Free Republic

So, will this mean he’ll voluntarily penalize himself? (Watchdog.org) Speaking in New York City last week, Wall Street billionaire Tom Steyer laid clear his vision for penalizing people whose actions may contribute to climate change. “We need to reward people whose behavior reduces climate risk and penalize people who add to it,” said Steyer “If we can get this right, I think there’s no doubt that our economy is going to continue to do very well.” Huh. How did he get to NYC when he lives in the San Francisco area? Fossil fueled air travel? Did he walk from the...

Jedediah Purdy, a professor of law at Duke University Law School, is vexed by the two biggest problems facing the United States. No, not a chronically low labor participation rate, not an economic recovery which often looks more like a recession, not the renewed aggression of great powers like China or Russia, or the collapse of smaller powers in Central America and the Middle East. Taking to the pages of Politico Magazine, Purdy warned in stark terms of the real problems facing the country. They just happen to be problems which have always been and always will be problems; the...

97% Climate Consensus ‘Most Nonsensical, Stupid Number in the World’ Climate alarmism is "the biggest fraud in the field of science" and the 97% consensus claim is nonsensical, Apollo 7 astronaut Walter Cunningham tells MRCTV in a preview of his presentation at the upcoming Heartland Institute climate conference, July 7-9. "Since about 2000, I looked farther and farther into it," Col. Cunningham (USMC, Ret.) tells MRCTV in an exclusive interview. "I found that not one of the claims that the alarmists were making out there had any bearings, whatsoever. And, so, it was kind of a no-brainer to come to...

A study sponsored by the American Psychological Association and ecoAmerica warns that climate change, including an expected increase in the global mean temperature, will cause increased “ecoanxiety” resulting in severe psychological and sociological consequences. The study, Beyond Storms and Droughts: The Psychological Impacts of Climate Change, led by College of Wooster psychologist Susan Clayton, warns that “we can expect a likely increase in mental health-related symptoms and conditions as a result of climate change.” Communities at risk include those with high levels of poverty, lower education levels, large populations of older adults, children and infants, disabled people, recently arrived immigrants,...

According to the Obama Administration’s newly released National Climate Assessment, climate change is already impacting communities in every corner of the country, with an increasing frequency and severity of extreme weather events – storms, floods, and droughts – and rising sea levels destabilizing the everyday lives of Americans. Worse, the impacts of these changes are accelerating, and they are affecting communities around the world. The Pentagon’s most recent Quadrennial Defense Review warns that “climate change may increase the frequency, scale and complexity of future missions.” Some of the least stable states in the world will face changing weather patterns that...

Scientists are desperately scrambling to face the newest “global change” problem: plastic in the ocean. A recent expedition involving over 400 scientists from around the world has discovered that there is plastic in ALL of the world’s oceans. Really. ALL of them. Oceans, not scientists. “The findings reveal that plastic pollution is far more widespread than first thought,” says Science World Report. “Rather than being in isolated pockets of the ocean, it's a global problem. It's clear that steps need to be taken in order to reduce the amount of plastic waste currently winding up in our world's oceans. A...

Today’s Supreme Court decision in Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA is potentially a huge setback for the climatistas and the Obama administration’s recent proposal to regulate greenhouse gases through the Clean Air Act, though it is a complicated opinion and will take a while to unravel.  It is a typical 5 -4 ruling along the usual lines, but in some ways appears to be a 9 – 0 vote against the EPA on the narrow holding, as the Court’s opinion features multiple partial concurrences and partial dissents about various sub-parts of the opinion that make it confusing to unravel. ...

Leif Svalgaard claims “TSI has not fallen since 2003″. It’s technically true in a sense, but demonstrably false when discussing 11 year smoothed trends (which is written on the graph he was criticizing). Willis Eschenbach sadly was carried along. This post is in response to an overheated thread at WUWT. Both men owe David Evans an apology. The fuss is over the big fall in TSI.  Leif Svalgaard said it was “almost fraudulent” that we claimed there was a fall in TSI since 2003 since there wasn’t a fall in this dataset. He says: “There is no such drop.” I...

Can you imagine telling the IRS you don’t need to complete all their forms or provide records to back up your claim for a tax refund? Or saying your company’s assurances that its medical products are safe and effective should satisfy the FDA? Especially if some of your data don’t actually support your claims—or you “can’t find” key data, research and other records, because your hard drive conveniently crashed? But, you tell them, people you paid to review your information said it’s accurate, so there’s no problem. Do you suppose the government would accept your assurance that there’s “not a...

Two years ago during the scorching summer of 2012, July 1936 lost its place on the leaderboard and July 2012 became the hottest month on record in the United States. Now, as if by magic, and according to NOAA’s own data, July 1936 is now the hottest month on record again. The past, present, and future all seems to be “adjustable” in NOAA’s world. See the examples below. Josh has been busy again and writes at Bishop Hill with a new cartoon:The temperature adjustments story has been brewing for weeks principally due to the many posts at ‘RealScience’ but taken up...

