Free Republic

Leading figures in the Vote Leave referendum campaign to take Britain out of the EU have links to a controversial climate-skeptic think tank and question the science behind global warming. The group’s three leaders, Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and figurehead Lord Nigel Lawson, have cast doubt over man-made climate change, which is backed by most of the world’s credible experts.Lawson founded the Global Warming Policy Foundation in 2009 and is a noted climate skeptic. Both the foundation, which broke UK Charity Commission rules for anti-climate bias, and Vote Leave share rich donors. Gove — who tried to stop climate change...

(CNSNews.com) - As part of its efforts to address climate change the Obama administration has designated May 23-27, 2016, as Extreme Heat Week. According to the White House, the five-day span is dedicated to having federal agencies work with communities to “enhance preparedness for extreme heat events.” In recognition, the government has launched the National Integrated Heat Health Information System (NIHHIS) website this week. The website was created through a joint effort by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). “NIHHIS is an integrated system that builds understanding of the...

Last week, the Senate passed legislation to address and prevent the spread of the Zika virus. However, the Senate failed to pay for it, and instead approved a $1.1 billion “emergency” spending supplemental bill that is not subject to the budgetary caps that were agreed to last year. (Snip) In March, President Obama gave the United Nations $500 million out of an account under bilateral economic assistance to fund the U.N.’s Green Climate Fund. Congress refused to allocate funding for the U.N. Climate Change Fund last year, so the president used this account designated for international infectious diseases to pay...

Ten years after the Oscar-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore is concerned that a potential Donald Trump presidency could roll back progress in the fight against climate change. "He has said some things on the climate crisis that I think should concern everyone,'' the former vice president told Anne Thompson in an exclusive interview on TODAY Monday."I'm not Pollyanna-ish, but I do think that there is still some basis for hope." In "An Inconvenient Truth,'' Gore used charts and graphs to make the connection between increasing carbon emissions and the changing climate. To mark the 10th anniversary of...

BARROW, Alaska — Most Alaskans and Canadians have a bear story — tales of fearsome grizzlies, even polar bears. But a mix of the two? They’re known as pizzlies or grolars, and they’re a fusion of the Arctic white bear and their brown cousins. It’s a blend that’s been turning up more and more in parts of Alaska and Western Canada. Last week, a strange-looking bear was shot by a hunter in Nunavut, a remote territory that curves around Canada’s Hudson Bay. Its head was large, like a grizzly’s, but its fur was white. The bear’s genetics were not...

Portland public schools ban textbooks that cast doubt on climate change | Fox News The Portland Public Schools board voted last week to ban any materials that cast doubt on climate change, the Portland Tribune reported. According to the resolution passed May 17, the school district must remove any textbooks and other materials that suggest climate change is not occurring or that says human beings are not responsible for it. “A lot of the text materials are kind of thick with the language of doubt, and obviously the science says otherwise,” said Bill Bigelow, a former Portland public school teacher...

In March a group of Democratic attorneys general formed “AG’s United for Clean Power.” It sounds nice enough, doesn’t it? New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, standing beside a grinning Al Gore, announced that the gang was going after any energy providers and distributors who may have committed thought crimes such as questioning the human cause of the 0.8oC global warming since 1880. MIT atmospheric scientist Richard Lindzen said the appropriate response to this tiny warming is to shrug and say, “So what?” It is a tiny fraction of the daily temperature change in most places, and a smaller fraction...

But the “97 percent of scientists believe in global warming” mantra became gospel on May 16, 2013, when President Obama tweeted “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made, and dangerous.” What the president was referring to was a 2013 paper by the University of Queensland’s John Cook. In his research, Cook studied 11,994 papers published between 1991 and 2011 that mentioned the search words “global warming” and “global climate change.” Guess what Cook actually found? Only 32.6 percent of the papers endorsed the view of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming. But of that group, 97 percent said that...

He has called global warming a “hoax,” for example, and claimed that the Chinese fabricated climate change (just a joke, he later said). And in an interview this week with Reuters, he said that he was “not a big fan” of the Paris climate accord, and that “at a minimum I will be renegotiating those agreements.” But more clues about Mr. Trump’s views on environmental issues emerged this week from a four-page briefing on energy policy prepared for the presumptive Republican nominee by Representative Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota and an early supporter of Mr. Trump. Mr. Cramer, who...

