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Blizzard of 1978, Chicago average 19 below zero. Ice is coming. Snowmobiles pressed into service in Buffalo. [Good Lord!] Hundreds died of illness because of the cold. People were running out of heating fuel. Alabama had a New England winter. California glaciers advanced to the San Joaquin Valley. The Ice could return in a single life time. Sea ice could be melted by putting black soot on it.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse is not a fan of anyone who disagrees with him about man-made global warming. And at an event hosted by environmentalists, he made it clear just how much he doesn’t like skeptics. “But, this vast denial apparatus that propagates the false doubt, that props up the phony science, that gets these yahoos who can’t survive … peer-reviewed scrutiny onto Fox News, onto the cable shows, saying that their scientists, they create an artificial conflict about this and that’s why I think there’s doubt,” the Rhode Island Democrat told attendees at a League of Conservation Voters event in...

Pope Francis's new encyclical on the environment (Laudato Sii) warns of the coming environmental catastrophe ("unprecedented destruction of ecosystems, with serious consequences for all of us"). It's the latest entry in a long literary tradition of environmental doomsday warnings. In contrast, Matt Ridley, bestselling author of Genome, The Agile Gene, and The Rational Optimist, who also received the 2012 Julian Simon Memorial Award from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, says this outlook has proven wrong time again. This is the full text of his acceptance speech. Video is embedded below. It is now 32 years, nearly a third of a century,...

After years of unfounded hysteria from so-called environmentalists, the media and Hollywood that fracking causes drinking water contamination, the Environmental Protection Agency just issued a major blow to anti-fracking activists. A new report from the EPA, based on a study sanctioned by Congress, shows drinking water contamination only results if fracking wells aren't built or maintained properly, which is a rarity. "We did not find evidence that these mechanisms have led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States. Of the potential mechanisms identified in this report, we found specific instances where one or more of these mechanisms...

Wesley Smith at National Review Online caught my attention while I was down here at Right Online with this piece on the question of nature rights. The nature rights movement is real and extremely subversive to human freedom and thriving. Most people think such a thing can never happen. But it already is happening. Bolivia and Ecuador have legalized the rights of nature, as have more than 30 U.S. cities, including Santa Monica. Moreover, the Secretary General of the UN, Ban-ki Moon has declared his support. Smith is referring to an article at Commonweal which discusses the Pope’s upcoming encyclical...

Will the next presidential election be won by a lie? Truth has long since been replaced by “narratives” on the American left. Rather than discuss genuine issues and objective facts, progressives prefer to make up a politically effective story. It doesn’t matter whether the story is false, as long as it sways the public’s emotions and wins the day. The ends justify the means. This “lying game” strategy often shows up in politically sensitive scientific debates. In honor of Earth Week, let’s look at one of the patron saints of environmentalism, Rachel Carson. Carson wanted to eliminate DDT, the most...

The present four-year California drought is not novel — even if President Barack Obama and California governor Jerry Brown have blamed it on man-made climate change. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, California droughts are both age-old and common. Predictable California dry spells — like those of 1929–34, 1976–77, and 1987–92 — are more likely result from poorly understood but temporary changes in atmospheric pressures and ocean temperatures. What is new is that the state has never had 40 million residents during a drought — well over 10 million more than during the last dry spell in the...

Lexus liberals ignore how their climate change agenda hurts the less fortunateBarack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren and the whole gang of Democratic leaders claim that one of their highest priorities is to lift up the middle class and reduce the income gap between rich and poor.That goal collides with what they admit is their very highest priority: stopping climate change. Their agenda is driven by the millionaire and billionaire Democratic donors who make the party possible. But the agenda also involves making energy, home heating, transportation and just about everything else less efficient and more expensive to the middle...

Syracuse University alumni are new additions to the lengthening list of persons who can stop contributing to their alma maters. The university has succumbed — after, one suspects, not much agonizing — to the temptation to indulge in progressive gestures. It will divest all fossil-fuel stocks from its endowment. It thereby trumps Stanford, whose halfhearted exercise in right-mindedness has been to divest only coal stocks. Evidently carbon from coal is more morally disquieting than carbon from petroleum. The effect of these decisions on consumption of fossil fuels will be nil; the effect on the growth of institutions’ endowments will be...

With environmentalists calling for divestment from fossil fuels, the former United Nations climate chief has gone against the grain and defended using the “Green Climate Fund” to finance coal projects. “There are massive challenges in terms of poverty eradication where coal is a logical choice from a cost effectiveness point of view, and you really have to be in a position to offer those countries an economically viable alternative before you begin to rule out coal,” Yvo de Boer, the former head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, told the news site Responding to Climate Change (RCC). “It’s...

