Climate Scientists Plan to Hit Back at Skeptics
March 05, 2010
FOXNews.com

In private e-mails obtained by The Washington Times, climate scientists at the National Academy of Sciences say they are tired of “being treated like political pawns” and need to fight back in kind.

This is a view of the Amazon basin forest north of Manaus, Brazil. A U.N. report stated that global warming is threatening the forests — a statement that was recently discredited.

Undaunted by a rash of scandals over the science underpinning climate change, top climate researchers are plotting to respond with what one scientist involved said needs to be “an outlandishly aggressively partisan approach” to gut the credibility of skeptics.

In private e-mails obtained by The Washington Times, climate scientists at the National Academy of Sciences say they are tired of “being treated like political pawns” and need to fight back in kind. Their strategy includes forming a nonprofit group to organize researchers and use their donations to challenge critics by running a back-page ad in the New York Times.

“Most of our colleagues don’t seem to grasp that we’re not in a gentlepersons’ debate, we’re in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules,” Paul R. Ehrlich, a Stanford University researcher, said in one of the e-mails.

Some scientists question the tactic and say they should focus instead on perfecting their science, but the researchers who are organizing the effort say the political battle is eroding confidence in their work.

“This was an outpouring of angry frustration on the part of normally very staid scientists who said, ‘God, can’t we have a civil dialogue here and discuss the truth without spinning everything,’” said Stephen H. Schneider, a Stanford professor and senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment who was part of the e-mail discussion but wants the scientists to take a slightly different approach.

February 25, 2010
Major Nor’easter Bears Down on New England
(AP) FoxNews.com

Another icy storm barreled into the winter-weary Northeast on Thursday as utility companies, airlines and others planned for what could team up with wet, heavy snowfall to be the most damaging part: high winds.

Even coastal New England, where rain was falling but nothing like the 18 inches of snow expected in some parts of northern New Jersey and upstate New York, was under coastal flood watches because of the wind.

The National Weather Service put much of the East Coast under wind advisories and warnings from 4 p.m. Thursday until as late as 7 a.m. Friday. The agency warned that winds could blow steadily between 20 and 30 mph in some areas, with gusts of 55 mph or higher in coastal and mountainous areas.

By late morning, the National Weather Service in Mount Holly, N.J., reported the strongest scattered gusts so far — a not-so-damaging 25 mph — with snow totals in the 2-inch range.

“Your tree may fall down; your neighbor’s may not,” said Kristina Pydynowski, a meteorologist for AccuWeather, a private forecasting company in State College, Pa.

She said dense, wet snow weighing down trees would make it more likely for strong winds to knock them down.

In upstate New York, the dangers are well understood.

In a storm hit the area with up to 2 feet of snow on Wednesday, some 150,000 homes and businesses lost power. By late Thursday morning, 60,000 customers were still without power, mostly in the Hudson Valley and the Catskills.

A pair of blizzards this month in New Jersey each knocked out 80,000 to 90,000 customers, mostly on the shore. Public Service Electric and Gas Co. in New Jersey had extra crews and supplies ready in case power lines start coming down this week.

Officials at Philadelphia International Airport said that by Thursday morning, nearly one-fifth of the flights scheduled there for the day had been scratched. The predictions of strong winds later in the day were the main reason, said airport spokeswoman Victoria Lupica.

The Delaware River Port Authority announced Thursday that no empty tractor-trailers would be allowed on its four Philadelphia-area bridges after 7 p.m., another nod to the wind forecast.

Winter storm warnings stretched into Ohio and along much of the Appalachian Mountains, with snow and wind expected as far south as the Tennessee-North Carolina line.

The National Weather Service on Thursday slightly downgraded some of its snowfall predictions, though the deepest totals were still in the 18-inch range. Forecasters said the snow would pile up a bit less than originally expected because it’s so heavy.

In snow-weary Philadelphia, this winter had set a seasonal record of more than 70 inches of snow even before the first flakes began falling Thursday. The new snow started arriving just as Philadelphia and New Jersey finally finished cleaning up from the two blizzards that deposited more than 3 feet of snow a few weeks ago.

Airlines canceled hundreds of flights in the New York City area and Philadelphia airports. Continental Airlines canceled 70 of its 200 flights at the major international airport in Newark, N.J., as well as all 200 flights planned by regional partners. Southwest scratched most of its Philadelphia flights.

Thousands of schools across the region either closed or planned to let out early.

The speed limit on New Jersey’s Atlantic City Expressway was reduced to 35 mph and transportation officials in Pennsylvania said they would close interstates in eastern Pennsylvania if conditions got bad enough.

New York State Police attributed one fatal traffic accident Thursday to the weather.

In Allentown, Pa., in the Lehigh Valley, 52-year-old Jim Yourgal put on knee-high snow boots and trudged three miles to his job as a valet at an orthopedic center. He figured he wouldn’t be driving home in a foot of snow. His dedication was no big deal, he said.

“What else am I going to do, read a book at home? I can do that on the weekend,” he said.

Tue Feb 16, 2010 5:35pm EST

* EPA pursuing CO2 rules if Congress does not act (Adds byline, American Petroleum Institute petition, others)

By Ed Stoddard

DALLAS, Feb 16 (Reuters) – Texas and several national industry groups on Tuesday filed separate petitions in federal court challenging the government’s authority to regulate U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

Texas, which leads U.S. states in carbon dioxide emissions due to its heavy concentration of oil refining and other industries, will see a major impact if U.S. mandatory emissions reductions take effect.

In December, the Environmental Protection Agency ruled that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide endanger human health, opening the door for the agency to issue mandatory regulations to reduce them.

