Free Republic

Climate change is widening the world’s gap between the haves and have-nots, worsening economic inequality between rich and poor countries, according to a new analysis by Stanford scientists.

Actress Dame Emma Thompson has been defending her decision to fly from the US to attend a climate change protest in central London. Speaking to reporters from the Extinction Rebellion campaign group's pink boat, she said did not fly as much as she used to - and planted a lot of trees. Ms Thompson also compared the protest to the campaign of disruption by the Suffragettes.

Which risk factor is responsible for more deaths around the world than any other? Not smoking. Not even high blood pressure. It's a poor diet. "In many countries, poor diet now causes more deaths than tobacco smoking and high blood pressure," said Ashkan Afshin, an assistant professor at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. Drinking two or more diet beverages a day linked to high risk of stroke, heart attacks Drinking two or more diet beverages a day linked to high risk of stroke, heart attacks And it's not just that people are choosing...

WASHINGTON — Anti-vaccination activists, some with their (presumably unvaccinated) children, packed the Dirksen Senate Office Building Tuesday morning for a hearing that they hoped would vindicate, or at least recognize as legitimate, their fear that protecting their families from measles runs the risk of something worse, including autism and other disorders. As the doors closed on the room where the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions was meeting, a woman could be heard pleading to be allowed in to give her side of what has become a heated, and potentially dangerous, controversy. That hope would be quickly dashed....

SCIENCEDIRECT.COM A mid-2000’s study linking anti-gay prejudice to shorter lifespans for lesbians, gays, and bisexual individuals has been retracted on grounds that it was an “erroneous” finding.The study “Structural stigma and all-cause mortality in sexual minority populations” was conducted by researchers from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and was published by the peer-reviewed academic journal Social Science & Medicine in February 2014.The study purported to have found that lesbian, gay, and bisexual people who live in communities with high levels of anti-gay sentiment tend to die earlier than lesbians, gays and bisexuals who live in communities that are...

CNN)In a sea of users live-tweeting the Oscars last night, one account stood out: the CIA. Apparently, the agency is into movies -- especially "Black Panther." Throughout the night, the CIA Twitter feed explored the feasibility of the technology seen in the Marvel superhero flick. The agency also tested its followers' knowledge of metals, asking if they thought the fictional metal vibranium is real...

This is how @SenFeinstein reacted to children asking her to support the #GreenNewDeal resolution -- with smugness + disrespect. This is a fight for our generation's survival. Her reaction is why young people desperately want new leadership in Congress.

Seeing is believing By now, everyone knows: the climate is changing, sea levels are rising, and the crises are likely to happen sooner than expected. Still, it’s one thing to know, and another thing to really see these potential disasters. Luckily (or unluckily), there’s no lack of tools to help the apathetic develop a visceral sense of what could be at stake. First, Information Is Beautiful has used data from NASA, Sea Level Explorer, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to create the aptly named “When Sea Levels Attack,” which shows how many years are left until major cities...

NYU Psychology professor Eric Knowles and doctoral student Sarah DiMuccio queried 300 men on Amazon's crowdsourcing platform Mechanical Turk to discover whether they had or would search for terms such as "erectile dysfunction," "how to get girls," "penis enlargement," "testosterone," and "Viagra," among others. They discovered a high level of concern about masculinity "was strongly associated with interest in these search topics." They then correlated the geopgrahic dispersion of these search topics in 2016 with how such areas voted in that year's election, finding "that support for Trump in the 2016 election was higher in areas that had more searches...

A new Tulane University study questions the reliability of how sea-level rise in low-lying coastal areas such as southern Louisiana is measured and suggests that the current method underestimates the severity of the problem. The research is the focus of a news article published this week in the journal Science. Relative sea-level rise, which is a combination of rising water level and subsiding land, is traditionally measured using tide gauges. But researchers Molly Keogh and Torbjörn Törnqvist argue that in coastal Louisiana, tide gauges tell only a part of the story. Tide gauges in such areas are anchored an average...

