Contradicting earlier findings supported by the Obama administration, new research suggests the record-high drought that affected agricultural production across the Great Plains region last year was, in fact, not caused by manmade global warming.

The lack of thunderstorms and rainfall in July and August last year led to the driest and hottest summer on record, creating drought conditions across two-thirds of the U.S. that were even hotter and drier than the infamous "dust bowl" during the Great Depression era.

According to the recent report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's drought unit, a "sequence of unfortunate events" occurred suddenly, making the drought unpredictable. The jet stream that typically pushes moist air from the Gulf region northward was stuck too far north in Canada and did not bring spring rains.

Last summer's record-smashing drought in the US heartland was driven far more by natural variability in weather patterns than by global warming, according to a new analysis by a team of federal and university researchers.

The study represents what its authors call a first cut at untangling the factors contributing to the drought – particularly to the hardest hit region in the Central Plains. The analysis does not explicitly exclude global warming as a player.

Instead, the researchers say that any one effect was too small to contribute to the time, place, and intensity of the drought in any significant way.

MinneapolisIt was hot in Washington, D.C. yesterday. Unfortunately, some Democrats couldn’t just sit back and enjoy it. The Hill reports:

House Democrats on Wednesday pointed to today’s record-setting heat in Washington D.C. as the latest sign that the Earth is warming.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) managed a speech on the House floor in which several Democrats joined to say that Congress needs to find a way forward on climate change in light of the growing number of incidents of extreme weather, which included Hurricane Sandy last year. …

Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) also cited today’s weather as a bad sign.

“In Memphis, it does occasionally get hot, but it also does in Washington. I think it’s supposed to be 90 today,” Cohen said.

The European Union's economic problems mean the bloc should be more flexible in the way it promotes a low-carbon economy and should broaden the focus of its energy policy beyond purely reducing greenhouse-gas emissions to ensuring that energy will remain affordable, the EU's energy chief said. Mr. Oettinger's comments signal a shift in the EU's clean-energy strategy, with a bigger focus on keeping down costs to preserve the competitiveness of the bloc's economy. In 2007, when the EU set its last binding targets for 2020 for greenhouse-gas emissions, renewable energy and efficiency, it focused almost exclusively on climate protection, Mr. Oettinger said. --Jan Hromadko, The Wall Street Journal, 10 April 2013

The EU’s chief scientific advisor has said that evidence allows the go-ahead for extracting shale gas, the energy source at the centre of a European policy tug-of-war. Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard has adopted a less favourable tone on shale gas, believing its extraction in Europe bears little comparison with the United States. But Anne Glover, the chief scientific adviser to Commission President José Manuel Barroso, contradicted this view and gave a scientific green light to shale. --EurActiv, 11 April 2013

The New Jersey chapter of the Sierra Club emailed to invite me to attend a “conversation on climate change in a post-Sandy New Jersey” intended to focus on the “impacts of fossil fuel pollution” later this month. “We need to take action to address and prevent the future impacts of climate change. Hurricane Sandy was the latest storm in an increasing trend of more extreme and severe weather.”

There isn’t “an increasing trend of more extreme weather” unless you include the current cooling cycle that has been in effect for the last 17 years, causing longer, more intense winters around the world. I doubt that the Greens can do anything about the Sun which has been in a natural cycle of reduced radiation.

As for hurricanes like Sandy, meteorologists will confirm that on average the U.S. can expect two major storm systems, categories 3 to 5, every three years. In all categories, the average is about five hurricanes that make landfall every three years. So, there is no increasing trend of more extreme weather. There is just the weather.

One doesn’t need to be a global-warming skeptic to be appalled by a new set of national K–12 science standards. Those standards, developed by educrats and science administrators, and likely to be adopted initially by up to two dozen states, put the study of global warming and other ways that humans are destroying life as we know it at the very core of science education. This is a political choice, not a scientific one. But the standards are equally troubling in their embrace of the nostrums of progressive pedagogy.

Students educated under the Next Generation Science Standardswill begin their lifelong attention to climate change as soon as they enter school. Kindergartners will be expected to “use tools and materials to design and build a structure that will reduce the warming effect of sunlight on an area” (perhaps this is what used to be known as “building a fort”) and “develop understanding of patterns and variations in local weather and the purpose of weather forecasting to prepare for, and respond to, severe weather.”

Maybe the greatest victory of all we climate sceptical bloggers have won in the aftermath of Climategate is this: we have established that "authority" – be it the Royal Society or NASA Giss or the Climatic Research Unit or the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change – does not have a monopoly on "truth."

Of course, the concept of argumentum ad verecundiam – the "appeal to authority" – was acknowledged as a rhetorical fallacy long before the invention of the internet.

But what the sceptical blogosphere has achieved in the last five or ten years has been to re-emphasise this point in a lively, thrilling, intellectually exciting, accessible way for a new generation of open-minded thinkers.

The first skirmish, as we know, was won long before Climategate by a "mere" mining engineer who had never once had a single lesson in climatology from the experts at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit but who yet demonstrated a better grasp of palaeoclimatology and statistical analysis than the entire official climate establishment. Before the internet, this almost certainly wouldn't have been possible. The climate establishment would have closed ranks – as it tried to do to shut out the unwelcome attentions of Steve McIntyre – and McIntyre would never have had the audience for his findings which he did with ClimateAudit.

According to the climate models, anthropogenic warming is supposed to predominantly manifest itself by increasing the winter temperatures th the middle latitudes - caused by the increased “greenhouse effect“ or increased amount of long wave infrared radiation LWIR from the sky to the surface. Children won’t know what the snow is, was the meme in 2000s after a string of warm winters in Europe.

Central England temperature vs Arctic oscillation index.

Meteor showers can be spectacular to watch. Year round there are some great displays, from the Perseids in August, to the Geminids in December, to the Quadrantids in January. The peak displays and intensities vary somewhat by year though, so knowing when to watch and what to expect can be hard to know. So I’ve created this guide to what should be the best meteor showers of 2013.

Some general meteor shower watching tips:

On Sunday, February 28, 2010, armed troops evicted villagers in Uganda’s Mubende district, to make way for a tree plantation. The troops were acting on behalf of a British forestry company that claims it fights global warming. The trees will supposedly absorb carbon dioxide, so that carbon-credits can be sold to transnational polluters, to stave off “dangerous manmade climate change and disruption.”

Long-time villagers in thriving communities were beaten by gun-toting soldiers who burned homes, destroyed crops and butchered livestock. Eight-year-old Friday Mukamperezida was sick in bed at home and was burned to death, while his mother was out getting medicine for the boy. Olivia Mukamperezida, the mother, was on her errand when she ran into friends who frantically told her to get home fast. When she got there, the house was sputtering to ashes. “I just cried,” she told a reporter. She buried her son’s bones, but isn’t sure if the grave is still there, now that the forest company planted its trees.