Free Republic

Congratulations to The Australian again for taking the hard road and reporting controversial, hot, documented problems, that few in the Australian media dare to investigate. How accurate are our national climate datasets when some adjustments turn entire long stable records from cooling trends to warming ones (or visa versa)? Do the headlines of “hottest ever record” (reported to a tenth of a degree) mean much if thermometer data sometimes needs to be dramatically changed 60 years after being recorded?One of the most extreme examples is a thermometer station in Amberley, Queensland where a cooling trend in minima of 1C per...

British Botanists conducting a Summer survey of Scotland’s tallest mountain, Ben Nevis, have been stunned to find evidence of recently formed multi-year ice fields, areas of compacted snow, some of which weigh hundreds of tons. According to the BBC; “Hazards common in arctic and alpine areas but described as “extremely unusual” in the UK during the summer have been found on Ben Nevis. A team of climbers and scientists investigating the mountain’s North Face said snowfields remained in many gullies and upper scree slopes. On these fields, they have come across compacted, dense, ice hard snow call neve. Neve is...

The unbearable sadness of climate activism: Nicole Thornton remembers the exact moment her curious case of depression became too real to ignore. It was five years ago and the environmental scientist – a trained biologist and ecologist – was writing a rather dry PhD on responsible household water use. Fair enough. That would make anyone depressed. Thornton had always been easily upset by apathy towards, and denial of, environmental issues. But now she began to notice an oddly powerful personal reaction to "the small stuff" – like people littering, or neighbours chopping down an old tree. So, she's a bossy...

George Soros gave $500,000 apiece to House Majority PAC and the League of Conservation Voters Victory Fund. Climate-change activist Tom Steyer gave the biggest super PAC donation in July with $7.5 million. Super PACs spent July beefing up for the fall campaign. Many groups filed new disclosure reports this week, leaving a paper trail littered with big checks from big names. Democrats dominate the list of notable July donors ... Michael Bloomberg is staying plenty active in his post-mayoral days. Aside from funding his gun-control-focused super PAC, Bloomberg has written checks to Senate Majority PAC and super PACs that backed...

Bay Area billionaire Tom Steyer's blitz against candidates who are soft on climate change is underway in seven states, but some prominent fact-checking groups say he's emitting enough hot air to melt a few glaciers. Negative reviews from watchdogs like PolitiFact, FactCheck.org and the Washington Post are dogging one of the nation's biggest political donors, a former hedge fund manager who ditched his ties to fossil fuels and presented himself as a transparent antidote to the conservative Koch brothers' semi-clandestine funding network.

Following rapid warming in the late 20th century, this century has so far seen surprisingly little increase in the average temperature at the Earth’s surface. At first this was a blip, then a trend, then a puzzle for the climate science community. More than a dozen theories have now been proposed for the so-called global warming hiatus, ranging from air pollution to volcanoes to sunspots. New research from the University of Washington shows that the heat absent from the surface is plunging deep in the north and south Atlantic Ocean, and is part of a naturally occurring cycle. The study...

The Old Farmer's Almanac, the familiar, 223-year-old chronicler of climate, folksy advice and fun facts, is predicting a colder winter and warmer summer for much of the nation. Published Wednesday, the New Hampshire-based almanac predicts a "super-cold" winter in the eastern two-thirds of the country. The west will remain a little bit warmer than normal. "Colder is just almost too familiar a term," Editor Janice Stillman said. "Think of it as a refriger-nation." More bad news for those who can't stand snow: Most of the Northeast is expected to get more snowfall than normal, though it will be below normal...

Congress should use the appropriations process to reassert its authority over the Environmental Protection Agency, according to a Heritage Foundation issue brief released Tuesday.The report, written by scholar Daren Bakst, identifies three issues on which the EPA has proposed rules and regulations that exceed its authority. In all three cases, Bakst recommends that Congress prohibit the agency from using its funding to implement the proposals. (RELATED: EPA Overrides Congress, Hands Over Town to Indian Tribes)According to the report, “the EPA is using the regulatory process to require greenhouse gas emission reductions even as Congress has been unwilling to take such...

Extraterrestrials are conveniently global warming believers Only Paul Hellyer, Canada’s Defence Minister from 1963-67 under Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson who rose to Deputy Prime Minister under Pierre Elliott Trudeau, would tell you that not only do extraterrestrials exist, but they are getting ticked off with those earthlings who don’t buy into Al Gore,/Maurice Strong man-mad global warming. And only Russian Television would be the first to break the ‘scoop’. It’s not enough that earthbound worries like the far left jumping into bed with the expanding Islamic State-Caliphate; that Marxism is on the march in the U.S.A.; or that the...

