Photo Credit: SJSU.edu

What could prompt two college professors to burn a book? Disagreement with the contents, of course.

Two San Jose State University professors took a picture as they held a match to a book that takes on the idea of global warming, and the photo landed on an official school website until some realized the idea of academics burning books is not exactly scholarly. The image depicted Alison Bridger, a professor and chairwoman of the university’s department of meteorology and climate science, holding a lit match beneath “The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania” as the 312-page paperback was held by assistant professor Craig Clements.

“This week we received a deluge of free books from the Heartland Institute,” the original caption read, according to an archived version of the webpage. “ … Shown above, Drs. Bridger and Clements test the flammability of the book.”

The picture and the accompanying caption, which was posted late last month, were later removed from the university’s servers after a popular climate change website, Watts Up With That?, noticed it and referenced Fahrenheit 451, the 1953 novel by Ray Bradbury in which books are outlawed and widely burned.

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Igniting Debate: School Scrubs Photo of Professors Burning Book

Photo Credit: Center for American Progress

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.

Read more from this story HERE.

Democratic Senator Uses Okla. Tornado for Anti-GOP Rant Over Global Warming

Photo Credit: AP

A Memorial Day weekend storm has dropped three feet of snow on a New York ski mountain near the Vermont border.

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

Lundin says the snow began lightly falling Saturday and steadily dropped Sunday, finishing in the evening.

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Where’s the Global Warming? Upstate New York Gets 3 Feet of Snow

Photo Credit: Daily Caller

Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) — not carbon emissions — are the real culprit behind global warming, claims a new study out of the University of Waterloo.

“Conventional thinking says that the emission of human-made non-CFC gases such as carbon dioxide has mainly contributed to global warming. But we have observed data going back to the Industrial Revolution that convincingly shows that conventional understanding is wrong,” said Qing-Bin Lu, a science professor at the University of Waterloo and author of the study.

“In fact, the data shows that CFCs conspiring with cosmic rays caused both the polar ozone hole and global warming,” Lu said.

Lu’s findings were published in the International Journal of Modern Physics B and analyzed data from 1850 to the present.

Lu’s study runs counter to the long-standing argument that carbon dioxide emissions were the driving force behind global warming. Recently scientists warned that carbon concentrations were nearing the 400 parts per million level. Scientists say that carbon dioxide levels must be lowered to 350 ppm to avoid the severe impacts of global warming.

Read more from this story HERE.

Report: CO2 Not Responsible for Global Warming

Photo Credit: Newsmax

Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed a $20 billion plan on Tuesday to transform how New York City girds itself for storms and global warming, including removable flood walls that would be set up for much of lower Manhattan, a 15-to-20-foot levee to guard part of Staten Island, and a system of gates and levees to protect a Brooklyn creek.

Bloomberg’s proposals also include building dunes in Staten Island and the Rockaways, firming up the shoreline with bulkheads in various neighborhoods and considering building a levee and a new “Seaport City” development at the South Street Seaport that would echo nearby Battery Park City.

The mayor also is suggesting giving $1.2 billion in grants to property owners to flood-proof their buildings and $50 million to nursing homes to improve theirs; making hospitals even in rarely flooded areas to upgrade their pumps and electrical equipment; and expanding beaches and marshes.

“This plan is incredibly ambitious,” Bloomberg said in a speech at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, acknowledging that much of the work would extend beyond the end of his term this year. “This is urgent work, and it must begin now.

“Piece by piece, over many years and even decades, we can build a city that’s capable of preparing better, withstanding more and overcoming anything.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Mayor Bloomberg Wants to Spend $20 Billion to Protect NYC from Global Warming

Photo Credit: Fox News

President Obama said Saturday that scientists must design new fuels and energy sources to curb carbon pollution, part of a larger plan that he will announce next week that is expected to include efforts to regulate emissions from coal-fired power plants.

The president says in an online video that his plan includes preparing the United States for the effects of such pollution, which has been connected to climate change, and leading other nations in such efforts.

