'Global warming'

[The Bobster]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/...93F0AJ20130416

Climate scientists struggle to explain warming slowdown
By Environment Correspondent Alister Doyle
OSLO | Tue Apr 16, 2013 6:25am EDT

(Reuters) - Scientists are struggling to explain a slowdown in climate change that has exposed gaps in their understanding and defies a rise in global greenhouse gas emissions.

Often focused on century-long trends, most climate models failed to predict that the temperature rise would slow, starting around 2000. Scientists are now intent on figuring out the causes and determining whether the respite will be brief or a more lasting phenomenon.

Getting this right is essential for the short and long-term planning of governments and businesses ranging from energy to construction, from agriculture to insurance. Many scientists say they expect a revival of warming in coming years.

Theories for the pause include that deep oceans have taken up more heat with the result that the surface is cooler than expected, that industrial pollution in Asia or clouds are blocking the sun, or that greenhouse gases trap less heat than previously believed.

The change may be a result of an observed decline in heat-trapping water vapor in the high atmosphere, for unknown reasons. It could be a combination of factors or some as yet unknown natural variations, scientists say.

Weak economic growth and the pause in warming is undermining governments' willingness to make a rapid billion-dollar shift from fossil fuels. Almost 200 governments have agreed to work out a plan by the end of 2015 to combat global warming.

"The climate system is not quite so simple as people thought," said Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish statistician and author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist" who estimates that moderate warming will be beneficial for crop growth and human health.

Some experts say their trust in climate science has declined because of the many uncertainties. The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had to correct a 2007 report that exaggerated the pace of melt of the Himalayan glaciers and wrongly said they could all vanish by 2035.

"My own confidence in the data has gone down in the past five years," said Richard Tol, an expert in climate change and professor of economics at the University of Sussex in England.

Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius first showed in the 1890s how man-made carbon dioxide, from coal for instance, traps heat in the atmosphere. Many of the exact effects are still unknown.

Greenhouse gas emissions have hit repeated record highs with annual growth of about 3 percent in most of the decade to 2010, partly powered by rises in China and India. World emissions were 75 percent higher in 2010 than in 1970, UN data show.

UN PANEL SEEKS EXPLANATION

A rapid rise in global temperatures in the 1980s and 1990s - when clean air laws in developed nations cut pollution and made sunshine stronger at the earth's surface - made for a compelling argument that human emissions were to blame.

The IPCC will seek to explain the current pause in a report to be released in three parts from late 2013 as the main scientific roadmap for governments in shifting from fossil fuels towards renewable energies such as solar or wind power, the panel's chairman Rajendra Pachauri said.

According to Pachauri, temperature records since 1850 "show there are fluctuations. They are 10, 15 years in duration. But the trend is unmistakable."

The IPCC has consistently said that fluctuations in the weather, perhaps caused by variations in sunspots or a La Nina cooling of the Pacific, can mask any warming trend and the panel has never predicted a year-by-year rise in temperatures.

Experts say short-term climate forecasts are vital to help governments, insurers and energy companies to plan.

Governments will find little point in reinforcing road bridges over rivers, for instance, if a prediction of more floods by 2100 doesn't apply to the 2020s.

A section of a draft IPCC report, looking at short-term trends, says temperatures are likely to be 0.4 to 1.0 degree Celsius (0.7-1.8F) warmer from 2016-35 than in the two decades to 2005. Rain and snow may increase in areas that already have high precipitation and decline in areas with scarcity, it says.

EXCEPTIONS AND CHALLENGES

Pachauri said climate change can have counter-intuitive effects, like more snowfall in winter that some people find hard to accept as side-effects of a warming trend. An IPCC report last year said warmer air can absorb more moisture, leading to heavier snowfall in some areas.

A study by Dutch experts this month sought to explain why there is now more sea ice in winter. It concluded melted ice from Antarctica was refreezing on the ocean surface - this fresh water freezes more easily than dense salt water.

Some experts challenged the findings.

"The hypothesis is plausible I just don't believe the study proves it to be true," said Paul Holland, an ice expert at the British Antarctic Survey.

Concern about climate change is rising in some nations, however, opinion polls show. Extreme events, such as Superstorm Sandy that hit the U.S. east coast last year, may be the cause. A record heatwave in Australia this summer forced weather forecasters to add a new dark magenta color to the map for temperatures up to 54 degrees Celsius (129F).

[The Bobster]

http://lewrockwell.com/orig11/caruba15.1.html

Earth Day's Big Lie
by Alan Caruba

Monday, April 22, is Earth Day. Begun in 1970, it led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, along with the Clean Air, Clean Water, and Endangered Species Acts. It is the global platform for the Big Lie that carbon dioxide (CO2) is causing the Earth to warm and the basis of the environmental movement’s ceaseless efforts to reduce the use of energy for any reason.

Carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere has been increasing, but the Earth has been cooling due to reduced solar radiation. CO2 has virtually no relationship to the climate except to show up well after a significant change has occurred.

On April 18, the Wall Street Journal reported that the International Energy Agency had announced that, despite spending “more than $2 trillion in investment into renewable-energy projects…the world had made almost no progress over the past 20 years in reducing the carbon content of its energy supplies.” It has never needed reduction. How many hospitals, schools, bridges, and other useful things that could have been built instead?

According to Wikipedia: “Carbon is the 15th most abundant element in the Earth's crust, and the fourth most abundant element in the universe by mass after hydrogen, helium, and oxygen. It is present in all known life forms, and in the human body carbon is the second most abundant element by mass (about 18.5%) after oxygen.] This abundance, together with the unique diversity of organic compounds and their unusual polymer-forming ability at the temperatures commonly encountered on Earth, make this element the chemical basis of all known life.” (Emphasis added)

Not one single piece of vegetation can exist without CO2. Without vegetation all animals and all humans would die. The Earth would look like Mars. One of the pillars of environmentalism is that humans are the greatest threat to the existence of the 4.5 billion-year-old Earth. The essence of Earth Day is that you are the enemy, primarily for your use of energy (coal, oil, and natural gas).

A global propaganda campaign will glorify Earth Day and its message is that you must change your life to accommodate the lies that sustain the environmental movement and permit government agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency to strangle the economic life of the nation.

On Earth day there will be thousands of events to promote its anti-energy, anti-technology, and anti-humanity message.

There are thousands, of environmental organizations. Here, for example, are some Earth Day recommendations from the Natural Resources Defense Council.

# Wash clothing in cold water. According to the NRDC, “this saves a great deal of money as the bulk of the energy tied to clothes washing is used to heat water.”

# Cut clothes dryer energy by 20 to 40 percent. “It is more efficient to spin water out of clothing than bake it out in the dryer.”

# Select the ‘normal’ or ‘standard’ picture setting on your TV.

An environmental group called the Food Tank recommends the following:

# “Get in touch with agriculture. “This time of year, many people are starting to plan vacations.” Forget Disney Land; instead choose a “farm-stay” in which participants spend a few days or weeks living with a host family…helping around the farm in exchange for free food and lodging.”

# “Buy food with less packaging.” This ignores the fact that modern packaging ensures the safety of the foods you purchase. Even ancient civilizations either burned refuse or created landfills.