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, criticized for manipulating temperature records to create a warming trend, has now been caught warming the past and cooling the present. July 2012 became the hottest month on record in the U.S. during a summer that was declared “too hot to handle” by NASA scientists. That summer more than half the country was experiencing drought and wildfires had scorched more than 1.3 million acres of land, according to NASA. According to NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in 2012, the “average temperature for the contiguous U.S. during July was 77.6°F, 3.3°F above the 20th century...

Hank Paulson, whose claim to fame in the public sector is panicking and browbeating the nation and its Washington politicians into accepting the Troubled Asset Relief Program in late September 2008, and who just two weeks later "put a (figurative) gun to the heads" of large-bank CEOs to "persuade" them to accept federal "investment" in their enterprises, has re-emerged to tell us, according to the Hill, that "Republicans are 'ready for a serious discussion' on climate change." As a reminder, in 2007, the late Robert Novak wrote that Paulson "contributed to Bill Clinton in 1992, Democrat Bill Bradley's 2000 presidential...

AL Gore, the world’s most famous global warming guru, last week used Australia to trash what’s left of his reputation. The Nobel prize-winning alarmist didn’t just tell his disciples here more astonishing falsehoods about the climate of the kind that’s good for his business. (See Gore’s truth for his latest whoppers.) Gore also meddled in our climate politics to the undisclosed benefit of his business partners, and against the interests of Australians. And in return for a favour, he falsely praised coal baron Clive Palmer as a planet-saver, when Palmer was in fact destroying our biggest schemes to tackle global...

Posted on June 28, 2014 by Guest Blogger Guest essay by David ArchibaldA couple of years ago the question was asked “When will it start cooling?” Of course solar denialists misconstrued this innocent enquiry. There is no doubt – we all know that lower solar irradiance will result in lower temperatures on this planet. It is a question of when. Solar activity is much lower than it was at a similar stage of the last solar cycle but Earthly temperatures have remained stubbornly flat. Nobody is happy with this situation. All 50 of the IPCC climate models have now been...

From Royal Holloway, University of LondonNew research published today (Friday 27th June 2014) in the journal Nature Scientific Reports has provided a major new theory on the cause of the ice age that covered large parts of the Northern Hemisphere 2.6 million years ago.The study, co-authored by Dr Thomas Stevens, from the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, found a previously unknown mechanism by which the joining of North and South America changed the salinity of the Pacific Ocean and caused major ice sheet growth across the Northern Hemisphere.The change in salinity encouraged sea ice to...

New solar theory predicts imminent global cooling To recap — using an optimal Fourier Transform, David Evans discovered a form of notch filter operating between changes in sunlight and temperatures on Earth. This means there must be a delay — probably around 11 years. This not only fitted with the length of the solar dynamo cycle, but also with previous independent work suggesting a lag of ten years or a correlation with the solar activity of the previous cycle. The synopsis then is that solar irradiance (TSI) is a leading indicator of some other effect coming from the Sun...

The Solar Series: I Background   |  II: The notch filter  |  III: The delay  |  IV: A new solar force?  |  V: Modeling the escaping heat.  |  VI: The solar climate model   |  VII — Hindcasting (You are here)   | VIII — PredictionsAll models are wrong, some are useful. That’s how all modelers speak (except perhaps some climate scientists).The barriers to making a good climate model are many. The data is short, noisy, adjusted, and many factors are simultaneously at work, some not well described yet. Climate modeling is in its infancy, yet billions of dollars rests...

NEW YORK (MainStreet) — This spring, new research out of Canada's McGill University that reviewed historical temperature records and geological data (ice cores, tree rings and lake sediments) concluded with 99% certainty that our current climate change predicament cannot be ascribed to natural cycles. But many are still dubious that man-made climate change is real. What's more, some skeptics even claim climate change is a money-making scam. In reality, you can follow the "dark money" to see how targeted funding is perpetuating these misconceptions -- even as climate change awareness and research groups lose funding.The article attempts to attack "skeptic"...

Confab of Climate Experts to Challenge Global Warming "Consensus" 28 June 2014 Climate experts will receive awards and present the latest evidence Against Global Warming at the Heartland Institute’s 9th International Conference on Climate Change. ...

President Obama’s recently announced energy and environment policies have been tried in many countries, always with the same result: abject failure. Yet when critics point this out, explaining that “the U.S. economy will lose millions of jobs and billions of dollars in growth,” Obama simply waves their objections away: “Let’s face it,” the president answers. “That’s what [critics] always say. … Every time… the warnings of the cynics have been wrong.” Other leaders, especially those in Europe who are further down the green path than is America, know better.The deputy leader of the German Green Party in the Bundestag, Oliver...