Free Republic

Climate change predictions can be scary, and political opposition to climate action is fierce. But EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy says she can’t help but be optimistic about the future. McCarthy, speaking at the American Meteorological Society (AMS) annual meeting in Phoenix on Wednesday, struck a decidedly positive tone. “If there is ever a challenge where the U.S. can shine and provide leadership, it is the challenge of climate change,” she said. “The real danger and the real economic problem we face is not taking action,” McCarthy said. She emphasized the importance of the work of the thousands of weather and...

Environmentalism: Re-upping on delusional climate-change fantasies, "Governor Moonbeam" asked in his inauguration speech Monday for the Golden State to meet half its energy needs with renewable energy by 2030. Gov. Jerry Brown, who leads the state that hosted Solyndra, embraces bird-chopping wind turbines and builds crispy critter-producing solar panel farms, is a leading advocate of renewable energy and environmental protection. As pollution from coal-fired plants and industries in China wafted across the Pacific, he took a deep breath at his fourth inauguration as the state's chief executive and doubled down on green energy's failed promise by tasking California to fight...

Forty years after first taking the oath as governor of California, Democrat Jerry Brown was sworn in to an historic fourth term Monday, proposing sweeping changes to address global climate change while offering a measured approach to targeting the state’s long-term financial liabilities. Brown said he would push to reduce petroleum use in cars by up to 50 percent; increase from a third to a half the required proportion of electricity produced from renewable energy sources and make heating fuels cleaner – all within 15 years.

How the Earth is getting both colder and warmer at the same time defies reality, but that is of little concern to Dr. Holdren As January 2014 arrived with a blast of cold air ominously dubbed the “polar vortex”, the White House released a video in which the Chief Science Advisor to President Obama, Dr. John Holdren, managed to get on both sides of it, declaring the “extreme cold” to be “a pattern that we expect to see with increasing frequency as global warming continues.” How the Earth is getting both colder and warmer at the same time defies reality,...

**SNIP** The Obama administration continued its attack on coal-fired power plants, which provide about 40 percent of US electricity. In June, the EPA proposed new restrictions on carbon emissions that would make it vitually impossible to build a new coal-fired plant in the US. At the same time, more than 1,200 new coal-fired plants are planned across the world, with two-thirds to be built in India and China. In his 2007 Noble Prize acceptance speech, former Vice President Al Gore warned that the arctic ice could be gone in “as little as seven years.” But arctic sea ice rebounded in...

A hacking threat against CNN that rose to the FBI attention is actually a hoax, claims a freelance writer from Tennessee who is claiming responsibility for the post. David Garrett Jr., from Nashville, says he we the one who posted to the anonymous site ´pastebin´ claiming to be Sony hackers the ´Guardians of Peace.´ It included the bizarre demand that CNN should turn over anchor Wolf Blitzer. It is believed that the FBI issued a Joint Intelligence Bulletin based on that post that warned CNN and other media companies that hack attacks could be in the works.

Fifteen months ago, academic climate scientists expressed worries that a new climate model sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) was going to harm existing modeling efforts, siphoning off talent and funding when federally funded science is short on both. The biggest concern: that the Accelerated Climate Modeling for Energy (ACME) project, meant to forecast local impacts of climate change and to be used on DOE’s future exascale supercomputers, would dilute resources from the Community Earth System Model (CESM). That model, managed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, is built on science and code...

You know the Catholic Church is in trouble when the left-wing Guardian refers to Francis as the “superman pope.” He didn’t earn this dubious honor just by brokering Obama’s embrace of the communist slave state in Cuba. He has promoted state-inflicted poverty by attacking economic freedom and is now pushing the global warming hoax: In 2015, the pope will issue a lengthy message on the subject to the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics, give an address to the UN general assembly and call a summit of the world’s main religions. The reason for such frenetic activity, says Bishop Marcelo Sorondo, chancellor...

Following a visit in March to Tacloban, the Philippine city devastated in 2012 by typhoon Haiyan, the pope will publish a rare encyclical on climate change and human ecology. Urging all Catholics to take action on moral and scientific grounds, the document will be sent to the world’s 5,000 Catholic bishops and 400,000 priests, who will distribute it to parishioners.

... There were many AGU talks about the climate impacts we’re already seeing. For example, human-caused global warming is amplifying many types of extreme weather like drought, heat waves, and storms. Climate and social scientists have struggled to communicate this urgency to the public. While most people accept that humans are changing the climate, few understand the urgency of mitigating these risks. This is particularly a problem for ideological conservatives. Among social scientists, a consensus is forming that more climate-specific knowledge translates into greater acceptance of the science and support for mitigation. However, facts are more effective when ideological barriers...

