CHURCHVILLE, VA—“2008 will be the hottest year in a century:†The Old Farmers’ Almanac, September 11, 2008.
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We’re now well into the earth’s third straight harsher winter—but in late 2007 it was still hard to forget 22 straight years of global warming from 1976–1998. So the Old Farmer’s Almanac predicted 2008 would be the hottest year [...]
CHURCHVILLE, VA—The United Nations’ new “senior advisor on waterâ€â€”a Canadian woman named Maude Barlow—says everybody has a right to water.
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What that means, I guess, is that I have a right to take a bucket down to Whiskey Creek—a mile away—and carry home enough water to drink (after I boiling it to kill any bacteria left [...]
CHURCHVILLE, VA—Now we’re going to give Ford, GM and Chrysler billions of dollars so the Feds can order them to build more “green†cars—with gas now costing $1.49 per gallon. How many Americans will pay $30,000 for one of these new high-mileage lightweights instead of getting a family-protective SUV for the same bucks? Or a [...]
CHURCHVILLE, VA—A North China cave stalagmite just produced an amazingly precise record of China’s rainfall over the past 1800 years, proving that variations in the sun’s activity—through weaker monsoons and poor rice crops—helped bring down three historic Chinese dynasties (the Tang, Yuan, and Ming dynasties).
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In contrast, the sun sent abundant rainfall for the Song [...]
CHURCHVILLE, VA—Incoming President Obama will undoubtedly call for a renewed crusade against greenhouse gas emissions. Will Thanksgiving dinners in the future feature kangaroo instead of turkey?
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Don’t get me wrong. Turkeys emit lots less greenhouse gas than beef cattle. Cattle today are fed lots of grain, and growing it requires nitrogen fertilizer (made with natural [...]
CHURCHVILLE, VA—The price of carbon has slumped in Europe’s emission trading—for the second time in two years. The long-term investments needed to reduce humanity’s greenhouse emissions are being discouraged. The carbon price is meant to offset the economic cost of shifting from coal, gas, and oil to non-fossil energy. If the carbon price is too [...]
CHURCHVILLE, VA— “As Barack Obama shifts from a waking dream to the real world, he faces the near-virtual reality of climate change. He has to move decisively.†(Ian McEwan, “A New Dawn,†Wall Street Journal, Nov8/9.)
What is near-virtual reality? I’m fascinated that McEwan starts his sermon upholding his belief in man-made global warming by quoting [...]
CHURCHVILLE, VA—China has now destroyed Western hopes for a new global warming agreement, just weeks before global talks in Poland aimed at writing a successor for the Kyoto Protocol— which expires in 2012. China has attached a ransom not to its Polish meeting RSVP: They might go along with a new warming pact if the [...]
CHUCHVILLE, VA—Alaska’s glaciers grew this year, after shrinking for most of the last 200 years. The reason?  Global temperatures dropped over the past 18 months. The global mean annual temperature has been declining recently because the solar wind thrown out by the sun has retreated to its smallest extent in at least 50 years. This [...]
CHURCHVILLE, VA—Imagine Africa feeding itself comfortably, instead of being overwhelmed by its own expanding population. Imagine millions of tropical consumers being fed without clearing more forests, thus protecting the wildlife in the very regions where most of the species of the world live and are critically threatened by population pressure. Suddenly, high-yield conservation for the [...]
