Free Republic

The United States joined a controversial proposal by Saudi Arabia and Russia this weekend to weaken a reference to a key report on the severity of global warming, sharpening battle lines at the global climate summit in Poland aimed at gaining consensus over how to combat rising temperatures. Arguments erupted Saturday night before a United Nations working group focused on science and technology, where the United States teamed with Russia, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to challenge language that would have welcomed the findings of the landmark report, which said that the world has barely 10 years to cut carbon emissions...

So now we have combat ready armored vehicles with the EU flag which are being used against unarmed European protesters who are demonstrating against a pro EU authoritarian regime.

Some 252 million years ago, Earth almost died. In the oceans, 96 percent of all species became extinct. It’s harder to determine how many terrestrial species vanished, but the loss was comparable. This mass extinction, at the end of the Permian Period, was the worst in the planet’s history, and it happened over a few thousand years at most — the blink of a geological eye. On Thursday, a team of scientists offered a detailed accounting of how marine life was wiped out during the Permian-Triassic mass extinction. Global warming robbed the oceans of oxygen, they say, putting many species...

BRUSSELS - Belgian police detained more than 400 people on Saturday after “yellow vest” protesters inspired by riots in France threw rocks and firecrackers and damaged shops and cars as they tried to reach official buildings in Brussels. In the second violence of its kind in the capital in eight days, a crowd which police estimated at around 1,000 faced riot squads who used water cannon and tear gas to keep people away from the European Union headquarters and the nearby Belgian government quarter. Calm was restored after about five hours. The movement in Belgium, inspired by the “gilets jaunes”,...

More than 1,700 people were arrested across France during the latest "yellow vest" protests, which left 135 people injured and caused widespread damage. Of the 1,723 detained on Saturday, 1,220 were ordered to be held in custody, according to the interior ministry. Despite the security clampdown clashes broke out in several cities across the country, including Marseille, Bordeaux and Lyon and Toulouse, during a fourth weekend of protests against rising living costs and the embattled French President Emmanuel Macron. Paris again saw the worst of the of the violence as protesters, wearing their distinctive yellow safety jackets, set fire to...

At least 700 people were arrested in Paris as 5,000 demonstrators faced off against 8,000 police in another violent demonstration by "yellow vest" protesters.Riots broke out all over France despite the supposed cause of the violence being eliminated earlier in the week by the government of President Emmanuel Macron. The government had been claiming that a fuel tax increase was to blame for the protests, but the government rescinded the increase on Wednesday.Donald Trump believes it was Macron's climate change policies: The Paris Agreement isn’t working out so well for Paris. Protests and riots all over France. People do...

Any blizzards that blanket Poland this winter can’t compare to the massive snow job climate campaigners are trying to pull off. Some 30,000 politicians, activists, computer modelers, bureaucrats, lawyers, journalists, renewable energy sellers and a few scientists are in Katowice, Poland December 2-14, for another Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change conference. Four issues will dominate the agenda. * Proclaim that humanity and the planet face existential cataclysms, unless fossil fuel use and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are slashed to zero by 2050 – to “prevent” average planetary temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 F) above what they...

The unwritten rule seems to be that each successive climate report and news release must be more frightening than any predecessors, especially during the run-up to international conferences. Thus Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report 15 claims governments worldwide must make “unprecedented changes in all aspects of society,” spend $40 trillion by 2035 on renewable energy, and impose carbon taxes that climb to $5,500 per ton of carbon dioxide (CO2) by 2030. Or temperatures could climb another 1 degree F (0.5 C) and bring utter cataclysm to human civilization and our planet. Not to be outdone, the 1,700-page 2018 US National...

NBC's Katy Tur, responding to an article in the New Yorker about climate, looked into the camera and asked, "How pointless is my life? And how pointless are the decisions that I make on a day-to-day basis when we are not focused on climate change every day, when it's not leading every one of our newscasts?" It's a safe bet that not only will climate change not lead all newscasts, it will not even lead Tur's very often. And the reason is not any of those often proffered for failure to act in ways activists prefer. It won't be that...

The passing of President George H. W. Bush and the ruckus caused by the Yellow Vests in France make this a good time to review the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm in Kuwait. Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait and as a deterrent to those who might oppose him, he threatened environmental warfare. This threat took advantage of the concerns first aired by a group known as TTAPS, an acronym of the names of the authors, Turco, Toon, Ackerman, Pollack and Sagan. They had postulated that a nuclear exchange would induce a “Nuclear Winter�. The TTAPS climate model was a...

