Free Republic

... David Cameron, who once promised that if you voted blue you would go green, now appoints Owen Paterson, a man who is not just ignorant of environmental science but proud of his ignorance, as his environment secretary. George Osborne, who once promised that his Treasury would be "at the heart of this historic fight against climate change", now gives billions in tax concessions to the oil and gas industry, cuts the funds for onshore wind farms and strips the Green Investment Bank of the ability to borrow and lend All of which is a long way of saying that...

Flooding, famine and rising sea levels will put hundreds of millions at risk in one of the world's most vulnerable regions. People in coastal regions of Asia, particularly those living in cities, could face some of the worst effects of global warming, climate experts will warn this week. Hundreds of millions of people are likely to lose their homes as flooding, famine and rising sea levels sweep the region, one of the most vulnerable on Earth to the impact of global warming, the UN states. The report – Climate Change 2014: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability – makes it clear that...

Junk Science: Climate change "deniers," as global warm-mongers call those who think empirical evidence is more reliable than computer models, may soon count among their number a 50,000-strong body of physicists. At the risk of being accused of embracing what alarmists call the flat-earth view of climate change, the American Physical Society has appointed a balanced, six-person committee to review its stance on so-called climate change that includes three distinguished skeptics: Judith Curry, John Christy and Richard Lindzen. Their credentials are impressive. Christy is director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and was a...

President Barack Obama is getting some help from the country's tech giants in his effort to show Americans how climate change will affect their communities. The Obama administration thinks that local data, which may have a real-world effect on Americans' lives, will provide a convincing argument for steps to prevent climate change. The risk rising sea levels have on individual communities will be the focus of a new website, climate.data.gov, which uses government data to put environmental changes in context. The White House also called on tech companies to develop tools for Americans to better get a grasp on how...

The White House will launch a new online initiative on Wednesday that will provide users access to climate data to spread awareness about the effects of global warming in an effort to improve climate-change preparedness across the country. As part of the initiative, the Obama administration will make federal data on climate change accessible to citizens, businesses and local governments in a new section within the data.gov website -- called climate.data.gov -- that will be jointly run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, and NASA.

The foundation publications for modern global warming science meet no criteria for valid science. Methodologies are not given, measurements are not made and evidence is not described. Instead, preposterous fantasies on atmospheric studies are glibly mentioned with self-contradictory blather. The studies consist of nothing but a desired end point with fictitious methods of deriving the result. --SNIP-- There is nothing but modeling in global warming analysis, the simple reason being that the complexities and randomness of the atmosphere are totally out of reach of the science that can be applied. Only modeling is obscure enough to evade accountability to outsiders...

Al Gore, the former American vice-president and Nobel Peace prize winner, spoke on the second day of the Climate Reality Leadership Corps training in Johannesburg on Thursday. The event drew environmental thinkers and activist wankers from around the continent. The corps is a global movement to teach people about climate change and help them adapt to a changing world. In his presentation, Gore gave an overview of how humans were driving climate change and how it was affecting conditions around the world right now. "Whenever any important question is ultimately resolved into a choice between right and wrong, the outcome...

--BIG SNIP-- Putin has said that "two or three degrees" of climate change could be good for Russia, in that it would reduce heating costs and increase crop yields. Of course Russia will face harsh consequences from global warming as well. Wildfires and drought have hit the country hard in recent years -- trends that will likely only worsen as the planet continues to heat up. So for all you out there blasé about climate change, you may want to take a long hard look at your position -- because it doesn’t take that much effort to see a post-global...

The Mongol warlord built the world's largest land-based empire. But he couldn't have done it without a change in climate. The difference was Genghis Khan, the warlord who united the tribes and launched them on their wave of unstoppable conquest. But the Mongol Empire wasn’t solely the product of Genghis’s will. As a fascinating new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) demonstrates, the rise of the Mongols may have owed just as much to beneficial changes in the climate that made the grasslands of the Mongol steppes green and verdant, fueling the horses that were...

In his job as Apple CEO, Tim Cook is mostly known for having a demeanor that's in some ways antithetical to that of Steve Jobs. Instead of bombast and bold claims, Cook's soothing Southern-tinged speech and steely temperament have marked him as a man whose head could be nothing but level. That is, unless you're a shareholder who thinks climate change is bogus.

