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As the European cold front is about to enter its third week, the Danube River and Black Sea have frozen over in many countries, with La Repubblica reporting that 420 have died across Europe. ... The Black Sea waters around the Ukrainian port city of Odessa were completely frozen for the first time since 1977, and Ukrainian ports will remain closed until at least Feb. 15. Russia's Novorossiysk port, usually an ice-free port all year round, was closed for two days last week because of ice. In the Romanian Black Sea port of Constanța, the waters were frozen for up...

Better technology yields better data. The bad news is the extra water from 2003-2010 would fill Lake Erie eight times By Jason Koebler February 8, 2012 RSS Feed Print Nearly 230 billion tons of ice is melting into the ocean from glaciers, ice caps, and mountaintops annually—which is actually less than previous estimates, according to new research by scientists at the University of Colorado, Boulder. If the amount of ice lost between 2003 and 2010 covered the United States, the whole country would be under one-and-a-half feet of water, or it'd fill Lake Erie eight times, researchers say. Ocean levels...

That’s the droll title of an article by Patrick Michaels at the prize-winning science blog Watts Up With That. Michaels is having fun while making some trenchant observations about the uproar surrounding a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “No Need To Panic About Global Warming.” It’s by sixteen concerned scientists, including the estimable Richard Lindzen of MIT, who were aiming their words, at least in part, at the current presidential candidates (hello, Newt Gingrich). This article apparently set off a @#$%storm in the already beleaguered warmist community, including the NY Times‘ leading enivro blogger, The Guardian, a gaggle of “climate...

The debate over global warming is now entering the classroom and its proponents are alarmed. It seems the “dogma” of the existence of global warming is running into problems as boards of education in several states have established a standard that requires the presentation of climate change “denial” as a valid scientific position. Legislators in other states have introduced bills that require equal time for climate change skeptics’ views in the classroom. With new national science standards from kindergarten through twelfth grade due by the end of 2012, we can expect to see a heated debate over climate change appear...

Government regulators, environmental groups and the news media tell us that the air we breathe is polluted, the water we drink is tainted, our orange juice contains a fungicide, and evil corporations are hoping to make a profit at Mother Earth’s expense. They also remind us that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other federal agencies are protecting us by fighting the greedy capitalists who seek our destruction. Don’t believe it. The United States is among the cleanest nations on the planet.

A South Florida plan to prepare for rising sea levels and other consequences of climate change has drawn intense criticism from a small segment of the public who see a conspiracy to weaken the United States. "Bogus science." "Socialist power grab." "A UN-based manmade global warming agenda that will tangle us all up in a nightmare." These are among the public comments received in response to the Draft Southeast Florida Regional Climate Action Plan, produced by Broward, Miami-Dade, Monroe and Palm Beach counties. "Anyone of even modest intelligence should be able to see that it is nothing more than One-World,...

Rising human carbon dioxide emissions may be affecting the brains and central nervous system of sea fishes with serious consequences for their survival, an international scientific team has found. Carbon dioxide concentrations predicted to occur in the ocean by the end of this century will interfere with fishes' ability to hear, smell, turn and evade predators, says Professor Philip Munday of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University.

Over at Real Science they have pulled back the curtain on another of the global warmists’ deceptive tactics. We will republish here what they have to say, which is so revealing of the way the warmists work:

(CNSNews.com) -- Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli says he is worried that a new District of Columbia law that governs how pest control operators must handle rats may result in entire rodent “families” being relocated across the Potomac River into Virginia by D.C. pest control personnel. Cuccinelli said D.C.'s new rat law--the Wildlife Protection Act of 2010 -- is “crazier than fiction” because it requires that rats and other vermin not be killed but captured, preferably in families; no glue or snap traps can be utilized; the rodents must be relocated from where they are captured; and some of these...

Climate change subscribers say the fight against global warming will require younger soldiers. On Monday, the National Center for Science Education, a nonprofit group that denounces intelligent design and supports an evolution-only curriculum in the classroom, will expand its mission. The organization of scientists, anthropologists and others is turning its attention to climate change, and it will mount an aggressive effort to teach the nation’s schoolchildren that climate change is real and is being driven by human activity. “For 20 years, we’ve helped teachers cope with what we can only describe as societal or political problems in teaching evolution. They’re...

