Free Republic

With his estimated wealth exceeding $200 million, Albert Arnold Gore has come a long way from the time he began a career in government politics. But it hasn’t all been a green path. He can thank some earlier events for paving over muddy ground, a time when his father, Al Gore Sr. met Occidental Petroleum’s CEO Armand Hammer at a cattle auction in the 1940s. When zinc was discovered on some of Gore’s land,

Junk Science: Despite no evidence that devastating tornadoes have increased in frequency or intensity due to fossil fuel use, another warm-monger blames the Moore, Okla., disaster on GOP "polluters and deniers." Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., thought the devastation of Moore was a crisis that should not be wasted as he took to the Senate floor Monday to rail against his Republican colleagues for denying the theory of anthropogenic (man-caused) global warming (known by its acronym, AGW). Other Democratic leaders like Al Gore, who profited handsomely off the manufactured hysteria, and President Obama, who promised the sea level would stop rising and...

IT'S A SCENE that could be from a '70s horror movie: A wave of ice crystals relentlessly marching towards homes in Minnesota in the United States. The massive ice floes have also destroyed 12 homes and damaged another 15 in Canada, which boarders Minnesota. According to emergency officials, a total of seven homes in Ochre Breach were "literally crushed" by the ice that rose up within minutes pushed by strong winds, Winnepeg Free Press reports. A resident caught footage of a wave of ice that creeped off another lake in Minnesota - as foam froze and was pushed ashore by...

The demonized chemical compound is a boon to pant life and has little correlation with global temperature. Of all of the world's chemical compounds, none has a worse reputation than carbon dioxide. Thanks to the single-minded demonization of this natural and essential atmospheric gas by advocates of government control of energy production, the conventional wisdom about carbon dioxide is that it is a dangerous pollutant. That's simply not the case. Contrary to what some would have us believe, increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will benefit the increasing population on the planet by increasing agricultural productivity. The cessation of observed...

The governor won’t meet with a leading New Jersey warmist critic. Hello from the Paul Robeson Center for The Arts, located on Paul Robeson Place, just a few blocks down from Princeton University. They like their hardcore communists here in Central Jersey. But they also make really great coffee, which is why I make it a point to meet up with my long-time lefty friend in Palmer Square where we have plenty of options. In print, we’ll call her “Moonbeam,” to prevent our association from destroying her standing in the community, and to make it clear that her environmental policy...

Updated 2 May 2013 to correct typo on date of previous low tornado countThe 12-month period from May 2012 to April 2013 was remarkable for the absence of tornado activity and tornado impacts in the United States.We can start by looking at the number of EF1 and stronger tornadoes during that period. A final count is available through January 2013 and we have a pretty good estimate of how many occurred in February through April, although final numbers won’t be available until July. Although the 12 month total may change a little bit with the final data, it’s unlikely to...

Update: High temperature in Little Rock has hit 52. The incredibly late season cold snap is breaking numerous records for Arkansas. Nearly 5 inches of snow was reported in some spots in Northwest Arkansas this morning marking the first ever officially recorded snowfall in the State in the month of May. Cold temperature records are also falling. Little Rock set numerous records today including: - Tied the record low for the day of 41, set in 1929 - High of 52 tied the record minimum high temperature for the Month. The previous record was 52 set on May 2 1994....

The inaugural Rising Seas Summit will bring professionals from national and local government, industry, academic institutions and environmental NGOs together to highlight the interrelationships between sea level rise, climate change and extreme events. Understanding, anticipating and adapting to water related threats is critical to national security and a stable economy. Sea level rise will continue to damage coastal ecosystems and inland water systems, and the recent catastrophic impacts of Hurricane Sandy have demonstrated the risks faced by all coastal communities on the U.S. eastern seaboard. These new environmental challenges require that stakeholders share knowledge and work together to reduce and...

A number House Democrats have written a resolution(PDF) calling on Congress to recognize that climate change will hurt the plight of women more than men; driving women into “transactional sex� for survival — among other horrible fates. Now, nothing causes more transactional sex than poverty, and few conditions bring more poverty to women around the world than limiting capitalism and free trade. One wonders if a poor woman in say, Bangladesh, would be happier and healthier with a car, an air conditioner and processed food rather than that light carbon footprint they now carry? I wish they had a choice.So...

