Free Republic

Already pegged by The Hill as one of the most vulnerable U.S. Senators facing re-election in 2016, and the only Democrat on that list now that Sen. Harry Reid has decided to retire, Michael Bennet is still scrambling to consolidate his base. With his polling numbers hovering just above the 50% mark among Democrats and Democrat activists actively protesting his fundraisers, we cannot blame him one bit. Bennet’s latest pander was an amendment he introduced last week that effectively declared climate change to be a national security issue. While this might mollify the environmental extremists who comprise a meaningful spot...

When California Bishop Marc Andrus wants to engage people in a conversation about climate change he doesn’t throw statistics at them, rather he begins with a question like: When was the last time you had an experience of wonder in the natural world? “If we can connect people back to it, or open them up for a fresh experience with wonder, it’s a great starting place for recovering a sense of why [climate change] is a moral issue,” said Andrus. Throughout history, the church has partnered with social movements on equal rights and justice issues. By beginning the conversation now...

Full Title: Pope Francis Says Protecting the Environment Is 'Ultimate Pro-Life, Pro-Poor, Pro-Family' Issue That Bible Calls Christians to Engage In Pope Francis is set to release an encyclical letter which calls the environment the "ultimate pro-life, pro-poor, pro-family" issue that Christians are called to engage in. The Vatican has said that this is not a political statement, but one stemming from biblical teaching. Catholic News Service reported that Pope Francis is finishing up his encyclical on the environment, set for publication early in the summer, which is set to build on the statements of his predecessors who have urged...

Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler uses a “Pinocchio” scale to assign a level of egregiousness to lies he uncovers, with four Pinocchios as the maximum … until now. Secretary of State John Kerry earned himself the full complement two weeks ago from Kessler for bragging about his management of the first global-warming hearing in the Senate, a hearing that he not only didn’t arrange but didn’t even attend. Kessler dug deeper on the tall tales emanating from the event, and found that one of the real organizers has been lying about what took place in the hearing in order to...

Villagers in a rural district of Kenya are getting a helping hoof to adapt to climate change. A newly introduced breed of "supergoat" is cutting the number of months per year that villagers in the district of Nyando go hungry. Galla goats are tough, but loving. They tolerate heat and drought and have great teeth (which means they rarely need to be culled due to worn-down chompers). The goats also produce a lot of nutritious milk and mature more quickly than the old straggly looking breeds that the Nyando farmers are used to keeping. And the females are really good...

The Texas Republican's devotion to principle – or an unyielding insistence on getting his way – could propel him to the front ranks of Republican contenders for president or render him unelectable.Ted Cruz looked out over a sprawling audience of Iowa farmers and agri-business leaders, people who rely on federal subsidies of ethanol, and the man who would be president stuck it to them. “I know you’d like me to say I’m for the renewable fuel standard” – that’s the subsidy of their product – “that’d be the easy thing to do,” he said. “But I’m going to tell you...

The Supreme Court heard arguments on Wednesday in Michigan v. EPA, asking whether it was unreasonable for the Environmental Protection Agency to ignore costs in determining the appropriateness of regulating mercury emissions from power plants. The EPA’s proposed regulations are expected to cost the coal industry a whopping $9.6 billion, but only offer a meager $500,000 to $6 million in public health benefits. Cato filed an amicus brief in the case that focuses on why the EPA chose to ignore costs in developing these regulations. It turns out that EPA could achieve its goal of comprehensively regulating utility emissions only...

OSLO/WASHINGTON - The United States will submit plans for slowing global warming to the United Nations early this week but most governments will miss an informal March 31 deadline, complicating work on a global climate deal due in December. The U.S. submission, on Monday or Tuesday according to a White House official, adds to national strategies beyond 2020 already presented by the 28-nation European Union, Mexico, Switzerland and Norway. Together, they account for about a third of world greenhouse emissions. But other emitters such as China, India, Russia, Brazil, Canada and Australia say they are waiting until closer to a...

This comes from ETH Zurich: Cold snaps like the ones that hit the eastern United States in the past winters are not a consequence of climate change. Scientists at ETH Zurich and the California Institute of Technology have shown that global warming actually tends to reduce temperature variability. Repeated cold snaps led to temperatures far below freezing across the eastern United States in the past two winters. Parts of the Niagara Falls froze, and ice floes formed on Lake Michigan. Such low temperatures had become rare in recent years. Pictures of icy, snow-covered cities made their way around the world,...

Discredited by reality, the U.N.'s prophecies go missing. In 2005, the U.N. Environment Program (UNEP) published a color-coded map under the headline "Fifty million climate refugees by 2010." The primary source for the prediction was a 2005 paper by environmental scientist Norman Myers. Six years later, this flood of refugees is nowhere to be found, global average temperatures are about where they were when the prediction was made—and the U.N. has done a vanishing act of its own, wiping the inconvenient map from its servers. The map, which can still be found elsewhere on the Web, disappeared from the program's...