Alcohol tastes sweeter when loud music is playing and the noise could make it difficult for drinkers to judge how much they are consuming, new research has claimed. Dr Lorenzo Stafford, a psychologist from the University of Portsmouth, conducted the first experimental study to find out how music can alter the taste of alcohol. Dr Stafford said: 'Since humans have an innate preference for sweetness, these findings offer a plausible explanation as to why people consume more alcohol in noisy environments.' New findings: Alcohol tastes sweeter when loud music is playing and the noise could make it difficult for drinkers...

Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) blasted skeptics of climate science Wednesday, alleging they are “endangering humankind.” “The message I have for climate deniers is this: you are endangering humankind,” Boxer said during a press conference in the Capitol. “It is time for climate deniers to face reality, because the body of evidence is overwhelming and the world’s leading scientists agree.” Boxer criticized skeptics of climate science, alleging they are standing in the way of significant progress toward lowering greenhouse gas emissions both domestically and internationally. “Wishing that climate change will go away by clinging to...

Actually, a couple of funny things happened to global warming’s Vatican, as Bret Stephens notes in a must-read Wall Street Journal essay: ClimateGate and the world’s financial meltdown: The U.S., Russia, Japan, Canada and the EU have all but confirmed they won’t be signing on to a new Kyoto. The Chinese and Indians won’t make a move unless the West does. The notion that rich (or formerly rich) countries are going to ship $100 billion every year to the Micronesias of the world is risible, especially after they’ve spent it all on Greece. Cap and trade is a dead letter...

(South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu speaks during a climate justice rally held in Durban, South Africa, Sunday, Nov 27, 2011, ahead of the official start or a two-week international climate conference with about 190 countries beginning upcoming Monday. The U.N.'s top climate official, Christiana Figueres said Sunday she expects governments to make a long-delayed decision on commitments to reduce emissions of climate-changing greenhouse gases, amid fresh warnings of possible climate-related disasters in the future.(AP Photo/Schalk van Zuydam)DURBAN, South Africa (AP) — Global warming already is causing suffering and conflict in Africa, from drought in Sudan and Somalia to flooding in...

A computer hacking in Russia has lead to a release of more undermining info about "Climate." Here's one tidbit: "Nations must invest $37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilize greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable levels."

From the Carnegie Institution , what looks to be a throwback to the old days of central planning has been introduced, except it is twice as good as that, ten years instead of five. The only difference between the ten year carbon and science plan and what you see in the image below, is that none of the industrial elements you see will be included. Let’s carry out the five year plan in 4 years! Picture courtesy nhikmetran at flickr.com Scientists tackle the carbon conundrumPalo Alto, CA—U.S. scientists have developed a new, integrated, ten-year science plan to better understand the...

Independent scientific research institutes whose work influences the policies of the U.S. government as well as governments abroad, also impact litigation in the states. "The information from these think tanks does bubble up," said Professor Alex Tabarrok, chair of the Economics Department at George Mason University in Virginia. And, James Copland, director of the Center for Legal Reform at the Manhattan Institute in New York, said organizations that host "research" conferences affect trial outcomes. "A lot of lawyers pay top dollar to attend these conferences," Copland said. One such organization is the Collegium Ramazzini (CR), an independent, international ...

The world has just five years to avoid being trapped in a scenario of perilous climate change and extreme weather events, the International Energy Agency (IEA) warned on Wednesday. On current trends, "rising fossil energy use will lead to irreversible and potentially catastrophic climate change," the IEA concluded in its annual World Energy Outlook report. "The door to 2.0 C is closing," it said, referring to the 2.0 Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) cap on global warming widely accepted by scientists and governments as the ceiling for averting unmanageable climate damage. Without further action, by 2017 the total CO2 emissions compatible with...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The global output of heat-trapping carbon dioxide jumped by the biggest amount on record, the U.S. Department of Energy calculated, a sign of how feeble the world's efforts are at slowing man-made global warming. The new figures for 2010 mean that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago. "The more we talk about the need to control emissions, the more they are growing," said John Reilly, co-director of MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. The world pumped about 564 million...

Several Republican lawmakers are challenging the Obama administration's science czar over what they claim are repeat incidents of "scientific misconduct" among agencies, questioning whether officials who deal with everything from endangered species to nuclear waste are using "sound science." The letter sent Wednesday to John Holdren, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, cited four specific controversies in recent years where scientific findings were questioned. Sens. David Vitter, R-La., and James Inhofe, R-Okla., and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., rattled off a slew of questions on what they called "the apparent collapse in the quality of scientific work being...