An army of emergency crews were gearing up for battle Wednesday with a vicious — and rare — ice storm in Georgia that had already cut off power for thousands of customers and left the streets of Atlanta looking like a sci-fi wasteland. More than 70,000 customers in Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama and the Carolinas were without power early Wednesday. But Georgia was bearing the brunt of the wicked weather, with nearly 40,000 customers in the dark Wednesday, while emergency planners urged drivers across the state to stay off “deceptively dangerous” roads.

Junk Science: Senate Democrats want TV networks to promote climate-change hysteria and follow the lead of Britain's state broadcasting company, which sent its top executives to a green propaganda training seminar. The mainstream media, long a house organ for Democrats, are about to come under pressure by Senate Democrats led by Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, who are gathering signatures from colleagues on a letter to the networks telling them they're ignoring global warming, according to a report in the National Journal. They are seeking to impose sort of a climate change "fairness doctrine" designed to ignore...

Governor Deval Patrick will commit more than $50 million on Tuesday to help Massachusetts communities and utilities prepare for and protect themselves from the increasing number of destructive storms and rising sea levels blamed on climate change. This is the first time the state has awarded these funds, which are partially financed by payments that retail electricity suppliers must make if they fail to procure enough power from renewable sources such as wind and solar. Power plants that burn fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas are considered among the major producers of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases...

Cold Climate: In an event chock-full of bitterly cold irony, perhaps even Al Gore has noticed that multiple icebreakers couldn't free a boat stuck in Antarctic ice that global warming was supposed to have melted. Few of the media reports on the plight of the Russian-flagged research vessel MV Akademik Schokalskiy have noted the irony of a ship full of climate scientists getting stuck in an Antarctic ice sheet so thick that early attempts at breaking through the ice to free them were failures. "We're stuck in our own experiment," the Australasian Antarctic Expedition said in a statement. "We came...

South Pole weather has stymied a rescue by a Chinese icebreaker trying to reach an expedition vessel trapped for the past four days in frozen seas, a ship officer told CNN Friday. The Chinese icebreaker Xue Long, or Snow Dragon, was just six nautical miles away from the rescue, but now it's stuck in an Antarctica ice floe, too... "The vessel is fine, it's safe and everyone on board is very well," expedition leader Chris Turney, a professor of climate change at University of New South Wales in Australia told CNN. "Morale is really high."... The expedition to gauge the...

Al Gore predicted the North Polar Ice Cap would be completely ice free in five years. Gore made the prediction to a German audience in 2008. He told them that “the entire North ‘polarized’ cap will disappear in 5 years.”

Although bats are nocturnal, they’re hardly flying blind. Most bats see with sound thanks to echolocation: They emit ultrasonic calls that bounce back off physical objects in front of them. Echolocation allows bats to stalk their insect and plant prey and also keeps them from flying into houses, trees, and telephone poles. But a changing climate could hamper the ability of some bat species to hunt effectively using sound, according to a new study. "Bats calling at low frequencies will hear echoes from an object further away than bats calling at high frequencies," says study co-author Holger Goerlitz, a biologist...

Junk Science: Researchers have discovered a chain of smoldering active volcanoes under the West Antarctic ice sheet — which happens to be the ice sheet that climate hysterics say is proof of man-caused global warming. The 2004 science fiction movie "The Day After Tomorrow" — and the operative word here is "fiction" — opened with a portion of the West Antarctic ice sheet shearing off as a prelude to planetary doom. But if the researchers depicted in the film had looked deep into the widening crevice, they might have noticed a string of active volcanoes lurking under nearly a mile...

Continued global warming poses a risk of rapid, drastic changes in some human and natural systems, a scientific panel warned Tuesday, citing the possible collapse of polar sea ice, the potential for a mass extinction of plant and animal life and the threat of immense dead zones in the ocean. “The reality is that the climate is changing,” said James W. C. Wanker, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Colorado Boulder who headed the committee on abrupt impacts of climate change. “It’s going to continue to happen, and it’s going to be part of everyday life for centuries to come...

A new survey from the American Meteorological Society contains more bad news for global warming alarmist: people who actually get paid for accurately predicting weather are increasingly skeptical about whether global warming is man-made or natural or whether global warming is occurring at all. The survey is the result of increasing tension amongst meteorologists regarding global warming. “There has been tension in recent years among AMS members who hold different views on climate change,” explains the AMS in the introduction to the new report. “Some members have expressed that their views – which question the view that human-caused global...