Free Republic

Incoming Global Warming Czar Carol Browner was — until last week — listed as one of 14 leaders of a socialist group that advocates what's called "global governance" and says rich countries must shrink their economies to address climate change. The Washington Times reports Browner's name and biography were listed on the Web page for Socialist International . Mr. Obama's transition team says Browner's membership in the organization is not a problem and that it brings experience in policymaking to her new role. But House Minority Leader John Boehner’s spokeswoman Antonia Ferrier asks, “Does she agree with the group's positions...

Donald Trump unveiled his energy vision for the United States at a petroleum conference in North Dakota Thursday -- vowing to cut off funding to U.N. climate change programs and attacking Hillary Clinton. "As bad as President Obama is, Hillary Clinton will be worse," Trump warned his audience at the Williston Basin Petroleum Conference. "She will escalate the war with the American worker like never before and against American energy." Trump, who used a teleprompter, said that if elected he would kill certain policies including the Paris climate agreement, arguing the agreement "gives foreign bureaucrats control over how much our...

Misaligned mirrors are being blamed for a fire that broke out yesterday at the world’s largest solar power plant, leaving the high-tech facility crippled for the time being. It sounds like the plant’s workers suffered through a real hellscape, too. A small fire was reported yesterday morning at the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS) in California, forcing a temporary shutdown of the facility. It’s now running at a third of its capacity (a second tower is down due to scheduled maintenance), and it’s not immediately clear when the damaged tower will restart. It’s also unclear how the incident will...

Donald Trump will have a climate plan and it will be ugly. For now, the Republican frontrunner is pedaling the kind of denialism his party loves, having called global warming everything from a "hoax" to a "con job" to a Chinese plot. But an interview with his energy adviser hinted that Trump might endeavor to Make Atmospheric Carbon Levels Great Again. "My advice would be, while I'm a skeptic as well", Trump energy honcho Kevin Cramer [said], "he is a product of political populism, and political populism believes that there needs [to be] some addressing of climate change". Cramer has...

Oil and gas industry groups on Thursday sued federal agencies over revisions to land management plans in Colorado and other western states to protect the greater sage-grouse. The Western Energy Alliance and the North Dakota Petroleum Council filed the suit in North Dakota, saying the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service failed to follow proper procedures for public involvement in adopting the land use plan amendments. They also say the plans ignore sound science and will hurt western economies. Plan revisions being challenged include ones in northwest Colorado, where greater sage-grouse habitat substantially overlaps with oil and gas...

A new study published in Climate Dynamics has found that humans are responsible for virtually all of the observed global warming since the mid-20th century. It's not a novel result - in fact, most global warming attribution studies have arrived at the same general result - but this study uses a new approach. Studies attempting to figure out the global warming contributions of various human and natural sources usually use a statistical approach known as 'linear regression'. This approach assumes we know the pattern of warming that each source (forcing) will cause, but we don't know how big the resulting...

In an unprecedented move, a US judge has given a group of 21 youths permission to sue the federal government for threatening their future health and security by failing to take sufficient action against climate change, despite being aware of the risks. "This decision is one of the most significant in our nation’s history," said the kids' attorney, Philip Gregory. "The Court gave America’s youth a fair opportunity to be heard ... The next step is for the Court to order our government to cease jeopardising the climate system for present and future generations." The lawsuit was brought before Oregon...

If all the countries do their bit then the total reduction in global warming – by the year 2100 will be 0.170 degrees Centigrade. As a climate sceptic friend of mine pointed out at the time, you’d experience a bigger temperature increase than that just walking down from the top to the bottom of the Eiffel tower. So there’s your deal folks: you – and taxpayers like you – are paying $1.5 trillion a year to reduce the world’s temperatures by the end of this century by 0.170. It’s so perfectly ridiculous it’s almost funny. And I suppose on a...

President Obama brought along a second, smaller Air Force One for his family to enjoy a day of sightseeing in Argentina on Thursday. After dancing the tango at a state dinner in Buenos Aires Wednesday night, the president and first lady Michelle Obama took their daughters aboard the government plane colloquially known as “baby” Air Force One Thursday to fly to the scenic town of Bariloche in southern Argentina. It’s a Boeing 757 used when traveling to places where the runway is too short for the primary Air Force One. The larger Air Force One, a 747-200, was parked alongside...

