Free Republic

The POV Channel's video titled "I Found a Weird Thing on Google Earth" documents their journey to a remote canyon where they discovered two rock formations that resemble breasts. The video shows the narrator and his friend hiking and exploring the area around the rock formations, which they affectionately refer to as "rock boobs." They marvel at the natural beauty of the canyon and the unique formations they find, including a cone-shaped rock and a spiral canyon. The narrator is impressed by the lifelike shape of the rock boobs and describes them as "surprisingly realistic." Despite the rain and the...

Many Americans are facing brutal cold this Christmas Eve. Freezing temperatures are plunging into Florida and Texas. Single-digit lows in the Plains and Great Lakes, and blizzard conditions are wrecking travel plans, while the same “bomb cyclone” is driving coastal flooding in the Northeast. Is climate change playing a role here? Weird weather and wild extremes have been the calling cards of a changing climate, and it’s almost reflexive to question how much influence the warming world has in this last angry burst of 2022. Recent advances in the science of weather attribution can offer quick insight — and believe...

A colossal simulation of the past two million years of Earth’s climate provides evidence that temperature and other planetary conditions influenced early human migration — and possibly contributed to the emergence of the modern-day human species around 300,000 years ago. The finding is one of many to come out of the largest model so far to investigate how changes in Earth’s movement have influenced climate and human evolution, published in Nature today. “This is another brick in the wall to support the role of climate in shaping human ancestry,” says Peter de Menocal, director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution...

The extent of destruction and death wrought by Germany's recent floods is slowly becoming apparent. Dozens of people have died, with many still reported missing. The disaster has devastated entire towns, washing away residential houses, cars and trees. Natural disasters are nothing new. They occurred long before the advent of the industrial age, when humans began burning fossil fuels on a large scale. Over time, however, atmospheric CO2 concentrations have doubled, raising Earth's temperature by 1 degree Celsius (1.8° Fahrenheit). A greater frequency and intensity of natural disasters has been the consequence. As vast swaths of western Germany are dealing...

Vast stretches of Earth’s northern latitudes are on fire right now. Hot weather has engulfed a huge portion of the Arctic, from Alaska to Greenland to Siberia. That’s helped create conditions ripe for wildfires, including some truly massive ones burning in remote parts of the region that are being seen by satellites. All told, northern fires released as much carbon dioxide in June as the entire country of Sweden does in a year, according to data crunched by the European Union’s Copernicus program. The agency said the wildfire activity is “unprecedented” amidst what was, incidentally, the hottest June ever recorded...

Earthquakes rattled residents in Oklahoma on Saturday, the latest in a series that have put the state on track for record quake activity this year, which some seismologists say may be tied to oil and gas exploration. One earthquake recorded at 3.8 magnitude by the U.S. Geological Survey rocked houses in several communities around central Oklahoma at 7:42 a.m. local time. Another about two hours earlier in the same part of the state, north of Oklahoma City, was recorded at 2.9 magnitude, USGS said. Those two were preceded by two more, at 2.6 magnitude, and 2.5 magnitude, that also rolled...

On December 20, 2007, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued its weather prediction for the winter of 2007-2008. In forecasting weather for the continental United States, NOAA examines several factors, but first among them is the state of the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which leads to El Niño and La Niña. For the coming winter, NOAA predicted a moderately strong La Niña. During La Niña, sea surface temperatures in the eastern tropical Pacific are below average, and temperatures in the western tropical Pacific are above average. This pattern is evident in this temperature anomaly image for November...