Texas said it had filed a petition for review challenging the EPA’s “endangerment finding” with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Texas has also asked the EPA to reconsider its ruling.

“The EPA’s misguided plan paints a big target on the backs of Texas agriculture and energy producers and the hundreds of thousands of Texans they employ,” Texas Gov. Rick Perry said.

The National Association of Manufacturers, the American Petroleum Institute, and the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association also said on Tuesday they filed a petition challenging the EPA in federal appeals court.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and U.S. iron and steel makers have also signaled they would file lawsuits.

Environmental groups said Texas should focus on building cleaner energy sources instead of filing lawsuits.

“Governor Perry should win an Olympic medal for taking the environment downhill,” said Luke Metzger at Environment Texas. “Global warming is the greatest environmental threat facing Texas and the planet and Governor Perry’s obstructionism puts the state at great risk.”

Conservative Republicans like Perry have been sounding the alarm of job losses in the debate over regulating greenhouse gas emissions — a hot-button issue at a time of high joblessness and economic uncertainty.

The EPA is threatening to regulate carbon emissions if Congress does not. In June, the House of Representatives narrowly passed a cap and trade bill that would allow industry to buy and trade pollution permits, but the legislation has stalled in the Senate.

President Barack Obama would rather have Congress pass a bill that could provide more protections for industry while also controlling pollution. But he is using the threat of EPA regulation to encourage lawmakers.

Some prominent Senate Democrats have predicted that comprehensive climate control legislation, including a cap-and-trade mechanism, will not pass this year.

Reuters.

February 10, 2010
Round 2: Blizzard Buries East, Grounds Flights
(AP)

Snow, wind and slush closed the federal government for a third straight day — the longest weather-related government shutdown since 1996, when employees did not have to go to work for a full week.

WASHINGTON — Worst winter ever? The second blizzard in less than a week buried the most populous stretch of the East Coast under nearly a foot of snow Wednesday, breaking records for the snowiest winter and demoralizing millions of people still trying to dig out from the previous storm.

Conditions in the nation’s capital were so bad that even plows were advised to get off the roads, and forecasters were eyeing a third storm that could be brewing for next week.

For many families, the first storm was a fun weekend diversion. People even went skiing past Washington’s monuments. But Wednesday’s blizzard quickly became a serious safety concern. The Pennsylvania governor shut down some highways and warned that people who drove were risking their lives.

“I’ve seen enough,” said Bill Daly, 57, as gusts of wind and snow lashed his face in Arlington, Va., where streets were nearly empty just a few days after people had been playing in the snow.

“It’s scary and beautiful at the same time. I wanted to shovel but thought if I had a heart attack it could be a while before anybody found me in this kind of weather.”

National Weather Service issues blizzard warnings Wednesday as thousands of people scramble to plow and salt roads buried by another major storm that dumped piles of fresh snow on the crippled Mid-Atlantic.

Old-timers talk about a storm that blew through Washington in 1922, collapsing the roof on the Knickerbocker theater and killing more than 90 people. Their great-great-grandchildren will be able to describe the back-to-back blizzards of 2010, which were not nearly as deadly but set records for the snowiest winters ever in Washington and Baltimore.

Up to 16 inches fell in parts of western Maryland. Reagan National Airport outside Washington had nearly 10 inches by 2 p.m., and Baltimore got nearly a foot. That was on top of totals up to 3 feet in some places from the weekend storm.

“I have never in my lifetime seen or heard anything quite like this,” said D.C. Fire Chief Dennis L. Rubin, who was born and raised in the District.

The previous records for snowiest winters were 62.5 inches in Baltimore in 1995-96, and 54.4 inches in Washington in 1898-99. As of Wednesday afternoon, Baltimore had 72.3 inches so far this winter and Reagan had 54.9.

Heavy snow also fell in New York and New Jersey. Airlines canceled hundreds of flights, and New York City’s 1.1 million schoolchildren enjoyed only their third snow day in six years. The Washington area’s two airports had no flights coming or going Wednesday.

The streets of downtown Philadelphia, which was close to setting its own snow record, were nearly vacant as people heeded the mayor’s advice to stay home.

Entrance ramps to closed highways were blockaded, and the Pennsylvania National Guard had Humvees stocked with food and blankets ready to help anyone who got stuck. Earlier in the day, about 25 vehicles were involved in two separate pileups on snowy Interstate 80 in central Pennsylvania. One man was killed and 18 people injured.

“For your safety, do not drive,” Gov. Ed Rendell said. “You will risk your life and, potentially, the lives of others if you get stuck on highways or any road.”

In Virginia, where some areas had snow totals exceeding 30 inches from the two storms, winds were howling at 50 mph and temperatures were plunging. Gov. Bob McDonnell urged people to stay indoors.

“This snow reminds me of when I was driving tractor-trailers in Saudi Arabia, and the sandstorm starts and you can’t see the roads,” said Syeed Zada, 55, a plow driver for the Virginia Department of Transportation.

Utility customers in western Pennsylvania said about 30,000 people were without power. Some never got it back after the last storm.

Glenn Harvey, 59, who has a lung problem and needs oxygen, had been staying at a Red Cross shelter in Bentleyville, Pa., since Saturday.

Firefighters brought him there after the storm knocked out power to his house Friday night. His wife stayed home with their dog, where she’s using a kerosene heater to keep warm.

“It’s not been easy on her,” Harvey said.

In Washington, the federal government was closed for a third straight day. The longest weather-related government shutdown ever was in 1996, when employees did not have to go to work for a full week.

A Caribou Coffee shop in the capital was standing-room-only. Most people pecked away at laptop computers as snow fell steadily outside.

“Can’t get to the office, but the work still needs to get done,” said attorney Christopher Erckert.

