Free Republic

From the White House, courtesy of John Podesta and John P. Holdren, comes this announcement of a new initiative to provide repackaged NOAA/NCDC data in a  way that supposedly helps “state and local leaders on the front lines of climate change”. It comes  with an emphasis on the supposed climate link to extreme weather events, that even the IPCC backpedaled on and Nature said in an editorial aren’t real enough to endorse because it is a dead issue.The initiative was unveiled on Wednesday and claims to be aimed at giving communities data to prepare for the effects of climate change, saying...

President Barack Obama is getting some help from the country's tech giants in his effort to show Americans how climate change will affect their communities. The Obama administration thinks that local data, which may have a real-world effect on Americans' lives, will provide a convincing argument for steps to prevent climate change. The risk rising sea levels have on individual communities will be the focus of a new website, climate.data.gov, which uses government data to put environmental changes in context. The White House also called on tech companies to develop tools for Americans to better get a grasp on how...

The White House will launch a new online initiative on Wednesday that will provide users access to climate data to spread awareness about the effects of global warming in an effort to improve climate-change preparedness across the country. As part of the initiative, the Obama administration will make federal data on climate change accessible to citizens, businesses and local governments in a new section within the data.gov website -- called climate.data.gov -- that will be jointly run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, and NASA.

An assistant philosophy professor at Rochester Institute of Technology wants to send people who disagree with him about global warming to jail. The professor is Lawrence Torcello. Last week, he published a 900-word-plus essay at an academic website called The Conversation. Torcello, who has a Ph.D. from the University at Buffalo, explains that there are times when criminal negligence and “science misinformation” must be linked. The threat of climate change, he says, is one of those times. Throughout the piece, he refers to the bizarre political aftermath of an earthquake in L’Aquila, Italy, which saw six scientists imprisoned for six...

The foundation publications for modern global warming science meet no criteria for valid science. Methodologies are not given, measurements are not made and evidence is not described. Instead, preposterous fantasies on atmospheric studies are glibly mentioned with self-contradictory blather. The studies consist of nothing but a desired end point with fictitious methods of deriving the result. --SNIP-- There is nothing but modeling in global warming analysis, the simple reason being that the complexities and randomness of the atmosphere are totally out of reach of the science that can be applied. Only modeling is obscure enough to evade accountability to outsiders...

**SNIP** “This current path is unsustainable, and we must take steps now to slow and stop the effects of climate change.” Hagan also brought out her own record as a state senator, and said she was proud of it. She mentioned that she had supported a mandatory renewable energy standard and a law that required emissions reductions from coal-fired power plants. She also cited efforts in North Carolina to develop clean energy technology. Hagan wrapped up with a call for Democrats and Republicans to work together on “commonsense measures” on energy, without spelling out what that might be. Congress hasn’t...

Between the homophobic birthday invitation (fake), the lesbian waitress receipt (fake) and Matthew Shepard (fake)… there seem to be more fake gay hate crimes than real ones. A UNC-Chapel Hill freshman who told police he was attacked by a man who burned his hand and called him an anti-gay slur made a false report,A lesbian couple spray painted the phrase “kill the gay” on their own garageFloyd Elliott, of Independence, told police that two attackers cut him in the stomach, branded him with a hot knife, and attempted to carve the word “Fag” on his forehead. Later, Elliott admitted to...

At a hearing Thursday on the Keystone oil pipeline, James Hansen, former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testified before Congress that 100 percent of the proceeds from a proposed carbon tax should go to the public, because liberals will try to use part of it to “make the government bigger.” “An important point is that such legislation I think needs to be introduced by conservatives, because I’m afraid liberals will try to take part of the money to make the government bigger. Not one dime should go to the government. 100 percent should go to the public,”...

Al Gore, the former American vice-president and Nobel Peace prize winner, spoke on the second day of the Climate Reality Leadership Corps training in Johannesburg on Thursday. The event drew environmental thinkers and activist wankers from around the continent. The corps is a global movement to teach people about climate change and help them adapt to a changing world. In his presentation, Gore gave an overview of how humans were driving climate change and how it was affecting conditions around the world right now. "Whenever any important question is ultimately resolved into a choice between right and wrong, the outcome...

Monday night in the U.S. Senate, something historic happened. Democrats took to the floor and demanded…um…nothing, really. And they weren’t going to leave until…they felt like it, I guess. That was the gist of the PR stunt known as “#Up4Climate” on Twitter. It was a filibuster that wasn’t really a filibuster that sought to draw attention to an issue progressives have deemed so important they have not offered or attempted to pass anything on since they took control of the Senate in 2007. That’s right, Senate Democrats have no legislation to address the coming “doom” they predict from the Artist...

