For just £2 you can stop the Arctic from melting!

Anthony Watts has up an amusing mailout that he received from some Warmist fraudsters who are trying to get their slice of the  lucrative  climate action.  And how are they going to use all those £2 donations?  They are going to use the money to "blast out of the gate".

I was not sure what that exactly meant but I found a video that shows it.  Watch carefully and you will see it.  Turn up your  sound.  What a blast!



I think that summarizes Warmists pretty well.





A lot more than 1,000 words

Dr. John Christy participated in a conference on global warming last month, and presented some power points that make several points with respect to the ongoing climate debate. All of these observations will be familiar to Power Line readers, but Dr. Christy’s visuals are effective. You can view the power point slides here, and the accompanying text here. The following are some of Christy’s slides.

Tornadoes are not becoming more frequent. On the contrary:


Snow cover in the northern hemisphere, where the most plausible claims of warming have been made, is not diminishing:

In the U.S., the climate is getting neither wetter nor dryer:

High temperature records are not being set with unusual frequency:

The climate models that are the only basis for warming alarmism are refuted by observation, and therefore are simply wrong:

And, finally, even if the U.S. were to adopt unrealistically harsh measures to restrict carbon output by impoverishing Americans, the effect on the Earth’s climate–assuming the models are right–would be close to zero:

Global warming alarmism is, in my opinion, the worst scientific fraud in world history.

SOURCE





Obama's Climate Plans Face Yearslong Fight

When President Barack Obama lays out plans to tackle climate change in a speech Tuesday, including the first effort to curb greenhouse-gas emissions from existing power plants, he will unleash a yearslong battle that has little assurance of being resolved during his time in office.

The president has called climate change a "legacy issue," and his speech may head off a backlash from environmentalists should his administration approve the proposed Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada. But the address is unlikely to blunt criticism of Mr. Obama's approach from the left or the right.

He is set to propose a host of measures to help lower emissions of gases that climate scientists say contribute to climate change. These include ways to boost energy efficiency, promote cleaner energy and rein in emissions from the existing fleet of power plants, according to people briefed on the speech.

In a video released by the White House over the weekend, Mr. Obama said he would give his vision for a "national plan to reduce carbon pollution, prepare our country for the impacts of climate change and lead global efforts to fight it." Mr. Obama said earlier this year in his State of the Union address that he would use executive authority to fight climate change if Congress didn't act.

Rep. Henry Waxman (D., Calif.), the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said, "It is important for the president to act because the Congress is still denying the science and is not about to pass any legislation."

Industry has warned that tough new guidelines could lead to the retirement of a large number of coal-fired power plants, which could raise questions about electricity reliability. Many utility executives also say that new rules, by knocking relatively cheap coal off the grid, will lead to higher electricity prices that will disproportionately affect lower-income families.

Tom Kuhn, president of the Edison Electric Institute, said the electric-power industry "has long understood the importance of addressing climate change," and has been working for years to clean up the industry. Of the prospective new rules, he said his trade group will be "considering whether they mesh well with this ongoing transition, contain achievable compliance limits and deadlines, and minimize costs to customers."

Environmentalists were cheered by the prospect that Mr. Obama will tackle power-plant emissions. Frances Beinecke, the head of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the power sector could cut its emissions by about one-quarter with this approach, meaning the U.S. could cut its total emissions by 10%.

The rules are almost certain to bring legal challenges, but even without that the process is lengthy. The Environmental Protection Agency must first complete rules for new power plants, which have been in the works since 2011. In draft form, those rules essentially blocked the construction of new coal-fired plants. Once the draft rules are finished, environmental lawyers say, the EPA would need until at least late 2014 to propose and make final rules for existing plants.

What's more, the rules would be merely guidelines for states to draw up their own plans for restricting greenhouse gases. Allowing a year for that—plus more time for the EPA to rewrite state plans if it is dissatisfied with them—means the process could easily stretch out to the end of Mr. Obama's second term and beyond.

In much the same way that states have opted out of some parts of Mr. Obama's health-care law, states that have a rationale to resist new power-plant guidelines could push back against them, said Jeff Holmstead, a former top EPA official under President George W. Bush and now a partner at Bracewell & Giuliani LLP.

"EPA's guidelines have no legal effect on any particular plant, and they don't really legally bind the states," Mr. Holmstead said.

Environmental groups say EPA guidelines could give states a variety of ways to lower power-sector emissions, including energy efficiency, more renewable energy, and more efficient plants.

Environmentalists have been pressing Mr. Obama to target coal-fired power plants. Those calls have gained in urgency in recent months as an uptick in natural-gas prices has led to a revival of coal use in power generation.