The new details and the Environmental Protection Agency-led plan for coal-firing plants, under the Clean Air Act, comes as no surprise, considering what Obama said in 2008 while running for this first term.

“If someone wants to build a new coal-fired power plant they can, but it will bankrupt them because they will be charged a huge sum for all the greenhouse gas that’s being emitted,” he said.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Declares War on Global Warming, Making Good on Campaign Promise to Bankrupt Coal (+video)

Photo Credit: CNS News

President Barack Obama said at a town hall event in Johannesburg, South Africa, on Saturday that unless we find new way of producing energy “the planet will boil over” if people in Africa are allowed to attain air conditioning, automobiles and big houses.

“Ultimately, if you think about all the youth that everybody has mentioned here in Africa, if everybody is raising living standards to the point where everybody has got a car and everybody has got air conditioning, and everybody has got a big house, well, the planet will boil over — unless we find new ways of producing energy.”

The president’s comments, made the day before unveiling his “Power Africa” initiative for a “sustainable” African energy strategy, came while speaking at University of Johannesburg-Soweto.

According to Obama, global warming constitutes “the biggest challenge we have environmentally,” one greater than all other environmental calamities like “dirty water, dirty air.”

However, the President’s statements do not reflect statistics released by the United Nations…

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama: ‘Planet Will Boil Over’ If Young Africans Are Allowed Cars, Air-Conditioning, Big Houses (+video)

Photo Credit: Reuters

As President Obama last month launched a sweeping new national program to combat “climate change,” including tens of billions of dollars in likely new subsidies for solar and wind power and bio-energy, a separate, groundbreaking study by the National Research Council has warned that those kinds of subsidies are virtually useless at quelling greenhouse gases.

The study, which looks at the subsidies and other incentives embedded in U.S. federal tax law after the past several years of climate change initiatives, concludes that they have done little or nothing so far to cut U.S. contributions to global carbon emissions, and are unlikely to do much more before 2035, the project’s research horizon.

The two-year, $2 million probe was the first of its kind undertaken to examine the relationship between U.S. tax provisions, a key tool of U.S. climate change policy, and the actual reduction of greenhouse gases.

The pioneering nature of the study itself speaks volumes about the murkiness of official knowledge concerning how well government can tweak the global thermostat by trying to radically reorient energy production and consumption in the U.S. economy.

It was carried out by a 12-member National Academy of Sciences panel of economists, energy experts, environmentalists, tax specialists and climate scientists backed by consultants wielding powerful computerized economic models and a sizeable handful of National Academy of Sciences staff.

Read more from this story HERE.

Study: Billions Utterly Wasted on Obama’s Global Warming Jihad

Photo Credit: NSF’s North Pole Environmental Observatory

The pictures are dramatic — a camera at the North Pole Environmental Observatory, sitting in the middle of what appears to be either a lake or open ocean, at the height of the summer sea ice melt season. Set against the backdrop of the precipitous decline in sea ice cover in recent decades due in large part to global warming, this would seem to be yet another alarming sign of Arctic climate change.

These images have attracted media attention, such as this AtlanticWire post and this Daily Mail story, both of which portray the images as potential signs of an intensifying Arctic meltdown.

But before concluding that Arctic climate change has entered an even more ominous phase, it’s important to examine the context behind these images.

First, the cameras in question, which are attached to instruments that scientists have deposited on the sea ice at the start of each spring since 2002, may have “North Pole” in their name, but they are no longer located at the North Pole. In fact, as this map below shows, they have drifted well south of the North Pole, since they sit atop sea ice floes that move along with ocean currents. Currently, the waterlogged camera is near the prime meridian, at 85 degrees north latitude.

“It’s moved away from the North Pole region and it will eventually exit Fram Strait,” said Mark Serreze, the director of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colo., in an interview. Fram Strait lies between Greenland and Canada, and is one of the main routes for sea ice to get flushed out of the Arctic Ocean.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Lake at the North Pole, How Bad Really Is It?

