Free Republic

Urgent action is needed to boost carbon prices to €150 per tonne ($215.65/ton)—2,250% higher than current levels—if the EU is to meet its decarbonization goals by 2050, the former secretary-general of the UNFCCC has told EurActiv in an interview. “We very quickly need to see a carbon price in the order of €150 a tonne because that’s the kind of level that drives the price signals that we really need,” Yvo de Boer said on a phone line from Manila, in the Philippines. EU carbon allowances are currently trading at €6.60 per tonne ($9.49/ton), but a price of around €150...

Virginia, Massachusetts and Rhode Island will be the first three states to sell leases for the right to develop offshore wind farms, U.S. government officials said Friday. The leases will be auctioned online, probably in the first half of 2013, according to the U.S. Department of the Interior, the federal agency overseeing the sales. The auctions will determine which energy company, utility or entrepreneur gets to build huge wind turbines and reap clean electricity from them in designated areas in the Atlantic Ocean. Costs are expected to be in the billions.No offshore wind farms exist today in the United States,...

URGENT - WEATHER MESSAGE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE MEDFORD OR 210 PM PDT WED AUG 22 2012 ...WIDESPREAD FREEZING TEMPERATURES POSSIBLE FRIDAY MORNING... .COOL HIGH PRESSURE WILL MOVE OVER THE AREA THURSDAY NIGHT AND FRIDAY MORNING. CLEAR SKIES AND LIGHT WINDS WILL LEAD TO ADDITIONAL COOLING WITH FREEZING TEMPERATURES POSSIBLE OVER MUCH OF NORTHERN KLAMATH AND LAKE COUNTIES FRIDAY MORNING. ORZ029>031-231100- /O.NEW.KMFR.FZ.A.0011.120824T1000Z-120824T1500Z/ KLAMATH BASIN- NORTHERN AND EASTERN KLAMATH COUNTY AND WESTERN LAKE COUNTY- CENTRAL AND EASTERN LAKE COUNTY- INCLUDING THE CITIES OF...BEATTY...CHEMULT...CRESCENT... GILCHRIST...SPRAGUE RIVER 210 PM PDT WED AUG 22 2012 ...FREEZE WATCH IN EFFECT FOR FRIDAY MORNING... THE NATIONAL WEATHER...

Droughts in southern and eastern Europe are contributing to the global decline in grain production while also elevating concern about the long-term impact on freshwater supplies. The European Commission, which has declared 2012 the Year of Water, is preparing a review some of Europe’s water legislation partly with climate change and extreme weather events in mind.Food security and how the EU safeguards its liquid resources are among the topics due to be discussed during World Water Week events that begin in Stockholm on 26 August. The UN Food and Agricultural Organization reports that food prices rose 6% overall in July,...

Gov. Jerry Brown said today that "humanity is getting dangerously close to the point of no return" on climate change, and he launched a website criticizing conservatives who dispute its significance. The website "Climate Change: Just the Facts," is hosted by Brown's Office of Planning and Research. It devotes one page to "the denialists" and another to rebutting "common denialist arguments." [Snip] "Global warming's impact on Lake Tahoe is well documented. It is just one example of how, after decades of pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, humanity is getting dangerously close to the point of no return," Brown...

The mainstream media is celebrating a physicist who allegedly did a U-turn on his global warming views and now says humans are the cause. Except Richard Muller had already said in 2008 that man was a cause of global warming. Nonetheless, the San Francisco Chronicle, for example, reported July 31: “The hot issue of global warming got hotter Monday when a UC Berkeley physicist, once a loud skeptic of human-caused climate change, agreed not only that the Earth is heating up, but also that people are the cause of it all.” Never mind that in an interview almost four years...

So eager are the shills at the George Soros-funded far-left website Think Progress to find evidence of global warming that on Thursday they falsely blamed melting street lights in Stillwater, Oklahoma, on the heat. As originally reported by TP's Stephen Lacey:… Even as residents swelter in the relentless heat, Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe continued his tirade about man-made global warming during a Senate hearing yesterday, saying the science had “collapsed.” It appears the only thing collapsing are the street lights.Way down at the bottom is this:UPDATE: After we published this piece, we saw reports from people on the ground in...

Dumping iron into the sea can bury carbon dioxide for centuries, potentially helping reduce the impact of climate change, according to a major new study. The work shows for the first time that much of the algae that blooms when iron filings are added dies and falls into the deep ocean. Geoengineering—technologies aimed at alleviating global warming—are controversial, with critics warning of unintended environmental side effects or encouraging complacency in global deals to cut carbon emissions. But Professor Victor Smetacek, at the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research in Germany, who led the new research, said: "The time...

