Free Republic

FAIRBANKS—An early winter storm is expected to dump as much as 18 inches of snow into the heart of Denali National Park and Preserve overnight, causing rangers to temporarily close portions of the road for travelers today. With about 10 inches of snow falling by noon at the Eielson Visitor Center at Mile 66 of the Park Road, crews closed the road to incoming traffic this morning at Mile 53 at Toklat River. The closure was lifted later this afternoon, although a winter weather advisory remains in effect through Monday morning. The conditions mean an uncertain trip for winners of...

DENVER (CBS4) – Colorado’s 2015-2016 Winter season may be one for the record books as El Niño conditions strengthen in the Pacific Ocean. The El Niño forecast released by NOAA suggests a colder winter with more snowfall than normal. Ocean temperatures in the equatorial Pacific have been as much as four degrees warmer than average over the past few months. Historically, this setup has brought more moisture into the state during the winter months, especially southwestern Colorado, but Denver has also seen its largest snowstorms during El Niño years.

“Scientists fear ‘Day After Tomorrow’ climate change,” shouts the headline on MSNBC. According to two new studies, global warming could (supposedly) shut down ocean circulation. This could drop vast stretches of Asia into drought and expose the entire Northern Hemisphere to severe ice and snow. “This change would be sudden and sharp enough to roil civilization—happening in as little as three years and resulting in as much as an 18-degree Fahrenheit drop in average temperatures,” says this article by Tony Dokoupil. Dokoupil tells the story of Jud Partin, a geophysicist at the University of Texas, who gathered new geological data...

Glacier National Park, the top of Logan Pass has been temporarily shut down again, this time because of snow. Glacier announced over the weekend that a section of the Going-to-the-Sun Road between Big Bend on the west side and Jackson Glacier Overlook on the east side is temporarily closed because of winter weather conditions.

The global extent and distribution of forest trees is central to our understanding of the terrestrial biosphere. We provide the first spatially continuous map of forest tree density at a global scale. This map reveals that the global number of trees is approximately 3.04 trillion, an order of magnitude higher than the previous estimate. Of these trees, approximately 1.39 trillion exist in tropical and subtropical forests, with 0.74 trillion in boreal regions and 0.61 trillion in temperate regions. Biome-level trends in tree density demonstrate the importance of climate and topography in controlling local tree densities at finer scales, as well...

Every so often you will see articles warning that some species is going extinct. And usually it's not really a species -- you never hear about "leopards" going extinct, usually it's "purple dotted left handed bisexual Nepalese leopards" or some subvariety.  We are assured they are going extinct because fewer have been seen recently. But the Earth is so big, how can we really be sure that some subspecies is going extinct just because we see fewer of them? After all, only three percent of the land mass of the Earth is urbanized. Animals could easily be hidden in...

It seems that scientists were a little off in calculating the number of trees on the planet. You remember trees: they turn CO2 into oxygen and water. In fact, if you buy a “carbon credit,” you are paying to plant trees to buy an indulgence for your private jet travel -- just like Al Gore and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. supposedly do. Well, all those calculations of doom over purported CO2-caused global warming may be a little more unsettled. The Wall Street Journal reports:

There are just over three trillion trees in the world, a figure that dwarfs previous estimates, according to the most comprehensive census yet of global forestation. Using satellite imagery as well as ground-based measurements from around the world, a team led by researchers at Yale University created the first globally comprehensive map of tree density. Their findings were published in the journal Nature on Wednesday. A previous study that drew on satellite imagery estimated that the total number of trees was around 400 billion. The new estimate of 3.04 trillion is multiple times that number, bringing the ratio of trees...

The global map of tree density at the square-kilometer pixel scale. Credit: Crowther, et al A new Yale-led study estimates that there are more than 3 trillion trees on Earth, about seven and a half times more than some previous estimates. But the total number of trees has plummeted by roughly 46 percent since the start of human civilization, the study estimates. Using a combination of satellite imagery, forest inventories, and supercomputer technologies, the international team of researchers was able to map tree populations worldwide at the square-kilometer level. Their results, published in the journal Nature, provide the most comprehensive...

Powerful and well funded, 1199 SEIU has unprecedented reach into city and state government. ... Medicaid is one of the primary sources of funding for the hospitals employing workers from 1199 SEIU, the powerful hospital and nursing-home employees’ union. ... The union’s clout can be assessed by several measures: the sheer size of its membership, its spending on campaigns and lobbying, and the depth and breadth of its connections with New York’s ruling elite. With well over 300,000 members in Massachusetts, Maryland, Florida, Washington, D.C., and New York (where over half of that total resides), 1199SEIU is the largest union...

