Free Republic

Bad news for environmentally conscious pet owners: cats’ and dogs’ eating habits are responsible for dumping as many as 64 million tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year — roughly the equivalent of driving over 13 million cars. That’s due to all the meat our furry friends gobble down, according to new research. There are more than 163 million dogs and cats in the US, and they just love to eat. In fact, cats and dogs in the US consume about 19 percent as many calories as people do in the US, or about as much as 62...

Judge Jeanine Pirro used her Saturday night Fox News show to launch a mockery-loaded rant against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-N.Y) Green New Deal, fixating primarily on cow farts. Reviewing the economic and environmental plan in her opening monologue, Pirro noted that it aims to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2030. The reason for the use of the term “net” rather than just “zero,” she insisted, was that the plan’s advocated are “not sure they’ll be able to get rid of bovine flatulence, a.k.a. cows farting.” The talking point was accompanied by a dramatic graphic involving Earth being busted into pieces...

Devastating news for human-caused global warming proponents. “The sun, not CO2, drives Earth’s climate,” says Dr Roger Higgs, long-time consultant geologist and sedimentologist. Higgs bases his statement on four vital points: Global warming and cooling are driven by the sun, specifically by the solar-sourced Interplanetary Magnetic Field, which regulates incoming cosmic rays, which in turn govern cloudiness and thus global temperature (the breathtakingly elegant Svensmark Theory). Global temperature oscillations lag 25 years behind the causative solar magnetic fluctuations. This 25-year lag is due to ocean thermal inertia in remarkable agreement with the 15-20-year time lag estimated by Abdussamatov et al....

Elon Musk and SpaceX's ambitious plans to reach around the moon and all the way to Mars require a big effin' rocket. Now we know what it looks like. Musk tweeted out an image on Thursday of an assembled early version of the SpaceX Starship, which was once known in polite company as the Big Falcon Rocket. Starship test flight rocket just finished assembly at the @SpaceX Texas launch site. This is an actual picture, not a rendering. pic.twitter.com/k1HkueoXaz — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 11, 2019 "Starship test flight rocket just finished assembly at the @SpaceX Texas launch site. This...

In his book "2061 - Odyssey Three" (the third of his Space Odyssey series), Arthur C. Clarke put forward the intriguing proposal that the core of the planet Jupiter was, in fact, a diamond the size of Earth. Now Clarke, even though a science fiction author of some repute, had a science background and always tried to bring rigorous scientific accuracy to his stories. So, could his proposition be possible? The somewhat predictable answer is - we don't know. But we can analyse the possibility within known scientific parametres, to see if it is, at least, possible. For diamond to...

Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras called on Turkey to respect International Law at the Press Conference following the 5th trilateral meeting in Israel with Cypriot President Nicos Anastasiades and Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu on Thursday... “We have emphasised the need for respect of international law in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean. Respecting, in particular, the right of Cyprus to exercise its sovereign rights in its EEZ “. Mr Tsipras went on to underline the need for a just and viable solution of the Cypriot problem with the scrapping of the guarantees on the occupied part of the island and...

Qatar will withdraw from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), Qatar's Energy Minister Saad Sherida al-Kaabi announced on Monday. The decision to quit the bloc of 15 oil-producing countries that account for almost half of the world's oil production was confirmed by Qatar Petroleum, the country's state oil company.

A simple molecule in the atmosphere that acts as a "detergent" to breakdown methane and other greenhouse gases has been found to recycle itself to maintain a steady global presence in the face of rising emissions, according to new NASA research. Understanding its role in the atmosphere is critical for determining the lifetime of methane, a powerful contributor to climate change. The hydroxyl (OH) radical, a molecule made up of one hydrogen atom, one oxygen atom with a free (or unpaired) electron is one of the most reactive gases in the atmosphere and regularly breaks down other gases, effectively ending...

Climatologists find familiar fluctuations in Pacific's past - test. “During past ice ages the tropical Pacific Ocean behaved rather as it does today in an El Niño event, bringing downpours to some places and drought to others.” Thus began a 2002 article Nature magazine (12 Jul 2002) For example, it could explain the low atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, during the last ice age. It is not clear whether this was a cause or a consequence of the difference in global climate, but such decreases would have lowered global temperatures still further,...

In a telegram earlier Monday, Putin had "stressed that the results of the vote fully speak of Recep Tayyip Erdogan's great political authority..." © Provided by AFP In a telegram earlier Monday, Putin had "stressed that the results of the vote fully speak of Recep Tayyip Erdogan's great political authority..." Russian strongman Vladimir Putin on Monday congratulated Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on his re-election triumph in a phone call, after saying the result showed the Turkish leader's "great political authority" and mass support. On the call Putin and Erdogan confirmed their interest in "deepening partnership ties between the two...

