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Study: Earthworms May Contribute To Global Warming

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Photo Credit: APAs environmentalists and politicians fret about man-made global warming, they may be ignoring another culprit: earthworms. According to a new study by an international team of researchers, earthworms could be contributing to global warming.

The study looked at results from 237 separate experiments from published stories to explore earthworms’ role in affecting global warming.

“Our results suggest that although earthworms are largely beneficial to soil fertility, they increase net soil greenhouse-gas emissions,” according to the study’s abstract.

Worms affect how much carbon dioxide is produced in the soil and how much escapes into the atmosphere by altering the physical structure of the soil through burrowing, which makes it more porous. Earthworms interact with microbes in the soil that produce a large chunk of the carbon dioxide emissions.

There are concerns that earthworms increase greenhouse gas emissions, which troubles scientists since earthworm numbers are on the rise.

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An Inconvenient Truth: More Polar Bears Alive Today Than 40 Years Ago

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Photo Credit: AP/Dan JolingAuthor Zac Unger was originally drawn to the arctic circle to write a “mournful elegy” about how Global Warming was decimating the polar bear populations. He was surprised to find that the polar bears were not in such dire straits after all.

“There are far more polar bears alive today than there were 40 years ago,” Unger told NPR in an interview about his new book, “Never Look a Polar Bear in The Eye.” “There are about 25,000 polar bears alive today worldwide. In 1973, there was a global hunting ban. So once hunting was dramatically reduced, the population exploded.”

“This is not to say that global warming is not real or is not a problem for the polar bears,” Unger added. “But polar bear populations are large, and the truth is that we can’t look at it as a monolithic population that is all going one way or another.”

According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, there are an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 polar bears worldwide, living in Canada, Greenland, the northern Russian coast, islands of the Norwegian coast, and the northwest Alaskan coast.

Polar bears became a focal point for environmentalists after former Vice President Al Gore featured them in his 2006 global warming documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” The bears were classified as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act to in May 2008 because their habitat was being threatened by global warming.

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Report Shows UN Admitting Solar Activity May Play Significant Role in Global Warming

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The Earth has been getting warmer — but how much of that heat is due to greenhouse gas emissions and how much is due to natural causes?

A leaked report by a United Nations’ group dedicated to climate studies says that heat from the sun may play a larger role than previously thought.

“[Results] do suggest the possibility of a much larger impact of solar variations on the stratosphere than previously thought, and some studies have suggested that this may lead to significant regional impacts on climate,” reads a draft copy of a major, upcoming report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The man who leaked the report, StopGreenSuicide blogger Alec Rawls, told FoxNews.com that the U.N.’s statements on solar activity were his main motivation for leaking the document.

“The public needs to know now how the main premises and conclusions of the IPCC story line have been undercut by the IPCC itself,” Rawls wrote on his website in December, when he first leaked the report.

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Global Warming? Not So Much in -58 F Russia

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Russia is enduring its harshest winter in over 70 years, with temperatures plunging as low as -50 degrees Celsius [-58 F]. Dozens of people have already died, and almost 150 have been hospitalized.

The country has not witnessed such a long cold spell since 1938, meteorologists said, with temperatures 10 to 15 degrees lower than the seasonal norm all over Russia.

Across the country, 45 people have died due to the cold, and 266 have been taken to hospitals. In total, 542 people were injured due to the freezing temperatures, RIA Novosti reported.

The Moscow region saw temperatures of -17 to -18 degrees Celsius on Wednesday, and the record cold temperatures are expected to linger for at least three more days. Thermometers in Siberia touched -50 degrees Celsius, which is also abnormal for December.

The Emergency Ministry has issued warnings in 15 regions, which have been put on high alert over possible disruptions of communication and power.

Across the country, heat pipelines have broken down due to the cold. In southeastern Russia’s Samara, the cold has broken down many heat pipelines, leaving hundreds of homes without heating, including an orphanage and a rest house. Many schools and kindergartens have been closed for almost a week.

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Matt Ridley: Cooling Down the Fears of Climate Change

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Forget the Doha climate jamboree that ended earlier this month. The theological discussions in Qatar of the arcana of climate treaties are irrelevant. By far the most important debate about climate change is taking place among scientists, on the issue of climate sensitivity: How much warming will a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide actually produce? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has to pronounce its answer to this question in its Fifth Assessment Report next year.

The general public is not privy to the IPCC debate. But I have been speaking to somebody who understands the issues: Nic Lewis. A semiretired successful financier from Bath, England, with a strong mathematics and physics background, Mr. Lewis has made significant contributions to the subject of climate change.

He first collaborated with others to expose major statistical errors in a 2009 study of Antarctic temperatures. In 2011 he discovered that the IPCC had, by an unjustified statistical manipulation, altered the results of a key 2006 paper by Piers Forster of Reading University and Jonathan Gregory of the Met Office (the United Kingdom’s national weather service), to vastly increase the small risk that the paper showed of climate sensitivity being high. Mr. Lewis also found that the IPCC had misreported the results of another study, leading to the IPCC issuing an Erratum in 2011.

