Free Republic

How can we believe in ‘global warming’ when the temperature records providing the ‘evidence’ for that warming cannot be trusted? It’s a big question – and one which many people, even on the sceptical side of the argument, are reluctant to ask.

Environmentalism: Re-upping on delusional climate-change fantasies, "Governor Moonbeam" asked in his inauguration speech Monday for the Golden State to meet half its energy needs with renewable energy by 2030. Gov. Jerry Brown, who leads the state that hosted Solyndra, embraces bird-chopping wind turbines and builds crispy critter-producing solar panel farms, is a leading advocate of renewable energy and environmental protection. As pollution from coal-fired plants and industries in China wafted across the Pacific, he took a deep breath at his fourth inauguration as the state's chief executive and doubled down on green energy's failed promise by tasking California to fight...

Junk Science: The high priests of the climate change religion decree in a recipe for global poverty that renewable energy must generate most of the world's electricity, with fossil fuels purged by the end of this century. In a report released in Copenhagen on Sunday that Secretary of State John Kerry has called "another canary in a coal mine," the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has recycled its prophecies of doom. The document is titled "Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report." The "synthesis" refers to the report's being essentially the "greatest hits" of prior climate assessment reports that...

The unrestricted use of fossil fuels must end soon if the world is to avoid dangerous climate change. That is the central message of a stark new report from the UN-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC urges that by 2050, most of the world's electricity must - and can - be produced from low carbon sources. Fossil fuels, without carbon capture and storage (CCS), should be phased out "almost entirely" by 2100. It re-states many familiar positions: Warming is "unequivocal" and the human influence on climate is clear Since the 1950s the observed changes are unprecedented over decades...

As worsening drought and extreme weather devastate crops, you may begin seeing global warming when you open your fridge. According to David Lobell,deputy director of the Center on Food Security and the Environment at Stanford University, “The general story is that agriculture is sensitive. It’s not the end of the world; but it will be a big enough deal to be worth our concern.” Lobell has already noticed the effect of climate change on some crops. For example, he says, yield data from corn and wheat production suggests that these two staples are already being negatively affected by the changing...

Wine and beer lovers face an uncertain future. While climate change is a distant consideration for many global businesses, grapes and grains are on the front line. The good news for those who like a tipple is that alcoholic drinks makers are among businesses leading the way in devising technology to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Experts say such mitigation and adaptation techniques are critical for a range of companies to prepare for a future that is hotter, drier and prone to extreme weather and consequences such as flooding.

For a good part of the year, the colorful rufous hummingbird can be spotted all over Portland. After nesting and breeding here in the summer and fall, these feisty hummers migrate some 2,000 miles southward to winter in Mexico. But over the next few decades, the tiny bird is expected to become increasingly rare in Portland. Climate change is likely to alter its travel plans, which include the longest annual migration of any hummingbird species. Its range is likely to shift northward, according to predictions in a new report from the National Audubon Society. The rufous, like hundreds of other...

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon on Monday released a report asserting decisively that climate change poses an immediate threat to national security, with increased risks from terrorism, infectious disease, global poverty and food shortages. It also predicted rising demand for military disaster responses as extreme weather creates more global humanitarian crises. The report lays out a road map to show how the military will adapt to rising sea levels, more violent storms and widespread droughts. The Defense Department will begin by integrating plans for climate change risks across all of its operations, from war games and strategic military planning situations to...

Fewer than half of American states are working to protect themselves from climate change, despite more detailed warnings from scientists that communities are already being damaged, according to a new online clearinghouse of states’ efforts compiled by the Georgetown Climate Center. Fourteen states have plans to prepare for the effects of climate change. California, New York and Maryland are among those that have made the greatest progress toward the dozens of goals their plans set forth, such as cutting statewide greenhouse gas emissions, improving infrastructure, securing water supplies, battling wildfires or coping with rising sea levels. Even those states have...

The world is warming. The beasts are dying en masse. The oceans are rising. The deserts are roasting. It's the survival of the fittest out there, guys. Who's going to win, evolutionarily speaking? Men or women? It turns out that warming temperatures may have a surprising gender bias—in favor of women. That's the conclusion of a team of Japanese researchers who have discovered a "statistically significant" association between climate change—including rising temperatures and extreme weather events—and the birth rates of boys and girls in Japan. Warmer temperatures have accompanied an increased proportion of female babies in the population, and a...