‘We could be in for a cooling period that lasts 200-250 years. The period of low solar activity could start in 2030-2040.’ Global warming which has been the subject of so many discussions in recent years, may give way to global cooling. According to scientists from the Pulkovo Observatory in St.Petersburg, solar activity is waning, so the average yearly temperature will begin to decline as well. Scientists from Britain and the US chime in saying that forecasts for global cooling are far from groundless. Some experts warn that a change in the climate may affect the ambitious projects for the...

Good news on natural gas is bad news for a Democratic party full of environmental true-believers Much has been said recently about the deep tensions within the Republican party. Far less has been said about a sharp division arising inside the Democratic party. That latter tension was front and center recently when former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Daily News drawing on his experience overseeing extensive natural gas development in Pennsylvania. “If we choose to embrace natural gas, it will help us get past a number of significant economic and environmental challenges,” Rendell wrote....

Barely a day after the Washington State Senate voted to fund a study that would explore ways to enforce tougher greenhouse gas emission standards, a respected academic spent nearly two hours presenting scientific evidence suggesting the assumptions on which that legislation was based were wrong. Dr. Don Easterbrook, a professor emeritus of geology at Western Washington University, on Tuesday told the Senate’s Energy, Environment and Telecommunications Committee he was relying on an old maxim in science: “In God we trust; everyone else bring data.” “Well, I’m bringing data,” he said. “You’ll hear very few opinions from me. When I’m finished,...

The National Weather Service has posted a winter storm warning for far eastern South Dakota, and winter weather advisories in other parts of that region and also southeastern North Dakota. ... Snowstorms have been crossing the Dakotas for the past week, dumping record amounts of snow

The Economist and other journalism icons are beginning to reassess their position on global warmingThe overwhelming consensus on global warming among journalists may be cracking. Last week, the world’s most prestigious newsmagazine – The Economist – backed away from its past alarmist position, saying that “If climate scientists were credit-rating agencies, climate sensitivity would be on negative watch.” The Economist now discounts the high-end estimates of warming coming from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as being unlikely if not far-fetched. Carbon taxes offer economic pain for little to no environmental gain Kenneth P. Green: Whether or not one...

The Sunday storm dropped as much as a foot and a half of snow in western and central North Dakota, and lesser amounts in the east. I-94 remains closed from the Minnesota border to Jamestown, and from the Montana border to Bismarck. No travel is advised in much of the state.

Big Brother: The government we entrust our medical records to under ObamaCare has its EPA sharing confidential data on farmers with green groups and the IRS reading your email. Smile and wave at the EPA drone. The Environmental Protection Agency has acknowledged that it released personal information on potentially thousands of farmers and ranchers to environmental groups, violating their privacy rights and acting in collusion with private groups with private political agendas. In Nixonian fashion, the EPA has provided these environmental groups with the dossiers of farmers it has gathered to help them create an enemies list of potential polluters....

In his 2013 State of the Union speech, President Barack Obama called on Congress to pursue a solution to climate change, or else he would do it on his own. The same week, Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman Barbara Boxer (D–CA) and committee member Bernie Sanders (I–VT) introduced the first major bill that would institute a carbon tax, the Climate Protection Act of 2013 (Boxer–Sanders). One glaring problem with the bill is that it would not preempt regulation of greenhouse gases by federal agencies. Even worse, the bill effectively turns the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator into a...

A recent study suggests that drivers that have real time traffic loaded on their GPS systems spend 4 days less on congested highways. The study also noted that C02 emissions from the traffic-enabled drivers decreased 21%. Traffic-enabled navigation retails for $250.00 to $350.00. By comparison, the expensive ‘cash for clunkers’ program cost up to $4,5000 per driver and if you assume the driver keeps the same driving habits with the new car, cuts CO2 emissions per driver 25%. (However, some suggest that most drivers will drive a new car more).

“We did not come to ask for mercy from nature,” Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin, the Lysenko of Soviet agriculture, once declared. “We must wrest it from her.” Communist science was guided not by the journey from hypothesis to fact but by the dusty proclamations of Marxist theorists. Soviet scientists were expected to reject capitalist science and formulate a science that matched the Communist worldview. The Communist worldview insisted that every living creature could be completely transformed into anything. It rejected natural selection as having a competitive capitalist bent that suspiciously resembled a biological version of free market competition. And pseudo-scientists like...

“The idea that CO2 is the tail that wags the dog is no longer scientifically tenable,” said Marc Morano of ClimateDepot.com, a website devoted to countering the prevailing acceptance of man-made global warming...