Mr. Lewis tells me that the latest observational estimates of the effect of aerosols (such as sulfurous particles from coal smoke) find that they have much less cooling effect than thought when the last IPCC report was written. The rate at which the ocean is absorbing greenhouse-gas-induced warming is also now known to be fairly modest. In other words, the two excuses used to explain away the slow, mild warming we have actually experienced—culminating in a standstill in which global temperatures are no higher than they were 16 years ago—no longer work.

In short: We can now estimate, based on observations, how sensitive the temperature is to carbon dioxide. We do not need to rely heavily on unproven models. Comparing the trend in global temperature over the past 100-150 years with the change in “radiative forcing” (heating or cooling power) from carbon dioxide, aerosols and other sources, minus ocean heat uptake, can now give a good estimate of climate sensitivity.

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More Global Warming Hysteria: Environmentalists Push For Nuclear Option in US Senate

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photo credit: bhamrecycled

More green groups are putting their weight behind an effort to change the Senate’s filibuster rules.

Friends of the Earth, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the League of Conservation Voters, Clean Water Action and Greenpeace signed onto a Monday letter to Democratic leaders calling for changes to the upper chamber’s rules, joining the Sierra Club, unions and social justice groups as members of the “Fix the Senate Now” campaign.

Green groups hope changes to Senate rules could make it easier to push clean energy and climate change-related bills through the chamber.

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Full-Court Press: Global Warming Hysteria Pushed by National Intelligence Council and Department of Defense?

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photo credit: donkeyhotey

A new U.S. intelligence community report finds that climate change will fuel new conflicts and competition for resources in coming decades.

The federal National Intelligence Council’s “Global Trends 2030” report issued Monday follows Defense Department analyses that have similarly called climate change an emerging security risk.

“Demand for food, water, and energy will grow by approximately 35, 40, and 50 percent respectively owing to an increase in the global population and the consumption patterns of an expanding middle class. Climate change will worsen the outlook for the availability of these critical resources,” the report states.

Elsewhere, it notes that climate change is among the factors that will drive conflict in some regions.

“[M]any developing and fragile states — such as in Sub-Saharan Africa — face increasing strains from resource constraints and climate change, pitting different tribal and ethnic groups against one another and accentuating the separation of various identities,” the report states.

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Murkowski Adds New Energy Committee Staff

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photo credit: lsgcp

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), the top Republican on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, is adding old and new faces to the panel’s GOP staff as she gears up for the new Congress.

Brian Hughes is returning to the committee after leaving in June to work as a speechwriter for the Romney-Ryan presidential campaign.

“Brian is one of those rare staffers who has both a great grasp of public policy and is also a gifted writer,” Murkowski said. Hughes, who is from Alaska, will work on alternative fuels, biofuels and vehicles policy.

Kate Williams will join the committee staff to handle oil-and-gas policy. She previously worked in the Senate as legislative director and chief counsel for the late Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska).

Williams, also an Alaskan, worked at the Anchorage law firm Birch, Horton, Bittner, Cherot after leaving the Senate in 2008 and most recently was with the Alaska Oil and Gas Association, an industry group.

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Lord Monckton Ejected From U.N. Climate Meeting For Telling Truth

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photo credit: harshil.shah

Stifling Dissent: A lone voice cried out against the global warming sham at the United Nations climate change conference and it was unceremoniously silenced. What are the alarmists afraid of?

Christopher Monckton, the third viscount of Benchley, adviser to Margaret Thatcher and global warming realist, shook up the U.N.’s talks in Doha, Qatar, when he told the delegates that “in the 16 years we have been coming to these conferences, there has been no global warming at all.”

“If we were to take action,” he continued, “the cost of that would be many times greater than the cost of taking adaptive measures later. So our recommendation, therefore, is that we should initiate very quickly a review of the science to make sure we are all on the right track.”

His statement was met with boos and heckles — and, of course, an ejection and seizure of his credentials.

The U.N. will justify the ejection on grounds that Monckton deceptively posed as a delegate from Burma when he spoke. But how else could a skeptic speak at such a gathering?

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Video: Climate Nazis Claim Exxon ‘Hates Your Children’

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photo credit: qnr

Two liberal groups hope to gain momentum for ending taxpayer backing of fossil fuel production by making a very strong allegation about the nation’s largest oil company.

“Here at Exxon, we hate your children,” states a faux-Exxon official in a new ad from the groups Oil Change International and The Other 98%. “We all know the climate crisis will rip their world apart, but we don’t care, because it is making us rich.”

The groups are raising money to buy TV time for the 30-second video.

As the “executive” speaks, viewers see images of extreme weather, such as violent storms and wildfires, that scientists say climate change will intensify.

The ad buy is slated to begin next week, but the locations and scope will depend on the online fundraising campaign, said Steve Kretzmann, the executive director of Oil Change International.

Read more from this story HERE.