Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently concurred with film director James Cameron that people who question the science of anthropogenic global warming are, in their opinions, “criminal.” Cameron, a Crank of the Week laureate, and Schmidt made the comments during a recent on stage conversation at a private event in Silicon Valley. During a two hour “discussion,” the duo of left-coast billionaires had a vacuous interchange in which they predicted that humanity “will have extincted 70% of the species on the planet by the end of the century.” This is another example of how people who can be very smart about some things can be very stupid about others.

World wide emission of CO₂ from fossil fuel burning decreased by 1.3% in 2009 owing to the global financial and economic crisis says a report in Nature Geoscience. Estimated CO₂ emissions from deforestation and other land-use changes (LUCs) have also declined compared with the 1990s. The decrease in greenhouse gas emissions was blamed on the contraction of GDP owing to the global financial crisis that began in 2008. Not so fast, say warmist scientists. They claim that CO₂ will rise by 4.8% in 2010, proving that what should be treated as good news is not welcome in climate change circles.

In the November 12, 2010, issue of Science a number of news focus articles decry the results of the 2010 US elections and the possible impact those results may have on the fight against global warming. Staff reporters for the AAAS flagship journal are all atwitter about the evil Republicans coming back into power, and they are not alone. Reportedly, many researchers fear the worst after the Republican victory at the polls produced a 25-plus-seat majority in the House of Representatives and reduced the Democrats' hold on the Senate. The $20 billion for scientific research that was part of the $787 billion stimulus package may have been the high water mark for government funding during the Obama administration.

One of the scary predictions made about the impact of global warming is the extinction of many current species leading to a crisis in biological diversity. Like most of the speculative effects of global warming, this prediction is not only without scientific basis, it is precisely backward. A new paper in the journal Science, studying the impact of rapid global warming at the Paleocene-Eocene boundary, show that rapid tropical forest diversification occurred without plant extinction. Moreover, diversity seemed to increase at higher temperatures, contradicting previous assumptions that tropical flora will succumb if temperatures become excessive. The tropical rainforest was able to flourish under elevated temperatures and high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, in contrast to speculation that tropical ecosystems were severely harmed by the heat.

With the Cap & Trade bill dead in Congress, the EPA continues to promote new regulations to control carbon emissions. The left is claiming the moral high ground and the right a new popular mandate, with environmental and energy policy a part of the new political battleground. While House Republicans take aim at federal bureaucrats a number of states, led by California, the left-coast champion of all things green and illogical, are creating their own version of Cap & Trade. Citizens beware, eco-activists are working at the state level to implement cap & trade through the backdoor.

Things have settled down a bit since the climate research scandals of early 2010, and some of the crew at the Met Office Hadley Centre have put forth a new paper. In it they claim the ability to “skillfully” predict hurricane activity for several years in advance. This seems a useful and more reasonable thing for this bunch to be doing, as opposed to scaremongering about anthropogenic global warming, but there is a catch. As it turns out, the whole exercise is aimed at blaming a purported increase in hurricane activity on global warming—the climate change scam lives on.

With the American mid-term elections finally over, the deafening din of political propaganda and news punditry has dropped to a dull roar. Having admitted that there were no “shovel ready” jobs in the offing, and that taking a “shellacking” is no fun, Barack Obama has nonetheless continued to talk up the idea of “green jobs.” This flies in the face of both reason and experience. To date, green job creation has been a resounding failure. American intellectuals and left leaning politicians have pointed out that Europe is a decade ahead of the US in embracing the new green economy. Since this White House seems infatuated with all things European, here is a lesson they can borrow from the old continent: creating artificial green jobs is bad for a nation's economy.

You know, in science, there was once this thing we called the Theory of Multiple Working Hypotheses. Anathema (a formal ecclesiastical curse accompanied by excommunication) in modern climate science. So, in juxtaposition to the hypothesis of future global climate disruption from CO₂, a scientist might well consider an antithesis or two in order to maintain ones objectivity. One such antithesis, which happens to be a long running debate in paleoclimate science, concerns the end Holocene. Or just how long the present interglacial will last.

