By Joseph D’Aleo

In the LA Times, there was a story on Richard Muller’s invitation to DC to testify to congress about the Berkeley Project, which attempts to reconstruct global dataThe Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study is led by physicist Richard Muller, a longtime critic of the scientific consensus on climate change, who plans to testify on the effort Thursday before the House Science Committee in the latest of several congressional inquiries on climate science since the GOP majority was seated. Temperature data from tens of thousands of weather stations across the globe, many of which have incomplete records, are “very contentious,” Muller said in an interview. “The skeptics are raising legitimate concerns.”

Muller and many of those who question the temperature data are drawn to the “urban heat island” phenomenon, maintaining that gauges may be registering latent heat from asphalt, concrete and other urban features. Over time, some weather stations that once recorded temperatures in rural areas have been surrounded by cities and suburbs. The Berkeley project is analyzing information from 39,000 stations -five times as many as the other groups, Muller said – and will address the fact that temperature data have been recorded at varying times of day.

The project also will put its calculations on the Internet in a “transparent” way, Muller said. Other scientists, he said, “put homogenized data online. They don’t put up the [software] tools that get you from the raw data to the homogenized data. How do they pick the [weather station] sites? That involves human judgment.”

Read the rest at IceCap.

From C3 Headlines

As the monthly empirical evidence keeps pouring in, the AGW hypothesis and climate model simulations that portray atmospheric CO2 levels being the principal driving force behind global temperature change looks weaker and weaker. A growing chorus of scientists worldwide are now saying that the idea that global warming is caused by ‘CO2 vapours’ is a quaint, 1800′s European hypothesis, but severely lacking in any robust, modern empirical evidence.

While the CO2-vapours based AGW hypothesis crumbles in the face of actual climate data, other scientific explanations regarding global temperature change are looking stronger and stronger. One such hypothesis is that the Southern Oscillation (SO) accounts for some 80% of global temperature variance.

Read the rest at C3 Headlines.

By Jo Nova

The good news is that skeptics are the majority, the bad news is that we’ll all have to pay the tax anyway. The IPA commissioned a Galaxy Poll in Australia and only one third of Australians believe that man-made global warming is real. Despite the advertising, the propaganda, the Nobel Prizes, the support of major institutions, the ABC censorship of skeptical science news, and the educational indoctrination at schools, most people are unconvinced.

Despite the falling polls, today the Gillard Government committed itself to getting a “carbon price” – the nice way of saying “tax”. (Note the poll attached to that story: Do you support a carbon tax? 84% say NO.)

(see full article for poll results)

It’s a question of youth

From the full results it’s clear that belief is mostly a “young” naive thing, and that by the age of 30 people are waking up to the truth.  Half of the 18-24 year olds think that man is to blame, but only a quarter of the over 50′s do.  The old cats who’ve been there and done that are wiser to exaggerated scare campaigns. Half of the 25 -34 year old group answered that they are not sure.

Read the rest at JoNova.

By Paul Yeager

A massive snowstorm is slamming America’s midsection — again. New York City just set a record for January snowfall. The South has experienced bitter cold, snow and ice this winter.If the Earth is getting warmer, why’s it so darn snowy and cold?

Are the U.S. winter extremes proof that global warming isn’t happening or is even a hoax, as some skeptics suggest? Or are the winter extremes a product of a warming atmosphere, as many climate change advocates assert?

While opinions about climate change vary greatly, even among experts in climate science, the consensus is that short-range weather events have little to do with the climate change debate.

There’s no debating that it’s been cold, especially in January. According to Deke Arndt of the federal National Climatic Data Center, “January 2011 will rank among the coldest 20 percent of Januarys on record since 1895.” December brought the coldest temperatures on record to parts of South Florida, although the month averaged near normal for the nation as a whole because the Southern cold was balanced by warmth elsewhere.

Read the rest at AOL News.

Exclusive New Video: Calls cap-and-trade an ‘horrendous scam’ — Joins other left of center scientific and activist dissenters

By Marc Morano

Physicist Dr. Denis Rancourt, a former professor and environmental science researcher at the University of Ottawa, has officially bailed out of the man-made global warming movement. 