# Do-it-Yourself projects such as “turning old t-shirts into produce bags to save plastic, starting seeds in eggshells…”

Behind the many Earth Day suggestions is the environmentalists’ insistence on a general return to an era when household tasks were undertaken without machines that used electricity, before the ubiquitous benefits of plastic, and less cars were on the roads. In the 1940s my late mother had to wash clothes by hand and hang them in the back yard or basement to dry. Food was kept cool in an ice box before the invention of refrigerators. This is Earth Day’s idea of saving the Earth.

Everyone wants clean air and clean water. We have it. The Clean Air and Clean Water Acts of the 1970s have achieved their goals. Substituting “clean energy” such as solar and wind power has proven to be expensive and impractical as neither of these produce sufficient energy (about 3% at present) to power America. Taxpayers have lost billions in the government loans made to solar and wind power companies while traditional sources of power contribute billions to the economy.

The Earth is not endangered, nor should it be worshipped as a pagan religion.

Behind environmentalism is panoply of schemes intended to enrich those who advocate “global warming” and/or “climate change.” Governments around the world are abandoning “clean energy” programs and returning to traditional and abundant forms of energy.

The “science” behind climate change and the claim of a “consensus” among the world’s scientists is a lie. Computer models have been rigged to produce “warming” data while the planet has been in a natural cooling cycle for the last seventeen years!

On Earth Day, you will be assailed by these and countless other claims, but you will do yourself and the Earth a big favor if you ignore them.

[The Bobster]

http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2...in-us-history/

Second Coldest Start To Spring In US History
Posted on April 26, 2013
by stevengoddard



Data is from here : Index of /pub/data/ghcn/daily/hcn/

The only year when the spring started colder was 1975.

[The Bobster]

http://investmentwatchblog.com/russi...200-250-years/

Russian Scientists: ‘We Could Face Cooling Period For 200-250 Years’
April 28th, 2013

‘We could be in for a cooling period that lasts 200-250 years. The period of low solar activity could start in 2030-2040.’

Global warming which has been the subject of so many discussions in recent years, may give way to global cooling. According to scientists from the Pulkovo Observatory in St.Petersburg, solar activity is waning, so the average yearly temperature will begin to decline as well. Scientists from Britain and the US chime in saying that forecasts for global cooling are far from groundless. Some experts warn that a change in the climate may affect the ambitious projects for the exploration of the Arctic that have been launched by many countries.

Just recently, experts said that the Arctic ice cover was becoming thinner while journalists warned that the oncoming global warming would make it possible to grow oranges in the north of Siberia. Now, they say a cold spell will set in. Apparently, this will not occur overnight, Yuri Nagovitsyn of the Pulkovo Observatory, says.

“Journalists say the entire process is very simple: once solar activity declines, the temperature drops. But besides solar activity, the climate is influenced by other factors, including the lithosphere, the atmosphere, the ocean, the glaciers. The share of solar activity in climate change is only 20%. This means that sun’s activity could trigger certain changes whereas the actual climate changing process takes place on the Earth”.

[Farwell Kirk]

A few years ago at a used book store I ran into a book called "The Waeather Conspiracy",published in 1977.The book was all about the new ice age that was about to begin soon.One of the experts who was quoted was from the East Anglia Climate Research Center in England,the exact same people now telling us about "global warming"!

GLOBAL WARMING IS TOTAL BS !

[The Bobster]

http://www.usatoday.com/story/weathe...ather/2121737/

Awful April: Spring hard to find across northern USA
Doyle Rice, USA TODAY
6:40 p.m. EDT April 29, 2013

April has been a freakishly cold month across much of the northern USA, bringing misery to millions of sun-starved and winter-weary residents from the Rockies to the Midwest.

"The weather map ... looks like something out of The Twilight Zone," Minneapolis meteorologist Paul Douglas of WeatherNation TV wrote on his blog last week.

Record cold and snow has been reported in dozens of cities, with the worst of the chill in the Rockies, upper Midwest and northern Plains. Several baseball games have been snowed out in both Denver and Minneapolis.

Cities such as Rapid City, S.D.; Duluth, Minn.; and Boulder, Colo., have all endured their snowiest month ever recorded. (In all three locations, weather records go back more than 100 years.) In fact, more than 1,100 snowfall records and 3,400 cold records have been set across the nation so far in April, according to the National Climatic Data Center.

Unfortunately for warm-weather lovers, after some mild temperatures the past few days, the chill is forecast to return as the calendar turns to May: Accumulating snow is forecast overnight Tuesday night and Wednesday in Denver and in Minneapolis-St.Paul by Wednesday night and Thursday, said AccuWeather meteorologist Mark Paquette.

And across much of the central USA, temperatures will be from 25 to 45 degrees colder on Wednesday than they were Monday, according to AccuWeather. For instance, Denver should see a high of 35 degrees Wednesday, after a high near 80 on Monday.

As for the cause of the ongoing cold? A stuck weather pattern that's continued to funnel frigid air into the central USA from Canada for the past few months. Specifically, the troublemaker is what's known as a "blocking" area of high pressure over Greenland, eastern Canada and the North Atlantic Ocean, which favors a cold northwest flow of air over the central and eastern USA, Paquette said.

If you want warmth, he said, head west: Hot, dry, windy conditions will prevail this week in much of southern California and Arizona, where highs will top out in the 90s.

Meanwhile, in Minnesota, the snow, rain and sleet that has dragged well into April means money lost for golf courses that have been unable to open. Territory Golf Club director Doug Stang in St. Cloud was asked last week if he'll ever see anything like this spring again:

"I don't think so," he said. "This is just too bizarre."


John and Laura Reinhardt walk with umbrellas in the snow around Lake Nokomis in Minneapolis, Minn., on April 22.(Photo: Renee Jones Schneider, AP)


Other chilly April 2013 records, according to AccuWeather and the Weather Channel:

•Both Bismarck, N.D., and Pierre, S.D., had their snowiest Aprils on record.

•International Falls, Minn., recorded a low of just 4 degrees April 20. In records dating to 1897, it had never been this cold before this late in April.

•Baton Rouge: The low temperature bottomed out at 39 degrees on the morning of April 20. This was the lowest temperature ever recorded this far into the spring season.

•Sheridan, Wyo.: Had a bone-chilling low of -1 degree on the morning of April 23.

•Amarillo, Texas: The low temperature dropped to 21 degrees on April 24. This is the coldest Amarillo has been this late in the season in records dating to 1892.

•Fargo, N.D.: The first 50-degree or higher temperature reading of the year occurred April 26. Previously, since 1881, Fargo had never had to wait past April 17 to get at least one 50-degree day.

[The Bobster]

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/new...e-rocks-449247

Milken Conference: Al Gore Rocks Crowd With Global Warming Speech
7:14 PM PDT 4/30/2013 by Paul Bond

The former vice president said our grandchildren would be justified in asking us, "What in the hell were you thinking? "

Al Gore, one of Hollywood's favorite sons because of his commitment to the environment, rocked a large crowd in Beverly Hills on Tuesday with an impassioned plea to solve the "climate change crisis," part of which is getting media right.

Gore lamented that a modern-day Thomas Paine would not be able to get his "Common Sense" message to the masses today because he couldn't afford TV airtime, and he criticized the "rise of television at the expense of the printing press."

But he was most animated, his voice pitching higher and lower and the volume steadily increasing, when he spoke of global warming.

"This is for real. It is not made up. The scientists are not in a conspiracy to lie to us," Gore nearly shouted.

