Next weekend is Memorial Day Weekend in the States, so CCD will be on a short vacation till next Tuesday, May 28.

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From the "Never eat yellow snow" department:

Reuters: The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear an Alaskan village's claim that it should be able to sue oil companies and utilities for damages attributed to climate change.

Lawyers for the village of Kivalina wanted various named defendants responsible for greenhouse emissions, including Exxon Mobil Corp, Chevron Corp and Duke Energy Corp, to pay damages for greater flooding and erosion that they say have caused by a reduction in sea ice.

New research suggests that the standstill in global temperature increases since 1998 means that global warming will be less severe than originally predicted in the coming decades as temperature estimates are adjusted downwards.

“The most extreme projections are looking less likely than before,” Dr. Alexander Otto of the University of Oxford told BBC News.

Researchers found the globe will warm about 20 percent more slowly in the coming decades than previously estimated. In 2007, the United Nations climate authority predicted that temperatures would rise between 1 degree Celsius and 3 degrees Celsius in the short term. However, this new report estimates that the globe will only warm between 0.9 degrees Celsius and 2.0 degrees Celsius.

Among the greatest liars on Earth today is the international organization called Friends of the Earth (FOE). It has engaged in the most scurrilous fear-mongering for decades, along with Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and the World Wildlife Fund, while all the time they pulled in billions in funding.

In May 2012, the Daily Caller noted that “The Congressional Research Service estimates that since 2008 the federal government has spent nearly $70 billion on ‘climate change activities.’” The leading critic in Congress, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) asked at the time, “Which would you rather have? Would you rather spend $4 billion on Air Force base solar panels, or would you rather have 28 new F-22s or 30 F-25s or modernized C-130s?”

Chemophobic anti-pesticide groups are at it again. This time they’re attacking a widely used and safe new insecticide, but their assertions and real agendas are nothing new.

Radical environmentalism rose to ascendancy on opposition to pesticides, specifically DDT. “If the environmentalists win on DDT,” Environmental Defense Fund scientist Charles Wurster told the Seattle Times in 1969, “they will achieve a level of authority they have never had before.” Using Rachel Carson’s often inaccurate book Silent Spring to drive a nasty campaign, they succeeded in getting the Environmental Protection Agency to ban US production and use of DDT in 1972, leading to a de facto global ban even to combat malaria.

The European Union, which has spearheaded efforts to curb global warming, is set to adopt a change of focus in response to concerns over costs and the impact on companies in economically depressed Europe. Under the change, the European Union will prioritize the supply of energy at affordable prices over cutting greenhouse gas emissions which impose burdens on industries, in a turnaround of the region’s energy policy, an EU official said Saturday. EU leaders will decide on the shift in energy policy at a meeting Wednesday. The change reflects requests from businesses in the 27-member zone amid the prolonged economic slump triggered by the eurozone sovereign debt crisis, the official said. --Kyodo News International, 18 May 2013

“The European Commission is already in ‘do nothing’ mode on climate change, and it will obviously put off a decision on ambitious targets,” the official said on the European Union’s post-2020 goals. The change in policy comes as some European companies are moving to shift operations out of the region to avoid increasing costs to meet the emissions-cut goals, and amid a decline in emission trading launched in the region in 2005. --Kyodo News International, 18 May 2013

The leader of the Scottish ­Government review of landownership yesterday pledged to examine ways of redistributing the cash wealthy lairds make from wind farms to benefit the less-advantaged. Alison Elliot, chair of the Land Reform Review Group (LRRG), said the issue would be investigated amid concerns that aristo­crats are benefiting from the renewables revolution while the poor grapple with fuel ­poverty. --Tom Peterkin, The Scotsman, 16 May 2013

Critics point out that landowners rent their land to renewable generators, whose wind farms are subsidised by extra levies on ordinary electricity consumers. Tory MEP Struan Stevenson’s estimates suggest that the Duke of Roxburghe could net £1.5 million a year from a wind farm on the Lammermuir Hills. The Earl of Moray is estimated to receive £2 million a year from a wind farm near Stirling. The Earl of Glasgow could be earning upwards of £300,000 a year from turbines on his Kelburn estate. --Tom Peterkin, The Scotsman, 16 May 2013

A Republican senator says allegations that the Environmental Protection Agency has made it more difficult for conservative groups to obtain information is no different from the burgeoning scandal at the IRS.

Shortly after the IRS admitted to targeting conservative groups, it was reported that the EPA has routinely denied fee waiver requests from conservative groups seeking government records, while at the same time, approving such requests to environmental groups.

“We know the Obama EPA has completely mismanaged FOIA, but granting fee waivers for their friends in the far-left environmental community, while simultaneously blocking conservative leaning groups from gaining access to information; is really no different than the IRS disaster,” Louisiana Republican Sen. David Vitter told the Daily Caller News Foundation in an emailed statement.

CCD Editor's note: John Cook is the creator of the website Skeptical Science.

I really have been struggling to summon up much enthusiasm for the inanities of John Cook's paper, but Brandon Schollenberger has written an extraordinary analysis of the data, which really has to be seen to be believed. Readers are no doubt aware that the paper involves rating abstracts of a whole bunch of research papers to see where they stand on the global warming question.

The guidelines for rating [the] abstracts show only the highest rating value blames the majority of global warming on humans. No other rating says how much humans contribute to global warming. The only time an abstract is rated as saying how much humans contribute to global warming is if it mentions:

that human activity is a dominant influence or has caused most of recent climate change (>50%).

If we use the system’s search feature for abstracts that meet this requirement, we get 65 results. That is 65, out of the 12,000+ examined abstracts. Not only is that value incredibly small, it is smaller than another value listed in the paper:

Reject AGW 0.7% (78)

The Associated Press reported a three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has dismissed a lawsuit alleging that emissions from power companies contributed to global warming and intensified Hurricane Katrina, causing property damage.

The lawsuit was filed by a group of Mississippi Gulf Coast resident and landowners against 32 different energy companies as well as the Tennessee Valley Authority, according to the report. The group had originally filed a lawsuit in 2007 in a case ultimately dismissed by the Fifth Circuit and denied a hearing by the U.S. Supreme Court.