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......................Organized science has become another special interest group lobbying for government favors. The temptation to present special-interest appeals as urgent public necessities has become not just irresistible, but commonplace. It is well-known that global warming skeptics are shut out...... ....The true believers in the threat of global warming use "education" and "communication" as euphemisms for suppressing and marginalizing dissenters. This crowd is strongly tempted by totalitarian solutions. The leading advocate of global warming fear, Dr. James Hansen, wants to put people who don't toe the line on trial for crimes against humanity. Peter Gleick, a scientist, a well-known advocate of...

This is sure to get some enviros in a tizzy.Fukushima I nuclear power plant before the 2011 explosion. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) From Chemical and Engineering News of the American Chemical Society:Nuclear Power Prevents More Deaths Than It CausesClimate Change: Study estimates that nuclear energy leads to substantially fewer pollution-related deaths and greenhouse gas emissions compared with fossil-fuel sourcesBy Mark SchropeUsing nuclear power in place of fossil-fuel energy sources, such as coal, has prevented some 1.8 million air pollution-related deaths globally and could save millions of more lives in coming decades, concludes a study. The researchers also find that nuclear energy...

I checked first, thinking this was some April Fools joke, it appears legit. (h/t to Tom Nelson and Skiphil)Climate Alarmist Jim Hansen leaving NASA on Wed. to devote himself to legal and political activism:Hansen retiring from NASA to press legal and activist efforts At the same time, retirement will allow Dr. Hansen to press his cause in court. He plans to take a more active role in lawsuits challenging the federal and state governments over their failure to limit emissions, for instance, as well as in fighting the development in Canada of a particularly dirty form of oil extracted...

Talk about biting the hand that feeds you! NASA’s James Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a controversial and highly vocal voice of alarm about the planet’s changing climate, will retire as the director of the space institute, NASA announced Tuesday -- and plans to immediately sue his former employer. Hansen will step down from his $180,000 a year position to join a number of lawsuits challenging the federal and state governments for their failure to police industry over man’s effect on the climate, the New York Times reported. Hansen was clearly aware of the irony....

Last Friday, at 3:40 p.m., the State Department released its “Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement” for the highly contentious Keystone XL pipeline, which Canada hopes to build to move its tar sands oil to refineries in the United States. In effect, the statement said there were no environmental impediments that would prevent President Obama from approving the pipeline. Two hours and 20 minutes later, I received a blast e-mail containing a statement by James Hansen, the head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA — i.e., NASA’s chief climate scientist. “Keystone XL, if the public were to allow...

James Hansen puts an interesting spin on reports of the ninth warmest year on record 2012 was a kind of glass-half full, glass half-empty year in terms of global temperature.   I. Climate Chief: Don't Worry, We're Still Doomed The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) in-depth analysis of satellite and other forms of climate data ruled the year was the ninth warmest on record.  The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) independent analysis of ground and sea-based climate stations reported that the year was the tenth warmest on record. The NASA report states that the average global temperature was 58.3 degrees Fahrenheit (14.6...

This week the United Nations begins two weeks of climate talks in Doha, Qatar. The primary goal of these meetings is to draw President Obama into accepting a redistribution plan designed extract money from the U.S. economy in the form of a global warming tax and doling out the cash to Third World nations. "There will be expectations from countries to hear a new voice from the United States," said Jennifer Morgan, director of the climate and energy program at the World Resources Institute in Washington...... [SNIP of information] ...The lame duck Obama administration will likely be all over this...

The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, according to new data released last week. The figures, which have triggered debate among climate scientists, reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012,there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures. This means that the ‘plateau’ or ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose,1980 to 1996. Before that, temperatures had been stable or declining for about 40 years. The new data, compiled from more than 3,000 measuring points on land and sea, was issued quietly on...

The amount of floating ice in the Arctic's Bering Sea - which had long been expected to retreat disastrously by climate-Cassandra organisations such as Greenpeace - reached all-time record high levels last month, according to US researchers monitoring the area using satellites. The US National Snow and Ice Data Center announced last week that ice extent in the Bering for the month of March has now been collated and compared, and is the highest seen since records began.

UPDATE: 11:30AM 4/12/12 Predictably, Andrew Revkin from the New York Times joins in with the poo-pooing consensus saying it is “utterly unremarkable ” (yet he writes a article about it – go figure). From Revkin’s shuttered in world of living in the woods (he didn’t even know what the TV show Seinfeld was until I brought it to his attention in Climategate2), that’s probably true, but Andy, here is one of your favorite consensus buzzphrases that can be applied: it is an unprecedented letter. There’s no denying that. – Anthony ==========From the Daily Caller, in my opinion, a load of...