"The generation of people alive today will be held accountable," he said. "Our children and grandchildren ... if they exist in a world that has been devastated by these consequences that have been predicted and are beginning to unfold -- they would be well justified in asking of us: 'What in the hell were you thinking? And what in the hell were you doing? And why were you so willfully blind of what was happening on your watch?'"

Gore was speaking at the Milken Institute Global Conference, the same venue where he presented a global-warming slideshow several years ago that led to the film An Inconvenient Truth. Gore said the 2006 movie directed by Davis Guggenheim would not have existed had it not been for a Milken presentation on the subject.

The former vice president also took some non-partisan shots at lobbyists and some partisan shots at the Iraq War, Republicans, and in particular the Tea Party, which he said, "has a lot of astro-turf in it," adding that he thinks "a lot of good people" have been lead astray by the movement.

He may have accidentally found some common ground with the Tea Party, though, when he spoke of an inept government that shouldn't be relied on to solve all problems.

"Since the United States government is so neurotic and dysfunctional and pathetic and paralyzed, we the people have to lift it back up and make it work again," he said.

[The Bobster]

http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-actio...nsactional-sex

Dem resolution warns climate change could push women to ‘transactional sex’
By Pete Kasperowicz
04/29/13 11:06 AM ET

Several House Democrats are calling on Congress to recognize that climate change is hurting women more than men, and could even drive poor women to "transactional sex" for survival.

The resolution, from Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and a dozen other Democrats, says the results of climate change include drought and reduced agricultural output. It says these changes can be particularly harmful for women.

"[F]ood insecure women with limited socioeconomic resources may be vulnerable to situations such as sex work, transactional sex, and early marriage that put them at risk for HIV, STIs, unplanned pregnancy, and poor reproductive health," it says.

Climate change could also add "workload and stresses" on female farmers , which the resolution says produce 60 to 80 percent of the food in developing countries.

The chances for regional conflict also increase with climate change, the resolution says, because changing weather patterns could lead to migration and refugee crises. It said these sorts of potential conflicts over land will have a disproportionate impact on "the most vulnerable populations including women."

More broadly, the resolution says climate change will hurt "marginalized" women, such as refugees, sexual minorities, adolescent girls, and women and girls with HIV. It also cites Hurricane Katrina as evidence of how climate change can affect women, noting that the storm displaced "over 83 percent of low-income, single mothers" in the region.

In a statement to The Hill, Lee said women are critically underrepresented in the development of climate change policy.

"My resolution will affirm the commitment to include and empower women in economic development planning and international climate change policies and practices," she said. "This will help communities adapt to climate impacts, and embark on a path towards clean and sustainable development."

The resolution calls on Congress to recognize the effects on women, and to use "gender-specific frameworks in developing policies to address climate change."

It says Congress recognizes the need for "balanced participation of men and women" in climate change adaption efforts, and that Congress will support women who are vulnerable to climate change.

Finally, it encourages the president to "integrate a gender approach in all policies and programs" related to climate change, and to ensure these policies "support women globally to prepare for, build resilience for, and adapt to climate change."

[The Bobster]

http://www.accuweather.com/en/weathe...omaha/11404310

Historic Snowstorm Potential for Omaha to Minneapolis
By Alex Sosnowski, Expert Senior Meteorologist
May 02, 2013; 3:50 AM

The same storm that brought heavy snow to Denver and Cheyenne Wednesday has the potential to bring a swath of heavy, wet snow from eastern Nebraska to northwestern Wisconsin and the western Upper Peninsula of Michigan through Thursday.

The storm, like many in recent weeks, seems to be ignoring the date and, if all the right pieces were to fall into place, could bring 6 inches to a foot of snow on its northwestern flank over the central Plains into the Upper Midwest.



By Wednesday afternoon, the northwest Iowa counties of Lyon and Sioux had received between 3 and 5 inches of snow. That snow has now expand eastward and southward.

Such an unprecedented storm could not only bring heavy snowfall to non-paved areas, but also downed trees and power outages. Most roads will be wet, but there can be slushy and slippery spots.

Forecast Challenge: In order for it to snow and accumulate, let alone bring this sort of snowfall away from the higher elevations in May, conditions have to be perfect with just the right balance of warm, moist air and cold, dry air.

Typically in this situation, a very narrow band or a small area of heavy snow falls, rather than a broad leaf of snow that is often observed during the middle of winter. Most often, the snow this time of year last only a few hours, changes to rain or melts as it falls.

In May, accumulating snow must also overcome a warm ground, sun effect and marginal temperatures.

It must snow hard for a small accumulation to occur away from the High Plains and Rockies, especially in the area of eastern Nebraska, neighboring Kansas, Iowa, southeastern Minnesota and the lower part of northwestern Wisconsin. In order for there to be a foot of snow, it must snow extremely hard for a long period of time.

[The Bobster]

http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2...ing-on-record/

US Headed For The Coldest Spring On Record
Posted on May 2, 2013
by stevengoddard

At the two-thirds mark for meteorological spring, 2013 was the second coldest spring on record – slightly warmer than 1975.




But 1975 had an unusually warm May at 17C. The two warmest months of May were in 1934 and 1896.




Both graphs above show the average of all daily temperatures at all US HCN stations, calculated per year.

The forecast for the first two weeks of May is well below normal, so odds are that the spring of 2013 will be the coldest on record in the US. This is what Fort Collins looked like at 7pm today (May 1.)




Crack government scientists with supercomputers, predicted in January that this spring was going to be super hot!

[The Bobster]

http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2013/05/02/i...in-the-spring/

It’s Never Been This Cold This Late in the Spring!
By Chief Meteorologist Larry Mowry
May 2, 2013 3:58 PM

Spotty showers will linger this evening. There might be a few spotty showers and some sprinkles around for the start of the Rangers game at 7pm, but skies will clear after 4am tonight.

This will be the coldest night we have ever seen this late in the Spring Season here in DFW. I expect a low tonight at DFW to be 39 degrees. This will be the latest date in the Spring season for us to ever see temperatures in the 30s. The previous record is 34 degrees on May 1, 1903.



This low of 39 degrees tonight will also break the daily low for May 3 which is 41 degrees set in 1954.

We could also tie or break a record low for today (May 2) if we drop to 44 degrees before midnight tonight.

Here’s a look at record low temperatures for today, tomorrow and Saturday along with the forecasted low.



FREEZE WARNING

Some areas north and west of DFW could see a freeze early tomorrow morning. Those in the counties shaded in blue below should protect any tender vegetation they would like to save. This includes Parker, Wise, Cooke, Montague, Jack and Eastland Counties.



LOWS TONIGHT – Winds will stay breezy overnight on the order of 10 to 20 mph out of the northwest. The key to reaching these cold temperatures is if clouds can clear out after midnight.



WHY SO COLD

A big upper level storm system that has carved out a junk of air right over the Central Plains is responsible for this cold outbreak. The air that has been dragged southward by this low has Arctic origin. This low will just slowly move over Arkansas this weekend. This will keep us in a northerly flow. That means more cool, dry air coming into North Texas.



WEEKEND OUTLOOK

Here’s a look at temperatures for high and lows this weekend. The average high for this time of year is 80 degrees. The average low is 60. We will be well below that thru at least Monday. It will also still be windy on tomorrow and Saturday.