While world leaders gather in Katowice, Poland, for the COP24 climate summit, protesters in the streets of Paris have successfully forced French President Emmanuel Macron's hand, undercutting his efforts to impose a carbon tax on French energy sales. Macron has made climate change and lowering greenhouse gases a central component of both his domestic and foreign policies, only to face dramatic failure at the hands of his "yellow vest" countrymen. Macron's popularity has been low in France for months, and has now fallen to just a 23% approval rating. But the rioting across his country sends a frightening signal to...

David Attenborough’s climate change fearmongering makes him look a fool"by Andrew Bolt column in the Daily Telegraph (Australia) 5 Dec 2018 It’s embarrassing to see Sir David Attenborough make such a fool of himself after decades of brilliant filmmaking. Organisers of this week’s United Nations’ global warming conference, in Poland, asked the documentary superstar to make a speech that would wake the dead. And he gave it his best shot, trying to sound like an Old Testament prophet but so overdoing the fearmongering that he seemed deranged. “Right now, we are facing a man-made disaster of global scale,” he thundered....

The Environmental Protection Agency acted again Thursday to ease rules on the sagging U.S. coal industry, this time scaling back what would have been a tough control on climate-changing emissions from any new coal plants. The latest Trump administration targeting of legacy Obama administration efforts to slow climate change comes in the wake of multiplying warnings from the agency’s scientists and others about the accelerating pace of global warming. In a ceremony Thursday at the agency, acting EPA administrator Andrew Wheeler signed a proposal to dismantle a 2015 rule that any new coal power plants include cutting-edge techniques to capture...

The government in France put out the word Wednesday night that the fuel tax would be suspended not just for six months, but for all of next year (2019). The leader of the opposition National Rally (former National Front) Marine Le Pen tweeted late Wednesday night that President Emmanuel Macron should pledge on his honor not to reintroduce the tax wit the amended budget in the spring. Whether this apparent concession will help stamp out protests is uncertain. Four have died and hundreds have been injured in the weeks of protests by the "yellow vests" but now high school and...

The Bernie Sanders campaign spent a whopping $297,685.50 on private plane travel in just nine days, reports The Washington Free Beacon. This is not the first time the 148-year-old Democrat Socialist has shown an affinity for what is still considered one of the great luxuries for America’s super wealthy. After losing the 2016 Democrat presidential nomination to Hillary Clinton, it was reported that Bernie would not support Hillary in the general election unless he received a “plane and staff for a series of fall rallies in battleground states … plane would be paid for by the DNC.”

I read yesterday that Big Tuna is blaming millennials for a downturn in canned tuna sales (The Trouble With Tuna: ‘A Lot of Millennials Don’t Even Own Can Openers’).Now I’ve found fault with millennials in the past for all sorts of things - mostly related to their willful lack of critical thinking skills and their mindless adoption of looney leftist dogma that they’ve been spoon fed and indoctrinated in since inception – but even I am unwilling to blame them for the demise of canned tuna. If it’s true that millennials don’t own can openers we could be dealing with...

Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez emphasized need to ‘transform our energy system’ but did not discuss how to pursue it. A star-studded progressive town hall on climate change drew thousands of viewers online and hundreds in person - but offered little insight into how the US left might overcome Republican opposition and lay the groundwork to limit rising temperatures. The Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, a potential 2020 presidential candidate, and Democratic socialist congresswoman-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who campaigned on a “Green New Deal”, elicited cheers with promises of an economic boom from massive investment in renewable power. “What we are trying...

Eskom’s warning that the country was threatened by months of rotating blackouts became a reality in less than 24 hours. The state-owned company, which produces most of South Africa’s power, said on Wednesday that controlled blackouts could return and last throughout the year. Even more concerning is that the company expects energy availability of the system will keep declining into early next year and probably only recover to current levels in six months. By Thursday, Eskom announced it was cutting 1GW from the grid. It doubled that amount on Friday in an outage that’s scheduled to last 13 hours. For...

Forest fires in California this year released carbon emissions equivalent to the amount produced to power the state's electricity for one year, according to a new analysis from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). The wildfires, including last month's record-breaking fires in Northern and Southern California, released 68 million tons of carbon dioxide as they incinerated huge swaths of land and destroyed thousands of homes this year. That is roughly the same amount of carbon emissions typically produced to power the entire state for a year, according to a statement from the Interior Department on Friday. "We know that wildfires can...

President Trump has become “the face of climate denial,” global warming activist and former Vice President Al Gore said Wednesday night, telling The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah that the 2020 election will provide the opportunity for voters to “make a statement — that we want to get back on the track to the real America.” After Noah had some fun with Trump’s comment, during a recent Washington Post interview, that U.S. air and water were “at a record clean,” Gore turned serious. “It’s really significant, Trevor, that Donald J. Trump is now the face of climate denial,” he said. “His...