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- Bishop Hill blog - Guardian: is totalitarianism the way forward?

Guardian Eco is, yet again, trying to set out its stall as the new home for totalitarianism in the international media, in an article questioning whether things would be a whole lot better if we didn't have freedom of the press any longer

Muzaffarnagar Muslims Freeze In Camps

With Rashida's death, the death toll in the relief camps reached 35.

Yakima Herald Republic | 16 dead as snow, severe cold pummel Midwest, East

BOSTON — Homeowners and motorists dug out across the white-blanketed Northeast on Friday as extreme cold ushered in by the storm threatened fingers and toes but kept the snow powdery and mercifully easy to shovel. At least 16 deaths were linked to the storm as it swept across the nation’s eastern half.

India - More deaths caused by the cold

31 Dec 2013 Dhaka (AsiaNews) – With the arrival of the first cold snap, at least 15 children have died in the northern districts of Bangladesh.

Three people killed by extreme cold in Pakistan

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Lack of accountability clouding the climate change debate

The world's so-called authority on climate change engages in exaggerated science and has become a political tool.

Do What I Say, Not as I Do: MSNBC Global Warming Edition - Amy Ridenour's National Center Blog - A Conservative Blog

Hayes has linked CAGW to various droughts and high temperature readings in selected locations and even the lack of snow at the 2013 Iditarod

The Solar Swindle | Somewhat Reasonable

Solar electricity is expensive and impractical. If it weren’t for government subsidies, some explicit and some disguised, the solar industry would collapse. The many claims of competitiveness are always based on ignoring subsidies provided to politically correct renewable power, ignoring the costs associated with unreliability, and ignoring the cost of backup fossil fuel plants.

Maryland’s Greens Following In Germany’s Footsteps - The American Interest

Why would a US state want to pick up with similar policies just at the moment that Europe is trying to retreat from them, especially when the US has capitalized so much more effectively on the shale revolution than Europe has? Maryland ought to learn from the European experience, and stop trying to prop up nascent technologies before it does even more harm to its most vulnerable citizens.

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Blog: The Global Warming Tipping Point is Near

Now the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has quietly downgraded their prediction for global warming for the next 30 years in the final draft of their landmark "Fifth Assessment Report." The effect of this is that they are tacitly admitting that the computer models they have religiously relied-upon for decades as "proof" of AGW theory are dead wrong.

The tipping point is near. I can smell it.

Arctic Sea Ice Extent Stats For 2013 | sunshine hours

2013 was ranked 30th out of 36 years for average anomaly above the 1981-2010 mean – just below 2009, but 530,000 sq km above 2012.

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- Bishop Hill blog - The bureaucracy's media defenders

The news this morning is that the Environment Agency is going to cut 1500 jobs in a bid to cut costs.

I’m Retiring from Full-Time Climate Change Blogging | Bob Tisdale – Climate Observations

as we well know, skeptics are not on the receiving end of billions of dollars in funding, so it may be a few years before I can afford to go back to blogging full time again.

Hydro- Québec running out of electricity for the province

MONTREAL, Jan. 2, 2014 – Hydro-Québec is anticipating high power consumption due to the extremely cold weather conditions prevailing now and forecast for the next few days. System demand is expected to be close to 38,000 MW. The last historical peak was 38,797 MW and occurred on January 23, 2013.

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At least there’s one positive thing happening because of climate change | Grist

The high-altitude Indian region of Ladakh, a chunk of the state of Kashmir that is home to many refugees from neighboring Tibet, is experiencing an agricultural boom as warmer weather sweeps up the mountainsides.

Bill Nye Wants To Wage War on Anti-Science Politics, Make a Movie—And Save the Planet From Asteroids | Mother Jones

When I ask Nye about what he considers his current top-three political passions, he responds: "Climate change, raise the standard of women around the world through education, asteroids."

Global Warming Model Estimates Major Reductions In Seafloor Marine Life By 2100

An international team of scientists predicts that seafloor dwelling marine life will decline by up to 38 percent in the North Atlantic and over five percent globally over the next century, due to global warming.

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New Year Storm to Dump Foot of Snow From NYC to Boston - Bloomberg

The European forecast models are “suggesting cold intensities in the Midwest to East Coast not seen for several years,” Matt Rogers, president of Commodity Weather Group in Bethesda, Maryland, said in a note to clients yesterday.