[The Bobster]

http://cnsnews.com/blog/dan-gainor/l...-cheeseburgers

Lefty Sirota: 'We Are Incinerating the Planet...Because Too Many of Us Like to Eat Cheeseburgers'
May 4, 2013
By Dan Gainor

How do you top making national news for bigotry? Trying getting people to "Give Up (Eating) Hamburgers to Stop Climate Change."

For loony lefty syndicated columnist David Sirota, it's all just another day at the office. Sirota made national news for his bizarre and bigoted hope that the Boston bomber would turn out to be "a white American."

Fresh off that fiasco, Sirota has turned his sights to changing the climate by changing America's diet. According to Sirota's May 2 column, "the fastest way to reduce climate change" simply "requires us all to eat fewer animal products." In cast that wasn't sufficiently clear, he added that "we are incinerating the planet and dooming future generations simply because too many of us like to eat cheeseburgers." Sirota's article on the left-wing site Salon included a photo of what appeared to be a bacon cheeseburger with an egg on top of it.

"That's right; essentially, if every fourth time someone craved, say, beef, chicken or cow milk they instead opted for a veggie burger, a bean burrito or water, we have a chance to halt the emergency," he added.

But Sirota wasn't optimistic that conservatives would join him in his veggie crusade. "I'm sure some conservatives will read this column and send me email smugly pledging to eat even more meat than they already do, just to make some incoherent point about freedom." Somehow "freedom" is always incoherent to the left. No matter. We either stop eating what we want or we are endangering what Sirota called our "ecological survival."

The left has been making what we eat their business for years, but it has escalated under the leadership of First Lady Michelle Obama and New York Nanny State Mayor Michael Bloomberg. With extreme groups like the Center for Science in the Public Interest and Food Democracy Now, that trend has accelerated. Liberals have targeted a wide variety of foods and drinks, portion size, menu information, what's in the food, what restaurants can serve and where they can even be located.

[The Bobster]

http://www.magnoliareporter.com/news...9bb2963f4.html

Arkansas locations experience record snowfall, low temperatures for May
Story
Posted: Saturday, May 4, 2013 2:30 am

For the first time since written weather history began in Arkansas (1819), snow has fallen in the month of May. This snow has set records for the latest snowfall and latest measurable snowfall in the state.

The previous latest snowfall ever recorded was on April 30, 1903 at Harrison, Gravette and Fayetteville. This was not measurable.

The previous latest measurable snowfall was 0.2 inches at Corning on April 24, 1910.

Below is a list of snowfall measurements from National Weather Service cooperative observer stations through specified times on Friday morning.

Fayetteville experiment station, 1.5 inches, 7 a.m.

Compton, 1 inch, 10 a.m.

Hindsville, 1 inch, 6:40 a.m.

Winslow, 1 inch, 7 a.m.

Kingston, 0.2 inch, 7 a.m.

Traces of snow were also recorded in Harrison, Jasper, Omaha, Parthenon and Ratcliff.

Record cold high temperatures have been seen at a number of stations. At the locations listed below, the calendar day high temperature for May 3 was the coldest ever recorded for the month of May.

Locations, Friday’s temperature and previous record lows for May 3 include the following.

Harrison, 38/45.

Flippin, 39/51.

Batesville airport, 45/45.

Jacksonville, 48/51.

North Little Rock, 48/50.

Little Rock, 52/52.

Pine Bluff, 52/56.

Russellville, 52/53.

Stuttgart airport, 52/52.

Record daily low temperatures were seen at a number of locations as well. Some of these temperatures also ended up being the coldest temperatures ever recorded in the month of May.

Stations, new record lows and the previous record include:

Jacksonville, 38/41.

Little Rock, 38/41.

Hot Springs, 39/41.

Monticello, 40.41.

Pine Bluff, 40/41.

[The Bobster]

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-0...sh-defeat.html

Gore Is Romney-Rich With $200 Million After Bush Defeat
By Ken Wells & Ari Levy - May 6, 2013 12:01 AM

In 1999, Al Gore, then U.S. vice president and a Democratic candidate for president, sold $6,000 worth of cows.

The former senator, who spent most of his working life in Congress, had a net worth of about $1.7 million and assets that included pasture rents from a family farm and royalties from a zinc mine, remnants of his rural roots in Carthage, Tennessee. Funds from the cattle sale went to three of his kids, according to federal disclosure forms filed as part of his presidential run.

Fourteen years later, he made an estimated $100 million in a single month. In January, the Current TV network, which he helped to start in 2004, was sold to Qatari-owned Al Jazeera Satellite Network for about $500 million. After debt, he grossed an estimated $70 million for his 20 percent stake, according to people familiar with the transaction.

Two weeks later, Gore exercised options, at $7.48 a share, on 59,000 shares of Apple Inc. stock that he’d been granted for serving on the Cupertino, California-based company’s board since 2003. On paper, it was about a $30 million payday based on the company’s share price on the day he claimed the options.

That’s a pretty good January for a guy who couldn’t yet call himself a multimillionaire when he briefly slipped from public life after his bitterly contested presidential election loss to George W. Bush in late 2000, based on 1999 and 2000 disclosure forms.

Gore isn’t finished exercising his Apple stock grants. Those 59,000 are part of 101,358 Apple options and shares of restricted stock Gore has amassed, according to company filings, giving his total holdings a gross value of more than $45.6 million today.

Fake Nobel Prize

Albert Arnold Gore Jr., 65, is a lot of things to a lot of people. Among friends and fans, he’s the progressive Democrat who should have been president, visionary author and Internet prophet, the man who more than anyone drove climate change to the center of public consciousness.

Detractors see Gore as a limousine liberal, tiresome pedant and climate alarmist who lives a jet-setting, carbon-profligate lifestyle while preaching asceticism for everyone else.

His work and writing on global warming have earned him a share of a Nobel Prize as well as a South Park cartoon parody in which he tries to scare school kids to his beliefs with a fictitious global-warming surrogate monster known as ManBearPig.

Whatever you think of Gore, one thing is indisputable: leveraging his aura as a technology seer and his political and climate work connections, Gore has remade himself into a wealthy businessman, amassing a fortune that may exceed $200 million.

Romney Wealth

That’s close to the $250 million net worth of 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, whom President Barack Obama and Democrats targeted in ads and speeches as being out of touch with most Americans.

Gore declined to be interviewed for this story. Estimates of his wealth are based on company filings, government records, public pronouncements he or his associates have made about past business dealings and interviews with people in a position to know of and evaluate Gore’s holdings.

How Gore achieved this is as much about timing and luck as it is about business skills. His Apple board tenure has coincided with a 5,900 percent increase in its stock price. Current TV was a moribund “fixer-upper” when Al Jazeera stepped in to buy it at “a huge valuation,” said Derek Baine, an SNL Kagan cable analyst in Monterey, California.

Gore also had his share of flubs, most of them in his efforts at green-tech investing. An investment firm he helped to start took stakes in two carbon-trading firms that fizzled and also racked up tens of millions in losses in a solar-module maker.

Diving In

The wealth accumulation attests to Gore’s ability, particularly among technology companies and rich political progressives, to attract moneyed and skilled people to do deals with him or seek his paid counsel.

This may be in part because Gore, by reputation, shuns figurehead appointments for real ones. One example: At Apple’s request, he dove into an options backdating scandal, which predated his arrival, chairing a 2006 committee that recommended revisions to company policies.