UPDATE: less than 24 hours after posting this, we already have an end of the world prediction naming global warming, see below. New end of the world book treats climate change just like many other end of times worries that have not come to pass. Weston, FL — (SBWIRE) — 07/16/2012 — The end of the world is not going to happen within our lifetimes. That’s the word from Justin Deering, author of The End of the World Delusion: How Doomsayers Endanger Society. “We’re bombarded with end-of-the-world scares practically everywhere you look,” Deering explains. “You hear about it in church, on...

The head of Iran’s cultural heritage and tourism organization believes that in addition to economic sanctions, the West is launching another kind of “soft war” on the Islamic republic. Speaking at a ceremony to introduce the nation’s new meteorological department chief, Hassan Mousavi, said that he was “suspicious about the drought in the southern part of the country.” He went on to accuse the West as using “technology” to influence the nation’s climate, saying sand storms, droughts, and other extreme weather were the result of an unspecified method of war. … Last year, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accused Western countries...

Ministers have delayed plans to axe Government subsidies for wind farms after another disagreement between the Conservatives and their coalition partners Liberal Democrats. Chris Huhne, the former Climate Change Secretary, had blocked any subsidy cuts The Government was poised to announce a 25 per cent cut in wind farm subsidies today after warnings from George Osborne that the taxpayer support was too generous. The planned deal, phased in over several years, also involved a system of community grants to encourage wind farm development in some areas as part of a “complex package”. Sources claim that Ed Davey, the Climate Change...

New cars and vans in the European Union will produce one-third less carbon dioxide within eight years, under proposed new rules set out on Wednesday (11 July) in Brussels. By 2020, the average emissions from new cars will have to be no more than 95 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometer driven (5.4 oz/mile), a cut of more than 40 grams from today's levels and of 35 grams per kilometer compared with the 2015 target, if the proposed new regulations are accepted. Connie Hedegaard, climate chief of the European commission, said the goals were "ambitious but achievable" and would benefit...

The German engineering giant Siemens is researching the idea of using overhead electricity lines to power truck traffic. But the state-supported project makes no sense. It would cost billions to implement—and only lead to higher fuel consumption and more pollution. … Germany's Ministry for the Environment (BMU) saw enough green potential in this hybrid truck to channel over €2 million ($2.5 million) in federal funding to the project. Siemens used the funds to help set up its first test track at an obsolete military airport north of Berlin. … In any case, electrifying Germany's roads is not going to bring...

Fears about climate change are overblown and shifting weather patterns and rising sea levels should be considered an engineering problem, said the head of the world's largest oil refiner, ExxonMobil. "The fear factor that people want to throw out there to say 'we just have to stop this,' I do not accept," Rex Tillerson, ExxonMobil's chief executive, said in a speech on Wednesday (June 27). Tackling global poverty should have a higher international priority than reducing carbon emissions, because it would give billions of the world’s energy poor access to oil and gas supplies, in his view. "They'd love to...

The earth is running out of natural resources like land, water and minerals so quickly that if nothing is done, some predictions say that by 2030 humankind will need the equivalent of two planets to sustain our current lifestyle. Those chilling figures come from a famous World Wildlife Fund ‘Living Planet’ report in 2008, but what exactly can we do to reduce our environmental impact—which has got worse since then—and how should we go about doing it? People “desperately” need a means of putting the environmental impact of their products into context, according to Martin Barrow, a senior consultant at...

From the University of California – Santa BarbaraThese are views of vegetation in summer and winter of suburban Minneapolis landscapes from the 500 foot tall KUOM radio tower where measurements for the study were made. In what might be the first study to report continuous measurements of net CO2 exchange of urban vegetation and soils over a full year or more, scientists from UC Santa Barbara and the University of Minnesota conclude that not only is vegetation important in the uptake of the greenhouse gas, but also that different types of vegetation play different roles. Their findings will be published...

The broad theory of man-made global warming is acceptable in the purely qualitative sense. If humans continue to fill the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, there can be little doubt that the average temperature of the world will increase above what it would have been otherwise. The argument about the science is, and always has been, whether the increase would be big enough to be noticed among all the other natural variations of climate. The economic and social argument is whether the increase, even if it were noticeable, would change the overall welfare of mankind for the worse.

The economist Thorstein Veblen once quipped that "invention is the mother of necessity." That was before the age of air-conditioning, but no technology better illustrates Veblen's point. Having developed efficient cooling, we've designed homes, businesses and transportation systems that are completely dependent on it, while the resulting greenhouse emissions create the need for even more air-conditioning. (snip) We must break this feedback loop, but what does one say to someone living in one of the tropical nations where much of the increase in cooling demand is expected? Surely not that Americans are addicted to air-conditioning and can’t give it up,...

