Climate News from Around The Globe

from Climate Depot

from Climate Depot

Borenstein's 'unprecedented' weather claims mocked: 'In June, 1934 the entire country had triple digit heat. We didn't come anywhere close to that this summer. Severe drought in 1934 covered 80% of the country, compared with 25% in 2011. Flooding in 1927 was worse. Are these reporters too lazy or too dumb to do any research?'

from Climate Depot

from Climate & Energy | Grist

by Tom Laskawy.

I don't expect that Monsanto takes much notice when articles about superweeds -- plants that have developed resistance to its flagship RoundUp herbicide and its active ingredient glyphosate -- appear in Grist, Scientific American, Mother Jones or even The New York Times. That's nothing but typical "fearmongering" from the "liberal media" and the biotech behemoth can laugh it off all the way to the bank.

But when the mainstream business press writes lead paragraphs like this:

Justin Cariker grabs a 7-foot-tall Palmer pigweed at his farm, bending the wrist-thick stem to reveal how it has overwhelmed the cotton plant beneath it. This is no ordinary weed: Over time it has developed resistance to Monsanto's best-selling herbicide, Roundup. Hundreds of such "superweeds" are rising defiantly across this corner of the Mississippi Delta. "We're not winning the battle," Cariker, owner of Maud Farms in Dundee, Miss., says as he looks at weeds that tower over his infested cotton field like spindly green scarecrows.

...as Bloomberg BusinessWeek did under the headline "Attack of the Superweeds," I have to believe that Monsanto's top brass starts to worry.

The language in the article is striking. Reporter Jack Kaskey tells how "unrelenting" use of glyphosate has led to an "invasion" of resistant weeds across the country. Of course, Monsanto has a plan -- and it involves engineering resistance to older (more dangerous pesticides) into its seeds.

The article even quotes Chuck Benbrook, director of the Organic Center and the type of sustainable agriculture spokesperson who doesn't often get quoted in magazines like BusinessWeek. Benbrook says Monsanto's strategy is "akin to putting gasoline on a fire to put it out... It's a very high-risk gamble for the U.S. biotechnology and pesticide industry to go down this road."

And missing in this account is the inevitable declaration that the solution to the problem lies "just around the corner" in the form of new technology and advanced seeds. In fact, one scientist in the article points out that many of the herbicides biotech companies are turning to in their search for a solution already have huge resistant weed problems of their own. The bulk of these herbicides pre-date glyphosate, so weeds have had decades to develop resistance. No easy techno-fixes there!

Of course, it will take more than a good article in the business press for sustainable ag to stake a real claim on our nation's future. But I was struck by Kaskey's choice of a kicker. After describing his efforts to battle superweeds the old-fashioned way (by industrial ag standards, that is), with lots of tilling, dangerous chemicals and manual labor, farmer Cariker declares:

"This can change the whole farming industry if we can't get a handle on it."

It says a lot about these anthropomorphic superweeds that even the business press has begun warning of their real and present danger. Next thing you know, BusinessWeek might just tell us that the best solution to this problem is agro-ecological farming. A guy can hope, can't he?

from Climate Connections : NPR

San Diego's power company has restored power to all of its customers. Thursday afternoon, more than 4 million people in the Southwestern U.S. and parts of Mexico lost electricity. Arizona Public Service Company says the outage occurred after an electrical worker mistakenly removed a piece of monitoring equipment at a substation in southwest Arizona.

from Climate Realists by Co2sceptic

A CME hit Earth's magnetic field on Sept. 9th, and the impact ignited a geomagnetic storm, in progress. Northern Lights have since been spotted in the United States as far south as Michigan, Montana and North Dakota. This could be the first of several hits from a series of CMEs expected to reach Earth during the weekend, so more geomagnetic activity is in the offing.