“It doesn’t surprise me,” Reed Hundt, a Gore high-school friend, said of his business success.

Hundt, whom Gore helped get appointed to run Bill Clinton’s Federal Communications Commission in 1993, didn’t detect a business gene in young Al back in their days at Washington’s private St. Albans School.

Gore went on to graduate with a degree in government from Harvard University, dabble in journalism and study but never graduate from law school at Vanderbilt University. Instead, he quit to run for public office.

‘Going Places’

Still, says Hundt, “it was clear that Al was smart and was going places.”

Gore hasn’t tried to hide his prosperity. Back in 2000, about $750,000 of his net worth was tied to two homes he and his then-wife Tipper owned in Virginia and Tennessee.

Most of the rest had been recently inherited, including an undisclosed number of shares of Occidental Petroleum Corp. left to him by his late father, Senator Albert Gore Sr., and valued at between $500,000 and $1 million, according to disclosure forms.

He’s moved up the housing ladder since then. He owns a 20- room, 10,000-square-foot antebellum mansion in Nashville’s wealthy Belle Meade neighborhood that’s mostly shrouded from view by a thicket of Southern foliage and a massive iron gate. In 2010 -- weeks before the Gores announced they were dissolving their 40-year marriage -- he purchased an oceanfront six- bedroom, $8.9 million villa in Montecito, California, where Oprah Winfrey and Kirk Douglas have lived.

Utility Bill

It isn’t clear how the divorce affects Gore’s net worth. No settlement has ever been published and Betsy McManus, Al Gore’s director of communications, declined to comment on it.

Such lavish living isn’t lost on Gore’s critics. In 2007, the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, using a public records request, published Gore’s Nashville home utility bill, showing it used almost 221,000 kilowatt-hours in 2006 -- 20 times the national average household consumption. Gore’s people dismissed the revelation.

His ascent into America’s 1 percent happened quickly. After losing to Bush, he had enough wealth by March 2008 to put $35 million into hedge funds and private partnerships through Capricorn Investment Group, a Palo Alto, California-based company, according to U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission documents.

The investment company was founded by his buddy, Canadian billionaire Jeffrey Skoll, who amassed a large part of his fortune in shares he was awarded as the first president of EBay Inc.

Book Profits

His best-selling climate books, “Earth in the Balance,” “An Inconvenient Truth” and “The Assault on Reason,” haven’t contributed to his wealth. Gore has long pledged any book and film money to his nonprofit, the Climate Reality Project, created in 2011 from two advocacy groups Gore founded a year earlier.

By the time of the Capricorn investment, he was already starting to rake in cash from Generation Investment Management - - a fund that incorporates “sustainability” into its investment approach. Gore co-founded GIM in 2004 with former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Managing Director David W. Blood.

Public filings show that in 2008 through 2011 London-based GIM racked up almost 140 million pounds ($218 million) in profits to be split among its 26 partners.

Gore and Blood as founders are thought to have the largest equity stakes. GIM doesn’t disclose partnership equity or how the partners split profits, said Richard Campbell, a spokesman.

Prosperous Enterprises

Gore had a string of connections and invitations to join what would turn out to be prosperous enterprises. Skoll’s Participant Media produced the 2006 Oscar-winning documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” based on Gore’s climate work. The movie was pivotal in helping him win his share of the 2007 Nobel and claim speaker fees at $175,000 a pop.

Prior to being invited to join Apple’s board, Gore was tapped as a senior adviser to Google Inc. (GOOG) before its 2004 initial public offering and at a time when it was not yet a household word. Google won’t discuss his duties or compensation though some in Silicon Valley believe his pay there may be as rich as his Apple remuneration, which that company is required to disclose because he’s a director.

Kleiner Perkins

Blood joined with Gore after he was among the original 221 Goldman partners who got shares in that company’s 1999 IPO. Blood’s 0.66 percent stake, based on valuations at the time, was thought to be worth about $100 million.

Blood lived with his family in Brazil as a youngster and has said he was distressed by the extreme poverty there. Gore’s notion of “sustainable capitalism” appealed to Blood, who also declined to be interviewed for this story.

In November 2007, GIM announced a partnership with Silicon Valley venture capital company Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, to join its green-investing efforts. The goal, according to a joint press release at the time, was to create “a global collaboration to find, fund and accelerate green business, technology and policy solutions with the greatest potential to help solve the current climate crisis.”

Gore was made a partner at Kleiner Perkins and John Doerr, an early investor in Amazon.com Inc., Intuit Inc. and Google, joined GIM’s advisory board. At Kleiner Perkins, Gore helps with investment strategies and selectively advises companies but doesn’t lead deals or take board seats on startups the firm invests in. Kleiner Perkins declined to discuss his compensation.

Green Blemishes

Investing on behalf of its clients, GIM has put $50 million to $100 million in KPCB’s $1 billion green growth fund, according to two people with knowledge of the amount who asked not to be identified because they aren’t authorized to speak about it.

While Kleiner Perkins doesn’t publish fund results, its green fund hasn’t had unblemished success.

Along with potential winners like Bloom Energy, a fuel-cell maker, and Nest Labs Inc., a thermostat company, Kleiner Perkins also backed Miasole Inc., a solar-panel maker that was bought for a reported $30 million after raising at least $494 million from investors, and Fisker Automotive Inc., the electric-car maker that fired three-quarters of its staff last month.

Well Versed

Gore earns his keep in Silicon Valley beyond simply attending the annual holiday party. He’s made himself available to a number of technology companies that got startup help from Kleiner Perkins. Andrew Fisher, chairman of Shazam Entertainment Ltd., a mobile music app maker backed by Kleiner Perkins, said Gore flew to London two years ago and agreed to be interviewed on stage in front of about 200 company employees and business partners.

Gore’s preparation was first rate and it was clear that “he’s tremendously well-versed” in Kleiner Perkins’s investments, Fisher said. At the presentation, “he talked about his work around the environment, leadership in small companies, decision making, sitting on the board of Apple. People were fascinated with his insight.”

Gore paid a similar visit last year to a recycling plant in Vancouver run by Harvest Power Inc., one of Kleiner Perkins’s clean-tech companies.

Shopkick Visit

Eric Feng, former Hulu LLC chief technology officer and ex- Kleiner Perkins employee, described Gore as an energized and active participant in investment decisions who is “very well- respected among the partners.” He’s regularly asked for feedback on investments and is considered “a very valuable resource,” Feng said.

Shopkick Inc. Chief Executive Officer and co-founder Cyriac Roeding met Gore about two years ago at Kleiner Perkins. As a guru on climate change, Roeding figured Gore was unlikely to have much interest in Shopkick’s technology, which helps retailers target customers with discounts.

“I took a photo with him because I thought I’d never see him again,” Roeding says.

He was wrong. In February 2012, Gore joined Roeding at the Village Pub in Silicon Valley -- the same place where Mark Zuckerberg was famously courted by Accel Partners’ Jim Breyer -- for an intimate event with about 35 executives from top retailers like Macy’s Inc., Crate & Barrel and Target Corp. In a fireside chat, Gore answered every question Roeding threw his way and showed a deep knowledge of Shopkick’s market.

Internet Invention

“I had not planned on talking about Shopkick, but he just kept coming back to it,” Roeding says. “He talked about how the future of the physical world is converging with the digital world.”