The United States, a vast nation of near unparalleled natural beauty, might have no more stunning an environment than that which characterizes the state of California. Over the weekend, I had the pleasure of taking a brief trip to the Bay Area where I sampled some of this landscape’s agricultural pleasures, many of which came in fermented form. The people were lovely and accommodating. The weather was near perfection. The scenery was positively inspiring. But the topic not far from every local’s lips was a worrying one. A debilitating drought that has forced Gov. Jerry Brown to impose draconian water...

Liberal policies turn a small problem into a statewide crisis.My family and I are in Los Angeles this week for some meetings concerning a super-secret venture, which, dude . . . it's super-secret! (But it won't be for long.)But one of the first things that became clear when we got here is that the state is in the midst of a water crisis - one so serious that Gov. Jerry (Moonbeam) Brown has imposed an unprecedented set of restrictions on the use of water. Friends we visited for Easter tell us the state isn't messing around. They send inspectors around...

In his first campaign for the presidency, then-Senator Barack Obama, D-Ill, declared that the phrase “culture war” was “so 90s.” Nevertheless, there are strong indications, seven years later, that the conflict is still with us, late and soon. “But ask yourselves this question: apart from conservatism, what have been the most important intellectual and social movements of the past forty years?” historian George Nash asked rhetorically at a meeting of the Philadelphia Society in Philadelphia last month. “As a historian I will give you my answer: feminism, environmentalism, and multiculturalism.” “Since the 1970s America has been moving Right and Left...

A new study out of Germany casts further doubt on the so-called global warming “consensus” by suggesting the atmosphere may be less sensitive to increases in carbon dioxide emissions than most scientists think. A study by scientists at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Meteorology found that man-made aerosols had a much smaller cooling effect on the atmosphere during the 20th Century than was previously thought. Why is this big news? It means increases in carbon dioxide emissions likely cause less warming than most climate models suggest. What do aerosols have to do with anything? Well, aerosols are created from human...

<p>Americans’ concern about several major environmental threats has eased after increasing last year. As in the past, Americans express the greatest worry about pollution of drinking water, and the least about global warming or climate change.</p> <p>Despite ups and downs from year to year in the percentage worried about the various issues, the rank order of the environmental problems has remained fairly consistent over the decades. Americans express greater concern over more proximate threats — including pollution of drinking water, as well as pollution of rivers, lakes and reservoirs, and air pollution — than they do about longer-term threats such as global warming, the loss of rain forests, and plant and animal extinction.</p>

WASHINGTON, D.C. (Press Release) — On Wednesday, U.S. Congresswoman Aumua Amata participated in a House Natural Resources, Subcommittee on Indian, Insular and Alaska Native Affairs hearing entitled: “Funding Priorities for and the United States’ Responsibilities concerning Indians, Alaska Natives, and Insular Areas in the President’s FY 2016 Budget Request for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Indian Health Service, Office of Insular Affairs, and Office of the Special Trustee for American Indians.” Amata, a Republican who serves as the vice chairwoman of the subcommittee, addressed Esther P. Kia’aina, the assistant secretary for insular areas, Department of the Interior on many of...

Editor’s Note: Patrick Moore, Ph.D., has been a leader in international environmentalism for more than 40 years. He cofounded Greenpeace... Human Emissions Saved Planet Over the past 150 million years, carbon dioxide had been drawn down steadily (by plants) from about 3,000 parts per million to about 280 parts per million before the Industrial Revolution. If this trend continued, the carbon dioxide level would have become too low to support life on Earth. Human fossil fuel use and clearing land for crops have boosted carbon dioxide from its lowest level in the history of the Earth back to 400 parts...

In budget discussions, Senator Jeff Sessions asks EPA head Gina McCarthy some simple questions about the climate hoax. She is unable to answer, but basically says, her facts matter and others do not.

Unafraid of his critics, whose baseless charges were systematically and comprehensively eviscerated by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley on Breitbart.com last week, Soon wrote, “I am willing to debate the substance of my research and competing views of climate change with anyone, anytime, anywhere. It is a shame that those who disagree with me resolutely decline all public debate and stoop instead to underhanded and unscientific ad hominem tactics.”

A drought from 2006 to 2010 was among the triggers for the current uprising in Syria, according to a new study. And climate models and the observational record suggest that the drought was amplified by a century-long, human-forced warming and drying trend.