Free Republic

Planting zones are retreating north all over the country, but the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) won’t state the obvious: the shift is a rock solid indicator of climate change. Although these zones, which serve as a guide to the kinds of plants that can grow, have shifted north in most areas, USDA shied away from making a climate change connection. “The map is not a good instrument for determining climate change,” said Kim Kaplan, a spokeswoman for the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service. “It’s not that there hasn’t been global climate change it’s that the map isn’t a good...

Forbes reports on a release of a new batch of emails where prominent climate scientists reveal that they actively deleted protected emails in an attempt to avoid releasing evidence that the data does not support alleged man-made warming. According to the Forbes report: Three themes are emerging from the newly released emails: (1) prominent scientists central to the global warming debate are taking measures to conceal rather than disseminate underlying data and discussions; (2) these scientists view global warming as a political “cause” rather than a balanced scientific inquiry and (3) many of these scientists frankly admit to each...

What happened to “climate change” and “global warming”? The Earth is still getting hotter, but those terms have nearly disappeared from political vocabulary. President Obama’s State of the Union address Tuesday was a prime example of this shift. The president said “climate change” just once. By contrast, Obama used the terms “energy” and “clean energy” nearly two dozen times. A recent Brown University study looked specifically at the Obama administration’s language and found that mentions of “climate change” have been replaced by calls for “clean energy” and “energy independence.” Graciela Kincaid, a co-author of the study, wrote: “The phrases ‘climate...

When it comes to climate change, open-mindedness is the wrong approach. I study the history of climate science, and my research has shown that the think tanks and institutes that deny the reality or severity of climate change, or promote distrust of climate science, do so out of self-interest, ideological conviction or both. In my travels, I have met many, many people who have told me that they are not in denial about climate change; they simply don't know enough to decide. Since the mid-1990s, there has been clear-cut evidence that the climate is changing because of human activities: burning...

A South Florida plan to prepare for rising sea levels and other consequences of climate change has drawn intense criticism from a small segment of the public who see a conspiracy to weaken the United States. "Bogus science." "Socialist power grab." "A UN-based manmade global warming agenda that will tangle us all up in a nightmare." These are among the public comments received in response to the Draft Southeast Florida Regional Climate Action Plan, produced by Broward, Miami-Dade, Monroe and Palm Beach counties. "Anyone of even modest intelligence should be able to see that it is nothing more than One-World,...

Some states have introduced education standards requiring teachers to defend the denial of man-made global warming. A national watchdog group says it will start monitoring classrooms. Reporting from Washington— A flash point has emerged in American science education that echoes the battle over evolution, as scientists and educators report mounting resistance to the study of man-made climate change in middle and high schools. Although scientific evidence increasingly shows that fossil fuel consumption has caused the climate to change rapidly, the issue has grown so politicized that skepticism of the broad scientific consensus has seeped into classrooms. Texas and Louisiana have...

As a result of the December 31 presidential signing of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA; H.R. 1540), the Department of Defense, or DOD, is prohibited from funding any LEED Platinum or Gold certification of new buildings for the current fiscal year, unless it submits notification of intent 30 days before the money is allocated. The only exception to the rule is if LEED Gold or Platinum certifications don’t involve additional expense. Under the same legislation, the DOD is required to submit a report to Congress (Sec. 2830) no later than June 30 on energy efficiency and sustainability standards used...

Concerns are growing in Brussels that persistent denial of human-caused global warming among Republican presidential hopefuls could damage EU-US relations and even spark a trade conflict. All the leading challengers for the White House have staked out positions on global warming that defy the international scientific consensus, causing what Thomas Legge, a climate officer for the German Marshall Fund, called “exasperation” in Brussels. Climate Action Commissioner Connie Hedegaard said in September she was “shocked that the political debate in the US is so far away from the scientific facts.” “When you hear American presidential candidates denying climate change, it's difficult...

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said Thursday that climate change deniers call the shots in Congress. “[I]t is clear that as long as Congress is effectively controlled by climate change deniers, all of us — investors, companies, workers and the broader public — must take action ourselves,” Trumka said. In a wide-ranging speech in New York at the Investor Summit on Climate Risk & Energy Solutions, Trumka made the case for creating jobs with the build-out of low-carbon infrastructure. He said the collapse of global warming legislation has prompted the labor federation to seek other means to spur investments in...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The most detailed data yet on emissions of heat-trapping gases show that U.S. power plants are responsible for the bulk of the pollution blamed for global warming. Power plants released 72 percent of the greenhouse gases reported to the Environmental Protection Agency for 2010, according to information released Wednesday that was the first catalog of global warming pollution by facility. The data include more than 6,700 of the largest industrial sources of greenhouse gases, or about 80 percent of total U.S. emissions. According to an Associated Press analysis of the data, 20 mostly coal-fired power plants in...

