If you're like me, you've been waiting for feminist claims that global warming is harder on women and therefore should be a greater concern to the public.

Actress Sigourney Weaver of "Alien" fame did just that Thursday with an astonishingly ludicrous article published at the Huffington Post – a website rife with astonishingly ludicrous articles:

You might think that a force as sweeping as global warming would be an equal opportunity threat: that it would endanger men and women alike. But the fact is climate change exacts a heavier toll on women.

Yep. She wrote that. It's so absurd it's worth repeating: "climate change exacts a heavier toll on women."

How you might ask?

Women produce up to 80 percent of the food in the developing world. Drought and unpredictable rains brought on by climate change will make this work far more precarious. Women will have to labor harder and longer to ensure their families have food, fuel, and water.

Our role as caretakers puts us at even greater risk in times of extreme weather. Studies have found that women are 14 times more likely to die as a result of storms and other extreme weather than men.

Fourteen times! Why? Because women often look after the children, the elderly, and the sick, and that means we have less mobility in a flood or wildfire.

Shh. Wait. It gets better:

If you ask people the tools we need to stop climate change, most talk about wind and solar energy, fuel efficient cars, and biofuels. But there is another solution that is not so widely known: empowering women.

Yep. We can solve rising temperatures by – wait for it! – empowering women:

Two groundbreaking studies, one from the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research and one from the Futures Group, found that simply by meeting women's existing needs for voluntary family planning, we could reduce carbon emissions by between 8 and 15 percent.

That is the equivalent of stopping all deforestation today…Improving women's lives while curbing emissions offers another arrow in our quiver.

Yep. Improving women's lives will lower temperatures on the planet.

I wonder if Tipper Gore agrees with this premise?

NewsBusters readers are quite familiar with the frantic hyperbole that often come from the keystrokes of Newsweek's so-called science editor Sharon Begley.

On Saturday she penned another breathless doozy with the Hitchcockian sub-headline "In a world of climate change, freak storms are the new normal. Why we’re unprepared for the harrowing future":

From these and other extreme-weather events, one lesson is sinking in with terrifying certainty. The stable climate of the last 12,000 years is gone.

The climate has been stable for the last 12,000 years? Yeah, that Little Ice Age between the 16th and 19th centuries was the picture of stability.

And though this has been a very active tornado season, it's hardly biblical as well as likely caused by this year's La Niña according to a majority of meteorologists on both sides of the global warming debate.

Alas, science really isn't important to this "science editor" who also seemed to miss an obvious point with her hyperventilation "The Midwest suffered the wettest April in 116 years." That means 116 years ago, when there was far less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the planet was a bit cooler, the Midwest suffered a wetter April.

But such inconvenient truths weren't getting in the way of Begley's paranoid delusions:

Picture California a few decades from now, a place so hot and arid the state's trademark orange and lemon trees have been replaced with olive trees that can handle the new climate. Alternating floods and droughts have made it impossible for the reservoirs to capture enough drinking water. The picturesque Highway 1, sections of which are already periodically being washed out by storm surges and mudslides, will have to be rerouted inland, possibly through a mountain.

Wow. So in just a few decades, all the orange and lemon trees in my state will be gone, there won't be enough drinking water, and much of the gorgeous Pacific Coast Highway will be kaput.

That's going to wreak havoc with property values.

But on a more serious note, what should really bother readers – as well as Newsweek's real editors if they care about facts – is how fast and loose Begley played with them.

Consider the following:

Scientists disagree about whether climate change will bring more intense or frequent tornadoes, but there is wide consensus that the 2 degrees Fahrenheit of global warming of the last century is behind the rise in sea levels, more intense hurricanes, more heat waves, and more droughts and deluges.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the entire rise in global temperatures between 1850 and 2005 was 0.76 degrees Celsius. That's 1.37 degrees Fahrenheit, meaning that Begley overstated the increase by almost 50 percent.

Did I mention that she's Newsweek's science editor?

