Free Republic

Vatican City, Jun 15, 2015 / 01:05 am (CNA/EWTN News).- One of the most challenging scientific questions Pope Francis faces in his new encyclical on creation is that of climate change, which a source close to the document says the Pope addresses in a balanced perspective without taking sides. “The great novelty which emerges from the encyclical is that it comes from a shepherd who’s thinking of all those who are his,” a source familiar the encyclical has said. "(It) has a big overview, the capacity of helping us walk towards a more integral ecology that is all inclusive and...

Ban Ki-moon arrived at the Vatican with his own college of cardinals. Mr. Ban, the United Nations secretary general, had brought the leaders of all his major agencies to see Pope Francis, a show of organizational muscle and respect for a meeting between two global institutions that had sometimes shared a bumpy past but now had a mutual interest. The agenda was poverty, and Francis inveighed against the “economy of exclusion” as he addressed Mr. Ban’s delegation at the Apostolic Palace. But in an informal meeting with Mr. Ban and his advisers, Francis shifted the discussion to the environment and...

The most anticipated papal letter for decades will be published in five languages on Thursday. It will call for an end to the ‘tyrannical’ exploitation of nature by mankind. Could it lead to a step-change in the battle against global warming?Pope Francis will call for an ethical and economic revolution to prevent catastrophic climate change and growing inequality in a letter to the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics on Thursday. In an unprecedented encyclical on the subject of the environment, the pontiff is expected to argue that humanity’s exploitation of the planet’s resources has crossed the Earth’s natural boundaries, and that...

Editor's note: This column was co-authored by Tom Tamarkin.A recent NOAA article is just what Doctor Doom ordered. It claims the 18-year “hiatus” in rising planetary temperatures isn’t really happening. (The “pause” followed a 20-year modest temperature increase, which followed a prolonged cooling period.) The article states: “Here we present an updated global surface temperature analysis that reveals that global trends are higher than reported by the IPCC, especially in recent decades, and that the central estimate for the rate of warming during the first 15 years of the 21st century is at least as great as the last half...

On Wednesday, the Weather Channel launched a dramatic campaign it says is intended to help shift the climate change conversation from science to solutions. The series of short videos, called Climate 25, is surprisingly political for a venue like the Weather Channel, and most are aimed at making the case for urgent action from a conservative, Republican angle. Among the featured speakers are U.S. Army Gen. Charles H. Jacoby (Ret.); Henry Paulson, a former CEO of Goldman Sachs who served as secretary of the treasury under President George W. Bush from 2006 to 2009; and Paul Polman, the CEO of...

When fossil fuels -- coal, oil and natural gas -- burn, the major combustion products are carbon dioxide (CO2) and water vapor. Water doesn’t matter since it is already everywhere and adding a little bit more to the Earth won’t tip any balances. CO2, on the other hand is considered to be a great evil by those who believe in catastrophic global warming. It’s perfectly reasonable that adding CO2 to the atmosphere could cause some warming, probably minor. This perfectly reasonably supposition was turned into unreasonable dogma by certain scientific disciplines that sensed an opportunity. They realized that if CO2...

BONN, Germany (Reuters) - Pope Francis is likely to have a major impact in spurring U.N. negotiations on global warming with an encyclical on the environment next week, the U.N.'s climate chief said on Thursday. "Pope Francis is personally committed to this issue like no other pope before him," Christiana Figueres told a news conference at June 1-11 talks on a deal to combat climate change due to be agreed in Paris in December. The encyclical, a letter sent to bishops, due next Thursday would add a moral dimension to work on climate change for many believers, who would view...

BONN, Germany (Reuters) - Almost 80 percent of people worldwide are perturbed about global warming and most want tough action to fix the problem, according to a new study that the United Nations touted as a spur to an international climate deal later this year. The report, based on consultations with 10,000 people in 75 nations from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, also showed that 66 percent viewed measures to tackle warming, such as more wind or solar energy, as a chance to improve their quality of life. Christiana Figueres, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, said the findings were "important...

Hoping to attract more conservative support for the Fast Track trade authority deal that will probably be voted on today, Rep. Paul Ryan is trying to address some major concerns that conservatives have with the bill by offering an amendment that would prevent the president from negotiating any changes to US immigration or climate change law. Wall Street Journal: [.....WSJ quote.....] I don't think these concerns are "far fetched" at all, and Ryan's amendment is both wise and prudent. The fact that Congress has a vote on whether to accept the final deal - just like they have an up...

