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Sometimes we need to think the unthinkable, particularly when dealing with a problem as dangerous as climate change - there is no room for dogma when considering the future habitability of our planet. It was in this spirit that I and a panel of other specialists in climate, economics and policy-making met under the aegis of the Stockholm Network thinktank to map out future scenarios for how international policy might evolve - and what the eventual impact might be on the earth's climate. We came up with three alternative visions of the future, and asked experts at the Met Office...

Somewhere on the road to Kyoto, Canada turned into the land of the carbon zombies. Like the walking undead, blood-sucking politicians of all stripes are howling at each other over discredited ways to reduce carbon emissions that other countries, having tried to implement, are running away from in terror. In Europe, politicians who boasted they were leading the fight to save Gaia from global warming are now fleeing before enraged mobs of citizens, furious their governments' plans to "save the planet" have turned out to be nothing more than skyrocketing taxes and energy prices. That, plus a "cap-and-trade" carbon market...

Is the earth warming? Is human activity the cause? Is there anything we can do about it? While many believe there is a consensus in the scientific community that humans are causing the earth to heat and that serious action must be taken immediately, that's not what most Americans believe, according to a Pew Poll taken May 8. The poll did find that 71 percent of Americans say there is solid evidence that the earth is warming. But only 47 percent said they believed the earth was warming because of human activities, such as burning fossil fuels. That clear majority...

Climate scientists Robert Allen and Steven Sherwood from Yale Universitry have used a new technique to show temperatures changes in the upper troposphere (7.5-10 miles up) since 1970 are clearly in sync with most of the climate change models in showing a general warming of 0.65 degrees celsius per decade. Over the past two decades, temperature data directly gathered by satellites and balloons had showed little or no increase in upper troposheric temperature during that period, but researchers suspected these discontinuities with the model projections were due to unknown changes in instrumentation and data processing. By tracking radiosondes attached to...

Almost every day another species of plant or animal is "discovered" to be threatened by global warming. I read a new report concerning moose in Scandinavia that are unexpectedly "threatened" despite what researchers admit is a growing population. Penguins are in danger from loss of Antarctic ice even though the Antarctic ice-cap is known to be growing with colder temperatures recorded in the southern hemisphere in recent years according to NASA. Fortunately for these species -- which hitherto managed to survive and thrive on their own for hundreds of thousands or millions of years -- intrepid 21st Century researchers have...

Iadmit it: I'm no environmentalist. But I like to think I'm something of a conservationist. No doubt for millions of Americans this is a distinction without a difference, as the two words are usually used interchangeably. But they're different things, and the country would be better off if we sharpened the distinctions between both word and concept. At its core, environmentalism is a kind of nature worship. It's a holistic ideology, shot through with religious sentiment. "If you look carefully," author Michael Crichton famously observed, "you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian...

Climate change could cause global conflicts as large as the two world wars but lasting for centuries unless the problem is controlled, a leading defence think tank has warned. The Royal United Services Institute said a tenfold increase in research spending, comparable to the amount spent on the Apollo space programme, will be needed if the world is to avoid the worst effects of changing temperatures. However the group said the world's response to the threats posed by climate change, such as rising sea levels and migration, had so far been "slow and inadequate," because nations had failed to prepare...

Is the non-principle of “sustainability” about to collapse under the weight of its own mushy contradictions? News this week from the seemingly unrelated areas of biofuels and health policy provide some hope. Sustainability has been smuggled into the policy lexicon as an Orwellian dumber-down of debate. Who would promote unsustainability? It has become the weasel word and policy tic of our time. Corporate chieftains, politicians, consultants and public intellectuals all bow the knee before this founding concept of environmental Newspeak. Its origins as a subversive political principle lay in the United Nations’ Brundtland report, which coined “sustainable development” as a...

Presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton took a momentary detour Sunday night from the campaign drumbeat of the economy and Iraq war to answer at times deeply personal questions about how faith influences their decision making and policy. The two candidates, who appeared separately at Messiah College in Grantham, responded to questions that ranged from abortion and abstinence education to whether they thought God wanted them to be president. The event was part of The Compassion Forum, an attempt to highlight sometimes overlooked issues in the religious community. The questions came from two moderators” Campbell Brown from CNN, which...

AND NOW . . . amidst billowing clouds of fragrant, aromatic first- and second-hand premium cigar smoke. . . it is time for . . . that harmless, lovable little fuzz ball, the highly-trained broadcast specialist, having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have, from behind the golden EIB microphone, firmly ensconced in the prestigious Attila-the-Hun chair at the Limbaugh Institute of Advanced Conservative Studies, with talent on loan from G-d, at the cutting-edge of societal evolution, with half his brain tied behind his back — just to make it fair, the all-knowing, all-caring, all-sensing, all-feeling,...