But there's more:

Because of the CO2 that has already been emitted, we're on track for an additional 5 degrees of warming…New York, which is looking at an average temperature increase of up to 3 degrees Fahrenheit by 2020, is planning to paint 3 million square feet of roofs white, to reflect sunlight and thus reduce urban heat-island effects.

It took 155 years for temperatures to rise 1.37 degrees Fahrenheit. If we continued at this pace it would take 565 years for us to rise another five degrees.

Yet this so-called "science editor" claimed New York could see its temperatures increase by as much as three degrees in only nineteen years.

It's this kind of mathematically-challenged forecasting that gives junk science a bad name.

Which is why Newsweek should be ashamed of itself for allowing such nonsense to be published.

If only the folks associated with this publication possessed such a thing called shame.

We are a litigious society and will sue over most anything. But at least it makes sense when one party is genuinely injured and seeks redress from an identifiable party that is arguably at fault.

Even in matters of science and industry, both harm and responsibility must be proved.

by OutloudOpinion.com For more Podcasts visit www.outloudopinion.com

If global warming is the modern secular religion, HBO’s “Real Time” host Bill Maher has bought into it hook, line and sinker.

On the Oct. 8 broadcast of his program, immediately following a segment criticizing a congressional candidate that was a Nazis reenactor for exercising bad judgment, Maher ironically had some words of praise for the founder of al-Qaeda Osama bin Laden, who is believed to have ordered the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks which caused the deaths of over 2,700 people on American soil.

Why would bin Laden be worthy of such praise? Because of his statement on the issue of anthropogenic global warming, which according to Maher was devoid of the usual violent rhetoric one might expect from a leader of extremist Islam.

“All right, let me ask — let me quote another person who is not in favor in this country and that’s Osama bin Laden,” Maher said. “He put out a tape last week. And there was nothing about violence or attacking America. See, Lindsay Lohan, people can change. It was about the Pakistani flood.”

Maher read the quote from bin Laden, which suggested the industrialized nations were at fault for the recent flooding in Pakistan.

“And his quote – show it there, he said, ‘Speaking about climate change is not a matter of intellectual luxury,’” Maher said, reading bin Laden’s quote. “‘The phenomenon is an actual fact. All the industrialized countries, especially the big ones, bear the responsibility for testimony global warming crisis.’”

And based on that statement, Maher determined bin Laden was worthy of praise because they agreed on an issue that Maher’s political opponents haven’t bought into.
“Well, I guess my question is, how come a guy in a cave gets it better than every Republican voting for the Senate?” Maher said.

That statement received applause from the “Real Time” in-studio audience, but later in the segment, Maher suggested bin Laden was speaking out in goodwill to draw attention to this crisis in Pakistan because it really didn’t get a lot of coverage in the media.

“Let just say this,” Maher said. “He made this statement because Pakistan – this really didn’t make the papers, but Pakistan had a giant flood this year. And it is the sixth biggest country in the world, and a fifth of it was underwater and 21 million people were displaced. And it was worse than the tsunami.”

S.E. Cupp, author of “Losing Our Religion: The Liberal Media’s Attack on Christianity” suggested to Maher that maybe he was trying to capitalize on the flood by blaming the United States and whipping up more anti-American sentiment in Pakistan.

“A lot of people think the United States created this flood,” Cupp said. “And that’s the kind of meme he is trying to jump on.”

Nonetheless, Maher didn’t concede that, but just suggested bin Laden was correct and alluded the recent heat wave in Southern California as another example of global warming.

“Global warming may have something to do with it,” Maher replied. “That’s what he was saying. It was 113 degrees in this city last week. Maybe it was more, but the thermometer broke. I’m not lying. The thermometer broke.”

Host Behar complained: "And the tragedy is that Jimmy Carter has been vilified as the worst President in the United States history, practically, besides George W. Bush, of course, and it’s really not very nice for people to say that."

