s leaders are gathering in Copenhagen to discuss ways of carbon-taxing us all back to the dark ages. Feast your eyes on this news release from Rionovosta, via the Ria Novosti agency, posted on Icecap. (Hat Tip: Richard North) A discussion of the November 2009 Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident, referred to by some sources as “Climategate,” continues against the backdrop of the abortive UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen (COP15) discussing alternative agreements to replace the 1997...

Tempers boil as delegates wait in freezing weatherBy Michael Lim Ubac Philippine Daily Inquirer First Posted 04:43:00 12/18/2009 COPENHAGEN — Coffee or tea? Police officers serving warm drinks to civilians is definitely not part of the job description of the Philippine National Police, or police forces in other parts of the world. But Danish police officers known here as “politi” had to assume this rather odd role as delegates braced themselves for long queues just to get inside Bella Center, the site of the UN climate conference here. It’s like being public servants literally. Below zero On Monday, with the...

Leadership: Alaska's ex-governor asks a question we'd like answered: Why is California's current governor pushing the same policies in Copenhagen that helped drive his state into record deficits and unemployment? The movie series that made Arnold Schwarzenegger a household name involved cyborgs traveling through time to alternately try to destroy or save one John Connor, who would grow up to be the leader of the resistance against a race of machines that ruled the planet. Prominent in the series was his tough cookie of a mom, Sarah Connor. Another Sarah has taken the lead in another resistance against another group...

In a related development, secret documents were leaked today indicating that the United Nations has been plotting to form an international environmental governing body which almost certainly would infringe on U.S. sovereignty.

SAN FRANCISCO — When the sun is relatively inactive — as it has been in recent years — the outermost layer of Earth's atmosphere cools dramatically, new observations find.

Pressure has mounted at the Copenhagen summit for the United States to take further action on climate change but opponents in Congress have vowed to throw up roadblocks for President Barack Obama. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered one glimmer of hope on a bleak day in the 194-nation talks by announcing the US would contribute to a $US100 billion ($A111.02 billion) fund to help poor nations cope with global warming. "There should be no doubt about the commitment of the United States to reaching a successful agreement here in Copenhagen and meeting this great global challenge together," Clinton said....

[This is a video report -- a very good one.] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eigKN8BouM

I’d like to thank Eugene Robinson for highlighting Alaska’s achievements on climate change [“Palin’s own ‘Climate- gate,’” op-ed, Dec. 15] and for noting that I’ve “treated the issue as serious, complex, and worthy of urgent attention,” while making “any number of pragmatic, reasonable, smart decisions as governor.” But he’s wrong to suggest that my views have somehow changed or that now I’ll have to “renounce” my past efforts. Once again: I don’t deny that climate change is real. In creating a sub-cabinet to deal specifically with the issue, I said that “Alaska’s climate change strategy must be built on sound...

The Copenhagen fiasco just keeps getting more ludicrous while more evidence is being found that climate responds to natural forces, not so much CO2. Read the original and the links. Pretty soon, they'll discover human CO2 has had zero impact and we'll still give the 3rd world billions, if not trillions, in aid for "global warming."

A leaked UN document emerged last night that shows the current proposals for a deal at Copenhagen will ‘put at risk the very viability of our civilisation on Earth’. The document is an internal briefing paper drawn up by the UN Framework Committee on Climate Change that is in charge of the talks. It says that even the most ambitious emission reduction targets currently offered by developed and developing countries, including the EU and US, would set the world on course for warming of around 5.4F (3C).

"Climategate" has put scientists on trial in the court of public opinion. If you believe climate sceptics, a huge body of evidence involving the work of tens of thousands of scientists over more than a century should be thrown out on the basis of the alleged misconduct of a handful of researchers, even though nothing in the hacked emails has been shown to undermine any of the scientific conclusions. If we are going to judge the truth of claims on the behaviour of those making them, it seems only fair to look at the behaviour of a few of...