Driving conditions got so bad that officials in Washington and some nearby suburbs pulled plows off the roads. In Baltimore, Pete Korfiatis dumped snow into the Inner Harbor with a front-end loader until city officials decided the roads were too slick.

“They just shut everything down,” he said.

Heavy snow collapsed part of the roof and a wall at a Smithsonian Institution storage building in Suitland, Md. It was not clear if any artifacts were damaged.

February 8, 2010
FoxNEWS.com (AP)

It has become very easy to call out the hypocrites like Al Gore who were so intent on taking money out of the pockets of middle-class America to fund his charlatan program of “Global Warming”, now called “Climate Change”. He deserves all the grief that comes his way. And I am more than happy to spoon-feed him loads of grief.

Mid-Atlantic Digs Out From A Historic Snowstorm

Tens of thousands of workers in the snowy Mid-Atlantic states were given Monday off to shovel out from a blizzard that buried some areas in nearly 3 feet of snow.

Federal agencies that employ 230,000 in Washington were closed, as were many businesses and school districts across the region.

The National Weather Service, meanwhile, issued a storm watch for the Washington area Tuesday, saying there was potential for another 5 inches or more of snow. Forecasters expect highs in the low- to mid-30s for the next few days, though sunshine on Monday should help melt some of the snow, said weather service meteorologist Bryan Jackson.

“You’ve got a whole city held captive here,” Gwen Dawkins, who was trying to get to Detroit, said as she waited at Washington’s Reagan National Airport, where all flights had been canceled after 18 inches of snow was recorded by Sunday.

The sight of cross-country skiers cascading down monument steps and flying snowballs has since given way to images of people hunched over snow shovels or huddled next to fireplaces.

John and Nicole Ibrahim and their 2-year-old son, Joshua, have been without power at their suburban Washington home in Silver Spring, Md., since overnight Friday. They were among hundreds of thousands without electricity across the region, and utilities warned it could be days before electricity is restored to everyone.

“We were all bundled up in the same bed together and (Joshua) was coughing in his sleep and his heart was racing, and we worried he might be getting pneumonia,” Nicole Ibrahim said.

The National Weather Service called the storm “historic” and reported a foot of snow in parts of Ohio and 2 feet or more in Washington, Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Parts of Virginia, Maryland and West Virginia got closer to 3 feet.

Eric Berry, a plow driver for Baltimore, said he worked 12-hour shifts Saturday and Sunday. He said overanxious residents were sometimes hindering his ability to clear secondary roads by digging out their cars and moving them into the path of his plow.

“They feel like they need to park in the street, so that when it’s time to go, they can up and go,” Berry said.

In Philadelphia, 28.5 inches of snow fell during the storm, just shy of the record 30.7 inches during a January 1996 blizzard. Snow totals were even higher to the west in Pennsylvania, with 31 inches recorded in Upper Strasburg and 30 inches in Somerset.

The nearly 18 inches recorded at Reagan National Airport was the fourth-highest storm total for Washington, and airport officials haven’t decided when flights would resume.

Dawkins, 59, was supposed to leave Washington on Saturday but still hadn’t Sunday afternoon because of delays and cancellations. And she said there was “no way we’re getting out of here tonight.”

“They were very ill-prepared,” she said.

At nearby Dulles International Airport in Virginia, the record was shattered with 32 inches. Some flights there have resumed.

Authorities say most public transportation in Philadelphia has resumed. In Pittsburgh, bus service restarted but light-rail wasn’t running. Washington’s Metro trains were to be limited Monday to underground rails, and its buses were going to operate on a very limited basis.

Despite the snow, watching the Super Bowl was still a priority for many. Eric Teoh, 29, of Arlington, said he borrowed his neighbor’s snow shovel and spent at least an hour getting his car out of the snow to head to the Crystal City Sports Pub in Arlington, Va.

“I was snowed in and I dug my car out today to come here,” he said. “I couldn’t go anywhere.”

The frigid temperatures and snowy and icy streets did not deter runner Patrick Duffy, 23, from training for the Pittsburgh Marathon in May. He admitted was going slower than usual.

“I’m trying not to fall. I haven’t fallen yet,” Duffy said, his eyelashes frosted white.

In Mount Lebanon, a suburb south of Pittsburgh, Robb and Meredith Hartlage were again trying to clear the sidewalk in front of their house.

“We did a couple hours yesterday. I would say about four hours mixed with sledding,” said Robb Hartlage, 40, who said he’s not too old to play in the snow. He acknowledged, however, that the shoveling was hard work.

“I made some ‘old man’ noises when I got out of bed,” he said.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

February 8, 2010
Africa-Gate? U.N. Fears of Food Shortages Questioned
FOXNews.com

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

The cover of the IPCC’s fourth assessment report to the U.N., “Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report,” more frequently referred to as AR4.

The U.N.’s controversial climate report is coming under fire — again — this time by one of its own scientists, who admits he can’t find any evidence to support a warning about a climate-caused North African food shortage.

The statement comes from a key 2007 report to the U.N., and asserts that by 2020 yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50% in some African countries thanks to climate change.

But this weekend, a key author of the team behind that report told The Sunday Times that he could find no evidence to support his own group’s claim. The revelation follows the retraction by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of a claim that the Himalayan glaciers might all melt by 2035, dubbed ‘Glaciergate’ by commentators.

The newest controversial claim could become a very important error in the IPCC’s reporting, because it comes not only from the IPCC’s report on climate change impacts — called Assessment Report 4, or AR4 — but is also repeated in its “Synthesis Report.” That report is the IPCC’s most politically sensitive publication, distilling its most important science into a form accessible to politicians and policy makers.

Its lead authors include IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri himself, who has quoted it in speeches, as has U.N. secretary-general Ban Ki-moon.