Questions Policymakers Should Be Asking Climate Scientists Who Receive Government Funding | Bob Tisdale – Climate Observations

Apparently, the climate science community, with their much-trumpeted numerical models, is no closer than they were decades ago at being able to detect any human fingerprint in global warming or climate change.

The New Nostradamus of the North: Ice trapped alarmist Australian climate change professor and his followers rescued - Australian taxpayers likely to foot the bill

as so often, the bill for the huge rescue operation, probably running up to several million dollars, is likely to be footed by the Australian taxpayers - money that could be used for some more meaningful purposes.

Among the rescued climate change tourists, one was the BBC's Andrew Luck-Baker (Senior Producer, BBC Radio Science Unit, Brighton, UK). Why on earth does the BBC waste money on this kind of useless global warming tourism?

New polar bear population status documents completed but have been withheld | polarbearscience

If the population estimate had gone down, you can bet your last dollar we’d have heard about it from every available media outlet immediately after the meeting — so it must have gone up

Remember when we were supposed to change our behavior so Green Bay Packers playoff games would be cold enough? High of 4F, low of -15F for game day Sunday

Bitter cold coming to Green Bay on Sunday | ProFootballTalk

The Weather Channel’s forecast for Sunday in Green Bay calls for a high of four degrees and a low of 15 below.

2008: Has Global Warming Hurt the Green Bay Packers? | The Deets

As if we needed another reason to tackle global warming, now even the Green Bay Packers could be affected, said LuCinda Hohmann, Field Organizer with Wisconsin Environment. Congress and the state legislature must get serious about global warming before rising temperatures fumble away the Packers home field advantage.

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Articles: A Few Easy Tests to Debunk Global Warming Hysteria

Man may have some influence over the climate, but the effect is likely to be very small. There is no cause for economy-disrupting control of carbon dioxide. Be very suspicious of those who advocate, and carry out, such a policy. They have something most unpleasant in mind.

Global Warming Researchers Ice-Bound; 96 Percent of Network Stories Censor Why Ship Is There | NewsBusters

Antarctic ice trapped a ship full of scientists on a climate change expedition. Yet, 96 percent of network news reports about the stranded researchers ignored climate change entirely. The ship has been stuck since Christmas morning.

Ship of Fools | Herald Sun Andrew Bolt Blog

But the embarrassment is so acute that the expedition organisers are pretending they were never that interested in global warming really

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Snow causes collapse of several P.E.I. roofs - Prince Edward Island - CBC News

Well over a metre of snow has fallen on P.E.I. this month.

The Global Warming Prophecy | NoFrakkingConsensus

At the heart of the climate change movement is the belief that we will be punished for our sins.

Plastic made from pollution hits U.S. market

"You'll be able to hold carbon in your hand," Herrema says of the products, which an independent lab says remove more carbon from the atmosphere than their manufacturing emits. By replacing oil-based plastics, he says he wants to help reduce global warming: "We actually want to change the world."

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Crowds go cold on climate cost

[Maurice Newman] From the UN down, the climate change delusion is a gigantic money tree. It is a tyranny that, despite its pretensions, favours the rich and politically powerful at the expense of the poor and powerless. But the madness of the crowds is waning and, as Mackay writes of the perpetrators: "Punishment is sure to overtake them sooner or later." We can only hope it comes before most of us descend into serfdom.

Two women die of exposure in Anchorage - Fairbanks Daily News-Miner: Alaska News

At least five other people have died outside in Anchorage this year.

An oily and murky environment in India

Ironically, this time it is Union Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas Veerappa Moily who has been offered the additional ‘role’ of handling the Environment portfolio. In certain quarters, the exit of his predecessor, Ms Jayanthi Natarajan, is being viewed as a punishment to her for taking a hard stand on green clearances for big infrastructure projects.

Before her, Mr Jairam Ramesh was also similarly shunted out of the Environment Ministry. The latter is often credited with having single-handedly put green issues on top of the Government’s agenda. No sooner than he had done that, he was booted out.

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Graham Holdings Co : One difference between climate change fears 90 years ago

The only difference being that, then, they did not destroy the countryside with useless wind turbines. Perhaps their politicians had more common sense in those days.

Canadian Cities May Set All-Time Record Low Temperatures This Week | Real Science

Mann-made global warming strikes again.

Skeptical view makes Australian front page: climate madness, dishonesty, fraud, deception, lies and exploitation says Maurice Newman « JoNova

The giant boondoggle is coming undone.