WASHINGTON (CBSDC) — Secretary of State John Kerry warns U.S. ambassadors that they will be dealing with “climate refugees” in the not-too-distant future. Kerry told U.S. ambassadors at the Global Chiefs of Mission Conference in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday about the threat climate change poses around the world. “There’ll be climate refugees that all of you will be coping with at some point, if not now, in the not-too-distant future,” Kerry said. “Ninety-seven percent of all the scientists for 20 years tell us unequivocally that this is happening and happening now, and humans are causing it, and we have a...

Excerpted from Campus Reform: Speaking to students at the University at Albany, Bill Nye the Science Guy said that a carbon tax was needed for the purpose of redistributing wealth.“We need, dare I say it, a tax, or should I say a fee,” Nye purportedly said Wednesday, right before an anonymous student began recording.“It’s not just to be mean, it’s to redistribute wealth,” Nye said.Nye went on to claim that instituting such a tax would drive innovation in more environmentally friendly ways.“It will stimulate people investing in more energy efficient means. If you gotta pay a fee every time...

WASHINGTON (CBS DC) – Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., proposed a resolution Wednesday that warns climate change and ensuing natural disasters will force millions of vulnerable and poverty-stricken women to engage in “transactional sex” in order to provide their families with adequate food and water. Lee’s House Concurrent Resolution 29 says that food and water scarcity will be exacerbated by the effects of climate change, forcing increased “conflict and instability” that will particularly affect the strain on women farmers “who are estimated to produce 60 to 80 percent of the food in most developing countries.” “[F]ood insecure women with limited socioeconomic...

Man I love this guy. Ted Cruz completely schooled a journalist who asked him about Climate Change in his Texas Tribune interview, a journalist who was clearly sympathetic to the cause. It was awesome to see.

“Many of the alarmists on global warming, they’ve got a problem because the science doesn’t back them up. In particular, satellite data demonstrate for the last 17 years, there’s been zero warming.” –Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex,), “Late Night with Seth Meyers” interview, March 17, 2015 “The last 15 years, there has been no recorded warming. Contrary to all the theories that – that they are expounding, there should have been warming over the last 15 years. It hasn’t happened.” –Cruz, CNN interview released Feb. 20, 2014 Cruz has been taking some heat — pun intended — lately over his global...

On Sunday, in anticipation of Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) announcement that he intends to run for president, California governor Jerry Brown (D), declared to NBC’s Meet the Press Cruz was “absolutely unfit to be running for office.” Why? Because of Cruz’s stance on climate change—some of which Cruz laid out on late night TV last week. But comparing Cruz’s comments on Late Night with Seth Meyers and Brown’s remarks on Meet the Press, it is pretty clear that it is Gov. Brown who needs to spend more time familiarizing himself with the scientific literature on climate change and especially its...

It is not anti-science to say that humans influence the climate, because, of course, humans, and every other species on the planet, influences the climate. At the least, humans move through the atmosphere, which influences it and hence the climate. Only a science denier would deny this. It is an semi-open question how much humans, and each other species, influences the climate. What is not an open question, indeed it is a question as closed as can be, that the global-warming-of-doom promised by organizations like the IPCC has failed to materialize in the ways these groups have promised. Only science...

A New York Times environmental reporter told Columbia University journalism students that presenting balance in an article about global warming is tantamount to perpetuating a lie. “It is a lie to say that global warming poses no danger,” New York Times reporter Justin Gillis told students after a screening of the movie “Merchants of Doubt,” reports The Federalist. “Journalists care about the truth—that’s my only care in life, to find the truth,” Gillis said. “To act as if the evidence is half and half is to tell a lie. I refuse to perpetuate that lie.” “This is much like the...

(CNSNews.com) -- Americans’ concern over environmental issues such as water and air pollution and extinction of species is down from last year, and the data show that of all green issues, Americans worry the least about global warming (or climate change), according to Gallup. As part of its annual Environmental survey, which Gallup has done for more than two decades, the surveyors on March 5-8 asked, “I’m going to read you a list of environmental problems. As I read each one, please tell me if you personally worry about this problem a great deal, a fair amount, only a little,...

The second day of the three-day Loyola University Chicago Climate Change Conference began with a panel discussion on divestment from fossil fuels. The Friday morning panel, titled “The Risks, Nuts, and Bolts of Divestment,” was chaired by Bruce Boyd, principal and senior managing director of Arabella Advisors, a company that works with foundations to improve planetary health and is now measuring global commitment to divestment from fossil fuels and reinvestment in alternative, clean energy sources.  In his opening remarks, Boyd noted that divestments are currently at $50 billion and are expected to reach $150 billion by the start of the...