Researchers get to grips with effects of heat, drought and storms on carbon release. Climate change has a disconcerting tendency to amplify itself through feedback effects. Melting sea ice exposes dark water, allowing the ocean to soak up more heat. Arctic warming speeds the release of carbon dioxide from permafrost. And, as researchers discussed at a meeting last week in Seefeld, Austria, climate extremes — heatwaves, droughts and storms — can hamper plant growth, weakening a major buffer against the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere. “Heatwaves and droughts will very likely become more frequent in a warmer climate, and...

Environment Colorado, also known as the Colorado chapter of the National Association of the Irony Challenged, is to release a report this week about how global warming – keep that word “warming” in mind – is endangering Colorado. ... The junior geniuses at Environment Colorado had planned to unveil their map about global warming at a really big press conference – but something unexpected occurred. The press conference was canceled and the map is to be unveiled via a telephone conference because of, wait for it … oh yes, you did indeed see this coming: No press conference because of...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Last week on this program a young man of 13 years old called. A young boy called from Wilmington, Indiana. He was a very, very bright, articulate guy who called here to tell me that he finally had proven to himself that global warming was a hoax. He'd gone to his local library. He'd researched it and he had found it, and he told me why he thought the left and liberals don't recognize it as a hoax is because they don't want to. So I offered the young man an iPad. I said, "Somebody like you...

I write in rebuttal to the March 31 letter by WWU geology faculty criticizing Dr. Don Easterbrook. I have a Ph.D in geophysics and have published research papers on climate change in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. In 2006 I testified before the US Senate on global warming. Additionally, I am the author of a three-volume history of science. I have never met Don Easterbrook. I write not so much to defend him as to expose the ignorance exhibited in the letter authored by WWU geology faculty. Their attack on Dr. Easterbrook is the most egregious example of pompous buffoonery since...

Climate Change: The man who once compared coal trains to Nazi boxcars headed to crematoria leaves government service to fight what he calls the "pipeline to disaster" and promote his brand of climate quackery. In 2007, Dr. James Hansen testified before the Iowa Utilities Board not in his capacity as a government employee but, in his words, "as a private citizen, a resident of Kintnersville, Pa., on behalf of the planet, of life on Earth, including all species." Hansen told the board, "If we cannot stop the building of more coal-fired power plants, those coal trains will be death trains...

"Since record keeping began in the sixties, we've never encountered anything like this before," ice breaker Ulf Gulldne told the local newspaper Örnsköldsviks Allehanda. On March 29th, 176,000 square kilometers of the Baltic Sea was covered in ice, a record for the time of year. On a map, it means about half of the central and northern parts are frozen over. Far north, the ice is both thick and difficult to break through. The date on which the ice reaches its maximum spread usually falls much earlier in the year. The previously latest date record was March 25th, 2008. That...

Many years ago, I remember thinking that it would take many years to refute the panicked claims about global warming. Unlike most political movements, which content themselves with making promises about, say, what the unemployment rate will be in two years if we pass a giant stimulus bill—claims that are proven wrong (and how!) relatively quickly—the environmentalists had successfully managed to put their claims so far off into the future that it would take decades to test them against reality. But guess what? The decades are finally here. At Forbes, Harry Binswanger dates the beginning of the campaign to 1979...

News is breaking out all over: global warming stopped 20 years ago. A political earthquake has resulted from a feature story in the Economist magazine because the Economist used to be a consistent cheerleader for global warming activism. Doubts about global warming used to be censored by its London editors, one reporter confided to Stephen Hayward. So what will voters do to Democrat candidates in 2014 and 2016 when the former realize that the Democratic Party was lying to them? Is it time to run away from the issue for Democrats, journalists, and Hollywood personalities? While our economy is struggling...

Associate Director of College Communications, Unity College claims in a press release this month: “Every college or university that claims to be holding a ‘green’ commencement needs to have divested from investments in fossil fuels, or admit that they cannot truly make that claim.” “As the first college in the United States to adopt sustainability science as its central focus, Unity College ascended to the leading-edge of higher education, training the next generation of environmental leaders to pursue trans-disciplinary solutions to the earth’s most pressing problems including global climate change.” “With a unanimous vote by the Board of Trustees in...

A California billionaire is pledging to spend as much of his fortune as necessary to make climate change “the defining issue of our generation.” Tom Steyer, who made his riches as a hedge fund manager, told The Hill on Tuesday that he wants to make climate change a campaign issue for years to come and Democratic support for environmental protections as widespread as support for gay marriage and immigration reform. “The goal here is not to win. The goal here is to destroy these people. We want a smashing victory,” Steyer said of candidates he judges to be on the...