What makes this article remarkable is the strong language coming from a credible source on the front page of a major national daily. We have crossed another line in the decline and fall of the Great Global Warming Scare. Maurice Newman is chairman of the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council , was Chairman of the ABC, and of the board of the Australian Stock Exchange. He was Chancellor of Macquarie University until 2008. The Op-Ed and news article today sums up the worst of the last five years of climate, and is the first time I can recall seeing a well respected commentator use such unequivocal and damning language and so prominently. There is no hedging here, no pandering. Newman obviously reads skeptical blogs and is very aware of what is going on. Ponder that he was Chairman of their ABC, and if someone of his sensible insight could not clean it up, we need far more drastic action (that’s another topic we will explore soon).

"New" ClimateGate III email 923489557: UEA's Mike Hulme, April '99: "I'm dubious about forcing climate to be the main driver of environmental change...IPCC might like to have us think climate change is that important, but I don't believe it"

At 17:39 01/04/99 +0100, [Mike Hulme] wrote to UEA's Trevor Davies:

I'm dubious about forcing climate to be the main driver of environmental change. I think this smacks of convenience to us rather than intellectually defendable. IPCC might like to have us think climate change is that important, but I don't believe it. The main driver of environmental change is socio-economic-technological development. Changing climates provide an envelope within which the environment has to adapt to the human drivers of change - in some sectors and regions it is a very loose-fitting envelope and in other it is a little tighter....

Mike Hulme - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Mike Hulme is Professor of Climate and Culture in the Department of Geography at King's College London. He was formerly professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia (UEA). In 1988, after four years lecturing in geography at the University of Salford, he became for 12 years a senior researcher in the Climatic Research Unit, part of the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia. In October 2000 he founded the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, a distributed virtual network organisation headquartered at UEA, which he directed until July 2007

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Prepare for better weather: Sweden to hand out 29 mln free carbon allowances in January - Reuters News - Point Carbon

LONDON, Dec 30 (Reuters) - Sweden will hand out its 2013 allocation of almost 29 million free EU carbon allowances (EUAs) to big-emitting companies in early January, an analyst with the Swedish Energy Agency (SEA) said on Monday.

Bumper Apple Crop Causes Problems

ROCHESTER, N.Y. (AP) — This year’s expected record-breaking apple crop left many New York growers with fruit still on the trees and not enough storage space after the harvest.

Sun ‘Flips Upside Down’ As New Magnetic Cycle Begins | The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF)

The sun has “flipped upside down”, with its north and south poles reversed to reach the midpoint of Solar Cycle 24, Nasa has said.

Climate policies helped kill manufacturing, says Maurice Newman | The Australian

THE unprecedented cost of energy driven by the renewable energy target and the carbon tax had destroyed the nation's competitiveness, Tony Abbott's chief business adviser has declared. Maurice Newman also says climate change policies driven by "scientific delusion" have been a major factor in the collapse of Australia's manufacturing sector.

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IPCC “science” on sea-levels dumped by an Australian State Government « JoNova

It’s just another day on the road back to reality.

The New South Wales state government in Australia has announced it will tell its local councils that not only are they not bound by the IPCC sea-level predictions, they must do their own research on their own beaches. It’s the polite way of saying that no one believes the IPCC predictions anymore, worse, that they are so sure the IPCC is wrong that councils have to get different advice. For the IPCC it’s just one more signpost on the path to oblivion.

Greenpeace and Arctic oil: Both becoming irrelevant.

The success of the shale oil revolution in the US is causing such rapid changes in the world oil industry that few people outside of the industry are aware of them. Essentially, the stunning success of US shale oil makes the Arctic irrelevant.

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- Bishop Hill blog - Friends

So when the BBC were casting around for someone to look at impartiality in the BBC's science output they picked a man whose wife worked for the BBC and who was pals with the deep-green climate change secretary of the time.

Articles: The Solar Swindle

Solar energy and wind energy are nothing but a scam promoted by ideological fanatics in environmental organizations and allied special interests. We all pay for the scam with our taxes and with our electric bills.

Another unsupported claim of starving polar bears in Western Hudson Bay | polarbearscience

For the last two or three years Amstrup has been seeing “a lot of skinny bears” but hasn’t taken a single photograph that he’s offered for publication or posted at PBI? Makes you wonder, doesn’t it – where are the photos of all the starving bears these guys keep talking about?