Republicans say any discussion of rules for existing plants is premature because the new standards aren't complete. During confirmation hearings for Gina McCarthy, an EPA official nominated to lead the agency, Sen. David Vitter (R., La.) pressed her on this point, and Ms. McCarthy responded in writing, "EPA is not currently developing any existing source GHG [greenhouse gases] regulations for power plants."

In light of such comments, Mr. Obama is expected to avoid specifics when discussing his vision for existing power plants, but he is still hoping to assuage environmentalists who fear the president may be planning to approve the Keystone pipeline.

Tom Steyer, a wealthy investor and a leader of the anti-Keystone movement, said if that is the bargain the president is offering, environmentalists wouldn't accept it. Environmental groups "are getting something that they were always going to get anyway" on power plants, Mr. Steyer said.

SOURCE





Bureaucracy standing in the way of cheaper bread


Researchers in Britain have announced the development of a new strain of wheat that early reports suggest produce 30 percent greater yields than those currently in use.

Developed by the Cambridge-based National Institute of Agricultural Botany, the new strain came about as researchers mixed "ancient" seeds (from seed banks) with those from the modern era. Importantly, the process did not involve genetic modification as such grains have been banned in many countries. Instead, the researchers cross-bred samples and used embryo transfer techniques to bring about a wholly new strain of wheat. Its developers say that thus far, they've seen yield increase of up to 30 percent. They add that the new strain is hardier as well—able to stand up to pests and drought better than conventional wheat varieties.

The news comes as welcome relief to people in Britain as bad weather has led to less wheat production than normal, giving way to its importation for the first time in over a decade. More importantly, an increased wheat yield has become crucial as the world population continues to grow. Recent estimates suggest that as many as a fifth of all calories consumed by people worldwide, come from wheat. In contrast, scientists have noted that the last 15 years have seen little increase in wheat yields. Some scientists have suggested that wheat yields will have to double over the next half-century to keep ahead of population growth. Put another way, the researchers claim that the world will have to produce more wheat over the next 50 years than has been produced over the past 10,000 years in order to keep ahead of demand.

Wheat evolved from goat grasses co-incidentally or not, around the same time as people were beginning to learn to grow their own food, the research team notes, most likely in the Middle East. Since that time, humans have reduced the varieties of wheat that are grown, resulting in an erosion of the plant's natural diversity. Cross breeding modern strains with much older samples that have been preserved in seed banks will bring back some of that diversity, and in this case, hopefully lead to increased yields.

Unfortunately because of governmental regulations, the new wheat strain can't be grown commercially in Britain for five years. That time interval will give scientists and others time to more thoroughly investigate the new strain to ascertain if the initial findings hold

SOURCE






Where's that long awaited drought?

Now it's Canada's turn for flooding

A state of emergency remains in the western Canadian city of Calgary, after some of the worst flooding to hit the region in a century.

Officials in Alberta province have now ordered at least 75,000 people to evacuate their homes.

At least three people have been killed and one is missing after his canoe overturned in floodwaters.

The downtown area of Calgary resembles a lake and has been declared off limits. It will remain so until at least the middle of next week.

There is no electricity, railway tracks have been lifted and hundreds of houses are partially submerged.

Communities to the south and east of Calgary were on high alert as floodwaters moved across the region.

Downstream, the city of Medicine Hat, was bracing for the surge and 10,000 people there were ordered to leave.

Authorities in Calgary expect water levels to drop in the coming days, but the Bow River is still flowing at around five times its normal rate.

With rainfall easing, a few residents began returning to damaged homes and authorities were hopeful that the worst might be over.

The city's mayor, Naheed Nenshi, who was visibly tired after two days of crisis management, told residents: "If you want to help your city, the best thing you can do is stay home."

The floods followed about 36 hours of unusually heavy rainfall - some communities received six months of their normal rainfall in under two days.

They are shaping up to be significantly worse than the floods of 2005.

A spokesman for Imperial Oil, Canada's second-largest producer and refiner, said the company was working on plans to maintain essential operations, including allowing employees to work from other locations.

It was not clear when trading in Canadian crude oil would resume after little if any occurred on Friday.

Shorcan Energy Brokers, which provides live prices for many Canadian crude grades, operated out of Toronto on Friday rather than Calgary, although no trades in Western Canada Select heavy blend or light synthetic crude took place.

Net Energy Inc, the other main Calgary crude broker, was closed on Friday and no trading took place.

The flooding has affected the grounds of the Calgary Stampede, an annual extravaganza of cows, cowboys and horses scheduled to start on July 5.

Mr Nenshi insisted the rodeo would go ahead.

"We're Calgarians. We'll make it work," he said. It may look different, but the show will go on."