As if she didn't have enough adversaries, Sarah Palin has decided to mix it up with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Ostensibly, the issue was global warming. Actually, it's about the future face of the Republican Party -- whose it will be, and the ideology that person brings to the table. The exchange of criticisms between the ex-governor of Alaska and the current California governor was provoked by comments Schwarzenegger made about Palin at the international summit on climate change in Copenhagen – a conference Palin not only avoided, but called on President Obama to boycott. With that, the gauntlet was thrown for...

In this country, even a global warming denialist with a carbon fetish and bad intentions has the right to see the inner workings of government. Or, at least, he should. When leaked e-mails recently exposed talk of manipulating scientific evidence on global warming, Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at The National Center for Atmospheric Research, argued that skeptics had cherry-picked and presented his comments out of context. To rectify this injustice, I sent Trenberth (and NCAR) a Freedom of Information Act request asking for his e-mail correspondences with other renowned climate scientists in an effort to help...

Journalist and filmmaker Phelim McAleer, the maker of Not Evil, Just Wrong, has been doing a standup job of showing the hypocrisy inherent in not only the man-made global warming schizo's but the left side of the aisle as a whole. Here he is questioning the hypocrisy of those "representatives" to the Copenhagen climate change conference who have belittled and shamed people about the effects of flying a plane. Funny how the dismiss McAleer as not worth their trouble. How dare he question them on their "green" credentials. Right? The U.N. estimates 40,500 tons of carbon dioxide will be pumped...

Former US vice president and environmental activist Al Gore called Tuesday for world leaders to meet in Mexico City in July to complete a climate treaty under negotiation in Copenhagen. Gore told a standing-room audience in the Danish capital that a summit in Mexico City previously scheduled near the end of next year was too late and too close to mid-term US elections. "I do not believe that we can wait until next November or next December," said Gore, a Nobel peace prize winner for his work on raising awareness of climate change. He called for activists to "join with...

Never before has a US government been as serious in its warnings against the dangers of climate change as the Obama administration. But Americans are divided: Half of them regard climate protection policies as socialist, and half want to save the world. Can Obama make America go green? There are parts of the United States where there is no real evidence of social discord, of the loathing and aggressiveness with which different groups view one another, and where no one seems to question the prevailing view. In Las Vegas, Nevada, they build artificial waterfalls and big roads for big cars...

The latest running debate between Al Gore and Sarah Palin reveals once more the absurdity behind today's Republican Party, which looms increasingly as a far right pressure group rather than a viable political entity. The Republicans indicated the direction where they were heading when Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele dared to speak of right wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh as an "entertainer," which was construed to mean that he was undermining his stature as a serious political analyst. A furious Limbaugh demanded an apology. The blustery talk show host had declared himself to be the titular head of...

Confronting your own false beliefs can be a daunting task, even more so when coupled with an overwhelming level of corruption in the world around you, steering you the wrong way. Coming to grips with the latter can end your days of innocence about mass media and politics. For years now, people around the world have been pummeled with false information about global warming. Politicians and special interest groups have issued “dire warnings.” Al Gore predicts deadly weather. Government reports, United Nations committees, Oscar award, Nobel Peace prizes, and what about that supposed “scientific consensus” all pointing to catastrophic...

Via RCP, I wanted to give you a longer clip but the audio’s shoddy on the only one I can find. Too bad. It was, says Politico, a Woodstock moment. If Copenhagen is the enviros’ Woodstock, then Gore is The Who, the Grateful Dead and Creedence Clearwater Revival as a one-man band. The former vice president drew such a big crowd that security had to shut down access, with hundreds of unhappy activists left outside…Moeller also quoted the 19th century conservative British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, saying that “to be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to...

Walkout heightens failure fears for climate marathon2009-12-14 COPENHAGEN (AFP) - Negotiators worked through the night Tuesday to prevent a UN climate summit from ending in catastrophic failure after developing nations staged a five-hour walkout and China accused the West of trickery. As the White House said Barack Obama wants a deal that imposes "meaningful steps" to combat global warming, ministers admitted they had to start making giant strides before 120 heads of state arrived for the summit's climax Friday. But their hopes were hit when Africa led a boycott by developing nations of working groups, only returning after securing guarantees...