Source: spaceweather.com

Read in full with comments »

from Climate Realists by Co2sceptic

from Climate Depot

'A paper published today in Journal of Climate examines the trend of sea ice extent along the East Antarctic coast from 2000 to 2008 and finds a significant increase of 1.43% per year'

from Climate Depot

'...and their arch rivals the aardvarks. As do yellow perch and their meals the nightcrawlers. Any species that moves or engages in respiration, or in eructation after a good meal, changes the climate'

from Climate Depot

Gore's ad shows 'a model of the Earth that is loosely attached to the ceiling and that kills the female naysayer mechanically, in the old-fashioned way. However, the result is the same: the climate skeptic 'ends' on September 14th'

from Climate & Energy | Grist

by Claire Thompson.

Al Gore officially kicks off his new Climate Reality Project on Sept. 14 with an ambitious global event called "24 Hours of Reality." It will broadcast a call to action on climate change once an hour for 24 hours, in every time zone on the planet. Gore gave Grist’s David Roberts the lowdown on the project in July. Grist will have a live feed of the event starting 7:00 p.m. CT, so tune in on Wednesday.

To generate buzz, the project released a couple of goofy videos featuring opera singing.

Was Gore inspired by the forthcoming but long-delayed "Inconvenient Truth" opera being developed by the La Scala opera house in Milan? If so, what does it mean that the diva gets squished by the planet?

from CanadaFreePress.Com

Mosquitoes are disappearing in Africa. According to this report in The University of Copenhagen/Malaria Journal.

from CanadaFreePress.Com

A new study in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene debunks the claim that global warming (via rising sea surface temperatures) will increase cholera outbreaks.

from CanadaFreePress.Com

Former Vice President Al Gore is well known for his advocacy work on climate-change issues. But a new interview with Gore is making waves - and not just for his comparison of climate-change skeptics to racists. Politico reports on Gore’s super-serial indictment of farming:

from BreitBart Big Government by Larry O'Connor

Solyndra, a San Francisco based solar panel company that received a $535 million loan guarantee from the federal government has declared bankruptcy. Last year President Obama touted the company as "leading the way" in the green jobs future he envisions.

Just a few months ago, ABC News revealed that one of the major financial backers for Solyndra is also a major donor to the Obama campaign.

The donor, Steve Westley, has subsequently been named to the President’s Energy Advisory Board. Solyndra was supposed to have produced 4,000 jobs with the loan guarantee. Now all of the company’s employees have been laid-off. Mr. Westley is still on the advisory board.

Congressman Cliff Stearns, Chair of House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Oversight Subcomittee, released the following statement this afternoon:

"In an apparent rush to push stimulus dollars out the door, the Obama Administration wasted $535 million in taxpayer funds in guaranteeing a loan to a firm that has proven to be unviable in the global market," said Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL), Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. "For months, we have been investigating how and why nearly half a billion dollars in taxpayer money was committed to this financially troubled company."

According to The Center for Public Integrity, one of Solyndra’s major investors was George Kaiser, an Oklahoma oil billionaire who raised large sums of money for Obama during the 2008 election. This raised concerns that politics my have played a role in putting taxpayer dollars at risk in making this loan guarantee. In addition, last year the Government Accountability Office issued an unusually blunt assessment of the Energy Department’s loan program, concluding that the department had "treated applicants inconsistently, favoring some and disadvantaging others."

Using stimulus funds to promote job creation, the Department of Energy awarded a $535 million loan guarantee to Solyndra and the Obama Administration was supposed to review the loan to ensure that taxpayer money was not put at risk. Stearns has been investigating this loan program, and specifically the loan to Solyndra, and was forced to subpoena the Administration for records involving this loan guarantee.