There seems little possibility that next month's climate summit in Durban will produce an emissions reduction agreement -- meaning the world will soon lack any binding CO2 targets. Europe may soon find itself alone in the fight against global warming. A climate catastrophe descended on the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin early last week. Politicians and diplomats from around the world were attending a conference to discuss how global warming will affect the world. They examined scenarios depicting how millions of people living in coastal areas could escape flooding, what will happen to the fishing and mineral rights of island...

From the mighty polar bear to the tiny house sparrow, many of Earth's species appear to be shrinking in size, a new study reports. And the authors think it's probably due to global warming, a little like wool sweaters that shrink when washed in hot water. But other experts say that conclusion goes too far, blaming global warming for what may be natural changes. ... The shrinking victims, according to the study, include cotton, corn, strawberries, bay scallops, shrimp, crayfish, carp, Atlantic salmon, herring, frogs, toads, iguanas, hooded robins, red-billed gulls, California squirrels, lynx and wood rats. Two years ago,...

Depopulation of Americas may have cooled climate MINNEAPOLIS — By sailing to the New World, Christopher Columbus and the other explorers who followed may have set off a chain of events that cooled Europe’s climate for centuries. The European conquest of the Americas decimated the people living there, leaving large areas of cleared land untended. Trees that filled in this territory pulled billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, diminishing the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere and cooling climate, says Richard Nevle, a geochemist at Stanford University. “We have a massive reforestation event that’s sequestering carbon … coincident...

Scientists say climate change will eventually claim many victims -– including, according to a new report, chocolate. As temperatures increase and weather trends change, the main growing regions for cocoa could shrink drastically, according to new research from the International Center for Tropical Agriculture. Ghana and the Ivory Coast –- which produce more than half of the global cocoa supply –- could take a major hit by 2050. Currently, the optimal locations to grow the crop are about 330 feet to 820 feet above sea level, with temperatures of about 72 degrees Fahrenheit to 77 degrees. That range will soar...

Everyone who follows the climate change controversy even casually will know about the “hockey stick” controversy. Well, Nature magazine this week offers a new graph of interest: the rising trend of retractions of scientific research papers... Lo and behold, it looks like a hockey stick! (Heh.) The Nature story notes: [B]ehind at least half of them lies some shocking tale of scientific misconduct — plagiarism, altered images or faked data — and the other half are admissions of embarrassing mistakes. But retraction notices are increasing rapidly. In the early 2000s, only about 30 retraction notices appeared annually. This year, the...

Modern science used to pride itself on its insistence on doubting everything and establishing the truth of things based on empirical data. Often the lone scientist would work hard against the common assumptions and make great breakthroughs and discoveries. It seems such ideas about science are becoming old-fashioned and romantic. Today’s scientists are part of university establishments that must worry about their bottom line and prestige. Sometimes it is simply too controversial to doubt. Scientists are treated no different from other academics and are encouraged to tow the politically- or ecologically-correct party line to ensure their future careers. The most...

As Chris Christie continues to play footsie with a presidential run, we should be aware that the New Jersey governor is yet another example of the politician as scientific know-nothing, warning of the dangers of anthropogenic global warming. Christie — a graduate of the University of Delaware in political science [sic] with a law degree from Seton Hall — has decided global warming is real. How does he know? Says Christie: “I’m certainly not a scientist, which is the first problem. So I can’t claim to fully understand all of this, certainly not after just a few months of...

The data process used to arrive at the administration’s determination that greenhouse gases endanger “the public health and welfare� violated the Environmental Protection Agency’s own peer review procedure, a new report from the EPA Office of the Inspector General reveals.Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), ranking member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, requested this report in April, asking that the OIG determine whether the EPA “followed key federal and Agency regulations and policies in developing and reviewing the technical data used to make and support its greenhouse gases endangerment finding.� Now, Inhofe is calling for a series of...

Donna Laframboise has an excellent piece on how the IPCC has been assimilated by influence from the WWF.Apparently hawking the threat of dead panda bears is quite lucrative, Donna writes:It is important to understand that while the WWF might once have been a humble, shoestring operation this is no longer the case. It has grown into a business entity with offices in 30 countries that employs a staff of 5,000 (see the last page of this PDF). The US branch of the WWF alone employs: a Managing Director of International Financea Vice President of Business and Industrya Senior Vice President...