Speaking at the 2008 global climate talks in Poznan, Poland, Pachauri said: “In some countries of Africa, yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by 50% by 2020.” In a speech last July, Ban said: “Yields from rain-fed agriculture could fall by half in some African countries over the next 10 years.”

Speaking this weekend, Professor Chris Field, the new lead author of the IPCC’s climate impacts team, said: “I was not an author on the ‘Synthesis Report,’ but on reading it I cannot find support for the statement about African crop yield declines.”

This sort of claim should be based on hard evidence, said Robert Watson, chief scientist at Defra, the U.K.’s department for environment food and rural affairs, who chaired the IPCC from 1997 to 2002.

“Any such projection should be based on peer-reviewed literature from computer modelling of how agricultural yields would respond to climate change. I can see no such data supporting the IPCC report,” he said.

February 05, 2010
U.N. Climate Chief: Critics Should Rub Their Faces With Asbestos
FOXNews.com

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the U.N.’s International Panel on Climate Change, said global warming skeptics are like people who see no difference between cancer-causing asbestos and talcum powder.

The U.N.’s climate chief dismissed “nefarious” global warming skeptics this week by insinuating that they are deep in the pockets of big business — and suggested that they go rub their faces in cancer-causing asbestos.

Rajendra Pachauri, the besieged head of the U.N.’s International Panel on Climate Change, told the Financial Times on Wednesday that he is the victim of a “carefully orchestrated” campaign to block climate change legislation.

“I would say [there are] nefarious designs behind people trying to attack me with lies, falsehoods,” he told the paper, swatting away allegations that his India-based climate institute, TERI, has benefited from decisions made by the IPCC, which he also chairs.

Climate change skeptics “are people who deny the link between smoking and cancer; they are people who say that asbestos is as good as talcum powder,” he said.

“I hope that they apply it (asbestos) to their faces every day.”

Pachauri’s remarks came as pressure and scrutiny are mounting against the IPCC’s hallmark Fourth Assessment Report, which laid out the case for man-made climate change over a thousand sprawling pages.

The report contained misleading data about the melting rate of glaciers in the Himalayas and is riddled with citations to data furnished by activist groups, non-scientific journals and material that was never peer-reviewed.

Pachauri called the furor over errors in the assessment report “a blip that is going to pass,” and reiterated his intention to remain in place as the chief of the world’s most powerful climate body.

“I’m not a quitter. Some people would want me to be; some people would probably say that I should go, but I am not going to oblige them. I have no desire to leave at all,” he said.

His critics in the business world, he told the paper, “see climate change as a threat to their own comforts, their own convenience and the generation of easy profits.” He accused them of establishing a network of lobbyists in D.C. “trying to write all kinds of malicious articles and indulge in invective.”

“It’s all part of a pattern,” he continued. “But let me clarify. I have no proof. I can only presume something like this is at work.”

The Great Global Warming Collapse
Anthony Jenkins/The GlobeAndMail.com
Margaret Wente/GlobeAndMail.com
February 6, 2010

As the science scandals keep coming, the air has gone out of the climate-change movement.

In 2007, the most comprehensive report to date on global warming, issued by the respected United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made a shocking claim: The Himalayan glaciers could melt away as soon as 2035.

These glaciers provide the headwaters for Asia’s nine largest rivers and lifelines for the more than one billion people who live downstream. Melting ice and snow would create mass flooding, followed by mass drought. The glacier story was reported around the world. Last December, a spokesman for the World Wildlife Fund, an environmental pressure group, warned, “The deal reached at Copenhagen will have huge ramifications for the lives of hundreds of millions of people who are already highly vulnerable due to widespread poverty.” To dramatize their country’s plight, Nepal’s top politicians strapped on oxygen tanks and held a cabinet meeting on Mount Everest.

But the claim was rubbish, and the world’s top glaciologists knew it. It was based not on rigorously peer-reviewed science but on an anecdotal report by the WWF
itself. When its background came to light on the eve of Copenhagen, Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, shrugged it off. But now, even leading scientists and environmental groups admit the IPCC is facing a crisis of credibility that makes the Climategate affair look like small change.

“The global warming movement as we have known it is dead,” the brilliant analyst Walter Russell Mead says in his blog on The American Interest. It was done in by a combination of bad science and bad politics.

The impetus for the Copenhagen conference was that the science makes it imperative for us to act. But even if that were true – and even if we knew what to do – a global deal was never in the cards. As Mr. Mead writes, “The global warming movement proposed a complex set of international agreements involving vast transfers of funds, intrusive regulations in national economies, and substantial changes to the domestic political economies of most countries on the planet.” Copenhagen was never going to produce a breakthrough. It was a dead end.

And now, the science scandals just keep on coming. First there was the vast cache of e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia, home of a crucial research unit responsible for collecting temperature data. Although not fatal to the science, they revealed a snakepit of scheming to keep contradictory research from being published, make imperfect data look better, and withhold information from unfriendly third parties. If science is supposed to be open and transparent, these guys acted as if they had a lot to hide.

Despite widespread efforts to play down the Climategate e-mails, they were very damaging. An investigation by the British newspaper The Guardian – among the most aggressive advocates for action on climate change – has found that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed, and that documents relating to them could not be produced.

Meantime, the IPCC – the body widely regarded, until now, as the ultimate authority on climate science – is looking worse and worse. After it was forced to retract its claim about melting glaciers, Mr. Pachauri dismissed the error as a one-off. But other IPCC claims have turned out to be just as groundless.