Thousands of birds are flying into a new solar "mega-trap" in the middle of California's Mojave Desert, killing the avian lot at a rate of up to one bird every two minutes, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). The state-of-the-art Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS), which opened in February, is the world's largest solar plant to utilize "power towers," skyscraping structures that receive beams of focused solar rays to generate electricity. At Ivanpah, the sun's ray's are redirected from a sea of more than 300,000 mirrors on the desert surface below to hit water filled boilers...

Workers at a state-of-the-art solar plant in the Mojave Desert have a name for birds that fly through the plant's concentrated sun rays — "streamers," for the smoke plume that comes from birds that ignite in midair. Federal wildlife investigators who visited the BrightSource Energy plant last year and watched as birds burned and fell, reporting an average of one "streamer" every two minutes, --SNIP-- The bird kills mark the latest instance in which the quest for clean energy sometimes has inadvertent environmental harm. Solar farms have been criticized for their impacts on desert tortoises, and wind farms have killed...

If you thought last winter was bad, get ready for a potentially worse winter in parts of the country this year. But another record-setting winter could mean more than higher heating bills and snow fights. Harsh winter weather combined with coal-fired power plant closings could spell trouble for many households across the country who will desperately need to keep the lights and heat on this winter. Joe Bastardi, chief meteorologist at WeatherBELL Analytics, told the Wall Street Journal Live that current weather patterns are “flowing along right now into the type of El Niño situation that is notorious for giving...

... In a study published in 2012, researchers asked national infectious disease experts in 30 different countries whether or not they thought climate change would affect infectious disease patterns in their countries. The majority agreed. Nevertheless, it’s unclear whether these beliefs are driven by good science, or, as Malcolm Gladwank argued way back in 1995, a guilt-driven “idea of disease as a punishment for wickedness.” It’s true that West Africa, where the latest and most catastrophic Ebola outbreak is currently raging, has faced unequivocal environmental changes in recent years. The International Food Policy Research Institute published a report in 2013,...

US Secretary of State John Kerry continues to baffle observers by insisting that "global warming is, by far, the greatest threat mankind faces in the 21st century." "The reason should be obvious from the term 'global' warming," Kerry said. "This means that it affects everyone. This has to put it ahead of dangers that afflict necessarily narrower categories of victims. The beheading of innocent children by ISIS in Iraq, for example, only affects thousands of people." "The threat to wipe Israel off the map and exterminate the Jews, at worst, would entail the deaths of only a few million," Kerry...

Public relations (PR) is a powerful but unseen force in our society. Companies hire PR firms to make them look as good as possible. When the companies do something they are proud of, they do everything they can to make sure everyone hears about it (including, sometimes contacting reporters like us). When the companies do things that are not so great, they “spin” the news to make it sound harmless. PR firms make their money from fees paid by their clients and have typically been value-neutral, meaning that they promote whatever their clients want them to promote. So it’s a...

Many scientists and non-scientists are discussing "Global Warming" (or as it is increasingly being called "Anthropogenic Climate Change" or ACC). ACC would simply be an interesting topic for discussion if it were not for the politicization, polarization, and sensationalism that have accompanied the science.

Diplomacy: Great leadership isn't necessarily about intelligence, expertise or background. It's more about wisdom and judgment. Based on this, Americans should be very concerned about Secretary of State John Kerry. As the world melts into chaos and threats to the U.S. homeland multiply, America's top foreign policy official seems bizarrely, even dangerously, fixated on ... global warming. In remarks at the East-West Center in Honolulu on Wednesday, Kerry repeated his claim that climate change is "the biggest challenge ... we face right now." To which we respond: Can he be serious? In recent days, we've seen the establishment of a...

Rupert Darwall is the author of Age of Global Warming (and earning excellent reviews). Darwall has a gift for converting tricky scientific concepts into a story. This month in the City Journal, he beautifully summarizes and updates the story of Murry Salby. He’s interviewed Richard Lindzen and others, and discusses Salby’s work in the context of the way heretics are marginalized. I helped Rupert with some of the background. It’s controversial science, a complex situation, with irrelevant baggage to boot. But that’s exactly the place where science communicators — or in the case of Rupert, excellent historians — are most...

WASHINGTON – News outlets, advocacy groups and fellow think tanks are jumping to the defense of a conservative-leaning D.C. policy center and publication being sued for libel by a scientist who didn't like what they had to say about his work on global warming. Michael Mann, a prominent professor of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University, has long been a target of climate change skeptics for his work claiming temperatures have risen dramatically in recent decades, and has sued before when groups tried to debunk his data. But this time, Mann is being accused of going too far with his case...

Kellogg said Wednesday it will step up efforts to reduce planet-warming emissions in its supply chain as part of a broader initiative designed to be more environmentally friendly. Under the plan, the Battle Creek-based food products manufacturer will require key suppliers such as farms and mills to measure and publicly disclose their greenhouse gas outputs and targets for reducing them...