TV News LIES

Earlier this year, top officials with the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy and the Department of Justice hauled a handful of senior State Department officials into a White House meeting.

The gathering was the governmental equivalent of being called into the principal's office. The energy regulators wanted to know why State -- which had the power to approve a controversial oil pipeline project called Keystone XL -- hadn't demanded the completion of an important task: the evaluation of alternative pipeline routes between Canada and the Gulf Coast that would avoid the Nebraska sand hills, a hotbed of environmental concern and local outrage.

The global output of heat-trapping carbon dioxide jumped by the biggest amount on record, the U.S. Department of Energy calculated, a sign of how feeble the world's efforts are at slowing man-made global warming.

The new figures for 2010 mean that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago.

A cascade of coal ash, dirt and mud fell into the shore of Lake Michigan yesterday after a large section of bluff collapsed beside the We Energies Oak Creek Power Plant in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin. It is unknown how much coal ash fell from the pile, but the spill left behind a debris field about 120 yards long, the Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel reports.

"Based on our land use records it is probable that some of the material that washed into the lake is coal ash," We Energies spokesman Barry McNulty told the Journal Sentinel. "We believe that was something that was used to fill the ravine area in that site during the 1950s. That's a practice that was discontinued several decades ago."

A prominent physicist and skeptic of global warming spent two years trying to find out if mainstream climate scientists were wrong. In the end, he determined they were right: Temperatures really are rising rapidly.

The study of the world's surface temperatures by Richard Muller was partially bankrolled by a foundation connected to global warming deniers. He pursued long-held skeptic theories in analyzing the data. He was spurred to action because of "Climategate," a British scandal involving hacked emails of scientists.

Three U.S. House members investigating the use of toxic substances in the fluids injected into natural gas wells have revised their estimate of the amount of diesel fuel used in the practice, known as hydraulic fracturing or "fracking."

Rep. Henry Waxman of Los Angeles, the ranking Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, joined Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) in sending a letter to the Environmental Protection Agency.

A massively thorough study – funded in part by a pair of US oil billionaires who are opponents of climate-disruption remediation – has come to the conclusion that the earth is, indeed, warming.

In fact, it's warming just as much as more-limited studies conducted by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA, and the UK's Met Office Hadley Centre for Climate Change said it was: about 1°C since 1950.