Free Republic

At least it was sustainable fair trade carbon neutral corruption. John Ashe, the UN General Assembly president, has been busted on corruption charges. A former president of the U.N. General Assembly "sold himself and the global institution he led" by allegedly pocketing more than $1 million in bribes to finance a luxury spending spree, according to a federal prosecutor. Ashe, 61, is accused of tax fraud in an alleged conspiracy involving five others, including a billionaire Chinese businessman and a former deputy U.N. ambassador from the Dominican Republic, according to a criminal complaint. Ashe is accused of underreporting his income...

The Fox News report that the Teamsters have decided not to endorse Hillary Clinton’s candidacy at this time, shortly after her pronouncement of her opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline, does not surprise and shows the peril of trying to be all things to all constituencies. On the one hand, there is a need to placate environmentalists and climate change true believers who oppose the pipeline from Canada. Among them is billionaire Tom Steyer, an eco-zealot who has pledged his fortune in support of Democratic candidates who want to repeal the Industrial Revolution who want us to rely on solar...

Progressive pundits increasingly envision the 2016 presidential election as a “last chance,” as one activist phrased it, to stop “climate change catastrophe.” As this agenda gets ever more radical, the prominence of climate change in the election will grow ever more obvious. The key here is that the green left increasingly does not want to limit or change the mix of fossil fuels, but eliminate them entirely, the faster the better. ... Climate activists such as hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer increasingly couch their policies on theological grounds, one reason why the pope’s intervention was so timely. Stark self-interest is...

While delivering the first address from a pontiff to a joint meeting of Congress on Thursday, Pope Francis touched on topics ranging from the plight of immigrants to climate change and the death penalty. Many of his comments were lightly delivered and unlikely to elicit much controversy, though the reaction might be different if they were given by another world leader.

White House Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett is quietly working behind the scenes to build a coalition of major U.S. corporations to back President Barack Obama’s goal of hashing out a global agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions at the upcoming United Nations summit in Paris.The Daily Caller News Foundation obtained a letter that outlines how, by the end of June, Obama is looking to build a coalition of businesses to show support for UN climate talks. After that, the White House will then try to grow this group of businesses to 250 in the run up to the Paris talks...

The Associated Press announced on its blog today that henceforth it will refer to climate change skeptics less pejoratively, reports Mediaite. The AP explained the changes thusly: Our guidance is to use climate change doubters or those who reject mainstream climate science and to avoid the use of skeptics or deniers. [emphasis in original] Some background on the change: Scientists who consider themselves real skeptics – who debunk mysticism, ESP and other pseudoscience, such as those who are part of the Center for Skeptical Inquiry – complain that non-scientists who reject mainstream climate science have usurped the phrase skeptic. They...

George Mason University Professor Jagadish Shukla is a lead author with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and winner of numerous awards including the International Meteorological Organization Prize, the Rossby Medal of the American Meteorological Society, and the Padma Shri National Award from the President of India. He is currently president of the Institute of Global Environment and Society and a professor of Climate Dynamics. For his expertise, Shukla is amply rewarded by George Mason University with a salary over $250,000 a year. Apparently, though, this isn’t a full time job. It can’t be – because on top of...

Construction workers in California's Santa Cruz mountains were subject to a surprise delay last week when a team of archaeologists took over the site to remove an ancient whale fossil. The project site was expected to have a high potential for archaeological finds, so a monitor was assigned to the Scotts Valley development and found the fossil amid construction vehicles on Sept. 4. This project site is not the only one in California with fossils ... Since the 19th century, paleontologists have been studying the “Sharktooth Hill Bone Bed” near Bakersfield, California, where fossils and bones of ancient whales, seals,...

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.