In a move spearheaded by environmentalists, the Portland Public Schools board unanimously approved a resolution aimed at eliminating doubt of climate change and its causes in schools. “It is unacceptable that we have textbooks in our schools that spread doubt about the human causes and urgency of the crisis,” said Lincoln High School student Gaby Lemieux in board testimony. “Climate education is not a niche or a specialization, it is the minimum requirement for my generation to be successful in our changing world.”

Since atmospheric CO2 emission levels do not correlate with such changes prior to the industrial age, the upward trend in temperature and sea level will continue regardless of the political campaign to impose economy-destroying carbon asceticism on the world’s population ...

Paris (AFP) - A rapidly melting glacier atop East Antarctica is on track to lift oceans at least two metres, and could soon pass a "tipping point" of no return, researchers said Wednesday. To date, scientists have mostly worried about the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets as dangerous drivers of sea level rise. But the new study, following up on earlier work by the same team, has identified a third major threat to hundreds of millions of people living in coastal areas around the world. "I predict that before the end of the century the great global cities of...

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) wants to increase the amount of ethanol and other biofuels in the nation’s fuel supply. But the volumes proposed Wednesday under the renewable fuel standard (RFS) still fall under targets written into the 2007 law that created the program. That ended up angering both the ethanol industry, which wants more of its product to be mandated, and the oil industry, which wants the program rolled back. The agency plans to mandate that 18.8 billion gallons of biofuels be blended into the country’s gasoline and diesel supply next year. Of that amount, 14.8 billion gallons can...

This election season has created an unprecedented alliance between the environmental Left and the anti-free market movement. The result is a well-funded juggernaut adept at conducting coordinated and sophisticated assaults on American businesses while attempting to influence crucial elections. Their goals are nothing short of shuttering our American manufacturing industry, halting the production of affordable energy and placing a ruling clique of radicals in office.One such tactic focuses on intimidating universities and other institutions into divesting their financial holdings of fossil fuel investments. Activists behind this campaign talk candidly about how they hope to “revoke the social license” of energy...

Four Massachusetts teens who say they were sick of watching the state drag its feet on global warming went to court — and yesterday came away with a historic victory that could have lasting effects for decades. The Supreme Judicial Court has sided with Olivia Gieger and Shamus Miller of Wellesley High School, and Isabel Kain and James Coakley of Boston Latin School — high school kids who sued the Department of Environmental Protection. The court agreed with them that the state has failed to fulfill its legal obligation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. “It’s so surreal. I always 
believed...

Academics are still trying to point out the dangers of global warming, even while the rest of us are still wearing winter clothes well into the month of May. "Although the world's nations, including the United States, should intensify their efforts to reduce carbon emissions, we cannot wait patiently for action on carbon emissions while children's health is in danger," Ron Haskins, Janet Currie and Olivier Deschenes write in a policy brief published by Princeton and the Brookings Institution. "Considering the immense barriers, especially economic ones, that stand in the way of action to control emissions, even under the best-case...

Report: Tesla Used Illegal Foreign Labor to Expand CA Plant by Chriss W. Street 17 May 2016Newport Beach, CA148 First Digital’s Bay Area News Group investigative reporters have accused Tesla Motors of employing foreign contract laborers at $5-per-hour, 10 hours a day, six days a week to expand its government-subsidized California auto plant. In 2009, the U.S. Department of Energy in loaned Tesla Motors $465 million to open a plant for its all-electric Model S vehicle. Despite the $1 billion traditional automakers were paying to build and equip new auto plants, Tesla acquired the bankrupt General Motors “New United Motor...

Donald Trump will have a climate plan and it will be ugly. For now, the Republican frontrunner is pedaling the kind of denialism his party loves, having called global warming everything from a "hoax" to a "con job" to a Chinese plot. But an interview with his energy adviser hinted that Trump might endeavor to Make Atmospheric Carbon Levels Great Again. "My advice would be, while I'm a skeptic as well", Trump energy honcho Kevin Cramer [said], "he is a product of political populism, and political populism believes that there needs [to be] some addressing of climate change". Cramer has...

President Barack Obama probably needed his gown to keep him warm as he delivered a commencement speech at Rutgers University amid historically cold temperatures in New Jersey. But as he touted global warming, Obama denied that colder than usual temperatures meant that climate change didn’t exist. “Now, I recognize it doesn’t feel like the planet is warmer right now. I understand,” he said, acknowledging that there was hail when he landed on Air Force One in Newark. But Obama insisted that it was still a reality, citing “overwhelming consensus” from the scientific community to back his claim. He also mocked...

The University of Illinois maintains a website monitoring global sea ice. Recent data is unprecedented (in my experience) in its strangeness.