By Angela Delli Santi

Federal environmental regulators are urging Gov. Chris Christie to reconsider a decision to pull New Jersey from a 10-state greenhouse gas reduction program.

Christie announced withdrawal from the program Thursday.

Read the rest at the Daily Journal.

By Rosalind S. Helderman

The University of Virginia and a conservative advocacy group have agreed the university will turn over documents in response to a public information request by the group seeking documents related to the work of a former university climate scientist.

U-Va. will comply with the request by Aug. 22.

The American Tradition Institute’s Environmental Law Center, along with Del. Bob Marshall (R-Prince William), want e-mails and other documents related to the work of global warming researcher Michael Mann.

The university has said the group requested about 9,000 pages of records, and the organization says about 20 percent have been turned over so far.

But the group believes the university has been dragging its feet in producing the records. The university has said it is working as quickly as possible to sift through thousands of pages of records to figure out which should be released.

In an agreement filed in Prince William Circuit Court on Tuesday, the university agreed it will turn over all records, in electronic form, within 90 days–or Aug. 22.

Read the rest at the Washington Post.

Candidates need to be ready to blow away the arguments

By Steve Milloy

If you’re thinking of becoming a Republican presidential candidate – and who isn’t these days – you can plan on being pressed on the climate issue. In the wake of last week’s new report from a panel of the National Research Council (NRC) reiterating its old talking points on climate, The Washington Post editorialized that all (read “Republican”) candidates for political office should be quizzed about whether they agree with the “scientific consensus of America’s premier scientific advisory group.”

Although this threat is intended to intimidate Republicans who tend toward queasiness when confronted with environmental issues, the attack is easy to parry and then even to counterattack – that’s why Al Gore and his enviros duck debating so-called “climate skeptics.”

First, let’s dismiss a couple of faulty premises of The Post’s editorial.

While it is true that the NRC operates under the umbrella of the National Academy of Sciences, the NRC panel that authored the report has nothing to do with the prestigious individual scientists who make up the National Academy of Sciences membership. NRC panels are highly politicized and often stacked, and no climate skeptics were included in the panel that wrote last week’s report.

Next, science doesn’t work on a consensus basis. We don’t accept that the Earth revolves around the Sun because most scientists or a group of scientists have agreed to say so. Science is driven by data, not groupthink.

In actuality, the NRC report is more an exercise in political science than climate science.

Read the rest of this op-ed at the Washington Times.

Steve Milloy is the author of Green Hell.

Every presidential candidate is going to come into the 2012 race with baggage. But Newt Gingrich has what, for primary voters, could be a doozy in his closet — three years ago, he cut an ad with Nancy Pelosi for Al Gore’s climate change group.The ad, in which Gingrich and Pelosi don awkward smiles while talking about clean-energy solutions, is coming back to haunt him, along with other statements he’s made about climate change, as he officially launches his presidential bid. While Democrats have a long and winding list of grievances against the former House speaker, his past environmentalism could cause problems on the political right.

The early complaints are coming in large part from a former aide to Congress’ No.1 climate change skeptic, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla. The ex-aide, Marc Morano, has virtually devoted his blog ClimateDepot to lambasting Gingrich’s stance on energy issues.

Morano specifically wants Gingrich to apologize for the Pelosi ad and for suggesting that lawmakers need to find a solution to global warming.

“It’s almost like he can’t admit he made a mistake,” Morano told FoxNews.com. “He needs to say it was a brain fart, at the very least.”

Read the rest at Fox News.

By Dr. Tim Ball

Traditionally, the older scientists held to the prevailing wisdom and were challenged by the new, skeptical graduates looking for wider answers. In climatology, the opposite has happened. The so-called skeptics challenging the prevailing wisdom are the professors who have researched and taught the subject for 30 years or longer. Their knowledge is much wider than that of the new young scientists because climate science has stagnated for thirty years. All the funding was directed to only one side of climate science, and that was the side promoted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and accepted as the ‘official science’ by governments.

It’s now frightening how little climate science is known by both sides of the debate on human causation of global warming. I wrote this sentence before I saw a paper from Michigan State University that found,

Most college students in the United States do not grasp the scientific basis of the carbon cycle – an essential skill in understanding the causes and consequences of climate change.

The professor says students need to know because they must deal with the buildup of CO2 causing climate change. This discloses his ignorance about the science of the carbon cycle and the role of CO2 in climate. It’s not surprising, and caused by three major factors:

1. a function of the emotional, irrational, religious approach to environmentalism;
2. the takeover of climate science for a political agenda; and
3. funding directed to prove the political, rather than the scientific, agenda.

The dogmatism of politics and religion combined to suppress openness of ideas and the advance of knowledge critical to science.

Read the Rest at Dr. Ball’s “A Different Perspective.”