This is the opinion of Nobel Prize Winning Physicist Dr. Ivar Giaever , Prof. Richard Lindzen, and many others. Climate change alarmism has a surprising number of attributes of a medieval or even ancient religion. Nevertheless, real religions have some pre-requisites, like a tradition spanning at least few generations. So the proper name for climate alarmism is a cult. And these are the telltale attributes: 1) Climate alarmists pretend to possess indisputable truths about the past, present, and future. From minute details of the paleoclimate to the world state 200 years in the future, alarmists know everything. 2) The alarmist...

As the Obama administration creates policy based on the premise that the planet is warming, more and more scientists are concluding the real danger is global cooling. One recently painted this scenario: Food shortages from crop failures brought on by cold weather during the summers will produce civil unrest, as in “huge civil unrest.” “There’s no question of will it occur … but exactly when,” said David Dilley, a former NOAA meteorologist and the current senior research scientist at Global Weather Oscillations. He gave a presentation recently on “Mind Your Own Business TV” with Debi Davis.

So there's a new climate report out from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Which do you want first — the good news or the bad news? LOL jk, it's all bad news! The NOAA has confirmed that July 2015 was the warmest month ever recorded on Earth. The average temperature across the Earth's land and ocean surfaces was 61.86 degrees Fahrenheit — 1.46 degrees warmer than the 20th-century average, 0.08 degrees warmer than the previous record set in 1998, and the hottest month since humans began recording global temperatures in the 1880s. The findings verify preliminary data released...

One of the leading lights of Marxism on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison brings home a sweet salary of $170,000 per year. The well-heeled sociology professor is Erik Olin Wright .. The tenured, capitalism-hating professor’s annual salary of $170,000 is $117,587 greater than the household income of a typical Wisconsin family and is in the top 2 percent of all Americans. Whil an average middle-class family in Wisconsin survives on $4,368 per month, the Marxist professor enjoys a cushy monthly income of $14,166. He will teach exactly two courses in the fall semester for this princely sum. ......

I came across this pictorial at DailyMail, spuriously-referencing a trend there in Scotland, and found the other articles for clarity. Scotland's winter snow STILL hasn't melted: Incredible network of tunnels and caves clings to mountains after the cold summer Among the picture captions:A range of factors has seen a growing number of snow patches remaining since 2007, but this summer there are more than have been seen for 20 years June on track to be coldest [Scottish] summer for 40 years The comments at the 2nd source are interesting.Scottish farmers suffering worst [coldest/wettest] summer in four decades I browsed and...

The Climate Change Business Journal has calculated that global warming is now a $1.5 trillion a year industry. The Business Journal’s report is not available for free online, but its findings are reviewed by the Insurance Journal. They are eye-opening, to say the least: The $1.5 trillion global “climate change industry” grew at between 17 and 24 percent annually from 2005-2008, slowing to between 4 and 6 percent following the recession with the exception of 2011’s inexplicable 15 percent growth, according to Climate Change Business Journal. The San Diego, Calif.-based publication includes within that industry nine segments and 38 sub-segments....

Industry blasts suggestion as harmful to the country. A conservation group that has succeeded in dealing recent legal setbacks to western Colorado coal mines called Thursday for a phase-out of federal coal leasing to help combat climate change. “It’s time for the Interior Department to shut it down,” Jeremy Nichols, Climate and Energy Program director for WildEarth Guardians, said in a news release. The group outlined a plan for ending the federal coal program over 10 to 25 years through a moratorium on leasing publicly owned coal, retiring existing leases that aren’t producing, honestly reporting the climate impacts of the...

Obama is petty and vengeful. At this point, anything with the words "Green Energy" might as well be read as "Screw the Middle Class". After being shot down by the court, Obama's Green Energy plan has risen from the grave meaner and nastier than ever. First of all it's been retooled to hit Republican states hardest. ... Behind the euphemisms, the Thug-in-Chief is doing his usual petty bit by lashing out at opponents while seeking to punish them. And backed in is a Carbon Tax plan, which will save the planet by enriching a handful of billionaires and rip you...

Having spent more than 30 years in the US Marine Corps, I know what constitutes a national security threat. Climate change, caused in large part by the carbon pollution we dump into our air, presents risks to the safety of both our nation and our world at large. The threats of climate change include extreme weather, rising sea levels, reduced military capacity, and conditions that can enable worldwide violence and perpetuate terrorism. To address this challenge, we’ll need to both prepare for the effects of climate change and reduce the pollution that is causing it. As the Environmental Protection Agency...

Ski resorts in parts of Montana and Wyoming fired up their webcams to capture images of something they don't usually see on their slopes: snow falling in late July. "An abnormally powerful low-pressure system is winding up near the Montana-Saskatchewan border – something more typical of the cold-weather season than mid-July," said weather.com senior meteorologist Nick Wiltgen. "As a result, it's yanking some pretty cold air southward quickly enough to bring subfreezing temperatures into the Northern Rockies at elevations above 10,000 feet or so. Throw in some moisture and boom, snow." The system dumped several inches of wintry precipitation on...