We have had several requests from people wanting to know what they can do about the climate change information their children are receiving in school. We feel the best approach is to write a personal letter to you child's teacher.

A paper letter has far more impact than email, don't trust it to your child's backpack actually mail it to the teacher in care of the school. Or hand it to them yourself on your next visit. But even an email message would be better than nothing. To that end we have prepared an example letter to a teacher that you can use to get started. You can either copy and paste the web text or download the attached MS Word document. Be sure to personalize it with at least your name, your child's name, and the teacher's name.

The important thing is to educate your child's teacher. Most teachers aren't stupid but they too are only being educated by people who believe man is responsible for global warming. It starts in college where they often receive an education that is biased against man, against America, against our military, against oil companies, against "the right", against big corporations, against almost anything that is status quo. Of course they're taught growing up and in college that we must protect our environment at all costs. Combine those two influences and only surround yourself with others that have had the same influences and you get a teacher that knows nothing about natural climate change. All they understand is what self-absorbed charlatans like Al Gore teach them. Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" is very emotionally based and has had a huge impact on a lot of young teachers. All you can do is try to appeal to their intellect. 

"Good Morning America" weatherman and resident global warming alarmist Sam Champion wondered on Friday if climate change could cause "the ultimate climate disaster" and force humanity to abandon Earth and live in space. Throughout the program, various GMA hosts filed reports on space, astronauts and the effects of living in an environment with no gravity.

So, as a transition to yet another piece on liberal environmental issues, Champion segued, "And now to our series "Global Warming: Global Warning." Could global warming one day force us into space to live?" (The ABC weatherman appeared in a pool as part of a previous space segment on weightlessness.) Champion used the segment to preview a new documentary called "Six Degrees" that will air on the National Geographic Channel on Sunday. He also failed to inform viewers that the author upon which the special is based on, Mark Lynas, is a hard-left environmentalist who once threw a pie in the face of Bjrrn Lomborg at a reading of Lomborg's book, "The Skeptical Environmentalist."

Speaking of the famous pie throwing incident, Lynas, in other public comments, has justifed attacking someone who disagreed with him: "I wanted to put a baked Alaska in his smug face, in solidarity with the native Indian and Eskimo people in Alaska who are reporting rising temperatures, shrinking sea ice and worsening effects on animal and bird life." 

Firms seeking to advertise their green credentials should shun generic images associated with climate change such as polar bears and melting ice floes, according to a major new survey of green advertisements and consumer attitudes.

The study from picture agency Getty Images assessed 2,500 advertising campaigns from last year for its annual "What Makes a Picture (MAP) report and concluded that many of the conventional images used to promote green campaigns were in danger of becoming visual clichés.

"When it comes to the visual language of the environment, we are in danger of killing it as a meaningful symbol with visual cliché," said Lewis Blackwell, creative advisor at Getty Images. "The first lesson we must learn in order to grab any attention is to make Death to Environmentalism our mantra and kill off the clichés of ecology.

Rebecca Swift, global creative planning director at Getty Images, warned that pictures of ice caps and polar bears in particular "will not resonate with consumers in the future." 

Anyone who has ever debated someone of the liberal persuasion is aware that in those debates certain rules apply.  Take the (non)debate over global warming, or climate change, as more prescient liberals have begun to call it.

The rules governing this debate are that all evidence supporting the reality of anthropogenic climate change is admissible in argument, while no evidence that supports the opposite view is valid or admissible.

Hence during years that hurricane activity is particularly strong, such as 2005, the increase in that activity is evidence of man-made global warming.  Conversely, years during which hurricane activity is particularly mild are also evidence of man-made global warming.  Seasons such as the current winter, when China is experiencing the coldest temperatures recorded in over a century, are also to be considered evidence of man-made global warming.

Recently solar scientists discovered that solar flares appear to have ceased just over a year ago and have predicted a period of global cooling as a result.  This fact may not be used in arguments with anthropogenic climate change proponents because it would be contrary to their worldview. 

Because of politics in Salem, Oregon State University has been put in an embarrassing position. It has to create a new climate research center wanted by the legislature and hire someone to run it without appearing to muzzle George Taylor, the longtime state climatologist whose views on climate change are not exactly politically correct.

The university tried to wiggle out of the dilemma by praising Taylor’s work for Oregon farmers, ranchers and others but then declaring that he and the new director will “share the duties usually assumed by the state climatologist, although neither will formally hold that title ... . The institute director will lead the research function of a state climatologist and represent Oregon at relevant conferences; Taylor will provide the supporting mapping and data services.”

This might have been the best that OSU could do in the face of House Bill 3543, which establishes the climate research center. But it still sounds like an unkind and undeserved way to treat a man who has done outstanding and reliable work for Oregon for nearly two decades.