For example, it warned that large tracts of the Amazon rain forest might be wiped out by global warming because they are extremely susceptible to even modest decreases in rainfall. The sole source for that claim, reports The Sunday Times of London, was a magazine article written by a pair of climate activists, one of whom worked for the WWF. One scientist contacted by the Times, a specialist in tropical forest ecology, called the article “a mess.”

Worse still, the Times has discovered that Mr. Pachauri’s own Energy and Resources Unit, based in New Delhi, has collected millions in grants to study the effects of glacial melting – all on the strength of that bogus glacier claim, which happens to have been endorsed by the same scientist who now runs the unit that got the money. Even so, the IPCC chief is hanging tough. He insists the attacks on him are being orchestrated by companies facing lower profits.

Until now, anyone who questioned the credibility of the IPCC was labelled as a climate skeptic, or worse. But many climate scientists now sense a sinking ship, and they’re bailing out. Among them is Andrew Weaver, a climatologist at the University of Victoria who acknowledges that the climate body has crossed the line into advocacy. Even Britain’s Greenpeace has called for Mr. Pachauri’s resignation. India says it will establish its own body to monitor the effects of global warming because it “cannot rely” on the IPCC.

None of this is to say that global warming isn’t real, or that human activity doesn’t play a role, or that the IPCC is entirely wrong, or that measures to curb greenhouse-gas emissions aren’t valid. But the strategy pursued by activists (including scientists who have crossed the line into advocacy) has turned out to be fatally flawed.

By exaggerating the certainties, papering over the gaps, demonizing the skeptics and peddling tales of imminent catastrophe, they’ve discredited the entire climate-change movement. The political damage will be severe. As Mr. Mead succinctly puts it: “Skeptics up, Obama down, cap-and-trade dead.” That also goes for Canada, whose climate policies are inevitably tied to those of the United States.

“I don’t think it’s healthy to dismiss proper skepticism,” says John Beddington, the chief scientific adviser to the British government. He is a staunch believer in man-made climate change, but he also points out the complexity of climate science. “Science grows and improves in the light of criticism. There is a fundamental uncertainty about climate change prediction that can’t be changed.” In his view, it’s time to stop circling the wagons and throw open the doors. How much the public will keep caring is another matter.

Bin Laden Blames U.S. for Global Warming in New Tape
January 29, 2010
(AP)

CAIRO — Usama bin Laden sought to draw a wider public into his fight against the United States in a new message Friday, dropping his usual talk of religion and holy war and focusing instead on an unexpected topic: global warming.

The Al Qaeda leader blamed the United States and other industrialized nations for climate change and said the only way to prevent disaster was to break the American economy, calling on the world to boycott U.S. goods and stop using the dollar.

“The effects of global warming have touched every continent. Drought and deserts are spreading, while from the other floods and hurricanes unseen before the previous decades have now become frequent,” bin Laden said in the audiotape, aired on the Arab TV network Al-Jazeera.

The terror leader noted Washington’s rejection of the Kyoto Protocol aimed at reducing greenhouse gases and painted the United States as in the thrall of major corporations that he said “are the true criminals against the global climate” and are to blame for the global economic crisis, driving “tens of millions into poverty and unemployment.”

Bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders have mentioned global warming and struck an anti-globalization tone in previous tapes and videos. But the latest was the first message by bin Laden solely dedicated to the topic. It was also nearly entirely empty of the Islamic militant rhetoric that usually fills his declarations.

The change in rhetoric aims to give Al Qaeda’s message an appeal beyond hardcore Islamic militants, said Evan Kohlmann, of globalterroralert.com, a private, U.S.-based terrorism analysis group.

“It’s a bridge issue,” Kohlmann said. “They are looking to appeal to people who don’t necessarily love Al Qaeda but who are angry at the U.S. and the West, to galvanize them against the West” and make them more receptive to “alternative solutions like adopting violence for the cause.”

“If you’re looking to draw people who are disenchanted or disillusioned, what better issue to use than global warming,” he said. While the focus on climate may be new, the tactic itself is not, he said: Al Qaeda used issues like the abuse of prisoners by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay to reach out to Muslims who might not be drawn to Al Qaeda’s ideology but are angry over the injustices.

Bin Laden “looks to see the issues that are the most cogent and more likely to get popular support,” Kohlmann said.

The Al Qaeda leader’s call for an economic boycott helps in the appeal — providing a nonviolent way to participate in opposing the United States.

“People of the world, it’s not right for the burden to be left on the mujahedeen (holy warriors) in an issue that causes harm to everyone,” he said. “Boycott them to save yourselves and your possessions and your children from climate change and to live proud and free.”

Al-Jazeera aired excerpts of the message and posted a transcript on its Web site. The tape’s authenticity could not be independently confirmed, but the voice resembled that of bin Laden on messages known to be from him. The new message comes after a bin Laden tape released last week in which he endorsed a failed attempt to blow up an American airliner on Christmas Day.

In the new tape, bin Laden refers to the Dec. 18 climate conference in Copenhagen — indicated the message was made recently.

The message — whose length Al-Jazeera did not specify — makes only brief passing mentions of Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine and instead hits on issues that could resonate at a time of widespread economic woes.

“The world is held hostage by major corporations, which are pushing it to the brink,” he said. “World politics are not governed by reason but by the force and greed of oil thieves and warmongers and the cruel beasts of capitalism.”

To stop global warming, he called for the “wheels of the American economy” to be brought to a halt. “This is possible … if the peoples of the world stop consuming American goods.”

“We must also stop dealings in the dollar and get rid of it as soon as possible,” he said. “I know that this has great consequences and grave ramifications, but it is the only means to liberate humanity from slavery and dependence on America.”

He also called for the “punishing and holding to account” of corporation chiefs, adding, “this should be easy for the American people to do, particularly those who were effected by Hurricane Katrina or those who lost their jobs, since these criminals live among them, particularly in Washington, New York and Texas.”

