Honestly, at this point one has to wonder if much like writers for a daily comedy program there aren't teams of folks in offices around the world working 24 hours a day, seven days a week thinking up new bits of hysteria about climate change to scare the public.

With this mind, here's the next bit of nuttiness, this one coming from the Vancouver Sun (emphasis added, photo courtesy USGS):

Andrew Bolt

But having last month had a record one million visits to my own blog, pardon me if I issue a threat: that's changing.

Blogs - online journals, essentially - can be as trivial and unread as the usual Facebook page.

But the United States has already witnessed the rise of political blogs, and learned that even elections for president may turn on their needling.

What makes such blogs most effective are two things.

The $13 billion trade in carbon offsets has also come under withering attack over profiteering and scam projects to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Carbon offsets allow people and businesses to pay others to cut emissions of planet-warming gases on their behalf, and is meant to cut the cost of fighting climate change.

New UN data shows in the past three months UN approvers registered a third fewer projects compared to the same period last year, under a Kyoto Protocol scheme. New project applications, for example backing wind power or energy efficiency, hit a peak last July.

Bangladesh Parliament

Scientists from the Dhaka-based Center for Environment and Geographic Information Services (CEGIS) have studied 32 years of satellite images and say Bangladesh's landmass has increased by 20 square kilometres (eight square miles) annually.

Maminul Haque Sarker, head of the department at the government-owned centre that looks at boundary changes, told AFP sediment which travelled down the big Himalayan rivers -- the Ganges and the Brahmaputra -- had caused the landmass to increase.

The rivers, which meet in the centre of Bangladesh, carry more than a billion tonnes of sediment every year and most of it comes to rest on the southern coastline of the country in the Bay of Bengal where new territory is forming, he said in an interview on Tuesday.

DAILY, new evidence emerges to demonstrate that Climate Minister Penny Wong is wrong.

The latest blow to the Government’s apocalyptic prophet is news from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute that there is more ice than normal in the Arctic waters north of the Svalbard archipelago.

According to the Barents Observer there are open areas in this area in most years during July - but this year the area is covered by ice.

A fortnight ago a Norwegian research ship, Lance, and a Swedish ship, MV Stockholm, got stuck in the ice in the area and needed to be freed by the Norwegian Coast Guard.

While one ice floe does not amount to a mini-ice age, the dramatic evidence runs counter to the mantra of the climate warming cult which has claimed the Arctic is becoming progressively free of ice.

T. Boone Pickens

This column previously discussed the plan’s technical and economic shortcomings and marketing ruses. Today, we’ll look into the diabolical machinations behind it.

Simply put, Pickens’ pitch is “embrace wind power to help break our ‘addiction’ to foreign oil.” There is, however, another intriguing component to Pickens’ plan that goes unmentioned in his TV commercials, media interviews and web site -- water rights, which he owns more of than any other American.

Pickens hopes that his recent $100 million investment in 200,000 acres worth of groundwater rights in Roberts County, Texas, located over the Ogallala Aquifer, will earn him $1 billion. But there’s more to earning such a profit than simply acquiring the water. Rights-of-way must be purchased to install pipelines, and opposition from anti-development environmental groups must be overcome. Here’s where it gets interesting, according to information compiled by the Water Research Group, a small grassroots group focusing on local water issues in Texas.

Birmingham University (UK) has seen fit to publicise an article by Jean-Francois Mouhot from the Modern History Department entitled, 'Free the Planet,' which is published in the journal History Today. The University Media Release follows:

Slaves to Fossil Fuels - a Dangerous Warning from History

A historian has drawn uncomfortable parallels between our current attitudes to fossil fuels and climate change and the behaviour of mid 19th century slave owners, with worrying predictions for the future.

Jean-Francois Mouhot, from the University of Birmingham, calls for a recognition of “the evil of continuing to live as we currently do.” Comparing the attitude of slave owners with our modern day attitudes to oil says Mouhot, is valid and useful, because so many people acknowledge that owning slaves is wrong.

Mouhot says: “It is almost impossible in our contemporary world to live without relying on some sort of energy of the fossil variety. We are perhaps as much victims as culprits of a consumer society. However, our moral duty once we become aware of the evil of the system is to resist it.”

