Green Group Blasts Media for Backing Off

President's miscalculations include scale, momentum

(NEWSER) - Scott Brown’s Senate victory in Massachusetts is the final nail in the coffin of the Obama administration’s first-year political strategy, John F. Harris and Carol E. Lee write for Politico . The miscalculations cover “three major counts":

• Believing 2008 was a game-changer: The Obama team thought the "election represented something seismic." But "the assumption that Obama would be swimming mostly with the current rather than often against it on issues such as health care, financial regulation and global warming was naive in retrospect."

VP pick has denied warming is man-made, focused on adapting, not reversing

(NEWSER) - Sarah Palin disagrees with both John McCain and scientific consensus on the causes of global warming, acknowledging that while Alaska has warmed by 4 degrees during the past 50 years, she’s not among those who “attribute it to being man-made.” McCain, meanwhile, has made a signature issue of capping carbon emissions in an effort to reverse climate change, the Washington Post reports. More»

Dead dolphins, birds could have been affected by warming waters

(NEWSER) - Peru may finally have an answer for the 5,000 birds and nearly 900 dolphins that have died on its northern coast: climate change. As waters warm, food supply is disrupted, says the country’s deputy environment minister. A weather expert also confirms warmer waters due to El Niño could be a factor. The minister also reiterated that so far, it appears neither contamination nor bacterial infections are to blame for the death of the dolphins. More»

Heartland Institute ends ad campaign 'experiment'

(NEWSER) - A conservative think tank has pulled a controversial billboard that compared those who believe in global warming to deranged killers. The Heartland Institute was taking heavy flak for the digital sign in Chicago that featured a photo of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and the question, "I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?" reports the Washington Post's Plum Line blog . The institute explained on its website that the "experiment" was designed to be deliberately provocative. It had originally planned to follow up with images of Osama bin Laden and Charles Manson, among others. More»

James Lovelock says global warming isn't happening as quickly as he thought

(NEWSER) - James Lovelock, a favorite of environmentalists ever since he originated the "Gaia" theory that views the planet as a single organism, admits today that he may have overreacted a bit when it comes to climate change. In recent years, Lovelock hypothesized that billions of us would die within the century—and that the few survivors would live "in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable." But the 92-year-old scientist now says that, though "we were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now," in reality the world is not much warmer than it was 12 years ago. More»