--BIG SNIP-- Putin has said that "two or three degrees" of climate change could be good for Russia, in that it would reduce heating costs and increase crop yields. Of course Russia will face harsh consequences from global warming as well. Wildfires and drought have hit the country hard in recent years -- trends that will likely only worsen as the planet continues to heat up. So for all you out there blasé about climate change, you may want to take a long hard look at your position -- because it doesn’t take that much effort to see a post-global...

WXOW reported: A 15-year-old transgender student in California who claimed to have been beaten and sexually assaulted in a school bathroom recanted after a police investigation failed to back up his story. The reversal left open the possibility the teen could be charged with making a false criminal report, said Connie Van Putten, a police department spokeswoman. The student, who is biologically female but identifies as male, had told officers he was leaving a boy’s bathroom on Monday morning when three other boys he did not know pushed him inside a large stall and attacked him. But officers could not...

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) used an all-night climate change campaign in the Senate to once again bash Charles and David Koch. “It's time to stop acting like those who ignore this crisis — the oil baron Koch brothers and their allies in Congress — have a valid point of view,” Reid said Monday evening. “But despite overwhelming scientific evidence and overwhelming public opinion, climate change deniers still exist. They exist in this country and in this Congress.” Sens. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) are leading an all-night Senate session to discuss the importance of climate change....

The Mongol warlord built the world's largest land-based empire. But he couldn't have done it without a change in climate. The difference was Genghis Khan, the warlord who united the tribes and launched them on their wave of unstoppable conquest. But the Mongol Empire wasn’t solely the product of Genghis’s will. As a fascinating new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) demonstrates, the rise of the Mongols may have owed just as much to beneficial changes in the climate that made the grasslands of the Mongol steppes green and verdant, fueling the horses that were...

SEPANG: A BOEING 777 pilot, who was flying 30 minutes ahead of the missing Malaysia Airlines aircraft, said he established contact with MH370 minutes after he was asked to do so by Vietnamese air traffic control. The captain, who asked to not be named, said his plane, which was bound for Narita, Japan, was far into Vietnamese airspace when he was asked to relay, using his plane's emergency frequency, to MH370 for the latter to establish its position, as the authorities could not contact the aircraft. "We managed to establish contact with MH370 just after 1.30am and asked them if...

WASHINGTON - US Secretary of State John Kerry has called on American ambassadors around the world to make the fight against climate change a top priority ahead of new UN talks next year. In his first department-wide policy guidance statement since taking office a year ago, he told his 70,000 staff: "The environment has been one of the central causes of my life." "Protecting our environment and meeting the challenge of global climate change is a critical mission for me as our country's top diplomat," Kerry said in the letter issued on Friday to all 275 US embassies and across...

'INTERFERENCE': Pilot in another plane was flying 30 minutes ahead of MH370 SEPANG: A BOEING 777 pilot, who was flying 30 minutes ahead of the missing Malaysia Airlines     aircraft, said he established contact with    MH370  minutes  after  he   was    asked to do so by  Vietnamese air traffic control. The captain, who asked to not be named, said his plane, which was bound for Narita, Japan, was far into Vietnamese airspace when he was asked to relay, using his plane's emergency frequency, to MH370 for the latter to establish its position, as the authorities could not contact the aircraft. "We managed...

A routine flight from Calgary to Victoria was marred by a passenger who apparently didn’t appreciate having his flight captained by a woman. CTV Toronto: Pilot shocked by nasty note Instead of thanking the female pilot, a passenger left an angry note behind on a napkin. Colin D'Mello has the story. Canada AM: Passenger leaves sexist note for pilot A WestJet passenger has caused an uproar after he left a note for a female pilot that said the cockpit was no place for a woman. A female WestJet pilot says she was in “shock” after a passenger left behind a...

Causes and Implications of the Growing Divergence between climate model simulations and observations For the past 15+ years, there has been no increase in global average surface temperature, which has been referred to as a ‘hiatus’ in global warming. By contrast, estimates of expected warming in the first several decades of 21st century made by the IPCC AR4 were 0.2C/decade. This talk summarizes the recent CMIP5 climate model simulation results and comparisons with observational data. The most recent climate model simulations used in the AR5 indicate that the warming stagnation since 1998 is no longer consistent with model projections even...

Add another instance to the long list of hate crime hoaxes, this time to the currently popular category of “transgender” faux-victims. Kurtis Alexander and Henry K. Lee of the San Francisco Chronicle report: A 15-year-old transgender teen admitted to police Tuesday that he made up a story about being sexually assaulted a day earlier in the boys bathroom at Hercules Middle High School, authorities said. The boy acknowledged making the false report - which raised alarm at the school and around the Bay Area - after investigators told him that the evidence gathered in the case didn't corroborate his story, said Hercules...