Who Is America’s Best Climate Prediction Expert? It’s a fair enough question, given all our government and the mainstream media have been telling us about the threats we all face from climate change (a.k.a. man-made global warming). With twenty five years and tens of billions of dollars spent by the US government alone on understanding what the causes and effects of climate change are, surely someone has risen to the top in terms of making accurate climate change predictions, right?

The climate may be heating up less in response to greenhouse-gas emissions than was once thought. But that does not mean the problem is going away | OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, “the five-year mean global temperature has...

The Economist has been fairly consistent in its stand that carbon dioxide emissions from man-made sources are the chief cause of global warming. But in an editorial this week, it sounds less certain. Global warming predictions haven’t panned out as predicted in the past decade, but the why is a bit fuzzy, the magazine admits. Greenhouse gas emissions have soared during the past 15 years, the magazine notes, with 100 billion tons of carbon having been added to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. Still, both air and ground temperatures during that time have remained virtually unchanged. In fact, the...

In my Weekly Standard cover story about the fallout from the “Climategate” email scandal three years ago, I offered the following question by way of prediction: Eventually the climate modeling community is going to have to reconsider the central question: Have the models the IPCC uses for its predictions of catastrophic warming overestimated the climate’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases? The article then went on to survey emerging research (U.S. government funded!) casting doubt on high estimates of climate sensitivity, along with alternative explanations on some climate factors, such as “black carbon.” The question in my mind at the time was...

Emily Litella was the Saturday Night Live character who would spin out lengthy theories based on her misunderstanding of a word or phrase and, when her error was pointed out, would respond crisply, “Never mind.” The Economist, which I read and revere and for which I have on occasion written (they assign reviews of books by Economist writers to outsiders), has long been convinced that we on earth face a crisis caused by man-made global warming. Now the newspaper (as it refers to itself) seems to have reached an Emily Litella moment.“Global warming slows down,” reads a line on the...

Sir John Beddington, the government's retiring Chief Scientist has been doing the media rounds today, telling anyone who'll listen how "Climate Change" is still a serious problem about which we should all worry greatly. Has he looked out of the window recently? Looking out of my window just now, I noticed that the Northamptonshire landscape was completely blanketed in Dr David Viner. Just like it was yesterday. And the day before that, when we rescued two orphaned lambs from the frozen fields. Which isn't something you normally expect in March, is it? I'm sure I know what Beddington would say...

An obsession with CO2 has left us dangerously short of power as coal-powered stations are forced to close As the snow of the coldest March since 1963 continues to fall, we learn that we have barely 48 hours’ worth of stored gas left to keep us warm, and that the head of our second-largest electricity company, SSE, has warned that our generating capacity has fallen so low that we can expect power cuts to begin at any time. It seems the perfect storm is upon us. The grotesque mishandling of Britain’s energy policy by the politicians of all parties, as...

Coldest UK March in 50 years ‘This is certainly unusually cold for this time of year. It’s very cold for mid-March when we should expect much higher temperatures.’ - MeteoGroup forecaster Matt Dobson Most of southern Canada buried beneath 40-50 or more inches of snow Paralyzed eastern European cities, buried cars and lots of snow – Video Photos and videos taken in eastern Poland, near Polish-Ukrainian border. Also from Southern Poland. Worst winter storm in 150 years – Belarus grinds to a haltLots of photos here." Bridgeport Connecticut – 2nd Snowiest Season EVER The Mini-Ice Age has Arrived Migrating...

We wrote here about a recent effort by a group of climate alarmists headed by geologist Shaun Marcott to resurrect Michael Mann’s discredited hockey stick. The Marcott paper, as you would expect, received uncritical coverage in the liberal press. But it didn’t take long for climate scientists to begin taking it apart, as we noted in our post. Now Steve McIntyre, who was principally responsible for showing that Mann’s original hockey stick was a fraud, has gone over Marcott’s data on the key proxies he uses for 20th century temperatures, ocean cores. McIntyre found that Marcott and his colleagues used...

NYT's Krugman: Skeptics 'punished in the afterlife' --- McKibben: 'White America' has failed

This DOE project explores a variety of strategies designed to curb America’s greenhouse gas emissions up to 80 percent by about 2050. Arguably the most controversial of those reports covers the “effects of the built environment on transportation.” To put it plainly, the “built environment” report lays out strategies the federal government can use to force development away from suburbs and into cities, supposedly for the sake of reducing carbon dioxide emissions given off by all those suburban commuters. The Obama administration wants to force so-called smart growth policies on the country: get out of your car, stay out of...