They love Al Gore in Silicon Valley and why shouldn’t they? Gore never claimed, as some conservative critics have asserted, to have invented the Internet.

Still, as a Tennessee congressman and senator, he was the first national politician to see how personal computers connected to a system he popularized as the “information superhighway” would radically change the social and commercial landscape of the U.S. and the world.

He drafted the Performance Computing Act of 1991, often called the Gore Bill, which led to funding to build the system that later became the Internet.

Luck and Timing

None of this was lost on Apple when, in March 2003, Steve Jobs personally asked Gore to join the board. An Apple press release about the appointment was a techie love fest. “Al is an avid Mac user and does his own video editing in Final Cut Pro,” Jobs said.

Apple was trading at about $7.50 a share when Gore accepted the Apple board seat. The company’s stock closed at $449.98 on May 3 in New York. The escalation of his options alone would have made him rich.

Gore’s profiting from the Al Jazeera sale is another example of luck, timing or both. Gore and partners that included Los Angeles billionaire Ron Burkle, Hyatt Legal Services founder Joel Hyatt and San Francisco money manager Richard Blum bought the predecessor company for $70 million in 2004.

Re-launched as Current TV, Gore said at the time he wanted to create a “transformational” network. It would, like YouTube, thrive on youthful viewer input, be an antidote to Fox News and a liberal competitor to MSNBC.

Olbermann Suit

Instead, Current failed to make much of an impact at all while Gore was paying himself $1.2 million a year in salary and bonuses, according to 2008 SEC documents filed as part of a proposed public offering that was later withdrawn. Meanwhile, Time Warner Cable Inc., which carried the network and accounted for about 9 million of its subscribers, made noises about dropping Current from its listings along with other “low- rated” networks.

In 2011, Current attempted to remake itself by bringing in Keith Olbermann, the former anchor of MSNBC’s Countdown program. The relationship quickly devolved into a public relations disaster. Olbermann, who had signed what was reported to be a five-year, $50 million contract, was fired in March 2012. Accusations and lawsuits flew.

Current, in an April 6, 2012, breach-of-contract suit in Los Angeles County Superior Court, accused Olbermann of waging a campaign to “undermine” the network by, among other things, taking unauthorized days off, leaking the terms of his contract to the media and failing to lead Current’s 2012 primary election coverage as he was asked to do.

‘Immediate Interest’

Olbermann, in his own lawsuit, painted an ugly picture of the Gore-anointed management team. Current, while promising to deliver “a high-caliber political commentary show,” turned out to be amateur hour with Gore and co-founder Hyatt “no more than dilettantes portraying entertainment industry executives.”

Olbermann had asked the court to award him as much as $70 million. The two parties reached a settlement in March for terms that weren’t disclosed.

The sale to Al Jazeera drew a lawsuit from media consultant John Terenzio who said putting the two networks in touch was his idea and he’s owed money.

Terenzio said he sent an intermediary to see Current investor Richard Blum under a supposition that “in light of Current’s well-publicized financial woes, its principals might be interested in selling the struggling network.”

Blum, according to the lawsuit, “expressed immediate interest” in hearing Terenzio’s proposal, explaining that “he and other Current investors were concerned about the prospect of losing their shirt in financially troubled Current.” Blum, Al Jazeera and Current declined to comment on the lawsuit.

‘Mogul Al’

The transaction also raised eyebrows because Gore, who has for years inveighed against fossil fuels and their role in climate change, sold the network to a company funded in part by oil-rich Qatar. Jon Stewart, host of the Daily Show television program, asked in January, “Can mogul Al Gore coexist with activist Al Gore?”

Gore defended the sale on the grounds that, among other things, Al Jazeera has “the highest quality, most extensive, best climate coverage of any network in the world.” It’s a position Gore’s been forced to defend repeatedly along the tour for his latest book “The Future: the Six Drivers of Global Change.”

Cable TV analysts, meanwhile, were abuzz over the $500 million payout. Current had been seeking buyers for a while, aware that Time Warner might soon pull the plug, but had not found any takers until Al Jazeera stepped forward.

‘High Price’

“It seems like a really high price to me,” SNL’s Baine said. “It’s hard to sell a fixer-upper. From the beginning Current had a programming strategy that hadn’t worked and they changed it over and over and it still didn’t work. Honestly, not a lot of people had ever heard of it.”

Al Jazeera might have been desperate enough to get into the U.S. market to pay that kind of a premium since it’s still cheaper to buy a network than it is to build one from scratch, he said.

“To be locked out of one of the world’s biggest markets is a problem for them,” Blaine said. Al Jazeera, while declining to comment on the price, has said it intends to hire about 100 journalists in New York and Washington for its rebranded channel.

The deal had no sooner been announced than Time Warner Cable said it was in fact pulling the plug on Current “as quickly as possible” and wouldn’t carry the rebranded Al Jazeera channel over its U.S. distribution system.

Meanwhile, Gore’s “sustainable” GIM investing company has seen its philosophy of buying stocks and holding for the long term tested at times.

Blood and Gore

Blood and Gore, as the company is sometimes known, eschews “the dominance of short-termism in the market” which “fosters general market instability and undermines the efforts of executives seeking long-term value creation,” the two men wrote in an 2011 op-end in the Wall Street Journal.

GIM’s roster of publicly traded U.S. holdings include successful, albeit not particularly green, companies like Amazon, EBay, Procter & Gamble Co. and Colgate-Palmolive Co. A few of the others would count in GIM parlance as green or at least sustainable investments, such as Solarcity Corp., a rooftop solar installer, and Blackbaud Inc., a software maker that helps nonprofits raise money.

Green Investing

GIM has assets under management of about $8.5 billion. Its investment strategy and returns have been impressive enough that Britain’s Environment Agency asked it to manage 7.2 percent of its 1.6 billion-pound investment portfolio through 2014. That’s up from 4.8 percent in 2009, according to documents filed with Britain’s securities regulator.

At times the company’s green investing approach hasn’t worked. In 2008, with optimism that a Democrat-controlled Congress would establish carbon controls and an international climate treaty would be extended, GIM bought a 9.6 percent stake, in Camco International Ltd., a manager of projects that reduce greenhouse gases.

By early 2010, GIM had upped its stake in the company now known as Camco Clean Energy Plc to 18.6 percent, according to documents. By October of that year, with Republicans in the House saying no to climate legislation and Kyoto Protocol talks stalled, shares in Camco were taking a beating. GIM dumped its stake. Neither company would comment on GIM’s actions.

Climate Exchange

In another instance, GIM took a 10 percent stake in the Chicago Climate Exchange, set up in 2003 by former derivatives guru Richard Sandor to take advantage of what the exchange’s founders hoped would be a government-mandated price on carbon. The exchange ran into the same headwinds as Camco and was sold to Atlanta-based IntercontinentalExchange Inc. in May 2010 for $581 million. It was later shut as carbon prices fell to all- time lows.

GIM would only say that neither Camco nor Chicago Climate Exchange were profitable investments.

If emissions limits had been approved by Congress, both Camco and the exchange stood to rake in huge profits, said Dan Kish, vice president for policy with the Washington-based Institute for Energy Research, which gets funding from oil and natural gas companies.

“Al Gore is like the preacher touting his moral purity and superiority,” Kish said. “Yet it turns out that heeding his preachings is directly linked to his financial interests.”

