Ancient Norse colonies hit bad climate times

Science News – New research reveals just how bad an idea it was to colonize Greenland and Iceland more than a millennium ago: average temperatures in Iceland – Read Article

Climate balance urged at ABC

The Australian -THE chairman of the ABC, Maurice Newman, has told about 250 leading journalists, program-makers and managers at the ABC that the media had displayed “group-think” on the issue of climate change in a speech that led to a feisty exchange with senior journalists- Read Article

Obama pushes senators for climate bill

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama made a renewed push for a long-stalled climate and energy bill Tuesday, urging lawmakers at a White House meeting to pass a comprehensive bill this year. Fourteen senators from both parties -Read Article

Greens protest genetically modified potato go-ahead

STRASBOURG (AFP) – Green members of the European parliament stood en masse and held up placards Tuesday in protest against the EU Commission approval of the cultivation of genetically modified potatoes. Read Article

Op-Ed: The climate industry wall of money

Somehow the tables have turned. For all the smears of big money funding the “deniers”, the numbers reveal that the sceptics are actually the true grassroots campaigners, while Greenpeace defends Wall St. How times have changed. Sceptics are fighting a billion dollar industry aligned with a trillion dollar trading scheme. Big Oil’s supposed evil influence has been vastly outdone by Big Government, and even those taxpayer billions are trumped by Big-Banking. The big-money side of this debate has fostered a myth that sceptics write what they write because they are funded by oil profits. They say, follow the money? So I did and it’s chilling. Greens and environmentalists need to be aware each time they smear with an ad hominem attack they are unwittingly helping giant finance houses. Read the full Op-Ed by Joanne Nova

Kangaroos – Victims of Factory Fluoride

The Age – SCORES of starving and pain-ridden kangaroos have been culled after developing tooth and bone deformities from breathing and ingesting fluoride emissions. Many more are believed to be suffering from growths that will kill them. The affected kangaroos are living near the Alcoa aluminium smelter in Portland, in the state’s south-west, and the Austral Bricks factory at Craigieburn. Read Article

Ed. – The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) currently sees itself as a regulatory agency, so they hide behind already established levels for poisons in emissions (not the environment). It makes for a peaceful relationship with the manufacturing corporations poisoning the environment, which suits most governments. This makes the EPA pretty toothless instead of being the powerful and innovative agency that they purport themselves to be. The EPA, or the manufacturer, could have chosen to be pro-active; they might have prevented a lot of unnecessary animal-suffering, now and in the future. When environmental poisoning like this is allowed to happen government agencies have very much ‘lost the plot’ – certainly their ‘vision’. EPA ‘plans’vs. P.2 – stated objectives

India officially gives support for Copenhagen accord

CTV News – NEW DELHI- India has officially agreed to sign on the nonbinding Copenhagen climate accord. Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh told parliament the decision implies that India stands by the accord. India, along with Brazil, China, South Africa, the EU and the U.S., forged the compromise at the Danish summit in December. But there was some concern earlier this year after several countries missed an initial deadline to express support for the accord that even the weak agreement would fall apart. Read Article

In Denial: The meltdown of the climate campaign.

Weekly Standard – It is increasingly clear that the leak of the internal emails and documents of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in November has done for the climate change debate what the Pentagon Papers did for the Vietnam war debate 40 years ago—changed the narrative decisively. Additional revelations of unethical behavior, errors, and serial exaggeration in climate science are rolling out on an almost daily basis, and there is good reason to expect more. The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), hitherto the gold standard in climate science, is under fire for shoddy work and facing calls for a serious shakeup. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the self-serving coalition of environmentalists and big business hoping to create a carbon cartel, is falling apart in the wake of the collapse of any prospect of enacting cap and trade in Congress. Meanwhile, the climate campaign’s fallback plan to have the EPA regulate greenhouse gas emissions through the cumbersome Clean Air Act is generating bipartisan opposition. The British media—even the left-leaning, climate alarmists of the Guardian and BBC—are turning on the climate campaign with a vengeance.  Read Article

Uganda plans to resettle 500,000 over mudslide risk

BBC – Half a million people will need to be moved from their homes in mountainous areas of Uganda because of the risk of mudslides, the government has said.Uganda has one of the highest population growth rates in the world but, as more people settle on the mountains, the trees have been felled to make way for agriculture – making mudslides and flooding more common.  Read Article

Palm oil: environmental curse or a blessing?