Photo Credit: Alamy

Earthquakes may contribute to global warming by releasing greenhouse gas from the ocean floor, a study suggests.

Scientists uncovered evidence that a large earthquake in 1945 released more than seven million cubic metres of methane into the North Arabian Sea.

The discovery exposes a natural source of greenhouse gas emissions that has not been considered before, they claim.

As a greenhouse gas, methane is 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide, but less abundant in the atmosphere.

Enormous quantities of methane are locked in icy structures called hydrates on the floors of the continental shelves surrounding the Earth’s land masses.

Read more from this story HERE.

Uh oh: Study Now Says Earthquakes are Causing Global Warming

Photo Credit: MDGovpics

Any thinking person (that leaves out Al Gore) knows that science is never “settled.” Further, as Galileo taught us, there is no such thing as science by “consensus.” Famed physicist Richard Feynman said, “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” This is a great truism to keep in mind when encountering climate alarmists who promote themselves as “experts.”

According to a theory proposed by climate scientists known as the “hydrate hypothesis,” global warming will melt the permafrost in the polar regions, suddenly releasing massive amounts of methane hydrate into the atmosphere. Since methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, climate Armageddon will ensue.

An article compiled by John Stokes in the “socially progressive” newspaper and blog The Canadian, contends that the resulting climate devastation will kill an estimated 4.5 billion people in five years. The only problem with this prediction is that the article was written in 2007. What was our fate to be?…

Read more from this story HERE.

Climate Change ‘Experts’: You Should be Dead by Now

Photo Credit: Recyclebank

Ezra Klein: In 2005, when “An Inconvenient Truth” came out, I remember that the hope was we could keep the carbon load in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, and the fear was we would hit 400ppm. Now we’ve hit 400ppm and people are hoping to avoid 450ppm. This seems to be getting out of hand, and fast.

Al Gore: We have already crossed the 400 parts per million mark. We crossed it earlier this year. The question now is how high it will go before we begin bending the curve. But in spite of the continued released of 90 million tons of global warming pollution every day into the atmosphere, as if it’s an open sewer, we are now seeing the approach of a global political tipping point.

The appearance of more extreme and more frequent weather events has had a very profound impact on public opinion in countries throughout the world. You mentioned my movie back in the day. The single most common criticism from skeptics when the film came out focused on the animation showing ocean water flowing into the World Trade Center memorial site. Skeptics called that demagogic and absurd and irresponsible. It happened last October 29th, years ahead of schedule, and the impact of that and many, many other similar events here and around the world has really begun to create a profound shift.

A second factor is the sharp and unexpectedly steep decrease in prices for electricity produced from wind and solar and the demand destruction for fossil fuel energy from new efficiency improvements. The difference between 32 degrees fahrenheit and 33 degrees fahrenheit seems larger than just one degree. It’s the difference between water and ice. And by analogy there’s a similar difference between renewable electricity that’s more expensive than electricity from coal and renewable electricity that’s less expensive. And in quite a few countries in the world and some parts of the United States we’ve crossed that threshold and in the next few years we’re going to see that crossed in nations and regions containing most of the world’s population.

Another way to think about this is that back when mobile telephones first appeared, the market projections for how quickly they would increase market share turned out to be not just wrong but way wrong. This is a point made by Dave Roberts at Grist, but the projections made 5-10 years ago for the installation of solar and wind technologies were, similarly, not just wrong but way wrong. We’ve seen a dramatic increase that’s far more rapid than anybody projected and it’s accelerating — not just in the United States but even more rapidly in developing countries.

Read more from this story HERE.

Al Gore Explains Why he’s Optimistic about Stopping Global Warming

Photo Credit: FrontPageMag

Those who are wondering why Al Gore chose to publicly resurface in a Washington Post interview last Thursday with that paper’s ever-pliable Journalist founder Ezra Klein only need to look in three places.