During a discussion of Delaware Republican Senate nominee Christine O’Donnell in which Maher took shots at her religious beliefs, he declared, "I need someone in the Senate who believes that global warming is real and the Earth is not 6,000 years old," leading Behar to add, "I know. It’s true. I mean, maybe they should be given an IQ test before they can even run."

Maher also voiced support for raising taxes on the wealthy, claiming that increased taxes "healed" the economy in the 1990s. Attacking the credibility of supply-side economic theory, he dismissed the benefits of cutting taxes on the wealthy as he declared that the wealthy would use their money to purchase more boats, seemingly oblivious to the fact that middle class people build boats and therefore benefit financially when they are purchased by the wealthy. Maher:

Obama just wants to go from what it is now, 36, to what it was under Clinton, 39. And I was saying it’s a win-win because people with that much money don’t even feel that three percent tax raise over $250,000. And it heals the economy. It happened in the ‘90s when Clinton did it. … That is the biggest canard ever that it trickles down. Give me a break. Rich people don’t do that. They put it in the bank or they buy a boat-

The discussion eventually returned to more religion-bashing:

MAHER: Well, they’re well versed in what, you know, they cherry-pick little things that they probably read in a pamphlet, but trust me they have, they have never read the Bible cover to cover. I don’t know if anybody could read the Bible and still want to be a religious person. It is a book that is filled with immorality, wickedness, and then just plain silliness.

BEHAR: Uh-huh, well, the other day I was having a conversation-

MAHER: But there’s a lot of wickedness, there’s a lot of-

BEHAR: Yeah.

MAHER: -God acting like a psychopath and just ethnically cleansing people and wiping people out and-

Below is a transcript of relevant portion of the Tuesday, September 28, The Joy Behar Show on HLN:

JOY BEHAR: He hates hypocrisy. He hates religion. But, most importantly, he hates stupidity. And we love to listen to him. He’s Bill Maher, and he’s got something to say about everything. Good thing because there is a lot of news today I want to ask him about. So welcome to the show, Bill Maher, host of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher.

…

BILL MAHER: But we have a microphone, and we like the President, but we want more. It’s our job to hold his feet to the fire. But when it comes time to vote, okay, that’s the time when you say, look, the talk is over. Talk is cheap. Now we have to make a choice. We only have two parties in this country. So we have to grow up and realize there is a difference between a disappointing friend and a deadly enemy.

BEHAR: Right.

MAHER: And when you look at the accomplishments, you know, of the administration, they’re actually pretty impressive. It’s really been a better year or two for liberals since the ‘60s. I mean, they did get health care through. It’s not the perfect bill, but it is a start. It’s about as much as I guess we could do in this climate. I mean, they got banks from, to stop being the middle men in student loans. They got a credit card bill of rights, they pulled out of Iraq, they had a flat lining economy that they at least have up and running again. There’s been a lot of stuff to be happy about, and the Democrats are just awful at bragging about their own accomplishments. The Republicans run on their screw-ups, and the Democrats stay quiet about their accomplishments.

BEHAR: That’s true. That’s true.

…

BEHAR: Well, who’s going to be the tough guy in the White House now, Hillary? I mean, who have they got?

MAHER: Well, I don’t know if you need a tough guy. I think you would need a guy like Bill Clinton who can make the argument. That is what they’re so bad about doing, is making the counterargument. Jimmy Carter, you know, who was always portrayed as this weak, ineffectual President, you know, he’s out plugging that book, so I see him all around. You know, he was a better proponent of what Democrats actually believed in. He was saying the other day, I heard him on 60 Minutes say that during his administration they never fired a shot, not a bullet, not a missile. He said, you know what, I thought, as the world’s superpower, we had the obligation to be the peacemaker. I think that’s fantastic. What a choice that would be for a voter because we don’t have that kind of choice. People say there’s not enough bipartisanship. There’s too much bipartisanship. If both parties are for using the army in Afghanistan to fight terrorism, that’s not too much bipartisanship. That’s not enough.

BEHAR: Well, and the tragedy is that Jimmy Carter has been vilified as the worst President in the United States history, practically, besides George W. Bush, of course, and it’s really not very nice for people to say that.