Unlike so many of the hapless victims on TVOne's daily Crimewatch (also known as One Network News) I have recently been lucky enough to be in two right places at the right time. In December last year, at the UN conference in Bali, I heard Viscount Monckton present a paper prepared by himself, the Australian Dr David Evans and our own Dr Vincent Gray (who were at Bali, too) that showed while the IPCC models predict that greenhouse gases would produce an extensive "hot spot" in the upper troposphere over the tropics, the satellite measurements show no such hotspots have...

Environmentalists in Ecuador have a difficult decision to make: pay the government roughly $350 million a year for the next two decades, or see oil companies drill in the pristine heart of Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest. President Rafael Correa, who recently delivered the audacious ultimatum, wants to harness his country’s oil wealth to develop its foundering economy. Although it’s unclear what will eventually happen, Correa’s strategy will have a lasting impact in Latin America and the Caribbean. If the environmentalists give in and pay Ecuador, other countries could copy Ecuador’s strategy. And if the NGOs demur, countries will wonder why they...

Note: Below is by Paleoclimate scientist Dr. Bob Carter of Australia's James Cook University, who has published numerous peer-reviewed papers. Excerpt: UN climate body in panic mode as satellite temperatures turn down and a hard winter lashes both hemispheres [...] The IPCC’s 2007 final Summary for Policymakers shows that the climate alarmists are at last on the run. Their evidence for dangerous, human-caused global warming, always slim, now lies exposed in tatters for all to see. In contrast, the alternative, persuasive and non-alarmist view of climate change is well summarized in two recently issued and readily available documents. The first...

The blogs are ringing with ridicule. Mark Mathis, duplicitous producer of the much hyped film Expelled, shot himself in the foot so spectacularly that the phrase might have been invented for him. Goals don't come more own than this. How is it possible that a man who makes his living from partisan propaganda could hand so stunning a propaganda coup to his opponents? Hand it to them on a plate, so ignominiously and so UNNECESSARILY. In writing this for RichardDawkins.net, I have assumed that our readers will already be familiar with the facts of the case, from Pharyngula and the...

Apology To Dr. Nigel WeissNigel Weiss, professor of astrophysics at the University of Cambridge, believes that the warming trend in Earth's climate is caused by greenhouse gases produced by human activity, and that the effect of a potential future reduction in solar activity would not reverse or cancel out that trend, but might have a small effect in mitigating it. He has held these views for several years. Incorrect information appeared in a column in the Financial Post on Feb. 2. The National Post withdraws any allegation that Dr. Weiss is a global warming "denier" and regrets the embarrassment...

When Frans Nieuwstadt, a distinguished Dutch meteorologist, engineer, editor and professor, died in 2005, his obituary recounted seminal events in his accomplished life. Among the experiences worthy of mention: Nieuwstadt had studied under the celebrated professor, Henk Tennekes, and along with other colleagues had been instrumental in convincing Tennekes to return to Europe in 1978 to become director of research at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and later chairman of the august Scientific Advisory Committee of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.Henk Tennekes, in ways both personal and professional, has touched an extraordinary number of lives in his own...

The Australian reports a few inconvenient truths regarding global climate change that have yet to receive much attention from a media sold on global warming. Not only has the Earth cooled since its peak year in 1998, not only are oceans cooler than predicted, but new NASA data shows that the computer models that predicted runaway global warming were based on a fundamental error. Rather than having clouds and water vapor amplifying the warming effect of carbon in the atmosphere, it turns out that they compensate for it (via Memeorandum): Last Monday - on ABC Radio National, of all places...

New derivation of equations governing the greenhouse effect reveals "runaway warming" impossible Miklós Zágoni isn't just a physicist and environmental researcher. He is also a global warming activist and Hungary's most outspoken supporter of the Kyoto Protocol. Or was. That was until he learned the details of a new theory of the greenhouse effect, one that not only gave far more accurate climate predictions here on Earth, but Mars too. The theory was developed by another Hungarian scientist, Ferenc Miskolczi, an atmospheric physicist with 30 years of experience and a former researcher with NASA's Langley Research Center. After studying it,...

If CO2 is such a powerful greenhouse gas, why has Mars, with an atmosphere of 95% CO2 not warmed any more than earth, with it's .3% CO2? With the Martian polar ice caps melting, that should pump even more CO2 into the atmosphere, resulting in even more warming. That it's not happening says to me that CO2 ain't all it's cracked up to be as a global greenhouse gas. Without energy from the sun, the temperature of earth would be a few degrees north of absolute zero, so to say the sun has no influence over global warming is absurd....

The first full day of the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, hosted by The Heartland Institute and more than 50 cosponsors, was by all accounts an extraordinary success, from the packed breakfast and lunch plenary sessions to the rapt attention given to panelists during the 20 concurrent sessions addressing nearly every aspect of paleoclimatology, climatology, and the economics and politics of climate change. It became clear this was no ordinary conference on climate change from the opening presentations by Dr. Robert Balling, professor of climatology at Arizona State University, and Dr. Ross McKitrick, associate professor of economics at the...