The rules put in place by the Obama administration’s Environmental Protection Agency have dealt a severe blow to the economy of the Appalachian region. The most recent proposal could be the death knell if they are enacted. More than 500 active and retired coal miners from West Virginia and other parts of Appalachia delivered that message to Washington Tuesday. The protest is the most recent demonstration against the clean power rule which would change the rules for emissions on existing coal fired power plants in the United States. The rally, led by the United Mine Workers Union, called on the...

Environmental scientists want to introduce a new system to prove that adverse weather events are directly linked to climate change to counter global warming sceptics. Under the new plan, a heatwave or major storm will be linked scientifically to man made climate change immediately after the event to prevent critics from blaming it on natural variations in the weather. Scientists want to be able to provide proof of whether an event was caused by climate change within three day rather than the current system which can take up to a year. Experts claim that such a long wait for proof...

Scientists frequently tout new evidence that climate change will drive some of the most populated cities in the United States underwater. New York, Boston and Miami are all at risk. But the impact of climate change varies even within cities, putting residents of poor neighborhoods at greatest risk of suffering from heat-related ailments, researchers say. “Cities tend to be warmer, but it’s spatially variable within cities,” says Joyce Klein Rosenthal, a researcher at Harvard who published a recent study on the impact of climate change in cities. “Generally, higher poverty neighborhoods are warmer and wealthier neighborhoods are cooler.”

Our most ancient ancestors were battling climate change to survive droughts, freezing and flooding. And now a growing number of scientists believe that shifts in the Earth’s climate are responsible for creating some of our most distinctive characteristics. Their research suggests that large evolutionary leaps, such as the development of our bigger brains and ability to create and use complex tools, coincided with periods of volatile climate change.

Global warming contributed to extreme heat waves in many parts of the world last year, but cannot be definitively linked to the California drought, according to a report released Monday. In the report, published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 20 research teams explored the causes of 16 extreme weather events recorded in 2013, including torrential downpours in Colorado, heat waves in Korea and Australia and a blizzard in South Dakota. The studies overwhelmingly showed that human-caused climate change played a role in the heat waves, in some cases making them 10 times more likely. But the report...

The savage heat waves that struck Australia in 2013 were almost certainly a direct consequence of the human release of greenhouse gases, researchers said Monday. It is perhaps the most definitive statement climate scientists have made that ties a specific weather event to global warming. Five groups of researchers, using distinct methods, analyzed the heat that baked Australia for much of last year and continued into 2014. All five came to the conclusion that last year’s heat waves could not have been as severe without the long-term climatic warming caused by human activity. “When we look at the heat across...

While President Obama challenged China at the United Nations to follow the U.S. lead in pushing for drastic reductions in national carbon emissions to save the planet from “climate change,” it appears that China has dramatically different ideas. As in: No. According to a document deposited at the UNFCCC in advance of a planned meeting next month, China insists that the U.S. and other developed countries endure most of the economic pain of carbon emission cutbacks, and need to make significantly more sacrifices in the months ahead. Carbon emission cutbacks by China and other developing countries, the document says, will...

Even as he battles ISIS and Ebola, President Obama today declared climate change the threat that will “define the contours of this century more than any other.” “Climate is changing faster than our efforts to address it. The alarm bells keep ringing. Our citizens keep marching. We cannot pretend we don’t hear them,” Obama told delegates at the U.N. Climate Summit in New York, referencing the massive demonstrations over the past few days. “We have to tackle this global threat before it’s too late.”

Junk Science: Those trying to save the planet leave trash-filled streets in advance of a U.N. climate confab that's a solution in search of a problem. Even a former administration official thinks the Earth is fine. Colorfully costumed zealots marched in New York and other cities Sunday in advance of Tuesday's U.N. Climate Summit. Once again they claimed, "The science is settled," and blamed capitalism for non-existent weather change. They barely noticed, as British climate-change skeptic Lord Christopher Monckton points out at Marc Morano's Climate Depot, the "Great Pause" in global temperatures now stands at 17 years and 11 months.

By 2080, birds like the northern saw-whet owl, the scarlet tanager and the Baltimore oriole could all but disappear from Pennsylvania. Climate change is expected to shrink and shift northward the ranges of these and hundreds of other species across North America, according to a groundbreaking National Audubon Society study. Citizen science was crucial to this report. Audubon scientists relied on tens of thousands of observations from the U.S. Geological Survey’s North American Breeding Bird Survey, along with Aubudon’s own Christmas Bird Count. It combined these observations with historical climate data and climate changes predicted in the Intergovernmental Panel on...