…

MAHER: She was on Politically Incorrect 22 times, and I’m apparently the only one who has every episode of Politically Incorrect. It’s good to be a hoarder. You know, we released the witch one the first week and last week the one where she says that, you know, come on, why don’t monkeys evolve right before our eyes? Like you could sit at the zoo and watch the chimp become a human? You know, whether, I have more, you know, we could put together a montage. It’s funny stuff, but I don`t want to make my show the Christine O’Donnell show, so I don’t know what we’re going to do this week. We might show one. We might not. I just think it’s important for people to assess that this person could be in the Senate. You know, there’s only 100 Senators. Those votes count. And, you know, I need someone in the Senate who believes that global warming is real and the Earth is not 6,000 years old.

BEHAR: I know. It’s true. I mean, maybe they should be given an IQ test before they can even run.

…

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BEHAR: I`m back with the star of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher. You know, I’m a huge fan, Bill. I watch you every week, and I’ve been on your show. Maybe I’ll come back-

MAHER: As I am of you.

BEHAR: Okay, darling. But, you know, the other night, you were talking about millionaires and how annoying they all are. You took on Ben Stein and Forbes, right? What’s your beef with Ben Stein specifically?

MAHER: Well, these rich people-

BEHAR: Go ahead. I’m sorry.

MAHER: Well, it’s that rich people are whining-

BEHAR: Right.

MAHER: -about Obama’s plan to merely raise the tax rate on the richest one percent, basically, three percent. I mean, it’s insane how, how they react, how they overreact. We’re talking about a three percent raise from 36 percent to 39 percent just for the richest people. Now, under Eisenhower the richest people paid 90 percent tax rate. Under Nixon it was 70 percent. Obama just wants to go from what it is now, 36, to what it was under Clinton, 39. And I was saying it’s a win-win because people with that much money don’t even feel that three percent tax raise over $250,000. And it heals the economy. It happened in the ‘90s when Clinton did it.

BEHAR: Well, what about this rap that they keep giving on the right about how you have to, you know, give tax breaks to these rich corporations and people so that it’ll trickle down in jobs? It didn’t during the Bush years, so why would it happen now?

MAHER: That is the biggest canard ever that it trickles down. Give me a break. Rich people don’t do that. They put it in the bank or they buy a boat-

BEHAR: Right.

MAHER: -or a bigger boat. This idea that we have to give the money to the rich people because then they’ll create jobs with it. No, they’re much more likely to cut jobs, mergers, and outsourcing. These are all, hiring immigrant labor, these are all ways to squeeze the middle class and make more money for them. That’s why we have this unbalanced economy that we have now where we have the very rich, just a few people who have more money than they could ever do anything with, and the rest of the people trying to find a second job at a yogurt shop.

…

MAHER: This is not news to me because this is exactly what I found out when I was on the road for a few months in 2007 making my documentary Religulous. What we found out talking to endless numbers of religious peoples that they know absolutely nothing about religion because they don’t want to know. Religion is all about sticking in fingers in your ears and humming. They don’t want to hear what the reality is. They want to believe what they believe. It’s not about critical thinking. I mean, faith is the purposeful suspension of critical thinking. I always ask the question: Why is that good? Why is it good when people brag about, "I have faith, I’m guided by my faith"? Every President says I’m guided by my faith. If there was a crisis, what would you do? Pray. Oh, good. I’m so reassured that if there was a crisis, the first thing you would do would be to try to telepathically communicate with your imaginary friend. That’s what we need in a crisis.

BEHAR: You know, the tragedy of that also, as you point out here a little bit, is that we’ll never have an atheist as a President. And even in running for the Congress you cannot say that you don’t believe. They won’t vote for you. I mean, there’s-

MAHER: Right.

BEHAR: -a new prime minister who is a female in Australia, and she’s an avowed atheist. She was elected. This country is way behind on that particular topic.