BLUEFIELD, Va. — The Virginia State Corporation Commission announced Wednesday afternoon that it has approved a pair of rate increases for customers of Appalachian Power Co. – one related to a biennial base rate review, and the other meant to recover environmental expenses. The combined increases amount to $85.1 million — a sum that will increase the monthly power bill for APCO’s Virginia customers by $7 per month, based on the average usage of 1,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity. “The important thing for our customers in Virginia to know is that these rate increases won’t take effect until February,” Todd Burns,...

Contradictory Studies UN Climate Body Struggling to Pinpoint Rising Sea Levels By Axel Bojanowski Photo Gallery: How High Will Sea Levels Climb? The United Nations' forecast of how quickly global sea levels will rise this century is vital in determining how much money might be needed to combat the phenomenon. But predictions by researchers vary wildly, and the attempt to find consensus has become fractious. Info It is a number which will ultimately establish how billions in taxpayer money will be spent -- and it is one which is the subject of heated debate, both among politicians and scientists. When...

A heat wave across much of Europe is causing crops to wither, forest fires to ignite and roads to melt, while women in bikinis are sunbathing in Moscow's parks and cooling off in city fountains. From Russia's Ural mountains to western Germany, temperatures have been hovering in the mid-90s this week and forecasters warn there could be more next week.

... As we have learned, these gases form an invisible barrier that, like a greenhouse's glass ceiling, keeps reflected heat of the sun from escaping our atmosphere. The denser that gaseous barrier grows, the hotter things get and the faster glaciers melt. As they flow off the land, we are warned, seas rise. Yet something else is lately worrying geologists: the likelihood that the Earth's crust, relieved of so much formidable weight of ice borne for many thousands of years, has begun to stretch and rebound.

For all you folks out there who take an interest in the doings of George Soros, here’s one I missed a few weeks ago — but just came across while catching up on some UN press releases. On March 4, the UN announced that Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon had picked a panel of “high-level experts” to form a UN “Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing.” Their assignment is to help “mobilize” the funding promised at the Copenhagen Climate Carnival this past December. Here’s the list. It includes an interesting mix of public and private officials, ranging from the prime minister of Ethiopia, the president of...

Then in 1999 an obscure young US physicist, Michael Mann, came up with a new graph like nothing seen before. Instead of the familiar rises and falls in temperature over the past 1,000 years, the line ran virtually flat, only curving up dramatically at the end in a hockey-stick shape to show recent decades as easily the hottest on record. This was just what the IPCC wanted, The Mediaeval Warming had simply been wiped from the record. When its next report came along in 2001, Mann's graph was given top billing, appearing right at the top of page one of...

A new system for mapping carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. will help regulators figure out exactly where these emissions are coming from and how best to reduce them. Among human-produced gases that contribute to climate change, carbon dioxide is public enemy number one. A group of researchers at Purdue University, led by atmospheric scientist Kevin Gurney, created the interactive mapping system. Called Vulcan, the system tracks the hourly output of carbon dioxide—emitted when fossil fuels such as coal and gasoline are burned—from factories, power plants and other sources across the country. Vulcan shows carbon dioxide emissions at a scale...

Anchorage continues to dig out from a snowfall that set a record for the day and the month.The National Weather Service says 17.2 inches fell at its office just south of Anchorage's international airport and 22 inches fell in northeast Anchorage on Friday and Saturday. The heaviest snow fell between 3 and 6 p.m. Friday at a rate of almost two inches per hour. The monthly total at the weather service office is now 29.7 inches, breaking a record from 1963 when 27.6 inches fell during April.

Snow fell across London on Sunday before an Olympic torch relay through the capital that is expected to attract anti-China protests. About 80 athletes and celebrities will carry the torch by foot, bike, boat and bus during a 31-mile (50-km) journey starting at Wembley Stadium and ending in Greenwich. The 2008 Games take place in Beijing from August 8 to 24. The next Summer Olympics are in London in 2012. Anti-China protesters are set to appear at key points along the route. Police have said they will be dealt with firmly if they try to disrupt the torch's journey. The...

Embracing Earth Charter key to environmental salvation Author and U of A professor Colin Soskolne says humans need to smarten up. March 7, 2008 - Edmonton -- Human beings, laments Colin Soskolne, are a "seriously dumb species." Just what kind of defect drives us to destroy the very ecosystems that provide us with sustenance? Why do we turn away from mounting, irrefutable evidence that we are sabotaging our very existence?Such questions are asked in a new collection of essays, called Sustaining Life on Earth: Environmental and Human Health through Global Governance, edited by Soskolne, on the environment and human health."Our...