Denver International Airport announced at 12:18 p.m. on Wednesday that the airport is closed until further notice. "Weather and visibility are such that it is not safe for aircraft to arrive or depart at this time," airport officials tweeted. Airport officials said that passengers should not plan on coming to the airport until further notice and those at the airport should stay in place because Pena Blvd. is impassable. United Airlines canceled all remaining flights in and out of the airport .. Soutwest Airlines also canceled all remaining flights, ... Up to 12 inches of snow could fall at the...

Officials in Beverly Hills say they tried it all: educational campaigns, usage restrictions and written notices for people suspected of wasting water. Despite those efforts, the community missed its savings target every month since June, when a statewide 25% reduction in urban water consumption became mandatory amid the punishing drought. As a result, state regulators fined the city, saying publicly that its water wasters "should be ashamed." About four months ago, city officials got tough. Beverly Hills sent letters to dozens of customers in November warning them of high water use and urging them to cut back. The city also...

The first chunk of a $3bn commitment made at the Paris climate talks ‘shows the US stands squarely behind climate commitments’, the State Department said. The Obama administration has made a first installment on its $3bn pledge to help poor countries fight climate change – defying Republican opposition to the resident’s environmental plan. The $500m payment to the Green Climate Fund was seen as critical to shoring up international confidence in Barack Obama’s ability to deliver on the pledges made at the United Nations’ climate change conference in Paris in late 2015. Obama is expected to announce a number of...

Colleges and universities worldwide are incorporating into their curriculums the evolving genre of literature that focuses on the changes coming to Earth as the result of climate change — "cli-fi." Some of the books and movies now being considered part of the genre are old classics, while others were written more recently in direct response to today's changing climate. "It's a very, very energized time for this where people in literature have just as much to say as people who are in hard science fields, or technology and design fields, or various social-science approaches to these things," said Jennifer Wicke,...

House lawmakers sharply criticized the head of the Department of Energy’s green energy loan program for not releasing documents requested by a committee looking into companies that have received taxpayer dollars. “It is disconcerting that the executive director of a major government program is unwilling to commit — to actually commit — to providing all the documents that an investigation committee of the Congress has requested,” California Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher .. told Mark McCall, the head of the DOE’s loan office, in a hearing Thursday, “and that the answer being given is using weasel words ... House committee members...

Average Arctic temperatures are rising twice as fast as elsewhere in the world and the polar ice cap’s permanent cover is shrinking at a rate of around 10 percent per decade. By the end of this century, summers in the Arctic could be free of ice.

OLIVER TOWNSHIP, MI — A wind turbine located in Huron County fell over during a winter storm that brought wind and heavy snow to much of the state, but the cause of the collapse is unclear. The Exelon Corp. turbine is located near Gagetown and Richardson roads in Oliver Township, according to Huron County Central Dispatch. Oliver Township Planning Commission Chairman Brion Dickens lives about a third of a mile from the damaged turbine. "I'm not going to speculate. It was just a mechanical failure," he said Thursday, Feb. 25. "We don't know if it was weather related." Dickens said...

The downward slide continued for Colorado's coal industry in 2015, highlighted by production at Routt County's Twentymile Mine, which was down 38 percent. Statewide, production in Colorado was down 18.5 percent, with 18.7 million tons, the lowest amount of coal mined in 23 years. ... Colorado Mining Association President Stuart Sanderson said the drop in production is a result of lower demand, but it was not caused by natural market forces. What we are seeing is the direct result of government regulations that are designed to drive coal out of the energy mix," Sanderson said. He called Colorado's 2010 Clean...

The last time I saw a temperature this low was 45 years ago, when I was in high school.

The Utah Attorney General's Office filed a lawsuit Thursday against the Department of the Interior and Department of Agriculture, claiming the agencies' strategy to disallow new mining on or near greater sage grouse habitats is a breach of "numerous federal laws and regulations." The lawsuit in U.S. District Court seeks an order voiding the federal government's land-use plan amendments submitted last year that would directly prohibit new hard rock mining on 233,300 acres in Utah. "The state of Utah claims that the 2015 federal plan amendments disregarded the hallmark of federal land management -- multiple use and sustained yield --...

"Proof is for mathematical theorems and alcoholic beverages. It's not for science." - Mann Washington Posts's Steven Mufson and Joby Warrick gave a glowing account of President Obama's warnings on Climate Change:"The growing threat of climate change could define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other," Obama said in a speech at the Le Bourget conference center in Paris's industrial outskirts. "What should give us hope that this is a turning point, that this is the moment we finally determined we would save our planet." Obama, who has staked his legacy on the fight against climate change,...