Global warming struck the Greely (Arctic) Expedition in 1881: "amazingly easy" trip where they "should have encountered heavy pack ice"; "extraordinarily warm" summer

Complete Program Transcript . The Greely Expedition . WGBH American Experience | PBS

Philip Cronenwett, Historian: The trip up was amazingly easy. Given the time of year they should have encountered heavy pack ice which would have impeded their trip and it didn't. They were able to move up there rather quickly.

Narrator: The real surprise was the ease with which they ran the narrow stretch of water between Cape Sabine on the coast of Ellesmere Island, and Littleton Island on the Greenland side. The few whalers that ventured this far north often found the passage choked with ice that drifted south in the summer.

Lady Franklin Bay Expedition - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Unbeknownst to Greely, the summer had been extraordinarily warm, which led to an underestimation of the difficulties which their relief expeditions would face in reaching Lady Franklin Bay in subsequent years.

Hmm: Even as warmists try to convince us that CO2 is devastating Rwanda, the child mortality rate has plummeted 11.1% per year for two decades

Global greenhouse warming: Rwanda

Parts of Rwanda have been hit by persistent drought over the last few years, rainfall patterns have been erratic with the result that, again, farmers are confused as to when to plant and harvest. Musoni Didace, director of the country’s meteorological service says climate change is “clearly visible” from the rise in minimum temperatures in the last 30 years of up to two degrees. Indeed 2005, was the hottest year for many years in Rwanda. Temperatures in the capital, Kigali, soared to 35 °C. Higher temperatures also mean the spread of diseases such as malaria, already the principal cause of morbidity and mortality in every province.

The interaction between diseases is also of concern: someone with malaria, for example, will be more prone to catching HIV, and vice versa. Malnutrition also means diseases spread more rapidly. It is a vicious circle. And diseases thought to have died out, like cholera, are reappearing. New cholera cases were recorded for the first time in Kigali in 2006 and in the north-east in 2007.

Paul Farmer’s Graph of the Year: Rwanda’s plummeting child mortality rate

The country’s child mortality rate—once the world’s highest—has fallen at a pace of 11.1% per year, and is now in line with the global average.

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India: Monsoon in 2013 Sets Ground for Record Grain Production

The agriculture sector bounced back in 2013 after a drought year as the country is set to harvest record foodgrain production of 260 million tonnes because of good monsoons and achieve 5 per cent growth.

This year's crop freezing on the vines | GJSentinel.com

Only twice since 2009 have valley grape growers seen a full crop.

“Merlot doesn’t like it that cold,” Caspari noted.

$400,000 seats can ensure a warm Super Bowl - DailyHerald.com

Robert Tuchman, president of the sports and entertainment marketing company Goviva, said he's seen suites available on the secondary market for as much as $600,000, a price that may increase with each winter storm that rolls up the U.S. East Coast between now and game day on Feb. 2. This is the first Super Bowl to be held in a cold-weather city without a domed stadium.

Stricken Russian ship MV Akademik Shokalskiy with Aussie scientists aboard is playing the waiting game in Antarctica | News.com.au

there is no guarantee it will be able to reach the Russian ship and tests done by the scientists on board the vessel have found that the frozen wasteland encasing its hull is now between 3m and 4m thick.

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Extreme weather deaths at lowest ever despite ‘global warming’ « Australian Climate Madness

Better adaptation, construction and planning, affordable thanks to economic progress, has enabled a much larger population to cut death rates from 241 per million per year to just 5.

Hong Kong's cold, dirty weather to continue | South China Morning Post

Hong Kong will shiver its way out of 2013, with the cold, smoggy spell set to continue in the last few days of the year as polluted air flows in from the mainland.

The government opened cold-weather shelters for a third day yesterday and four elderly people were sent to hospital with hypothermia as the city recorded some of its lowest temperatures in three years. Two of the four people in hospital were in a serious condition last night.

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Brutally cold weather on the way for much of U.S. and Canada

Some major cities in Canada have a chance at reaching all-time record lows, provided the right conditions occur, including Montreal, Quebec City and Ottawa, Ontario.

Lesson for UP bureaucrats: Yes, people do die of cold. Here is how - Indian Express

This is in response to UP principal secretary (home) A K Gupta's comment that nobody dies of cold.

▶ Climate Change! N.Z. expedition trapped in Antarchtic ice, ice breaker too - YouTube

You can't make this stuff up.

Leading German Daily: “Also The Ice Breaker Gets Stuck!” Unable To Rescue Global-Warming Boatpeople From Sea Ice

The trapped boatpeople better start hoping for a little luck. Conditions down there are unpredictable and can get nasty quickly. One bad storm could spell serious delays and a lots of trouble. Moreover, expect the costs of the rescue efforts to run up into the millions.