In 1848, the discovery of gold in California lead to one of the most dramatic population shifts in US history. People hoping to strike it rich migrated from all over the country, South America, and even as far as China. The non-native American population of California went from under 1,000 to over 100,000 in a little over one year. Today, there is another gold rush taking place in Washington D.C. as political entrepreneurs seek to strike it rich by mining the climate change mother lode. According to the 2013 Federal Climate Change Expenditures Report to Congress, the Federal Government is...

A theory that does not contain within it the terms of its own falsification is not a valid theory. If the planet Mercury's orbit did not vary by the number of degrees that Einstein's theory said it would, then Relativity would be unproven and Albert would have had to admit failure, as he indicated he would be willing to do. A weasel-word term like Climate Change, where any drought and any flood, any heat wave or cold wave, any storm or any clear sky, any melting or freezing, anywhere at any time, can be cited as evidence of industrial humans'...

On Wednesday, according to The Hill, the White House Office of Management and Budget approved new plans to regulate airplane emissions. The Environmental Protection Agency will now hold hearings on the prospective findings, then write up regulation. According to the OMB, the EPA has shown that such emissions justify an “endangerment finding” because they affect climate change; the regulations will reportedly “align… with regulations that the International Civil Aviation Organization, an agency of the United Nations, is developing.” So the Obama administration wants to crack down on emissions from airplanes. Except, of course, if President Obama is aboard. Then, it’s...

In an interview with American Public Media’s Marketplace, President Obama says fast-tracking the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade bill would help him advance his climate change agenda, which he said is “one of my highest priorities.” During the interview with host Kai Ryssdal of Marketplace, Obama said, “If we want to solve something like climate change, which is one of my highest priorities, then I’ve got to be able to get into places like Malaysia, and say to them, this is in your interest.” “What leverage do I have to get them to stop deforestation?” he asked. “Well part of the...

One of the largest companies to manufacture solar panels in the United States uses a surprising resource to keep costs low and compete against producers from China: prison labor. Suniva Inc, a Georgia-based solar cell and panel maker that is backed by Goldman Sachs Group Inc, farms out a small portion of its manufacturing to federal inmates as part of a longstanding government program intended to prepare them for life after prison. Suniva does not actively publicize its work with the prisons, saying it prefers to talk about its in-house factories in Georgia and Michigan, which handle most of its...

Before winning a minority government in 2006, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper promised to get to the bottom of the climate change file and handle the issue properly. Neither he, nor most members of his party, believed that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from human activities were causing a climate crisis. Emission reduction regulations were clearly not necessary, they said.In a 2002 fundraising letter for the now-defunct Canadian Alliance, Harper called the UN climate process “a socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations.”Somewhere along the road to power, everything changed. Now, like the Chretien and Martin Liberal governments...

Until last week, government data on climate change indicated that the Earth has warmed over the last century, but that the warming slowed dramatically and even stopped at points over the last 17 years. But a paper released May 28 by researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has readjusted the data in a way that makes the reduction in warming disappear, indicating a steady increase in temperature instead.

With the papal encyclical on climate change scheduled for a June 18 release, the liberal media can be expected to portray the Vatican document as a major step forward for the United Nations agenda of controlling and taxing the use of natural resources by governments and people. But a group of retired NASA scientists is taking on the pope directly, armed with the expertise that has come through decades of planning U.S. space missions and dealing with the most complex and difficult issues of climate science. Their verdict: the pope is risking his moral status and his credibility. In fact,...

Even if you don’t happen to believe that Bilderberg is the sinister organisation that really rules the world, what cannot be denied is that its secretive quinquennial meetings do tend to attract some pretty high-level insect overlords. Here’s the participants list for their latest get together in Telfs-Buchen, Austria later this week. It includes everyone from the CEO of Royal Dutch Shell and the President of the Royal Bank of Canada to the German Minister of Defence to British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne to retired General David Petraeus to none other than the Prime Minister of Belgium. Far...

A lot of us having been pointing out one of the big problems with the global warming theory: a long plateau in global temperatures since about 1998. Most significantly, this leveling off was not predicted by the theory, and observed temperatures have been below the lowest end of the range predicted by all of the computerized climate models. So what to do if your theory doesn’t fit the data? Why, change the data, of course! Hence a blockbuster new report: a new analysis of temperature data since 1998 “adjusts” the numbers and magically finds that there was no plateau...

The war has been waged on several fronts for nearly a decade, and the aggressors are poised to declare victory over the wounded U.S. coal industry. After powering the Industrial Revolution and helping to turn the U.S. into the world’s top economic power, coal now seems to be drowning in what environmentalists call a “deadly cocktail” — a rabid, politically potent anti-fossil fuels movement, the rise of cheap, abundant, relatively clean domestic natural gas and an Obama administration that freely admits it wants to decrease coal use in America through a host of new rules. That near-perfect storm is taking...