One of the cardinal creeds of the world’s climate alarmists is that there will be more severe flooding in a CO2-enriched warmer world; and one of their cardinal claims is that 20th-century warming has been unprecedented over the past two millennia ... and maybe a whole lot longer (Hansen et al., 2006). Hence, the world should have experienced some truly phenomenal flooding over the past century or so, and especially over the last few decades. But has it?

What was done
In a study that sheds some light on this question as it pertains to southwest Germany, Burger et al. review what is known about flooding in this region over the past three centuries, which takes us back into the Little Ice Age, when according to climate-alarmist “wisdom” flooding should have been much less significant than it has been recently.

What was learned

It’s official – buying carbon credits to offset CO2 emissions is like doing penance for sins, according to a high-level Vatican official. An article in The New York Times today, “Vatican Penance: Forgive Us Our Carbon Output,” focused on the Vatican’s plans to become the world’s first carbon-neutral state – by planting trees along the Tisza River in Hungary. The article notes:

“After the Vatican agreement was announced, Msgr. Melchor Sánchez de Toca Alameda, an official at the Council for Culture at the Vatican, told the Catholic News Service that buying credits was like doing penance. “One can emit less CO2 by not using heating and not driving a car, or one can do penance by intervening to offset emissions, in this case by planting trees,” he said.

Perhaps the Roman Catholic Church is trying to best its upstart competition – the Church of England in …

Die 8. UN-Konferenz zur Bekämpfung der bedrohlichen Ausbreitung der Wüsten in aller Welt ist gescheitert. 

Die Delegationen aus 191 Ländern verabschiedeten am Wochenende in Madrid zwar einen Aktionsplan für die kommenden zehn Jahre. Auf die notwendige Finanzierung konnten sie sich jedoch nicht einigen, obwohl es nach Presseberichten vom Sonntag um eine geringe Anhebung des vergleichsweise bescheidenen Budgets von 17 Millionen Euro ging. Dieses sollte um fünf Prozent erhöht werden.

Umweltschützer warfen den Industrieländern «Untätigkeit» und «Gleichgültigkeit» vor. Die Wüstenbildung bedrohe die Existenz von rund zwei Milliarden Menschen, einem Drittel der Weltbevölkerung.
http://www.co2-handel.de/article184_6756.html

Antarctica—a vast territory whose sea-ice growth in winter effectively doubles its size to envelop an area three times that of Canada—is the world’s coldest continent by far, its permanent ice sheet regulating the Antarctic atmosphere. It is also the world’s windiest and driest continent by far, and its highest by far, with a mean elevation of 2,300 metres.

It is also the world’s most remote continent, its least explored and least understood.

Not until 1998, with the advent of new technologies and improved scientific understanding, did human knowledge “allow the question of the global relevance of Antarctica to be explored in detail for the first time,” stated David Bromwich of the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University. A decade ago, Dr. Bromwich was embarking on a major research project for the National Science Foundation to begin to understand this frozen continent, which is the …

Addressing the urgent need for fighting fraud, forgery and plagiarism in science world-wide, the very first World Conference on Research Integrity is set to facilitate an unprecedented global effort to foster responsible research in Lisbon, Portugal from 16 to 19 September 2007.

The controversies surrounding the recent assessment report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change demonstrates how research integrity is a critical issue not only for the science community, but for politicians and the society as a whole as well. In August 2007 the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) had to withdraw previous published historical climate data. The incident came after a British mathematician discovered that the sources used by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) have disregarded the positions of weather stations, plus intentionally using outdated data on China from 1991 and ignoring revised data on the country from 1997.

Sergei Zimov bends down, picks up a handful of treacly mud and holds it up to his nose. It smells like a cow pat, but he knows better.

“It smells like mammoth dung,” he says.

This is more than just another symptom of global warming.

For millennia, layers of animal waste and other organic matter left behind by the creatures that used to roam the Arctic tundra have been sealed inside the frozen permafrost. Now climate change is thawing the permafrost and lifting this prehistoric ooze from suspended animation.

But Zimov, a scientist who for almost 30 years has studied climate change in Russia’s Arctic, believes that as this organic matter becomes exposed to the air it will accelerate global warming faster than even some of the most pessimistic forecasts.

“This will lead to a type of global warming which …

Madonna and Britney Spears have been targeted as the spreaders of “Satanic culture.”

The aggressive comments were launched by spokesman and senior leader of Palestinian terror group the Popular Resistance Committees, a group based in the Gaza Strip and responsible for the increase in shootings and bombings in the region.

Muhammad Abdel-Al is quoted in new book Schmoozing With Terrorists: From Hollywood To the Holy Land Jihadists Reveal Their Global Plans--To A Jew! attacks the two pop stars, labelling them “prostitutes.”

Abdel-Al rants, “If I meet these whores I will have the honor--I repeat, I will have the honor--to be the first one to cut the heads off Madonna and Britney Spears if they will keep spreading their Satanic culture against Islam.”

He continued, “If these two prostitutes keep doing what they are doing, we of course will punish them.”

…

If you were asked to name the biggest global-warming villains of the past 30 years, here’s one name that probably wouldn’t spring to mind: Jane Fonda. But should it?

In the movie “The China Syndrome,” Fonda played a California TV reporter filming an upbeat series about the state’s energy future. While visiting a nuclear power plant, she sees the engineers suddenly panic over what is later called a “swift containment of a potentially costly event.” When the plant’s corporate owner tries to cover up the accident, Fonda’s character persuades one engineer to blow the whistle on the possibility of a meltdown that could “render an area the size of Pennsylvania permanently uninhabitable.”

“The China Syndrome” opened on March 16, 1979. With the no-nukes protest movement in full swing, the movie was attacked by the nuclear industry as an irresponsible act of leftist fear-mongering. Twelve days later, …