Free Republic

Climate change coupled with wide-spread famine is “creating more terrorism” in Africa, home to jihadist organizations like the Islamic State (ISIS/ISIL) and al-Qaeda, declared Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY).

A group of U.S. scientists has had to be rescued by helicopter from Antarctica after being trapped by encroaching ice. Good Morning America reports: A group of American scientists was rescued from an island off Antarctica’s coast after ice prevented a U.S. Antarctic Program research vessel from reaching them. The four U.S. scientists and a support staff member conducting research on Antarctica’s Joinville Island were airlifted by helicopter Sunday from an icebreaker ship dispatched by Argentina, said the National Science Foundation, which funds and manages the Antarctic program. You’ll, of course, never guess what the scientists were doing there. No,...

But Republicans said they worried their ranks would bear the brunt of the shift as young people moved away from party orthodoxy on issues like guns, gay marriage and climate change.

This has been a colder-than-usual winter in the Midwest and Northeast, so many Americans are facing high home heating and electric bills. In some areas, these bills can reach $1,000 a month. Liberals, of course, charge that Donald Trump is the culprit. An AP story last week screamed: "Trump Once Again Wants to Cut Energy Assistance to the Poor." Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders charged that if Trump has his way and eliminates the Low Income Heating Assistance Program, people might "freeze to death." But wait. Donald Trump is pro-American energy development. He isn't the one who is making energy bills...

The Arctic is melting catastrophically! Sea ice levels are experiencing their most precipitous decline in 1500 years! Something must be done – and fast… Well, so claims the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and we know by now what that means, don’t we? Yep: the Arctic sea ice is doing just fine. Yep: yet again, the NOAA is telling porkies. As usual, Paul Homewood has got its number. First, here’s what the NOAA is claiming, as relayed in a scaremongering piece at Vox:

Last year the inhabitants of Venezuela led the world in weight loss with an average decline in weight of 24 lbs. per person. President Nicolas Maduro lamented that "the outcome would've been even better if more of the largest losers had been able to survive. Still, we are showing the gringos how to fight climate change." Former US President Barack Obama hailed the country's mass starvation method of weight loss as "a remarkable shrinkage of Venezuela's carbon footprint. The sacrifices made by their people to reduce global warming have been truly heroic. One of my biggest regrets is that I...

Columbia, SC Once again, a group of obstructionists who like to call themselves environmentalists is trying to steal opportunities away from South Carolina. The Coastal Conservation League and Southern Environmental Law Center filed a suit in federal court a week before Christmas to halt the construction of Interstate 73, highlighting their continued disregard for the public good. These groups say the environmental impact of I-73 is too high. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The federal government requires that any new highway be constructed along the least environmentally impactful route. Fifteen state and federal agencies have spent 16 years...

A Princeton physicist has shared an inconvenient truth of his own--climate change models are based on an alternate reality. "And I know they don't work," Princeton University physicist William Happer says in a video produced by Prager U. "They haven't worked in the past." "They don't work now. And it's hard to imagine when, if ever, they’ll work in the foreseeable future." "In the video, Happer argues that even supercomputers used to predict the weather and forecast future global warming aren't strong enough to capture the complexity of Earth's atmosphere, including cloud cover and natural ocean cycles," Michael Batasch, who...

Fake science: Two articles yesterday from the so-called science journals Nature and Science today illustrate once again how pervasive the corruption in the climate field has now spread to almost anything that relates to climate

A free-market think tank is asking the Securities and Exchange Commission for an investigation into possible bond fraud by local and municipal governments that claim they will be harmed by climate change. The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) says a number of municipalities, most of them in California, are suing oil and gas companies for future damages because of climate change, and in doing so are often explicit in their forecasts of predicted sea-level rise and monetary damages. However, when those same cities sell bonds to investors, they're being far more generic in their claims of future catastrophe. "In their suits...

internet-connectivity seems to be what really counts, even for dishwashers. Indeed, our new machine flashed a light in excitement about finding a signal from our router. It must have been really happy! Dear Cousin Punxsutawney Phil, Cordial thanks for your response to my letter of last year to our Aunt Climate. I think you were right on target and our great aunt has listened to our gripes. Of course, she’s not alone; as you know the U.S. President, in his speech on the State of the Union, a couple of nights ago, did not even mention “climate change” once. Presumably,...