The message represents a honing of Al Qaeda’s rhetoric. In 2007, bin Laden issued a tape in which he warned that human life is endangered by global warning, and he blamed democratic systems for seeking the interests of major corporations, said the U.S.-based Site Intelligence Group, which monitors Islamic militant message traffic.

But in Friday’s message, the anti-democracy rhetoric is dropped.

“It’s populism, pure and simple,” Kohlmann said.

HumanEventsOnline.com
by Ross Kaminsky
January 10, 2010

After the climate hoaxers and extortionists quietly slunk home after their utter failure in Copenhagen, one might have expected a barrage of “the end is nigh” press releases by Al Gore and friends, explaining how the refusal of governments to kneecap their economies will lead to us all being slowly convection baked to death in a never-ending trend of man-made global warming.

But apparently the alarmists have gone into hibernation…perhaps because world-wide record breaking cold would expose errors so great that even the “mainstream” news would have to call them out as full of (much needed) hot air.

As often seems to happen around big “global warming events”, Copenhagen was hit with extremely cold weather during the “climate conference,” including a blizzard on December 17…in a country which hasn’t had a white Christmas since 1995. In a bit of “God must have a sense of humor” irony, the cold weather followed President Obama home, dumping record snowfalls in and around Washington, D.C. two days later.

But that was just a warm-up for the world’s continuing deep-freeze, which seems to have frozen the alarmists’ mouths shut:

Dallas had its first “White Christmas” in more than 80 years and Oklahoma City broke a 95-year old record by getting 14 inches of snow — the previous record was 2.5 inches for that day.

From the Irish National Meteorological Service, Met Éireann, December 2009 was “the coldest December for 28 years over most of the country and the coldest of any month since February 1986 at a few stations.”

And now it continues into January, shattering even more records:

From the Times of Malta (January 1, 2010), “Heavy snowfall and seemingly permanent freezing temperatures have made this December the coldest for 13 years, UK forecasters said yesterday.” The UK’s Times newspaper piles on: “forecasters have warned Britons to brace themselves for a freezing cold, bleak new year — this winter is set to be the coldest for more than 30 years.”

From the Chinese news service Xinhua (January 5, 2010), “A cold wave across much of China since Saturday has brought heavy snow to major cities in the north, causing a surge in fuel demand and traffic chaos on roads and at airports.” And from China Daily, “In the next 10 days, temperatures could fall to around -32 C in the far north and another cold wave will sweep the region around Friday, bringing gales and severe cold…”

The BBC reports (January 4, 2010) that “Dozens of people have died in a cold wave sweeping through northern India.” And from Agence France-Presse, “As temperatures plunged to minus 25 degrees Celsius (minus 13 Fahrenheit) in Poland at the start of the year, the number of cold-related deaths rose to 122 so far this winter, police said.”

It’s not just Europe and Asia that are cold: From Columbia, Missouri (January 4, 2010), “If Columbia doesn’t warm up to more than 20 degrees by Wednesday, this winter will make the list of worst cold snaps in Columbia history. The National Weather Service predicts temperatures will stay below 20 degrees through Saturday, which would be the ninth day of temperatures that low. A streak that long hasn’t happened since 1983.”

From Palm Beach, Florida (January 4, 2010), “Nevermind what your goosebumps are telling you — this cold weather snap is not about how cold it’s getting, but about how long it’s going to stay that way.” Southwestern Florida expects a cold streak to tie or break a 37-year old record.

And in Colorado, the National Weather Service station nearest my house reports that “December was the coldest December (and the coldest month of any name) in 27 years of record.”

To be sure, there are parts of the planet that are not colder than average today, but they represent places where a tiny fraction of the world’s population lives. Let’s face it: The Tunisians are not big players in the “global warming” debate. Essentially the entire highly-populated latitudes of the northern hemisphere are in the deep freeze, with forecasts for more record-breaking cold — and more cold-related deaths — for the immediate future.

From a decade-long lack of warming to record-long cold snaps and snowfalls, from a recovery in the Arctic sea ice extent to a healthy polar bear population, from fewer hurricanes than average to stable sea levels, the data are not on the side of the alarmists. But of course, the real data never have been on the side of the alarmists, which is why they felt the need to “hide the decline” and to manipulate the peer-reviewed publication process.

Yet neither the short-term nor long-term trends keep the alarmists from fear-mongering with junk science intended to cause you to give up your money and your economic liberty. Energy Secretary Steven Chu warned earlier this year of dramatic long-term sea-level rises due to global warming even though multiple studies have shown no trend of accelerating rises…and no rise at all around some of the island nations like Tuvalu and the Maldives which routinely try to extort money from the west with the excuse that we’re causing them to be flooded out of existence. And the most (in)famous chart in the climate change debate, Michael Mann’s “hockey stick,” has been proven wrong both in its underlying math and in its wildly faulty predictions of ever-increasing temperatures.

The alarmists regularly get it wrong in the relatively short-term as well. In a stunningly erroneous prediction, the British Met Office said in September, 2008, that “the coming winter (is) likely to be milder than average.” The actual results? The winter of 2008/2009 was the UK’s coldest in 13 years. The same office guessed in September, 2009 that “that winter temperatures are likely to be near or above average over much of Europe including the UK. Winter 2009/10 is likely to be milder than last year for the UK, but there is still a 1 in 7 chance of a cold winter.” Let’s just say Caesar’s Palace isn’t worried about odds-making competition from climate alarmists. In their November update, the Met Office said there was only a 20% chance of a colder winter this year.