In a hard-hitting and new exclusive video just released by Climate Depot, Dr. Rancourt declares that the entire man-made global warming movement is nothing more than a “corrupt social phenomenon.” “It is as much psychological and social phenomenon as anything else,” Rancourt, who has published peer-reviewed research, explained in a June 8, 2010 essay. (Rancourt’s email: claude.cde@gmail.com)

Watch Rancourt video here. 

“I argue that by far the most destructive force on the planet is power-driven financiers and profit-driven corporations and their cartels backed by military might; and that the global warming myth is a red herring that contributes to hiding this truth. In my opinion, activists who, using any justification, feed the global warming myth have effectively been co-opted, or at best neutralized,” Rancourt said. 

“Global warming is strictly an imaginary problem of the First World middleclass,” he stated.

Read the rest at Climate Depot.

THE Royal Society’s report coincides with dissidence at the American Physical Society

By Des Moore

THE Royal Society’s September report, Climate Change: A Summary of the Science, has brought into the open the widening difference of views about how the science of climate change should be assessed. It comes after a prominent resignation from the American Physical Society (the top body of US physicists) for the refusal of the society’s executive to undertake a similar review despite requests from a large number of members.

In Australia, too, an examination of the Inter-Academy Council’s review of the processes and procedures of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concludes that, although the council’s chairman claims the IPCC’s findings stand, the review itself exposes serious flaws in the panel’s information and analysis. The examination by this group, which is a follow-up to its recent publication in the British journal Energy & Environment, is now being widely distributed in Australia.

All three assessments reflect the revelations provided by the exchanges between scientists actively involved in climate research – now known as Climategate – that some research results appear to have been falsified. These reports have spread widely in science circles in Australia. However, apart from The Australian, there has been almost no reference to these revelations in the Australian media. The Age, which had not bothered to cover the Royal Society’s report, was quick to report that the Royal Society’s vice-president John Pethica (who chaired the report committee) had rejected suggestions that the society had changed its position on climate change.

Read the rest at The Australian.

By Elmer Beauregard

HACKENSACK – Yet another Global Warming report came out yesterday, it’s called “Global Warming and Extreme Weather” and its put out by a group called Environment Minnesota.

I haven’t had a chance to look at it in detail yet, but it seems to be the same old recycled shtick. They are trying to blame the horribly cold winter we had on “Global Warming”.

Plus, there were some floods and it was hot this summer (even though it never broke 100º) and its all our fault. So just like our ancestors we must make sacrifices to the gods of Global Warming and they will save us.

I Googled the term “extreme weather global warming” to see what people were saying about it and was surprised by what I found.

This same supposedly “Local” report was also done in Maryland by Environment Maryland. I found the same thing in NewJersey, Iowa, Pennsylvania (of course), and Virginia. I don’t know how long the list goes on.

The other thing I noticed is all the websites have the same logo, so I did a whois and found out that all these sites are registered by the same group Fund for Public Interest based in Boston Massachusetts and by the same person Marcia Eldridge.

Read the rest of this ground-breaking story at Minnesotans for Global Warming.

By George F. Will

The collapsing crusade for legislation to combat climate change raises a question: Has ever a political movement made so little of so many advantages? Its implosion has continued since “the Cluster of Copenhagen, when world leaders assembled for the single most unproductive and chaotic global gathering ever held.” So says Walter Russell Mead, who has an explanation: Bambi became Godzilla.

That is, a small band of skeptics became the dogmatic establishment. In his Via Meadia blog, Mead, a professor of politics at Bard College and Yale, notes that “the greenest president in American history had the largest congressional majority of any president since Lyndon Johnson,” but the environmentalists’ legislation foundered because they got “on the wrong side of doubt.”

Read the rest at the Washington Post.

Raj Pachuri

By Matt Patterson

If this keeps up, no one’s going to trust any scientists.

The global-warming establishment took a body blow this week, as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change received a stunning rebuke from a top-notch independent investigation.

For two decades, the IPCC has spearheaded efforts to convince the world’s governments that man-made carbon emissions pose a threat to the global temperature equilibrium — and to civilization itself. IPCC reports, collated from the work of hundreds of climate scientists and bureaucrats, are widely cited as evidence for the urgent need for drastic action to “save the planet.”