"Although the Administration has been uncooperative with this investigation, this decision by Solyndra does not end our inquiry and we will continue to look into how this loan guarantee was approved and why the American taxpayers are mostly likely out $535 million," added Stearns. "In addition, this brings up concerns if taxpayers were adequately protected during the restructuring of the loan to Solyndra."

from Education Action Group Foundation by Chriss W. Street

Nature Journal of Science, ranked as the world’s most cited scientific periodical, has just published the definitive study on Global Warming that proves the dominant controller of temperatures in the Earth’s atmosphere is due to galactic cosmic rays and the sun, rather than by man. One of the report’s authors, Professor Jyrki Kauppinen, summed up his conclusions regarding the potential for man-made Global Warming: "I think it is such a blatant falsification." The research was conducted by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, which invented the World Wide Web, built the multi-billion dollar Large Hadron Collider, and now has constructed a pristinely clean stainless steel chamber that precisely recreates the Earth’s atmosphere. The climate study involved scientists representing 17 of Europe’s and America’s premiere research institutes. The results demonstrate that cosmic rays promote the formation of molecules that can grow and seed clouds in the Earth’s atmosphere; the temperatures then fall as the density of the clouds increase. Because the sun’s magnetic field controls how many cosmic rays reach Earth’s atmosphere; the sun determines the temperature on Earth.

Nature Journal has been the holy-grail of scientific research publication since it was established in England in 1869. Its original editors gave the title to their new scientific journal in celebration of a line by British poet William Wordsworth: "To the solid ground of nature trusts the Mind that builds for aye". Because research scientists are the primary audience this most prestigious of journals, the magazine strives to retain its stamp of approval as the pinnacle of scientific credibility for original research. Nature first introduced its readers to X-rays, DNA double helix, wave nature of particles, pulsars, and more recently mapping of the human genome.

But Nature’s reputation suffered a huge black eye on November 21, 2009 when a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) and released 1079 emails and 72 documents exposing willful fraud in several scientific papers published in Nature that supported Al Gore’s theory Anthropogenic Global Warming. CRU houses the most world’s most extensive data base on atmospheric temperatures and the e-mails exposed blatant exaggerations of the warming data, possible illegal destruction of evidence, and conspiracy to manipulate or suppress data not supporting of the man-made Global Warming theory.

One e-mail describes tricks used supporting Anthropogenics in major Nature article:

"I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline."

As the Wall Street Journal and other conservative media hyper-ventilated over the hacker leaks they referred to as the "Climategate Scandal"; Nature quickly retaliated in defense of Anthropogenic Global Warming with a scathing editorial titled: "Climatologists Under Pressure" stating: "Stolen e-mails have revealed no scientific conspiracy, but do highlight ways in which climate researchers could be better supported in the face of public scrutiny." The editorial skewered academic doubters of man-made Global Warming as the "climate-change-denialist fringe" and in a shocking Freudian-slip the Nature editorial roared its political partisanship:

"This paranoid interpretation would be laughable were it not for the fact that obstructionist politicians in the US Senate will probably use it next year as an excuse to stiffen their opposition to the country’s much needed climate bill. Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real - or that human activities are almost certainly the cause."

For Nature to now publish research that eviscerates the Anthropogenics theory heralds a tectonic rejection by academia of support for United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The UN protocol requires every nation on earth to reduce their atmospheric emissions of greenhouse gas to 94.8% of 1990 levels to "prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system." The U.S. Senate legislation that Nature sought to stridently lobbying for is named "America’s Climate Security Act of 2007"; commonly known as the Cap-and-Trade Bill.

The Heritage Foundation estimated that the costs of complying with Cap-and-Trade would include; a 29% increase in the price of gasoline, losses of hundreds of thousands of jobs, and lead to reductions of $1.7 to $4.8 trillion of the U.S. GDP by 2030. Furthermore, Cap-and-Trade would set up a gargantuan intergovernmental bureaucracy that would likely ban natural gas fracking, steam injection of tar sands, and surface coal mining for exploration and development of America’s immense energy reserves.

After 20 years of academic supremacy and hundreds of billions of dollars of costs; the Anthropogenic Global Warming theory seems headed for the dust bin of history. Perhaps the admirable action of the Nature Journal of Science to place scientific integrity above partisan politics will be a valuable lesson for the scientific community in the future.

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