Free Republic

Jinan Cao has been dissecting the nature of the greenhouse effect and a key calculation that I normally just accept without questioning. This will set a few pigeons loose, but it will be interesting to see where they land. The claims analyzed here are the oft repeated ones that the Earth’s greenhouse effect already warms us by 33°C and that a doubling of CO2 directly causes a 1.1°C rise (that’s with no feedbacks taken into account).Jinan points out that these numbers, repeated as “fact”, are merely a result of misuse of the Stefan-Boltzmann equation. If Earth is not a...

A Charlotte, N.C., man says he was arrested unfairly on a traffic violation because police were worried he would organize protests during the Democratic National Convention. ... Tyson's lawyer, Derek Fletcher, says a police report of the arrest claimed his client was on a terrorist watch list and should be held until the convention ends Thursday. Tyson says he's an activist with the Rainforest Action Network. He thinks he was targeted by police to stop him from organizing protests

Ridding the U.S. of oil-based energy and avoiding the catastrophic consequences of climate change are the primary goals of the Democratic Party platform released this week that labeled the planet’s temperature variations as a national security crisis. “We must end the tyranny of oil in our time,” the platform said. “This immediate danger is eclipsed only by the longer-term threat from climate change, which will lead to devastating weather patterns, terrible storms, drought, conflict, and famine. That means people competing for food and water in the next fifty years in the very places that have known horrific violence in the...

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Though the 2012 Democratic Party platform declares that the “national security threat from climate change is real, urgent, and severe,” it is apparently not urgent and severe enough to merit mention by speakers at the Democratic National Convention during the past two days. The Daily Caller reviewed the speech transcripts of the over 80 speakers who took the stage at the Time Warner Cable Arena here in Charlotte on Tuesday and Wednesday, and only one mentioned climate change — and even he only mentioned it in passing. “Thanks to President Obama, America is laying the foundation for...

Perhaps greens just aren't the good guysAnalysis "Why should we sacrifice 10 per cent of our income today to make Bill Gates better off?" asked an MP. "As the world's [second] richest man, he doesn't need our sacrifice." The second richest man in the world, Bill Gates, is a proxy in this rhetorical question. The MP, a former Cabinet minister, is raising a fascinating and rarely asked moral question. Should we make ourselves poorer to save the rich of the future some insignificant amount of money: an amount so small, it will be a rounding error? The argument he builds...

.....More may be revealed this week as the Democrats meet in Charlotte, N.C., when the president will be formally nominated as their candidate. Some of the possible second-term goals are ones he set aside in the first when they were too difficult or politically costly. They include a rewrite of immigration laws, efforts to combat global warming and a sweeping change in the tax code beyond the year-to-year extensions of Bush-era tax cuts.... The government faces a “fiscal cliff” of scheduled tax increases and spending cuts at the end of this year. If he and Congress can’t reach a permanent...

President Barack Obama took a veiled jab at his predecessor, George W. Bush, Monday during an appearance in New Orleans, where the former was touring damage caused by last week's Hurricane Isaac.  Here's what Obama said, according to the White House transcript:  

A sudden blast of cold polar air accompanied by heavy precipitation led to heavy snowfall in the Alps at levels below 1600 meters.

An important new paper published today in Global and Planetary Change finds that changes in CO2 follow rather than lead global air surface temperature and that "CO2 released from use of fossil fuels have little influence on the observed changes in the amount of atmospheric CO2" The paper finds the "overall global temperature change sequence of events appears to be from 1) the ocean surface to 2) the land surface to 3) the lower troposphere," in other words, the opposite of claims by global warming alarmists that CO2 in the atmosphere drives land and ocean temperatures. Instead, just as in...

The upcoming election battles may be unique in offering for the first time a debate about global warming. Neither Bush-Gore nor McCain-Obama chose to discuss the issue -- maybe because they were not really that far apart. By contrast, Barack Obama has already announced that, if re-elected, he will make climate change an important priority -- while Paul Ryan is an assertive skeptic on AGW (anthropogenic global warming). The science of climate change is not just of academic interest, but has been leading to policies for large-scale changes in energy use and supply -- with important economic consequences. The burden...

Reposted from the Hockey SchtickA new paper published in Nature Geoscience finds “From about 50,000 to 11,000 years ago, the central Arctic Basin from 1,000 to 2,500 meters deep was … 1–2°C warmer than modern Arctic Intermediate Water.” This finding is particularly surprising because it occurred during the last major ice age. Horizontal axis is thousands of years ago with modern temperatures at the left and 50,000 years ago at the right. Temperature proxy of the Intermediate Water Layer of the Arctic Ocean is shown in top graph with degrees C anomaly noted at the upper right vertical axis. Note...