Global warming may not be entirely to blame for the collapse of an Antarctic ice shelf in 2002, according to research published today. The 10,000-year-old Larsen B ice shelf was initially believed to be a victim of climate change. But a paper published in the Journal of Glaciology claims the shelf had been teetering on collapse for decades. Professor Neil Glasser, of Aberystwyth University, the paper’s lead author, said cracks and fault lines in the ice had significantly weakened the structure. “A number of other atmospheric, oceanic and glaciological factors are involved. For example, the location and spacing of fractures on the ice shelf such as crevasses and rifts are very important too because they determine how strong or weak the ice shelf is.”

From their abstract: We define domains on the ice shelf related to glacier source areas and demonstrate that, prior to collapse, the central Larsen B ice shelf consisted of four sutured flow units fed by Crane, Jorum, Punchbowl and Hektoria/Green/Evans glaciers. Between these flow units were ‘suture zones’ of thinner ice where the feeder glaciers merged. Prior to collapse, large open-rift systems were present offshore of Foyn Point and Cape Disappointment. These rifts became more pronounced in the years preceding break-up, and ice blocks in the rifts rotated because of the strong lateral shear in this zone. We suggest that the ice shelf was preconditioned to collapse by partial rupturing of the sutures between flow units.  See full paper here.

Read rest...

The conference will take place on March 2-4 at the Marriott Marquis Hotel on Times Square in New York City. Hundreds of scientists, scholars, and policy analysts are expected to attend the event to discuss the latest scientific evidence challenging the unproven notion that human activity is the cause of global warming.

"Quite simply," said Heartland Senior Fellow James Taylor, principal organizer of the conference, "the debate is not settled. There is no consensus."

Taylor is preparing a two-day program with five tracks of concurrent sessions covering every aspect of the science, economics, and politics of climate change. the cosponsoring organizations have committed to recruiting speakers and guests and promoting the event.

"'The end of the world' is still the best front-page banner headline ever concocted to sell newspapers," said Jay Lehr, Ph.D., science director of The Heartland Institute. "Global climate models now substitute for gospels, stories about what might happen if we continue to sin, or go forth and sin no more.

"But these models, when run on actual climate data from the past, do not validate the past, and when fed accurate information they do not in fact predict a climate Armageddon," Lehr noted.  Read rest...

Growing crops to make biofuels may accelerate global warming, not slow down its effects, a new study says.

When farmers clear native ecosystems such as forests or grasslands to grow crops, this gives off substantial amounts of carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas that fuels climate change.

Biofuels such as ethanol from corn and biodiesel from palm oil typically start out with a "carbon debt."

Before these biofuels could reduce individual carbon dioxide emissions, they would first have to pay off this debt, which would take decades or centuries.

"I was surprised that with so many of the crops, it takes so long before you break even [on carbon emissions]," said study co-author David Tilman of the University of Minnesota in St. Paul. The university and the nonprofit group the Nature Conservancy conducted the study. 

Europe is facing an energy crisis because of green-influenced legislation and regulation, and difficulty in obtaining planning approval for key projects, energy companies warned yesterday.

Europe needs to spend €2tn (£1.5tn) on upgrading power networks in the next 25 years but leading energy companies have cancelled investments in new power plants worth billions of euros because of increased regulatory uncertainty, a senior executive claimed yesterday.

Johannes Teyssen, chief operating officer at E.ON, Germany's biggest energy group, blamed the European commission's plans to make companies pay for all their pollution permits from 2013, huge delays in approving planning applications and confusion among national regulators for the cancellations.

Teyssen, vice-chairman of the World Energy Council (WEC) Europe, said: "We see now every week a new investment project being cancelled across the EU." He cited at least four multibillion-euro projects to build power plants in Germany and said thousands of kilometres of new power lines were "lying on the table" because of planning delays. 

The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. The fact that the developed world went into hysterics over changes in global mean temperature of a few tenths of a degree will astound future generations.

Such hysteria simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the Goebbelian substitution of repetition for truth, and the exploitation of these weaknesses by politicians, environmental promoters, and, after 20 years of media drum beating, many others as well.

Climate is always changing. We have had ice ages and warmer periods when alligators were found in Spitzbergen. Ice ages have occurred in a hundred thousand year cycle for the last 700 thousand years, and previous warm periods appear to have been warmer than the present despite CO2 levels being lower than they are now. More recently, we have had the medieval warm period and the little ice age. During the latter, alpine glaciers advanced to the chagrin of overrun villages. 

Sunnyvale couple first in state convicted under Solar Shade Control Act

Talk about a clash of cherished green values.

In a case with statewide significance, the Santa Clara County District Attorney's office cited a Sunnyvale couple under a little-known California law because redwood trees in their backyard cast a shadow over their neighbor's solar panels.

Richard Treanor and Carolynn Bissett own a Prius and consider themselves environmentalists. But they refuse to cut down any of the trees behind their house on Benton Street, saying they've done nothing wrong.

"We're just living here in peace. We want to be left alone," said Bissett, who with her husband has spent $25,000 defending themselves against criminal charges. "We support solar power, but we thought common sense would prevail."

Their neighbor Mark Vargas considers himself an environmentalist too. His 10-kilowatt solar system that he installed in 2001 is so big he pays only about $60 a year in electrical bills. He drives an electric car.