Steve McIntyre has made what I can only describe as a stunning discovery as to why there is a sharp uptick in the main Marcott et al graph being touted by the media from its publication in Science.It seems the uptick in the 20th century is not real, being nothing more than an artifact of shoddy procedures where the dates on the proxy samples were changed for some strange reason.McIntyre writes: The Marcott-Shakun Dating ServiceMarcott, Shakun, Clark and Mix did not use the published dates for ocean cores, instead substituting their own dates. The validity of Marcott-Shakun re-dating will...

FOIA – the anonymous leaker who brought the Climategate and Climategate II emails to light has emerged briefly from the shadows. He has released to selected parties (not me) the password to the cache of Climategate II emails in the hope that someone will have the time and energy to sift through them in search of exciting new revelations about the ongoing "Climate Change" scam. No doubt we'll hear much more in the coming weeks. In the meantime, I think it's worth dwelling on some of the clues he offers as to his identity and motivation. (I'm assuming it is...

Green forces, eager to promote their theories of global warming, appear to be practicing intellectual recycling. Is this the return of the notorious hockey stick - which, in 2001, was the central dogma of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) believers ? This quasi-religious faith in catastrophic AGW still remains a prerequisite for membership in scientific and media elite circles, even in the face of the failure of earlier (model) predictions of apocalypse to manifest, and the admission by an apostle of the faith that for the past 17 years global temperatures have not increased -- contrary to the projections of every...

Last Friday, at 3:40 p.m., the State Department released its “Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement” for the highly contentious Keystone XL pipeline, which Canada hopes to build to move its tar sands oil to refineries in the United States. In effect, the statement said there were no environmental impediments that would prevent President Obama from approving the pipeline. Two hours and 20 minutes later, I received a blast e-mail containing a statement by James Hansen, the head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA — i.e., NASA’s chief climate scientist. “Keystone XL, if the public were to allow...

PRESIDENT OBAMA began his second term with a promise to push harder on energy and climate change. The events of the past week remind us that he wonÂ’t have to contend just with Republicans and coal-state Democrats determined to oppose reasonable measures to combat global warming. He will also have to sidestep environmentalists demanding that he fight the wrong battles. Last Friday, the State Department released a new draft analysis of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, opposition to which has become a counterproductive obsession of many in the environmental movement. In its 2,000 pages, the report dismantled the case that...

Ed. note: This piece was first published on Robert Rapier’s R-Squared Energy Blog.If not for the US government’s latest demonstration of incompetence that played out at the end of last week (a.k.a. sequestration), the top news story might have been a report issued by the US State Department late Friday.The report was the Draft Supplementary Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) for the Keystone XL Pipeline project, and it was unwelcome news for environmentalists who have been protesting the crude pipeline extension that would link Canada’s oil sands to Gulf Coast refineries.It may seem arbitrary, given the large number of oil and...

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is part 3 of a three-part series. Click to read part 1 and part 2.The fossil-fuel divestment campaign now sweeping America’s college campuses is a window onto much that is wrong with our culture and our politics. The fate of America’s free-enterprise system — long the engine of our prosperity and security — now hangs on a generation increasingly skeptical of the system’s premises.Surely doubts about capitalism held by America’s 20-somethings have been greatly magnified by climate change. Yet it is not changing global weather patterns but the deteriorating climate of intellectual interchange in the nation’s academy — and the...

Last week, the Partnership for a Secure America (PSA), led by former Democratic representative Lee Hamilton and former Republican senator Warren Rudman, released a letter signed by 36 other formerly important people insisting that the United States must take action on climate change for national-security reasons. The letter begins: The effect of climate change in the world’s most vulnerable regions present[s] a serious threat to American national security interests. As a matter of risk management, the United States must work with international partners, public and private, to address this impending crisis. . . . Both the Department of Defense and the State Department...

The target is fossil fuels, but the goal is an end to economic growth.Horse-drawn plow at the Mother Earth Farm in Orting, Wash. You may not have heard of the fossil-fuel divestment movement yet, but you will soon. While the campaign to have universities sell off any stock they may hold in large fossil-fuel companies is still in its infancy, the effort has spread to hundreds of campuses in just the past few months. This ambitious crusade to save the planet from global warming by crushing the world’s fossil-fuel producers is the brainchild of Bill McKibben, arguably America’s foremost environmentalist,...