With a House Republican loading political ammunition in a national fight over government science, Interior Department officials said Friday they would stand by the work of two scientists whose integrity was attacked recently by a federal judge overseeing the Delta water wars. U.S. District Judge Oliver Wanger, in a lengthy and strongly worded assault Sept. 16, said the two scientists deliberately misled him when they urged him not to weaken new rules meant to help imperiled Delta smelt in wet years like this one. He called one scientist, Jennifer Norris of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a "zealot" who...

Former President Bill Clinton said Tuesday that the success of the alternative energy movement is hampered by a lack of financing. His comments came as world leaders attending his annual philanthropic conference expressed fears about rising seas. The ex-president's three-day Clinton Global Initiative for VIPs with deep pockets began Tuesday with a frank discussion about addressing global climate challenges, co-hosted by Mexican President Felipe Calderon and South African President Jacob Zuma.

For the second time in a year, a federal judge has tossed out a key permit governing Delta water deliveries. The permit was meant to prevent salmon runs and other fish from going extinct. . . . "Some of (the National Marine Fisheries Service's) analyses rely upon equivocal or bad science to impose (restrictions) without clearly explaining or otherwise demonstrating why the specific measures imposed are essential" to protect salmon, steelhead and green sturgeon,

Al Gore: climate science "reality" versus Republicans Photo 4:00pm EDT By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent WASHINGTON (Reuters) - For Al Gore, the choice is obvious: Either accept scientific reality about climate change or believe what the fossil fuel industry is paying some Republican candidates to say. "Anti-climate lobbyists ... give massive campaign contributions and they're not shy about making it clear to the candidates they support that there's a quid pro quo. In return for getting their money, these candidates have to pretend that they really believe this nonsense," the longtime climate change campaigner said on Wednesday in a telephone...

Full Title: How to go out with a bang — score points for censorship — a poseur for honor! An editor has resigned after committing the dastardliest of crimes: He helped publish a skeptical paper in a peer-reviewed journal. God-forbid, imagine a paper being reviewed only by people who have some sympathies with your results? It’s unthinkable. We all know that Nature and Science, for example, dutifully send all the papers by alarmists to at least one skeptical reviewer, and since 97% of 77 climate scientists are alarmists, that means the other two scientists who aren’t, are very busy people. ...

Obama tells young reporters: Climate change a top challenge for young people By Andrew Restuccia - 08/30/11 01:21 PM ET Climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing young people, President Obama said in a recent interview with young reporters from Scholastic News. “Another big challenge that your generation is going to face is the environmental challenge,” Obama said in an interview with Scholastic News Press Corp. that was conducted in July but posted online this month. “Although we’ve made big improvements over the last 20 or 30 years in making our air clean and our water clean, there...

Junk Science: The governor of a state under assault by the EPA takes on the patron saint of climate change over whether "warmers" or "deniers" benefit financially from the debate. Meanwhile, the nation loses. Is Texas governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry a racist? According to the increasingly bombastic Al "expletive deleted" Gore, who was interviewed by Climate Reality Project collaborator Alex Bogusky on Ustream last Friday, Perry's global warming skepticism qualifies him as one. Gore related how his "generation watched Bull Connor turning the hose on civil rights demonstrators" and that it was when racists could not answer the...

In a paper published in Geophysical Research Letters of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) earlier this month, climate researchers have found that another prediction in the UN’s IPCC reports — what Al Gore likes to call “settled science” — is simply wrong, and that IPCC’s predicted rise in sea level over the next century is likely not going to happen.

It may not rank as the most compelling reason to curb greenhouse gases, but reducing our emissions might just save humanity from a pre-emptive alien attack, scientists claim... This highly speculative scenario...described by scientists at Nasa and Pennsylvania State University...

Polar bears drowning in an Alaskan sea because the ice packs are melting—it’s the iconic image of the global warming debate. But the validity of the science behind the image—presented as an ignoble testament to our environment in peril by Al Gore in his film An Inconvenient Truth—is now part of a federal investigation that has the environmental community on edge. Special agents from the Interior Department’s inspector general's office are questioning the two government scientists about the paper they wrote on drowned polar bears, suggesting mistakes were made in the math and as to how the bears actually died,...

Two stories have dropped that may blow big holes in the anthropogenic global warming argument — one of which is literally sky-high.  Forbes reports on a peer-reviewed study that uses NASA data to show that the effects of carbon-based warming have been significantly exaggerated.  In fact, much of the heat goes out into space rather than stay trapped in the atmosphere, an outcome that started long before AGW alarmists predicted: NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth’s atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new...