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GISS Busted Again In Antarctica | Real Science

In 1958, the head US weather researcher said that Antarctic temperatures had risen five degrees in first half of the 20th century.
...
GISS shows zero warming in Antarctica during that period of five degree warming.

Truth Finds A Way | Real Science

The Guardian censored my comment, but through the magic of Twitter and Climate Depot – it made it there anyway.

Germany’s New Generation Of Coal Power Stations | NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

The new plant at Lunen follows the opening last month of another hard coal power plant in Dortmund, the first of ten new hard-coal power stations, amounting to 7,985 MW, that are scheduled to start producing electricity in the next two years, according to information from German grid regulator Bundesnetzagentur and operators.

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Antarctica – The Canary In The Cuckoo Mine | Real Science

Eighty three years ago today, Mawson was sailing along the Antarctic coast. In 2013, global warming nutcases trying to retrace Mawson’s route are hoping an icebreaker comes and saves them.

NOAA Says That They Don’t Know Why They Keep Making The Past Colder | Real Science

I’m guessing that it has to do with money.

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THE HOCKEY SCHTICK: UK taxpayers spent $49 million this year for wind farms to sit idle

£30 million for wind turbines that don't work when it's windy: Cost is £25 million higher than last year and paid for by household bills

Climate Change 2013: Where We Are Now - Not What You Think

At $200 per ton of CO2, we can remove 50 ppm CO2 from the atmosphere for $21 trillion. This is $13 trillion less than US military and health care spending from 2000 to 2009 ($34 trillion).

Why climate change hysteria is mostly bogus and wrong

Chicago has been covered by glaciers for about 90% of that last million years. Our 12,000 years of rapid human development has occurred during a particularly warm period in earth’s history.

Delhi: Demolition leaves 900 homeless in bitter cold | Niti Central

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The Big Freeze that became an unforgettable Frost Fair - Telegraph

Two hundred years ago, a dense fog heralded the onset of bitter weather that would see Londoners dancing and frolicking on the frozen Thames

Heavy snowfall may cause problems for Sochi Winter Olympics | Ice Age Now

There will be enough snow, that issue doesn’t disturb us,” said Alexander Frolov, head of the Russian Weather Service (Rosgidromet).

Time to recognize approaching Southern Hemisphere disaster | Climate Sanity

It is now the warm season in the Southern Hemisphere. Sea ice is making its seasonal retreat, yet the Russian cruise ship, Akademik Shokalskiy, is trapped in the sea ice with “52 tourists, scientists and explorers” and a crew of 22. You would think the combined brains of all those scientists on board would have kept them out of the zone of freezing water. While the ship’s brochure points out that “Views are excellent from the large, open decks and the Navigation Bridge’” maybe they couldn’t see the ice coming from the vantage point of the “Lounge and bar, open late afternoon and evening with a wide selection of wines and spirits” (an essential feature of all scientific research vessels). Our prayers go out to the scientists and others on this harrowing adventure as ice breakers race to free them the frozen grip of the sea. I hope the sauna stays warm and the booze holds out until they get there.

Original Temperatures: Czech Republic and Slovakia

For sure, yet again, the BEST project is not presenting reality.

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Climate-Science Boatpeople, In Search Of Global Warming Signs, Trapped In Thousands Of Kilometers Of Sea Ice!

The metaphor just couldn’t be more fitting: desperate true believers of global warming and accelerating polar ice melt now find themselves trapped by thousands of square kilometers of summertime sea ice that wasn’t supposed to be there.

No picture could better symbolize and communicate the intellectual bankruptcy and disillusionment of a faithful group who refuse to believe they have been led astray. This has to be deeply embarrassing, if not outright humiliating.

Unions must defend climate | Vancouver Observer

if corporations were people they would be diagnosed as psychopaths. They are ruthless in the single-minded pursuit of profit. Psychopaths feel no empathy for their victims. They do not care if the consequences of their actions could soon be the overheating of our planet to the degree that our grandchildren no longer have a habitable environment...Without the basics of life, being able to buy more things is meaningless.

Liberal run Ontario a ‘green energy laboratory’ : Prime time : SunNews Video Gallery

Ezra Levant discusses the total failure of the Ontario Liberal government’s green energy policies with PC MPP and shadow Energy Minister Lisa MacLeod.