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is making a move to open up Germany's market to U.S. gas companies, following a lobbying push from President Trump, The Wall Street Journal reported. Merkel told a group of lawmakers over breakfast in October that her government will co-finance a $576 million liquified natural gas (LNG) shipping terminal in northern Germany, the Journal reported, citing people familiar with the meeting. The project had been stalled for years, but Trump has lobbied hard for Europe to increase LNG purchases from the U.S. while reducing their reliance on Russia. Germany gets most of its gas from Russia,...

BIERE, Switzerland - Cows burp and fart more than they need to, according to a Swiss firm that says it has developed a feed that cuts methane emissions from livestock - helping to combat global warming into the bargain. A single cow produces the equivalent of about three tonnes of carbon dioxide per year, says Agolin, based in Biere, near Lausanne. Co-founder and managing director Kurt Schaller told Reuters its specialist feed can reduce that by 10 percent. "We sell our mixture for around 1 million cows per year... There are 25-28 million cows in the European Union, so it...

“Germany is totally controlled by Russia … They will be getting between 60 and 70 percent of their energy from Russia and a new pipeline, and you tell me if that is appropriate because I think its not,” Trump said. The U.S. president was speaking at a press conference in front of NATO representatives ahead of a two-day summit. The Trump administration’s policies indicate it views security and trade as intimately linked. And when it comes to the trade balance, no ally will be spared. Speaking in Brussels, Belgium on the first leg of his European trip, the U.S. president...

One Trump Administration achievement has been liberating U.S. energy producers of all kinds from federal shackles. Companies have responded with jobs and investment, but all of a sudden the Administration wants to do a Barack Obama imitation and play energy favorites. The National Security Council on Friday reviewed a 41-page internal memo, leaked to Bloomberg News, suggesting that President Trump invoke emergency authority to require grid operators to buy nuclear and coal power. But there’s no emergency, and the political intervention will do more harm than good. *** The supposed problem is that the U.S. is producing an abundance of...

Fertilisers washing into lakes could increase methane emissions, potentially undoing progress in addressing climate change. The biggest human influence on climate change and global warming is the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Now research published in the journal Limnology and Oceanography Letters is the first to show how the size of lakes and the nutrients in their waters from fertilisers are contributing to that influence. "Our research pioneers a new way of determining the global atmospheric effect of lakes using satellite information on lake greenness and size distribution," said Professor John Downing. "Our research team assembled the largest...

Earth’s surface will almost certainly not warm up four or five degrees Celsius by 2100, according to a study released Wednesday which, if correct, voids worst-case UN climate change predictions. A revised calculation of how greenhouse gases drive up the planet’s temperature reduces the range of possible end-of-century outcomes by more than half, researchers said in the report, published in the journal Nature. “Our study all but rules out very low and very high climate sensitivities,” said lead author Peter Cox, a professor at the University of Exeter. How effectively the world slashes CO2 and methane emissions, improves energy efficiency,...

What Happens When You Don't Build Natural Gas Pipelines? Jude Clemente , CONTRIBUTOR The answer to the question posed is a really, really bad chain reaction: magnified during winter and peak demand...with a pipeline shortage...a natural gas shortage is created, prices for both natural gas and electricity skyrocket, CO2 emissions go up because more carbon intensive fuels are forced to compensate. Headquartered in New York, New Jersey, and New England (hereafter the "Northeast"), the devastating consequences of the anti-pipeline business just reared its ugly head again as we faced the coldest temperatures since The Polar Vortex of 2013-2014. Two of...

Farting, breaking wind, cutting the cheese, or gas. The English language has numerous words for flatulence and this is even before we devolve into the subcategories that make up the genre. Whatever you call it, farting is a taboo act, but it is also a source of fascination. It’s not for nothing that there is a popular children’s book series called Fart Squad or that the preview of the most recent installment of the Alvin and the Chipmunks dynasty led with the punchline, “Sorry, pizza toots.” Today farting is something for which we perfunctorily ask forgiveness, but in the past...

The Trump administration was ordered by a federal judge Wednesday to immediately enforce new restrictions on the release of potent methane emissions at oil and gas drilling operations on public land. The ruling came at the behest of California and other states, which charged the administration is required by law to enforce the new rules intended to cut the release of 175,000 tons of the potent greenhouse gas annually, as well as reduce the emission of associated toxic pollutants. The Interior Department had been delaying enforcement as it mapped out a strategy to rescind the new rules, which industry has...

If you had plans for the weekend, a Christian numerologist says you won’t get to them because the world is about to end. David Meade, a self-proclaimed “researcher,” is predicting that a series of apocalyptic events will begin on Sept. 23 and, “a major part of the world will not be the same.” According to Meade, the mysterious rogue planet Nibiru, also known as Planet X, is on a collision course with Earth, which will bring world-ending tsunamis and earthquakes. The numerologist claims the dates of recent events like the Great American Solar Eclipse and Hurricane Harvey’s flooding of Texas...