How to Reduce Carbon Dioxide, Create Fields of Green in the Desert and Solve Our Dependency on Foreign Oil

There is a lot of buzz about a new technology being touted as a possible solution in the “climate change crisis.” It is called a CO₂ scrubber, and it removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Just one would take a ton of CO₂ out of the air every day. I mean, everyone is talking about this. And when I say everybody, I pretty much mean Glenn Beck. Other than him and some in the blogosphere, the subject is almost non-existent. Just Google “CO₂ scrubber” and you can see what I mean.

The article continues that ocean warming eats the ice sheet from beneath, causing glaciers to calve and melt faster, changing patterns of migration and hence of hunting, which, it says, has a positive effect: warm-water cod have returned, and shops can now offer locally-grown vegetables. Recession of ice along the shore has exposed pockets of lead, zinc, and bauxite. More than 30 billion barrels of oil may also be reachable if there is further melting. Yet the thrust of the article is Apocalyptic.

The truth: The “Greenland is melting” scare is an old one, and long discredited. It was first given widespread currency by Al Gore, not a climatologist, in his sci-fi comedy horror movie about the climate – a movie that is now an international joke for serious, serial, scientific inaccuracy. In October 2007, a UK High Court Judge ordered the Department of Education to issue a disclaimer about several inaccuracies in the movie before innocent schoolchildren could be exposed to it. The learned Judge’s finding about Gore’s claim that sea level would imminently rise by 20 ft was blunt:

Detroit — More proof that we’re reliving the 1970s. . . .

Having passed legislation flogging U.S. automakers with a mandated fleet average of 35 mpg for by 2020 (an echo of 1975’s expensive 27 mpg mandate), Congress is now rushing in with first aid. Michigan’s Congressional delegation is making a major push to bail out U.S. automakers that are suffering disproportionate losses in the U.S. auto market (as happened in the late ’70s culminating in the rescue of Chrysler in 1979).

The Detroit News reported Tuesday that Democrat John Dingell is spearheading the package which includes “$5 billion in direct loans over five years; $3 billion a year for five years to help speed the retirement of 1.5 million older, less efficient vehicles; $2 billion over five years in tax breaks for advanced vehicles (and) $800 million over three years to develop an ‘advanced battery trust fund’ to help build three domestic battery manufacturing facilities.”

Additionally, more than 70 members have signed a letter urging five-year, $25-billion loan guarantees for automakers as part of a second stimulus package.

Here's a report that Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport, the small airport that serves corporate and private jets in the Denver area, is preparing for the huge influx of those arriving for the convention by private jet:

BROOMFIELD, Colo.— Denver AirCenter, Denver’s executive FBO located at Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport, is busily preparing for the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Denver this August. The DNC is expected to bring thousands of travelers to the area, many of whom will arrive on private and corporate aircraft that will land at Denver AirCenter.

The FBO, or fixed based operator, has established a DNC private air travel hotline at 800-525-8139 to field travel and planning questions from people coming to the convention via private, corporate and charter aircraft.

Denver AirCenter is also staffing up to ensure the seamless delivery of the concierge-level passenger and pilot services for which the FBO is known.

“We are anticipating an influx of aircraft looking for the closest landing spot to DNC activities and downtown Denver come August,” said Laura Turner, general manager. “No other airport offers a quicker trip to downtown Denver. We know that busy conventioneers will appreciate that the drive between Denver AirCenter and the DNC is much faster than traveling on the clogged routes between other airports and downtown.”

So much for going green and flying commercial.   Source

A poll commissioned by the NDP has found more than two-thirds of British Columbians oppose the provincial carbon tax, Opposition leader Carole James said Tuesday.

James said in an interview that British Columbians "want strong action on climate change," but "What British Columbians also believe is it has to be fair and it has to be effective."

James said the poll, conducted by Angus Reid Strategies July 11-13, confirmed her party's position that the government should target industrial producers contributing to global climate change.

She said respondents clearly want the province to focus on industrial producers of such products as aluminum, oil and gas to tackle the global climate-change challenge.