Meanwhile, British senior citizens are burning books to keep warm. As one bookstore worker in Wales said, “Book burning seems terribly wrong but we have to get rid of unsold stock for pennies and some of the pensioners say the books make ideal slow-burning fuel for fires and stoves. A lot of them buy up large hardback volumes so they can stick them in the fire to last all night.” Apparently, it’s cheaper to burn an encyclopedia than coal. Perhaps Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com will have an epiphany and begin to lobby, along with Al Gore and other enviro-radicals and profiteers, for higher taxes on coal; just think what that could do for sales of War and Peace.

Ross Kaminsky has been a professional derivatives trader for over 20 years. Ross is a fellow of the Heartland Institute and writes about political economy and current events at Rossputin.com. He also contributes to blogs for the Denver Post, the National Taxpayers Union and FreedomWorks among others.

By Heather Buchman
AccuWeather.com
January 3, 2010

This story was to much of a temptation for me not to post for obvious reasons. Thanks Al. We love ya!

The powerful storm that created blizzard conditions in Maine, dumped 1 to 2 feet of snow across northern New England and has been producing high winds across the entire Northeast will pull away from the region through Monday.

While snow lightens up through tonight from eastern New York into New England, winds will take awhile longer to subside. Lake-effect snow will last several more days across the Great Lakes region, while lighter snow showers linger across the Appalachians.

In many areas where snow has fallen, winds are causing significant blowing and drifting of the snow and thus dangerous travel conditions. The good news is that winds are expected to lighten up north-to-south across the hardest-hit areas of New England tonight.

This will aid crews working to plow roads overnight.

Across areas farther south from southern New York and New Jersey into Maryland, winds will remain quite strong through the overnight hours with gusts still reaching 30 to 40 mph.

These winds will keep AccuWeather RealFeel® temperatures below zero through Monday morning in cities like Buffalo, N.Y., Pittsburgh and State College, Pa. In New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., RealFeel temperatures will be in the single digits.

People in these cities should bundle up before heading to work Monday morning.

Winds through the early part of the upcoming week will not be as strong as they were over the weekend. Still, gusts between 20 and 25 mph are expected the next few days, making it feel at least 10 degrees colder than actual temperatures.

Record Setting Snowfall Across Oklahoma, Most Interstates Closed
Updated: December 25, 2009
News9.com

OKLAHOMA CITY — Thousands of Oklahomans remain without power as a massive winter storm blew through the state bringing record setting snowfall to a large part of central Oklahoma. Will Rogers World Airport reported receiving about 14 inches of snow.

The Oklahoma Highway Patrol said roads remain slick and hazardous, and they discourage travel Friday.

All interstates in the Oklahoma City Metro were closed due to weather Thursday but were reopened Friday. Numerous accidents and stranded vehicles are blocking all roadways.

Travel in western and southwestern parts of the state is strongly discouraged. Blizzard conditions in far western and southern counties have reduced visibility. Highways remain slick

Snow, Sleet Across the State.

In the western two thirds of the state, and conditions continue to deteriorate.

Around 30 salt trucks were dispatched to salt regional snow

routes around the metro. See a map of metro snow routes.

In the Panhandle, snow continues to blow. However, as the storm moves south and east, crews reported sunshine in Cimarron County.

Crews have been applying sand/salt mixtures as needed to highways.

The National Weather Service has issued a winter storm warning for 33 counties in Oklahoma, including Oklahoma and Tulsa counties, through Thursday evening. Heavy snow and reduced visibility due to strong, northerly winds are occurring.

A winter weather advisory for 25 counties in south-central and southeastern Oklahoma has been issued for the possibility of freezing rain and snow. Temperatures will be below average in many areas.

Dog, a man’s best friend? What about kitty?
December 20, 2009

PARIS (AFP) – Man’s best friend could be one of the environment’s worst enemies, according to a new study which says the carbon pawprint of a pet dog is more than double that of a gas-guzzling sports utility vehicle.

But the revelation in the book “Time to Eat the Dog: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living” by New Zealanders Robert and Brenda Vale has angered pet owners who feel they are being singled out as troublemakers.

The Vales, specialists in sustainable living at Victoria University of Wellington, analysed popular brands of pet food and calculated that a medium-sized dog eats around 164 kilos (360 pounds) of meat and 95 kilos of cereal a year.

Combine the land required to generate its food and a “medium” sized dog has an annual footprint of 0.84 hectares (2.07 acres) — around twice the 0.41 hectares required by a 4×4 driving 10,000 kilometres (6,200 miles) a year, including energy to build the car.

To confirm the results, the New Scientist magazine asked John Barrett at the Stockholm Environment Institute in York, Britain, to calculate eco-pawprints based on his own data. The results were essentially the same.

“Owning a dog really is quite an extravagance, mainly because of the carbon footprint of meat,” Barrett said.

Other animals aren’t much better for the environment, the Vales say.

Cats have an eco-footprint of about 0.15 hectares, slightly less than driving a Volkswagen Golf for a year, while two hamsters equates to a plasma television and even the humble goldfish burns energy equivalent to two mobile telephones.

But Reha Huttin, president of France’s 30 Million Friends animal rights foundation says the human impact of eliminating pets would be equally devastating.

“Pets are anti-depressants, they help us cope with stress, they are good for the elderly,” Huttin told AFP.

“Everyone should work out their own environmental impact. I should be allowed to say that I walk instead of using my car and that I don’t eat meat, so why shouldn’t I be allowed to have a little cat to alleviate my loneliness?”

Sylvie Comont, proud owner of seven cats and two dogs — the environmental equivalent of a small fleet of cars — says defiantly, “Our animals give us so much that I don’t feel like a polluter at all.

“I think the love we have for our animals and what they contribute to our lives outweighs the environmental considerations.