AFP _ It is blamed for everything from deforestation to threatening the extinction of the orangutan, but palm oil is a vital source of income for many developing countries, the crop’s producers say. In Indonesia, the world’s largest palm oil producer, where the plant provides work for three million people, the government is keen to promote the benefits of the crop. Read Article

Ed – The fact of the matter is however that most palm oil production is owned by big corporations (not the peasant farmers), that it leads to massive deforestation, and that despite this it still counts towards ‘carbon off-setting’ for corporations

Modify your weather, here

Financial Times – China Daily reports that the country’s Weather Modification Office says there is ‘rising demand’ for ways to control the weather: As drought and hailstorms pose severe threats to rural income and food supply, there is a rising demand for technology to cushion the impact, Zheng Guoguang told China Daily. What is weather modification, you ask? Well, it’s mostly cloud-seeding, and, in China at least, precipitating snowfall and preventing hail. Read Article

Researchers seek ’super’ bee cure for a deadly disorder

WASHINGTON TIMES -A team of researchers from universities across the nation are urgently trying to develop a strain of “super” honeybees to ward off a mysterious malady that has been decimating U.S. colonies for the past three years.Scientists continue to search for the cause of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), a malady that has greatly reduced the U.S. bee population. “Over the past three years on average, our surveys have said that we’ve lost about 30 percent of the (2.4 million) colonies nationwide,” said Jeffery Pettis, a lead bee researcher at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Of that figure, the government suspects 13 percent is because of CCD. Read Article

Shark Attacks In U.S. Decline In 2009 – overfishing a probable cause

AHN – The number of shark attacks in the United States has dropped sharply with the number of deaths from attacks dropping to unprecedented levels, according to the University of Florida’s annual shark attack report. There were 28 unprovoked shark attacks 2009, down from 41 attacks in 2008, the report found. The decline is about 30 percent nationwide and 40 percent in Florida, where most attacks occur.Worldwide, there were 61 attacks, including 20 in Australia and six in South Africa. In 2008, there were nearly the same number of attacks, 60. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Fish Watch says sharks are particularly vulnerable to overfishing because they take many years to mature and give birth to a few offspring at a time. Apart from overfishing, from which the species take years or decades to recover, sharks also fall victim to finning, an illegal practice the involves removing fins and discarding the carcass. Read Article

Wet summers drive five British butterflies close to extinction

The Independent – Three years of heavy rain and low temperatures made it hard for insects to fly. Five of Britain’s rarest butterflies are on the road to extinction after three sodden summers in a row, the charity Butterfly Conservation reveals today. Headed by the rapidly vanishing Duke of Burgundy, a small but very attractive insect whose wings are a lattice of marmalade-orange and black, the threatened species continued to plummet in numbers or remained at near rock bottom levels during the course of last summer. Read Article

Huge Garbage Patch Found in Atlantic Too

National Geographic – Billions of bits of plastic are accumulating in a massive garbage patch in the Atlantic Ocean—a lesser known cousin to the Texas-size trash vortex in the Pacific, scientists say.”Many people have heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” said Kara Lavender Law, an oceanographer at the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. “But this issue has essentially been ignored in the Atlantic.” The newly described garbage patch sits hundreds of miles off the North American coast. Although its east-west span is unknown, the patch covers a region between 22 and 38 degrees north latitude—roughly the distance from Cuba to Virginia Read Article

Strong earthquake hits eastern Turkey

BBC – A strong earthquake has struck eastern Turkey, killing at least 57 people, officials have said. The 6.0-magnitude quake, centred on the village of Basyurt in Elazig province, struck at 0432 (0232 GMT). It has been followed by more than 40 aftershocks. Read Article

Climate Fluctuations 115,000 Years Ago: Were Short Warm Periods Typical for Transitions to Glacial Epochs?