MAHER: Way behind. And, as I also tried to point out in Religulous, the biggest minority that gets absolutely no respect in this country is atheists and agnostics. They are at least 15 percent of the country. They are a bigger minority than blacks, Hispanics, Jews, National Rifle people, teachers, you know, gays, you name the minority, it doesn’t, it’s not quite 15 percent. And yet they have absolutely no voice.

MAHER: They talk about how there’s no Protestants on the Supreme Court. Who cares if there’s no Protestants on the Supreme Court? What they are, all are believers in something. So when you’re having a case of, you know, the First Amendment, church and state, yes, they have a, they have a stake in this because they believe in some sort of a church or a temple.

BEHAR: But, you know, you were saying that the religious people that you interviewed for Religulous … But they’re uninformed, and yet they can quote chapter and verse of the Bible a lot of times and give you some kind of like story about Noah … and also things about gay people. You know, they seem to be well versed on that. How come?

MAHER: Well, they’re well versed in what, you know, they cherry-pick little things that they probably read in a pamphlet, but trust me they have, they have never read the Bible cover to cover. I don’t know if anybody could read the Bible and still want to be a religious person. It is a book that is filled with immorality, wickedness, and then just plain silliness.

BEHAR: Uh-huh, well, the other day I was having a conversation-

MAHER: But there’s a lot of wickedness, there’s a lot of-

BEHAR: Yeah.

MAHER: -God acting like a psychopath and just ethnically cleansing people and wiping people out and-

BEHAR: Yes.

MAHER: -just, you know, that, I was pointing out on the show Friday night the Ten Commandments. You know, this is the ultimate list of the ten things right from God, and it doesn’t include rape, incest, or genocide. That’s okay. That’s not on the top ten. But apparently swearing, working on Sunday and building statues to other gods, those are the things that are important.

BEHAR: Okay, thank you, Bill, always a pleasure to hear from you. Keep up the good work.

MAHER: Okay, Joy. Thank you.

The following is a full transcript of the segment as it was aired on the September 20 Today show:

ANN CURRY: Now to an extraordinary wildlife event taking place in northwest Alaska. Tens of thousands of Pacific walrus have crowded onto a beach near a remote village. And biologists think it is because the sea ice melted early, leaving the animals no other place to rest. NBC’s Lee Cowan is in Point Lay, Alaska with more on this story. Lee, good morning.

[On screen headline: "Global Warning, Walruses Coming Ashore In Record Numbers"]

LEE COWAN: Good morning, Ann. We’re about 300 miles above the Arctic Circle this morning and this is where the walrus has gathered, some 20,000 of them, at one point, over the course of the summer. And Ann, scientists are saying that this is a gathering that is so large and so unusual that scientists are now worried about the walruses’ safety. It’s the end of summer along the north slope of Alaska and in the tiny Inupiaq village of Point Lay, they wait for the ice to return. The tundra is usually already frozen by now, with snow on the ground and slush ice forming along the Chuckhi Sea. But instead, children are playing in the lagoon, barefoot, innocently oblivious to what it all may mean.

LEO FERRARA, TRIBAL PRESIDENT: I always thought the Arctic would be cold but scientists tell us that there’s global warming going on.

COWAN: Do you believe them?

FERRARA: Yeah I believe them.

COWAN: Leo Ferrara, the tribal president here, doesn’t mind that the bone-chilling 80-below winter temperatures are taking their time getting here, but he’s worried about the villages most recent resident, who need the ice to survive.

COWAN LOOKING THROUGH BINOCULARS: Oh you can see them in the water.

FERRARA: There you go.

COWAN: The Pacific walrus, who normally rest on ice sheets floating out in the sea, have instead hauled out by the thousands at Point Lay to nap, unable to find refuge even on a small piece of sea ice. The scientists say most of it, has melted early.

MARK SERREZE, NATIONAL SNOW ICE DATA CENTER: What this is telling us is that there is continuing pattern of sea ice loss in the Arctic. We may be looking at summers with no sea ice at all, or little to speak of in 20 or perhaps 30 years.