The U.S. is still on schedule to meet its obligations under the Paris Climate Agreement despite its decision to pull out of the accord, Gore said Thursday"Several governors of our largest states, hundreds of cities and thousands of U.S. businesses are now ensuring that the U.S. will not only meet but exceed the commitments it made under the Paris Agreement," Gore, who was speaking on a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, said Thursday. Under the agreement, reached at the end of 2015, world leaders committed to making sure global warming stays "well below" two degrees Celsius...

Why Humans Left Africa: Our Ancestors Watched Climate Change To Cold, Dry BY ELANA GLOWATZ @ELANAGLOW ON 10/05/17 AT 3:09 PM Early humans may have left Africa and spread all over the globe because their home climate was drying up. The idea comes from samples of marine sediment taken from northeastern Africa that show the area was cold and dry around 60,000 years ago, which is around the time humans might have migrated off that continent and into Europe and Asia. A team of scientists wrote in the journal Geology that after warm and wet conditions between 120,000 and 90,000...

In California, seven cities have sued energy companies for misrepresenting the dangers of global warming, but a review of public records reveals those communities may have done a little misrepresenting themselves.And ExxonMobil, the principle target of these suits, has had it. It says the lawsuits seek only to use the courts to win a public policy battle it otherwise could not win, and the claims the cities make are undermined by claims they have made to investors in recent months to obtain bond financing.In its lawsuit against energy companies, the city of Oakland declared “Global warming has caused and continues...

Manmade climate change is now dwarfing the influence of natural trends on the climate, scientists say. Last year was the second or third hottest year on record - after 2016 and on a par with 2015, the data shows. But those two years were affected by El Niño - the natural phenomenon centred on the tropical Pacific Ocean which works to boost temperatures worldwide. Take out this natural variability and 2017 would probably have been the warmest year yet, the researchers say. The acting director of the UK Met Office, Prof Peter Stott, told BBC News: "It's extraordinary that temperatures...

As we again break records for cold in the southern U.S., while sitting indoors trying to keep warm (and schooling my wife and kids in Trivial Pursuit), I stumbled across this on the AJC.com: Warm up your car this morning? That could be illegal where you live. According to the article, 31 states have laws against "idling." Some of these laws are rooted in some measure of common sense--to deter theft and the like--but many are the sad result of governments buying into the myth of man-made global warming. As the author of the AJC piece puts it, "Of course,...

California is poised to meet its goal to reduce greenhouse gases 33 percent, to 1990 levels, by the year 2020. Its targets for use of more renewable energy by that date are, in some cases, already exceeded. ...hold on tight for what comes next. The state’s overarching plan was intended to ease industry and consumers into a carbon-free future bit by bit; ten years in, the training wheels are off. Emissions-reduction must hit 40 percent by 2030 and twice that by 2050. In 12 years, half the state’s energy must come from renewable sources. 14 million buildings must operate twice...

Climate change is first and foremost a threat to human society. That fact has been somewhat obscured in regular discourse, in favor of a false dichotomy portraying climate policy as an upper-middle-class noblesse oblige idea for anxious birders and other environmentalist types, and hardheaded economists who think building up yet more wealth is more important. In reality, one obvious way that threat to humanity is going to be expressed is through economic damage. In other words, unchecked climate change is going to be terrifically expensive. It drives home the fact that dawdling on climate policy, as Democrats did when they...

Litigation may be as American as apple pie, but some lawsuits are so destructive that they stand out even among the hugely expensive wreckage wrought by our legal system. The most prominent current example is the "children's" climate lawsuit (Juliana v U.S.): A group of kids, including "future generations, through their guardian Dr. James Hansen," claim that the government's actions and failures to act have caused climate change, thus violating the youngest generation's constitutional rights to life, liberty and property, and have failed to protect essential public trust resources. I leave the numerous legal issues to the lawyers, although precisely...

A broad survey of climate change literature for 2017 reveals that the alleged “consensus” behind the dangers of anthropogenic global warming is not nearly as settled among climate scientists as people imagine. Author Kenneth Richard found that during the course of the year 2017, at…