Science Daily — At the end of the last interglacial epoch, around 115,000 years ago, there were significant climate fluctuations. In Central and Eastern Europe, the slow transition from the Eemian Interglacial to the Weichselian Glacial was marked by a growing instability in vegetation trends with possibly at least two warming events. This is the finding of German and Russian climate researchers who have evaluated geochemical and pollen analyses of lake sediments in Saxony-Anhalt, Brandenburg and Russia. Read Article

Huge island of rubbish floating off California

Daily Telegraph – Oceanographers have found that a vast floating island of rubbish in the Pacific has doubled over a decade and is now nearly six times the size of Britain. The giant waste collection, known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” lies between California and Hawaii and has been gradually growing for 60 years. It contains everything from plastic bags to shampoo bottles, flip-flops, children’s toys, tyres, drink cans, Frisbees and plastic swimming pools. The soupy water is heavy with toxic chemicals and the broken-down plastic particles are now turning up inside fish. Up to 26 pieces of plastic were recently found inside a single fish and researchers have warned that the chemicals will work their way into the human food chain.  Read Article

Ed – As we have reported many times previously there are similar ‘islands’ of rubbish in all the other oceans too.

Shields down! Earth’s mag field may drop in a flash

New Scientist – EVEN if we knew precise details of Earth’s core, we would not be able to predict a catastrophic flip in the polarity of its magnetic field more than a decade or two ahead. Our planet’s magnetic field has reversed polarity from time to time throughout its history. Some models suggest that a flip would be completed in a year or two, but if, as others predict, it lasted decades or longer we would be left exposed to space radiation. This could short-circuit satellites, pose a risk to aircraft passengers and play havoc with electrical equipment on the ground. Read Article

British rivers could power 850,000 homes

Daily Telegraph – Rivers could be harnessed to generate electricity for almost a million homes with the building of up to 26,000 controversial hydropower turbines around the country, a report will say tomorrow. Read Article

A dubious defender of the scientific faith

Daily Telegraph – Some of America’s top ”warmist” scientists, demoralised at how their faith is being discredited, are planning a counter-attack on the “climate sceptics”, according to the Washington Times. “We’re not in a gentlepersons’ debate, we’re in a street fight against well-funded, merciless enemies who play by entirely different rules,” says Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University. As for “well-funded”, a new study by Jo Nova suggests that, in the US alone, the $79 billion (£52bn) of state funding for pro-warming research in the past 20 years outweighs the money given to climate sceptics by 3,500 to one. As for Prof Ehrlich, he is best known for his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb which, as well as catastrophic climate change, predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the 1970s. He also forecast that by 1980 the average age of death in the US would be 42, due to pesticides. Sounds like just the man to restore our faith in true “science”. Read Article

Quotation Of The Week

“Nothing to fear in God; Nothing to feel in death; Good can be attained; Evil can be endured”

- Epicurus, 3rd century BCE

Aboriginal Groups Chastise Royal Bank Canada For Oil-Sands Role

Wall Street Journal – Canada’s First Nations peoples chastised Royal Bank of Canada (RY) for not doing enough to prevent “an environmental holocaust,” at the bank’s annual meeting in Toronto Wednesday. Four aboriginal groups appealed to Canada’s biggest bank to use its corporate heft and political influence to stop Enbridge Inc. (ENB) from building a 725-mile pipeline to carry oil from Alberta’s tar sands through northern British Columbia to Kitimat, where it would be loaded on tankers for shipment to the U.S. west coast or Asia. Read Article

Fury as EU approves GM potato

The Independent – The introduction of a genetically modified potato in Europe risks the development of human diseases that fail to respond to antibiotics, it was claimed last night. German chemical giant BASF this week won approval from the European Commission for commercial growing of a starchy potato with a gene that could resist antibiotics – useful in the fight against illnesses such as tuberculosis. Farms in Germany, Sweden, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic may plant the potato for industrial use, with part of the tuber fed to cattle, according to BASF, which fought a 13-year battle to win approval for Amflora. But other EU member states, including Italy and Austria and anti-GM campaigners angrily attacked the move, claiming it could result in a health disaster. Read Article

Ed – Slowly but surely the global food supply falls under corporate patent. Irrespective of the possible health affects of GM crops, there are considerable civil liberties and moral implications of mankind’s most basic need being controlled by corporate psychology.

Popular Nanoparticle Causes Toxicity in Fish, Study Shows

Science Daily — A nanoparticle growing in popularity as a bactericidal agent has been shown to be toxic to fish, according to a Purdue University study. Tested on fathead minnows — an organism often used to test the effects of toxicity on aquatic life — nanosilver suspended in solution proved toxic and even lethal to the minnows. When the nanosilver was allowed to settle, the solution became several times less toxic but still caused malformations in the minnows. Read Article