Highlights: Combines multiple methods estimating pre-Columbian population numbers. Estimates European arrival in 1492 lead to 56 million deaths by 1600. Large population reduction led to reforestation of 55.8 Mha and 7.4 Pg C uptake. 1610 atmospheric CO2 drop partly caused by indigenous depopulation of the Americas. Humans contributed to Earth System changes before the Industrial Revolution. Furthermore, we show that the global carbon budget of the 1500s cannot be balanced until large-scale vegetation regeneration in the Americas is included. The Great Dying of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas resulted in a human-driven global impact on the Earth System in...

More than 3.8 billion years ago, in a time period called the Hadean eon, our planet Earth was constantly bombarded by asteroids, which caused the large-scale melting of its surface rocks. Most of these surface rocks were basalts, and the asteroid impacts produced large pools of superheated impact melt of such composition. These basaltic pools were tens of kilometres thick, and thousands of kilometres in diameter. “If you want to get an idea of what the surface of Earth looked like at that time, you can just look at the surface of the Moon which is covered by a vast...

Hagfish Haunts Darwin A zombie hagfish rises from the dead, and scares Darwin from two directions. January 24, 2019 | David F. Coppedge Hagfish are eel-like fish that look like creatures from a horror movie. Their tapir-like snouts are scary enough, but when threatened, they have a unique weapon: slime! They can spread a net of sticky slime around them that can clog the gills of an attacker. And they have been doing this for at least 100 million Darwin Years, perhaps 300 million.

A legislative proposal in Connecticut would mandate instruction on climate change in public schools statewide, beginning in elementary school. Connecticut already has adopted science standards that call for teaching of climate change, but if the bill passes it is believed that it would be the country's first to write such a requirement into law. "A lot of schools make the study of climate change an elective, and I don't believe it should be an elective," said state Rep. Christine Palm, a Democrat from Chester who proposed the bill. "I think it should be mandatory, and I think it should be...

... The most obvious way that cannabis fuels violence in psychotic people is through its tendency to cause paranoia. Even marijuana advocates acknowledge that the drug can cause paranoia; the risk is so obvious that users joke about it, and dispensaries advertise certain strains as less likely to do so. But for people with psychotic disorders, paranoia can fuel extreme violence. A 2007 paper in the Medical Journal of Australia looked at 88 defendants who had committed homicide during psychotic episodes. It found that most of the killers believed they were in danger from the victim, and almost two-thirds reported...

Blind, slippery and prone to burrowing underground, a newly discovered amphibian has much in common with President Donald Trump, claims the British company that named the creature.

EDISON - A recent study has ranked New Jersey 47th in the U.S. for the least Christmas-friendly states. The survey was done by GetCenturyLink. The rankings were based on online activity and areas of culture.

Academic Freedom — Sweeping Up the Shards Rob Sheldon December 4, 2018 The online magazine Quillette has a tradition of providing a forum for people who can’t get heard on the regular channels, perhaps due to political correctness. Here is an article, “The New Evolution Deniers,” by evolutionary biologist Colin Wright at Penn State. He thinks that the slogan “gender is a social construct” denies Darwin. Here are the conclusions: Back when evolution was under attack from proponents of Biblical Creation and Intelligent Design, academic scientists were under no pressure to hold back criticism. This is because these anti-evolution movements...

A former Obama administration official with ties to a liberal advocacy group funded by Democratic megadonors George Soros and Tom Steyer helped prepare the Fourth National Climate Assessment, whose dire predictions have since been attacked as overblown. Andrew Light, who worked on the 2015 Paris accord negotiations as a senior adviser to the U.S. Special Envoy on Climate Change under Secretary of State John F. Kerry, served as a review editor for the assessment, overseeing the pivotal final chapter that concluded under a worst-case scenario that global warming could wipe out as much as 10 percent of the U.S. economy...

... The new U.S. report, as well as a United Nations report issued in October, instead aim at frightening the public—exactly the approach that so manifestly has failed to move the needle for 35 years. Maybe it’s because voters are skeptical of doom-mongering. Maybe they have grown fatalistic about climate change. Or maybe, reflecting the folly of climate campaigners, they’ve gotten a message that acting on greenhouse gases requires giving up prosperity. Reporting Sunday on the French fuel-tax demonstrations, the New York Times noted: “Many in the crowd said that they did not disdain the government’s environmental goals, but that...