After all the fanfare a few months back, when US President Obama announced government loan guaranties for a new nuclear power plant in Georgia, the truth is emerging—Obama is quietly letting the nuclear Renaissance die from neglect and broken promises. Trying to distract green critics and the public with its approval of plans to build the world's biggest solar-thermal power plant in the Southern California, the administration ignored the faltering plans to expand an existing power plant on the Chesapeake Bay. Constellation Energy sent a letter to the US DOE stating that the terms offered by the government to guaranty financing for expanding the Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant were “unworkable” and that the project could not go forward. Despite paying lip service to reviving nuclear power by providing government backed loans, the extreme greens in the Obama administration are trying to kill the nuclear power industry.

Climate scientists continue to be fascinated with the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), which took place about 55 Myr ago. This period of sudden global warming and increasing atmospheric CO₂ represents a possible model our present era of warming climate and growing CO₂ emissions. Studying the PETM, therefore, may provide insight into climate system sensitivity and feedbacks. Just such a study, reported in Nature Geoscience, found that CO₂ forcing alone was insufficient to explain the PETM warming. Scientists speculate that other processes and/or feedbacks, hitherto unknown, must have caused a substantial portion of the warming during the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum. Simply put, CO₂ did not cause the PETM climate change.

While governments invest heavily in wind power something has been happening to the surface winds of the Northern Hemisphere—the winds have been slowing down. While the cause of this “stilling” remain uncertain, surface winds have declined in China, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, the United States and Australia over the past few decades. A new study, published online at Nature Geoscience, analyzes the extent and potential cause of changes in northern surface wind speeds over the past 30 years. In it, researchers have found that surface wind speeds have declined by 5–15% over almost all continental areas in the northern mid-latitudes, and that strong winds have slowed faster than weak winds. They also note that the observed decline of surface wind in many regions of the world is a potential concern for wind power electricity production.

A new paper, penned by a group of known warmist scare mongers, claims to have proof that CO₂ is the control knob that regulates Earth’s temperature. Andrew A. Lacis, Gavin A. Schmidt, David Rind, and Reto A. Ruedy, all from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, are boasting they have experimental proof that “carbon dioxide is the single most important climate-relevant greenhouse gas in Earth’s atmosphere.” Even though this climate alarmist cabal admits that H₂O, in the form of water vapor and clouds, accounts for 75% of greenhouse warming, they still claim that that CO₂ is king. Why? Because water's contributions are supposedly caused by feedbacks involving carbon dioxide. How have they proven that? By fiddling around with the same biased computer climate models that their other fictitious claims are based on.

The 2^nd anniversary of “Climate Fools Day” is almost upon us and it is starting to attract the attention of UK MP's. This year's Climate Fools Day Rally will be held Wednesday, October 27^th 2PM at Parliament and we encourage all climate skeptics who can to attend. Our friends at Climate Realists have posted the following update on the planned festivities:

One of the arguments used by critics of nuclear power is that there is not enough uranium to power a nuclear world for an extended time. The energy hungry world would just be trading looming oil shortages for uranium shortages, they claim. As with most anti-nuclear scare-mongering these charges are totally bogus. MIT has just released a major report on the nuclear fuel cycle that finds uranium supplies will not limit the expansion of nuclear power in the US or around the world for the foreseeable future. It suggests that nuclear power, even using today’s reactor technology with the wasteful once-through fuel cycle, can play a significant part in satisfying the world's future energy needs.

It is accepted that volcanic eruptions can have a major impact on short term climate. A new study in Nature Geoscience uses instrument records, proxy data and climate modeling to show that multidecadal variability is a dominant feature of North Atlantic sea-surface temperature (SST), which, in turn, impacts regional climate. It turns out that the timing of multidecadal SST fluctuations in the North Atlantic over the past 600 years has, to a large degree, been governed by changes in external solar and volcanic forcings. Solar influence is not surprising but the fact that volcanoes cause climate change lasting decades has some significant implications for those trying to model climate over the next century.