Besides its losing investments in Camco and Chicago Climate Exchange, GIM also bailed out of First Solar Inc., a solar-panel maker that, like bankrupt Solyndra LLC, got squeezed when cheap Chinese supplies began hitting the market in late 2010.

Democracy ‘Hacked’

According to SEC filings, GIM first began buying First Solar at $113 a share in the third quarter of 2010. GIM continued its buying for several more quarters even as the shares lost luster. When it was clear First Solar was truly tanking, GIM dumped its last lot in the second quarter of 2012.

It’s accumulated loss was $165.9 million, according to a Bloomberg calculation based on SEC filings.

Gore said in a May 1 interview with Bloomberg Television that American democracy has been “hacked” by the influence of money in politics and that he hopes activist investors will continue to exert influence on corporations globally to act in a responsible way.

During a 2009 House hearing, Tennessee Republican Representative Marsha Blackburn tackled Gore on the issue of whether he had become a “climate profiteer” by betting on companies that might hugely benefit from his advocacy. Gore’s response: “Congresswoman, if you believe that the reason I have been working on this issue for 30 years is because of greed, you don’t know me.”

[The Bobster]

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/interna...TuIsGWqpvnrgTK

Global warming hits standstill, extreme heating now unlikely: report
By MICHAEL BLAUSTEIN
Last Updated: 2:36 PM, May 20, 2013
Posted: 12:35 PM, May 20, 2013


This photo of climate scammers Lesley Butler and Rob Bell sunbathing on a frozen fjord in Norway was included in the prestigious Reuters Pictures of the Decade. However new data suggests that global warming won't be as bad as scientists have been predicting.


The Earth's atmosphere won't warm up as fast in the next few decades as climate scientists have been claiming because global warming has hit an unexplained standstill.

Since 1998, the atmosphere hasn't heated up much as climate researchers had predicted which has caused a group of researchers to modify their predictions for the next few decades.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in 2007 that the short-term temperature from 2000-2009 would most likely rise by 1.8-5.4 degrees Fahrenheit, but a new group of researchers are reporting that the rise was probably only by 1.62-3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, according a report in Nature Geoscience.

In comparison, the 1990s saw a probable rise of between 1.62-5.58 degrees Fahrenheit.

The reason the measurements are given in ranges is because they are made based on what would happen to the Earth's average temperature if the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere doubled.

Because the 2000s didn't heat up as much as expected, the scientists writing in Nature Geoscience are predicting that global average temperature will rise 20% slower than had been expected over the next few decades.

"The hottest of the models in the medium-term, they are actually looking less likely or inconsistent with the data from the last decade alone," said Dr Alexander Otto from the University of Oxford.

Even though the short and medium term are looking less bleak than had been predicted, the climate change projections over the long term have not been affected by the most recent "standstill."

"We would expect a single decade to jump around a bit but the overall trend is independent of it, and people should be exactly as concerned as before about what climate change is doing," said Dr Otto.

[The Bobster]

http://dailycaller.com/2013/05/20/de...medium=twitter

Democratic Senator uses Okla. tornado for anti-GOP rant over global warming
7:40 PM 05/20/2013
Jeff Poor - Media Reporter

While many Americans were tuned into news coverage of the massive damage from tornadoes ravaging the state of Oklahoma, Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse took to the Senate floor to rail against his Republican colleagues for denying the theory of anthropogenic global warming.

Whitehouse spent 15 minutes chastising GOP senators and justified his remarks by alluding to states that seek federal assistance in the wake of natural disasters.

“So, you may have a question for me,” Whitehouse said. “Why do you care? Why do you, Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, care if we Republicans run off the climate cliff like a bunch of proverbial lemmings and disgrace ourselves? I’ll tell you why. We’re stuck in this together. We are stuck in this together. When cyclones tear up Oklahoma and hurricanes swamp Alabama and wildfires scorch Texas, you come to us, the rest of the country, for billions of dollars to recover. And the damage that your polluters and deniers are doing doesn’t just hit Oklahoma and Alabama and Texas. It hits Rhode Island with floods and storms. It hits Oregon with acidified seas, it hits Montana with dying forests. So, like it or not, we’re in this together.”

Whitehouse went on to condemn the current Republican position on global warming, citing economic, environmental and diplomatic damages.

“You drag America with you to your fate,” he continued. “So, I want this future: I want a Republican Party that has returned to its senses and is strong and a worthy adversary in a strong America that has done right by its people and the world. That’s what I want. I don’t want this future. I don’t want a Republican Party disgraced, that let its extremists run off the cliff, and an America suffering from grave economic and environmental and diplomatic damage because we failed, because we didn’t wake up and do our duty to our people, and because we didn’t lead the world. I do not want that future. But that’s where we’re headed. So I will keep reaching out and calling out, ever hopeful that you will wake up before it is too late.”

[The Bobster]

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/u...PnAbOE6gnHjvGI

NY ski resort celebrates unofficial start of summer with 3 feet of fresh snow
From ASSOCIATED PRESS
Last Updated: 8:54 AM, May 27, 2013
Posted: 8:50 AM, May 27, 2013


Whiteface Mountain Veterans' Memorial Highway after a heavy snowfall Sunday, May 26, 2013.


WILMINGTON, NY - A Memorial Day weekend storm has dropped three feet of snow on a New York ski mountain near the Vermont boarder.

Whiteface Mountain spokesman Jon Lundin says 36 inches of white powder has blanketed the nearly 5,000-foot tall mountain in the Adirondacks. That has forced the Olympic Regional Development Authority to close Whiteface Veteran's Memorial Highway on the backside of the mountain.

Lundin says the snow began lightly falling Saturday and steadily dropped Sunday, finishing in the evening. He didn't know if the 3-foot snowfall was a record for Whiteface.

Burlington, Vt., National Weather Service meteorologist Mike Muccilli says the mountain experienced steady snow and gusty winds throughout the weekend.

He says Mount Mansfield, in Stowe, Vt., had 13.2 inches of snow Sunday, the latest in the season it's ever had a foot.

[The Bobster]

http://lewrockwell.com/orig11/caruba16.1.html

The Continuing Collapse of the Global Warming Hoax
by Alan Caruba

While the nation tries to come to grips with the cascade of scandals involving the Obama administration, a significant phenomenon has been occurring. It is the demise of the global warming/climate change hoax that has driven national and international policies since the 1980s.

Directed from within the bowls of the most corrupt international organization on planet Earth, the United Nations, the hoax originally generated the Kyoto Protocols in December 1997 to set limits on the generation of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The UN’s climate charlatans claimed that CO2 was causing the Earth to dramatically warm. It was a lie. The U.S. Senate unanimously refused to ratify it and, in 2011, Canada withdrew from it.

As reported by Craig Rucker, Executive Director of CFACT, fast-forward to the recent UN climate talks in Bonn, Germany, and news that Russia, joined by Ukraine and Belarus, blocked the adoption of the agenda of the “Subsidiary Body for Implementation”, part of the standard fast-tracking toward a 2015 Climate Treaty scheduled to be adopted and signed in Paris. Part of the treaty is a scheme to redistribute the wealth of developed nations to those less developed.

The Russians were fed up with the usual behind-closed-doors proceedings that create such treaties, but no doubt they were well aware that the treaty would empower the UN to govern a large portion of economic activity around the world. All UN treaties require nations to surrender some aspect of their national sovereignty.