Despite significant pyrotechnics and air travel disruption last year, the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajokull simply didn't put that many aerosols into the stratosphere. In contrast, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991, put 10 cubic kilometers of ash, gas and other materials into the sky, and cooled the planet for a year. Now, research suggests that for the past decade, such stratospheric aerosols—injected into the atmosphere by either recent volcanic eruptions or human activities such as coal burning—are slowing down global warming. "Aerosols acted to keep warming from being as big as it would have been," says atmospheric scientist John Daniel...

More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere causes soil to release the potent greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide, new research published in this week's edition of Nature reveals. "This feedback to our changing atmosphere means that nature is not as efficient in slowing global warming as we previously thought," said Dr Kees Jan van Groenigen, Research Fellow at the Botany department at the School of Natural Sciences, Trinity College Dublin, and lead author of the study. Van Groenigen, along with colleagues from Northern Arizona University and the University of Florida, gathered all published research to date from 49 different experiments...

The Science and Environmental Policy Project is one of the leading sources of realist research and analysis on climate change. It produces a weekly compilation of news and research on global warming which you can sign up to receive via email. SEPP was founded by Fred Singer, one of the leading realist scientists. For a great short summary of the current status of the climate debate, which rages hotter than ever before, see this presentation which Dr. Singer will deliver in Sicily next month. It covers in incisive fashion the most significant aspects of the debate. For a full picture,...

Perhaps you have very publicly expressed your belief in dangerous man-made warming, just as many media organisations and politicians have done? Who could blame you, for the United Nations, through its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC) is adamant that manmade emissions of CO2 are to blame for higher temperatures during the late 20th century. The media duly reports this to the world, assuming that surely the IPCC knows what it is talking about. On it goes, with a new prediction of disaster every week and hardly a word to be seen or heard from anyone who disagrees with the...

------ snip World temperatures did not rise from 1998 to 2008, while manmade emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuel grew by nearly a third, various data show. The researchers from Boston and Harvard Universities and Finland's University of Turku said pollution, and specifically sulphur emissions, from coal-fueled growth in Asia was responsible for the cooling effect.

At a California Senate oversight hearing yesterday called by Senator Pavley, a joint author of the state's landmark Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32), Air Resources Board Chairman Nichols reaffirmed her agency's commitment to proceed with implementation of a robust package of clean energy policies backed up with a cap-and-trade program to cut the state's emissions back to 1990 levels by 2020. Chairman Nichols also announced a major new addition to the AB 32 package - CARB will require that major industrial facilities in California, such as refineries and cement plants, implement cost-effective reduction measures that will provide significant greenhouse...

As time passes the global warming fiasco becomes more and more understandable, and more incredulous, more unbelievable. Hard-nosed physical evidence of man-made global warming has yet to be provided by the promoters of warming, even after a nominal $80 billion dollars have been spent in the attempt to do so. Since some of the ideas for mitigating man-made global warming (yet to be demonstrated) involve trillion dollar measures, it is crucially important that we get the science right. If we don’t get the science right, we’ll never get the policy right.

A frothing Chris Matthews on Wednesday excoriated Rush Limbaugh as "evil" for spreading "lies" about global warming. The Hardball host highlighted a new Rolling Stone article by Al Gore that chides Barack Obama for not doing enough on climate change. Matthews, however, chose to attack Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh: "These people are evil in what they're doing. I'm not saying their souls are evil, but what they're doing is really, really wrong and it's not the President." [See video below. MP3 audio here.] The MSNBC host declared no room for debate on global warming, announcing, "But here is a...

From the safety of the political sidelines, former Vice President Al Gore is venturing into a touchy topic, presenting his holistic view of how to curb the buildup of greenhouse gases warming the planet. Besides improving technology to reduce fossil fuel emissions, he is advocating "educating and empowering girls and women." "That's the most powerful leveraging factor," Gore said in a speech Monday in New York. "When that happens, then the population begins to stabilize and societies begin to make better choices." Although not entirely spelled out in the speech, Gore's thinking goes this way: If women are confident their...

Gun ownership, carrying a gun linked to heavy alcohol use Large, multi-state study shows certain gun owners more likely to drink excessively June 14, 2011 (SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — Gun owners who carry concealed weapons or have confronted another person with a gun are more than twice as likely to drink heavily as people who do not own guns, according to a study by UC Davis researchers. Binge drinking, chronic heavy alcohol use, and drinking and driving were all more common among gun owners generally than among non-owners, even after adjusting for factors such as age, sex, race, and state of...