COWAN: In fact a new report this month shows it’s the third lowest Arctic sea level in over 30 years. Walruses need that ice to rest on in between feeding, much like the polar bear, they can’t swim forever.

ANTHONY FISCHBACH, U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY: We suspect this is going to cost walruses more to make a living, when they have to commute from a coastal resting spot out to the foraging grounds, than it would cost them simply to roll of the ice and feed directly beneath them.

COWAN: But that’s not the only worry. With upwards of 20,000 crammed so tightly together, easily startled mothers can often stampede, crushing newborn calves as they hurtle toward the water to safety.

BILL TRACEY, POINT LAY FIRE CHIEF: Anything can spook them from a polar bear, a brown bear, a dog, a man, a boat going by, an airplane going over.

COWAN: Bill Tracey is Point Lay’s fire chief. Last year he says, not far away, more than 100 walruses trampled each other to death. So until the ice comes back, strict limits are now in place.

This is about as close as we can legally get to the walruses without disturbing them. From this point forward, the only people allowed in are researchers. There’s even a no fly zone over the beach, something residents here are happy to see.

SOPHIE HENRY: What we have now, we have to protect what’s there, because maybe in the next 10 years we won’t have any.

COWAN: A way after life for this village, a way life for the walrus, both trying to adapt to an Arctic changing faster than many expected.

HENRY: The whales, the walrus, the Belugas, you know they, they live with the ice. And if it, if that all is gone, does that mean all the animals are gone too?

CURRY: NBC’s Lee Cowan.

For more CNS News videos make sure you check out their Eyeblast channel.

Former CNN anchor Miles O’Brien (no relation to current CNN special correspondent Soledad O’Brien) slammed Delaware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell as a "Tea Party nutbag" in a Tweet on Wednesday evening. O’Brien continued that he "forget [sic] her ignorant nonsense," referring to her defense of the creationist viewpoint during a 1996 appearance on his former network.

O’Brien, who was let go by CNN in 2008 after they closed their science unit, linked to an article on the left-wing website Talking Points Memo after his attack on O’Donnell. The article, by Eric Kleefeld, highlighted an item by Dan Amira of New York magazine, who "dug up" the Republican’s March 1996 appearance with O’Brien and Dr. Michael McKinney of the University of Tennessee-Chattanoga. During the panel discussion, O’Donnell defended the creationism. Kleefeld labeled it as just another part of the social conservative’s "religious right work," citing her apparent "long career in anti-sex and anti-masturbation activism."

The former anchor’s Tweet is not surprising, gives his record of liberal bias when he was at CNN, particularly on the issue of climate change. On February 9, 2006, O’Brien accused scientists skeptical of the theory of manmade global warming as being "bought and paid for by the fossil fuel industry." Over two months later, he suggested raising gasoline taxes to "help pay for these alternative fuels." During 2007, the then-CNN anchor insisted to former Republican Congressman J. C. Watts that the "scientific debate is over" on the climate change issue. O’Brien also dismissed critics of Al Gore’s movie "An Inconvenient Truth" later that year.

Less than a year before his dismissal from CNN, he compared manmade global warming skeptics to Flat Earthers. More recently, O’Brien, working a special correspondent for PBS’s NewsHour program, helped promote Dubuque, Iowa as a "city of a future" during a June 17, 2010 report, for its transformation from a former industrial center into a "green" capital, with the help of money from the Obama administration’s "stimulus" package.

Outside of the global warming issue, the journalist conducted other left-leaning advocacy. He helped CNN promote the controversial "Death of a President" movie depicting the assassination of former President George W. Bush during an October 27, 2006 segment with director Gabriel Range. He labeled four American contractors who were kidnaped in Iraq "mercenaries" less than a month later. In April 2008, he tried to spin the 40% approval rating the Democratically-controlled Congress had at the time: "Democrats are marking 100 days of their congressional reign now, and they’re riding pretty high."