There is clearly a backlash against the global warming hoax, particularly from nations that have discovered the costs to their economies that idiotic “renewable” energy schemes and emissions reductions incur. In the real world, they are experiencing longer, harsher winters as the result of the cooling cycle the Earth has been in for the last seventeen years!

Despite President Obama’s incessant claims that the Earth is heating, scientists in both Russia and China have been publishing data from scientific studies disputing the Big Lie of global warming/climate change.

The Chinese Academy of Sciences – 50,000 members strong – recently published “Climate Change Reconsidered and Climate Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report”, two hefty volumes with more than 1,200 pages of peer-reviewed data on climate change published by The Heartland Institute in 2009 and 2011.

In May, Marc Morano, publisher of ClimateDepot.com and a former member of the staff of the U.S. Senate Environmental & Public Works Committee submitted written testimony to the committee.

“The scientific reality is that on virtually every claim – from A-Z – the claims of the promoters of man-made climate fears are failing,” wrote Morano, “and in many instances the claims are moving in the opposite direction. The global warming movement is suffering the scientific death of a thousand cuts.”

“There is no evidence,” wrote Morano, “we are currently having any unusual weather.” Weather events such as the Moore, Oklahoma tornado and the sub-tropical storm Sandy that hit the northeast are normal occurrences despite the damage they inflicted.

In The Wall Street Journal in May, Princeton University physicist Dr. William Happer and NASA moonwalker and geologist, Dr. Harrison H. Schmitt wrote that “Thanks to the single-minded demonization of this natural and essential atmospheric gas by advocates of government control of energy production, the conventional wisdom about carbon dioxide is that it is a dangerous pollutant. That’s simply not the case.”

Literally thousands of scientists around the world have disputed the IPCC “science” and many former “warmists” have reversed their former beliefs. Dr. Lennart Bengtsson, a top Swedish climate scientist, formerly affiliated with the IPCC, said in February “We are creating great anxiety without it being justified…there are no indications that the warming is so severe that we need to panic...

“The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that, if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it, we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The threat facing Americans is posed by the Environmental Protection Agency that clings to the Big Lie about CO2 and uses it as the basis for a flood of regulations that are doing great harm to economic recovery and development.

The same holds true for the Departments of Energy and the Interior that deny access to the nation’s huge reserves of energy resources and, in the case of coal, act to destroy its mining industry and plants using it for the generation of electricity.

The global warming/climate change hoax continues to be widely taught in the nation’s schools and that should end. Now.

It continues to be reported as truth by the mainstream media and as fodder for Hollywood movies and for television programs such as those on the National Geographic Channel.

Despite the lies surrounding global warming/climate change, the hoax is in its final death throes and has been for many years. That’s the good news.

[The Bobster]

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/...ed_737807.html

WH Climate Adviser: 'A War on Coal Is Exactly What’s Needed'
7:21 AM, Jun 25, 2013 • By DANIEL HALPER

Daniel P. Schrag, a White House climate adviser and director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment, tells the New York Times "a war on coal is exactly what's needed." Later today, President Obama will give a major "climate change" address at Georgetown University.

“Everybody is waiting for action,” Schrag tells the paper. “The one thing the president really needs to do now is to begin the process of shutting down the conventional coal plants. Politically, the White House is hesitant to say they’re having a war on coal. On the other hand, a war on coal is exactly what’s needed.”

Obama's speech today is expected to offer "a sweeping plan to address climate change on Tuesday, setting ambitious goals and timetables for a series of executive actions to reduce greenhouse gas pollution and prepare the nation for the ravages of a warming planet," according to the Times.

Here's the full context of Schrag's quotation:

Daniel P. Schrag, a geochemist who is the head of Harvard University’s Center for the Environment and a member of a presidential science panel that has helped advise the White House on climate change, said he hoped the presidential speech would mark a turning point in the national debate on climate change.

[The Bobster]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...ve-planet.html

Barack Obama to cut emissions in vow to save planet
Barack Obama today unveiled the most ambitious plan to counter climate change ever put forward by a US president, saying he would not condemn future generations “to a planet that is beyond fixing”.
Obama to cut emissions in vow to save planet
By Raf Sanchez, Washington
8:10PM BST 25 Jun 2013

In sweeping proposals released after four years of frustrated efforts, Mr Obama ordered new curbs on carbon emissions from power plants and called for America to ready its defences against an already-changing climate.

The president also surprised environmentalists by signalling he would reject a controversial oil pipeline if it was found to “significantly exacerbate” the problem of carbon pollution.

“I refuse to condemn your generation and future generations to a planet that is beyond fixing,” Mr Obama told students at Georgetown University. “As a president, as a father and as an American I’m here to say we need to act.”

Mr Obama first promised a new push on climate change during his inagural address on a freezing morning in January, warning that failing to cut emissions “would betray our children”.

Today, as Washington sweltered in the summer heat, Mr Obama finally laid out the details of his plan, which can be carried out by executive order and therefore do not need Congressional approval.

He announced he was imposing the first-ever limits on carbon emissions from power plants, the single largest source of pollution in the US.

Coupled with new efficiency standards for vehicles, appliances and buildings the limits are intended to help reduce carbon emissions by three billion metric tonnes over 17 years.

The plan commits to cutting hydrofluorocarbons, the “super greenhouse gases” emitted by refrigerators and air conditioning units, part of a commitment reached last month with China.

The government will also issue permits for wind and solar energy projects on government land intended to eventually power more than six million homes.

On the coasts barriers would be strengthened to fight against Hurricane Sandy-like storms while in the heartland farmers will be given more support in the face of drought and wildfires.

Mr Obama also made an unexpected reference to the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry oil from the tar sands of Canada down to Texas and is the target of intense campaign by green groups.

The president said he would only approve the project if it could be shown not to significantly increase carbons emissions.

“The net effects of the pipeline’s impact on our climate will be absolutely critical to determining if this project is allowed to go forward,” he said.

The overall plan is intended to help meet Mr Obama’s pledges to the UN climate change summit in Copenhagen, where he promised that by 2020 the US would cut emissions by 17 per cent from their 2005 levels.

Mr Obama’s proposals were largely applauded by environmental groups.

“President Obama is really resetting the climate agenda and it’s a wonderful thing to see that he’s reclaiming this issue,” said Andrew Steer, president of the World Resources Institute.

But even before the speech was delivered, Republicans seized on comments by an outside advisor to the White House who urged the declaration of a “war on coal”.

Daniel Schrag, a Harvard academic who advises on climate change, had told the New York Times that while the White House was hesitant to use such language, a “war on coal is exactly what’s needed”.

Mitch McConnell, the Republican senate leader, said Mr Obama’s effort to curb coal industry emissions represented “a war on jobs”.

“It’s tantamount to kicking the ladder out from beneath the feet of many Americans struggling in today’s economy,” said Mr McConnell, who represents coal-rich Kentucky.

Yesterday’s speech was the latest step in what has been a long and frustrating journey for Mr Obama as he tried to fulfill his 2008 campaign pledges to fight climate change.

Soon after taking office in 2009, the new president backed a bill that would have set a national limit on the amount of carbon the US could emit.

The legislation, nicknamed “cap and trade”, was vigorously opposed by Republicans as well as conservative Democrats, and was defeated in the Senate in 2010.