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THE shocking images of oil-covered wildlife and ruined beaches across the Gulf of Mexico have horrified millions. But passionate green campaigner Sir Paul McCartney believes the environmental disaster may have a silver lining, with the search for clean, renewable energy now being pushed forward. The Beatles legend said: "Sadly we need disasters like this to show people. Some people don't believe in climate warming - like those who don't believe there was a Holocaust. "But the facts indicate that there's something going on and we've got to be aware of it if we want our kids to inherit a decent...

Vice President Al Gore will deliver his wildly popular “An Inconvenient Truth” multimedia lecture at the University of California, San Diego at 5:30 p.m. May 21 in RIMAC Arena. The event is free and open to the public; however, tickets are required for entry. Sponsors for the presentation are UC San Diego, Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, the San Diego Foundation, the UCSD Helen Edison Lecture Series and the Environment and Sustainability Initiative. Tickets will be distributed only through the UCSD Box Office (a maximum of four per person) by either coming to the Box Office located...

Language Warning - THR: [James] Cameron calls [Glenn] Beck a "f***ing asshole" and says that global warming deniers have "got their head so deeply up their ass I'm not sure they could hear me." And that's just Cameron getting started.

PHILADELPHIA - When news of the so-called climategate scandal involving a researcher at Pennsylvania State University broke, the orderly world of the ivory tower was suddenly invaded by a shouting match worthy of talk radio.  Confronted by a torrent of complaints and concerns from the public and from state officials, the university started a familiar procedure - a misconduct inquiry, which escalated into an investigation last month, focused on the activities of climatologist Michael Mann. It's an inquiry that's normally prompted by a specific complaint launched by a fellow researcher who suspects that data in a piece of published work...

Sad news: George Monbiot, the high priest of the AGW cult, is feeling frustrated and depressed. He is oppressed by the realisation that, as the politicians phrase it, he is not getting his message across. And this blog, at least in a small way, bears some part of the responsibility. From his pontifical throne in the Vatican of global warming – The Guardian – he has issued an anathema. Quoting from a recent anti-AGW scam posting by me, he observes: “The attack on climate scientists is now widening to an all-out war on science.” Don’t get carried away, George. It...

Of the festivals of nonsense that periodically overtake American politics, surely the silliest is the argument that because Washington is having a particularly snowy winter it proves that climate change is a hoax and, therefore, we need not bother with all this girly-man stuff like renewable energy, solar panels and carbon taxes. Just drill, baby, drill. When you see lawmakers like Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina tweeting that “it is going to keep snowing until Al Gore cries ‘uncle,’ ” or news that the grandchildren of Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma are building an igloo next to the Capitol...

I cannot condone some things that colleagues of mine wrote or requested in the e-mails recently stolen from a climate research unit at a British university. But the messages do not undermine the scientific case that human-caused climate change is real. The hacked e-mails have been mined for words and phrases that can be distorted to misrepresent what the scientists were discussing. In a Dec. 9 op-ed, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin argued that "The e-mails reveal that leading climate 'experts' . . . manipulated data to 'hide the decline' in global temperatures." Yet the e-mail she cites was written...

"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...