Free Republic

Oversight: A federal agency keeps stonewalling congressional efforts to access its internal communications. What's the problem here? If the agency's global warming claim was honestly arrived at, just turn over the documents.

Summary: Over 100 cities have pledged to create bold climate action plans as President Obama & Secretary Kerry travel to Paris to negotiate an international climate agreement. In August, as part of an ambitious plan to expand renewable energy to households across America, President Obama called on all U.S. mayors to publicly commit to a local climate action plan. The President set a goal of at least 100 U.S. cities signing the Compact of Mayors prior to the Paris UN climate change meeting (“COP”). Today, that goal has not only been met, but surpassed. Why are U.S. cities so important...

Gavin and Tom delivered their fraud right on schedule ahead of Paris, just as I predicted they would. They claim that October had the highest temperature anomaly ever recorded for any month....Somehow, they managed to calculate Earth’s temperature within 0.01 degrees – even though they had no temperature data for about half of the land surface, including none in Greenland and very little in Africa or Antarctica.

Climate change advocates are optimistic that last Friday's terror attacks in Paris have improved the chances of an international climate deal being agreed upon at the upcoming United Nations talks being held in the French capital in less than two weeks. Andrew Steer, president of the World Resources Institute, said on a call with reporters on Wednesday that while there is no way to know for certain what the impact of the attacks will be on the Paris conference, the current spirit of global solidarity bodes well for cooperation.

New studies flip climate-change notions upside down The sun will go into "hibernation" mode around 2030, and it has already started to get sleepy. At the Royal Astronomical Society's annual meeting in July, Professor Valentina Zharkova of Northumbria University in the UK confirmed it - the sun will begin its Maunder Minimum (Grand Solar Minimum) in 15 years. Other scientists had suggested years ago that this change was imminent, but Zharkova's model is said to have near-perfect accuracy. So what is a "solar minimum"? Our sun doesn't maintain a constant intensity. Instead, it cycles in spans of approximately 11 years....

Climate Change: Researchers from developed nations who insist that humans are warming the planet have inadvertently given Third World nations a weapon to shake down capitalist nations. Or was that the plan all along? Third World nations haven't developed their economies because their governments are often run by con men, thieves, killers and tyrants. While these governments never recognize that they are the problem, they do know an opportunity for a racket when they see one. Extortion often comes with a veneer of legitimacy, though, and that's what we have in a manifesto produced by Bolivia. It is ostensibly that...

This tripe today: ANALYSIS: POLARIZED POLITICS DICTATED OBAMA KEYSTONE CALL WASHINGTON (AP) - President Barack Obama's decision to block the Keystone XL oil pipeline has exposed an endlessly polarized Washington, and likely hardened its divides. Obama is now being praised to the skies by environmentalists and most Democrats, and denounced in apocalyptic terms by Republicans and the business community. And although environmental issues once produced bipartisan agreement in Congress, consensus on action to increase energy production or deal with climate change looks farther away than ever. "This became a tribal issue of bizarre proportion," said Jason Grumet, president of the...

Paris (AFP) - France's top diplomat, who will preside over a year-end Paris summit tasked with inking a climate rescue pact, warned Sunday of looming planetary "catastrophe" if negotiations fail. "It is life on our planet itself which is at stake," Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told journalists as ministers and climate envoys from 70 countries met for pre-summit talks to iron out tough political questions. With the key UN conference just three weeks away, he also announced that Russia's President Vladimir Putin would attend the November 30 opening. Russia, a major oil producer, is seen as a deal-maker or -breaker...

Microsoft multi-billionaire Bill Gates averred that freedom and democracy will need to be sacrificed if we are to avert climate disaster. "Left to their own devices, common people don’t see the need for action to prevent global warming," Gates lamented. "They are too prone to place having a job, food on the table, and a comfortable home ahead of working against global warming." Gates advised "a top down imposition of socialism to overcome individual resistance to the measures deemed essential for taming runaway climate change. Only socialism can stifle prosperity sufficiently to achieve the reductions in human activities that contribute...

The global elite has little idea what afflicts the poor, says Pope Francis. He's right ---but that observation sometimes applies to him, too. In his US visit, the pope is already creating headlines about the urgent need to respond to climate change. Invoking the need to "protect the vulnerable in our world," he calls for an end to humanity’s reliance on fossil fuels. But do the world’s poor believe that carbon cuts are a top priority? Since March 2013, the United Nations has sought citizens’ ranking of 16 policy priorities. More than 8 million people have participated, with nearly 3...