Global Warming: The Alaskan governor who knew polar bears weren't endangered says the planet isn't either and challenges the oracle of climate change. Al Gore says despite the CRU e-mails, the situation is of the utmost gravity. In a Dec. 9 Washington Post op-ed, Sarah Palin noted that the Climate-gate e-mails from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia "reveal that leading climate 'experts' deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to 'hide the decline' in global temperatures and tried to silence their critics from publishing in peer-reviewed journals." This did not sit well with Gore. "The entire North...

There are many kinds of truth. Al Gore was poleaxed by an inconvenient one yesterday. The former US Vice-President, who became an unlikely figurehead for the green movement after narrating the Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, became entangled in a new climate change “spin” row. Mr Gore, speaking at the Copenhagen climate change summit, stated the latest research showed that the Arctic could be completely ice-free in five years. In his speech, Mr Gore told the conference: “These figures are fresh. Some of the models suggest to Dr [Wieslav] Maslowski that there is a 75 per cent chance that the...

Africa's frustration at the UN climate summit boiled over on Monday as delegates walked out of key talks and continental giant Nigeria warned the negotiations were now on red alert. Sources at the marathon talks said Africa led a five-hour boycott of working groups, with the backing of the Group of 77 developing nations, and only returned after securing guarantees that the summit would not sideline talks about the future of the Kyoto Protocol. The Kyoto Protocol ties rich countries - but not developing countries - that have ratified it to legally binding emissions curbs. It also has an important...

Odd things are going on at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. Widely available data, existing in the public view for years, is now disappearing from public view. For example this link to Keith Briffa’s Yamal data: Keith Briffa’s Yamal data

ClimateGate Research Unit Disables Its Website By Noel Sheppard Created 2009-12-14 10:03 The Climatic Research Unit at the heart of the ClimateGate [0] scandal has taken down most of the information previously available at its website. Prior to November's release of controversial e-mail messages and documents from Britain's University of East Anglea, there was a separate website for the institution's CRU that allowed readers to review articles and studies created by and for the Unit. Now, no matter what link one tries to access via a Google search, it directs you to a page that reads: "Due to the present...

As an Expert Reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for eighteen years, that is to say, from the very beginning. I have submitted thousands of comments to all of the Reports. My comments on the Fourth IPCC Report, all 1,898 of them, are to be found at IPCC (2007) and my opinions of the IPCC are in Gray (2008b) I am therefore very familiar with the arguments presented by the IPCC, many of which have now been copied by the Royal Society of New Zealand, and the responses to them. I will first comment on the Introduction to...

EXCERPT The Arctic Ocean sea ice has shrunk dramatically, to record low levels, the past several summers. Scientists blame global warming, which has raised temperatures twice as fast in the far north as elsewhere. Gore said polar scientists told him Sunday that the latest data "suggest a 75 percent chance the entire polar ice cap will melt in summer within the next five to seven years."

People in the north-central part of the Canadian province of Ontario are digging out after one of the worst snow storms on record. Some areas north of Toronto received as much as 100 centimetres of snow over the past three days. The main highway through the region re-opened for the first time in days, but nearly all side roads remain closed, blocked by a thick blanket of snow, in some areas chest high. More than 100,000 people have been affected by the storm, either cut off in smaller communities, or in their cottages, or stranded by the road closures. In...

Dear global warming fanatics, Please. Stop. You’re embarrassing yourselves. Take a deep breath, and try to understand what has happened to you during the past month. You need to accept that your dreams of global domination are over. Increasingly shrill attempts to terrify the masses into ignoring Climagate are only making you look foolish. The con job you’ve been running for the last thirty years is busted forever. I know this is difficult for you to accept. Things seemed to be going well. You’ve got the cap-and-trade bill lurking over the United States, ready to shatter an already weakened economy...

Don't be fooled about climate science. In April 1994 – long after scientists had clearly demonstrated the addictive quality and devastating health impacts of cigarette smoking – seven chief executives of major tobacco companies denied the evidence, swearing in a US congressional hearing that nicotine was not addictive. Now, the American public is again being subjected to those kinds of denials, this time about global climate change. While former Alaska governor Sarah Palin wrote in her recent opinion essay that she did not deny the "reality of some changes in climate," she distorted the clear scientific evidence that Earth's climate...