But the prestigious InterAcademy Council, an independent association of “the best scientists and engineers worldwide” (as the group’s own Web site puts it) formed in 2000 to give “high-quality advice to international bodies,” has finished a thorough review of IPCC practices — and found them badly wanting.

Read the rest of this story at the New York Post.

Skeptic Terminator or Chicken?

By Noel Sheppard

Multi-millionaire filmmaker James Cameron on Sunday backed out of a global warming debate that he asked for and organized.

For those that haven’t been following the recent goings on concerning Nobel Laureate Al Gore’s favorite money-making myth, an environmental summit was held this weekend in Aspen, Colorado, called AREDAY, which is short for American Renewable Energy Day.

Ahead of this conference, Cameron challenged three noted global warming skeptics to a public debate where he was going to personally “call those deniers out into the street at high noon and shoot it out with those boneheads.”

One of the invited skeptics, Ann McElhinney of NotEvilJustWrong.com, wrote about Cameron’s surprise cancellation Sunday…

Read the rest at Newsbusters.

By Marc Oestreich

Former Vice President Al Gore spent the last decade as a larger-than-life figure, more of a symbol than a living, breathing human being. Stolen from the pages of a Danielle Steele novel and plopped on stage at the 2000 Democratic Convention, this normally lifeless personality was possessed by the ghost of Madmen’s Jon Hamm and political pop-culture history was made. Al and Tipper’s kiss marked the dawn of Gore’s personal stardom and his pet project: anthropogenic global warming (AGW) alarmism.

Since his mind-numbing PowerPoint presentation An Inconvenient Truth hit theaters, Gore has been married to the AGW cause. And just as Al’s and Tipper’s kiss represented the dawn of the most successful movement in pseudoscience, their divorce aptly marks its end.

A stark trend toward accepting empirical science instead of speculation has caused the ground beneath AGW to cave in quickly. Like the news of the Gore divorce, the scientific evidence hit the public as if from nowhere. But both these cases are results of major, longstanding problems instead of a single cataclysmic event.

For AGW alarmism, what were once dismissed as minor discrepancies are being exposed as major contradictions of the scientific facts.

At first, AGW was a smooth talker. Graphs, models, charts, PowerPoints, and Hollywood movies all worked to persuade. As questions began to arise, however, patronizing and talking down turned small spats into explosive arguments. The Michael Mann “hockey stick” diagram was exposed as being based on a trick that would make any trend look like a spike. Gore’s new mansion was built in an area he had predicted would be underwater in the near future. The Climategate scandal showed us AGW was hiding the facts. Stories weren’t adding up.

Read the rest at Heartland Institute.

By Ben Webster

Britain’s premier scientific institution is being forced to review its statements on climate change after a rebellion by members who question mankind’s contribution to rising temperatures.The Royal Society has appointed a panel to rewrite the 350-year-old institution’s official position on global warming. It will publish a new “guide to the science of climate change” this summer. The society has been accused by 43 of its Fellows of refusing to accept dissenting views on climate change and exaggerating the degree of certainty that man-made emissions are the main cause.

The society appears to have conceded that it needs to correct previous statements. It said: “Any public perception that science is somehow fully settled is wholly incorrect – there is always room for new observations, theories, measurements.” This contradicts a comment by the society’s previous president, Lord May, who was once quoted as saying: “The debate on climate change is over.”

The admission that the society needs to conduct the review is a blow to attempts by the UN to reach a global deal on cutting emissions. The Royal Society is viewed as one of the leading authorities on the topic and it nominated the panel that investigated and endorsed the climate science of the University of East Anglia.

Read the rest of this story at London Times.

From Rasmussen Reports

Voters in recent months have been increasingly skeptical of the idea that global warming is chiefly caused by human activity, but the number who blame long term planetary trends instead has now fallen back to its lowest level in nearly a year. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 40% of Likely U.S. Voters now say global warming is caused primarily by human activity, while slightly more (44%) say long term planetary trends are to blame. Five percent (5%) blame some other reason, and 10% are not sure.

Read the rest of this story at Rasmussen Reports.