“I don’t want a life without animals,” she told AFP.

And pets’ environmental impact is not limited to their carbon footprint, as cats and dogs devastate wildlife, spread disease and pollute waterways, the Vales say.

With a total 7.7 million cats in Britain, more than 188 million wild animals are hunted, killed and eaten by feline predators per year, or an average 25 birds, mammals and frogs per cat, according to figures in the New Scientist.

Likewise, dogs decrease biodiversity in areas they are walked, while their faeces cause high bacterial levels in rivers and streams, making the water unsafe to drink, starving waterways of oxygen and killing aquatic life.

And cat poo can be even more toxic than doggy doo — owners who flush their litter down the toilet ultimately infect sea otters and other animals with toxoplasma gondii, which causes a killer brain disease.

But despite the apocalyptic visions of domesticated animals’ environmental impact, solutions exist, including reducing pets’ protein-rich meat intake.

“If pussy is scoffing ‘Fancy Feast’ — or some other food made from choice cuts of meat — then the relative impact is likely to be high,” said Robert Vale.

“If, on the other hand, the cat is fed on fish heads and other leftovers from the fishmonger, the impact will be lower.”

Other potential positive steps include avoiding walking your dog in wildlife-rich areas and keeping your cat indoors at night when it has a particular thirst for other, smaller animals’ blood.

As with buying a car, humans are also encouraged to take the environmental impact of their future possession/companion into account.

But the best way of compensating for that paw or clawprint is to make sure your animal is dual purpose, the Vales urge. Get a hen, which offsets its impact by laying edible eggs, or a rabbit, prepared to make the ultimate environmental sacrifice by ending up on the dinner table.

“Rabbits are good, provided you eat them,” said Robert Vale.
.

Climate Alarmist Blames This Weekend’s Blizzard On Global Warming
By Noel Sheppard
NewsBusters.org
December 21, 2009

Climate Progress’s Joe Romm says this weekend’s blizzard that rocked the Eastern seaboard was caused by global warming.

That’s right, folks: you can add winter storms to the neverending list of things Nobel Laureate Al Gore’s bogeyman is now responsible for.

Of course this isn’t at all surprising, for Romm blamed the 2007 Minnesota bridge collapse on global warming.

Potentially just as interesting was how Romm initially tried to downplay the severity of this storm in his article published Sunday:

As for the East Coast storm, my home in DC did get 18 inches of snow — although if this had been a true blizzard, I doubt my flight from Copenhagen on Saturday would have been allowed to land in Dulles airport and I wouldn’t of been able to get home 12 hours after I left Denmark. [...]

If having snow around the holidays on the East Coast were strange, I doubt the song “White Christmas” would have been written.

So, this WASN’T an extreme event? Not so fast:

The Capital Weather Gang reports that the DC snowstorm has set multiple records (previous in parentheses):

•National: All-time December daily (11.5″, 12-17-1932) and monthly snowfall (16.2″, 1962)
•Dulles: All-time December daily record (10.6″, 12-12-1982) and second highest December snowfall (24.2″, 1966)
•Baltimore: All-time December daily (11.5″, 12-17-1932) and monthly snowfall (20.4″, 1966)
Interesting, wouldn’t you agree? First he said, “Nothing to see here. Move along.”

Then he showed actual data proving the weather event was historic.

Kind of like Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) claiming he voted for war funding before he voted against it!

But Romm wasn’t done:

So it is inane for anyone in the media to cite this massive DC snowstorm as somehow counterintuitive or ironic against the backdrop of Obama’s Copenhagen deal.

In fact, this record-breaking snowstorm is pretty much precisely what climate science predicts.
And therein lies the rub, for alarmists like Romm and the rest of his ilk have stacked the deck so that no matter what happens with the weather, it’s caused by global warming:

•Excessive heat
•Excessive cold
•Droughts
•Floods
•Warm winters
•Cold winters
•Hot summers
•Cold summers
•Autumns with great foliage colors
•Autumns lacking foliage colors
•Lack of snow
•Abundance of snow
You name it, these charlatans blame it on global warming, and they want the media to comply:

I’m not say [sic] that the media should link every extreme weather event the way [New York Times columnist Andrew] Revkin did. But when we have “worst on record” type events, or 100-year floods — and especially ones that last more than a day and/or hit a broad area — then I think the reporter has an obligation to include the issue.

So, unless all weather events stay within ranges these folks consider “normal,” it’s evidence of global warming.

I guess this is why Romm’s fellow scientists involved in ClimateGate did everything within their power to flatten out past temperature extremes so as to make more recent data APPEAR extreme.

Readers are highly encouraged to review Marc Sheppard’s outstanding American Thinker piece on this very subject.

The point here is that alarmists like Romm want everyone to believe that weather in the past was much less extreme than it is today so that they can blame anything supposedly out of the ordinary on global warming.

Which makes these people the Bernie Madoffs of climatology and meteorology. After all, the key to Madoff’s successful Ponzi scheme was convincing new and existing investors that he was producing higher returns than he really was.

This is exactly what Romm and his ilk are doing: exaggerating current weather events while downplaying what happened in the past so as to convince the public it all correlates with the predictions emanating from their own climate models.

Of course, as Marc Sheppard proved, when proxies created by them don’t fit the desired result, they just splice in other numbers that do — just like Madoff did. But this is FAR worse, for these folks demand media assist them with the scam.

With this in mind, while press members jump on the left-wing’s castigation of bankers and Wall Streeters as the scum of the earth, maybe they should set their sights on climate alarmists like Romm who are involved in a far more nefarious plot involving a far greater number of people.

—Noel Sheppard is the Associate Editor of NewsBusters. Follow him at Facebook and Twitter.