SOURCE






Britain's weather prophets should be chucked in the deep end

Homeowners lumbered with useless swimming pools know precisely who they should blame  -- says  Boris Johnson, the inimitable Mayor of London

The great thing about flying into London is that you get bags of time to see the countryside below. The congestion at Heathrow is so bad that many passengers circle above the Home Counties for half an hour, allowing themselves to be penetrated by the splendours of Surrey while their planes spew thousands of tons of CO2 into the upper air.

You can observe the way we live in the peri-urban world: the golf courses, the landfill sites, the pleasant whorls of detached houses; and over time the embourgeoisement of the British people has added an amenity that the Romans first introduced to this island. Look down on southern England, and you see the little winking ultramarine oblongs of the swimming pools – perhaps the greatest triumph of hope over experience in the history of English domestic architecture.

In Roman times, a swimming pool was a sign of taste, style and affluence, and in some of the biggest Romano-British villas you can see where Roman nobs frolicked and enjoyed the pleasures of water and nakedness. These days it would be fair to say that a swimming pool is a luxury – but not an unheard-of luxury. In the past 10 years there have been plenty of middle-class punters who have decided that they want a touch of Beverly Hills about their homes – and I know why they did it. They thought it would be nice for the kids and the grandchildren. They thought it might conceivably add to the value of their homes. In their secret hearts they hoped, forgivably, that it might provoke the envy of their neighbours.

But then there was an extra spur – the new and unanswerable imperative to find a way of keeping wet and cool. For more than 20 years now, we have been told that this country was going to get hotter and hotter and hotter, and that global warming was going to change our climate in a fundamental way. Do you remember that? We were told that Britain was going to have short, wet winters and long, roasting summers. It was going to be like 1976 all over again, with streakers at Lord’s and your Mr Whippy melting before you could even lick it, and Hyde Park scorched into a mini Kalahari.

They said we were never going to have snow again, and that we should prepare for southern England to turn gradually into a Mediterranean world. There were going to be olive groves in the Weald of Kent, and the whole place was going to be so generally broiling in summer that no one would be able to move between noon and 4pm, after which people would come out to play boules and sip pastis, to the whine of a mandolin, in the dusty square that had once been a village green.

That’s what they said: the BBC, and all the respectable meteorologists – and I reckon there were tens of thousands of people who took these prophecies entirely seriously. Omigod, they said to themselves, we are all going to fry. The only answer was to build a source of permanent refreshment – and so they did. They saved up, and they remortgaged, and they got in the diggers. They moved huge cuboids of earth and used them to create curious berms at the bottom of the garden, and then they lined these trenches with tiles (jolly expensive) or with a kind of blue plastic sheeting (virtually indistinguishable and much cheaper) and then they filled these holes with thousands of gallons of water that circulated endlessly by an unintelligible process known only to the people who had installed it but who seemed unfortunately to have gone bust.

They fought gallantly but in vain against the green slime, and to understand the balance of chemicals that the pool required; and they watched baffled as it oscillated – now choking with vegetation, now a glorified sheep dip of eye-stinging acid. Year after year they summoned up their courage, choked back their nausea and fished out the dead mice and the pallid corpses of worms bleached white by the chlorine. They sieved for leaves; they flipped out bugs with their hands; and all the while they were comforted with the thought that it was a sound investment.

They imagined the poolside parties they would have when the warming really kicked in: the barbecues; the bikinis; the pina coladas. They saw themselves on their lilos talking to their brokers on their mobile phones or getting up early on a glorious summer day and diving in unclothed when no one else was around. They thought they were doing the sensible thing and getting ready for a Californian lifestyle – and they were fools! Fools who believed that the global warming soothsayers really meant what they said or that they had a clue what the weather would be in the next 10 years.

I hope I don’t need to tell you that we have not experienced a Mediterranean climate – not since they started to tell us to expect it. On the contrary, we have had some pretty long and miserable winters – including the last one, in which I saw snow settle in London on four separate occasions – and our summer is at risk of becoming a bit of a farce. As I write these words, I am looking out yet again at lowering grey clouds, in what should be the peachiest time of year – and now these so-called weather forecasters and climate change buffs have the unbelievable effrontery to announce that they got it all wrong. They now think that we won’t have 10 years of blistering summer heat; on the contrary, it is apparently going to be 10 years of cold and wet.

It is outrageous. Think of all those honest hard-working folk who have sunk their resources into a pool, only to find they use it only a couple of times a summer, and even then the wind-chill is so bad that the swimmers get goosebumps as soon as they emerge. I am generally against the compensation culture, but in my mind’s eye I see a class action: aggrieved English pool-owners against the global warming prophets and the erroneous meteorologists who have, frankly, been taking the piscine.

SOURCE

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