First, there’s the recently revealed empirical evidence that the “global warming” movement’s claim that climate change is causing increased extreme weather events isn’t true. Second, there’s a new summary of historical research which blows up the movement’s infamous core “hockey stick” chart forecasting unprecedented, accelerating warming. Finally, there’s a new report due to arrive in a month from an increasingly desperate United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In late September, the IPCC, laughably described by the wire service AFP as “an expert body set up in 1988 to provide neutral advice on global warming and its impacts,” will release its next set of “scientific data” to advocate for a worldwide carbon-tax regime. Gore’s mission is clearly to start greasing the skids for the IPCC’s next round of hysteria.

Gore told WaPo’s Klein that the earth is already suffering the negative consequences of failing to act against “global warming.” He claims that “every extreme weather event now has a component of global warming in it,” and that “the appearance of more extreme and more frequent weather events has had a very profound impact on public opinion in countries throughout the world.”

There’s no doubt that the worldwide press’s emphasis on “extreme weather events” has been greater. Virtually every such occurrence will cause one or more journalists, politicians or both to claim it as definitive or presumptive “proof” of the existence of “global warming” and the urgent need to combat it.

Read more from this story HERE.

Al Gore’s Global Warming Desperation

Photo Credit: CNS News

A multi-million dollar project funded by the National Science Foundation is developing card games, videos and other educational programs “to engage adult learners and inform public understanding and response to climate change.”

The $5.7 million Polar Learning and Responding (PoLAR) project is just the latest in a series of federally-funded climate change efforts since Congress established the Climate Change Educational Partnership (CCEP) in 2009.

CCEP has already spent $46 million on taxpayer-funded research projects around the country designed to find the most effective ways to convince Americans that the federal government should confront what researchers claim is the threat of global warming.

Stephanie Pfirman, principal investigator and professor of environmental science at Barnard College, told CNSNews.com that one of the games under development by PoLAR is “EcoChains” – a card game in which “players learn the components of an Arctic marine food chain, the reliance of some species on sea ice, and potential impacts of future changes.”

Other games include “Future Coast” – described as “a community-based activity where participants consider the implications of sea level rise coupled with a storm surge, as happened with [Hurricane] Sandy.”

Read more from this story HERE.

$5.7M NSF Grant For Card Games, Videos To Teach Public About Global Warming

Photo Credit: NASA Goddard Photo and Video

An unusually cold Arctic summer has resulted in almost a million more square miles of ocean covered with ice compared to the same time last year, bucking predictions that global warming would result in the disappearance of the ice cap by 2013.

According to the MailOnline, Arctic sea ice averaged 2.35 million square miles in August 2013 compared to the low point of 1.32 million square miles recorded in September 2012.

“We are already in a cooling trend, which I think will continue for the next 15 years at least. There is no doubt the warming of the 1980s and 1990s has stopped,” Anastasios Tsonis of the University of Wisconsin told the Mail.

Read more from this story HERE.

Arctic Sea Ice Up 60 Percent in 2013

Photo Credit: AP

The Obama administration will press ahead Friday with tough requirements for new coal-fired power plants, moving to impose for the first time strict limits on the pollution blamed for global warming.

The proposal would help reshape where Americans get electricity, away from a coal-dependent past into a future fired by cleaner sources of energy. It’s also a key step in President Barack Obama’s global warming plans, because it would help end what he called “the limitless dumping of carbon pollution” from power plants.

Although the proposed rule won’t immediatedly affect plants already operating, it eventually would force the government to limit emissions from the existing power plant fleet, which accounts for a third of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Obama has given the Environmental Protection Agency until next summer to propose those regulations.

The EPA provided The Associated Press with details of the proposal prior to the official announcement, which was expected Friday morning. The public will have a chance to comment on the rule before it becomes final.

Despite some tweaks, the rule packs the same punch as one announced last year, which was widely criticized by industry and Republicans as effectively banning any new coal projects in the U.S.

Read more from this story HERE.