Man-made global warming is saving the Earth from “another ice age,” White House Science Advisor Eric Holdren says in a new video promoting man-made global warming theory: “We know beyond any reasonable doubt that humans are the main cause of the warming of the earth’s climate that has been measured over the past few decades. The warming is unequivocal. “While the climate of the earth has changed over the millennia as a result of natural factors – principally changes in the tilt and orientation of the earth’s axis and rotation, and in the shape of its orbit around the sun...

Researchers at EurekAlert say that our efforts to protect the beaver from extinction have had eco-unfriendly side effects. Beaver’s numbers have rebounded thanks to efforts across the globe to protect them. The new research states that as their numbers rise they are contributing to climate change. Beavers create dams in shallow ponds, which then can host increasing levels of carbon as biological material accumulates on the pond floor. This accumulation results in methane, a greenhouse gas that does not dissolve in the pond, but instead enters the atmosphere. The study shows that today beaver ponds release 200 times more methane...

Some of the consequences of climate change are obvious -- shrinking polar ice caps, rising sea levels, more damaging floods -- and some are subtle. Among the latter, we can now add bad-tasting seafood. So concludes a team of researchers led by Sam Dupe of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, recently published in the Journal of Shellfish Research. They tested shrimp raised for three weeks in seawater of average pH versus shrimp raised in acidic waters, similar to conditions that may prevail as the continued emission of excess carbon dioxide turns the oceans more acidic. Seafood is an important source...

Jessica Pressler is no longer going to work at Bloomberg’s investigation unit after the disgraced New York magazine writer penned last week’s story about the Stuyvesant High School senior who allegedly made $72 million trading stocks, only to have it proved a hoax.

If 2013 was “the year of the viral hoax,” what then should we call 2014 — a year slightly older, slightly wiser, and even more full of moronic shenanigans? This was the year, after all, that saw the rise of the fake news industry: a cynical (and profitable!) enterprise that churns out convincing hoax-news for clicks. This was also, arguably, the year that properly ushered in the worst of the bogus fact/photo Twitter accounts, a la @UberFacts or @HistoryInPics. And that’s not even getting into the pranks, the “viral” attention-seeking, and the outright bald-faced lies — made for infamy, lolz...

Three friends of the alleged University of Virginia rape victim are growing more skeptical about her account, saying they have doubts about information she gave them and why she belatedly tried to get herself deleted from the Rolling Stone article that engulfed their campus in controversy. The friends say among their concerns is the fact that the woman, named only as “Jackie” in the article, gave them a cellphone number so they could text a man she said she was seeing about three weeks before she alleged she was gang-raped at a fraternity house. Eventually, the friends ended up with...

Old and busted, legacy media edition: Layers of fact checkers and editors. New hotness: “There was this one time, in band camp …” Yet another big, splashy mainstream media story has collapsed, although the damage from New York Magazine’s tall tale of a teen-genius stock traders and the New York Post’s follow-up is entirely limited to the two publications’ reputations. Jessica Pressler wrote this weekend that Mo Islam, a 17-year-old student, had amassed a $72 million fortune during his participation in a high-school trading club, apparently without asking some basic questions about how a minor could trade and how...

(VIDEO-AT-LINK) Peg Brokaw, 95, had missed the early Saturday morning Mass at St. Rose of Lima, on Church Hill Road in Newtown, but said she would go inside and say a prayer, anyway. She has lived in this town a long time, and tells you her son is a retired policeman here, one who still directs traffic in front of the church occasionally. And because this was another December in Newtown, two years now since 20 children and six adults were shot dead inside Sandy Hook Elementary, because Peg Brokaw stood outside what became the church of small coffins in...

<p>In a now-infamous Nov. 19 story in Rolling Stone, disgraced journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely asserted that at least five members of the Phi Kappa Psi fraternity gang-raped a freshman named Jackie at a frat house party, then left her in a bloodstained dress to exit via a conveniently vacant side staircase.</p>

President Barack Obama has wisely chosen to ignore bipartisan bleating over the lawful use of his executive authority to address pressing issues long championed by the so-called professional left. He has instead decided to flex his muscle, at long last. He struck a deal with China to reduce greenhouse gases by 30 percent over the coming years, pushed for regulating the Internet as a public utility, raised the minimum wage of workers employed by companies with federal contracts, created gender equity rules for such employees and protected from deportation as many as 5 million undocumented immigrants. Also, his Environmental Protection...