Five dollars per gallon of gas by 2012! A former president of Shell Oil considers this likely.

http://townhall.com/columnists/LarryElder/2010/12/30/$5_gas_predicted_under_obama_--_what,_no_pitchforks

Very interesting Minneapolis Star Tribune comment on solar energy by someone who installs it.

Main story. http://www.startribune.com/local/112486579.html

http://comments.startribune.com/comments.php?d=asset_comments&asset_id=112486579&sort=E&section=/local&start=20

The environmental math challenge is showing here. We can save $1,330 per year for a system that cost $61,670 and have a 10 year payback. Maybe the Star should buy the author a calculator to check facts. I have installed large solar projects and I am invested in a wind company through family ownership. Solar and wind are both great tools where you don't have an electric line running. When you use wind to supplement available electric you are paying 20 times the cost for the additional electricity. As far as heating water for showers ect, a good rule of thumb is that the solar will heat water 15 degrees higher then the outside temperature. A shower on a sunny 60 degree day with 75 degree water may not be very comfortable. Remember, these are your tax dollars being squandered here and they are being thrown away on these useless, feel good projects.

posted by notaxmax on Dec. 27, 10 at 8:16 AM

The Abiding Faith Of Warm-ongers. "This is what global warming is really about — wealth redistribution,basically socialist".

http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=557597&p=2

Pradva-Russia:New theory of climate change

http://english.pravda.ru/science/earth/30-11-2010/115987-climate_change-0/

For many years, climatologists attempted to correlate the number of sunspots with various climate variables, including temperature and precipitation. By the 1980s these attempts were determined to be futile, because the percentage change in solar heating was found to be insufficient to explain the variations. However, this interest began to increase the connection between cosmic rays and sunspots, carbon-14 in the atmosphere, beryllium-10 on the surface of meteorites, and other processes. In particular, it was found that carbon-14 dating needed to be corrected for fluctuations in cosmic ray flux. Without such adjustments, many carbon-14 dates were inconsistent. The question was raised, could cosmic rays affect other geophysical phenomena as well?

A New Climate Theory
(full story at link)

top six snowstorms in the twin cities

Irony alert: The unusually chilly global-warming summit

http://theweek.com/article/index/210181/irony-alert-the-unusually-chilly-global-warming-summit

The irony: As negotiators fromnearly 200 countries met in Cancun to strategize ways to keep the planet from getting hotter, the temperature in the seaside Mexican city plunged to a 100-year record low of 54° F. Climate-change skeptics are gleefully calling Cancun's weather the latest example of the "Gore Effect" — a plunge in temperature they say occurs wherever former Vice President Al Gore, now a Nobel Prize-winning environmental activist, makes a speech about the climate. Although Gore is not scheduled to speak in Cancun, "it could be that the Gore Effect has announced his secret arrival," jokes former NASA scientist Roy W. Spencer. (MORE AT LINK)

Scientists see fatal flaws in the NASA study of arsenic-based life.

http://www.slate.com/id/2276919/?from=rss

But how could the bacteria be using phosphate when they weren't getting any in the lab? That was the point of the experiment, after all. It turns out the NASA scientists were feeding the bacteria salts which they freely admit were contaminated with a tiny amount of phosphate. It's possible, the critics argue, that the bacteria eked out a living on that scarce supply. As Bradley notes, the Sargasso Sea supports plenty of microbes while containing 300 times less phosphate than was present in the lab cultures.

FULL ARTICLE AT LINK