Last week, The New York Times published an exclusive about how Greenland is melting away. They had satellite photos and drone footage of the massive river formed by the melting ice sheet. It could raise sea levels by 20 feet, and could turn the world into something seen in Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence. In the film, global warming has flooded the coastlines and pretty much decimated humanity: For years, scientists have studied the impact of the planet's warming on the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. But while researchers have satellite images to track the icebergs that break off, and have...

Gobal Warming blamed for antarctic snow growth as IPCC data wrong again, Putin says warming is a ‘fraud’ Warming equates to more snow is the latest update from global warming enthusiasts as the latest report from NASA and the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) points out that from 1992 to 2001, Antarctica was estimated to have gained 112 billion tons of ice every year. Even when growth slowed, it still continued, adding 82 billion tons of ice during 2003 t0 2008. “We’re essentially in agreement with other studies that show an increase in ice discharge in the Antarctic Peninsula...

French weatherman fired for promoting book sceptical of climate change Philippe Verdier of state-owned channel France 2 was taken off air in October for his book attacking ‘complete hype on the climate’ Associated Press in Paris Monday 2 November 2015 15.40 EST A weather forecaster for French state television has been fired after releasing and promoting a book criticising politicians, scientists and others for what he calls an exaggerated view of climate change. Philippe Verdier’s dismissal from France 2 comes a month before Paris hosts a UN conference aiming for the most ambitious worldwide agreement yet to limit global warming....

Right Wing Watch reports on the extreme rhetoric and activities of key right-wing figures and organizations by showing their views in their own words. In this video, Ted Cruz tells Glenn Beck that belief is climate change is not a scientific position, but a religious one.

Mass extinction events are sometimes portrayed in illustrations of volcanic eruptions causing widespread destruction. According to Dr. Richard E. Ernst of Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, expert on Large Igneous Provinces (LIPs), this interpretation may have some truth behind it, but not in the instantaneous way we might think. Ernst will report on his research on 1 November at the Geological Society of America's Annual Meeting in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. The basaltic lava flowing from ancient volcanoes and the portion of magma (liquid rock) emplaced underground can create geologic conditions linked with climate change and, subsequently, extinction events. This climatic effect...

ENEVA (Reuters) - The U.N.'s weather and climate agency said on Thursday there was no cause for alarm about a record-size hole this month in the ozone layer, that shields life on earth from the sun, as it should shrink again. The ozone hole that appears over Antarctica fluctuates in size, normally reaching its widest in the polar spring as extreme cold temperatures in the stratosphere and the return of sunlight unleash chlorine radicals that destroy ozone. Last year, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said it detected the first sign of ozone recovery, largely thanks to a 1987 ban on...

World | Thu Oct 29, 2015 7:52am EDT Russian media take climate cue from skeptical Putin MOSCOW | By Andrey Kuzmin ...snip... But the Russian public heard little mention of climate change, because media coverage across state-controlled television stations and print media all but ignored it. On national TV, the villains were locals who routinely but carelessly burn off tall grasses every year, and the sometimes incompetent crews struggling to put the fires out. ...snip... The president believes that "there is no global warming, that this is a fraud to restrain the industrial development of several countries including Russia," says...

How scary are your jack-o’-lanterns? Scarier than you think, according to the Energy Department, which claims the holiday squash is responsible for unleashing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Most of the 1.3 billion pounds of pumpkins produced in the U.S. end up in the trash, says the Energy Department’s website, becoming part of the “more than 254 million tons of municipal solid waste (MSW) produced in the United States every year.”

Scientists from the UK’s National Oceanography Center (NOC) have set their sights on unmasking the ocean’s ‘twilight zone’ – the area between 100 and 1000 meters deep where a small amount of the sun’s light can still penetrate. This area has proved particularly troublesome for researchers to study, as scientific instruments are typically designed to either sink to the ocean floor or float on the surface. But this elusive region is teeming with ocean life that plays a key role in keeping atmospheric carbon-dioxide (CO2) levels 30 percent lower than it otherwise would be, according to the scientists from NOC....

New Hamp­shire Sen­at­or Kelly Ayotte is at odds with GOP lead­er­ship and the vast ma­jor­ity of her Re­pub­lic­an col­leagues over cli­mate-change policy head­ing in­to the 2016 elec­tions. Ayotte, who is gird­ing for a dif­fi­cult reelec­tion fight, on Sunday be­came the first GOP sen­at­or to sup­port Pres­id­ent Obama’s sweep­ing reg­u­la­tion that man­dates car­bon-emis­sions cuts from the na­tion’s power plants.