Watch Tinfoil: Sen Whitehouse calls climate ‘denial’ is biggest ‘scam’ since Teapot Dome, Watergate
Study: Parched Earth soaks up water, slowing sea level rise
http://news.yahoo.com/parched-earth-soaks-water-slowing-sea-level-rise-231245199.html
Miami (AFP) – As glaciers melt due to climate change, the increasingly hot and parched Earth is absorbing some of that water inland, slowing sea level rise, NASA experts said Thursday.
Satellite measurements over the past decade show for the first time that the Earth’s continents have soaked up and stored an extra 3.2 trillion tons of water in soils, lakes and underground aquifers, the experts said in a study in the journal Science.
This has temporarily slowed the rate of sea level rise by about 20 percent, it said.
“We always assumed that people’s increased reliance on groundwater for irrigation and consumption was resulting in a net transfer of water from the land to the ocean,” said lead author J.T. Reager of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“What we didn’t realize until now is that over the past decade, changes in the global water cycle more than offset the losses that occurred from groundwater pumping, causing the land to act like a sponge — at least temporarily.”…
Bipartisan panel of politicos: Climate skepticism does not harm Republicans in general election
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/insiders-keystone-climate-science-republicans-219102
Republicans, meanwhile, don’t believe that their candidates — the majority of whom don’t believe human activity is altering the climate — are jeopardizing their electability in the general by opposing changing public policy to address the perceived threats of climate change.
More than 90 percent of Republicans — surveyed last month prior to the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary — said they don’t believe a candidate who doesn’t believe in man-made climate change is unelectable.
“Climate change is simply not a front-burner issue to most people,” said one South Carolina Republican, who, like all respondents, completed the survey anonymously.
Another South Carolina Republican was blunter: “’I really like their jobs plan, but, boy, I don’t know about their position on climate change,’ said no blue-collar swing voter, ever.”
One Nevada Republican compared the issue of climate change to another topic on which the polls are lopsided, but few voters actually choose candidates on that basis.
“It’s like campaign finance reform,” the Republican said. “Everybody was for it, but few voted on it as a determining issue.”
Democratic insiders were split on the question of whether disputing the notion of manmade climate change would be damaging in a general election. Some thought voters would balk at a candidate who denies the balance of scientific research, but others thought climate change isn’t a major issue for voters.
“I don’t believe this is a critical issue for many voters when compared to [the] economy and national security,” said a Nevada Democrat.
A handful of Republicans want their party to embrace the idea of climate change — but not to enact policies that harm the economy in order to address it.
“You don’t have to be a tree-hugging granola liberal to realize that man’s having an effect on the planet,” an Iowa Republican said. “To blindly deny man’s effect on the planet is as intellectually dishonest as saying only the U.S. can fix the problem. The truth lies somewhere in between.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/insiders-keystone-climate-science-republicans-219102#ixzz3zsM5V600…
WaPo: Gov’t Needs To Relocate Those Victimized By Global Warming
President Barack Obama’s FY 2017 federal budget repeals oil and gas revenue sharing payments and uses a portion of the money to relocate coastal Alaskan communities supposedly ravaged by “climate change,” prompting global warming alarmists to sing his praises.
The Washington Post’s environmental reporter, Chris Mooney, told his readers Tuesday the move to redirect money from a shuttered oil and gas revenue sharing program for relocating Kivalina, a small Alaskan village of about 400, is a good thing because it illustrates how serious the president is on the issue.
Nearly $400 million of a $2 billion Coastal Climate Resilience program in Obama’s budget is allocated to cover Alaskan communities supposedly scarred by global warming, including expenses accrued while relocating towns afflicted by coastal erosion, among other environmental calamities.
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2016/02/11/obamas-budget-short-changes-states-to-relocate-entire-american-towns/#ixzz3zsGAjXW5…
Clinton’s Solar Scheme Would Cost Taxpayers $200 Billion/Year, Have No Effect on CO2 Levels
BBC: Climate change ‘to make transatlantic flights longer’
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35533761
Flights from the UK to the US could take longer due to the changes in the climate, according to a new study.
Global warming is likely to speed up the jet stream, say researchers, and slow down aeroplanes heading for the US.
While eastbound flights from the US will be quicker, roundtrip journeys will “significantly lengthen”.
The University of Reading scientists believe the changes will increase carbon emissions and fuel consumption and potentially raise ticket prices.
The study has been published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.…
How the Environmental Movement Morphed into the Climate Change Movement
Obama’s NASA Budget Is All About Global Warming, Not Space
http://dailycaller.com/2016/02/10/obamas-nasa-budget-is-all-about-global-warming-not-space/
The NASA budget President Barack Obama released Tuesday is far more concerned with spending cash on global warming research than supporting the agency’s mission of space exploration.
The top scientific question the space agency claims it wants to answer in its budget justification is “How are Earth’s climate and the environment changing?” The more typical space questions, such as “Are we alone?” and “How does the universe work?,” were at the very bottom of the list.
“This administration cannot continue to tout plans to send astronauts to Mars while strangling the programs that will take us there,” Texas Republican Rep. Lamar Smith , chairman of the House Science Committee, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “President Obama’s 2017 budget proposal shrinks our deep space exploration programs by more than $800 million. And the administration once more proposes cuts of more than $100 million to the Planetary Science accounts, which have previously funded missions like this past year’s Pluto flyby.”
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2016/02/10/obamas-nasa-budget-is-all-about-global-warming-not-space/#ixzz3zs9xdAnK…
Supreme Court Blocks Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan
Aussie CSIRO boss Larry Marshall: Politics of climate ‘more like religion than science’
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-02-11/csiro-boss-apologises-for-climate-religion-comments/7160288
CSIRO chief Larry Marshall has apologised for describing the emotion of the climate debate as almost “more religion than science”.
Key points:The CSIRO boss apologises for referencing religion in climate debateHe said he was referring to the ‘passionate zeal around the issue’Dr Marshall defended this CSIRO shake-up, despite international backlash
Dr Marshall had told the ABC the backlash from his decision to restructure the organisation made him feel like an “early climate scientist in the ’70s fighting against the oil lobby” and that there was so much emotion in the debate it almost “sounded more like religion than science”.
He also said he would not be backing down on his controversial shakeup of the organisation’s climate divisions, telling the ABC he was yet to be persuaded.
At Senate estimates Thursday afternoon he backed away from those comments.
“I’d like to apologise for any offence I may have caused to anyone with respect to my reference to religion,” Dr Marshall said.
“I was merely referring to the passionate zeal around this issue, not any other reference, and I deeply apologise.”…