The Obama administration was more vocal about the supposedly dire need to combat climate change toward the beginning of their oh-so-eminent reign, with President Obama out championing the cause at such august events as the U.N. climate conference in 2009. There’s been a bit of a lull in their alarmist-enthusiasm rhetoric in the past year or so (maybe they’ve figured out that concern for climate change is a luxury good during times of economic recession), but it looks like they may be thinking about bringing back the meme to help sell their horrendous energy polices in the run-up to November....

NASA is swiping back at a group of nearly 50 of its former scientists and astronauts who wrote to accuse the space agency of advocating the “extreme” position that global warming is the result of man-made carbon dioxide.In a March 28 letter addressed to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, 49 former employees said the “unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change is unbecoming of NASA’s history of making an objective assessment of all available scientific data prior to making decisions or public statements.” But NASA responded on Wednesday by saying they don’t “draw conclusions and issue ‘claims’...

Joint letter from 49 former NASA scientists and astronauts to the current NASA Administrator blasts agency’s policy of ignoring empirical evidence about global warming.

Looks like another GISS miss, more than a few people are getting fed up with Jim Hansen and Gavin Schmidt and their climate shenanigans. Some very prominent NASA voices speak out in a scathing letter to current NASA administrator Charles Bolden, Jr.. When Chris Kraft, the man who presided over NASA’s finest hour, and the engineering miracle of saving Apollo 13 speaks, people listen. Former NASA scientists, astronauts admonish agency on climate change positionFOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEContact: Blanquita Cullum 703-307-9510 bqview at mac.comJoint letter to NASA Administrator blasts agency’s policy of ignoring empirical evidenceHOUSTON, TX – April 10, 2012.49 former NASA...

March 28, 2012 The Honorable Charles Bolden, Jr. NASA Administrator NASA Headquarters Washington, D.C. 20546-0001 Dear Charlie, We, the undersigned, respectfully request that NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) refrain from including unproven remarks in public releases and websites. We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data. With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from...

The 85th Congress and President Eisenhower set up the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to explore space. Government bureaucrat James Hansen has used his position and NASA’s reputation to advance an unscientific agenda that calls for government restrictions on all major industries and any other human activity in the bane of controlling carbon dioxide production. This junk science has made him a millionaire through income outside the government. He is a rogue government agent who no one seems able to supervise. Now 50 top former and current astronauts and NASA scientists and engineers have had enough. They want this crackpot...

Joint Post by Tony Cox and Jo Nova Clouds cool the planet as it warms Clouds cover an enormous 65% of the planet and are responsible for about half of the sunlight that is reflected back out to space.[i] The effects of clouds are so strong that most of the differences between IPCC-favoured-models comes from the assumptions the models make about clouds. Cloud feedbacks are the “largest source of uncertainty”.[ii] Numerous studies show models project wildly different results for clouds, and yet few could correctly simulate clouds as recorded by satellites.[iii] One researcher described our understanding of cloud parameters as...

Given the high profile story today about the 49 NASA astronauts, engineers, and scientists who wrote a scathing letter to NASA director Charles Bolden, Jr. saying Jim Hansen and NASA GISS are exemplifying the “wrong stuff”, I thought I’d share this poster contributed by WUWT reader NickFromNYC:

According to WWJ Detroit, there was an explosion at the General Motors Tech Center in Warren, Mich., on Wednesday morning. Deputy Fire Chief Gary Wilkinson said the explosion most likely was related to a lithium battery. Wilkinson told Autoweek that a responder notified the HAZMAT team via radio that the explosion involved lithium batteries in the research facility's Alternative Energy Center. The fire was extinguished and portions of the facility were evacuated, but responders were still on the scene. Two people were taken to the hospital with nonlife-threatening injuries. Check out WWJ CBS Detroit for up-to-the-minute information. Read more: http://www.autoweek.com/article/20120411/CARNEWS/120419982#ixzz1rkOFfaeg

Copper -- the stuff of pennies and tea kettles -- is also one of the few metals that can turn carbon dioxide into hydrocarbon fuels with relatively little energy. When fashioned into an electrode and stimulated with voltage, copper acts as a strong catalyst, setting off an electrochemical reaction with carbon dioxide that reduces the greenhouse gas to methane or methanol. Various researchers around the world have studied copper’s potential as an energy-efficient means of recycling carbon dioxide emissions in powerplants: Instead of being released into the atmosphere, carbon dioxide would be circulated through a copper catalyst and turned into...