The Department of Energy announced on Friday it would not complete a low-interest, $730 million loan toSeverstal North America, after it had given the company a conditional commitment in July under its Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing program. DOE gave no reason for its disapproval of the loan, but it had come under scrutiny about its judgment after the collapse of solar company Solyndra, which was lent $535 million in taxpayer dollars. House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa called upon Energy Secretary Stephen Chu to revisit the Severstal project – which would modernize its facility in Dearborn,...

Years before Climategate, THAT email, from Phil Jones to Warwick Hughes told us everything we needed to know about the scientific standards at the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia. THAT email was the tip of the iceberg, and below is what lay underneath the surface — the things that were said behind the scenes at the time. Geoff Sherrington has pieced together a sequence of climategate emails, his own emails, and parts of Warwick Hughes work to recreate the sequence. And for the true skeptic-aficionados, here’s a new layer of history to the skeptical chronology. Where did this volunteer...

Source of title inspiration hereFrom NOAA Headquarters.Colorado mountain hail may disappear in a warmer futureNOAA-led study shows less hail, more rain in region’s future, with possible increase in flood riskSummertime hail such as this, which fell in Boulder, could all but disappear from the eastern flank of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains by 2070, according to a new modeling study by scientists from NOAA and several other institutions. Credit: Will von Dauster, NOAA Summertime hail could all but disappear from the eastern flank of Colorado’s Rocky Mountains by 2070, according to a new modeling study by scientists from NOAA and several other...

You need to curb those carbon emissions or else you’ll be responsible for warming up the planet, sinking the Maldives and ruining skiing season for everyone. Just ask Al Gore. But apparently the “settled science” still isn’t quite so settled, at least not at Cambridge. Scientists there have concluded a lengthy study of climate cycles as they relate to “wobbles” in the Earth’s orbit around the sun and reached a somewhat different conclusion… man’s emissions of carbon might be the only thing standing between us and another ice age. Researchers used data on the Earth’s orbit and other things to...

Margaret Thatcher was the first leader to warn of global warming - but also the first to see the flaws in the climate change orthodoxy A persistent claim made by believers in man-made global warming – they were at it again last week – is that no politician was more influential in launching the worldwide alarm over climate change than Margaret Thatcher. David Cameron, so the argument runs, is simply following in her footsteps by committing the Tory party to its present belief in the dangers of global warming, and thus showing himself in this respect, if few others, to...

Sir Fred Hoyle Vindicated (Via Dr. Benny Peiser of the GWPF) According to new research to be published in Nature Geoscience  (embargoed until 1800 GMT/10AM PST, Sunday 8 January 2012), the next ice age could set in any time this millennium where it not for increases in anthropogenic CO2 emissions that are preventing such a global disaster from occurring. The new research confirms the theory developed by the late Sir Fred Hoyle and Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe in the 1990s that without increased levels of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere ‘the drift into new ice-age conditions would be inevitable.’Hoyle and Wickramasinghe...

For the first time, the federal government is regulating big-rigs, RV's, and tractor-trailers in much the same way it's held car makers to rigorous fuel efficiency standards for decades. But a group of California truckers contends the regulations will drive them right out of business -- and has filed suit to block them. The Environmental Protection Agency is ordering large trucks and buses to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by up to 20 percent and overhaul engine design starting with models built in 2014. Most operators will need to spend thousands upgrading their rigs or buying new vehicles,

Friday, 06 January 2012 09:12 Amanda Carey, Capital Research Center A careful look at the history of environmental activism shows how the movement has been unravelling. Now it seems to be dead in the water. In 2012, three years into President Barack Obama’s first term, green activists are asking, “What went wrong?” Where are all the new laws and regulations regulating energy use and the natural resource production? Where are the public-private partnerships signalling a new era of enironmentalist problem-solving? Where’s Al Gore? Shouldn’t he be lurking over President Obama’s shoulder, smiling, as the President signs yet another green jobs...

Guest Post by Willis EschenbachWell, I woke up to some bad news this morning. It turns out that the GAO, the US General Accounting Office, says US has been secretly hiding their funding of the IPCC for the last decade.They were already told not to do that by the GAO. In the 2005 GAO report with the swingeing title of “Federal Reports on Climate Change Funding Should Be Clearer and More Complete”, the GAO said … well, basically what the title said. But noooo, those sneaky bureaucrats didn’t do that at all.The latest 2011 GAO Report says the US government...

Former Vice President Al Gore, America’s green guru, is a man who rarely says anything good about Republican politicians. But that’s until Gore read Mitt Romney’s ‘Climate Protection Plan,’ that outlined his cap-and-trade initiative in 2004, while he served as governor of Massachusetts. Grist, an environmental news website, quotes Romney as saying, “I believe the world’s getting warmer … I believe based on what I read that the world is getting warmer. And number two, I believe that humans contribute to that … I think it’s important for us to reduce our emissions of pollutants and greenhouse gases that may...