Weather Channel Founder Blasts Network The Weather Channel has lost its way, according to John Coleman, who founded the channel in 1982. Coleman told an audience at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change on March 3 in New York that he is highly critical of global warming alarmism. “The Weather Channel had great promise, and that’s all gone now because they’ve made every mistake in the book on what they’ve done and how they’ve done it and it’s very sad,” Coleman said. “It’s now for sale and there’s a new owner of The Weather Channel will be announced – several billion dollars having changed hands in the near future. Let’s hope the new owners can recapture the vision and stop reporting the traffic, telling us what to think and start giving us useful weather information.” The Weather Channel has been an outlet for global warming alarmism. In December 2006, The Weather Channel’s Heidi Cullen argued on her blog that weathercasters who had doubts about human influence on global warming should be punished with decertification by the American Meteorological Society. Coleman also told the audience his strategy for exposing what he called “the fraud of global warming.” He advocated suing those who sell carbon credits, which would force global warming alarmists to give a more honest account of the policies they propose. “[I] have a feeling this is the opening,” Coleman said. “If the lawyers will take the case – sue the people who sell carbon credits. That includes Al Gore. That lawsuit would get so much publicity, so much media attention. And as the experts went to the media stand to testify, I feel like that could become the vehicle to finally put some light on the fraud of global warming.”....
Dispatches from the International Conference on Climate Change Michaels then turned to various climate change puzzles. Is Antarctica melting, he asked? Exhibit A in the Antarctica warming story is the 2002 collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf on the Antarctic peninsula. However, as Michaels showed, the peninsula is a very small area of the southern continent and most of Antarctica shows no warming trend. In fact, the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report (4AR), released in 2007, found that "current global model studies project that the Antarctic ice sheet will remain too cold for widespread surface melting." Michaels sardonically noted that former Vice President Al Gore did not say that sea level would rise by 20 feet in his movie, An Inconvenient Truth; he just showed animations of such a sea-level rise. What about Greenland? Michaels displayed temperature records showing that Greenland's temperatures had been higher in the earlier part of the 20th century. In particular he cited a 2006 study by Danish researchers who reported, "The warmest year in the extended Greenland temperature record is 1941, while the 1930s and 1940s are the warmest decades." Michaels suggested that Greenland was losing about 25 cubic miles of ice annually. He further noted that there are about 690,000 cubic miles of ice locked up in Greenland's ice cap. At that rate of melting, Greenland's ice cap would shrink by less than 0.4 percent over the next century. According to recent reports, Greenland's ice cap is now losing about 57 cubic miles of ice annually. If that rate were sustained over the next 100 years, a little over 0.8 percent of the ice cap would melt away into the oceans. Michaels also talked about the recent steep reduction in summer Arctic sea ice. However, he pointed to research by UCLA biological geographer Glen MacDonald and his colleagues who found that the Eurasian tree line reached as far as the shores of the Arctic Ocean 9,000 to 7,000 years ago. Why? Because "the mean July temperatures along the northern coastline of Russia may have been 2.5° to 7.0° celsius warmer than modern [ones]." This implies considerably reduced Arctic sea ice cover lasting for centuries in the past. Michaels noted in passing that polar bears survived that warmer period....
Should biotech piggy go to market? In January, when the FDA declared that cloned animals and their progeny are safe to eat, it opened the door to genetic engineering, a prospect that hasn't been widely reported, but one that has plenty of consumer advocates concerned. For livestock professionals like Kelley, the FDA's decision, and a meeting the U.S. Department of Agriculture held in late November to seek guidance on how to work with transgenic animals, signal that the U.S. is primed to consider the public's appetite for G.E. animals. They say it is a sign that the agency is beginning to take more seriously the job of creating regulations for G.E. animals. To clone an animal, a cell nucleus is taken from an "elite" animal, implanted into an egg whose nucleus has been removed, cultivated into an embryo in a lab, and then implanted in the womb of a surrogate "mother" of the same species. To genetically engineer an animal, scientists splice foreign genes, generally from some other type of animal, into a nucleus, and then implant the modified embryo into a host mother. Creating a transgenic animal is incredibly difficult and expensive, prone to mistakes that can cause the premature death of animals. "Genetic engineering doesn't work all that well," says Hanson. He points out that once genetic farmers produce the perfect animal through trial and error, they will save a tremendous amount of money by cloning its genotype -- which is why they welcome the FDA ruling. "When they find it works in an animal, they want to copy it with cloning," Hanson says. "Cloning is how you Xerox your success."....
California cows start passing gas to the grid Imagine a vat of liquid cow manure covering the area of five football fields and 33 feet deep. Meet California's most alternative new energy. On a dairy farm in the Golden State's agricultural heartland, utility PG&E Corp began on Tuesday producing natural gas derived from manure, in what it hopes will be a new way to power homes with renewable, if not entirely clean, energy. The Vintage Dairy Biogas Project, the brainchild of life- long dairyman David Albers, aims to provide the natural gas needed to power 1,200 homes a day, Albers said at the facility's inauguration ceremony. In addition to being a partner in the 5,000-head Vintage Dairy, Albers is also president of BioEnergy Solutions, the company that funded and built the facility which cost millions of dollars. PG&E is simply a customer and the companies declined to give details of project finances. As cow manure decomposes, it produces methane, a greenhouse gas more potent than carbon dioxide. As luck would have it, methane can be captured and treated to produce renewable gas, and California regulators have directed PG&E and other utilities to make renewable energy at least 20 percent of their electricity supplies by 2010....So, will we be cloning cows based on how much gas - they can pass - to the grid?....Will vegans refuse to use the gas?