Obama Takes on Coal with First-Ever Carbon Limits

Photo Credit: AP

Critics of a new United Nations report on global warming say their skepticism is based on discrepancies between the UN’s climate models and actual, observable conditions.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will release its full report on Monday. It expresses 95% certainty that human activity is primarily responsibly for an observed rise in global temperatures over the past century. Environmentalists have said that even mild criticism of such reports on global warming as science “denial.”

Skeptics have already pointed to what they say are flaws in the report’s methodology and resulting problems with its findings.

Past discrepancies between the IPCC’s models and either subsequent environmental conditions or contradictory scientific work at the time demonstrate why those models should not be taken at face value, the critics say.

The IPCC predicted in 1995 that global sea levels would rise by up to 55 centimeters by 2100 “for the range of emissions scenarios.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Critics Dispute Global Warming Assertions Made by IPCC

Photo Credit: Daily Mail

The 17-year pause in global warming is likely to last into the 2030s and the Arctic sea ice has already started to recover, according to new research.

A paper in the peer-reviewed journal Climate Dynamics – by Professor Judith Curry of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Dr Marcia Wyatt – amounts to a stunning challenge to climate science orthodoxy.

Not only does it explain the unexpected pause, it suggests that the scientific majority – whose views are represented by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – have underestimated the role of natural cycles and exaggerated that of greenhouse gases.

The research comes amid mounting evidence that the computer models on which the IPCC based the gloomy forecasts of a rapidly warming planet in its latest report, published in September, are diverging widely from reality.

The graph shown above, based on a version published by Dr Ed Hawkins of Reading University on his blog, Climate Lab Book, reveals that actual temperatures are now below the predictions made by almost all the 138 models on which the IPCC relies.

Read more from this story HERE.

Seventeen Year ‘Pause’ in Global Warming May Last 20 More Years; Arctic Sea Ice Recovering

Photo Credit: MCT ILLUSTRATION

Recall global warming hysteria’s halcyon days? Just 13 years ago, Dr. David Viner, senior scientist at Britain’s University of East Anglia’s climatic research unit, confidently predicted that, within a few years, winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event.”

“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.

Of course, that doesn’t mesh with what happened. This past October, the UK Express headlined, “Worst winter for decades: Record-breaking snow predicted for November.”

By the end of November, Brits were shivering, “as Britain faces snow, ice and plummeting temperatures,” reported the Mirror newspaper. “Most of Scotland has been issued severe weather warnings for ice, and temperatures are expected to remain low, causing problems with snow and ice across the country.” Winter yet lay ahead.

We shouldn’t pick on Great Britain. There is plenty of global warming foolishness here at home. Recall James Hansen, global warming guru whose alarmist campaign was underwritten by his NASA paycheck. By the 2020s, Hansen predicted in 1986, the U.S. average annual temperature would rise 9 degrees Fahrenheit, or more, and up to 3 degrees by the 2010s.

Read more from this story HERE.

Global Warming Climate Alarmists’ Search for Proof Growing Cold

Photo Credit: REUTERS/Pauline Askin

It was only five years ago in December that Al Gore claimed that the polar ice caps would be completely melted by now. But he might be surprised to find out that Arctic ice coverage is up 50 percent this year from 2012 levels.

“Some of the models suggest that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during some of the summer months, could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years,” Gore said in 2008.

The North Pole is still there, and growing. BBC News reports that data from Europe’s Cryosat spacecraft shows that Arctic sea ice coverage was nearly 9,000 cubic kilometers (2,100 cubic miles) by the end of this year’s melting season, up from about 6,000 cubic kilometers (1,400 cubic miles) during the same time last year.

This came as a shock to researchers who saw Arctic sea ice coverage shrink to a documented low in 2012. However, now sea ice coverage has expanded to reach the sixth record low, according to AFP.

“We didn’t expect the greater ice extent left at the end of this summer’s melt to be reflected in the volume,” said Rachel Tilling of the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling in a statement. “But it has been, and the reason is related to the amount of multi-year ice in the Arctic.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Gore’s Dire Global Warming Predictions?: Satellite Data Shows Arctic Sea Ice Coverage up 50 Percent!