The only conclusion to draw from a year like this one is that Mother Nature is not always kind. Never waste a good crisis, at least when it comes to the op-ed section. On the subject of this year’s historic drought, the chattering classes have certainly obliged. William Moseley contributed a sermon for the New York Times, pinning the scarlet A on corn and damning it for all that is wrong with agriculture. The author informs us that because corn is particularly vulnerable to a hot, dry period during the crucial week of pollination, no sensible farmer should grow it....

In a nearly full-page op-ed appearing in the business section of the August 25 New York Times, Cornell professor Robert H. Frank lays out the new green agenda for tax policy.According to Professor Frank, stopping global warming may require carbon taxes of about $300 per ton of carbon dioxide emitted, and by implementing such taxes, we can also balance the federal budget. “If such a tax were phased in,” Frank says, “the prices of goods would rise gradually in proportion to the amount of carbon dioxide their production or use entailed. The price of gasoline, for example, would slowly...

Today I'm launching a fund and I wonder whether anyone would like to contribute. Please, I implore you all, PLEASE chip in to help finance Professor Michael Mann's suit for defamation against sinister, right-wing Canadian climate-change denier Mark Steyn and the fascist-denialist organ for which Steyn writes, National Review Online! I don't think Mann is going to win his case, not for one fraction of a millisecond. That's why I think it's so important that we give him all the financial encouragement we can at this sensitive early stage. There's a danger that Mann may yet take advice from his...

Mackinac Center analysts have long been critical of the way consultants — and frequently their clients — misuse economic modeling software. We were reminded why with the recent publication of two papers purporting to show large job creation, if only state voters would approve a renewable energy mandate on the statewide November ballot. The initiative, commonly known as the Michigan Renewable Energy Amendment, would mandate that 25 percent of Michigan's energy usage be provided by renewable sources by the year 2025. There is at least one major problem with each study, however: costs. The study authors' did not include the...

A new theory to explain global warming was revealed at a meeting at the University of Leicester (UK) and is being considered for publication in the journal "Science First Hand". The controversial theory has nothing to do with burning fossil fuels and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. According to Vladimir Shaidurov of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the apparent rise in average global temperature recorded by scientists over the last hundred years or so could be due to atmospheric changes that are not connected to human emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of natural gas and oil. Shaidurov explained how...

Hardly anyone knows that two thirds of the warming predicted by the climate models comes from assumed changes in humidity and clouds, and only one third comes directly from the extra carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases. Some awareness of the calculations is essential, because there is no direct observational evidence that rising CO2 caused the bulk of the recent warming. If there were, don't you suppose we would have heard all about it by now? The world has spent over $60B since 1990 looking for that evidence. The ice cores shown by Al Gore in his movie were...

25 May 10 – The revamped cap-and-trade (control-and-tax) bill that Senators Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.) are trying to foist on the American public is predicated on a flat-out lie. The control-and-tax proponents would have you believe that our planet has been enduring unprecedented global warming (now coyly referred to as “climate change”), but the facts do not bear that out. Facts. Oh, those damnable facts... ...You’ll see that today’s benign climate is not even close to being the warmest on record. Not even close. Temperatures have been warmer than today for almost all of the past 10,000...

Came from an underwater volcano. The New Zealand Navy announced today that they have found a patch of floating volcanic pumice from an underwater volcano floating about 600 miles off the shore of New Zealand. “The rock looked to be sitting two foot (half a meter) above the surface of the waves and lit up a brilliant while colour in the spotlight. It looked exactly like the edge of an ice shelf,” said Lieutenant Tim Oscar aboard the ship the HMNZS Canterbury.Scientists aboard the ship said the white pumice – which covers 10,000 square miles ( 26,000 sq km) –...

Posted on August 23, 2012 by Anthony Watts From the British Antarctic SurveyWordie Ice Shelf location within Antarctic Peninsula (Photo credit: Wikipedia) New climate history adds to understanding of recent Antarctic Peninsula warmingResults published this week by a team of polar scientists from Britain, Australia and France adds a new dimension to our understanding of Antarctic Peninsula climate change and the likely causes of the break-up of its ice shelves.The first comprehensive reconstruction of a 15,000 year climate history from an ice core collected from James Ross Island in the Antarctic Peninsula region is reported this week in the journal...